!!

Oh that's—that's really something, is what that is. That's so much of a something. Yeah, these two feelings are like each other in these ways, and different in those ways, and he can look at them where Zash is holding them up for him and feel out the similarities and differences—and, at the same time, feel out the similarities and differences between the ways Zash feels these things and the ways Siran does, how they're different kinds of lonely and those flavours are expressed in the ways they react to comfort and affection, how they process and experience the world differently and that affects how they experience their emotions and which parts of a scenario they focus on, like, Siran very much lives in his body and a lot of the way he sees social things is as the sight of someone making a certain face or movement or posture that echoes in his own body a faint reflection of how it feels to make that face or movement or posture and then translates to a feeling in his mind of how they're feeling and what that means, but Zash of course sees social things in other people's heads and in the ways he's learned to translate what he sees into what someone must be feeling, so it's a whole different thing—but there's still sameness there, still a fundamental connection between feeling this way as one person and feeling this way as a different person even though the feelings themselves aren't literally the same—what a good telepathy Zash has.

Zash is feeling inordinately pleased right now, and even a bit smug, though he recognises being smug about being part of a species that has a certain kind of telepathy is a little bit silly. It'd be like being smug for having toes. ......well, he made his toes, plants don't have them and he didn't have them when he was born, but still, you get the picture.

Now going back to another thing Siran thought—Zash wants to contrast the way Siran feels about thrill and about power with the way he himself does. He doesn't know that much about the way Siran does it but he felt like there was something there they could look at, and maybe they can just show each other themselves and then contrast? He'll go first.

There is a thrill and a power there, Siran is absolutely right. Zash doesn't often focus on it or lean into it but it's... it's a bit like...

Side comparison: it's a little bit like his hair. His ridiculous fluffy bright-yellow hair, which is so attention-grabbing, and which coordinates with his orange shades and his red jacket and his boots and his gun. He feels a bit embarrassed to admit this but he is an aesthete. He's a little bit vain. There's a certain aesthetic that he plays up, plays into, embodies. He's an incredibly skilled gunslinger, he can literally shoot a single wing off a wormfly from fifty yards away, and he loves the aesthetic of using that skill to never, ever kill anyone. To, in fact, prevent people from being killed. He understands that his pacifism comes from a position of privilege, that he can afford to be pacifistic because if he decides a conflict isn't happening then it doesn't happen full stop. That's part of why he doesn't, really, judge others for not being as pacifistic as he is, doesn't demand it of them.

And that, of course, circles back to the power thing. He is incredibly powerful. He is incredibly skilled, and deadly if he wants to be (which he never does). And there is a thrill there, there's an ego thing there. He is that person, that powerful superhuman creature who could kill dozens of people a second and who instead chooses not to, and chooses to help them. The ego thing and the power thing and the thrill thing aren't the reason why he does this but they do help.

And there's another thing that attaches to the tail of that: much of his power and skill was earned. He was nowhere near this good, a century and a half ago. And... people suffered because of it, people died. The central motivation here, of not wanting people to die, that core is probably unshared between him and Siran, but here, Zash can show him how everything else he is fits around that one thing like a jigsaw puzzle. He cultivated his skill and his power and his image around that core, and he became better, and stronger.

...huh. Yeah, he sees it. He very much sees it, the way all those pieces are built on that central foundation—

—and he doesn't have it, doesn't have anything like it, it's alien to him, the idea of not wanting people to die, it's the opposite of everything he's stood for all his life. Except. Except that that's what he wants, now, what he's looking for. His tiny confused flailing desire to Not Fuck Up Enormously Again, his half-formed questing notion of not being an engine of destruction that burns everything he touches... it's a shape that's very reminiscent of that shape at the core of Zash's soul. An echo, a reflection, not the same but—connected, related, similar. Almost like, what he has is a question, and what Zash has is an answer. Not the only answer, by any means. But... an answer, an answer that works.

