Opalite Wires

Agni smiled at him. "Why don't you tell me?"

"It's not my business to cater to you," Skaff told her. It was something Skaffwory often said. He clicked his beak together, then started to yawn -- not completely out of politeness, but because he was still tired from the grueling night before. "What are you talking about, with this Quartzal torch thing?"

"Pyreksoma has torches corresponding to the separate Districts of Fire. There are roughly thirteen of them, spread out across Anthem Low. The largest is Aubuston, which covers seventy percent of Anthem Low, including the entirety of Feldspar Grade."

Now Agni raised her hand, fisting it. The darkness of her skin made her entire forearm look like a pitch-covered torch, and fire began to rise from her flesh. "When the salamanders of a certain District are in good spirits, the torch burns brightly, and calmly, like this. If not, the torch's light either withers" -- the light dimmed down to smolder against her knuckles -- "or grows out of control." She spread her fingers and the fire burgeoned, roared.

He watched in amazement. There was...how could he put it? A...different quality to his fire, than to his own. When Skaff moved his salamanders, they spiked up in all directions, they moved too quickly, overshot the magnitudes he wanted them to obey and had to cool down to normal temperatures. Controlling them was like controlling a leaf floating on the top of oil, which he could move by no other way than flapping his wings on it -- to get it to a specific point he had to flap at it from all directions. In comparison, it was as if Agni was simply placing her finger on the leaf and moving it into place directly. Direct, perfect.

His salamanders saw it too. They spent most of them time crawling between his shoulder blades and wings, but now all huddled on his shoulders, still, their flames reduced as they too concentrated on Agni's expertise.

Agni smiled again, the two rows of bones in her mouth a firelight-shiny crescent. "Your mother never did want to have anything to do with Pyreksoma, but I wonder if you should like to make your own opinions?"

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Having been acclimated to Skaffwory, Prince and the other two salamanders were as docile as lapdogs (though Skaff made sure to never, ever voice this thought aloud, or indeed, even to think of it too loudly, in case he accidentally bruised the salamanders' pride and ended up in ashes).

The problem was going through the activities of his everyday life with the salamanders in tow. In this respect, they were less lapdogs and more like cats. They didn't like to be left behind with his attention, but disliked moving; when he tried to fly off, they clutched at branches, making cinders of loftree boughs until Skaff gave them treats of sweet-scented feathersticks and cones of incense. Even then, if Skaff kept aflight or too far from their familiar areas for too long, the salamanders would begin to heat up again, drawing the attention of everyone nearby, making small children cough and rub teary, reddening eyes.

The worst was taking showers. Skaff was a passerine, and had visited the public passerine baths everyday; but the salamanders, once they began following Skaff around exclusively, would have none of it. They despised all forms of water, to the extent that Skaff had to resort to melons and hydrated gourds for the water that he himself needed, a trick that he had seen Skaffwory employ herself. The taste was awful, but it diluted the actual water enough that the salamanders grudgingly allowed him to consume it.

Some passerine took baths in dust and mud, and though Skaff had always thought of this practice as somewhat anti-intuitive, he tried it as well, visiting the dirt baths located in the lower regions of Quartzal. The dust was fine and white and scratchy, spelled to be abrasive to bacterium and curses of all sorts, but the salamanders would have none of this either, and in defiance turned the sand in Skaff's vicinity to a dark black glass which chipped into pieces sharp as daggers.

So, that was it. In resignation, Skaff purchased bath oils, and winced every day as he rubbed the slimy, slippery stuff into his feathers and skin. There were no bath oils that didn't smell, suffocatingly, of some type of flower, and he felt like he was basting himself every time he used it; but the oil captured the dirt on him pretty well, and thereafter the salamanders quite enjoyed burning it up, sending it up in floral-smelling steam and splatters. Skaffwory had herself always smelled like flowers, and now Skaff understood why.

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"What are you here for?" he asked, making his voice sharp. His crest flexed with irritation.

"Just to see how you are doing," Agni told him, with a smile. If she was perturbed by his aggressive behavior she didn't show it -- which, he imagined, was the mark of a good fire elementalist. "Quartzal's torch sputtered, but didn't go out, so it wasn't until we heard word of Skaffwory's death that we thought to check on the state of the fires here."

"Quartzal's torch?"

