The thing about bad decisions was, if you ran fast enough and hoped hard enough, you could outrun the consequences, even if only for a moment.
Jiri was no fool. She was barely a woman, alone on the Dothraki Sea with nothing but the clothes on her back and the food in her belly, and no one but Sundancer beneath her, surging forward with every gallop he took away from the khalasar.
But every time his hooves left the ground, every instant of flight where the two of them were unbound from the earth, Jiri could cast it from her mind.
Jiri threw her head back and watched the sky. She savored every divine breath, away from the stench of the khalasar, the sweat and blood and seed and waste. The starry sky bent over the horizon, embracing the earth. The moon was hardly a curved sickle against the night sky, just bright enough for her to see the shadow of the land against the sky.
The memories weren't so loud anymore.
When the last light of the khalasar's campfires faded from the horizon, Jiri let Sundancer rest. The longgrass no longer tickled at her feet, tall enough to hide serpents and ticks and vermin. She put herself down on shortgrass, too small for pests to hide in. The grass was cool, not cold. In the summer, it never got cold enough to need a woven grass blanket, and the far spots from the fires were warm enough.
"Down, Sundancer," she whispered, stroking his broad neck. The white stallion folded its legs and rested next to her. Jiri laid up against his back. He was warm enough for them both.
The gnaw of hunger had not set in, nor the bite of thirst. Tomorrow, Jiri knew, was not going to be as pleasant. So she promised herself she would enjoy tonight.
Jiri traced constellations in the sky, found the Slaver Star, the Sea Star, the Broken Till, and the Stallion over the Womb of the World.
Weariness had nearly drew her into its embrace when the sky changed. A new star appeared, far closer and far brighter than the rest. A brilliant blue, it brightened and brightened, straining against the blackness. She sat up. Sundancer perked up beneath her.
It burst into fractures, shattering the night sky. Cracks formed in the black, spreading into fractals that threatened to bulge downwards. The star burst open, sending a ripple of blue energy racing away towards the horizon in all directions. Jiri sat up. A ray of yellowed light poured through, illuminating a spot on the grass.
Energy surged through her. "Up, Sundancer!" she exclaimed, throwing herself astride the horse. "Go! Go!"
Sundancer ran like the wind, racing towards the star and its ray of light. "Faster," she urged. Sundancer ran even faster. The wind pulled her hair into a rippling pennant behind her, just like his pure white mane.
A pair of figures fell out of the star, lit by the ray of sunlight. They tumbled down to earth, just ahead. Panting, Sundancer gave a final push just as the star and its ray of light vanished. Jiri cursed. They'd be lost to her.
But when Sundancer crested the next hill, she could see illuminated eagle's wings, splayed against the grass. She approached warily. A man was crouched over a woman - no, a goddess, wounded and desperate, humming a foreign tune while heaving up and down on the goddess's chest. The man struck the woman across the face. Jiri was about to leave – she did not leave her khalasar to join another of the same sort – when the man screamed something. The woman pounced on him like a tiger, wings splayed out in the air behind her. Jiri's heart ached. They were broken worse than any bird she'd ever seen fly again.
"Hello?" she called out.
The woman did not react, except to release the man. He immediately cast about searching for her. As his head turned, the moonlight glinted off something on his face, a metal eyepatch nestled over his right eye.
He called out a garbled, unfamiliar word, questioning. When Jiri did not respond, he spoke a string of foreign words, beckoning her towards him. Jiri nudged Sundancer onwards, tense and wary. Sundance sensed her readiness and moved in, prepared to sprint away.
Jiri did not think she could outrun a goddess, but she knew Sundancer could outrun a man.
"Hɛˈləʊ? aɪm nɒt ˈɡəʊɪŋ tuː hɜːt juː, aɪ sweə. aɪ dəʊnt səˈpəʊz juː spiːk ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ? Harri, hæv juː ɡɒt ˈɛni trɪks ʌp jɔː sliːvz fɔː ðɪs?" the man spoke like he was gargling water, with half a sing-song lilt.
"You should have mastered AllSpeak," the goddess said. Jiqui heard deadness in her tone, like all the inflection had been drained from her voice. "I am without tools or tricks, Tony. I've got shitty, crude magic and a broken body left. Hello," she greeted Jiri. "My name is Harri Evans. This idiot is Tony Stark. Can I ask your name?"
