As I began to outline a guitar, my hands remembered every line, every curve, the texture and the weight.

  “You didn’t continue with art or music?” Terenei prompted.

  “I got busy learning to be a paramedic. School was tiring, I was working a part-time job because my parents couldn’t really afford to support me, and then I got a job and I was... I don’t think you’d even believe me about the hours and how exhausting it is even when I’m not at work. Art and music aren’t the only things that I decided to put aside for the moment. It’s not uncommon for paramedics like me to burn out before we can retire.” ‘Burn out’ felt like it might have transted oddly. So had ‘retire.’ “The amount of work and the stress and emotional strain and the poor support system and the low pay combine to make it hard to keep going. I figured I’d do my best to help people for as long as I can, and then I’ll switch to teaching or find a less stressful job where my skills will be useful, and after that, I can start remembering how to do things just because I want to.”

  “And figure out who you are?”

  Oh right. I had said that, hadn’t I?

  “That too.”

  “That’s a terrible way to force people to live who are devoting themselves to trying to help others who are in need. What is wrong with your world?”

  I tried not to bark a ugh. “Let’s just say, a lot, and leave it at that.”

  He made an affirmative “Mmhmm,” noise, and stretched, and let himself drop back to lie on the grass, gazing up at the brightening sky.

  That did make it easier to concentrate on drawing my impression of a guitar. Specifically, my guitar, which was an unremarkable second-hand acoustic that had reached me via a friend of my mother’s.

  “There,” I said. “That’s my guitar.” Compared to what I’d just watched him create, it was crude, but effective.

  Terenei sat up to look. “That will do. May I?” He retrieved his pen, then he crossed his legs, facing me, and id the sketchbook across his p. “Turn to face towards me, please? And give me your hands?”

  Puzzled, I obeyed.

  He cupped my hands around the sides of the sketchbook. “Think about how it feels, how it looks, how it sounds.”

  It wasn’t top of the line, but it was enough for me, and after all the hours I’d spent practising in high school, it felt comfortable when I got the chance to pick it up. I could bring every detail to mind easily, every scratch, every highlight.

  Terenei added a few more swift strokes that further crified the contours, humming softly to himself.

  It wasn’t a three-dimensional image, just a rather hasty drawing done with indifferent skill. It certainly wasn’t life-sized.

  Why, looking at it, did I have the peculiar feeling that it was both of those things? That it was all perspective, an optical illusion that my eyes simply refused to resolve?

  Terenei closed a hand around the neck of the guitar and raised it, dropping the pen so he could use his other hand to support the body, and the illusion vanished.

  So did the image on the sketchbook page.

  But Terenei held out the guitar to me, smiling.

  “Unfortunately, it will only st a short time. Even my own drawings will only let me make something real for less than a day—which means being careful about timing when I create clothes! But for the moment, it’s real.”

  Not quite sure what I was feeling right now, I took it, settled it in my p, and tested the tuning. I was forever losing picks and had given up, switching to fingerpicking, so that was fine, and the strings all felt and sounded the way they should. A gentle thump on the body with the heel of my hand gave me the resonance I was used to, a pseudo-drum rhythm for songs that benefited from that.

  I probably shouldn’t question it. The rules here were different, and I’d gotten used to things like tents that set themselves up in moments, so why should this gift be such a shock?

  Even if this could have passed for the absolute identical twin of my own guitar, at home in my bedroom gathering dust.

  In high school, I’d been very into the Ramones, along with the rest of the cssic CBGB crowd, and had discovered that I could comfortably both sing and py their songs. ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ had been successful at getting romantic attention more than once, pyed with appropriate eye contact and, depending on the subject, possibly a few swapped gender-specific words.

  I’d discovered, when teaching Serru ‘We Will Rock You,’ that the transtion in my head could interfere with my ability to sing familiar songs by forcing emphasis onto different sylbles and changing which vowel an extended note used, though it hadn’t been a serious problem. I ran through the lyrics of this one in my head, in case anything fgged as an odd transtion, but it seemed generally fine, and it was short and simple enough that I didn’t think it was going to mess with my ability to sing it. It might be the only Ramones song that wouldn’t involve attempting to expin foreign concepts and words that didn’t transte at all.

