“Since you’re pretty smart, we’ll be aggregating complex applications into the lesson now. Not very complex, mostly just single runes for these topics, until we get to the next, where I’ll properly introduce the specification rune.”
“Cool. Does that mean we won’t be able to see the fire of the rune we’ve made?”
“No. I’m just not teaching you how to set me on fire right out the bat. You probably wouldn’t be able to, but I’m more resistant to directed kinetic stresses.”
“Ms. Paranoid.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Right. Let’s start. So. I lied, technically. Catching fire would only work with stuff that burns in the air, because lots of things don’t oxidise. If you want to make those things catch fire, you’ll need to chemically transmute something or change the laws of thermal conductivity or like alter the way the gravitoelectromagnetic field works to change how chemistry works locally. Though that’d make compound spells rather than a simple boom fire spell. This spell is just heating something up, but I like fires to represent that because I don’t want you burning your fingers off and a weaker spell is boring. There’s two ways I want you to go about this. First, Joule heating. Second, going directly to the source and imparting bond instability via quantum cohesion, in this case quantum incohesion. Heh. We’ll be doing this as a continuous spell, as in you’ll have to continuously power it at a lower level than a single-frame spell, since that’s safer. Consider a bomb versus a lightbulb. Over enough time, a lightbulb might give off a similar amount of energy to the bomb, but the bomb’s considerably more likely to maim you. We’ll also be manipulating time to make the process faster, to demonstrate more aspects of what we can do with magic. Because air’s got oxygen, there shouldn’t be too much of a worry with specifying combustion conditions with oxidation reactions. Also means I’ll have to transmute some sand into something flammable. Once you’re good enough with magic, you could transmute the air, as well, but you’d need to control a larger space, and that’s less efficient than transmuting denser objects. Reason why mages like to use osmium and other nonradioactive heavy metals like gold for transmutation. Depleted uranium was more common, historically, due to the early wars, but gold’s just better, and once we developed economies of scale for the compression and transmutation of gases into heavier metals osmium’s high-key just more efficient.”
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A ball of sand rises from the ground, flowing like a liquid into a perfect sphere.
“Uhm. What again? Fuck it. Hydrogen.”
It disappears.
“Not very visual, really. But here. Fireball.”
Barely, I see the space ignited into something white.
“It’s white,” I comment. “Cool, I guess.”
Beryl snorts. “Pale blue. Your eyes just get used to all the blue around.”
“Mhm.”
Beryl sighs. “Not very impressive, is it? Believe me. It’s pretty cool when you get good. The Vatra clan have their innate channel towards firebending. I can do it too, just less efficient. I’m just going to transmute this hydrogen into methane and carbon soot to get a nice contrasting yellow colour. Colour theory.”
She reaches out towards the fireball, and it seems to recoil, before growing, stretching, like a beautiful dragon, writhing and flying across the horizon, growing and growing, until it fills the sky. I see a painting, a video, a great scene of hell, but it was not the usual picture of hell as drawn by ordinary artists. The flames, which were with such vividness that they seemed almost to burst from the air into my eyes and then my brain, surrounded figures writhing in excruciating agony. There were men, women, and children, some of them burnt by the flames, some being boiled alive in cauldrons, others skewered by iron hooks, or pierced by sharp blades. The tormenting heat from the flames seemed so real that I could almost feel the burning pain. The figures’ faces were twisted with the grotesque expressions of suffering, their mouths open in silent screams that seemed to emanate from the air-canvas itself. The hellish scene was alive with motion and notion, and the air trembled with the vibrations of the screams and the crackling of the flames. It was a hell so vivid, so terribly real, that anyone who looked at it could scarcely believe that it was only a fire.
I cough, as I inhale some of the soot.
Beryl seems too fixated on the flames.
“Hey,” I say. “Mind coming back to me?” The air grows thin. “I’d like not to choke.”
The robot lady turns her head back to me, staring, for a moment, before sighing, snapping a finger, extinguishing the fire.
“Got carried away. Art’s fun.”