"You like to play with fire, Reyes Drazir."

Fire. Desert suns. Cloudless moons. It bounced across his lazy fingertips when he set his feet on his desk, surrounded by large, leatherbound texts. Fire, it was a part of him, deep in his star shattered blood. The joy inside the core of fire stopped in his palm.

A blessing?

He squashed the flame and smoke billowed out of fingertips.

A curse, more like.

A curse for a stupid magi like me. 'Make something of yourself, Reyes Drazir'. Play with fire too much, and you're likely to get burned? At least getting burned will have some meaning. Fire just is. No one starts to question whether the fire should act — oft they don't want it to. He released the smoke back to its freedom in the air. His ebony stave sat against his desk, with the crystallised opal conduit curled around the protective branches of the parent tree. He leaned further in his chair and tried to ignore the shouts of the street outside the apothecary he found himself saddled into with his less than stellar departure from the Magi's Tower.

"You like to play with fire."

Students left with the singing bell of the school, but he chewed on the embers and swayed on the legs of his chair instead of his own. Sunlight pierced the white cobbled streets of the Abraxa Magus Republic capital, though he preferred to call it the land of stuffy know-it-alls. He should know. He was one of them — a stuffy know-it-all, more specifically. Underneath desert suns, the cold in the air stole his sense of homesickness long ago. Reyes took his feet off his lonely desk when footsteps sounded behind the door, with the usual squeaky stairs, and he made a note to get it fixed before the sound drove him mad. One finger against his temple, he tried to grasp for a silencer spell to flee from the squeak squeak squeak. "Kailu," he drove his tongue deeper behind his teeth to avoid chewing on it. "You know I'd rather people take the side entrance in here." He lifted his head to the alchemist of their humble store, they tucked their curly brown hair behind their ears, but their silence indicated a problem — a problem he wanted nothing to do with already. Though against his quiet wish, Kailu placed a scroll with a thick, plastered ribbon, with the insignia of the Council. The stuffiest of all the stuffy know-it-alls.

"What is this?" He squeezed the scroll in his hands and eyed Kailu.

"The Council wants to talk to you."

"Funnily enough, I could surmise that from the exquisite piece of cloth." Reyes unravelled it simply for the ribbon, before the scroll hovered over his palm. Kailu jolted when the edges of the parchment curdled and popped. Embers chewed through the words, and he grinned when the blaze consumed it — along with his nonexistent desire to talk to the council in the first place. He swept the ashes into a small phial as Kailu stared in slack-jawed horror. "What?"

"You didn't even read it," they rasped.

"So? I know what it says. I can hear them already," Reyes said and left the comfort of his chair and pocketed the phial of dead embers. "If I know them, they'll want to try and convince me to return to the Tower of Magi to teach, or to observe testing of students, as if I hadn't had my fill of being threatened with paper-cut curses enough. Imagine me trying to wrangle a bunch of students who think they're the best Magi who ever lived. Or, better yet, try and convince me to use my blessing for reasons they will never deign to tell me. Again." He grabbed his black staff, and power rippled at his fingertips, but he donned the leather strap to keep it against his back.

"You can't keep dismissing the Council at every turn, they're not going to give up," Kailu argued.

"Why do you think I hide in your basement?"

Kailu brushed their nose with an irritated groan, but it was nothing compared to the annoyance ripping through his chest as he left the room full of medical texts and medicinal herbs. He sent his annoyance through the smoothed wood of the stairs to smother the endless squeaking, but whether it worked or not, he neither cared nor wanted to test it himself. He took the side exit, where often Kailu sent people with endless maladies to him for investigation. His most common patients were students with what he liked to call 'too much dust from musty tomes and stress' sickness. He almost felt bad for the last student who came in, hungry-looking and harried with a plea to have him give them the energy to study and not miss one important test or another.

And they never like to hear me give them the 'medicine' of food and bedrest. Maybe I will talk to the Council to not pressure their students so much. Reyes bit down on the memories of the Tower, where his teachers complained at his lack of desire with his great blessing. Undeserved in his hands, but it was what he was born with, and they could no more give it to someone pliable then he could get rid of it. People liked to mention how much they'd do and get done with his gift. Outside into the mild climes, he tucked his hands in his pockets and waddled his way down the largest street. Storefronts shone brilliantly with their wares, with the Tower of Magi in the distance, the council at the top. At least they have the decency to create simple teleportation circles.

He ascended the massive steps to the equally huge doors. Students sat underneath the small groves of the courtyard, deep in their studies. A couple pointed his way with curious expressions. Curiosity stifled by what laid within. Corridors followed the roundabout into classrooms, with a staircase going downwards into the bowels, to the forbidden sections where he snuck into to study what the teachers never wanted him to look at. One text left an impression on him.

The Great Inferno — the near world-ending calamity to burn the world into an ashen apocalypse.

