Work Text:
All he'd wanted, all he'd taken, had been one empty, discarded shell from the thing's last clutch of eggs. It certainly hadn't looked like its previous inhabitants were still using it, and it was a crucial ingredient of the speed enhancement spell Ms Pentstemmon had requested.
All he could think of as he ran was how useful that spell would have been to have right now , because even in seven league boots, the creature was still gaining on him, in a flurry of luminescent white feathers, dishearteningly sharp talons, and a beak that seemed built specifically for ripping pretty wizard heads off of their very fragile bodies like flower buds off their stems.
"I keep telling you, the egg is empty!" Howl bellowed, running just that little bit faster after he caught the beast's reflection in a lake he crossed in a single step, as though it had been a puddle.
His relentless pursuer's singular flaw as a predator was her extraordinary size and wingspan, which meant that she would be slow to turn, low to the ground as they were. But in Howl's attempt to exploit this shortcoming, he tripped on a branch floating in the bog, stumbling sideways as his boot came off. Going ten miles only every other step as he tried to regain his footing was not only undesirable, on account of the furious approximation of a bird intent on feeding his comparatively brittle bones to her chicks and who was now, relative to him, going twice as fast, it was also disorienting. It only took moments for him to be left with no clue where he was or which way he was facing.
He looked up, hoping to find the moon, or else some star that might point him North, but the tempestuous attitude of the mighty hunter whose prey he was trying not to become seemed to have caught the fancy of the entire sky, which now hung low above him, cloaked in an obtrusive layer of clouds.
When a blinding flash cut through the porous darkness, seemingly headed straight for him, Howl figured he had gotten turned around so much that he must have ended up running towards the bird instead of away from it. How unfortunate. How tragic. What a loss to the world (and particularly Ms Pentstemmon) his death would be!
At this point, she was surely too close to evade with one boot, and Howl was not one for futile efforts. He found they made him look pathetic in an unsightly sort of way. But his own demise by bird would certainly be even less pleasing to witness, so he closed his eyes with purpose.
It hit him just below the collarbone, almost softly, with none of the violent intent of a bloodthirsty predator looking to pry his ribs apart like the covers of a stiffly bound book. His hands darted up reflexively, pinning whatever it was against his chest. He found that it fit in the palm of his hand and was somehow both cool and warm to the touch.
Opening his eyes hesitantly, he scanned the whole horizon for the bird, turning meticulously on his bootless foot so he wouldn't take off, and found her nowhere. Perhaps, in his erratic movement, he really had lost her. He was frozen in silence for a second, waiting to be proven wrong, feeling as though even his blood didn't dare move, and the thunderous heartbeat ringing in his ears was all just for show. But then, when nothing happened and kept happening, he chanced a look down at whatever he had trapped behind his cupped hands, peeling his fingers gingerly away from the ornate front of his silk shirt, careful not to drop it. It blazed like a tiny sun, blue like a will-o-wisp, but brighter, slightly iridescent, and angular, somehow, as if light was coming off it in clean, straight-edged shards, like bits of a broken mirror.
"A star," he mused, incredulous. He seemed equal parts entertained and annoyed. "If I'd gone looking to catch one, it would've taken me days," he went on, the reproach in his tone meant for nobody in particular, except maybe the universe at large, for daring not to behave in the way most convenient for him.
Having had a chance to look around, he now recognized the area as the empty fields South of Porthaven. Holding the star in one hand, he shook his one boot off, picked it up, and began walking very slowly, still half expecting the bird to pop up out of nowhere and dismember him without so much as a courtesy warning. He would have to return for its pair in the morning.
"If I put you down, you'll die." It was an announcement, not a question.
Clinging to the surface that was not the impact of his final moments in existence with little more than the traces of gravitational draw that Calcifer had left to his name, his attention swiveled to the sound of a voice, the shadowed edges of a figure far too close to register as anything less than a landscape, with its own horizon. Considering how long he had been falling, staring at the ever growing horizon as it swelled toward him, never mind how long he had been dreading the moment that fall began, the moment it ended, and every powerless, vulnerable, terrified moment in between, he could do nothing less. Here was hope. Here was opportunity. Here was the gentle embrace of a warm shelter, thrumming with the same energy that drove him, amongst an orchestra of processorial noises - a beating drum, a rushing river, a gust of wind that rocked back and forth like a ship on choppy seas.
A star - he remembered then - nestled in the open darkness of the night sky, gaze winced shut against the glare of the morning sun, blinking back to life as the earth moved to blot out the blaze for another night. Calcifer was that still, held aloft and clutched delicately, not quite dangling over the precipice of his precarious death. A finale he was unprepared and unwilling to face.