"Pyreksoma keeps a track of the districts of Anthem," Agni explained. "Well, not the districts as they're politically drawn. Not by Anthem politics, anyway. The point is, Quartzal's torch flickered, which meant there was trouble -- but when it revived itself, we assumed that Skaffwory had taken care of things."

"Skaffwory wasn't part of Pyreksoma," Skaff said warily. At least, he was pretty sure that she hadn't been.

"You're correct. But she regarded us still with respect, and we regarded her with respect as well. Which is why I came to investigate what happened to her. And to see," she added, "if you, the new lead fire elementalist in Quartzal, can match her ability."

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perplexed, until he realized he had to do something with it -- something human -- what? His feathers ruffled even further and he unfolded his left hand, reaching out. Embers rose from his fingers -- he quickly drew his hand back before he could touch her, and the human woman's mouth twisted at the corners again, this time unevenly.

Was she angry? Skaff twisted his head, gazing at her with the other eye. That he rearranged his wings was all the apprehension that he dared to show the salamanders.

"A handshake is a human greeting," Agni explained, reading his confusion correctly. "Nothing to be afraid about -- especially between two elementalists as ourselves."

She reached out again, her digits glowing with flames, the corners of her mouth sharper. Skaff held out his hand again, mirroring her extended right hand by extending his left. What came next?

After a moment of staring at him she laughed and then she switched her hands, lifting her left hand and using it to grasp his. At contact, flesh and feathers and nail flared.

"Adorable."

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when he descended to Quartzal. He wasn't sure if it was because she actually expected him, or had merely seen him approaching. As soon as he came within a certain proximity, he felt Prince begin to flare. He allowed it -- there was nothing else for it -- Leg and Pins merely hid at his shoulders. When he landed on the ground, it was with a slight jump which dislodged charred bits of stick and soot that he occasionally poked at the salamanders.

The elementalist's brows raised.

"Here has he come," the elementalist said. "The Phoenix of Quartzal."

The elementalist was a human. He eyed her. The human had black lines around its eyes, gold speckles, a large breast -- a female. She was uncommonly dark-skinned, which led him to assume that she was from Anthem High -- certainly not Low, skin couldn't be tanned like that in Low. Certainly not in Quartzal either, though Quartzal received the most light from the sun than anywhere else.

But when he came near her, he saw that the dark skin glimmered, and he realized. She wasn't a denizen of High at all -- just somehow tanned by salamanders. Come to think of it, he had never seen a human fire elementalist before, so perhaps this is what they all looked like. If his own skin weren't so dark, perhaps he would notice something unusual himself. Then again, hadn't his feathers been darkening? Was it something more than age?

In any case.

"I'm Skaff," he told her, feathers ruffling. She came here and called him by some dumb nickname?

"Skaff," she said after a moment, unfazed. Skaff clicked his beak in annoyance. So she didn't care, did she? Who was she to come here with her squishy human skin on his grounds, where the fire knew his name?

"I'm Agni," she said, holding out a hand. The corners of her mouth turned up at the edges -- a smile. "Of Pyreksoma."

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because Prince told him -- its coils, which always rested in loose loops around his throat, abruptly tightened. Leg and Pins also skittered about nervously, and Skaff flapped up to his den, which had previously been Skaffwory's old warehouse for basket-materials and charcloth. In her old age -- and typical of passerine behaviors -- she had neglected the organization of these materials, and Skaff (at that time, Chimbeeriun) took it upon himself to clear the area up. It cleaned up nicely and he discovered that the warehouse den contained a small stove and a small furnace that had previously been hidden beneath piles of half-finished baskets.

He had also discovered that the entire back wall was a mirror, though it was hard to tell since the majority of it was scratched and sooty. With some work he had polished it up, and with some writings he had found and Prince's help, he learned that its primary purpose was for divination and communication, much like a pocket mirror.

He approached the mirror now, rubbing his hands around Prince's tail to warm them sufficiently before pressing his fingers against the glass. The mirror flickered, then began to heat, quickly becoming a glowing yellow slab on the dark wall. Skaff peered into the light, listening intently to Prince's sibilant translation, which Skaff was not yet experienced enough to understand himself.

"He is coming to ask you to be a part of the guild," Prince explained. Its eyes were dim, coal-colored slits.

