There is a small man with a paintbrush in his hand, kneeling on dry cracked ground beside a large round metal plate, painting the plate with coloured inks drawn somehow from glass spheres in the open case that lies on the ground beside him. Occasionally he checks his work against the book propped up beside the case.
He yelps in startlement and drops his paintbrush. The ink smears under Cam's feet, and the paintbrush contributes a final splatter.
There is... something like an explosion. The plate warps and shatters; a mass of twisted wreckage fountains out of it, shredded spirals of stone intersecting with loops and whorls of coloured glass and splintered lumps of wood, all at highly uncomfortable speeds in semirandom directions. When the shrapnel hits Cam's summoner, he shatters into a fine spray of brilliantly gleaming crystalline shards, which are then blown outward in a wide arc by the force of the blast, shredding the book and scattering the ink-spheres across the ground.
It's over in moments. The fountain of debris stutters to a halt. Cam, somehow, is still here. The person who presumably summoned him is in a thousand glassy pieces spread out over the fifty-foot blast radius, glittering beautifully in the sunlight.
He is in a flat and lifeless wasteland, under a glaring yellow sun. There is a hill visible in the distance, and a glimmer next to it that might be water; besides that, it's pretty much flat dry ground as far as the eye can see.
A few of the shards of Cam's summoner are moving. They pull together into a single piece, and that piece starts to grow, in a manner somewhere between a crystal and a plant. It forms the shape of a face, which is crying in pain. As the growth moves on to form a neck and a pair of shoulders, the head slowly transmutes from shining white crystal back into flesh and bone and skin and hair.
While he waits, he might take the time to notice that the eldritch crystalline horror is bilingual in two languages he's never heard of and which share no discernible roots with any language he speaks!
It takes about a minute from the first signs of movement until enough of his torso regrows that he has lungs and can breathe. He gasps in an agonized breath, whimpers, tries to speak, fails, whimpers some more, tries again.
"What," gasp, "the fuck," wheeze, "are you?"
'Demon' comes through as 'maker'; there isn't a word for it in either of the two new languages.
"I'm a human," says the eldritch crystalline horror. "And I'm—" A spurt of new growth from his elbow jars his whole body, and the movement presses his face against the mass of shards underneath him. They're sharp. His cheek and jaw are shredded right down to the bone. He stifles a whimper; the deep gashes barely have time to bleed before the edges turn glassy and knit themselves back together. "Fuck. What was I saying?"
His legs are starting to regrow. He scrunches his eyes shut and stops talking. The new growth shoves him across the shard-dusted ground, shredding part of his new outfit and most of his back, but there's enough of the clothes left to preserve modesty and his back only has half a second to bleed before it glazes over and heals. And now there's enough of him intact for him to sit up.
"Making stuff," he says. "Huh. Seems handy, I guess."
"They have a lot of magic, and sometimes someone convinces one to do them a favour, but they really don't like killing people. So somebody won a favour from an athra and tried to come up with the most inevitably fatal curse they possibly could that didn't directly mention death, hoping the athra wouldn't figure out that cursing me to shatter into little pieces whenever something hits me hard enough was effectively murder, and the athra cursed me exactly as specified but then also made me immortal."
"My favorite analogy is 'imagine attacking a watermelon with a plastic fork' but I'm not sure how that translates for you. Basically I can get a little bit hurt - for that matter, I can get tired and hungry and thirsty and whatnot - but only to a point, and from there it just doesn't get any worse. And I heal really fast, if injured. Without your inconvenient crystal theme."
"Make it pleasant and habitable. This one already has air and gravity, which, good on it, those are important, but it could use plants! And water features! And animals, although I can't make anything smarter than a snail so at first it will be mostly like bugs and I will have to have careful breeding programs of demonic fauna otherwise."
"There's lots of magic where I'm from but none of it can create persistently magical effects unless you count the indestructibility; everything has to work by the laws of physics once it gets there. This plant could conceivably be managing to do that somehow but it implies some combination of a magic system that can handle the design of a thing that does that somehow, on its own, or an inventing civilization that could invent it and thought this was the best use of their incredible biological knowledge. Or, this magic system works very differently from the ones I'm used to, but is based on similar enough underlying principles that it has 'bacon' as a concept."
"Yeah, exactly. If this is some weird athra prank or whatever, there will be no result beyond what you've got on the shelves if I try to conjure up 'the complete works ever produced in this language' for a translation program to chew on, but if there was a whole civilization, they presumably wrote more than that."