“Put me down? Are you crazy? You know what kind of potential you would be missing out on here? I am a once heavenly body made of magic and boundless energy who has lived a thousand of your measly lifetimes. The wealth of knowledge alone. You’d be hard pressed to find an encyclopedia set with even a percentage of my expertise. You’re lucky I came untethered at such opportune time, this will probably be your one chance to have a shot at a star of my power.”
Clinging tighter with the draw he had left, like sucking in an endless breath that left him as swollen as it did exhausted, Calcifer nibbled on the tinseled edges of earth grown fiber thread, interlaced with a glinting metal that left his tongue chastened as a char scent drifted slowly away from them with every step of the horizon pressed against him, still cradling him close.
"All that magic, and still you fell," pondered Howl, quietly. He was soft-spoken, gentle, almost, expertly hiding the slight cruelty of his words behind a thin veneer of perhaps authentic wonder. He hadn’t been surprised to hear it talk. He’d never met a star before, but that much magic could make just about anything sentient (and what a curse that was. The most atrocious hexes he had ever had to dismantle had nothing on the burden of the self). No, the source of his fascination was altogether different, and very hard even for himself to pin down.
Perhaps he wondered what could cause so much magic to coagulate in the form of a star, when, to his knowledge, in the world he had left behind, they were just entirely uninspiring balls of gas. Perhaps it was the mystery of what it meant to be self-aware outside of the larger context of a society or culture, since he didn’t think stars had those. Or maybe he was just curious what it was like to be on fire. He wouldn’t put it past himself.
Having had his very own uncomfortably recent near-death experience, he was somewhat sympathetic towards the fragment of celestial magic in his hand. The poor thing would die anyway, even if Howl held onto it. Even if it set him ablaze and reduced him to ashes to feed itself. Very few earthly things could sustain a star long-term, so this desperate bid for its own continued survival was an impulse he understood. But the resentment towards the implication that he might ever need or depend on anyone else momentarily outweighed his empathy. It simply couldn’t be allowed to continue.
“This is your one shot at not being dropped in the next puddle over,” he retorted, smoothly. “So stop eating my blouse.”
Briefly setting down the misshapen boot, he fished around in his pouch for the ingredient list of the speed enhancement spell, cast one last glance across its formidable length, and then crumpled it up and surrendered it to the blue flame.
“Witches, wizards and warlocks of all sorts subjugate all manner of magical creatures for their own benefit all the time. You can’t be sure”, he declared, assertively, despite nothing indicating this was true, “that I’m not already skilled or cunning enough to overpower you. And anyway, do you know what it would take to keep you here?”
“You telling me I can’t be is enough to be,” Calcifer muttered in retort, doing his best to keep himself a bit at bay as the ash of the thread began to crumble apart and pass through him. It seemed not even to be what it would take to pop a seam or a stitch, let alone leave a gap in the complicated weave, though knowing that did not prevent the star from soothing the fibers straighter.
“If you were as cunning and skilled as you suggest, it would take very little,” he mentioned, much louder then, since he intended to properly answer (or interrupt) as necessary. “I can tell from here what a big-strong man you are. Powerful, too, by the looks of it and not at all hesitant to prove or ensure that. Not many people are smart enough to take and keep hold of an entire star, so I’ll give you some credit, but surely your cleverness does not fall short of identification.”
Turning his attention slightly toward things that weren’t the delicious fibers of the warp and weave nestled against him, Calcifer chased stray hairs that clung to the faintest disruptions in the fabric, to dust and fuzz on the numerous edges and leaving nothing but crisped edges while he consumed the minutiae hungrily.
“You already possess all I could possibly need. Why, I could live as long as you will just off the curve of a lung or the length of a leg. The sinew alone, the oils, the iron or the plasma. It could take a century to work through a mere corner of your body. Surely you must have a piece or two that serve you less than I could.”
“Did you really think I wouldn’t notice that you’re baiting me?” Howl laughed.
To the star’s credit, it wasn’t terrible at this. It even got him to consider it, for just a second, but given that his heart hadn’t quite settled yet, it served as a sufficient reminder that it would’ve very much been unwise to part with either a lung or a leg, if he intended to continue behaving like his usual self.
To his knowledge, there wasn’t, in fact, enough magical potential in just any regular old organ or limb, not in their natural state. It set a question loose in his head, like a wasp in a jar. Was it lying? How would that benefit it? If Howl agreed to part, say, with a chunk of liver, which, in his current state of sobriety, was far from indispensable, the star would go back to wasting away by the minute within weeks.
