"It really is!"

"I've been doing a lot of really reckless experiments, but I can teach you everything I've learned how to do that's safe and why all the dangerous stuff is dangerous."

"Reckless like how?"

"Like, uh. Did you see that kind of scorched crater near the lakeshore, on the far side of the hill from where we were coming from?"

"Yyyesss?"

"I was still figuring out how the recipe diagrams work and I might have been in kind of a bad mood and I scribbled all over the plate and, uh, I'm now pretty sure the orange ink represents fire. And I'm very careful about drawing recipes correctly these days. The plate and brush were a total loss."

"...How are you okay?"

"It's hard to explain. The short answer is 'magic'. I told Aduva some of the background; how much do you want to know?"

"Aduva?"

"His world works completely differently from ours--they have one species with no magic, one I'm-not-even-sure-it's-a-species with lots of magic, no death tolls, and no portals. The maybe-not-a-species shares, sometimes, which would be good except they hand out curses as well as blessings. He's...got a thing that hurts a lot, but he can't die of it because the not-species doesn't like killing people, and it's plausible that nothing else can kill him either as a side effect."

"I guess if not every world has death tolls that explains why this is--was--virgin soil," Leuska mutters.

"The maybe-not-a-species are called athrai," says Tiro. "Singular 'athra'. And what I am is 'human'."

"I assume Aduva already told you what we all are," Luvei says.

"Yeah."

"Ouch!" yelps Proust from the other room.

Tiro is alarmed! "What happened?" he calls, hurrying toward the sound.

She is cradling a hand with one lightly sliced finger. A shard of something clear and glimmering with a little blood on one edge lies on the floor beneath it.

Tiro winces. "Sorry, I thought I'd cleaned all those up," he says. "Don't touch them, they're really sharp. Worse than broken glass by a lot."

"What is it?" she asks. "I know it was kind of dumb, it was just so pretty..."

"It's, uh. It's me."

"...What?"

"I - break, when I get injured, and it makes those."

"That the thing that hurts a lot?"

"Yeah."

"I guess that explains why you don't have visible scars."