Theodosia was lucky. She was wrong about how far she was from the Border. Even taking into account that she had swung around to avoid territories patrolled by the Standing Battalion and the various small detours made around obstacles too troublesome to just walk around, it wasn't twenty miles until she caught sight of the river of magma delineating where the human kingdoms gave way to Xadia.

It was eleven. Which was still about six miles after exhaustion began to set in.

She was in fact stopping for a break, taking out the bottle of sunberry juice, when the smell of sulfur first made itself known.

"Thank the moon, the sun and the stars," she breathed, making her way to the nearest high point.l

But she was still too close to the Border to even think about stopping here. Illusion magic or not, she'd rather not chance a run-in with the Standing Battalion.

True, about this area it was too steep for humans, but sometimes there were scout patrols. After coming this far, she couldn't afford to be careless.

Which she wasn't, of course. For all of her wandering attention in lessons, she knew how to sneak around, her eyes constantly scanning the terrain around her. Her studies aside, she knew enough than to let herself be caught unaware by something as plebian as enemy soldiers.

Which was why when she began crossing the river, making her way cautiously across a narrow, natural stone bridge, it managed to catch Theodosia absolutely off guard when the Lava Wyrm burst out of the magma and nearly bit her head off.

If she had been a human, Theodosia would have died right then and there. As it was, with common elven preternatural reflexes kicking in, she threw herself flat and rolled, the Lava Wyrm passing harmlessly overhead.

Well. Almost harmlessly.

Even through a haze of smoke and ash, a searing pain blinded all else from her mind, as a few drops of magma splattered down onto her right flank, burning through her clothes. She was able to crawl to the side, forward momentum from her jump bridging the gap, but once there she had trouble doing anything more complicated than breathing.

Much easier to discern was the utter collapse of the bridge as the Lava Wyrm unceremoniously fell on it. Leaving her stranded on the Eastern side. And also mere feet from what was apparently a hungry Lava Wyrm's hunting grounds.

Okay, with all her visions, she certainly did not see that coming. Then again, maybe this was why humans opted not to come from this way.

Another way out would be the best answer in any other situation, but Lava Wyrms could burrow through cooled magma at a rate faster than a grown man can run, and worse yet, it'd sensed her now.

No Lava Wyrm had ever been reported that was more than ten feet long, and no blade could pierce through that plate. The one she'd just been oh-so-politely been acquainted with had to be nearly thirty.

As she watched the magma river bubble ominously, she tried to block out the agony burning through her side and went through her options. Lava Wyrms can't sense its prey from below ground if there was no motion, so one option would be to stay perfectly still, but she couldn't just stay there forever. Even ignoring the timeline, she didn't know how badly the damage was, and she wouldn't be able to escape the thing's territory anyhow without being attacked with the amount of pain she was in. 

Taking in deep breathes to keep it at the back of her mind, she looked for her bag a few feet away, thrown off with the momentum of her sudden attack. Any moment made the pain shoot up her side, making her spend another few seconds breathing in to calm herself, and from here it was a highly disorienting angle, but at the moment Theodosia was too distracted with thinking up a plan to not die. 

She knew the step pattern Lava Wyrms associate with wounded prey. Attempting to walk would draw its attention quicker than she'd like. Lava Wyrms move faster than elves as well. Moonshadow elves had a saying amongst themselves whenever on missions or going anywhere danger may lurk, how they were already dead. It had been a way to help them accept death as a part of life, and accept their own should the time come. Theodosia had never really shared the same sentiment, no matter how many times the saying was uttered.

No, thank you. If you ask me, I much rather prefer being alive, she'd retort whenever someone would say it to her.  

It was only due to the vibration of the cooled magma under her feet that Theodosia had enough notice to hurriedly throw herself in another direction as the Lava Wyrm erupted out of the ground beneath her. She landed on her back, her only saving grace being that her jump had ended with her behind a small outcropping of rocks, protecting her from yet another magma splatter as the Lava Wyrm screeched its displeasure and burrowed itself again underground.

The only problem was, the Lava Wyrm had seen her when it surfaced. It knew exactly where to find her, and it was much, much closer.

It was not, Theodosia thought distantly, the way she had wanted to go, eaten by a Lava Wyrm. Sure, regardless of the lengthy years both her parents' races lived, everyone died eventually, but in more recent years she'd contented herself with the thought of passing away peacefully in her sleep some non-trivial number of centuries or even millennia in the future, a scholar of magic, that or at least after having gotten to punch her childhood friend Skor in the face at least once.

(Not hard. But definitely in the face—especially after what he said before going off to join Runaan's mission.)

Nowhere in her calculations had she anticipated being consumed whole by a massive armored crocodile. For one thing, Lava Wyrms were usually a little too small to pursue humans or elves as prey. For another, they were very stupid, and there was something undignified about—

Wait. They were stupid.

They were very stupid.

And Theodosia was less than ten feet from a flowing magma river.

Well, no better time to actually try Earth magic for herself than now, right? Some of her best experiments had been done while learning on the job. Of course, she wasn't the best at it, and she was mediocre at best since it had been her native primals that came easy to her, but there was no harm in using this experience for training.

