Snort.

"Of course that sort of assumes that next time I'm either near enough my room to take advantage or it didn't break on a fall down the stairs or something. Ugh, my stupid fucking curse."

"They're not going to break, and," a bottle materializes in his hand, "I've got plenty more." The extra bottle vanishes. "I just figured while I was going all that way I might as well give you some too."

"Well, thanks. I do appreciate it."

Shrug. "So. Should I take you somewhere off my mountain and give you some artifacts to play with?"

"Sounds like fun to me!"

"Fly you there?" He offers his hand.

"Ooh, flying, sure," she says, taking his hand.

And then they are wind. It's - definitely an experience.

They fly out of the castle and down the mountain and past a considerable number of hills to a charming little field of wildflowers, where they materialize again.

She stumbles but doesn't fall over. "Wow."

—he grins.

"That was cool! My flight spell is nowhere near that trippy."

"If you think that's trippy you should see lightning."

"Ooh. Is that an offer?"

"On the way back, if you want. I don't like to fly lightning too often; it gets me places fast but if I'm going any distance then everybody within ten miles of the route knows I went by, and that's flashier than I generally like to be."

He materializes three very pretty lamps and hands them to her. "Will this do for experimenting?"

"Should do!"

She carries the lamps about fifty feet away from him, and incants, "antimagic field."

Absolutely nothing happens.

"...Huh."

"Huh," he agrees.

She cancels the antimagic field, and utters a short, harsh word.

There is an impossibly bright light and an impossibly loud noise, and then there is a problem.

Everything is pain and he has no idea what's happening but he's very sure he needs to be doing something about it. Before he really has time to think, he pulls power and reaches for make it stop.

Making it stop turns out to be fairly simple, just a matter of throwing a lot of power at it very quickly. He can do that. The enormous seething blob of something-more-than-fire where Elodea used to be first slows, then stops, then shrinks, and finally disappears.

The charming little field of wildflowers is gone. Several of the hills are gone, and the ones beyond them seriously damaged. The air smells scorched.

He steps up to the edge of the smoking crater and peers down into it. As an afterthought, he materializes himself some clothes to replace the ones vaporized in the blast.

At the bottom of the crater is a blackened skeleton, already starting to un-char and regenerate its viscera.

He whisks down there as a breeze, materializes a bottle of healing water, and pours it over her.

She regenerates the rest of the way, and then there is a beautiful woman lying naked at his feet, streaked lightly with the slight bits of blood that had leaked out because of nonzero viscera and zero skin and breathing heavily.

"You all right?"

"Ow. What the fuck."

"Don't look at me, I don't know a thing about how your magic works. Looked like you turned everything in a forty-foot radius into what fire wants to be when it grows up. I assume it's not usually supposed to do that."