“Ahhhhh, shit! What’s happening?” Dellromoz cried, his voice deeper and harsher than it had been only a moment ago. The vegetation near him began to blacken from the heat he gave off.

“I’m really not sure,” Erasmus told him. He took a couple of steps toward the burning gnome, but had to stop. “I don’t think I can get closer than this without risking my clothes catching on fire. I doubt it would do the rest of me much good, either. Was it just like this last time, or do you notice anything different?”

“Uhhhhh,” Dell flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulders, and took a couple of steps. “I don’t notice anything different from last time. They’d beaten me up pretty bad though, I wasn’t focused on much besides running away.”

“That’s sensible enough, I suppose.” Erasmus walked around Dell in a half-circle. “Your skin looks like ash, is that just what it appears to be, or does it slough off like ash as well?”

Dell rubbed the palm of his hand against his other arm, from the wrist up to his shoulder. A layer of fine, black ash fell to the ground where it passed.

“Have you ever seen anything like this? Or heard of it?”

“I guess there was that one time...”

“What?!”

“Well, when I died, I had a pretty high fever.”

Dellromoz stared at him in disbelief for a moment. “This isn’t funny!”

“Not even a little? You got so angry you lit yourself on fire and burned up the clothes you were wearing, and now you’re standing in the middle of a swamp with your bits out,” Erasmus pointed out. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that you’re foolish, or that you’ve acted that way. I’ve just found that when the circumstances of your existence diverge markedly from the people around you, or even your own past experience, it serves you well to maintain a sense of humor about the whole thing.”

“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not the one who burns up everything they touch!”

“I once fell out of a tree, not long after I’d come back. I hit a branch on the way down and knocked my skull off, which rolled down a rabbit hole and got stuck. It took me two days to dig it out.”

Dellromoz stopped imagining how he was going to spend the rest of his life trapped on a marshy island because any boat he stepped into would immediately burst into flames. “Two days?” he asked.

“I was hiding from some bandits, and they came back before I’d retrieved it. I had to lay there and play dead while they went through my pockets and stole all my things.”

Dell tried not to laugh and failed miserably. He clutched at his sides and fell over.

“They couldn’t believe how the skeleton of the adventurer they stumbled across was dressed just like the person they were looking for. The theories ranged from ‘Gerry Saw A Ghost, And We Just Found His Body’ to ‘This Guy Thinks We’re Stupid And Put His Clothes On This Skeleton To Fool Us’. One of them kept poking at my ribs to see if I’d suddenly move!” Erasmus continued. “Don’t tell that to anyone, by the way. I’m trying to be known for gallantry, not ineptitude.”

“You did the same thing with the watch right before we met!” Dell exclaimed before he cracked up again.

“I certainly did, nobody plays dead better than I do! As for your current situation, if it isn’t painful, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. If it burned itself out before, it probably will again. We’ll just wait here until it does.”

“How are you always so calm when things go wrong?”

“Most adventurers do things in the wrong order; they go out on a bunch of grand escapades and eventually die. I got the dying out of the way first, so what’s the worst that could happen?”

“Somebody else could get hurt,” Dellromoz pointed out.

“That’s certainly true, which is why when I work with others, I always volunteer to do the dangerous parts of a plan myself,” Erasmus explained. “I’m not immortal, but if somebody has to get stabbed, or strangled, or maybe drowned, I make sure it’s me.” He tilted his head thoughtfully. “I guess we’ll leave getting lit on fire to you, though.” Dell laughed.

“Have you tried to control it at all?” the adventurer asked.

Dellromoz’s glowing eyes widened. “I haven’t thought to try, this is only the second time it’s happened.”

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“Well, I’m not concerned about witnesses out here, or burning down the swamp, for that matter. If you can avoid scorching the rest of our supplies, we might as well see what you can do.”

“So what should I do?”

“How about you try to hold in all that heat you’re giving off? That seems like a practical way to start.”

It took a while, but Erasmus talked to him about what it felt like to change his voice, or pull something up his sleeve without using his hands, and Dell found a part of his mind that was connected to his fiery transformation. Soon, he was able to reduce the heat given off by first one hand, then the other. As the heat declined, his skin began to resemble its usual texture and hue. However, if he lost his concentration, the partial change was undone, and he went back to being able to boil a cup of water by putting his finger in it.

