Subject: Belated entry: Burning Books
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Posted on: 2019-10-03 12:50:00 UTC

(written in about fifteen minutes as I have other stuff to write and not that much time)

Something was on fire. Tiger wasn’t having much success in putting it out: the brute force method of simply using Water-Conjuring Spells would leave him magically exhausted in seconds and there was no river nearby which he could – wait. An idea struck him, and he grinned.

It only took him a second to open a portal to the River Amphis, a mile away, and then he had the suitable supply of water which he needed to be able to put out the burning building, given enough organisation and planning to efficiently transport the water.

Unfortunately, he was on his own. No-one to run back and forth, carrying buckets: he’d have to do all of the work himself. That meant using a lot of magical power, but if he could be certain that it would work it would be worth it to protect what this building contained.

Books. Immensely valuable books, any one of which contained spells with the power to shatter continents, rituals which could decimate the Island’s population in a fraction of a second, tales of creatures that could crack the toughest of rocks with one terrible blow.

And someone was trying to destroy them all. The fire had been started deliberately. There was only one explanation: to keep the knowledge they contained out of the hands of his father.

In that case, why was he on his own? Why wasn’t someone else helping him to save this library?

There was no time to dwell on it now, because he needed to control a raging river and use it to put out the flames before it was too late. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and summoned all his power for a spell which would control the water and let him move it as he wished without falling foul of the regular laws of physics.

The spell was at the edge of his power limit, but it was said that magical power could increase a little when you needed it most, and whether that was true or not, the spell caught and gave him control of about two hundred metres’ worth of river water.

Slowly, carefully, he gathered the water together into a collection of spheres about a metre in diameter. One by one, he manoeuvred the spheres through the portal and dropped them onto the burning library. The flames had yet to spread to the areas that held the most valuable books, so if he could control the water finely enough and quickly enough there was a chance that he could limit the worst of the damage.

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