“The lights aren’t working as well. Is it because you are tired?” Clayton asked. The group was submerged in darkness and cautiously feeling out the walls.

  “That’s not what’s happening.” Grace held up the stone in her hand for inspection. They all had one just like it, glowing at the same intensity. “This is not a heavy magical lift. Everyone one of those stones is as bright as I can get it.”

  “But I can barely see.” Clayton’s arm was extended out in front of his body, warding himself against collisions as he walked. “It’s definitely darker.”

  “Yes, Clayton. It’s darker. And I’m annoyed that you understand that, and that still somehow isn’t enough answer for you. It’s darker. I make light stones. There’s a conflict there.”

  Clayton’s face scrunched thoughtfully. This felt for all the world like one of those conflicts between his reborn intuitions and how this new world actually looked and felt to natives of the realm. He just couldn’t see how.

  “Grace. Could you explain darkness to me? How it works?”

  “Are you really going to keep arguing this point?” Grace had barely tamed the fury in her voice. It was still obvious. “Really?”

  “I’m not arguing. I think I’m misunderstanding something. Please, explain it,” Clayton pleaded.

  “Fine. God.” Clayton could almost hear her roll her eyes. “All things are magic. Everything you can touch, feel, see, or sense is magic. That’s how a place like this can change so quickly. In the established world, the magic follows rules. It obeys laws of permanence, and leaves the shaping of the world up to the people in it and the natural forces that are already in place. It’s predictable.”

  “Okay. I think I understand.”

  “Great, I’m glad I won’t have to repeat it. Now, if everything is magic, then what’s making this stone glow?”

  “Magic?”

  “Kind of. Only kind of. The glow itself is magic. I’ve put it in the stone, and you can see it as it dissipates from the stone. But the stone itself is not really, truly glowing. The magic is. I told it to be light and my class allows me to turn unprimed magic into light, and it obeyed.”

  Clayton considered staying quiet out of politeness, but if he was going to ever understand what was going on around him, he needed to stop glazing over details. Luckily, the other knowledgeable person in the group saved him from it.

  “There’s no chance he understands unprimed magic, Grace,” Tom said.

  “He has to,” Grace argued.

  “He doesn’t.” Tom laughed. “I think I have an idea of why he doesn’t understand the rocks. Trust me. You want to explain this.”

  “Why don’t you do this?”

  “I’m a shielder, Grace. Do you think I’d do a good job?”

  It wasn’t universal, but different classes had types. Mages in this world tended to be the same kind of people who Clayton would have called indoors kids in his. Martial classes were jocks, not necessarily stupid but usually not reading-on-rainy-days types. Some people crossed those lines, but Tom wasn’t one of them.

  “Dammit. So, everything is magic. That includes magic itself. It becomes less magic when it turns into fire, or soil, or anything else. Before it does that, it’s magic in its purest form. Unprimed magic sits just below the layer of reality we can directly observe, waiting to be drawn on to flesh out our universe,” Grace explained.

  “If you can’t see it, how do you know it’s there?” Alvin asked. Clayton sent quiet blessings Alvin’s way for joining the conversation and drawing Grace’s fire. “Sorry if that’s a dumb question.”

  “It’s actually not, but it would take far more patience than I have to explain to you why. Just know it’s been studied, theorized on, and debated for centuries. There are more experiments that have been done on the subject than there are rocks in this mountain. It’s a settled matter. Can we accept that for now, or am I wasting my time?”

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  Neither Clayton nor Alvin was dumb enough to respond. Grace seemed to accept that as sufficient.

  “Good. Now, I’ve created light, and crammed it into a rock. I could have crammed it into your weapons and armor, but they have their own magic to compete with, and it’s much stronger than a rock’s is. And that, as you already know, is fighting against the natural magic of the dark.”

  “Wait. There.” Clayton stopped. “That part. The what?”

  “The natural magic of the dark. It’s generated by places that match nature’s conception of… oh, God. Does dark work differently in your blasted, magic-less worlds?”

  “I think so. Just keep going,” Clayton said.