He looks with great dismay on the prospect of learning how to be skilled enough and smart enough and powerful enough to do the things Zash can do. He hates being bad at things, most of all when they're things he really wants to be good at. But... he can see how it works, to do that, he can feel out in his mind the way he could—try, and still probably fail, but fail with a purpose, fail toward succeeding. He wouldn't be the same as Zash, because, among other things, what the fuck is a gun. But—he could learn to build his own skill and power and aesthetic around his own desire to be in control of his actions and their consequences. He could reach for that power that Zash has, embrace it in ways that Zash isn't, become someone who loves being powerful enough to earn people's gratitude and adoration by helping them when he could have done nothing and by—by doing nothing when he could have hurt them. He stumbles a little, over that part; mercy still hurts, as a concept. But he's going to have to learn mercy if he wants to succeed at this at all. There was no way out of this situation that didn't involve learning mercy, when mercy, fundamentally, is the only way he could have avoided cursing his father's empire right off the map.

Zash is... not sure how well this will land, because it might feel to Siran like lying, but Zash sees it as a... reframing. Looking at it from a different angle, it's the same thing but it's approached differently. This whole thing, mercy. Not hurting someone when he could hurt them. When they deserve to be hurt, even. There's...

(This isn't how Zash himself does it, it's not the core of it, but there is an echo of it in himself, a part of him that also uses this dimension of it to fuel his own mercy.)

...there's a few things, here, that aren't just about mercy.

Zash himself, as he said, is very vain, and an aesthete. And while much of it is for himself, is him playing this person because it resonates, this is heavily informed by the existing narratives of the world, by what other people perceive. And there's a narrative of mercy as weakness, but there's also a narrative of mercy as strength, as superiority. Of understanding that the people who you want to hurt—they're not worth your time, your attention. They don't deserve that you dirty your hands for them, don't deserve to have the power over you to make you regret your choices. The choices Siran wants to make, from now on, are choices of creation rather than destruction, right? The only one who gets to choose whether to create or destroy, whether to build up or tear down, to heal or to hurt, is Siran himself. No one else. And these people, who have moved Siran to action, that don't deserve that Siran make any but the choices he wants to make, be anyone but the person he wants to be.

And Siran does have the power to do that. He hasn't explained to Zash the details of how his magic works but Zash has seen it in the colour of his thoughts, in the unsaid but still felt words, that Siran is a powerful mage and that part of that power comes from how he can handle and subjugate his own magic to do what he wants to do, to not escape his control. And he sees that there's also something Siran feels about having lost control there, and... well...

Zash feels like the situation is pretty analogous, see? His magic isn't his only source of power, nor the only beast he can tame; his self is also that, a raging fire he can wield to burn only and exactly what he wants to burn, and not a hair further.

He spends a while turning that one over in his mind while he strides across the desert. (Moving his body makes everything come easier, his thoughts, his feelings, his whole being. He's not fully consciously noticing this, just a little relieved in the back of his mind not to be standing still anymore.)

There's definitely something to it, at first glance. There's something to all of it. The idea of mercy as an expression of power, as refusing to let someone control him—that speaks to the same parts of him that have so much trouble with mercy in the first place. And the idea of himself and his feelings and desires as being like magic, a wild power that can be turned to a purpose or let loose to rampage unchecked, that can be controlled with careful attention and skill or slip free and wreak havoc...

...well, that's just true. Startlingly, kind of upsettingly, unequivocally and directly true. In a sense, that's just literally what happened, when he made his grand mistake. He got out of his own control, gave in to... Siran-fray... and did a bunch of stupid shit culminating in doing the exact same thing with magic, trying to spin up a spell too big to hold—though he held it for surprisingly long, in the end—without even a clear idea of what exactly he wanted to accomplish by it, and it tore itself out of his hands the way magic always does when you get overambitious with it. He can clearly see the echo there, the similarity in structure between the spell going wild and soaking the continent in spellfray, and his own ego going wild and grabbing for power in a mad idiot rush without thought to the consequences. And... it is, he thinks, a helpful way to think about himself. Magic is the way that it is, and you have to learn to work with it, and he did learn to work with it, he's one of the most accomplished mages in the world (though 'accomplished mage' is kind of a backhanded compliment at best, carrying as it does the fundamental connotation of the kind of reckless idiocy that's necessary for anyone to try to become accomplished as a magic user). He's starting kind of from scratch on learning to work with himself, but... the parallels are helpful in figuring out how to work with himself. There are differences too, definitely, lots of them, but the basic approach of 'this is a powerful force you need to learn to handle on its own terms, and until you do it will keep wrecking stuff every time you mess with it' is... apt.

