Where she wakes up:

A bed, which would seem huge and magnificently cozy if the one she fell asleep in hadn't been bigger and cozier, in a room, which would seem decadent and luxurious if the one she fell asleep in hadn't been Tanaikon's best guest room. It shows signs of occupation, and not by her; the clothes she sees are unfamiliar in style and significantly smaller than she could possibly wear. But whoever else is staying here, they're not around at the moment.

What.

What the actual fuck.

At least she didn't fall asleep naked, this time, that would make this even more awkward than it's inevitably going to be. Also, what the actual fuck.

Did she get kidnapped again? For real this time? Only why would she be in a room filled with someone else's way-too-small clothes--seriously, what.

For lack of any better ideas she pokes her head out of the room and looks around.

The hall is dimly lit and foreboding in a way that's somewhat at odds with the opulence of the visible decor. There is no one else around.

She's starting to suspect that the relative coziness of the beds isn't the only reason one might prefer to be on the Howling Mountain than here. But she still doesn't have the faintest clue what's going on, so she steps out into the foreboding hallway and starts walking.

The first person she runs into is a slightly nervous-looking servant who addresses her in a completely unfamiliar and unrecognizable language.

...She doesn't really expect him to speak Nathuremi or Ansati, at this point, but she tries both.

Nope.

He attempts to indicate by gesture alone that he's very sorry for the inconvenience and would she like to come this way please?

Yeah, sure. She's not without misgivings but she is without better options, so.

He leads her to a faintly ominous sitting room and scurries away.

The styles of architecture and furniture here are just as foreign as the clothes. She is very, very far from home.

Yeah.

"Tanaikon," she says, because she isn't sure if he can hear her from here but maybe he can, maybe he'll show up in a gust of wind or a crash of lightning and everything will be fine, "I woke up somewhere strange and vaguely ominous and there was someone who looked like a servant who didn't seem to speak or even recognize Nathuremi or Ansati. I'm very confused and more than a little nervous."

No answer.

Well--he said it takes a while to get anywhere on the wind and lightning is conspicuous. There wouldn't necessarily be an answer yet anyway.

Yeah.

A different servant enters the room. She beckons for Siva to follow her.

She gets up to follow her.

"Tanaikon," she mutters under her breath, "there's another servant, now. She's taking me somewhere else. I still have no idea what's going on." Talking to him makes her feel a little better, at least, and it can't hurt to give him more information.

The second servant takes her to a different part of the castle, where a... non-servant, that much is discernible from posture alone... is sitting at a window, looking out at an utterly foreign city.

The servant announces their arrival in a soft voice and gestures for Siva to have a seat at the small table there.

Siva sits at the table. She continues quietly describing things.

The non-servant turns to look at her with an expression that indicates it would probably be appropriate for Siva to stop talking to herself and pay attention.

She was paying attention, thank you very much, but she stops talking for the moment.

The lady nods acknowledgment.

"A morhiari mi Tairasante. Nuimena e kolith amai?"

"I have no idea what you just said," she says in Nathuremi, and then repeats herself in Ansati.

She nods.

"Kelora," she says, gesturing to herself, and then she waits.

Well, that's reasonably straightforward. "Siva," she says, mirroring the gesture.

Another nod.

There's something kind of familiar about her. Her posture, her expression, the tangible weight of her attention...

Huh, kind of reminds her of Iri. Way younger, of course, and they don't look very similar, but they do have a similar bearing.

And now she seems to be waiting for something, though it is not at all clear what. She doesn't seem to expect it from Siva, whatever it is.

"Tanaikon, the woman who isn't a servant kind of reminds me of Iri," she murmurs.

Kelora looks curiously at her when she talks to herself.

Siva tries to think of ways to communicate that she wasn't talking to herself. She closes her eyes and holds up a finger to indicate that she's thinking.

Finally she repeats as much of their earlier conversation as she can remember verbatim, then says, firmly, "Kelora, Siva." She mutters something, trying to be relatively theatrical about it, and says, "Siva, Tanaikon." She gestures to Kelora, says, "Kelora," gestures to herself, says, "Siva," and sort of waves a hand vaguely, trying to indicate some interminable distance, and says "Tanaikon."

