There is a small man with a paintbrush in his hand, kneeling on dry cracked ground beside a large round metal plate, painting the plate with coloured inks drawn somehow from glass spheres in the open case that lies on the ground beside him. Occasionally he checks his work against the book propped up beside the case.
'Demon' comes through as 'maker'; there isn't a word for it in either of the two new languages.
"I'm a human," says the eldritch crystalline horror. "And I'm—" A spurt of new growth from his elbow jars his whole body, and the movement presses his face against the mass of shards underneath him. They're sharp. His cheek and jaw are shredded right down to the bone. He stifles a whimper; the deep gashes barely have time to bleed before the edges turn glassy and knit themselves back together. "Fuck. What was I saying?"
"You were claiming to be a human. I gotta say this is a novel form of humanity for me."
"An athra did it," he explains. "But maybe you - ow - have as little idea what I mean by 'athra' as I do what you mean by 'maker'."
"Not unless you're claiming to have been enchanted by an eggplant. That's presumably just a homophone."
He giggles. This proves to be unwise. Now he has to regrow half his face again. "Augh!"
"I'll be fine in a couple minutes," he says. "Just not much fun in the meantime. I hate exploding, it's the worst."
"That sounds - ow - inconvenient."
(His regeneration has progressed far enough that it may at any moment become relevant that the explosion destroyed all his clothes.)
"It's voluntary on the demon's part and usually intentional on the summoner's. Will you be harmed if I replace your outfit?"
"Demons aren't usually summoned for decorative purposes. We make stuff." He replaces the outfit.
His legs are starting to regrow. He scrunches his eyes shut and stops talking. The new growth shoves him across the shard-dusted ground, shredding part of his new outfit and most of his back, but there's enough of the clothes left to preserve modesty and his back only has half a second to bleed before it glazes over and heals. And now there's enough of him intact for him to sit up.
"Making stuff," he says. "Huh. Seems handy, I guess."
"They have a lot of magic, and sometimes someone convinces one to do them a favour, but they really don't like killing people. So somebody won a favour from an athra and tried to come up with the most inevitably fatal curse they possibly could that didn't directly mention death, hoping the athra wouldn't figure out that cursing me to shatter into little pieces whenever something hits me hard enough was effectively murder, and the athra cursed me exactly as specified but then also made me immortal."
"Athrai are weird! Their minds really don't work like human minds. They can take any form they choose, and some of them try to pretend to be human sometimes, and I can always tell."
"Weird barren wasteland with weird magic. I've been trapped here alone for months with no idea how I got here or how to get home and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person on the planet and I'm kinda going insane a little."
"Oh. Well, I'm not a hallucination, if my saying that helps, which it probably shouldn't. No idea at all?"