"So, you can learn to generate small amounts of the same stuff, and it can do many interesting things, including flow in a manner loosely analogous to water through paths in special materials. The paths can store information and the flow can move the information around. And it can be very very small. I will proceed to elaborate on all of that." He produces a version of his computer and starts explaining electrons.
So Cam walks him through the process - he has all kinds of fun demonic software for designing mountain ranges and such - and here is how it can be shaped and here is what it will look like if he puts a different composition of rocks in it and then they slide and here is how tall it will have to be to have snow caps once there's more general moisture around and here are plants that could go on the mountains!
"Oh, let's see -"
Cam dabs flourishes scattered around in the range - high caldera lake with unreasonably pretty waterfalls, vein of bright quartz, copse of excessively shapely trees, salt terraces, basalt columns - displays the result and pans around - and then shuffles things around until it's all crowded onto one mountain.
It was a pretty big childhood home and they are going to have to squint to get some of the details, but Tiro is happy to talk about the difference in architectural styles. He's not actually an architect but he can point out things like the customary shapes of windows and the way the roofs have that particular profile and the open awnings with the decorated columns that go over all the main doors... Haelahar architecture is overall very pretty.
"Oh, the palace, too, that has some really good stuff," he thinks to suggest. "But you might need to make it bigger for us to, like, see the windows."
"Let's see..." He moves some things from one side of his table to the other. "That should be enough space. There's two sets of walls, see, and the really old stuff is mostly inside the inner walls and the newer stuff is mostly between inner and outer, and I'm a fan of both."
The palace of Haela is huge and gorgeous. The inner fortifications are blockier, the construction techniques less refined, but their entire surface is decorated with beautifully intricate carvings, mostly abstract curves and lines, a little weathered but still clear. Between the inner and outer walls, the interconnected buildings are a little more elegant and modern in style, looking more like Tiro's childhood home and less like an ancient and forbidding castle. There is an enormous beautiful garden surrounded by charming colonnades. Tiro smiles wistfully at it.
"How hard would it be to copy, like, the style of the stonework on the inner castle without actually copying the exact designs? And there's a huge window somewhere around here that I really like," he hunts down the huge window and points it out, "yeah, this, that one." It's latticed diagonally in the Haelahar style, small individual panes of glass held securely in a wrought-iron frame, but unlike previous examples the frame has been crafted to look like a huge climbing vine instead of being a simple crosshatch of straight bars. "Isn't it great? I used to climb it as a kid until my mom caught me. Literally, I fell off and she caught me."
"They're great!" Cam agrees. "Okay - you're gonna want to prune what the program spits out, it can do silly things sometimes regardless of how great it is that it can do the things at all -" The program produces an example of a "more of that" based on the stone carving.
Tiro examines it. "That doesn't look so bad, except this corner is kind of messed up... it's weird the kind of mistakes it makes," he says. "Like, if this was calligraphy I'd say it had great handwriting but really iffy spelling, d'you see what I mean? Almost reminds me of athrai."
"The thing with the computer generation is that it 'knows' when certain elements are combined but has no idea why, and it's not equipped to speculate," Cam says, "nor to tell by feel when something 'looks right' if it fits all the rules it derived from looking at its sample." He generates another instance. "How's this one?"
"I'm pretty sure they screwed something up. Like, it took me a while to notice, but this whole hill-house thing looks kind of like it was dug in a hurry, you know? And it's full of - I mean I don't know for sure that they're emergency supplies, but they sure look like emergency supplies. That seems more like 'suddenly everybody needed to hide underground' than like 'they died off gradually of starvation or plague'."
"It's not that I'm uncreative, it's that I've never designed a house before and all my house-related experience is from a totally different world," he says. "So I can think of things like 'needs more gorgeous stonework', but, like... okay, I can ask for a computer with a copy of every book ever published in Haelahar or Sanash on it, right, but I only even know I can do that because I saw you do it for the language from my books, so how many other things like that are there that I don't know are options because I haven't heard of them yet? That's what's tripping me up here."
And from this Tiro learns things such as the existence of hot tubs (he doesn't want one) and the thing about never writing something down in plaintext if you want to keep it secret from demons (which sounds potentially if not immediately useful), and then he asks for examples of especially interesting or striking interior design choices Cam has heard of.
It's going to be so pretty! And he gives in to the temptation to ask for physical copies of all the books in the royal libraries and his family's personal collection, and designs an extension to the house to hold them all. It is bigger than the rest of the house. This is acceptable to Tiro.