Or else, if it wasn’t lying, what exactly was Howl’s misconception about this being and the kind of magic that allowed it to exist? It seemed a little late to address that gap in his knowledge now, with one of them in his hand, but later still would’ve been even worse.
“It seems to me I am the one who would be serving you. If I say no, I go on crafting spells and charms that will land half the contents of the Kingsbury treasury in my purse in no time, and you go out like a candle. What could I stand to gain by striking a bargain, besides the bragging rights?”
“Unlimited cosmic power?”
This promise of unfathomable might failed to induce even the slightest moment of hesitation on his next step, perhaps because he could not fathom it. He could no longer tell if the star was desperately grasping at straws, scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas on how to lure a dumber apprentice than Howl into some sort of horrible trap, or if it genuinely did not care how convincing it was being. Either way, the question was more interesting than the answer could ever be, and he would’ve happily sat with it forever, if not for the sudden, dull awareness that he could no longer see as far in front of him as he had when he’d started walking.
The blue light was getting dim.
It was quite an unfortunate position to be in. If the star had only just missed him as he ran, if he’d simply seen it streak across the sky from the other side of the marshes, he would not have spared it a moment’s thought, would not have felt the briefest sense of kinship or loss watching it sink into the mud just past the horizon. But here he was, having been deprived, on false pretenses and against his will, of the luxury of not caring, of the inalienable human right to ignorance. He couldn’t imagine letting this thing go out in his hand, melt into the darkness like a swatted firefly. He envied the people in Porthaven, hidden behind brick walls and lit windows, who did not even have to try.
It was completely possible, especially for someone of his skill and with the magical aid of a whole star, to separate a part of the body and have the whole continue to function exactly as though it was still there. Ms. Pentstemmon could, and had threatened to, “take off his head and make him go about his business without it, since it appeared to be of no use”. So really, whatever part of himself Howl surrendered, he wouldn’t miss it as much as if he had had it torn off by the bird just now. But for personal reasons, he very much did want to keep his head and everything sheltered within it, as well as, ideally, all limbs. He made a mental list of internal organs that nobody would notice the absence of. But there was another matter. The magical potential of any of them would always be directly proportional to the sacrifice made, so really, an appendix was not going to go very far. He took a moment to wonder if it mattered, and if less time, rather than more, wouldn’t perhaps be a blessing to this luminescent entity. It must have been around for millennia. Howl himself had only been around for about one forty-fifth of a millennium and it was already getting to be quite a lot. Perhaps all it needed was time to come to terms with its own mortality.
As if anyone ever did.
“I’ve been told my eyes are rather striking. I suspect they would not make quite as strong of an impression if separated, so I shall keep them both,” he declared. His words were velvety and effortless, but slightly restricted by the impression, the mere specter of form, of deliberate performance. “I’ve spent decades sharpening my tongue, and only the deaf would fail to suffer a veritable loss if you were to take off with it. My mind is mine alone, I’ve had more skilled chemists than you try to set it on fire and fail. The heart, however, does nothing but ensnare one with ridiculous endeavors, quiver pointlessly and break over nothing. I have no use for it. That’s my offer.”
Blinking slowly, (without even the influence of day’s blinding light), Calcifer endeavored to remain present and attentive as the humming horizon gently prattled himself down the spiraling maelstrom of surrendering to the allure of new and more and extra power. The nice reliable thing about the people who spent all their lives either accruing it, suffering it, or destroying it, was that they could not avoid let alone resist it.
Especially not young men who so pragmatically realized that they were capable of compulsion. Calcifer wondered if he had considered the possibility of recompense should he refuse - considered the desperate lengths that a dying star trying to survive might go to, even knowing it was futile .
Spite didn’t feel as entirely futile, and there was enough within reach still to leave him plenty of time to say lay in silent appreciation or else goodbye to the whole twinkling sky hovering above.
“The heart,” Calcifer considered, echoing aloud. “I could make that last a while. Yes, quite a while. Perhaps longer, so long as you don’t expect me to survive on that alone.” Turning his attention up once more - an effort, for all the focus he had already on keeping himself from falling asleep or to his death - the star stared at the mountains and valleys that made up the shape of a chest and collarbone, of a jutting throat and jaw, the barest tip of a nose leagues away.
“ But ,” he enunciated pointedly, “I can’t reach it from here, I’m too far away. You’ll have to get me closer.”
