To—

—well, the ground is solid. The air is breathable. Nothing looks immediately likely to kill him.

But he is on a flat expanse of dry cracked earth, under a blazing sun, and the nearest evidence of anything resembling life is an extremely dead tree rising from the ground in the middle distance.

That's promising. He'll want to check a few different spots on the planet - there are deserts on his world too - but it's promising. He walks along, in case there's anything in easy walking distance of here before he goes and gets scouting helpers.

After some walking there is a hill.

A person is sprawled at the foot of the hill. He might be unconscious, or just very unhappy. He isn't wearing any clothes, which is remarkable because if he's been there for any length of time he should be terribly sunburned, and he isn't.

"- hello?"

He mumbles something unintelligible without bothering to lift his face out of the dirt.

"I don't expect you to speak my language or anything but you seem to be lying facedown in the dirt in a wasteland and that's sort of concerning."

He turns his head in Cor's direction.

"I've had kind of a shit day."

"That's, uh, unfortunate. Can I help? How do you speak my language?"

He sighs, and sits up. (Yep, definitely not wearing any clothes.)

"Dunno," he says. "I was at home and then something—hit me, I guess—it felt like I was getting... torn out of the world? And then everything was really uncomfortable for a really long time and then I fell down this hill." He winces. "Oh, until I moved I didn't notice how thirsty I was—"

A stream of water as wide as his hand abruptly begins pouring out of the air in front of him. He stares at it in complete bafflement for a second, then shrugs, sticks his face in it, and drinks.

"- how long ago was this?"

Rather than take his face out of the water just yet, he shrugs expansively.

"I'm trying to figure out if it's my fault. Have you been lying here more or less than fifteen minutes?"

He takes his face out of the water; the flow stops. "Why would it be your fault—? Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was longer. Like, a lot longer."

When he shakes his head to get the water out of his hair, the movement reveals that his ears are long and pointed. When he yawns, it is apparent that the same is true of his canine teeth. His fingernails and toenails are short but sharp, like claws; he's careful of them when he rubs his face to dry it.

Could've been weirder. "For reasons to do with the limits of my magic system it wouldn't have been that weird if my travel also moved someone else at the same time but it seems you arrived before I left, which is not something my magic does."

"So, wait, you came here on purpose? Uh, why?"

"I didn't come here on purpose, exactly, although if you aren't a native it's actually a really great planet for one of my needs. I'm scouting, more or less."

"Scouting for...?"

"Somewhere to evacuate and, separately, a planet nobody'll miss."

"...somehow I get the impression you're not looking to wreck a planet just for kicks."

"No. Destroyed planets turn out to be a byproduct of my magic. Nasty surprise."

"Oh, wow, yeah. Guess that also explains what you need to evacuate for."

"Yep!"

"Well, I'd suggest you talk to my dad but I have no idea how to get home from here and also home is kind of being invaded by murderous aliens at the moment."

"Uh, since my spell apparently works I can probably get you home. And if this planet is really as dispensable as it looks help with the murderous aliens maybe."

"I went a long way falling between worlds." He rubs his head. "And learned half a hundred languages while I was at it, apparently. How d'you tell how dispensable a planet is?"

"I'll want to land in a few places around the globe and see if they're all, uh." He gestures expansively. "This won't find us, like, an island with people on it, say, and there clearly used to be life here so it's not ideal, but jumping at random could easily kill me or other scouts so I don't want to be too terribly picky. Anyway, it won't be destroyed immediately, it took a long time to get bad with ours, so if there's a tiny enclave somewhere they'll have lots of warning once we run into them."

"Hm."

He frowns absently at the puddle he's sitting in; it obediently dries up.

"...moving between worlds doesn't usually give you random magic powers, does it?"

"Well, uh, I haven't noticed any new ones."

"'Cause I definitely couldn't do this shit," he gestures with one hand and a rippling ball of water appears floating in midair, "before the interdimensional adventure." The water vanishes.

"It's pretty cool."

"Yeah." He glances down at himself. "Wish I could magically appear some clothes, though..."

No clothes appear to grant his wish.

