“writing stories is a kind of magic, too”

“Hey, none of that. You're a valued member of the team, no matter what your power level.”

“I just don't understand how you can tear open that portal to the fire dimension so easily.”

“… fire dimension?”

“Yeah. Where the fire lives. Before you summon it. For fireballs.”

tagged by @reneesbooks! thank you! my words are honor, sky, field, and sun. from a mix of sentinel & herald!

honor (herald):

“Why didn’t you—” Marry Ronald. Tell Amelia earlier. Why did you lie to your eldest daughter for thirty-seven years, why did you let her think her father was dead, why, why, why— “Because I didn’t, Alexandrina,” Mary bursts. “Because I didn’t.” She can feel the tears coming to her eyes, and Mary buries her face in her hands as her voice breaks. She feels like she’s twenty again, like Donovan’s sitting next to her on the couch and holding her hand and Mary was certain, then, just as she’s been certain for the last twenty years: She’s lost Ronald forever. Alex closes the bedroom door after her, and two thoughts ping in Mary head, one after another: I really did love him, once, and I was wrong then. What if I am now? Thirty-seven years ago, the lifetime of the man she’d promised to love forever, a promise she hadn’t known if she could honor even then. “Will you marry me, Mary McGrath?”

sky (sentinel):

"I was born on Earth," Pandora says quietly. "In the mountains. My parents we researching early human spaceflight." She reaches out to brush the thick glass with her fingertips. "The sky was blue," she says softly. "It was so blue."

field (herald):

Alexandrina Gates throws herself into her work, and Mary’s youngest daughter is unceremoniously shot behind a field-house the next April. Just like Donovan, no one ever saw the shooter. Just like Donovan, the police chalk it up to a mugging gone wrong, and cheer behind closed doors that the “nuisance reporter” who had bothered them for so many years was gone.

sun (sentinel):

"Which way is Earth?" "Oh." Pandora shifts, and then points. "There. The blue dot." Avalon squints and leans forward. "I can't see it," ce says. "Neither can I," Pandora whispers. She presses her fingertips harder aganist the glass. "It might… it might be on the other side of the sun. There's, um. There's a photo, a very old one. I can… hold on." Pandora reaches around, and pulls at something taped to the base of the light. "Here." Avalon takes the photo: black, except for a few stray beams of color—sunrays, ce thinks—, the brightest near the right third of the photo. And in that beam, a tiny pinprick of light. Blue. "Pale Blue Dot," Pandora says. "It was taken a hundred-odd years ago, by Voyager 1."

from @akindofmagictoo! thanks! my word is GARDEN.

G: Goodnight. [she laughs softly, quoting] "Good night, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time."

A: After a moment, the sound of purring fills the air. Pandora sighs. “I am the last remaining crew of the Sentinel 5 mission. The last remaining crew of any of the Sentinel missions. This is my ship, and that—”she gestures at the ball of fur pressing into Lexi’s legs—“is my cat, Dusty. Winston, if you prefer. He doesn’t mind. The voice you heard earlier is MARTHA, our AI. My name is Pandora Eloise Harriet Fay. Who, I repeat, are you?”

R: Rajani hadn't gotten a burial. We never found her. No one ever found her. She was out there, dead and gone, gone twenty-eight years and more.

D: "Don't you leave me, too." No dying. Dying's not allowed. Not yet. Not ever—no more deaths. That's what they had said, after Rajani. 'No more deaths'. But he was dead. Lucas was dead, and gone, and he broke the promise. Broke the deal.

E: Enna and Lexi are having a… conversation, as civil as the two of them could, and ce doubts they even noticed cer leaving. They aren't yelling yet, but it was only a matter of time. Their fights never ended peaceably. They were both too stubborn—too angry at the world and at themselves—to let that happen.

N: "Nothing much. The Golden Record, my mission, the only time we ever won the bands, Lucas'—" her voice cracks. Pandora tries to cover it with a cough.

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

I think healing magic would be like that. Suddenly there are no more sick days sitting on the porch with a cup of tea or weeks where you take it slow because you hurt your foot so you should stay off it as much as you can. No one holds the door for you when you’re on crutches because “you should just go get that healed.” There are no flowers or “get well soon” wishes because it’s not that big a deal. Your spouse won’t spend an evening rubbing your back or making your favourite comfort food. Your adventuring party will expect you to just walk it off and they might complain that your temporary injury slowed them down. “Why were you so careless?” they might say. “If you’d just watched your footing we’d be there by now.” Your injuries are nothing but a minor annoyance to everyone else but you’re thinking how if the healer wasn’t there you would be dead right now.