  Terenei listened, smiling.

  “Music from another world,” he ughed, when I finished. “I like that. The energy of it.”

  “The people who wrote it were good at that. Loud and direct and raw.”

  “Well, keep pying.”

  I dug around in my memory for something else that would be viable, and unearthed Patti Smith’s ‘Because the Night,’ which gave me several uncomfortable moments due to the transtion issue. It was hard enough trying to get back into pying after letting it pse for so long; the additional effort required to juggle the vocals was just too much, and invariably meant missing both my fingering and the note I was aiming for.

  So after that, I dropped the vocals and stuck with just the guitar, which dramatically reduced the errors. It also made it easier to just tune out everything else, all my attention on what I was doing, resurrecting the memories of figuring all of this out the first time around. I hadn’t really entertained dreams of fame and fortune as a musician for long, but it had given me a sense of connection with bands singing about emotions and experiences that made me feel less alone. I’d put a lot of time, and effort, and sore fingers, into getting good enough to feel like I was expressing a lot of confusing and overwhelming feelings.

  Speaking of sore fingers...

  Years of constant handwashing and hand sanitizer followed by lotion to keep the skin from cracking had utterly destroyed my calluses.

  I flexed my fingers, wincing. The muscles were murmuring compints about the unaccustomed exercise, but my fingertips had considerably stronger feelings and were making that abundantly clear.

  “Ow. I think I need to test whether I can heal my own hands.”

  “I’m sorry,” Terenei said. “I didn’t think of consequences. For whatever it’s worth, I enjoyed listening to that, very much, and I think it’s safe to say I’m not the only one.”

  “What?” I blinked and looked around.

  Next to the built-up fire, Serru had clearly been preparing breakfast, though currently she was sitting on the ground and watching Terenei and me with a smile; Aryennos was helping Nurea tend to the ornithians, which apparently meant feeding them triple helpings of a mix of red berries and fruit and leafy greens while petting them, but both were gncing in our direction intermittently.

  “Oh. I keep trying not to tell the whole world I’m from somewhere else and can do things like change shapes, but I don’t think I’m very good at it.”

  Terenei chuckled. “That, at least, shouldn’t have much by the way of consequences. I doubt that you’d be pying much longer anyway. I can only give things reality for a very limited time.”

  “I just pyed for long enough to mess up my fingers on a guitar that shouldn’t exist at all. You can stop sounding so apologetic. Thanks. That... felt good.”

  “I’m gd.”

  I set the guitar gingerly on the ground and edged back a short distance so I could be sure I had enough space. Then I gestured my interface into sight, and spun the dial to centaur.

  The moment the brief vertigo passed, I brought it back up and looked for Quickheal. Regur strength should be more than enough. Since I needed to touch the subject with one hand while pcing the other against the dial, I brought both hands together in the centre.

  Since my mana level dropped, I figured it was a success. I let the interface vanish and inspected my hands.

  The redness faded as I watched.

  “Well?” Terenei said.

  “All good. Apparently I can use my healing magic on myself. Maybe we should go help Serru?”

  “I’m sure she’d let us know if she considered that more important, but yes, we could. And don’t worry about expining to Nurea. She isn’t going to care about the details—although she might have been disappointed if you stayed human instead of centaur.” He slipped his sketchbook and watercolours and pen back into his backpack, slung it on one shoulder by both straps, and got up. I followed suit, which was less easy with four feet but I was getting used to it.

  “What about the guitar?”

  “What guitar?” Terenei asked, already several steps down the slope.

  There was nothing lying on the grass anymore.

  Serru greeted us with a smile. “That was a pleasant way to start the day. I imagine you’re both hungry. The tea is certainly ready, and the oatmeal should be soon.”