Kelora absorbs this explanation thoughtfully, then nods.

The resemblance to Irikaino is really pretty striking.

That...does appear to be a thing.

"Tanaikon, she's reminding me more and more of Iri all the time. It's sort of weird."

If Kelora can tell she's being talked about, she doesn't give any sign of it.

Whatever she's waiting for, it's taking a while to show up.

Well. Siva will just sit here, then, and look at things, and occasionally say something to Tanaikon. It is reasonably obvious that she doesn't start actually talking to herself because she says his name before every utterance that's more than a few seconds after the last one.

The thing Kelora was waiting for arrives.

It's a person, and he's wearing a pendant around his neck, a pale green - glass? crystal? - a pale green something-or-other with flat sides and hard edges and a soft shifting gradient of colour in its translucent depths. Looking at it gives a vague sense that its bearer is someone mild-mannered and scholarly.

When Kelora tells him, "Thank you for coming," the sentence is perfectly understandable even though the words are just as foreign as they would have been a minute ago.

When he responds, "Of course, Princess," his meaning is equally clear.

"Well that's even more confusing but at least now I have an avenue to getting my confusion resolved. Hello, I'm sorry for showing up in your castle uninvited but I promise not only did I not do it on purpose I haven't the foggiest clue how it happened."

"What is more confusing?" the princess inquires.

At her gesture, the man with the mysterious magical object proceeds through the room and disappears behind a side door. He has a book tucked under his arm.

"How we can suddenly talk to each other? I don't think I've ever heard of a translation artifact before, let alone an artifact of personality-display, although now that I think about it it's a lovely idea."

"...Ishmiote Odeno is a soulbearer. That is his soul," says Kelora. "Are there no soulbearers wherever you come from?"

(Whatever this magic is, it even translates double meanings. 'Ishmiote' means 'library', but it's a contraction of an older word which literally translates as 'book-hoard', and can also be read as 'Book-hoarding', making his title Book-hoarding Odeno.)

"...No. That's not how magic works, where I'm from."

"Surprises on surprises," says Kelora. "Well. If you don't know how you came here, it's unlikely that you are able to return easily, and that is a problem. I was supposed to be married today, and the boy who was supposed to marry me has vanished overnight. Since you appeared the very same night, my father is going to have some uncomfortable questions for you. I'd rather spare you that if possible, but I do not have very much power to affect the actions of my father or his favoured associates."

"...You remind me very much of someone I know from back home. Tanaikon, if you're not listening, start. What's your father like?"

"His soulname is Tekhesin." ('Mighty'.) "I suppose that in a society without soulbearers you wouldn't have the context to appreciate what that says about him. I think, in order to properly explain my father's personality and the current political situation, I am going to have to describe some ancient history first."

"...Go on."

"A few thousand years ago, the world was divided into many separate countries, and the knowledge of how to manifest one's soul was secret, so soulbearers were very rare. Two of those countries were at war. In one of them, a soulbearer made that knowledge public, hoping to make the world a better place by making magic available to anyone capable of completing the process. That country immediately raised an army of soulbearers and tried to prevent their enemy from finding out how to do the same. They failed. Armies of soulbearers fought one another for the first time in history. It was enormously destructive. Both sides were much more able to attack than defend, and each was determined to be the first to wipe the other out. By the end of the first Soul War, both of those countries had been effectively destroyed. Everyone else agreed that that should never be allowed to happen again, and signed treaties promising never to field an army of soulbearers."

"...Yikes."

"That state of affairs held for a while. But of course someone eventually decided that the power of such an army was worth the risk. They embarked on a war of conquest, and at first their neighbours were afraid to meet them in kind, because everyone remembered how the first Soul War had ended and no one wanted that to happen to them. Eventually, though, it did come to open war between armies of soulbearers again, except this time there was no part of the world left untouched by the conflict. That time is what most people mean when they say 'the Soul Wars'. It lasted for most of a century, or for a few centuries, depending how you look at it; it's hard to pinpoint the moment it ended because recordkeeping was very bad in those times and it did not so much stop as gradually fragment into smaller and smaller conflicts until no one was left with the resources to muster any kind of army, soulbearing or otherwise. Anarchy reigned for several more centuries after that."

