Survey entry, Fenwick Scarp lava bench, eleventh day of the dry count: one magmin, height 14 inches, surface temperature estimated above a blacksmith's quench. Entered by the undersigned, who watched it from a basalt shelf for most of an afternoon.
The first hint is the grass. Along the lower edge of Fenwick Scarp the blades curl brown in a line as straight as a plowed furrow, and the line moves. The magmin comes up out of a vent crack the way a loaf lifts a cloth, a lump of black crust seamed with orange, then arms, then a blunt head with two pits for eyes that glow the yellow of a candle seen through a thumb. It is the size of a spaniel and built like a sack of coals. It walks on knuckles and the flats of its feet, and each step leaves a print of glass. The one observed paused at a fallen fence rail, laid a palm on it, and let the wood smoke itself black from the inside. Then it ate the char, crunching, and sat with its legs crossed, pleased in a heavy, drowsy way, the crust on its back dulling to gray as it cooled.
The people of Ashgrove Tor, a day's walk east, will not say its name aloud while it is on the bench, and they will not lend it fire. A lit lamp is never carried onto the scarp, because a magmin that is offered a flame follows it home. Ilsabet Voss, who keeps the Ashgrove kiln, says her mother lost a roof that way. Voss has a trade the magmin made for her: she sells slag glass, the green-black beads the creatures drop as they walk, which cool into a hard bead that holds heat for an hour and is sewn into mittens and bed warmers. Collectors go out at dusk with iron tongs and a bucket of dry sand, and they take only beads that have lost their color, never the ones still ticking as they cool.
The aftermath of the observed visit was a ring of scorched stubble, a handful of beads, and a vent crack that had widened by a finger's width. On earlier counts that crack was closed, and the bench was two paces shorter. Each dry season the magmin come up a little farther from the vent, and each season they linger a little longer in the open. Nobody at Ashgrove Tor can say what draws them down the slope, or what they will do on the day they reach the first thatch.
- Classification
- Small fire elemental, volcanic crust
- Habitat
- Lava benches and active vent fields
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 14 inches tall, 40 pounds
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Plane of Fire, surfacing at volcanic vents
- Binomial
- Pyrolithus scoriaceus
- Diet
- Charred wood, hot ash, dry grass
- Temperament
- Drowsy, curious, drawn to flame