The reason why Abraxa banned the use of blood magic, and kept him out of the loop. Starborn and Shadowblood, whose lifeforce mixed into a conduit of clean-cut iceglass and spread destruction throughout the star. His ears never recovered from the verbal tongue lashing and squeezing the Headmistress gave him, but it was too late to undo the knowledge. Too late to take from him the truth. He passed some testing rooms, where students gathered around basins to test the limits of their magic with all their collected, dusty knowledge. Into the teleportation circle, he sighed when it pulsed underneath his feet and followed the track of the runes. A dancing swirl upwards. One blink, and he found himself at the top, where huge windows overlooked the entirety of the capital. An endless perspective as the council sat on their rumps.

Probably patting themselves on the back for their hard work.

Reyes left the circle to round the corridor and checked on the phial of ash in his pocket before stopping outside the doors into the council room. For some reason unfathomable to him, two mirrors sat inside the doors themselves. He suspected a one-way view, but he shrugged his shoulders and decided not to fix up his flyaway hair of draconic coal. He pushed his hands into the doors, and let them swing open.

A long table curbed into a semi-circle, with a rune of power in the middle. Their chairs sat at the focal points, but with the power split, he doubted any entrapment magic they performed would hold him down for long. Each one turned their heads in his direction.

"Reyes Drazir." Councilman Syvar sat up from his lazy lounging. "You came."

"You're the one that sent a letter." Reyes challenged their authority by stepping into the middle of the rune, a subtle dare to test him again. "What do you want?"

"I see time hasn't tempered your tongue." Councilwoman Alavara said with a sneer.

"Forgive my candidness, oh esteemed council people," Reyes said and swept into a bow. "What do you require of me?" He wrapped his hands around the phial of ashen letters, but kept his shoulders loose. "I'm afraid if this is about trying to cajole me into teaching wide-eyed Magi, I'm afraid I'll have to decline. Never really been one to be a good teacher, as I'm sure Councilwoman Alavara will confirm. I do remember her being a hard no on that front."

Alavara scowled.

"No," Syvar mumbled. "We've gotten word."

"Word... are you going to continue with that sentence?"

Syvar's hesitation told him more than his 'word' ever would, but he listened all the same. "As you know, the Kingdom of Tervale lies to the north," Syvar observed. "They sit against the mountain range into the northern reaches."

"Yes, I can read maps well enough."

"Well," Alavara interrupted. "Two or so suns ago, we received word that the youngest Prince of Tervale was murdered in an assassination plot."

"Wow. Royalty getting murdered. Fascinating. Tell me more." He tipped his head at the unease writ on their faces. "What? Did you expect me to be surprised? Royals and bloodshed often go hand in hand, though I wouldn't say it's exclusive to them." He gazed at them all, in their high seats. "What is it to me what an assassin did in an entirely other kingdom?"

"It should be to you," Alavara said. "It was rumored he was a Shadowblood."

"And the prevailing rumor is that the Crown Prince has gone mad in grief."

Reyes scowled. "I wouldn't fault him, but again, what does this have to do with me?"

"They're accusing us."

"Did you?"

Syvar sputtered. "What?"

"Did you or did you not have involvement in it?" Reyes questioned. "I'm not ignorant of the politics around me. I like to keep myself informed just in case I find myself in this exact position." He waved his hand around the chairs. "You want something from this. Spit it out."

"We had nothing to do with the assassination," Alavara said. "It came as a shock to us as well."

"Yet this proves a good time to push outwards, is it not? Tervale has been a thorn in your side. You wanted a safety net in case they got a funny idea to invade you as they had when they crossed the mountain range. You could only get that by finding the opposite of what was apparent in the royal family. A Starborn. Me. So, now that we're past that," Reyes said and drew out the phial. "Without a Shadowblood, you want me to help with said push. Am I wrong?"

It went quiet.

I am a stupid Magi, cursed with this power.

"I'm not in the habit of using my abilities in such a manner, so my answer remains the same, it is of no consequence to me what happens here, or what happened in Tervale," he said with a drawn out shrug. "I know that won't deter you, of course." He pocketed the ash again. "You will not change anything. If anything, Tervale is not in the position to invade, especially if the royal family is as thrown into turmoil as I'm sure it is from the Crown Prince's 'madness' as you refer to it as."

Further silence told him more.

He smiled at them. "I see we're done here. Good evening."

"You're playing with fire, Reyes Drazir," Syvar warned. "Remember that you are one Starborn. You are not invincible to the world around you. The more you run from it, the more it will chase after you."

Good thing I know how to cover my tracks. "I'll keep that in mind, Councilman Syvar." He sent one last grin back at them. "You know what? I like the taste of the heat. It's too cold in this tower. You should consider warming up the place before your students freeze to death."

If I like to play with fire, they can drown underneath ice.