“Of course I don’t expect you to survive on that alone,” snapped Howl, sounding offended — which he was — by the implication that he did not know his business — which he did. The main obstacle to the survival of celestial bodies on earth, immediately after the high risk of landing in water, was that, instead of being the primary form of matter, magic was simply woven through everything, less like the air, and more like the dust drifting through it. Ever-present, often indistinguishable, but still absolutely separate in a number of key ways.
“Far be it from me to assume,” Calcifer muttered absently.
For someone with any trace of talent or skill, it was abundant and endlessly accessible. It was second nature to Howl to pull magic out of anything. Flowing rivers, whispered secrets, unmoving mountains. It was all there for him. Much like a tree, he could use his roots to tap into the complicated system of capillaries that magic liked to flow through in his world. Stars had no roots of their own. That was the sole purpose his heart would serve.
He was stalling. If they’d had the luxury of time. Howl could’ve taken it out himself at the Porthaven house, but they did not, and he shuddered to think how a star might sidestep the need for his enchanted dagger.
What would it feel like for one’s heart to catch fire while still in one’s chest? What would it feel like to have it moving blood through his body while decidedly absent from it? He wasn’t quite ready to find out, and it had always been easier for him to do things if he went on pretending he wasn’t going to do them, for just a while.
“What’s your name?” he decided to ask. “It seems ill-advised to entrust my literal heart to a complete stranger.”
“You say that as if I have been offered your name already and left you at a disadvantage,” the star retorted primly, perfectly content to reach for the same affronted dramatics that seemed so natural to the haughty wizard. In truth, it was a relief to find the man so demanding, even if it reflected a modicum of hesitation, uncertainty, or contemplation. Despite some immediate (obvious) concerns, he was still hungry enough to talk himself into it, and Calcifer could work with that.
“My name burns with centuries of creation, experience, observation, knowledge, control, and strength. You would not be able to fathom a single syllable of it, let alone taste the sound. But while I hold your heart and you wield my power, you may call me Calcifer.”
Words slowing, the star finally let his eyes fall closed - perhaps too confident that his access to the agreed upon oblation was forthcoming, imminent, and assured. Fear of falling to his death had all but fled him now, his essence settling more certainly into the cradle of the palm around him, his cheek against the warm fabric that was the first barrier between him and the heavy drum at the core.
Howl could taste the dramatics of the incoming pontification before a single word of it even reached his ears. That was also second nature to him, after all. While the star spoke, he gestured mockingly off to the side with the hand he was holding the boot in, not entirely tuning him out. The name seemed like a challenge, and he, when not overcome by his own unacknowledged cowardice, was quite drawn to those.
“I’m Howl,” he said, and moved his hand away slightly, just a little bit uncomfortable with the star’s confidence in cuddling up to his heart like that.
He dropped the boot in the wet grass and cupped his now free hand under the other one, raising them both in front of his face, as though he were simply about to drink water from a river, as opposed to what was potentially his own eternal damnation. His heart rate picked up a little then, as if to make a point. No, he thought bitterly towards it, suddenly resolute, it serves you right, for all of what you’ve dragged me into.
He brought his cupped hands to his lips and tilted his head back. The star fell through him as though the rest of his body weren’t even there, and settled in his chest like a rock in the sand. There’s no way that’s it, Howl thought, apprehensively. He felt it shift weightily, and looked down with some alarm just in time to see it fall out of his chest as easily as if he were made of air, flaming blue and violet and amber. He caught it, and it throbbed stupidly against his fingers. Some part of him wanted to shrink back from the tactile sensation of it, but he suspected he didn’t want it ending up in the grass.
Dubiously, it did not feel like anything. At first, it had. It had been heavy and distinctly electrifying, and, while not an experience he could say he regretted yet, definitely not one he might want to repeat. But now, it hardly even felt like an absence . The pulse in his fingertips matched the quivering thing he was holding reasonably closely, and it very much did not seem as though he might die. Impulsively, he squeezed it once, just to see if he could feel it. Barely anything.
“Well. You made quick work of that,” he noted, distantly, and started off towards Porthaven again, each step pointed and deliberate, careful not to accidentally look at the burning mass in his hand for too long.
Calcifer had been anticipating that the stability of continued life would have a similar sensation to the comfort and familiarity of being suspended in the sky. Unbothered by the pull of falling or the breeze of movement, with nothing to dread but the unexpected end, and nothing to do but indulge the whims of an endless, untouched observer - enduring the endless plot of the world beneath him.
Instead, it felt like he was being encased, enclosed. Wrapped up in soft, throbbing sinew that wasn’t nearly as elastic as it had promised to be. He held himself suspended as the whole of him slipped down the gentle cascade of Howl’s body, until the moment that all of his shining, glowing, sharp shards of undirected light and raw power were gathered together, folded over one another, and swaddled to the point of immobility. The star wrestled with that for a moment, bends and corners thrusting against the tissue only to find his energy turned back on him, reflected instead of refracted.