"Can't help you there, sorry." He's wearing shorts with a little bag pinned to them, but only those, and otherwise covered in dried blood swirls and ash markings.

Maybe blood is fashionable where he's from.

"Oh, hey, what's your name? I'm Tias."

"Cor."

"Nice to meet you, I guess. It definitely beats lying at the bottom of a hill for another couple of hours."

He stands up and looks around. "Wow, this place is depressing."

"I know, right, the only way it could be better would be if it didn't even have a dead tree."

Snicker. "Don't get rid of the dead tree, it's scenic!"

"It's very scenic, just doesn't signify that there's no way there's ever been a native here."

"And you don't wanna wreck the place until you know. Yeah."

He squints up at the sky. "Huh, no sun-circle. I guess not every world has those."

"Sun-circle?"

"Yeah, you know—okay, I guess you don't—the circle the sun moves on—"

He gestures illustratively, and in the path of his hand a glowing golden hoop appears, with a glowing golden bead sliding along it; and inside of that, a silver hoop and silver bead; and inside of that, a... planet. At least, something resembling a planet. It's shaped like a partly-flattened sphere, or a very puffy pancake, and it's hollow - if you look in through the transparent oceans or the jagged gap that rings the outer edge, there's mountains and lakes and forests and rivers on the inner surface of the shell, and something green and tangly floating in the middle.

Tias blinks at it.

"...yeah, so, that's Suranse. And the sun-circle and moon-circle."

"Wow. I was assuming planets in general would be like mine, which, before its magical puncturing, was a solid sphere of rock that melted in the middle, going around a sun which was circle-free. I might have to figure out how to check that here in case there's less planet to eat than I expect."

"Huh. What other totally normal things do you not have? Healing wells? Winged people? Goats?"

"We have goats."

"Well at least you have goats. Wow, if I didn't have my wings to look forward to I'd go crazy—although I guess I wouldn't even know what I was missing, I dunno if that'd help—"

"What's the deal with the wings?"

"Oh - some people have wings, and they don't get old and they're much harder to kill than usual, and they have Spheres, which I have no idea how to explain. You get your wings when you, like, do something. Like winning a war, or saving the planet from aliens, or, I don't know... something impressive."

He pauses. A thought occurs to him.

"...you know, the trip here was bad enough I'm almost surprised just surviving it didn't—"

A blazing beam of white light surrounds him, lancing upward to pierce the sky. When it clears a few seconds later, he has wings, iridescent black feathers gleaming in the sunlight with undertones of red and gold.

"—count," he says, curving the wings around in front of him so he can touch his feathers disbelievingly. "Uh. Never mind, then, I guess."

"Congratulations."

"Thanks!" He folds his wings to his back, puts them away, brings them out again.

"...and the Sphere part you can't explain."

"Oh - well, I could show you," he offers, and then there is a portal shimmering in the air next to them.

"That doesn't look spherical."

"It's not, it's a portal. To my Sphere. C'mon."

He walks through it.

"You're sure this is safe?" calls Cor.

"Why would it not be safe???"

"I don't know! I'm just asking!" He follows.

They are on a balcony overlooking a stunningly gorgeous mountainside, with a forest and a wide shining lake at the bottom. Overhead, the sky is dark and full of starry lights, but between the 'stars' are streaks of swirling silver like someone went to paint the moon and got it very wrong.

"Prettiest Sphere I've ever seen," Tias says proudly. "I wonder why it's so big - they usually start out barely big enough to fit a house, and keep growing as long as you're alive."

"...which is indefinitely since you're ageless now? Wow, that's a neat sky."

"Yeah. My dad's is boring but it's huge, he's five thousand years old. And nothing in there but a flat grassy field as far as the eye can see, 'cause that's the kind of person he is, I guess."

At the rear of the balcony, a pair of ornate double doors lead into what must be a house built into the mountain. "I wonder if there's clothes in there," says Tias, opening them and going through.

"You don't just automatically know?"

"Nope! Where would be the fun in that?"

The interior of the house is richly decorated, palace-like, with wide corridors and high ceilings and comfortable-looking furniture. And, behind the third door he tries, a wardrobe. He throws on a pair of pants and doesn't bother with a shirt.

