Fireball

The record preserved here comes from a controlled detonation arranged after every available contributor expressed firm support for the importance of the entry and no interest in improving it personally.

Several offered to witness.

One offered to hold a bucket.

Vale therefore contributed the sensation herself.

Account of Orentha Vale

The first thing was not fire.

It was a bead of light.

Small. Bright. Almost courteous.

It crossed the chamber with the delicate confidence of a candle-flame that had misunderstood its future.

I had prepared.

This should be recorded, because preparation makes failure more useful.

The floor had been marked. The wards had been tested. The observation cords had been stretched at sensible intervals. My cloak had been removed. My notes had been placed behind a screen. My hair had been tied back in what I believed was a responsible fashion.

I had also chosen a stance.

This was the optimistic part.

Some people evade fire with grace. I have seen them: dancers, monks, thieves, certain intolerable duelists, and cats who possess no scholarly respect for combustion.

I do not belong to this category of person.

I planted my feet, lifted my shield, and intended to meet the edge of the blast with disciplined observation.

The bead reached its appointed place.

Then the room became fire.

Not filled with fire.

Became.

There was no time to watch flame travel. No heroic wall of heat rolling forward like a cavalry charge. No elegant blossom unfolding petal by petal for the benefit of witnesses.

One instant, air.

The next, answer.

Heat struck from every direction the body recognized and several it did not. It entered the mouth before I had finished closing it. It pressed beneath the shield. It found the left ear, the back of the wrist, the exposed edge of the neck, and a regrettable gap between glove and sleeve whose existence I had not previously considered important.

My body attempted three responses at once.

Brace.

Turn.

Leave.

It accomplished none of them with distinction.

The blast lifted me from the certainty of my stance and placed me elsewhere with unnecessary confidence. I struck the floor on my shoulder, slid, and came to rest beside the observation cords, which had begun to burn beautifully.

This was not their assigned function.

For several breaths, I was aware of only heat, smoke, the taste of ash, and the distant sound of someone saying, “Bucket,” in the tone of a person who had finally found a vocation.

My shield remained in my hand.

I mention this because one must take victories where they survive.

My hair had not caught fire.

It had, however, listened closely to the flame.

I have kept it shorter since.

When I could sit up, the chamber looked larger than before, not because it had grown, but because several arrangements within it had ceased to exist. The cords were gone. Two wax tags had become memory. A measuring frame had collapsed into a shape that offered little assistance to measurement.

The caster asked whether I had seen the explosion.

I told him that I did not.

I had seen the bead.

After that, I had participated.

That is the distinction most reports fail to preserve.

Fireball is often described as spectacle. From within, it is neither impressive, beautiful, nor dramatic.

It is immediate.

The body does not experience a grand detonation.

It experiences the sudden loss of every place that was not fire.

Selanka’s Note

This working requires little introduction, which has not prevented readers from providing many.

The most persistent correspondence concerns not heat, but geometry.

In theory, the working is a sphere.

In field diagrams, battle-maps, tiled halls, chalk grids, and other places where violence has been forced to respect squares, this sphere has been known to acquire corners.

Several correspondents object.

The fire has not.

I have reviewed arguments insisting that the blast should be rounder, that the diagram should be kinder, that the corner should not have counted, that the far edge was “plainly outside,” and that no reasonable person would describe the affected space that way unless they had misunderstood the nature of reality.

I have also reviewed the injury reports.

The injury reports are shorter.

Readers should understand the practical lesson: fire is a poor subject for debate while it is arriving. A person who survives by arguing geometry has usually been standing elsewhere.

This spell is also ambitious at corners. Do not trust a wall merely because it is good at being vertical. Flame produced by this working has a regrettable talent for finding spaces that witnesses later describe as “surely protected.”

They were not surely protected.

Unattended flammable objects should be presumed eager to participate. Vale’s notes survived because she had placed them behind a screen, proving that even excellent scholars are occasionally saved by their own paranoia.

If you see the bead, do not admire it.