Wand of fireball

It came out of the sealed storeroom under the Mól ruins with the Silver Web’s coin and books: badly damaged, and still audibly humming. A mending might have knitted it and might have made it backfire, so Mikhail left it alone. Read over with the rest of the loot it gave up what it was. A wand of fireball, caster level six, three charges, and a firm enough hand needed to make it answer at all.

He repaired it in the downtime week that followed, on the ledge above the big open room, with Koa standing further back than he should have been and Aldo watching from the rail. He worked it as a ten-minute performance for an audience of one, flourishes and all, and held the last chord until the wand knitted itself back into shape. Koa asked for a demonstration and was refused: “You’ll get to see it when we’re using it for what its purpose is.” There was no way to put charges back into it, and there never has been.

A second reading turned up something nobody had gone looking for. Held rather than cast, the wand carries a pressure of fire at a focal point, and while it still holds charges it lends a caster level to any fire spell of second level or lower. Two things in one stick, and both of them end together.

It changed the plan for the Twisted Grove outright. The burning had been Koa’s job, with oil and a torch, and it became Mikhail’s. He had been using wands for years and had simply never done it in front of them, and the first fireball of his life went off in a chamber of the death-tree’s keep: no concussion, no report, only a flash and heat rolling outward in silence, the count tripled against a swarm that could not stand fire, seventy-five points of it when it was done. Koa, who had never seen the like, patted himself down to check that he was not burning. Three charges went at the Grove. One is left.