"I don't think it came up."

Shrug. "Well, he is. He's not great at being a dad but he's all right at being a king. Anyway, I'm gonna go fuck around with the wasteland."

He heads back to the portal.

Cor follows.

Once they're both back out in the wasteland, the portal vanishes tracelessly. Tias climbs the hill. He squints up at the sky, and wisps of cloud begin to form, twisting together until they pile up into a big grey blanket and a light rain begins to fall.

"Wow, it really doesn't wanna rain here," he comments. "Also I have weather powers, that's cool."

"How can you tell it doesn't want to rain?"

"I dunno, it just... feels that way? It's like, you know if you sit still for too long you get stiff and then moving is weird? It feels kind of like that, except with weather."

"Huh. It was awfully dry..."

"Yeah, that probably has something to do with it. Hmm. Wonder what else I can do..."

He surveys the land, fanning his wings to let the rain run down his feathers. Weather, check, what's the next step in making this place less depressing? Maybe some grass? He reaches out mentally, and winces.

"Oh wow, it was a little reluctant to rain but it's way more reluctant to, like, grow any plants. I'm not sure there's a single living thing within a mile of us. I'm not sure there's a single living thing anywhere."

"Can you tell what your range is?"

"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."