"This is all designed stuff. What designed it?"

"...me, I guess? But not me, like... a person's Sphere is their place, it's things that suit them, that they'd like and want, but you don't actually get to pick."

"Huh. Well, it's all very tasteful."

He laughs. "Thanks!"

"You're welcome! Anyway, we don't have these where I'm from and this place is too small and too pretty for any of the urgent applications even if you took it into your head to donate it, I guess I'll have to find planets how I was originally planning to after all."

"Guess so. Why not just run off and leave the whole mess behind, though?"

"...'cause a billion people, or however many are left after the war, are gonna die?"

"Well... and? Do you like any of 'em?"

"...yes, but even if I didn't..."

"Even if you didn't...?"

"...then I still wouldn't want a billion people to die?"

Tias seems to find this very puzzling for some reason!

"...are you from a place where it is customary to be indifferent to large death tolls?"

"I dunno? I guess not, Dad's always annoyed when we lose a lot of people in the war even if they're all Ceirene."

"Ceirene?"

"Ceir is the outside of the planet, Aluvanna is the inside. You look Ceirene to me, I guess 'cause there isn't an inside of your planet for you to be from. Aluvai have the fangs and claws and long ears, like me."

"Gotcha. Uh, I do care about people of different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities, yes."

"Huh. I'm not sure I care about anybody," says Tias.

"...sounds lonely."

"I guess. Wouldn't it be exhausting, though, getting mad every time somebody dies even if you've never met 'em?"

"I don't hear about all the individual deaths but the war was exhausting for that among other reasons, sure."

"Oh, what'd you have a war over? Not invading aliens, I'm guessing."

"First time the planet got punctured the city on the far side appeared to have been attacked."

"Oh wow. Yeah, that'd do it."

"Sure did. But then we all discovered that actually the problem was the planet getting eaten."

"I bet that sucked."

"Tremendously. Hence my attempt to go looking for alternate dumping grounds and somewhere to escape to."

He laughs. "Makes sense."

"Thank you."

"Hmm," he says. "I think I wanna go back to the depressing wasteland and fuck around with my inexplicable magic powers. Wanna come and watch?"

"I'm under a bit of a time constraint. If you don't want to help and you don't want me to try to send you home either I should probably go back where I came from and get more people investigating the wastelandness of this planet."

He shrugs. "How would I even help if I wanted to? Wouldn't 'finding out what my inexplicable magic powers even do' be a pretty good start either way?"

"I guess it depends on what they do. Do you want to help?"

"Well, I dunno! Depends how!"

"If you could make this planet less wastelandy we could find another dumping ground, presuming hospitable planets no one will mind us moving into are fewer than empty ones. If you're tougher than a mage you could scout. You could introduce us to the folks back home and we could ask if they've got space."

"They've got tons of space out in Ceir if you don't mind the invading murderous aliens. But making the planet less wastelandy might be fun."

"I kinda mind invading murderous aliens but they sound solvable."

"Then maybe you could talk to my dad. —He's the king of Aluvanna, I forget if I said."

"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."

"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."

"Ooh, magic textbooks. What's the other one say?"

"Mm..."

The stone floor sprouts a stone table so he can put two of the books down on it and open the third.

"Some guy's journal." He flips to the end. "'We can hear the fiends scratching at the door every night', wow, ominous much?"

"Very, and I perform a sort of magic that involves me chanting about fire and blood and destruction all the time."

He giggles.

"Okay..."

He spends a minute or so flipping through the journal, skimming the entries that catch his eye.

"...So, this guy's on a research project in the middle of nowhere, he complains a lot about how boring it is, he's got a crush on one of his coworkers - she sounds hot, I wonder if one of the skeletons was hers - and then the weather gets all fucked up, like, 'the last rainfall recorded on the continent was three months ago', and so now everybody's trying to figure that out... then there's fiends, and the research people hide away in their little mountain hidey hole and bar the door and spend what looks like another month or two getting really sick of each other, and then the last entry's about the fiends and I guess they got in because those skeletons were pretty fucked up."

"I see. There don't seem to be fiends left..."

