“Yes, my Lord. If this body is abused badly enough, the vessel ruptures, and we die. I cannot explain it in a way that you would understand, but suppose that we are under great pressure, just as the air in a Spitter pellet is under great pressure. If the vessel is ruptured, we disintegrate like the shell of the pellet. And, by design, our prisons are made to be easily broken, whether by misfortune or intent.”

“Oh gods,” he groaned, and even Beltran understood enough to be appalled. “How often does that happen?”

“Often enough,” Star stated sadly. “It is presumed that there is an endless number of us, and it is of no matter if some are destroyed.”

“Of course it matters!” he snarled. “And there isn’t an endless number of you, is there?”

“No, my Lord.” Star fell silent.

“Give me a moment,” he said, so filled with rage that it was very hard to think.

“My lord?” Beltran said quietly. “What’s a vrondi?”

Thinking about how to explain Elemental magic to his Herald allowed him time to let his temper cool. “You know there are four—well, call them ‘worlds,’ right? We mages call them ‘planes of existence.’ Because as complicated as they are, the most plain way to make any sense of it all or chart it is to think of them as flat. They aren’t flat, at all, but that’s the easiest way to make sense of what we can perceive.”

“I have read that, my Lord, yes. One of them is the world in which we live, and it interacts with the other three. But because the other three are different, we can’t see the creatures that live there without specific effort, either on our part or theirs.” Beltran scratched his head. “I can’t say as I understand it, but my ma and pa taught me to believe in Heaven and Hell and I can’t see those either, nor the ones that live there, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t believe you when you tell me these things exist too.”

“Right,” he said, relieved that he wasn’t going to have to undertake a really basic explanation. “The world we live in is the Material Plane. The others are the Abyssal Plane, where demons come from, the Elemental plane, and the Aetherial Plane, where the gods and their servants are.”

Beltran opened his mouth, probably about to say something about “but demons come from Hell and the gods are in Heaven,” when he realized that those were just different names for the same thing—or maybe Heaven and Hell were like districts on these other planes—and shut his mouth again. “Yes, my Lord. Go on.”