we accidentally a whole chainsaw | Glowfic Constellation

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And meanwhile on the bottom of the world:

"Okay, so when you say you have a high pain tolerance—"

"It would astonish me if you were capable of inflicting an amount of pain that mattered. Shren kids have to go to a light - d'you know about those, they're the healers - every few weeks to heal all our forms in case we picked up a serious injury and didn't notice."

"'kay," she says, shrugging. "I can heal too, so don't freak out—" and she reaches over and breaks his arm.

He waits a beat and then says, "Ouch," very deadpan.

She giggles. "Well, you're gonna make a really good pain mage if this works. So, I have no idea how to actually teach you to hold power, but I did pretty well at it just kind of trying it a bunch of times until I figured it out—I'm gonna try throwing you some, because I also have no idea how to explain how to pick it up—"

"Sure."

"Okay, catch," and then there's something there, something that sparks and fizzes and jumps, demanding to get out to get free to get active—

Mial feels a sense of kinship with it. He keeps hold of it for a tick or two and then it escapes his grip and there's a bright flash of fire.

"Nice," says Anlei. "So you can hold it—okay, now try doing something with the next batch, if you hold onto it and want to do a thing you can kind of get a feel for how—catch," and there's another bundle of power, invisible and intangible to all the ordinary senses, struggling to escape his mental grip.

He hangs onto it—it's almost like dancing, or like scoot racing, an active lively process of balancing forces—and thinks, all right, start small, what about silver fire like he could theoretically make all by himself... and he can feel it, just like she said, a kind of guide, like a phantom image he could trace on paper, or a faint echo to sing along with... he follows the hint, shaping the power, and directs a spiral of silver flame off to the side away from Anlei.

"You're picking this up fast," she says. "Okay, now you know what holding it is like, see if you can pick it up by yourself?"

He peers at his broken arm and thinks about the feeling of power. It takes him a few ticks to get a handle on it, but then there it is, right from the source, leaping into his figurative hands and immediately attempting to leap out again. He laughs and turns it into billowing clouds of mist.

"Wow," says Anlei. "It took me ages to get that good, what the hell's your secret?"

"I empathize with it," he says, half-joking. "The dragonish aging rate is one-tenth the human one, I spent a very long time as a child wishing I could do more than was available - eventually snuck into a scoot racing league despite being well below their minimum equivalency."

"Well, you and pain magic can be best friends then."

"I'm probably still going to want to do all my pain magic on the bottom of the world for the forseeable future," he says, pulling power again and making a simple pyramid structure rise from the dirt, "just in case I—" and a blast of flame scorches the edges of the miniature ziggurat "—get distracted. But wow. What-all can you do with this stuff?"

"Healing, like I said - let me know when you want your arm fixed - and conjuration, I built my house with it..."

He immediately attempts to build a house. The helpful hinting feeling informs him that he's going to need a lot more power for a project that big. He forms the dirt into the shape of foundations, then desists.

"What about magic stuff," he says, "you said the other kind of magic could do artifacts—?"

"Can you think of a way to get this stuff to sit still that long? 'Cause I sure can't."

He frowns thoughtfully. "It shouldn't be impossible... let me see..."

It's harder to get the hint to show up, this time. Apparently it has standards for how well-specified his plans must be before it'll help him achieve them. But he's done a little wizarding spell invention before; he knows how to come up with solid specifications for something. He attempts to invent a pain-magic spell to make a simple waterspout.

It takes him two degrees and rather a lot of accidentally letting go of the power and getting scorched by the resulting blast. But: "Ha," he says, "got it - proof of concept, anyway - you're not getting bored, are you?"

"Watching you pace around and make faces is actually kind of fascinating," she says, "but if it takes you ten more minutes to finish whatever you're trying to do, I'm gonna get antsy."

"Shouldn't be too long. All I want to do is—" and he pulls power again, and keeps pulling, concentrating on his desired end result. Conjure this shape and attach this complicated fiddly twist of magic and - wait what was that - the waterspout drops into his hand, and he uncaps it and turns it over and watches water pour out and then caps it again and hands it to her.

"Whoa," she says, studying the little widget, like a bottle that's just half an inch of neck with a cap on the end. "Artifact. How the fuck?"

"I think it's all the practice I have with wizardry," he says, "you really get good at precisely imagining the thing you want. But I'm going to do it again, because something weird went by in the hint-thing while I was building it."

Another waterspout, and this time he pays much closer attention to the interplay between the specification he envisions, the hint-guide's suggestions for how to accomplish it, and the subtler, more elusive layer of hinting that shows him what the end result is actually going to be like. And there it is again: a flaw, an instability, an imbalance in the neatly pinned loop of power that performs the waterspout's function.

"Well that's unfortunate," he concludes. "Apparently I haven't quite solved artificing with pain magic - it looks good for now," he pours a little water out of the second spout, "but the magic's all wobbly, it's going to go haywire eventually." He tosses the second waterspout at the pyramid. It bounces off.

"Has anyone ever told you you're a crazy perfectionist?"

"It's a surprisingly uncommon complaint! Can you teach me how healing with pain magic works? What do you aim for?"

She giggles. She attempts to explain. She manages it well enough that he successfully heals his arm.

"It's fascinating how much - conscious manipulation of forces - is involved in this magic," he comments. "With wizardry you mostly just specify the result and let the power take care of itself. I think I might prefer this method. It feels more like I'm really doing something, you know?"

"Think so. Hey, d'you know anybody who might want to teach me witchcraft?"

"Not off the top of my head, but I could probably help you find someone. Will you get bored if I spend another angle here trying to make a stable waterspout?"

"Yeah probably. But like being on the bottom of the world by yourself playing with fire doesn't sound like the best plan ever."

"If I wreck this form too badly I can always take another one - that's what 'losing a form' is, if we're injured to the point of death while in a form other than our natural one we revert to natural and we're fine - and my natural form's fireproof."

"What is your natural form even?"

He shifts.

"...so you're a dragon."

"I'm a shren," he corrects.

"How, uh, do I tell the difference?"

"You're really unlikely to ever see a shren in natural form, because a shren in natural form being near a dragon in natural form is how the condition transmits. And my wings don't work." He flops them demonstratively.

"...and that's enough to make you a whole different species?"

"Sort of. It's complicated. Dragonishes speak a magic language called Draconic that has words for every possible thing with every possible shade of meaning that a person could want to say, except that it's really insistent on shrens not being dragons and not even being categorizable as the same sort of thing as dragons in any meaningful sense."

"...your magic language is broken."

"That's certainly the sort of opinion that someone who didn't speak Draconic would tend to have, yes. And it's one I agree with but damn few other people do." He shifts back. "Anyway. I think I'm safe to play with fire down here for a while longer as long as I'm not a complete idiot about it. I can teleport you to my living room and then come back."

"Sure, sounds good. Enjoy your self-injury."

"I will!" he says, giggling, and he takes her hand and brings her home.