"Just a guess, but maybe once they were done eating everybody they all starved to death?"

"Could be. I don't see fiend skeletons, but maybe fiends don't have skeletons, or there weren't any in the places we've been before they starved."

"Yeah, or something. Anyway." He looks at the other two books and makes a face. "How likely is it that the magic textbooks are boring?"

"Dunno what magic is like here. Mine is like art history."

"Eh, guess there's only one way to find out."

He puts down one book, picks up another, skims a bit.

"Could be worse, I guess. Looks like you do magic by painting." He turns the book around to show Cor an example diagram, neat lines and arcs drawn out carefully in coloured inks. "And you have to be really careful to get all the lines right or you'll fuck it up and maybe die or catch fire or something."

"Oh no. The horror. Whatever shall I do."

Snort. "What, is yours like that too?"

Cor gestures at himself. "It might require less exactitude but I do paint things and have to get them right. That having been said it would be irresponsible of me to take any unusual risks until I've gotten word home."

"Makes sense, I guess. It'd be too bad for your planet if you found this nice wasteland and then caught fire before you could tell everybody."

"Exactly. I mean, I told them what I was doing, but they won't consider it as promising to follow up on if I disappear."

"No kidding."

"Especially since that'd be exactly what would happen if the spell didn't work at all!"

"Does that mean you'd better get back home and tell everybody right away?"

"Ideally. I was planning, if I survived the landing, to pretty much immediately use my own blood to refresh the markings - can't be dry - since I don't have a way to bring significant cargo - and then go home. It's convenient I landed near you, since there are more opportunities afforded thereby."

"...Opportunities like what?"

"I'm pretty sure I could target where you came from, knowing now it exists. It might be a good place to park refugees temporarily to give scouts more time, even if it's not a good long-term plan, and I bet mages can help with your aliens problem if it's as described. Knowing what, generally, these books contain is helpful even if you don't feel like translating more; gives whoever else a head start. Plus you scanned a ways around and now I'm more confident than I was before that this planet is otherwise not inhabited."

"Huh. ...What happens if you try to get to my world and you can't, though?"

"Uh, range of outcomes from 'I land somewhere random again' to 'I disappear'? Which is why I want to go home first."

"I'd be kind of annoyed if you died," he remarks. "You're all right."

"I have the impression that this is high praise."

He giggles. "Well, I can't think of anybody else I like that much!"

"Thanks!"

"Why blood, anyway? Like is that actually how the magic works?"

"Yep. Blood and ash. It's usually sheep blood, can't make a habit of using your own. Vacuum is useful too but hard to make."

"Can't make a habit of using your own because...? Not enough of it for all the painting you want to do?"

"Yeah. People who do only really casual magic and don't want to pay for sheep access will use their own - well, did, everybody's trying to cut out nonessentials now - and I would have used it in this case so I didn't have to bring anything but myself and some ash to reapply if mine got smudged, but if you do lots of magic you'd be in pretty bad shape trying to run it on your own blood."

"Huh. ...and what do you mean, 'vacuum'—?"

"Nothingness-not-even-air. We have it around our planet above the air if you go high enough and can produce it in small amounts in containers on the surface."

"Oh, weird. Either we don't have that around Suranse or nobody's ever flown far enough to find it. Seems like it'd be kind of hard to paint with, though."

"Yeah, you don't paint with it, you place containers among blood and ash markings."

He nods.

"What's next for you?"

"Seeing if I can bully the wasteland into growing plants, probably."

"With your thing or the paint thing? What can the paint thing do?"

"My thing. Although apparently the paint thing's good for plants? It, like... makes stuff, as far as I can tell. You paint your magic lines and a thing appears. It might do other stuff, I didn't read far enough to tell."

"Pity the fiends got 'em. This does make me think there might be somebody ungotten by fiends who may have managed to restart somewhere, though."

"Eh, I can probably check that without too much trouble."

"I'd appreciate that very much. Imagine how pleased they'd be to find that they weren't the last people alive anywhere at all."

He laughs. "No kidding, wow."

"And anyone who's still alive is probably good at painting without exploding or whatever!"