He's thinking about his sword, now. He used to have a sword that ate spellfray. He was really proud of it; it let him cast spells that would've been stupid to cast without. He only managed permanent translation in the first place because of the sword. Also, it was fundamentally a tool of destruction, getting more and more unwieldy and inclined to lash out at everything in reach the more spellfray he fed to it, until he discharged the excess by annihilating a few trees with it. He lost it when he walked into a cursed city and got torn apart.

There's no reason why an artifact to eat spellfray has to be an engine of destruction. It's just... easier, to build it that way. If you want to build something to eat spellfray and you want it to do anything other than mangle things, you have to put a lot of careful thought into what exactly it should do instead, and how to get it to do that and not something else, because spellfray is fundamentally about not doing what you expect. It seemed at the time, when he made that sword, that of course it would be ridiculous to try to make it anything other than a dangerous barely-controlled weapon. But... he'd like to stop being a dangerous barely-controlled weapon. And he thinks, if he makes himself another spellfray artifact, he'd like it to not be a dangerous barely-controlled weapon either. And—most of the details of designing such a thing are going to be totally inapplicable to designing himself—but, he thinks, there are still useful parallels in the underlying approach, again. Creating, healing, helping, mending, these things are much harder and more delicate than destroying. Most things you do, if you're not being careful, will destroy more than they create. But if you pay attention and put the work in, you can find ways to build up instead of tear down.

(As a side note he's sort of confused by the 'deserve' framing; it's not a concept-structure his mind naturally falls into. Like, he's heard of the idea, he just doesn't personally tend to think that way. But it doesn't interfere much with his understanding of Zash's point, it's just a quiet little aside as he considers things.)

(Yeah, personally Zash doesn't super jive with the "deserve" framing either, it's mostly scaffolding for the narrative he's familiar with and since it doesn't resonate with Siran himself Zash is more than happy to do away with it.)

(There's a certain flavour to those thoughts, too, that isn't leaking overtly into the thoughts themselves, that suggests Zash jives with the exact opposite of the concept of "deserving". What that exact opposite is isn't something Zash is explicitly thinking about and most certainly not projecting, but... "people deserve bad things" is almost the complete antithesis of Zash the Stampede.)

Zash also wants to observe another parallel: Siran's sword, and Zash's gun. The thought has some wryness attached to it, and Zash will project words alongside the feelings because unfortunately Siran does not have the telepathic equipment to be able to literally see the visual mental pictures Zash projects and Zash does not think this is the kind of thing he even can project, in principle, to humans.

[guns are a sort of weapon that creates a miniature explosion to propel a small metal object (a bullet) with such speed and force that it can pierce through bone and flesh and occasionally even solid objects such as wood and stone and metal. my gun is a .22 caliber, which is to say it's made for bullets yea thick, and this is relevant because it's a good caliber for precise trick shots and fast reloading and a bad caliber for killing people with.] And the reason Zash is amused by the comparison is the way he does use this supposed weapon of destruction almost exclusively nondestructively.

He's not suggesting that Siran make a magic gun, of course—if nothing else, he wants Siran to decide on what his aesthetic will be uninfluenced by Zash (though the mental image of the two pacifistic gunslingers roaming the realm getting into trouble together is very amusing to him, also)—just idly musing about the parallel, with a side observation that with some creativity one can often figure out (fun, interesting, cool, aesthetic) ways to apply tools to ends they were not designed for.

(Another part of Zash also observes a parallel between that and, again, Siran himself (and magic), though he rejects the idea that Siran was designed for anything. Siran is Siran, and who and what Siran is is up to Siran, no one else. But to the extent that Siran is (or was/has been) a weapon, well, sometimes you can creatively make weapons do things other than what weapons do.)