"Heɪ!" Tony Stark protested.
"Jiri, uh, your Highness," she said, as respectfully as possible. She slid off Sundancer and bowed.
"Just Harri," the goddess commanded. "Ugh, my night vision is buggy. I keep seeing mottled discoloration- naina!"
Soft white light flared into existence, from no discernable source. Jiri gasped. The goddess looked awful, like she'd been beaten within an inch of her life. Limbs hung askew, twisted like her broken wings. Bruises covered her throat and wrists and much of her face.
Harri's brows contorted in rage. Jiri stepped back, throwing herself to the ground. "I - I apologize, divine Harri, I meant no offense-"
"Who did that to you," she demanded in a cold, terrible voice. Tony Stark scowled in displeasure. It took Jiri a moment to notice that they were not angry at her, but on her behalf.
"A man far away," Jiri said quietly. "And no bother to me anymore."
"wɒt dɪd ʃiː seɪ?" Tony demanded.
"A man far away," Harri repeated to him.
"aɪl ˈfʌkɪŋ kɪl hɪm."
"With what? A pair of socks and an eyepatch?" Harri asked. "You're alone in the middle of nowhere," she said. "How did you expect to survive?"
"Better than with the khalasar," Jiri admitted. The truth was like bitter poison. The moment it was out of her, she felt raw, but clean. She wondered if she looked much like Harri. Except, the goddess was beautiful beyond mortality, without blemish and with an immaculate figure. Jiri did not measure up to that. She knew she was 'twiggy and titless,' as Bloodrider Gaq liked to call her.
"kæn juː hiːl hɜː?" Tony asked.
Harri did not speak. She beckoned Jiri closer, holding out her hand. Jiri came to the goddess. She reached out and rubbed her bruised cheek with a thumb. Golden light spilled between the cracks of Harri's fingers and a wonderful, serene sensation spread from her face. Like everything was going to be okay, and nothing would ever harm her again. The tension, the worry, everything knotting up her heart and mind eased until she was left in a state of perfect bliss.
When it ended, she fell to her knees. Nothing hurt anymore, not her bruises, nor the twisted ankle that had only just healed and still bothered her sometimes, nor the scar between her thumb and first finger where she stabbed herself with a wooden needle that splintered and hurt for months and months.
"Harri," she whispered in awe. A true goddess.
Harri turned away uncomfortably and clasped Tony's hand. The gold light lit his skin from beneath, especially intense by his belly. A moment later, he too slackened in relief. The goddess finally clasped her hand to herself, rubbing a stab wound on her shoulder, then caressing her neck, realigning her arms and massaging herself. Everywhere her hands went, unblemished skin followed. All except her wings.
"Θæŋks," Stark said. Jiri did not know the word, but she was sure of its meaning.
"Thank you," she repeated. "Thank you."
She woke to arguing, only half of which she could understand.
"You could have helped the other Avengers!"
"Wɪð wɒt? hɑːf ɒv ðɛm ɑː dɛd baɪ naʊ, ænd nəʊ ˌɡærᵊnˈtiːz əˈbaʊt ðə rɛst ɪf Thanos dɪdnt fiːl laɪk ˈliːvɪŋ ˈʧælɪnʤəz əˈraʊnd. wiː lɒst. ɪf ˈɛniwʌn kæn tɜːn bæk ðə klɒk, ɪts juː ɔː streɪnʤ, ænd streɪnʤ ɡɒt snæpt."
"Does this look like a much better situation?" Harri demanded.
"Juː təʊld miː daɪˈmɛnʃᵊnᵊl ˈtrævᵊl ɪz ə ˈhaɪər ˈɔːdə ðæn ˈtɛmpᵊrᵊl. wiː kæn spɛnd ə ˈmɪljən jɪəz hɪə ˈɡɛtɪŋ ˈrɛdi, ænd pɒp bæk ɪn ði ˈɪnstənt ˈɑːftə Thanos ʧʌkt ʌs aʊt."
"Your dimension is lost to me." The goddess's voice was raw and wounded. "Thanos took everything from me. My things, my connections – I cannot find Arya anymore, let alone the rest of my family. They are needles in an infinite haystack, Tony."