"You'd think!"

"Or they just live on an island, I guess. A butte. I don't know how good fiends are or were at swimming or climbing."

"You'd think if an island was all it took then more people would've lived, but maybe this is the shit continent with no good islands, or something."

"It's very dry, some islands might have been isthmused to death."

He giggles.

So does Cor. "A painting to appear stuff magic system is basically the opposite of mine."

"Yeah, it's kinda funny, isn't it? Learn to do both and you're all set. Except for the disappearing planets part, I guess."

"It doesn't have to disappear planets in particular, I think if you dumped enough stuff into a disappearance point it'd stop growing. The problem is they grow faster as they get bigger and/or used more - not sure which on current data."

"...huh. And they don't get bigger when you put more stuff in, they get—full?"

"I guess you could say they get full. Small enough points, if you try hard, you can pile things into fast enough that they can't keep up. If you know what you're doing you can use that to fine-tune gates, which are made from disappearance points that are peeled apart from themselves and installed in separate locations. The peeling calls for precise timing relative to the growth of the point."

"Weird. Kinda cool though. Probably a good thing I started out in Suranse and not your world, I'd have way too much fun painting blood on things."

"If you get carried away you lose toes!"

"Like I said, good thing I didn't grow up around your magic!"

"You'd be toeless! It'd ruin your symmetry."

"Can't have that! Luckily I have different magic, and so far it seems like it wants me to keep my toes."

"Good for it."

"Speaking of which, I think I'll go back outside and argue with the desert some more."

He puts the textbook down with the other two books and heads for the entrance tunnel.

Cor confirms that he can't read the books, and follows.

He spreads his wings and strides up the hill, and the ground shivers slightly in his wake. Shoots of grass poke up tentatively from the dead dry dirt, withering from the moment the sun touches them. Tias growls under his breath.

A fountain of sparkling water erupts from the ground at his feet, arcing ten feet in the air before it splashes back down and begins to flow down the hill. In a wave that starts there and spreads outward, the dry ground transmutes to rich soil. Grass grows, and flowers, and wild berry bushes, and eventually trees. The fountain calms to a trickling spring as the trees grow tall enough to shade it.

"Pretty! Are you doing your own design work here or is it like your Sphere?"

"I dunno, little of both?"

"What was wrong with the plants at first?"

"There wasn't enough, like... anything? Water, things plants use to grow? This whole place is just dead. So I made it a little less dead."

"It looks much less dead!"

He beams.

"Do you have to ration your magic use at all or can you just do that as much as you want?"

"How should I know? I haven't run into anything that looks like a limit yet, though."

"Some possible limits might have been clear early on!"

"I guess. Haven't found any of those, though."

He stares out over his forest for a moment, with the same distant look from when he was examining their surroundings with magical senses before. "...huh," he says. "Vacuum. Wow, there's not really much air on this planet, at least not in comparison to how much planet. Is that normal?"

"I don't think all planets have to have air at all, but I haven't noticed it being very thin here. Uh, it should go a few miles up if it's like mine, fading out?"

"Sounds about right, I think. It's just that doesn't really look like much when there's so much planet underneath it. Anyway I'm pretty sure there's literally nothing alive on this planet except us and what I put here, but I've got about half a planet to go so it could still surprise me."

"Islands of paint mages! More hideyholes of books!

"Oh, yeah, there's definitely more magic stuff. I can see like a dozen more bits of magic like this one scattered all over the continent."

"Oooh."

He laughs delightedly at the look on Cor's face.

"Everyone'll be so excited about figuring out the lost civilization! After we have arranged not to lose our civilization."

Snicker.

"They just roll right under the couch, civilizations."

Helpless giggling.

"Hey, is this water drinkable, it's been hot out."

"Pretty sure it is, here—" and he gestures, and the spring heaves itself up into a charming little fountain, made of rough stone with a clear pool spilling a tidy little waterfall into a slightly bigger pool which pours in turn into a little stream flowing down the hill.

"Thanks!" Slurp.

He makes a tree bend itself into the shape of a chair and sprawls in it, contemplating the planet as he extends his senses. Ocean, ocean, ocean, "—wow, what the fuck happened there?"