Ah, so that's what the fuck a gun is.

...he definitely sees what Zash means, about how cool it would be to make themselves a pair like that. But... he thinks he agrees, that he shouldn't decide on his aesthetic based on how glamorous a pair they would make. He wants to take time to think this over, and consider a lot of different possibilities, and not rush into things impulsively like he always has before. He wants to think about what kinds of things he could make, and what purposes he could make them for. Repurposing a tool meant for one use into another is definitely an interesting idea with interesting thematic implications, but since he's starting from scratch anyway, he might as well make something that does what he wants from the start.

Yeah no doubt. Does he have any preliminary ideas for what he'd want? And much of Zash's curiosity here is really curiosity about this magic and its artefacts and all of that.

(Also he's a teensy bit proud of this conversation which feels like it was good and useful to Siran. Eeee he helped!)

Cute. Cute. He did help, it's true!

The first most obvious thing for an anti-sword to do is healing. But of course healing is a lot harder than destruction; there are a lot of ways you can change something that will break it, fewer that will repair it. So he'd have to think very carefully about how to waste most of the power of all that spellfray on things that don't matter and can't get big enough to do any damage, and only let through the tiny fraction of it that actually wants to do something helpful. (That's an oversimplification. It's not that specific bits of spellfray 'want' different things; it's all sort of sloshing around wildly doing this or that, and if you're careful and clever and a little bit of a reckless idiot you can figure out how to bend it away from what it's in the middle of being about to do and push it into something else instead, but you can't get too far from its original purpose and you have to do it much too fast to be able to save any of it in the moment when you have a spell going wrong; his sword used layer after layer of redirection, to catch it all and funnel it into the destructive effect he wanted, but because 'destruction' is so much broader a target it only took a few layers, doing the same for healing would be much more complex and delicate work...) Anyway, the main trouble with healing is that you can only do it when someone or something needs to be healed, which won't be all the time, so his anti-sword might spend a while being overcharged and that's not a good way for things to be.

Then there's water, which is springing (so to speak) to mind because they're walking in a desert. Making water is probably easier than making healing, because there's a sense in which the target is broader—it's hard to explain why; it has to do with things he feels more than knows, his practiced sense of which ways magic is more and less eager to turn—but he's not sure how useful it will be. Well, obviously water is generally useful in a desert. But he's not sure how much water he'll get at a time, and he sort of feels like even in a desert, dumping out several wagonloads at once in an inhabited area is maybe kind of still a destructive act.

Then there's the concept of a shield, one that could potentially redirect these 'bullets' Zash mentioned to make them miss anyone in range. That would be tricky for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it would screw with Zash's trick shots unless Siran put a lot of work into figuring out how not to. But it's a pleasing image, and he thinks motion might be a fairly broad target as these things go, maybe broader than water. It has the same problem as healing, though, in that you can only use a shield when there's something to shield against.

He could, he supposes, also try combining all of these effects into a single item. He's not sure what shape such an item should be. A... shield-wand-cup?? Well, the shape doesn't really matter to the magic, except to the extent that it makes Siran's work easier by making him feel like it's more naturally inclined to the purpose he intends. Anyway it would be a beastly amount of work to set all that up and have all the different parts work without interfering with each other, but if he got it all set up just right, it'd help make up for the comparative narrowness of all these targets. He suspects, though, that if he did it this way it'd be harder to avoid the big obvious problem of any spellfray-absorbing artifact: the fact that inevitably a little bit will leak out around the edges. With the sword that wasn't so bad, because the sword's job was to obliterate things and it didn't matter much if in the brief final moments of their existence it also turned them purple or made them burst into song. Rather less convenient to have random magic effects on the several wagonloads of water you just dumped in the middle of the street. (He's imagining a rainbow flood singing thirty songs at once and it's quite the mental image.) And he thinks, the less unified in purpose his artifact is, the more it will tend to do random things and the bigger those random things will tend to be, unless he puts a whole lot more work in to mitigate that.

...let's table those thoughts for the moment because Zash thinks he should probably explain plants, he feels like their existence and context is probably important to Siran's plans too.