"səʊ wɒt?" Tony said, challengingly. "ɡɪv ʌp? məʊp əˈraʊnd ɪn ðɪs fiːld ɒv ɡrɑːs fɔːr ɪˈtɜːnəti?"
Harri did not speak after that.
"hɔːs ɡɜːlz ʌp," Tony pointed at her. "aɪ θɔːt juː wɜː ði ˌɒptɪˈmɪstɪk wʌn."
"Horse girl?" Harri asked. "At least I'm not the only one floundering." she stalked off.
Jiri sat down next to Sundancer and watched Tony. The man paced back and forth on the tamped grass, restless as a screamer waiting to join battle. His hands moved through the air like he needed something in them to calm down.
He tried to speak with himself, and genuinely waited for a response. After a second, Tony looked even more wretched than he had last night, stabbed and bloodied. He sprawled in the grass and waited.
Harri returned an hour later with a wet tree branch slung between her broken wings. Floating behind her, a zorse drifted along. Jiri was sure it had to be dead, zorses did not dangle in the air quite like that, but it looked unwounded.
"Food," she announced. The branch, she stuck into the ground. Water poured from her cupped hands and into the dirt around the branch, darkening the soil. "Grow, grow, grow, grow," she intoned flatly. Jiri gaped. The sapling sprouted leaves, roots digging into the soil. The stick grew and broadened, shooting from the ground in jerky fits and starts. Within minutes of deadened chanting, the sapling had become a mighty Red Oak.
"juː ˈjuːʒʊəli sɪŋ," Tony commented.
"I don't feel like singing." Harri grunted the last word, slashing an arm. The magnificent oak toppled at the stump, crashing into the dirt. She hacked off another branch and stabbed it into the trunk and started over again. Tony said something else to her, half questioning, half challenging.
"Well I'm sorry," she spat. "The Elder Wand is gone, the Ring and Cloak are in a different dimension. You're just going to have to live with reduced circumstances." The goddess held out a hand towards a fallen tree and knit her brows. A ghostly duplicate wavered in the air next to it for one, two, three seconds before vanishing like a mirage. She cursed. "God, I've gotten complacent. This shit used to be easy for me."
Jiri counted twelve trees before Harri was done adding to the pile. "Are you interested in making yourself useful?" she asked Tony.
"Yes," he nodded. Jiri decided she knew that word. Harri pointed a hand to the ground and grasped, yanking up at nothing in particular. A moment later, the earth disgorged a perfect cube of stone, banded with dull reds and browns. Harri traced a fingernail across the cube and carved out a knife blade. She severed a branch from the tree in the same manner and fashioned a crude knife from the two. The goddess tried to sit crosslegged on the ground, but winced in agony when her broken wings twisted, forced even further from normal by the ground.
Snarling, Harri tore the wings from her back at the shoulder blades. Jiri watched with wide eyes. The stumps did not bleed as she expected, but rather sparked, like miniature lightning was playing along the metal. She tossed them onto the grass carelessly.
Tony reacted much as Jiri felt, horrified. Harri flicked her head as if to shake off their dismay and set about staring at the knife like she could make it submit if only it were to blink first. Two long, uncomfortable minutes later, she handed the stone blade to Tony gingerly, handle first. "Be careful. That will cut anything without resistance."
Tony said something in response, something that sounded like a joke. Harri did not answer.
Tony Stark set about cutting the branches off the tree trunks, sliding the stone blade through them like fish through the water of the river Sarys. He heaved each branch into another pile, excavating the twelve trunks from their leafy clothing.
Harri eyed Sundancer with vague distaste, then made a scooping gesture midair. A shallow pit formed in the dirt. Harri spent the next five minutes gazing into the middle distance, gesturing and pointing at the surrounding ground. Then she approached the pit and poured water into it without pause. The soil wicked away the water nearly as fast as she poured it, leaving clumps of dirt and mud until eventually, it didn't. The water pooled in the pit, filling up to the brim. At first it was foggy with mud, but a gesture banished the impurities, leaving crystal clear drinking water behind. Jiri could actually see roots poking out of the dirt walls.
"Can I help?" Jiri asked. It felt wrong to watch higher beings toil without offering aid.
"Do you know how to prepare an animal to eat?" Harri asked her.
"No, but I've seen it done."
"Then no."
"Can you teach me?"