"I was thinking up here -" Plop goes the architecture of Cam's house, non-black-hole-planetoid version - "by the crystal vein, but that's accessible for me, not as much for you since you don't have wings and that's another thing I don't know if you could have without exploding."
"Yeah, that's an ink colour index," says Tiro of the first search result. "Does it already know all the words I guessed?"
It does. Also it describes itself as a List of Known Essences. The first one is "0. Void", then "1. Chaos", "2. Order", "3. Light", "4. Matter", and Tiro's four other guesses, all of which the computer agrees with.
"They're the ones with the most straightforward and popular recipes! Earth makes dirt and stone, fire makes hot things, water makes water, light makes glowing things - air was harder to figure out but it makes things that have a lot of air in them or are light, that sort of thing."
"Pretty much! And then I figured out what some of the colours tended to do and used that to guess which other recipes might be useful to try. And so on."
There are so many recipes. Most of them for some kind of raw material, but there's intermediate products like cloth and knife blades in there, too, and a few entire tools.
"Like, all the fancy software that my computer has to design houses and mountains and stuff, that's installed, it was written by people out of teeny parts to allow computers to do those things, computers can't innately do that. There's not enough teeny parts in these recipes for me to buy that they add up to 'weaving' or 'garden implements' on their own, so I am imagining that one of two things is going on - someone wanted a cloth spell and came up with the recipe and 'taught' the system that this recipe means 'cloth', or, the system itself is personlike enough that the recipe conveys to it just the gist and it can fill in the blanks."
"Yeah, but mostly in the category of 'what kind of rock is that'... the bacon plants seem like they would've needed complex ideas like that, but they also kind of look like someone took a 'pig' recipe and a 'plant' recipe and mashed them together, so it still seems possible that the whole thing runs automatically on basic concepts and the weird part is which basic concepts it's able to draw on."
"For all I know they got all those things before they figured out a bacon plant that grew edible bacon! I do actually know you can fuck up a recipe and get something weird - like, if I draw a random extra line on a diagram, what usually happens is the result is shaped wrong or appears in the wrong place, but if it's a diagram for something complicated like cloth, it does weirder things. I managed to get cloth that was missing all the threads in one direction so it was just a big pile of loose threads, once."
"It's customary to summon daeva of any kind with restrictions on our behavior so we don't go on magical rampages, as magical rampages are terribly inconvenient and a lot of summonings are of random willing daeva rather than specific ones. Demons in particular are often also summoned gagged, which means we can't talk or in fact do anything communicative at all except for agree to or reject proposed trades. Except, like, make facial expressions and stuff. Part of the reason I got the tail is that unless someone does something dumb like 'tail left for yes, right for no', I can be fairly expressive with it even under a gag. Also it's fun but I didn't know how fun it would be in advance."
"Doesn't. Or rather, doesn't actually. Demons are kind of hard to trade with for the obvious reasons. So the sort of demons who show up to summons are sometimes nice people who just want to help out but sometimes are looking for intangibles, and one intangible that got popular to go for was some human thinking you had their soul because of, I don't know, the looks on their faces."
"Get into kinds of trouble that aren't available when there's only two people on a planet. Read a lot. Bother the royal family. I've vaguely wanted to go find an athra and try to get favours out of them for a while, but it's hard to just do that and my parents made me promise not to go on a year-long expedition for it until I reach majority because year-long expeditions in search of favourable athrai sometimes end in disappearing for two hundred years or getting turned into a talking songbird instead of having any useful favours granted and they didn't want their teenage son impulsively going off to get turned into a talking songbird."
"I can make them small people, but replacing the materials requires knowing more than I do about what materials are involved. If they're human, I could do locks of hair, say, if they're tentacle aliens or at the moment I try to conjure them from they are being made of crystal shards or something not so much."
"I shall take that as a no and assume there is not terribly much writing about on your planet!" says Cam. "Printing press is a pre-computer mechanism for distributing writing without having to have scribes copy it over all the time, literacy is not a huge priority for most societies before that."
"Yup. Be right back." And he goes over to his own house and sets that up and swoops back down. "It'll be easier to get good results because I can correct it but still way less hassle to let the computer figure out most of it rather than entering an entire dictionary and grammar textbook per."
"The Haelahar alphabet is prettier, right? My father likes Sanash better but he's the only one in the family and, you know, it's his native language."