👂

(Siran is also very cute, for the record.)

So, uh, plants are—well, the sapient nonhuman species that Zash is technically a specimen of, though Zash is very very noncentral in many respects and many things about him should be ignored when thinking about plants. Most humans think plants are machines or artificial organisms created by them, but Zash's best guess is actually that plants are from another dimension—(here's a small mental package with a superficial explanation of what "another dimension" means)—and found humans and decided that the fact that humans die was an ongoing moral atrocity and decided to help. Most humans also think plants are not sapient, or even sentient.

Due to not being from this dimension, plants can typically not stay in this dimension by default; it's hostile to them. If they try, they usually die very quickly. In order to counteract that, humans have created machinery that can stabilise them here and keep them alive. In order to survive, they need to be in these vats filled with nutrient fluid, being managed by various automated systems that keep them from popping like an overcharged light bulb. Plants can reach into their origin dimension to bring matter and energy over, as far as anyone knows with no limitation in quantity, only in throughput. Each plant has a "gate", a personal portal to this other dimension, which is one-way only, and which for most plants has a fixed size and ability to transport matter.

Plants are absolutely necessary for humans to survive here. Remember how Zash mentioned that humans had cursed their planet of origin? It was to the point that it was beginning to become unable to sustain them. And plants are basically a solution to this, because they can create water, and food, and minerals, and electric power, and gravity, and air, and chemical compounds, and on and on and on, without limit. They are what allows humans to be able to live on a planet as inhospitable as Gunsmoke (which is arid desert and wasteland everywhere, there is not a single lake or river on the face of this planet).

With him so far? Any questions?

...huh. Maybe wagonloads of water at a time wouldn't be so bad after all, unless that much water started messing up other things about the planet, or something. Anyway he's good, go on.

This planet would absolutely benefit from wagonloads of water.

Anyway.

So, plants... well... they're really hard to explain without meeting one in person, but... they love everyone. Everyone. They want everyone to have everything that brings them joy, to live their best happiest most fulfilled lives, to do everything they can so that others can thrive. And they are very very bad at self-care, and there is actually a limit to how much and how often they can use their gates before it starts being tiring, and then painful, and then injurious. And humans will... occasionally just use them to death, suck them dry until they become dust.

And they die happy knowing that their life was put to good use and they've made humans thrive more than they otherwise would.

The place Zash is going to is in fact a town he visited five years ago to heal one of their plants, to check on them.

...that seems... sad? But sad in a complicated way, like—it's good that they get to do what they want and accomplish what they care about even though it kills them, but it's still sad that it kills them. He thinks. He's not used to being sad about people dying.

—also, if the plants are the only source of water on a whole world without it, isn't killing them also... very... stupid...???

Oh yes it is. It is very, very stupid. But...

...well, most qualified plant engineers died on the Fall, and the remaining ones had to rebuild their technological base from scratch. And dealing with plants is very complicated, the automated systems are good as far as they go but if you just rely on them and don't optimise your usage of plants' outputs you end up inevitably hurting them like this. And while in many big cities they're learning how to reduce the rate of that happening, they're not really... doing so in a very sustainable way.

Humans are not very good at consuming their resources in a sustainable way. That's how they fucked up their original planet.

The most forward-thinking humans are hoping they can rebuild enough of their technological base to be able to create (or fetch) new plants before they run out of the existing ones but most people aren't really hopeful; with the rate of population growth and plant usage, most realistic projections do not end with humanity surviving.

...okay. So. His first impulse, obviously, is: fuck that, he'll make this world livable.

That's a stupid impulse; if he tries to just make it work with a wave of his hand and all the magic he can bring to bear, the world will probably turn out livable but it'll also be inside-out and backwards and filled with people turned to stone or struck by eternal slumber and monsters that sneak up on you and devour you or ask you strange riddles and turn you into a worm if you can't solve them and odd floating bits of magic that make you dance for a hundred years at a stretch or lose all your memories or explode.

