Ah, but could they be obscenely healthy?

It is technically possible for them to get healthier than they currently are.

Tiro goes down to the smallish crater by the lakeshore and piles up all his collected shards and consults a recipe book and paints the recipe for a pile of wood and then the recipe to set the pile of wood on fire.

Yttren putters around contentedly, improving the plants.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" Leuska asks. "I don't really know--what's helpful, here, it's nothing like the palace or like being on the run, I don't really know what's useful. Everything obvious someone else is doing."

"Sorry, I'm a little at loose ends myself," says Tiro. "Um, I was planning on hauling the broken furniture out of the downstairs rooms at some point, if you wanted to help with that."

"I can do that!" she says brightly, and goes to find Delsmiar to help her do that because hauling furniture is a two-person job.

Hooray!

Tiro settles down at the table in the upstairs room with his recipe books and starts trying to figure out construction.

"Ooh, what's that?"

"This is me trying to learn how to build a house!"

"I assume you'll be substantially slowed down by trying to explain any of it to me."

"I can try anyway. I don't need a house urgently in the next three hours."

"Awesome."

"So where did we leave off, before?"

"You explained how the colors combine to form the other colors?"

"Right," he says. "I have guesses about what the most common four are. Fire I think I mentioned, and then there's water, earth, and air. I'm kind of confused about what the five basic colours could be, but I think this one's light?"

"I'll ask Delsmiar if she's had any new insight since then once she and Leuska are done hauling stuff."

"Good plan."

"Oracles are useful!"

"Sure seems that way!"

"So that one's probably light."

"Yeah. Where it appears in recipes, things tend to end up glowing. That's how I got those glowing yellow rocks I'm lighting the interior of the hill with."

"Can you get other colors of glowing rock?"

"I haven't found a recipe for any yet! But here's the glowing yellow rocks one." He flips to the appropriate page of the appropriate book and shows it to her. The colours glimmer beautifully on the page. "I have no idea how they got the ink in the books to look so magic without it actually being the real thing and going off the second they were done drawing it. For that matter I have no idea how diagrams know when you're done drawing them, but they totally do. When I did my stupid scribbling experiment, it didn't explode until I was done adding more scribbles."

"Huh. I bet I can work out what bit of this means 'yellow' eventually and do other colors, and then I can make a beautiful glowing mosaic."

He laughs. "How do you know there's a bit that means 'yellow'?"