(Haelahar uses letters with a more angular aesthetic and varied shape. Sanash has a lot of very samey letters with swooping lines and curves, somewhat sacrificing readability for elegance.)
Cam pulls up a sample on his computer: خلاف تعديل الحيلولة الا مع, أدوات بقيادة تحرّكت بلا عل. لكل وقرى لغزو المبرمة قد, بسبب العالمي ويكيبيديا، قبل من. الثالث والمعدات والإتحاد عرض أي, وإقامة الأوروبية بعد أن, لكون فرنسا ممثّلة وقد بـ. ذلك لم وجزر وبغطاء إيطاليا. دنو لم دأبوا وانهاء ممثّلة, بل أضف مايو وسوء. به، وصغار ضمنها لإعلان أم, بهيئة الأحمر وهولندا، من لان. مكّن فكان أطراف أم ولم, مقاومة تغييرات دون بل.
It purports to be the Standard Introductory Alchemy Reference, Third Edition, published by the University of Kelarne.
The first chapter is called "Tools and Practices of Alchemy" and it explains all of the tools and safety equipment in a standard alchemy kit, what they are for, (in brief) how to make them, and (also in brief) why they are made of the specific materials involved. Anything that's going to come into direct contact with alchemical essences has to be made of something certified completely alchemically nonreactive. Standard alchemist's work gloves are made of alchemist's leather, developed for this purpose; standard essence plates are made of a nonreactive metal whose name translates literally as 'airsteel', and the paintbrushes similarly of 'airfoam' and 'airwood', and so on.
"That's interesting," comments Tiro. "I did notice that some awful fuckups can happen when liquid essences get on things, and the pictures in the safety guides are pretty clear that you shouldn't touch the essence balls directly so of course I, uh, completely ignored them and touch essence balls all the time, but I guess being a crystalline horror makes me alchemically nonreactive by accident?"
"Wood and leather are made from living things, steel isn't and I have no idea about that foam stuff, maybe that's related?" guesses Tiro. "The kit I brought up here is by the door, but if you're going to risk blowing the essences up anyway you could go back to my hill and get some spares."
Alchemist's leather is usually manufactured via essence diagram (here's a recipe), but there's a paragraph somewhere about the history of the stuff and people did a lot of alchemical experiments before they figured out a treatment that successfully gave the leather an alchemically nonreactive surface.
"Huh," says Tiro. "I guess they're magic?"
A whole lot of really foreboding diary entries and only marginally less foreboding research notes. The diary entries are a bit all over the place in the way of diary entries, but the research notes are fairly neatly divided into 'what is happening to the global climate and how can we fix it?' and 'what are we going to do about all these ravening fiends?'.
"I guess they never found a solution to the ravening fiends," says Tiro. "And then I guess the ravening fiends all starved to death."
"Did anyone ever find out where the ravening fiends came from? Or the climate problems?"
They did not. It was widely speculated, but never confirmed, that the fiends were someone's failed workaround for the climate problem; the fiends never seemed to get thirsty that anyone could tell, and everyone's normal essence plants were being badly affected by the water shortage, so if someone invented the fiends as a water-free essence reclamation/generation mechanism and got a few too many things wrong in their prototype... well. And the study of the climate problem was severely hampered by everyone's inability to go outside without being eaten by fiends.
In only a couple more month-intervals, there is indeed such a discontinuity! The crater has finally reached all the way through the planet's crust, and there is magma visible at the bottom, and it's twice as big as it would be if it had been keeping to the consistent schedule of the last few intervals, and the rest of the world is nearly dry and the flooded continent's water supply is noticeably diminished.
"Whoa," says Tiro.
The crater is not yet all the way through the planet's crust, and the flooding has not yet begun to vanish.
"I wonder what that big crater actually is," says Tiro. "As far as we know, if there was something in there that you can't conjure it has to have been either magic or intelligent, right?"
Now it looks like there are a few bits of the Problem Continent still left at the edges, poking tentatively through the drastically lowered surface of the ocean, but the entire middle bit is a water-filled crater. And everywhere else is dry and largely flat, with occasional remaining mountains.
"...Told you we weren't on that continent," says Tiro, slightly stunned.
"That seems like a good guess for what happened to the Problem Continent. And I guess there are obvious ways to avoid accidentally creating ravening fiends. What's missing is... I don't know what exactly the Problem Continent people did wrong that caused their continent to be eaten by Problems."