Harri stared at her for a long moment. Jiri worried she'd overstepped. "Fine," she muttered.
The next sapling she stabbed into the trunk did not grow straight up. It contorted into a shape not even resembling a tree, looping into an arch, the bark receding from the hale heartwood. The stripped wood warped and twisted, but refused to take recognizable shape under the god's flat commands.
"aɪ dəʊnt θɪŋk ðə triː laɪks jɔː sɒŋ," Tony remarked.
Harri turned to him with loathing, then sang. It was resentful and childish, each syllable falling from her lips like it was a mouthful of bad meat she couldn't wait to spit out, yet her voice was like a choir of angels despite. "Grow, grow, grow your boat gently down the stream. Terribly terribly terribly terribly, life is a machine."
The tree took form then, growing from a sapling straight into a table, perfectly level with squared corners and stripped wood. The wood grain was nonsensical, too, criss-crossing with itself, switching directions at the edges and turning to keep in line with the direction of the limbs and boards.
Harri produced several knives from the stone block. The part where she looked blankly at them for a while took less time with each knife she made. The last one barely took consideration at all. "They're less sharp than his, but be careful nonetheless," she warned Jiri. "The most important bit about butchery is to never pop the intestines. This zebra was eating and shitting yesterday, and his guts aren't cleared out yet. The intestines keep the poop away from the meat, so long as you never cut into them.
While she worked, she explained what she was doing in flat, curt statements. She fit her knife under the zorse's skin and worked away peeling back the hide. Tony watched with queasiness. Jiri found that odd. What sort of man couldn't stomach a mere animal being butchered? It was far worse to see a human in the same state.
Harri cut along the belly pulled all the blood out with a flowing gesture, conducting the dark red fluid through the air and sending it splattering against the grass a dozen paces stuck her hand in there, rummaging around until she found what she was looking for. With a tug, the pile of slimy ropes came spilling out. Harri chucked the offal into the growing pile of viscera. The goddess worked methodically to separate cut upon cut of meat from the carcass. When she finished, half the table was covered in meat and furs, the other, a mere skeleton.
Tony had spent his time whittling branches into a spit and rendering a few of the larger branches into firewood. Harri did not acknowledge his efforts other than to point at his firewood and force steam to billow out, then snap her fingers and start a flickering fire in the pit.
Harri was really off her game. Tony wasn't sure if it was just that she didn't have her wand, but he'd seen her make entire houses blink into existence, complete with furniture, plumbing and wiring.
He wasn't opposed to a bit of bushcraft, but if he had to take a shit without a toilet when Harri could have provided one, they would be having words.
Tony was hardly one to talk, but they'd picked up a stray within minutes of landing. And he couldn't even speak to her. At least Harley Keener had taken a shower in his life.
"Am I able to learn AllSpeak?" Tony wondered.
"It takes a spark of magic," Harri dismissed. "It wouldn't have been a problem yesterday. I don't have the stuff to make you a wizard anymore."
"Strange was born with the stuff?" Tony asked.
"No, but he learned everything the much, much harder way," Harri said.
"I'd like to be able to speak with Jiri. You're not very talkative right now."
"I'm sorry that having my soul violated has inconvenienced you, Tony."
Oh.
That was a good reason to be off her game. Tony thought he might hate Thanos even more than Bucky back in the bunker.
Seething about it didn't help much, so he went through what Friday had left in the eyepatch. The files were not in alphabetical order, so Tony expected it to be ordered by importance. At the very top, he selected .
Boss. You may be pleased to know that Miss Harri's spatial relays were operational up until timestamp/ and all of your data until that point is backed up on both the Malibu and New York servers.
Preliminary scans reveal a planetoid with 30% more surface area than Earth, a gravitational constant of 10.2m/s/s, and a biome of impact of high-latitude grasslands. Files are arranged in order of urgency.
I await your return at the Malibu mansion at 34.038143° N, 118.692387° W, UTC 6/1/2024,12:30/
Take your time, Boss.
-Friday
Tony swallowed and returned to the menu. The next two entries were playlists with a note.
Research says music aids with loneliness and depression. -Friday
He opened Tony's Playlist. Rock and roll didn't appeal to him, so he backed out and opened the other. Earth's Greatest Hits.
