"That does help. I don't know how much to expect that to work elsewhere - maybe my aesthetic is off but swoops feel portable and I'm not sure about blade of void powers."

He reaches for the book and attempts to book a "blade" that he supposedly has.

There is no such—

—maybe there is some such thing, but he doesn't have it like he has his bookable thing-notions; if anything, he has it like he has the zooming thing, as a kind of signposted mental direction. This one feels small and dark and dense, and when he leans his mind into it, a small knife appears in his hand. The glossy black blade looks sharp enough to split hairs; the handle fits in his hand like it was made just for him. He can vanish and reappear it at will, in a way comparable to going in and out of zoom. It is not the sort of thing that can be voided or put in the book.

"Oh look. The blade of the void. ...it's a sheep knife."

"...It can't have always been a sheep knife, can it? If it's always been a sheep knife I have so many questions."

"I suppose it may have historically been other things! At the moment, it is a sheep knife. A very nice very sharp sheep knife."

Riale giggles.

"I very much expect that it has not always been a sheep knife," says Telarin.

"Never seen it before?"

"I don't think it's ever before appeared in physical form - certainly not where I could see it - and the physical form it currently takes is very obviously customized for you. Unless there is some sort of destiny at work, on a level much deeper and farther-reaching than I would have thought possible, it must have taken this form because this form suits you in particular, and if someone else had it it would take the form that best suited them instead."

"Under what circumstances would someone from in here normally visit the bottom point, anyway?"

"I'm not sure anyone ever has. It's hard to get to and there's - well, one would assume there's nothing there. I don't know whether the Blade of the Void has been available there every time, or if that was something Esere put in somehow - he wouldn't have known any more about it than we do, at least not to start with, but he was using the book right up until the very last moment of his existence and something informative might have happened while he was watching the world end."

"This entire cycle is really not designed to make it simple to patch, is it."

"No. But if it were too easy to patch, someone might do that before it was ready, and then there would be an unstable world that would eventually fall apart in a more permanent fashion."

"It's so annoying when you can't design something to be easy to do right and hard to do wrong!"

"Easy to do right and hard to do wrong is the best kind of thing," Riale agrees. "I was going to say 'my favourite' but I think if everything was like that I'd get bored eventually, not having any problems that took effort and cleverness to untangle."

"Well, you could have hard to do right and impossible to do wrong, how about that?"

Snicker. "Sure."

"Excellent, I'm glad your needs can be reasonably accommodated."

"Me too! It would be so inconvenient to have needs that would be unreasonable to accommodate."

Giggle. "Hmmm, other uses of voiding things... sculpture, snowplowing, I could probably void a fire - is there a good, non-planet-eating way to test that, have you got matches or something -"

"Or something," says the spirit of fire.

"Hah."

Riale produces an iron bowl with a block of wood in it.

And now they have fire!

"Thanks!" Cor attempts to void the fire without harming the wood.

The fire is reasonably voidable. He might have gotten a little more air than he intended, but the wood seems fine, accounting for its other fire-related experiences.