"Soooort of? I can tell what's in it... I'd probably have a better guess about how big it was if there were, like, things, and not just lots of dry dirt with some hills on it. Oh, I found another dead tree." He waves vaguely off to the side. "Can't see it from here but it's that way. —I'm not even sure it's a range so much as a, a focus? Because I keep looking harder and there keeps... being more."

"Can you detect the curvature of the planet?"

"Dunno. Oh, found a lake. Nothing living in it, but it's water and I didn't put it there." He stares into the distance, eyes unfocused, and reports his findings with little gestures to one side or another indicating their direction. "Wasteland, more wasteland, a couple of hills... that might be a mountain? Kind of a pathetic mountain... oh, the ocean's that way, looks like. And super dead. Oh, okay, I see what you mean about the curvature of the planet. ...huh."

"Yeah, your planet does it differently. Magma? Downwards?"

"Mm..." He flexes his hands. "Yeah, looks like. Oh, wow, it goes down a long ways. In Suranse there's some in the middle of the shell but not nearly so much of it."

"My planet is estimated to have a diameter of about eight thousand miles."

"I think mine might be smaller than that but I don't remember the numbers. ...something's up with that mountain I mentioned. Like, there's something in it, and it's... I can't really tell what it is but it's weird. I don't think it's alive, though, alive is a different thing."

"Interesting. How far?"

"Uh... a ways. You probably don't wanna walk it. I'm not even sure I wanna fly there."

He contemplates this state of affairs for a moment, and then the whole hill shudders delicately and starts sliding across the ground. (Tias grins the grin of somebody who is really enjoying his newfound capacity to scoot hills.)

"Goodness."

"Whee!"

"Whee!"

They zoom across the wasteland, leaving the dissipating clouds behind. Tias giggles and lets the wind of their passage ruffle his feathers.

The mountain is indeed pretty small, more of an unusually large rocky hill than anything. When they arrive, Tias steers the hill partway around it, and points at an arched gap in the rocks near ground level. "There's like a... almost a house in there," he says. "With mystery stuff in it. I'm gonna go check it out."

He takes off and glides down to the opening, then walks in. It's tall enough to admit him, even though he is himself pretty tall.

Cor hangs back a little but follows.

The archway leads to a tunnel which leads, eventually, to a room. It's kind of dim in there, at least until Tias starts glowing.

The walls of the approximately rectangular chamber are lined with shelves, and the shelves are lined with nearly identical boxes. One of the shelves on the far wall has fallen, spilling its boxes across the floor; there are round balls of what looks like colored glass scattered across the floor at that end of the room, glittering strangely in Tias's light.

"That's the stuff," he says, crossing the floor to pick up a red-orange sphere.

It catches fire.

"Ow!" he says, laughing. "Maybe the weird thing they are is 'magic'? And, uh, don't touch them, I guess." But he has yet to let go of the burning orb.

"...noted. I wonder if you'd be able to read any writing that was left here."

"Maybe! See anything that looks like a book?"

He tosses the orb in the air and catches it. After the initial surprise, the flames don't seem to affect him.

The only thing in this room is shelves and shelves of boxes presumably containing magic balls, but there are two more doorways besides the one they came in; one even has the remains of a door next to it, or at least that's a pretty good explanation for that haphazard scatter of splintered boards.

"You seem like you'll weather failure at finding books that comes with success at finding... booby traps... better than I will." He cranes his neck but avoids tromping around; he might fall.

"Fair enough."

He sets the spilled box upright, puts the flaming ball in it (it goes out), waves a hand vaguely at the ceiling (it starts glowing), and wanders off down the nearest tunnel.

"You sure have a lot of random magical powers. Did you have any of them besides the possibility of sprouting wings before?"

"Nope!" comes the cheerful reply, from out of sight down the tunnel; and a few seconds later, "Ooh, skeletons!"

"Oh dear."

Giggle. Faint rummaging noises.

"It's your lucky day, the skeletons have books! Well. Had."

He comes back down the tunnel carrying an armful of books titled in an unrecognizable alphabet.

"Can you read those? Because I can't, and you're the one who mysteriously picked up my language."

"I can! There's a couple of what looks like magic textbooks and then I dunno what the other one is."