Should I? Skaff wanted to ask, but held back. Skaffwory had told him that indecision was the worst trait to show to an elemental; it showed untrustworthiness and weakness, and was especially insulting to fire elementals, who loved ambition and security. Skaff licked his mouth, tightened Prince about his neck, and turned, propelling himself from the den and floating down to where Prince -- and his own senses -- told him the visitor was.

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Skaffwory Newer noticed the change immediately, and his long silence had been in part because he had become overwhelmed by the sudden mutterings in Quartzal, the hissing and smouldering of mourning salamanders. They missed her. Her favorites crawled toward him, twisting their bodies around the ironwood beneath his talons, languishing with him whose presence (and perhaps blood) they recognized from his training with her. Meanwhile he found that the salamanders in general, the weaker ones, had become confused, befuddled -- he noticed this because the ones near him would move about sluggishly, yet endlessly, rather than settling calm and burning in place. Yet when he descended finally from his perch, he noticed that it was affecting the whole district. The salamanders that Skaffwory Former had sold grew very dim, or went out completely; and throughout the caverns and cliffs rang warning bells for fire, as embers leaped from ovens and stoves and grew inexplicably, out of control.

The slyphs were alight with the voices of salamanders. "Skaffwory! Skaffwory...!" He followed the call of it wherever he went, to spitting hearths and violent candles, to embers that wouldn't go out. He answered them, introduced himself to them, tried to set them at ease, to the initial skepticism of the fires' watchers.

"Who are you?" they would ask; and at his terse reply, his new name, they would purse their lips and say nothing more. The Skaffwory they new was different. Some fires too, didn't obey him -- they screeched in denial, seeing straight through -- his feathers singed but never his body, thanks to the favorites, who clutched the flesh beneath his shoulderblades and arose against confrontation. The lesser fires would subdue; and Skaff went on with the favorites tugging at feathers, pressing their bellies and warming him to the bone and muscle.

He worked. But there was not a lot that one newly initiated fire elementalist could do, especially in the stead of a fire elementalist who had been the most powerful one in several districts (if not, he thought to himself, one of the best in the entirety of Anthem Low). Beyond Quartzal, kitchens were overheating, forges were going out of control. The odor of smoke grew denser. Soon, the guild sent one of their own.

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and when it did, Chimbeeriun hadn't noticed. When she hadn't spotted him for a while, Kuhyo'ur left her business to go searching, though didn't have to look for long -- another sibling of their hatch had brought her news that Chimbeeriun was on one of the highest ironwood boughs and hadn't stirred.

Even if she hadn't been told, he would have been easy to see -- his body gave off a heated aura that made the air around him shimmer in waves as long as a wing-length all around. She came as close as she could, until the heat made her feel like her feathers were curling -- and even from the distance she was she saw that his feathers were glowing. His skin seethed with fires creeping in and out around his skin, peeking out in glimmers like embers twinkling on a charred log.

"Chim," she called uncertainly. She knew that Skaffwory had been teaching him how to master the salamanders, but she hadn't witnessed until now, nor really quite grasped, that this meant Chimbeeriun would be crawling with fire. In curiosity, branchers from nearby, who had already been watching the silent Chimbeeriun and occasionally throwing paper and wood balls at him for fun, neared closer than they had before. One experimentally tossed a wad of moist newspaper at him with her beak, and the branchers all crowed and raised their wings in surprise and delight as the wad disappeared in a flicker and hiss of steam.

"Stop that," Kuhyo'ur snapped, and then called again, more loudly -- "Chimbeeriun. Come on. Wake up. You haven't eaten. I know you haven't. I brought you your favorite even, look."

She unstrapped the basket from her back and pulled the blanket from its mouth, revealing rich dirt, a teasing glimpse of the glowing skin of a wyrm nestling within.

He glanced up at her, finally, and she swallowed as she saw his eyes -- bright blue. Just as Skaffwory's had been.

"Chimbeeriun?" she said nervously. What if his transition into an elementalist had gone wrong -- what if he had gone crazy? She pinched the basket between two boughs and stretched her wings, preparing to flee. The shimmery waves around him began to lengthen --

"No," he said, and there was something about it that made the air pucker closer to him. The waves shortened -- tightened down, so that now the air around him didn't shimmer anymore. The light began to fade too, become more contained against his body.

"Chimbeeriun," Kuhyo'ur said in amazement.

"No," he repeated again. "No."

He looked down at himself, and then at her again. "I am Skaffwory."

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