"...couldn't begin to tell you."

...he laughs a little. "There's, uh... something weird, all the way around the planet from us. It looks like there might've been a continent there once, but now it's mostly just a really big hole that goes almost right down to the magma, full of ocean."

"I cannot explain that based on my background understanding of spherical solid planets. Unless it's actually just an ocean. What do you mean looks like there might've been a continent?"

"Like... imagine a continent, right, and now imagine something exploded real hard right near the middle, so now there's still some continent around the edges but it's mostly hole?"

"A crater?"

"Yeah, I guess that's the word. A really big one."

"Ocean crater hogging all the water, okay. How does your language thing work?"

"I know a whole lot of languages and it's like I've known them all my life but that doesn't actually make me any better at using them than the one I really have known all my life. And I think I learn them as soon as I'm in the same world as somebody who speaks one - I think yours showed up while I was lying at the bottom of a hill being miserable."

"Both of 'em?"

"I guess? What's the other one?"

"Gatetalk? Sounds like this."

"Oh, yeah, that one too then."

"Neato. I've only got tidbits of the rest - uh - how much does this cost -?"

"I vaguely feel like I might've heard that somewhere before even though I'm pretty sure I haven't? And I dunno what it means."

"'How much does this cost', and I have numbers in that one too."

"I guess you don't know enough of it for the language magic to pick it up."

"Wonder what the cutoff is."

"Dunno. Guess you could bring people here who know different languages but not very well and see which ones I get, but that sounds boring to do more than like twice."

"It'll happen incidentally anyway if you hang out here even if we eat this planet. I dunno if you'd rather terraform it but we kinda need a lot of space."

"Arguing with the desert was pretty fun. How much is a lot?"

"Billion people. I dunno if your terraforming also does, like, natural resources besides water and dirt and plants? We'll want metal and things like that, I don't have a complete index of the things like that off the top of my head though. Seems like the kind of thing that... fiends might have eaten... or whatever."

"Dunno, but I can try it and see!"

"Cool! You're good to have around, this is way better than I was expecting to be the best case."

He bursts out laughing.

"...what?"

"I haven't been called 'good to have around' much before!"

"The magic powers admittedly give you a huge edge."

"Oh, if I'd grown up with these, people would definitely not think I was good to have around."

"Oh?"

"When I was a kid I would've burned down cities just 'cause I could."

"Ah."

"I'm still not a very nice person but I did at least grow out of 'destroy everything in sight for no reason'."

"I'm glad of that, as a visible thing."

He laughs.

"It seems like my magic should be able to do invisibility but nobody's got it figured out."

"Yeah? Wonder why not."

"If I'd ever decided to mess with it, which I might not have done - risky stuff, experimental magery - I probably would have tried to destroy the visual impression, rather than the light or something like that."

"...huh. But then what do you do when you want to be visible again?"

"It'd probably wind up being something like visibility to someone or someones in particular, maybe over a contiguous period of time."

"It's weird that that's a thing," he muses.

"It might not be! Experimenting in this direction could easily get the 'whoops, no, try again now without half your leg' result of trying to destroy a nonthing."

Giggle.

"Getting here was likewise a risky experiment, but, yanno."

"Better trying again without half your leg than trying again without half your planet?"

"Yup."

"Well, you've got a whole new planet now. With one habitable hill."

"And two legs!"

"Yep!"

Cor chuckles. "So, my spell is probably possible to repurpose into just sending objects, but it's not like that now, all experimentation carries risks, and the information needs to get home. Do you wanna check out my planet or should I go, presumably soon to return?"

"I think I'll stay here and see if I can make mountains."

"Have fun. I'll probably be back soon."

"See you!"

Cor checks and refreshes all his ash markings. Carefully moistens his fingers and wipes off dried blood. Nicks the inside of his elbow, produces a sponge, collects what he needs, and refreshes the blood markings.

Well that's sure a thing.

He checks himself over, and then before the blood has a chance to dry, consults his little bit of notepaper from his little bag and reads in a low voice, something about destroying things.

And then he disappears.

Huh.