A small trickle of blood winding its way along her hairline, she had just managed to bring herself up into a sitting position, grasping her side and taking pained breathes, when she had to heave herself back over the outcropping as the Lava Wyrm, predictably, exploded from the rock where she had been crouching moments before.

Extremely predictably. Lava Wyrms were ambush predators, not clever ones. Out of magma flows, they always attacked and retreated in straight, vertical lines.

Which meant Theodosia knew exactly where to aim.

She did not have the good fortune to learn firsthand about using Earth Primal magic, but her mother had and she preferred to teach Theodosia of learning to understand the primal first before attempting to connect with it, so she had touched Earth magic once or twice young. Even before doing the occasional spells on her own, she had studied the foundation spells associated with Earth magic's domains, knew enough basic principles to craft simple spell variations with many trial and error, including the explosion-whose-name-will-not-be-spoken. The feeling of Earth magic flowing through her had always been... grounding, for all she was loathe to use puns. With an Earth Primal spell, you always knew where you stood (oh dragons, even staring down death she couldn't escape them).

Channeling Earth magic through an active volcano was nothing like that at all. She wasn't directing the unyielding, unperturbed strength of stone now; she was attempting to guide the course of Earth in its most furious guise, to convince it of the wisdom of boundaries, of solidity.

It was not easily convinced. Its ferocity wrapped itself around the base of her spine, its desire to move, to consume nearly all encompassing. So often Earth magic was connected with life, but that was only the half of it. The Earth was also where things returned once that life ended.

As it was about to end now, either hers or the Lava Wyrm's.

Fortunately for her, while the Wyrm may have been a magical creature of Earth, the Primal Sources had never made a secret of loving their mages more.

Thus it was only through a haze of burning agony—her eyes filled with sulfur, her mouth with ash, her right side still aching—that she sketched a rune in the air and coughed, barely coherent, "Perfigo!" With her inexperience, she hardly even expected it to work. Yet three spikes of volcanic glass shot out of the ground just in time for the Lava Wyrm to impale itself upon them through the force of its own weight.

It was not a quick, painless death. There was a lot of shrieking, which was unpleasant and struck at her heart despite its desire to kill her moments ago, and even more thrashing, which was actively dangerous considering it was happening only a few feet from Theodosia's nose, but considering both her being in shock and the sheer extent to which her burned side had seized up, she found herself incapable of doing more than watching blankly even as a splatter of magma landed inches from her feet.

The Lava Wyrm was still thrashing ten seconds later when Theodosia managed to haul herself upright and away. Through the numbness she felt, she recalled the next crossing was a mile to the south if she wanted to avoid the Standing Battalion. Or she could try another option.

Death reflects life, she reminded herself to keep her mind of what she'd just done. It had to be done. Now there was only to think up the next move. If that spell worked, she could try another and see how it worked. Dragging herself back towards the river after picking up her bag, she stopped just a few paces from the shore. Her hands were cut up from landing on the lava rock, and she ignored the sting as she dropped to her knees, then to take a steadying breath as a wave of sulfur hit her in the face and brought back a wave of nausea she had spent the last few minutes doing her best to disregard.

Then she took another breath, then another, reaching once more into the volcano.

There was no traditional spell she knew for this, no simple path forged by her ancestors. Earth magic in general was difficult for its permanence; it stood alone amongst the Primal Forces for the mark it left upon the world. A breeze came and went, the tides rose and receded, each day the moon and the stars gave way to the sun as the sun gave way in turn, but flora and fauna remained until they died, and the mountains were forever. To ask Earth to change was to enact something eternal, and the Earth would not do so for just anyone.

And so she looked into the mountain's molten heart, and said, I'm tired.

It was, to say the least, an understatement. Tired? She was exhausted, shaking from it, the extent of the magic draining most of her energy. She was kneeling on rock so hot it blistered her skin through her clothes, her side burned, and yet it was the idea of having to stand up again that made the bottom drop out of her stomach.

The mountain's response was immediate, a suggestion: Rest. As it had not been able to, for so long.

It was not natural for a volcano to burn for thousands of years. Decades, perhaps, but the Border was magical in nature, Earth magic violently twisted to cauterize a scar across the continent that had never been allowed to heal.

It predated the exile. It predated everything. And while the spell that fueled it was self-sustaining, a rage constantly feeding upon itself, the mountain itself knew that something was wrong.

So it was perhaps with less difficulty than she might have had otherwise that Theodosia sketched in her mind the shape she wanted. One small piece of the mountain finally being allowed to settle. An arch that would allow Theodosia, in just a short time, to rest as well.

And because the Primal Sources loved nothing more than their mages—to be with them, to move through them, to listen when they called—when she asked, the mountain answered.

A single word etched in the air before him, and the magma stretched out of the river in one graceful curve before coming to rest on the far side, instantly cooling into dark, smooth glass.

The exhilaration and pride felt in the action almost made up for the agony in getting there.

☪️☪️☪️

"So, what's that?" Rhun asked Callum who was currently looking over a blue-black orb, similar to the one Claudia had nearly used on them. 