  “Dark comes from places that should be dark. It’s naturally generated in open spaces. All open spaces. Things like torches fight it.”

  “Wait. So the sun is just beaming light magic down? Like a giant wizard?”

  “No. That’s stupid. The sun changes the nature of spaces it can directly influence to be light-generating.”

  Clayton didn’t mention what seemed stupid here and what didn’t seem that way. It didn’t seem productive. He took a different tactic.

  “So you are telling me that something like cold works the same way. How a place feels is determined by how much cold magic and heat magic are in a particular place, fighting it out,” Clayton suggested.

  “It’s more complex than that, but yes. You are telling me it’s different on your world?”

  Clayton took the next minute or so to try and explain how those things worked back in Earth’s universe. It wasn’t easy. He was a mentally focused martial, which was probably because on Earth he was the kind of person who tried to understand a lot of things just enough to make them useful. He wasn’t truly a bookish type, just a guy who knew enough to make him dangerous.

  He took his best shot despite the limitation, trying to talk about how atoms worked on earth, how they could be excited, how this translated to heat. He tried to explain what light was, which was even harder. The worst part of it was that he didn’t really know where to stop, given that he didn’t know where the differences really quit.

  “Okay, okay. I think I get it. So, on your world, dark is just not-light? Not the opposite of light, but something like how an empty cup isn’t full of something?” Grace concluded.

  “Right.”

  “Cold is the same?”

  “Yes.”

  “Insanity.” In the dim light, Grace rubbed the bridge of her nose. “But it does make your confusion make some kind of bizarre sense. To give you the very abridged version, it’s very dark in here. Darkness isn’t very powerful as a general rule, at least not when generated naturally. This place is about as dark as a place can be. It’s the heart of a mountain, closed off from the influence of any better lit environments by a mile of rock. That means these…”

  Grace waved her dim stone through the air.

  “Can only do so much. The rocks are neutral. They don’t like light magic. They don’t hate it, but they fight it a little. It’s everything I can do to pack them with enough magic that they can influence the nature of this environment at all.”

  “Ah. I see,” Clayton said. “It’s a shame we can’t use something better. Like those rocks from the Crystal Roper. If you could use those, I bet they’d work better.”

  In the dim light, Grace ground to a stop.

  “Oh, dammit. Damn.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know how frustrating it is, Clayton,” Grace’s voice dripped with ire as Clayton felt an object pass out of their shared inventory. “When you just spent a half-hour explaining how stupid someone else was, and they still manage to be smarter than you?”

  “Wait. Would the rock thing work?”

  “I have no idea, but it didn’t stop my laser beam before. It just redirected it. That suggests an affinity, and I completely forgot about it. Of course, we don’t have any idea if it will work until we try it, but…”

  Grace’s hand began to blaze with a much brighter light as one of the shards of crystal absorbed her magic. All around them, the oppressive dark began to retreat. It wasn’t a complete victory. The tunnel was still a much darker place than any of them liked. It was still the case that they could see at least two times further and better than they had before, and that was with just one of the shards.

  “Dammit. Dammit, dammit.” Grace sighed and shook her head. “Of course that worked. Everyone stop for a moment. Alvin, take this.”

  Alvin reached out and took the stone as Grace took another from the inventory and charged it for Tom before pulling out yet another shard and holding it in her palm.

  “This one will be for you,” Grace said. “I hope you appreciate it. I could have just as easily pretended this wouldn’t work at all and avoided you all knowing I’ve been being very dumb.”

  “Actually, could you charge my ring?” Clayton lifted up his hand. “It’s already sort of magical, right? And made of the same kind of rock? If it worked, I wouldn’t have to hold on to my light source.”

  Grace’s mouth opened and closed, noiselessly. She took a step to Clayton and laid her finger on his ring. It worked even better than the shards had. A second later, it was as if he had a portable sun strapped to his hand. The distance they could see doubled again.

  “Wow. That’s…” Tom looked at Grace and smirked. “Are you sure you are the light mage, and not him? He seems to be having a lot of good ideas about it, lately.”

  “Tom, if we weren’t on the same team, I’d melt you.” Grace shook her head. “I really would.”