"You think there's a way one of our magic users could mimic that effect?"

It's the first idea that comes into her head, and she needs something to say while she races to process the implications of what he's saying, and the extreme concern it causes her. He is a grown man. He seems relatively experienced in his world's magic, at least as experienced as she is in hers.

Yeah, but how often has she taken risks she didn't really understand, and paid for it?

Just because it sounds like a cursed object designed to corrupt the wearer and turn him or her into a vessel for horrors doesn't mean that's what it is for sure and certain.