combinatorial explosion | Glowfic Constellation

rockpaperscissors

The strangers have six casters, in their group, that Qiri can count. Qiri's group has four counting him, and they got split up awhile ago when the strangers started that earthquake. Qiri is stuck with Master Huo. Master Huo is dying, but since Qiri is chained up he can't use that to escape, or attack Master Huo. The master's magic is uninjured, and he can reach Qiri's from where he lies, and Qiri is sitting there, goosepimpled, enduring it. He wonders if Master Huo might be in enough pain to distract him, if Qiri tried to wrench his magic away, but he doesn't think so. He can squirm around a fair bit under Master Yu and Master Zao if only one of them is using him for a spell - and if he wants to earn himself a beating - but not Huo.

He doesn't get nauseous anymore, like he did when he was a kid. So there's that.

Huo's casting a healing spell, moving Qiri's magic around this way and that to set it up. Qiri assumes it's going to target Master Huo, but spells don't know who anyone is. Qiri can't distract himself, not with his spine tingling and all his magic cringing under the slide of Huo's. Instead he tries to concentrate on something less directly sensory: how's the spell targeting? How is Huo going to make sure it heals him, and not Qiri's irritated skin under where the chains sit, the injuries to his fingers from the last time he irritated Master Yu, the probably broken toe sustained in the earthquake?

He figures it out when the spell is probably almost over: it's going to target the most injured person, and Qiri is a little banged up but Master Huo's got an arrow to the gut and a slice through his thigh that's probably going to bleed him out before the abdominal wound can kill him. It's objectively pretty impressive that he can concentrate enough to make his magic force Qiri's through the motions he wants.

Then, dimly around the cloying sensation of Huo's magic over his, Qiri notices a group of the stranger mages approaching, standing close together, back to back to back, doing something -

And he and Huo are banished somewhere else.

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"- are you scared? That wasn't scary."

rockpaperscissors

"Not this time, no, but it's still kind of weird."

"Because he's important?"

rockpaperscissors

"Yeah. - Also he holds his magic funny."

"Hmm?"

rockpaperscissors

"I know you can't see it but it's there? And it would be like going around holding your arms like this all the time -" He lifts them up to shoulder height, elbows thrust back behind him, hands clenched into fists.

"Huh. But isn't his a different kind than yours -"

rockpaperscissors

"Yeah, but, uh, if you saw a bird you could probably tell if what it was doing with its wings looked like a normal thing?"

"I guess."

rockpaperscissors

"It just looks uncomfortable and I've seen other magic people who had all different kinds and none of them looked uncomfortable like that."

"I wish I could see magic, it sounds cool."

rockpaperscissors

"It's not really seeing. It's more like feeling, but it can work at a distance - I guess feeling can too, you don't have to touch a fire to know it's warm."

"I think that's because the air is warm and you are touching it. I wonder if there's a blessing that'd let everyone see magic."

rockpaperscissors

"Oooh, that would be cool! Is that the sort of thing they can do?"

"They can do lots of things but I don't know if they could do that. It might depend whether magic does anything that our souls can detect."

rockpaperscissors

"I think it's invisible and stuff except when it's actually doing magic."

"Oh, can anyone see it then?"

rockpaperscissors

"You can see what it does, you still can't see the thing that's doing it."

"Can you use magic to make a person magic?"

rockpaperscissors

"Maybe, but you'd definitely need a lot of people working the spell and I'm not sure which kinds it'd have to be without looking at them and thinking about it."

"I still don't get how you know how magic would work by looking at it."

rockpaperscissors

"It's kind of like... if you look at a bunch of rocks you can guess how you'd stack them into a pile and you might not be exactly right but you definitely know you can't put a long one so it's trying to balance on a small one with all its weight to one side."

She frowns for a second. "Wow. I wish I were magic."

rockpaperscissors

"Some things about it are neat."