Tias flies away a bit, so that Cor won't come back to the middle of an earthquake, and experiments with making mountains. Turns out he can totally do that. It's - weirdly easy, actually, to work at that kind of scale; the difference between scooting hills and raising mountains is more like a shift in perspective than like an increase in effort.

Cor is back six hours later!

By that time, the scooted hill and little mountain and miniature forest are surrounded by fields of grass and wildflowers, and there's a mountain range nearby that wasn't there before, lightly forested and attended by an entourage of soft white clouds.

"Oooooooh!"

A distant winged figure emerges from the clouds, spots him, and glides down for a landing.

"Hi! I made mountains!"

"You did! They're fantastic!"

"Thanks!!"

"How far out have you been working, is it just what I can see or would there be a heck of a view from uphill?"

"There's a pretty good view from uphill!"

"Can you do the scooty thing, I'm not nearly surefooted enough for mountain climbing."

"Sure."

A nearby tree uproots itself, scoops Cor up gently with a leafy branch, and carries him up the small mountain. Tias flies.

"Wheeeeee! Is flying as fun as it looks?"

"Absolutely!"

Up on top of the small mountain, the tree puts Cor down and re-roots. The view from here shows lots and lots of lovely flowering fields, dotted with interesting features like rivers and ponds and for some reason a small castle. In some directions, a bit of actual wasteland is still visible on the far side of the greenery, but near the mountains the flowers extend all the way to the horizon.

"Oooooooooh."

Tias lands and beams at him some more.

"I wish getting wings were a thing where I'm from, it'd be neat, and I would obviously get a set for saAAAAHWHAT," says Cor, suddenly bathed in a pillar of light.

...

Tias cracks up.

"Eep!" says Cor.

When the light clears he has long narrow wings.

The scapulars near where they join his back are exactly blood-red. The tips of the primaries are flame-colored, yellow orange scarlet, fading into the black that is the rest of the feathers. The... extra-ultra-black black. The hole in light.

"...oh, nice," says Tias. "Those are some good wings."

Cor looks at one.

"Yes," he says. "Yes they are."

"Also that was hilarious."

"Yes, I suppose it was."

"Congratulations, though!"

"Thank you! - how does the Sphere thing work, does it just - allow transit straightforwardly -"

"Mm? You can, like... make a portal to your Sphere from anywhere you are that's not your Sphere, and once the portal's there you can open and close it from either side if you're near it. Oh, but if you try to make a portal to your Sphere from somebody else's they have to let you, and then either of you can close it anytime but if one of you tries to open it again the other one has to let 'em."

"But it's still probably more efficient to evacuate people that way than by painting them all."

"Oh, yeah, probably. ...though I don't know what happens if you put a portal somewhere and then the place you put the portal disappears."

"Are portals permanent or could I just un-put them as disappearance encroached?"

"You can open and close them once they're made but I've never heard of somebody unmaking one."

"Yeesh. Well. I can put one in the last place likely to go and hope."

"Yeah. And it might be fine. Although not if you ever open that portal again after, I guess."

"Are there any costs to having a disused portal, does it take up space or anything?"

"Nah, when the portal's closed it's basically like it's not there at all except you can tell that it is."

"Cool."

"Spheres are nice!"

"Sounds like it! What if a lot of portals are close together and open?"

"I don't actually remember. I think you can't open a portal if it's, like, right through another one?"

"But all lined up like book pages?"

He attempts to picture the results of this. He fails. He shrugs.

"Maybe I'd better go ask people from your world."

"Maybe. Or experiment, I guess."

"Seems better left for somebody with a Sphere that isn't going to be an evacuation route. I guess you're contagious, though, so there'll be more winged people sooner or later."

"Guess I am. Or something. Maybe it's going into somebody's Sphere that does it? Who knows."

"If it's that there will still be more winged people soon! I will hang a sign. 'Contemplate your proudest achievements'."

He giggles.

"What are some other things people've done to get wings?"

"I can't remember any offhand... a lot of people don't say, and for some reason it's supposed to be rude to ask? And then I ask anyway and they don't tell me. Well, Faidre Kevarsin said he killed somebody, but I'm pretty sure he was joking."