There were a lot more songs than should've fit. He selected Taylor Swift's Shake it Off. The audio quality was lower than he was used to, but not altogether unpleasant. It reminded him a bit of vinyl.
"Oh my god, Tony. Turn that off," Harri grumped.
He grinned. "Too happy? Would you rather listen to an angsty teenage breakup dirge?"
The tiniest smile crept over her lips. She nodded. Tony rolled his eyes and selected White Horse. A much younger Taylor Swift began singing aloud for their whole oasis to hear. Jiri perked up at the unfamiliar music. Her foot began to tap. Tony smiled. "We need to take stock. What have you got? Friday's gone, but she put together the essentials. I feel pretty healthy all things considered, and it looks like we can get food and water."
"Ciri is gone," Harri reported. "I have nothing but what you see. A lot of broken cybernetics. No Philosopher's stones, no wand, no wings, no flight. Not even a back up body in case this one gets killed."
"Couldn't Snape fly?" Tony wondered.
"He had a wand," Harri said. "The flight spell is way too complicated to do in your head. Maybe I could make an artifact to do it, but without a wand-" she sighed in frustration. "We need a magical reagent and we're back in business, but not even human heartstrings are good enough."
A concrete goal. Tony could work with that. "Hey Horse Girl, any idea where we can find unicorns, phoenixes, or dragons?"
Her ears perked up at that last one. "Dragons?" Yes, yes, come on, tell me where Smaug lives, Tony urged. "Valyria." She said something else, something Tony didn't catch.
"All dead since the Doom of Valyria," Harri relayed. "That sounds ominous. Can we go there and find a corpse?"
Jiri shook her head and elaborated.
"Valyria kills everyone who sets foot there," Harri reported. "Smoking sea, volcanic ash, shambling stone zombies, a regular volcanic wasteland."
"Okay so maybe don't go there until we're better prepared," Tony reasoned. "What can we do here? We've got food and water. Shelter?" Harri pointed at the logs he'd just spent the morning preparing. "Right. We're already working on that."
It felt good to work with Harri. They were both tinkerers. They meshed well. It was a shame Harri was a stone cold lesbian, she was smoking hot and they'd get on like a house on fire, Tony was sure. She got along well enough with Pepper, too. Tony banished his daydreaming and finished scribbling in a doorway on the graph paper wondered what she defined her sexuality as right now. She'd been a heterosexual man up until two weeks ago, but she'd seemed happy with female pronouns despite presumably millenia of experience as a man. He wondered what the story behind it all was. She seemed too comfortable in her skin for this to be the first time she'd been of the fairer sex.
Tony wouldn't say he was perfectly straight (though a bit of experimentation in his wilder days left him confident he did not enjoy men in that way) but Harry had never been the slightest bit interested. Not even in Loki, who probably served as the closest thing to a gay radar you could get. He resolved to feel out if she wouldn't be offended by him asking later, when he was less likely to be smote for saying something insensitive.
Since Harri was understandably depressed, Tony took it upon himself to keep the vibes up. He played music (not too happy to be told off, not too miserable to make everyone sad) and cracked jokes, sawing logs into planks while Harri dug out a basement and foundation, and raised polished, leveled bedrock to form the cellar floor.
His jogging clothes had seen better days, he reflected, mopping sweat from his brow. There was the obvious stab wound near his belly, plus assorted rips and tears across his shoulders and the cuffs of his pants. The whole ensemble was more than a bit bloodstained, and stank of sweat. He shrugged off his jacket in the blazing heat and let it hang under the sawhorse. Harri came around and repaired it with half a gesture.
He wished he'd asked for magic earlier. Things were so busy, he'd never had the chance to sign off on a month of sickness while Harri forcibly regenerated his body from donated bone marrow. Now he regretted it. It was too damn useful, and it meant Harri had to pull double duty, being responsible for everything that required magic to do. At least their stray was making herself useful, cooking the zebra meat over their firepit.
Twelve trees wound up being woefully inadequate for the floorplan they were working on. Harri eventually realized they would run out of wood and went back to growing red oaks. They were really not the ideal tree for construction work, Tony reflected. They didn't grow in straight lines, the wood was technically a hardwood, but on the softer end of the scale, and dented fairly easily.