What was easy though was intensifying the heat. He was able to raise a cloud of steam from the swamp water by just yelling at it, with the heat pouring out of his throat like a river trying to burst its banks. Erasmus tossed him a stone, and by focusing and squeezing his hand, Dell heated it until the surface began to melt. He threw it into the mud, which hissed and sputtered as the stone cooled.

After about three hours, Dell began to notice a change. “I feel different,” he said to Erasmus, “like something is hollowing out. It reminds me of being hungry, but it’s not quite the same. I think I’m going to turn back soon.”

“Before it happens on its own, I think you should try to change it yourself. You’ll be a lot better off if you’re able to control when you do... whatever this is.”

Dellromoz agreed with him. He sat down cross-legged and squeezed his eyes shut in concentration. With his will, he tried to grab onto the heat he gave off and pull it back, to a point inside himself that it seem to flow out of, and hold it there. It was difficult, the heat wanted to flow, to expand outwards and consume what fuel it could find, using it to make even more heat. He had to build a sort of dam of will, without any holes or weak spots, or the heat would just run out of them. More and more, he built up the dam within himself, surrounding the source of the flow, containing it. He kept at it until he seemed to cross a sort of threshold, and it felt like the heat coursing through wasn’t enough to keep the source open. It slammed shut without further effort on Dell’s part, and he opened his eyes.

Like watching himself burn in reverse, the hot, tar-black layer beneath the ash that covered him changed back into the skin he recognized as his own, the transformation sweeping up towards his core from his extremities, with his torso changing back last. When it finished, it left behind a layer of black ash on top of his skin.

“I did it!” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet.

“Congratulations, my boy!” Erasmus clapped his hands. ”That’s quite a lot of progress for one day, though if you can forgive me for being a taskmaster, I do have one more thing I’d like you to try.”

“What is it?”

“Can you turn just a finger, or just a hand? That way you could start a campfire, or light a lantern easily, and without the spectacle and destruction of the entire transformation.”

Dell thought about it. “That would have been useful back in that cell under the watchhouse, I might have been able to melt that shackle off my foot.”

“Useful, though I’d want to keep it a last resort. People aren’t going to forget the gnome whomelted his way out of an iron shackle.”

“I thought you were trying to be remembered,” Dell said with a sly smile on his face.

“I am!” the Popinjay asserted gesturing at Dellromoz with both arms, “But how am I supposed to compete with a little naked man made of cinders who lights everything on fire?! Who’s going to care about an old swordsman in a brightly-colored coat?”

“I think you’d compete just fine if you took your mask off," Dell said.

Erasmus laughed. “I have enough people after me as it is, I don’t need to add Phaeton’s paladins to their number.”

“Well, if you insist,” replied Dellromoz, staring intently at the tip of his index finger. It began to glow and smoke slightly, turning black down to his hand. It was difficult, holding the source open just enough to change his finger. It didn’t want to only let a little through, it wanted to either burst open, or slam shut. It was a balancing act, and he had no experience with it. He pulled too hard as his finger began to change back to normal, and the full transformation swept over him again, but faster this time.

“Shit.”

“You probably shouldn’t practice that near anything you don’t want destroyed,” Erasmus observed.

“I’m not sure I want to practice it at all, I never signed up for any of this,” sighed Dellromoz. “I worked hard and sacrificed a lot to be a doctor, and turning into some sort of magic arsonist isn’t practicing surgical medicine.”

“You’re confident it’s magic?”

“There’s no anatomical basis for a person turning into this,” Dell gestured at himself, “I’ve spent more time studying anatomy than almost anyone. It’s got to be some kind of magic, but I’ve never heard of it.”

“Well, if it’s a curse or a spell, we could try a purifying pool. We should be able to find one that isn’t too far out of our way.”

“I suppose you’re right,” replied Dellromoz.

“Of course I am, I have the benefit of decades of experience,” Erasmus told him. “And I know I’m a bit partial, but don’t write off adventurers so quickly. I’ve no doubt there’s plenty of adventure to be had as a traveling doctor.”

Before Dell could answer him, he felt the source of the fire exhaust itself. He stopped giving off heat abruptly, and his body changed back to normal, though he was absolutely filthy with all the ash left behind.

He stood up, then stumbled as he tried to take a step and suffered a bout of vertigo. He was wiped out; something about the change really left him fatigued. He walked over to his remaining clothes, then thought better of putting them on with all the ash on his skin. Luckily, something about the stuff bothered the mosquitoes, and they gave him a wide berth.

He wrapped himself up in the one remaining blanket, bade Erasmus a good night, and then curled up on the ground. He was asleep in seconds.