You know, I never thought I would find myself wishing magical syntax was a context free grammar. I scratched another line into the rock face, hoping that it wouldn't explode on me this time. I mean come on. This shit sucks ass, no wonder it's hard to actually do anything with it.

That demon kid, Asher, watched on as I scrawled block after block of arcane circuitry. It wouldn't do anything even once it was finished—for that, we had to stick a bunch of his magic dust into the grooves and then set it off, kind of like a gunpowder trail in an adventure movie.

It turned out that doing magic—not sorcery, which was how I decided to translate this guy's concept for what Guardians did—was kind of simple. You made a chain of 'blocks' that would trigger one after another, adding context along the way until the final block which would be consumed to create the effect.

All you needed were the right materials and the right sequence.

The materials were a bunch of powders that my new buddy carried around in pouches and jars. Magic dust, basically, and the kind of dust was very important. The simplest formation was just a straight line of dust on the ground, with the spell being defined by the sequence of which kind of dust you used for each segment.

Once triggered, the magic would consume the dust like a lit fuse, traveling down the line and picking up both power and 'context.' Each time the type of dust switched, it would alter the growing magic potential, and the order really, really mattered.

Things could get more complicated when you started making the path of dust split and converge in various ways, and doing so was essential for most nontrivial spells.

But mainly, it was the recurrent, sequential, relative position based nature of it that made things so tricky. I was used to things like natural language, math formulae, computer code, or so many other things that were 'context free' in the sense of having non overlapping, nested blocks of meaning.

This was entirely unlike that. Everything affected everything else globally based on order and relative position. It was extremely confusing and easy to mess up even very simple steps. This alien kid, Asher, was growing increasingly nervous with the size of my experiments.

"Don't worry, I know it will work this time." Cutting the final groove in the rock, I turned around. "Come on, let's fill this one in."

Hesitantly, he handed over some more pouches and both of us went to work, using the powder along with some kind of sticky glue substance to keep it firmly embedded in the rock. I elected to use the solid rock wall instead of the sand on the ground—which should have been 'easier'—because I wanted to stand up and look straight at my work instead of crawling around all hunched over.

The powders were mostly similar in color. The main one we used, which was apparently cheap and basically just raw fuel for the rest of the magic, was a dirty yellow color. It also tingled against my body when I touched it, which was—interesting.

Filling in the lines with magic dust didn't take nearly as long as carving them, but that wasn't because of the actual carving. Carving into soft rock was pretty easy for me with my strength and my claws. What made it take so long was figuring out what I was going to do and making sure it was correct.

Finally, it was time to activate it. The whole sequence only had two parts where it diverged and later converged again, and the whole thing was only about twenty feet long. We'd used four different varieties of dust, one of which was mostly used for things involving water, another for air, and the last for—well, it was hard to describe. Control, kind of?

I still didn't really know what I was doing, but experimentation was the best way to find out. Asher didn't know much fancy magic anyway. Apparently he was some other guy's apprentice, but when I tried to go bother that guy, I discovered that he was engaged with the Bouquet people. Annoying.

Stolen story; please report.

"So you really think it's possible to turn air into water?" He asked for perhaps the fifth or sixth time.

"I don't think it is, I know it is. But also not really. It's taking the little bit of water that's already floating around in the air and separating it out. It's not actually transforming it."

I was admittedly a bit nervous that maybe there wasn't any water in the air at all in this place—it was very dry looking, with almost zero vegetation—but that wouldn't stop me from trying.

"Alright, trigger it."

Nervously, Asher dipped a literal stick into a jar of clear liquid. He wouldn't let me touch that one. Then he touched the wet end of the stick to the start of the sequence, and I felt that same tiny ripple and pop again. The magic consumed itself quickly, racing all the way to the end in barely even a second.

Then it released, and I felt a much bigger sequence of esoteric implosions and explosions.

Asher had backed away quickly, joining me at my side and putting himself slightly behind me. I couldn't really blame him. The last attempt had been explosive—instead of just sucking out the water, the magic also sucked in a bunch of air. The pressure got too high, and it blasted shards of stone everywhere.

There was no sign of that happening this time, though, and as we continued to watch expectantly, I realized something subtle was happening. It was hard to see, but when I changed the angle slightly, I realized that there were in fact tiny drops of liquid refracting the lights from the nearby camp.

The drops didn't remain hanging there, but drifted over to the spot on the wall where the original spell terminated. More and more drops collected, some from several feet away. They all pressed into the rock, and then—disappeared?

I frowned. The magic was dying off now, but the water was just—gone. I stepped over to investigate. Asher tried to grab my arm to hold me back, but I just shrugged it off, as he was far too weak to do anything to truly stop me.

Peering at the spot in the rock, I confirmed what I thought. The water was just gone, and the spot where it disappeared wasn't even wet. I also didn't see any wet sand below it. Is that really possible? Can a simple spell like this destroy matter? That doesn't seem—

There was a startling loud crack, and I reflexively yelped as shards of rock dinged off my chest and face. One of them even hit me straight in the eye, which was a super weird experience in this state. When partially transformed like this, my eyes took on a hard, glassy texture, making them much more durable.

Unfortunately, they weren't that durable, and were still a relative weak point. The rock that hit me there literally left a scratch like it would on normal glass. Fortunately, that would heal.

What wouldn't heal was the damage I'd done to the whole rock face. For about thirty feet in every direction—and it was only a dozen or so feet high—the entire thing cracked and crumbled, huge parts of it tipping over and cascading down the rock side.

In turn, those broke off and kicked up more rocks further down until there was a small-scale avalanche rumbling below us. "Oops."

A bunch of people were already running towards us, Bouquet people and natives alike. Asher looked like he wanted to turn invisible, but unfortunately, we didn't have a spell prepared for that. Instead, he kind of slinked behind me and tried to use me as a shield again. We were about the same height, so it kind of worked.

But seriously, what happened? I knew that the water part worked, and it sure seemed like I didn't suck in any air this time. So—oh, wait. Don't solid rocks sometimes have water in them? I knew that oil well, for instance, didn't literally have pockets of liquid oil in them. The oil was soaked through the rocks, but it was under enough pressure that they would literally bleed oil when you made a hole and stuck a pipe down into them.

Can water do the same thing?

If I also aggressively sucked a bunch of microscopic water particles through the solid material—yeah, that could potentially stress and fracture it. Damn.

"Valkyrie!"

"Asher!"

Yeah, we were probably both in trouble.

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