Tony spent the rest of the day rigging up a contraption to do most of the work for him. He wheedled an enchanted stone ring from Harri and had her sharpen it to the point of lethality on one end, then set up rollers to send the base of the trunk through. After a bit of troubleshooting, it shaved off all the branches in one pass, for the threat of dismembering any careless operators. As long as Harri steamed the whole trunk and forced it into a straight line, it worked perfectly.
He begged a set of boring, unenchanted steel tools off her and crafted the second bit out of wood, a sort of cookie-cutter in the shape of dozens of tesselated two-by-fours. The theory was to roll the trunk through both of them and instantly render the tree into planks. Harri obligingly enchanted the wooden cutting die to terrifying sharpness levels and gave it a test run.
The entire contraption was a total death machine and it made a horrible mess of wood chips that were closer to wood chunks, but it did produce beams of the reddish wood just like Tony might find at Home Depot. And again, Harri rubbed in his face how absolutely bullshit magic was. They didn't have metal for nails and neither of them possessed the patience to whittle wooden pegs, or a jigsaw to make fitted joints, so Harri provided a conjured paintbrush and a jar of water enchanted with a sticking charm.
"I'm no contractor, but I'm absolutely certain several of the things we've done would have any builder shrieking in horror," Tony mused. "I remember NYC building codes forbidding several of the things we've done."
Harri bobbed her head. "Of course. That's why we have magic."
Armed with the promise that the wooden planks would not break under anything short of devastating force, Tony found it very easy to plan out the frame of the house. It was just two a-frame roofs that met in the middle. He sectioned off two small rooms in the cellar with charcoal snagged from Jiri's firepit while Harri put together a table saw and conjured measuring tapes. The saw blade was ordinary conjured steel with an enchanted stone bit in the middle. The bit spun the blade endlessly by magic. Apparently conditional enchantments were beyond Harri's wandless magic.
While he worked, he looked through more of what Friday had left him. Beneath his playlists was a file labeled Tech Tree. Inside, dozens of files were laid out in branches like the Civilization 6 game. They did not start at animal husbandry, pottery, and mining. The first one was agriculture. After that carpentry, masonry, and irrigation, all the way up to circuitboards, photolithography, and orbital mechanics.
There was something comforting about the familiarity of building. Though half the tools were janky and they used magic like duct tape, Tony knew what to do with himself at a machine shop. They worked methodically while listening to Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo sing about breakups, under the foreign kid's curious gaze.
When Jiri seemed finished with the zebra meat, Harri made them a table and chairs, insisting they eat outside. "We're going to have guests," she said.
They sat atop the shallow ridge Jiri had come from, covered in short grass. Harri stabbed another sapling into the ground and grew it over the picnic table until it shaded the whole thing.
Tony bit into his haunch. He wasn't one of those loser billionaires who paid a bit of money to kill and eat an endangered African species, so he'd never had zebra meat. He remained unimpressed after his first taste. It was tough and gamey. He had to chew it long after it lost any taste to render it swallowable, and they had no seasoning to give the bland meat any taste.
"Got any of that meal replacement powder?" he prodded Harri. She shook her head.
"Needs ingredients I don't have. Real, filling food, salt, a few other minerals. And the Philosopher's stone – which I don't have – quadruples the yield."
Tony tried to keep calm when a pair of massive tigers loped up to the table. The nonchalant way Harri had said it, he half expected bunnies or something. The predators loped with a lazy, lethal grace, silent footfalls prowling ever closer. Jiri's white horse got skittish, standing up and shuffling backwards. He'd bet only Jiri's presence stopped the big guy from bolting.
"We're not going to harm you guys, if you don't harm us," Harri promised.
"AllSpeak works on animals?" Tony hissed.
"Of course. It operates on ideas and understanding, not vocal cues. Just as a Zulu speaker would hear the clicks of their language even if I didn't make that noise or even know how, those tigers are reading non-threatening body language, promise of food, and the assurance that we won't attack first."
Jiri looked up at Harri in awe. She said something in her unfamiliar tongue.
"I don't speak a word of Dothraki," Harri agreed. "I'm speaking English. With a British accent, too, but Tony hears an Americanized accent and dialect because he expected it of me when we first met.
The tigers crawled up on the bench next to him. Harri slid a couple cuts over to them. Tony watched in morbid fascination as they devoured the meat. Jiri watched with wide eyes. When they had both finished, the bigger of the two glanced between the girl and her horse, panting and licking its chops.
