I love the idea of Scott’s ice magic providing relief to Osteon’s chronic pain due to their wither magic. It being a factor in why Osteon is a bit warmer with Scott when they’re having 1 on 1 conversations.
I would also like to raise the idea/point of ice magic having a particularly interesting relationship to wither magic. With withering, it is the power over the active process of deterioration. However, ice is regarded as one of natures greatest preservers. Freezing something can slow down or even outright halt the deterioration of organic matter.
In that sense, you could view ice magic as a blanket of protection against wither magic. But is that the right way to look at it? Wither magic is based in the inevitability that things break down until there is nothing left. Ice magic challenges that inevitability and offers an opportunity to take things more slowly. Ice offers a gift of more time when for wither it was meant to be fleeting. By all means the very nature of ice and wither magic are in opposition, and yet it is when those two work in tandem that opportunities for new life emerge. The withering of organic life to allow new life to harvest what’s left behind and grow strong, the bitter cold of winter protecting dormant life for a greater flourish of life later in the spring. They are both essential to the cycle of nature, needed and necessary for life to go on even when it isn’t apparent.
Magic musings in mind that’s what makes Scott and Osteon’s potential friendship all the more fascinating to me. Those who wield forces of nature that actively work in tandem to kickstart the ever recurring genesis of living things finding camaraderie in one another. One in constant pain from it, the other being able to provide relief regardless of it.