He was stuck. Trapped. A terror roiled within him like a storm that he had traded the blink of an easy and instant death for the slow agonizing surrender to an endless and irresistible darkness.
Howl’s voice reached him again and Calcifer turned his attention toward it, his shape and form rolling and spinning in the clutch of his fresh made cage.
“Of course I did,” he lied, his terror and anger emerging with a flavor of egotistical incredulity that the star clung to with fervor. The more he twisted and straightened and writhed against it, the more things seemed to settle into place, and just as Calcifer began to remember confidence in his own abilities, he seemed to find precisely where he needed to be.
Instead of empty sky and midnight darkness, there was Howl. Instead of stars glimmering in the periphery of his attentions, gaze focused on the world below, there was the shifting warmth of a moving, living body. Instead of rushing rivers and distant drums, there was the endless highways of veins and nerves, the swell of breath, the chill of night air and the rush of oxygen, the taste of accomplishment and smug satisfaction on a tongue made of muscle instead of the usual plasma lick. It was the most Calcifer had ever experienced in his entire life, upclose, engulfing, endless. Howl was no horizon, he was a universe.
“I’m starving,” he complained then, narrowing his focus only to keep from losing it entirely.
At that, Howl meaningly pulled up on his right sleeve, to keep it from being reduced to ashes. “Contain yourself,” he demanded, sharply, but not unkindly. Dropping the boot again, he stuck one foot in it (it didn’t matter which, as this was not a particularly shapely pair). “Hold on,” he said, by way of a warning, and his fingers curled just so against a rounded wall of smooth, rhythmically contracting muscle as he took a single step.
Tragically, this did not land them exactly in front of Howl’s door, which, among other things, suggested that his luck charms needed work. It still took them about half an hour of walking the other way to get home, whereupon Howl shook his left leg abruptly, and the boot shot into the wall of the hallway before falling over like a slightly liquid bucket. Come to think of it now, he was fairly hungry too, although the feeling came from slightly higher up than usual.
Walking into the main room (the only one on the ground floor of the tiny house), he put out the vibrant pink flames in the hearth with a wide gesture of his free hand. Their purpose had been mainly aesthetic, and he did not imagine they would get along well with Calcifer. Dropping his burning heart — still quite an unpleasant thought — into a nest of white ashes, quite happy to no longer have to be touching it, he opened some sort of cupboard or pantry door nearby, and began having a look around.
“Do you think you can get hot enough to fry an egg?”
Flying was far too much like falling. Calcifer closed his eyes against it and then turned himself entirely into the protective wall of Howl’s body, until the rush of wind stopped. Like this, he could almost rest, warmed not by the morning sun but the solid presence against him, drumming with the same pulse that had become him.
It wasn’t until the warm beat of Howl’s palm and chest was replaced by a downy puddle of whisper soft carbon that Calcifer opened his eyes again, allowing his awareness to spread out once more to its seemingly endless reaches.
Howl’s footsteps moved around the room like a sonograph, tracing the room in the soft glow of his wrapped and bound and swaddled energies until he could map every wall and entrance, the pipes and vents leading away indefinitely, the grains in the boards. Wide eyed with wonder, the star stared, an open mouth if he had ever had one gaping with delighted shock at all that he could see. No longer shining down from above but entirely immersed in the goings on, in the minutiae.
And then the idle question of a creature who had no grasp on or concept of his potential and abilities had Calcifer snapping back into focus, his displeased grunt aghast.
“I can get as hot as I very well please,” the star answered, “Need I remind you that I am an infinity of unfathomable energy strong enough to light a galaxy and more? Direct your questions toward what you might lose if I do, and if what you are willing to part with is enough. More diary pages? You would be lucky to warm a single slice of bread. If you want an egg fried, I need something slower to deteriorate. Fibrous and reedy, with avenues to wander along and meander through. An egg takes time!”
“I’m counting the days to the moment that you stop reminding me,” Howl confessed, sullenly.
And then, because he hadn’t been authoritative enough to shut him up, Calcifer launched into the most obnoxious and unnecessarily detailed description of a piece of timber anyone could ever have had the misfortune of being forced to sit through. He was, in general, an advocate for flowery language, he just happened to believe he was better at it than anyone else, and so it was quite regrettable when other people had a go.