"Um, it's nothing, really—" he stopped flat at the look Rhun sent him. "Well...Claudia told me it was a sky orb."

"A Primal Stone?" Rhun held out his hand for it. "May I see it?" Once it was in his palm, he felt the primal energy radiating from it. Most primal sources came and went as was nature. Breezes may pass but then were gone. Storms may cloud the sky, but all cleared in time. To contain them to be ever-present was a difficult task many human archmages sough to complete. And even there the practice of their creation was near forgotten with time, which meant finding a Primal Stone was a miracle in itself for some.

"Never thought I'd see one," Rhun said, tilting his head. They were walking through the forest to the place he'd told his father they'd be meeting. Rayla and Ezran had walked ahead. Somehow despite how little he knew the elf girl, he knew she wouldn't attempt to harm the prince for the egg. If she had no qualms about killing, she would have taken the opportunity right then and there at their meeting, not hesitate.

"Well, Viren gave it to Claudia for her birthday, but before that, she kept stealing it to show off," Callum explained, shrugging it off. There had been an awkwardness there after Rhun told them the truth. Were half-elves even possible? thought Callum. Apparently if the man beside him was any indication.

Rayla seemed to share the same sentiment, but she had no reason not to trust him. He had plenty of opportunities to harm them or turn them over. On one hand, he could be attempting to gain their trust, but...if he told Harrow, and Harrow still let Rhun watch over Callum and his brother, then there was no way he could be that bad. Harrow had an instinct about most people, especially of those coming close to his sons. Not to mention Callum had met his mother and stepmother; Amadahy reminded him of what little he remembered of his own mom, and Rosella, well, stern as she may be, she had a soft spot for Ezran and Ezran had a soft spot for her jelly tarts.

With Ezran more than ready to help, he had accepted Rhun's intentions without much fight, and now that Rhun wasn't hiding anything more from them, Callum had no reason to distrust him. Any other he could find made him feel wrong. After all, he'd saved their lives now, and to doubt him now would be like Claudia immediately assuming Rhun was a spy after spending his whole life among humans, just because she assumed (albeit she was right) he had elven blood. She wasn't wrong to when she hadn't known, but now that Callum had seen parts of who he was, seen the fear and hesitation at speaking of his heritage, there wasn't any need to doubt him.

If he wanted to hurt them, he would have long ago.

"Hmm, what drew you to this?" Rhun asked instead. "You know, you could have just left it."

For that, Callum elected to go through the items he'd swiped from Lord Viren's secret room before leaving.

He had nabbed a variety of things: a book, a bunch of knick knacks he just blindly grabbed, and a jar of some kind of ointment. On the way out, he also managed to grab the primal stone out of Claudia's hand before she could use it after chaining her up. He hadn't known what he would do with it, but he didn't need Lord Viren or Claudia to have it when they realized that Callum and Ezran were gone.

It all was a blur, really. Not exactly a point in time when he was thinking the clearest that he had ever reasoned. Half of these things he probably wouldn't use, but it was better than having no supplies. He regretted not grabbing anything to eat. One look in Ezran's bag, however, and he relaxed a little bit. Just a little. At least Ezran had grabbed a handful of jelly tarts.

Rhun was a bit more helpful on that part, though. Besides, they wouldn't be gone long.

When Callum told him just that, Rhun appeared thoughtful, then, "You know, my stepmother's a mage, too."

"Rosella's not a mage," Callum said almost automatically before catching Rhun shaking his head in amusement. Oh. Callum mentally facepalmed. Of course, if Rhun's father was a king, then there was also a queen. Even if that queen wasn't his own mother. 

"Not her. My Xadian stepmom, Prince Callum," he sighed, still shaking his head in that what-am-I-supposed-to-do-with-you way he was slowly becoming accustomed to. "She's an Archmage, so she managed to master all the Primal Sources. We write every now and then." Callum raised his eyebrows. "Yes, she knows about me. And she honestly didn't care as long as she got to marry my dad. Now, back to topic. She told me that with human mages, they can't produce natural magic without a Primal Stone. But it's a bit more than just having a Primal Stone, because unlike elves, there still has to be something within them that draws them to the Primal Sources, that they can connect and reach out to--that's the best I can explain." He threw the Sky Orb back to Callum, who fumbled to catch it before holding it in his hands. "That's why not every human can use magic whether or not with a Primal Stone. Some just...have that spark. And some don't."

"You're saying I might have reached for it because I might have it?" asked Callum, pointing to himself.

"No, I'm talking to the other Prince Callum walking next to me." This time, Rhun couldn't help rolling his eyes. "It's possible. But for now...just keep it in your bag, alright." 

Callum didn't need any prompting or explanation for that. He tucked away the primal stone in his bag. The last thing they needed was for the elves to feel threatened. He continued to sift through the contents of the bag, examining his collection, and making sure Rhun knew in case. Something scraped against his fingers, cutting across the soft pads. He winced as they welled with blood. Grabbing the ointment, he opened it and spread a little bit of the contents over his skin. It burned a little more than it should have, but the wound closed before his eyes.

Callum blinked. Well, that was useful.

"Was that a magic thing?" he asked, getting another sigh.

"Yes, that was a magic thing."