"Wow. I wonder why it's rude to ask. Maybe people often feel proud of stupid things like not snapping at their mother-in-law through a whole dinner or saying a tongue twister five times fast and would be embarrassed?"

"That actually sounds really plausible."

Snort. "Well. I am good and endorsedly proud of my wing accomplishment."

"It's a pretty good wing accomplishment!"

Flap flap. "How do I do the Sphere thing? Do I have to learn how to fly, you seemed to have it down fast but you also speak Gatetalk for magic reasons..."

"I dunno how long it takes people to learn to fly normally. You make a portal by, like... making one? It's not super hard but maybe I just think that because I grew up around this stuff and I already knew basically what it was all about the first time I tried it?"

"Hmm. Is this a good place or is the topology likely to change?"

"I've been leaving this particular mountain mostly alone so you'd have someplace to come back to that wasn't under a bunch more rock than it was when you left. I can keep doing that."

"Thank you." Cor frowns at empty space and attempts to make a gate.

Tias watches curiously.

It's pretty easy to figure out how to make a portal; once you're trying, it sorts itself out pretty quick.

There it goes.

Cor goes in.

Tias was not technically invited, but he follows anyway.

Cor doesn't object.

They are on the front porch of a pleasantly temperate stone house with a garden full of flowers and dwarf fruit trees.

Abruptly, in straight lines each of the four cardinal directions away from the house, the landscape changes: there a sandy beach with little castles and arrangements of seashells, there what looks like a riverbank, though there isn't enough of it to see a corresponding river; there a foot of snow, gently swooping over suggested underlying shapes and dotted with bird footprints; there a layer of picturesque red-gold leaf litter. The Sphere isn't big enough to show any more than those little slices.

"Aww!" he says, grinning. "That's really cute! If it does a whole pattern like this I bet it'll be a mess when you're a few thousand years old. But like a great mess."

"Is it likely to cut it out after a few more squares?" he wonders.

Shrug. "Who knows? Mine's got a whole coherent thing going on with the mountain and stuff, Dad's is literally just grass, I've heard there's somebody's that's just a big house that keeps growing more house without ever getting an outside..."

"Does it not even have windows?"

"I've never been there, but it didn't sound like it!"

"Sounds like a kinda depressing house! I like mine, it's cute."

"Is not having windows that depressing?"

"I guess I don't know how it's lit, but I'm used to houses having plenty of windows."

"—oh, right, light comes in windows when your sky's got a sun in it."

"Oh, yes, I suppose that's a hidden assumption."

"Yeah. In Aluvanna windows are more about how much you like looking at the stuff outside your house."

"Which I'm used to but could dispense with much more easily than light!"

He laughs.

"Come to think of it, my eyes should be killing me after all this time under an actual sun. It's probably the magical powers again."

"Sounds like a likely culprit! Sensitive eyes?"

"Aluvai eyes. We see better in the dark, but too much light hurts."

"Well, conveniently you were slapped with a shit ton of magical powers."

"I have so fucking many magical powers! It's great!"

"Pity the acquisition method doesn't sound pleasant or repeatable."

"It was really unpleasant, yeah."

"Do you need, like, a hug, or anything?"

—he seems startled and confused by this question.

"Or not? I was not designated comforter of the traumatized in the war, I did healing and refugee stuff."

"—nobody's ever asked me that before, is all. You know what, sure, I will take a hug."

"- quick question, do you know if there is hug etiquette to do with wings."

"Huh, dunno. If the wings are too confusing there can just not be wings," and his wings neatly vanish.

"Hmmmyes." He manages to put his vantablack wings away.

Hug?

Hug.

Hug! What a good.

"Thanks," he says, letting go. His wings fluff out from his back again.

"No problem."

He looks at Cor thoughtfully.

"I'd be pretty annoyed if you died," he says. "I hope you don't get eaten by the disappearing planet."

"You and me both. With the hoping, not the being annoyed, I'd be too dead to be annoyed."

Giggle.

"I will try my best not to let anyone who has not yet been eaten by the disappearance points get that way."

"Nice of you!"

"I try."