Not one to be outdone, he said, with the air that he was revealing some great secret: “I’ll have you know it was not a diary page, it was an ingredient list for a reasonably powerful spell, and that alone is enough to have imbued it with its own magic.” The same was true of actual diary pages, depending on their contents, but that would’ve undermined his point. “I suppose all that unfathomable energy has necessarily desensitized you to any and all subtlety,” he conceded afterwards, careful to steep his words in an infuriating sort of sympathy.
Setting down the eggs he had retrieved from the pantry somewhere on the edge of the pile of ash in the hearth to prevent them from rolling away, as they would have on the uneven table, and unclasping his pouch from his belt so he could abandon it in on the workbench, he knelt down in front of the hearth to look for something in a sort of metal drawer under it, and fished out a quartered log of muted, greyish wood. He briefly wondered how hard he could get away with smacking Calcifer with the piece he was holding without giving himself a heart attack, but in the end, he settled for neatly placing three wedges in a sort of triangle shape around him in the ash.
“You can have the shells and anything else in there that you think you want, if I can have five whole minutes of silence.”
It was in those five whole minutes of silence that Calcifer agreed to those terms, acquiescent exclusively for the purpose of keeping Howl’s back turned and focus elsewhere as the flickering firelight began his slow crawl out of the hearth. The stretch away from his still drumming heart was a tenuous one, which he eased himself into inch by inch, crawling across the mounds of white ash and the stone and steel of the structure around him.
The shells were deliciously smooth, his tongue flicking over them like a flag in the wind until he had gathered each one up enough to begin rolling them back toward his core. Calcifer retreated with them slowly, the noise muffled and then utterly silenced by the thickness of the ash bed.
Howl could get his own eggs next, he decided.
Settled once more at his center, Calcifer shrank close to them contentedly, licking and lapping at the smooth shells until he could sink close enough to trace the veins of their creation, the microscopic channels and seams where the calcium folded together in protective arches. Delicious.
Rather than burn through and drown himself in liquid egg, Calcifer focused on solidifying the center first - it would last longer that way as well. Cheeks fat with the roundness of the eggs, he didn’t quite manage to resist the impish smile that pulled at him when the wizard faced him once more.
Howl was beginning to feel quite scattered. He found his awareness of his own surroundings... tasted different than usual, somehow, had a different sort of shape and weight to it, and more dimensions than before, not dissimilar to the way touching one’s nose with one’s fingers crossed might produce the sensation of multiple noses, or to the way going up the stairs while in an altered state of mind might produce the sensation of multiple gravitational fields, each with its own direction, and none particularly useful if one’s ambition was to remain perpendicular to said stairs.
Unhooking a cast iron skillet off the wall-mounted support, he reached absently for the eggs, and found they had sublimated from their ashen nest. Shifting his gaze just that little bit further, he found his all too self-satisfied culprit.
“I said,” he began, with the air that he was chastising a child. But as he went back over his own words, he had to start back towards the pantry to hide his smile from Calcifer. It wasn’t proper to reveal oneself so soon, and it was just as well that the sudden need for yet more eggs offered him an excuse. “How fortunate that you only got my heart out of our little deal. Had I offered a finger, you might have taken the whole hand.”
Keeping the eggs on his person this time, he held the skillet a ways above the fire. It seemed rude to descend upon his new housemate with several pounds of solid metal, with no warning.
“Put your head down, please. This will only be a minute, should be no trouble at all for a magical being of your caliber.”
When the skillet had heated up, he cracked both eggs on the side of it, dropping the shells in the ash. Calcifer could help himself, apparently.
“I would very much appreciate it if you did not take advantage of ambiguity in my phrasing for the purpose of appropriating anything else. I suggest you try asking. I’m known to be quite amenable, when approached properly.”
Far too pleased by the concession, the star smoldered quietly, flickering less and warming around the complex edges of the crystalline shell. The membrane beneath resisted him far more, but Calcifer slid along the edges, vibrating in the gaps between the atoms of both.
A dart of delight sent their heart into a brief flutter before he was too distracted by the careful spread of himself to recall why. Relaxing into the cradle of soft ash, Calcifer puffed out a slow breath, and kept his gentle grasp on the eggs even as they were nestled deeper into the plush mound. Metal did not like to be consumed the way paper and lumber did, but it loved to share, and it took no time at all for the star to feel like he had grown a million fingers. Warmth radiated in every direction like the twinkling of yesternight, unbridled, unfettered, cycling through in a way that made the finite edges of the pan feel utterly endless. As the broken, emptied eggshells thumped within his reach, Calcifer reached for them around the unmappable curves, and consumed them with a fearless joy.
Howl’s request had him seeping into a low blue, perhaps as tickled by the notion of having fully gotten away with something he never would again.