"No," Harri scolded. "Those are friends, not food." The tiger flicked its ears and stalked away, tail held high in indignation. "Be like that," she sniffed. "You're welcome for the food."
Jiri said something again. Tony sighed. Being ignorant was not cool. "Can you try to teach us?" he asked. "Jiri and I can race to learn it first. Pointbreak figured it out, didn't he? That's inspired me. I think I can do it."
"He has magic," Harri dismissed..
"Strange didn't, right?" he insisted.
"Strange was- is a one in a billion prodigy," Harri snapped. "He was taught by the greatest master of his art since its progeniture."
Tony spread his hands. "Isn't that you for yours?"
"No," she said shortly.
"I won't hold it against you if it doesn't work."
"Fine," Harri growled.
Jiri did not know what to expect of living with a god. That she'd be expected to serve, at least, perhaps made to follow demanding laws or give offerings. That was as much as she knew of foreign religions, what gossip had made its way to her khalasar. If Harri was an unkind god, perhaps she might have demanded human sacrifices, gruesome burning the city-dwellers did to each other for some twisted god.
Harri asked none of those things. She asked Jiri to prepare food – did gods eat? – but she thought that seemed more like a task to keep idle hands busy. And now, she meant to teach Jiri a portion of her divinity.
"AllSpeak is the goal," Harri commanded. "But it takes a spark to fuel, and since neither of you possess innate power, you'll need to find it elsewhere. Kamar Taj introduces channeling with sling rings. They are crafted to link to the eldritch dimension, and provide students a point of reference to how it feels to channel dimensional energy. At Hogwarts, we did much the same thing with wands. Using a sling ring with no experience is hard. It's the first task put to learners, and a barrier that filters out many people. Your task is harder still. I have no sling rings, no wands, no aids of any kind. So we're going to learn to draw power from a shitty source that's only available to you half the time." She pointed straight up. "The sun."
"We won't be able to speak to each other at night?" Jiri asked.
"There are better, always present sources to draw from," Harri said. "The sun is merely something you're both familiar with. Think about what it does for the earth. It lights and warms the earth. It fuels photosynthesis and provides the foundation for life. It, along with the moon, pushes and pulls the oceans to form tides, the air to form weather, it evaporates water to create rain. Without the sun, nothing lives."
Tony challenged Harri somehow. Jiri wished she understood what he'd said.
"Everything has that kind of reductive value," Harri sighed. "Billions of years ago, the sun was just a ball of fusile energy warming a lifeless rock. But we're here now, Tony. Billions of people saw the sun in the sky giving them life and ascribed it names and personalities. Helios, Apollo, Ra, Inti, Huitzilopochtli, and so on. The collective belief of billions upon billions of humans has weight." Harri tilted her head back and closed her eyes.
"Can you feel it?" she murmured. "The singular source of all life on this planet?" the goddess spread her arms. Golden light wreathed her upturned palms. Jiri would swear she could see a beam of sunlight illuminate her in specific, a spotlight from the heavens like the one she'd arrived in. Harri's arms moved in bewildering patterns, leaving burning lines in the air behind, building a pattern like woven grass overhead. She punched the center and sent it telescoping upwards. The design unfurled into a golden dome of geometric shapes. The burning lines dissolved into motes of light.
Jiri released a breath of awe she had not realized she was holding. "We can do that?"
"I don't know. Tony might figure it out out of stubbornness. Everyone has the potential."
"səʊ wɒt? ʤʌst weɪv ˈaʊə hændz ɪn ði eə?" Tony snarked.
"Learning how to shape magic can wait," Harri replied. "If you don't do anything with it, it'll fizzle out. It's concentrated sunlight. It'll warm things, and probably make them grow. Point it at a bit of grass or something."
"Like the trees?" Jiri asked.
"Sure."
The next day, Jiri had naught to do with herself. They had plenty of leftover zorse meat, sheltered from decay and spoil by the goddess's power. She spent most of it watching Tony put together a dwelling and trying herself to do Harri's sun magic. The goddess's aide was trying it too, she was sure. Sometimes he paused in the midst of fitting a plank or marking a beam with charcoal and basked in the sunlight. He'd put his hands out in front of him and try to draw shapes in the air.
Nothing worked for her, either.