But... with time and care and effort, lots of it... he's pretty sure he can make a difference without wrecking everything? He might have to bend the project of his anti-sword toward the cause, but... it wouldn't be so bad, he thinks, to design his anti-sword with this sort of thing in mind. Hard to think of anything that's more the opposite of destruction than taking a whole world full of people doomed to die and giving them life instead. And it'll help the plants, too, if people aren't relying on them quite so desperately. Maybe he could even help the people by helping the plants. Less fragile, more powerful plants seem like they will just make everything better for everyone.

Eheheheheheh so about that ahahahah.

Zash (and his twin, Nai, whom Zash hasn't been explicitly thinking about until this point but whose existence has been sort of colouring everything else) have been termed "independent plants". They were created by plants aboard one of the generation ships a century and a half ago, appeared fully formed as infants in the plants' room, and then they aged very rapidly to adulthood (they looked the way humans look when they're seven at one year of age, and when they were seven they looked sixteenish) and haven't aged since. They are extremely thoroughly immortal as far as Zash can tell; he tried to, um, kill himself, because of reasons, very very hard aboard the ship, and failed. They also have better-than-plants ability to generate matter with as far as they can tell no noticeable drain or injury, they have very thorough telekinesis, and their telepathy is not as good as plants' but with some effort Zash has managed to get superficial thoughts and emotions from a distance and somewhat-less superficial ones when touching plus project (which Nai can't do at all, but on the other hand Nai can completely hide from psychic senses which no one else can).

(Aaaand there's another related bit there where Zash can no longer do TK or matter generation because of mumble mumble mumble but anyway it's doable in principle.)

So, "less fragile, more powerful plants" is actually a known reachable target! But it's only been reached via creating them from scratch, he is not sure it's possible to do so to existing plants.

A whole lot of things are possible with magic that aren't otherwise, in Siran's experience. But, also in Siran's experience, if you want to solve a problem instead of creating several more you have to go slow and know what you're doing and not bite off more than you can chew.

...also he's surprised how many feelings he has about Zash attempting suicide. That's sad??? That's sad and he's sad about it??? He's glad that it didn't work but also that's complicated because presumably past Zash had good reasons, but also that's complicated because Siran certainly remembers wandering despairingly into a cursed city and 'reasons' were not so much a feature of his decisionmaking process at the time.

...nah, he didn't really... have very good reasons, and he's... mostly... glad that he survived, too. He was just a kid. He was extremely traumatised and self-loathing and felt like the world would be better without him.

(He is not, entirely, certain that it wouldn't be. Most of the time he thinks it wouldn't, but in his darkest moments... well.)

Consider: without Zash, Siran would not have gotten hugged today. Siran thinks this is a pretty solid argument in favour of Zash's existence.

Zash grins and... nuzzles him, a little bit. Look, hugs are nice, okay, and Siran is cute.

Anyway, Zash just meant that, like, there exists already a potential target for "making plants stronger" so if Siran wanted to aim for that it would be a remarkably solid choice. But there are probably other targets to aim for that Zash isn't thinking of because he's too used to thinking of independent plants.

(But what if Zash is cute, what then. What then.)

The example of independent plants is definitely a helpful one to have in mind! But probably he's going to start by just trying to find ways to make plants more resilient, harder to hurt, better able to live in this world, better able to use their own powers to sustain themselves, that sort of thing. And he's going to try to be really cautious about it.

Fair enough, Siran is the expert here.

So one last thing about plants is that, like Zash mentioned, humans don't really know they're more than machines and the majority of them think they were created by humans so they often act pretty... well, callous. And then when you point out that plants are actually sapient they by and large tend to rationalise it away as either lying or justified because if they didn't abuse plants they'd die anyway and if it's between them and plants, well.

And the plants themselves see this and so mostly prefer that humans therefore not be made aware of the facts because they're... very bad at long-term planning and strategy and getting them to cooperate with sustainable usage is very difficult. A single plant can sustain dozens of humans for decades if left alone with the automated systems and over a century if minimally cared for and they mostly see this as a worthwhile tradeoff. Trying to swap to a sustainable system would involve lots of deaths in the short term and they're horrified by the idea.

Well, maybe they'll feel better about it if Siran can bridge that gap by helping them keep people alive.