Or would he ?
“That does sound much easier,” Calcifer offered congenially, though his words were slightly muffled by the way he moved around the pan and eggs - the broken shells already black ash against the white mounds.
Four or so minutes later, the whites had set around perfectly runny yolks, catching the overhead light of a magically fueled lantern like tiny suns sinking slowly into the tops of snowy hills, which was an association one could only make in complete disregard of one’s own senses, because the heat of frying eggs on a fallen star was not reminiscent of snow-covered mornings in any way whatsoever.
Unwilling to find a spatula, Howl simply shook all three, and the slice of ham he had dropped in there last-minute, out onto a plate, and sat himself down. He ate about half of it in relative silence, distantly noticing that the satisfaction of it felt duller than usual, almost as if it was happening from memory. He supposed it was difficult for any parts of his routine to break through the thrill of the night’s events, sort of like throwing a rock into a lake would make no difference to the clarity of the water surface during a storm. He looked towards Calcifer, now free to flare as high as he wanted, with the pan discarded somewhere in the vicinity of a sink.
“Tell me,” he said, gesturing with his fork, on which a piece of yolk-soaked rye bread had been stabbed like the head of a fallen enemy on a pike. “Is a star not defined by its earthbound demise? Your very essence is a tapestry woven with thread spun of descent and death. But here you are, fallen and blazing still. What have we made of you?”
With the pan gone, Calcifer almost missed the sensation of the endless folded metal, but with his own energy so woefully contained anyway, it had been exhausting to indulge to its stable extent. Still, it was enough to have him dancing gently with the excess spread, flickering and undulating until he could sit low between the timber instead. He had no real cause to follow Howl with his attention, but it was a quick thing to find him with it when he spoke.
A funny question, perhaps particularly from someone who had implied some sort of extensive knowledge on the subject of magic and stars, though he supposed it was a fair thing now that he had abdicated his nature.
“Of course,” Calcifer mused, “A wizard would think one was defined by their final form. But a star is a star because it is in the sky, not because it will eventually fall to the ground.”
Howl found that he was experiencing something of an allergic reaction to the pompousness and self-importance of this glorified candle. This was all obviously just an effort not to concede anything to him, because he failed to see how it actually made him wrong . Whether a star was defined by its existence in the sky or by the fact that it died once fallen didn’t really matter in any measurable sort of way, because it was only incidental that falling would occasionally convert a star into anything other than a slightly magical rock, and any way you sliced it, the occurrence of one meant the end of the other.
“Well, you’re not in the sky anymore, are you,” Howl retorted, a brief flicker of suave malice in his voice.
Somewhat because Calcifer's eggs had finally hardened, offering him a chance at a theatrical demonstration, and somewhat because the stretch of the endless folding pan had left him restless and excited with his own excess, the fire rose up rather suddenly, swelling into every corner of the stove until he had engulfed it, dancing around it in thick plasmic limbs while he grinned at his heart’s owner. The eggs blackened quickly, sizzling just a bit as he reached their still moist core, until nothing was left but powder soft carbon ash.
“Now, I am your heart,” the fire nearly growled, his voice deepened by his size and emission. “Which I may or may not be until my death. What else would you call me? The options are myriad and many.”
He was tempted to tell Calcifer not to flatter himself. He wasn’t Howl’s heart, he merely had it, for the foreseeable future. But upon further inspection, he discovered it was really hard to make that not sound pathetic, desperate, or a flavor of melodramatic that didn’t suit him very well (or at least didn’t suit his current purposes), so he abstained.
As Howl finished the last of his eggs, he pondered the subject for a minute. There were numerous creatures who did things to humans that were not that dissimilar to this. Finding them in the dead of night, trapping them in some way or other. Converting their life force into all manner of magic. Demons. Fae. Muses. What would he call Calcifer instead of star ?
“Depends on how you behave.”
He picked up his plate and fork and dropped them in the sink.
“Can you heat the water, I wonder?”
“Well, I won’t be called a furnace,” Calcifer declared vehemently, relaxing down into the triangle of his lumber with a puffed sigh that sent ash in every direction. Not very far, but certainly billowing over the edges of his platform.
“The size of this place, anyway,” he continued, muttering beneath the log as he pouted, nose turned up at the notion as if he had ever had one to turn up at all. “How many hearths has it got? How far apart? Do you mean to drop me into a fresh cradle each time you imagine a new use of my energies?” Tone lofty, Calcifer lounged over the narrow lumber, lapping gently at the fibers with all the intent in the world to relax.
Heating water! As if he were some common inductor.
“You would be better served to expose this whole space to me,” he muttered on the brink of bitterness, and then brightened at the very notion, excited by it. Surging toward the triangle’s edge, Calcifer gleamed, beaming at the wizard.
“Let’s taste it together, hm? Twist it around a bit. There’s so much sharp corner and dead end in the floor’s shape alone. We could line the space with all the endless curving folding pathways of ten thousand pans and then I could heat the water and limn the windows and defend the door and fry the eggs, all without being fondled and jostled from one room to the next.”
“I am, in fact, not going to cover my entire floor in cast iron pans so you can get to the bathroom,” Howl announced solemnly, before it occurred to him that, with the occasionally incomprehensible way the star had been talking, that was probably not the intended takeaway. He was, most likely, asking to connect the space not with conductive metal, but with magic.
He considered it.
On the one hand, giving Calcifer, whatever on God’s green Earth he now was, control, or even just access , to his entire house seemed like a terribly risky idea. On the other, oh, the mere thought of no longer needing to start a fire one hour in advance just to be able to take a bath.
“I want to stress,” he began, no real sense of danger or genuine intent to his words as he went rummaging through a drawer below the workbench for a metal tin full of charcoal and chalk, “that you will not be tasting anything. If one curtain, one beam, one floorboard catches on fire, I will put you out in the leftovers of my evening tea without so much as a second thought.”
“You’d best swallow me first,” Calcifer warned ominously, even as his voice dropped low with little intent to be heard at all. Whether he was or not seemed to matter little, as the wizard had already caught himself up in this and that, and the star watched quite contentedly from his plush vantage point (for as much as he was able).
Having taken the time while he was vacantly running his mouth to think of the kind of spell he wanted to use, Howl began to draw various symbols on this wall and that, in the combined sitting room and kitchen, on the fence of the backyard, and on the bathroom ceiling (balanced precariously on the edge of the claw-footed tub). In a rare moment of inspired caution, he had left his bedroom out of the mix, the very last symbol being on the far end of the upstairs hallway.
Calcifer knew the taste of a cage or collar, but never from this side. His perch in the heavens had been more of a throne or pedestal (certainly more throne than the cradle he lounged in now), than a cocoon or crate - or cage. He had watched centuries of surrender and armor, of siege and survival, and knew utter freedom, despite that utter freedom meaning not very much freedom at all.
There was only the one way to go, after all. No matter the direction, it was down .
Astonishingly, as the last of the marks stretched the ephemeral limitation of his blurred horizons, the star did not know, as intimately or thoroughly, the sensation that gripped him. Not throne or pedestal or cradle or cage, but reach . As if suddenly he knew the length of his arm and could see the empty space between him and the out of focus backdrop of his perception where his fingertips ended. The final line of dimensional space that he could manipulate. Not by ability but by awareness.
Were he able to see further, Calcifer doubted he would feel restrained.
That awareness faded a bit with each space that Howl left behind, the mark and its memory enough for him to know , even if he couldn’t quite see .
Returning downstairs, Howl dug his hands into the white ash and gently scooped Calcifer up, placing the both of them squarely in the middle of some intricate circular drawing on the living room floor. “Let’s see what you can do.”
The shift of the ash beneath him was startling in its own right, his thoughts spaced like fog and collapsing into a thick cloud as he turned his attention toward the wizard and his petal soft grip. Their heart drummed with a steady intent, the horizon of Howl’s chest a secure comfort that was easy to brace against as Calcifer drew in the swell of a mimicked breath - preparing himself.
Aligning those marks like marks on a compass, the star began to amplify . The lick of his flame swept down toward the floor, engulfing Howl in a gentle heat, dispelled so quickly it had not the time to crisp his shirt nor encourage a bead of sweat before Calcifer reached with every fingertip to the very fringes of his spacial experience. A mere brush against each chalk-mark let him map and stamp and measure the space as easily as he had the earth from the sky, ley-lines drawn in glimmering trails of conscious engagement. All those sharp corners and sudden dead ends quivered in his wake, in his shadows, casting long dark lines that rounded their finite fall in every direction, doubling back and dancing. Curling those stretched fingertips, Calcifer dragged the shape of their reality toward the core of himself, the center of his own universe. His claws rent curves and grooves into the rectilinear manifestations, dragging burning pathways that gleamed with bright, hot, and then slowly soothed energy until the star had returned to himself. The flames licked themselves to a halt, with only the faintest scent of smoke and spark in the air, and Calcifer puffed out the breath he had been holding, a heaved sigh of smug delight and unfathomable relief.
Throne.