"Well. That's, uh. That's...considerably worse than the time civilization collapsed where I'm from."

"More recently, one of my ancestors managed to unite the world into a sane and stable empire with a functioning legal system. His name was Tezru Zierni Diakor." (Tezru: 'true, strong, right, just'.) "He reigned peacefully for a while; but when he died, the throne passed to his son, Far-seeing Arime, who immediately tried to have all his living relatives assassinated. This started a war, which my grandfather won: All-enduring Zierni Esarkan, so named because one of his soul's powers is self-resurrection, meaning he cannot be permanently killed. His own son, my father, Tekhesin Zierni Seofar, objected to spending his entire life an imperial prince with no hope of ever becoming emperor. Since he couldn't possibly have succeeded in an outright coup, he gathered up a lot of like-minded friends - including more than one powerful soulbearer - and took over one of the southern island provinces. That is where we currently are: Tairasante, capital of Atialemain, in what is now effectively my father's palace."

"Well. Um. So...more than three thousand years ago, the Ansati empire spanned most of my planet. Magic, where I'm from, comes in two forms. The more common one everyone has; it's tiny, enough for this much fire," she makes a tiny flame over one finger, "or a trivial amount of healing, or equivalent. Or you can get a lot of people to spend a lot of time making an artifact together. The Ansati Empire had fantastic magic infrastructure including fountains of healing and de-aging.

And then the Last Emperor's son Prince Serik decided he didn't want to spend his entire life an imperial prince with no hope of becoming Emperor."

"That is a very strange coincidence," says Kelora.

"By taking Atialemain when he did, in the way that he did, my father is essentially daring Grandfather Esarkan to either assassinate him and risk starting Far-seeing Arime's troubles over again, or go to war and risk my father making a Soul War of it. No one doubts that my father would do that. My father is exactly that sort of person. He craves power and abhors weakness and his favourite hobby is torture. Even besides his unpleasant personal habits, he is making a disaster of this province because he doesn't care about anything beyond maximizing his own enjoyment. Does that sound familiar as well?"

"It sounds...second-hand familiar. When Prince Serik's attempt to usurp his father instead resulted in the complete destruction of the empire, he fucked off to a pretty castle fueled by the other way of doing large-scale magic, which is pain. He then spent the next several millennia growing up enough to realize what a disaster his younger self was and gain the capacity to form meaningful relationships with people, and occasionally abducting people to fuel the castle with. 

He showed up at a party I was attending and noticed me. I wasn't cowering as much as everyone else. He asked me to dance. I figured if I was going to spend the rest of my life in horrific torment I might as well have a moment of fun first, and said yes. It was glorious, and he decided he didn't want to hurt me.

 I was the first person Serik Tanaikon decided he'd rather have as a friend than a victim, but not the last."

"That... sounds much less like my father."

"I assume your father is not millennia old."

"He is not. Many things can happen in a thousand years, I suppose."

"Yeah. And you remind me a lot of his daughter Irikaino."

"He has a daughter?" Pause. "Is she... okay?"

"I think so. We don't talk a lot."

"I do not think I would do well spending thousands of years alone in a castle with my father and his victims. Or does she live elsewhere?"

"She lives in the castle, the victims have a village thing."

"Well."

She shakes her head slightly.

"As fascinating as this is, I don't think it's as important as finding a way to protect you from my father and his court. If he takes an interest in you, it will be bad; if his friend Nahira does, it could be much worse."

"His friend. Nahira. Yes, that...that sounds bad.

If I'm guessing right, and I think I am, we had one of those too. Tanaikon warned me about her just on the off-chance she might somehow have set something up to stop being dead."

"Her name is Den-aminde" ('long shadow') "Rysher Nahira and she shares many of my father's tastes, but she is more interested in making people suffer than physically hurting them and she understands the point of having a functioning government."

"The latter part didn't specifically get mentioned in regards to Halieve Narafaer, but the former, yes."

"I have the feeling that it would be very useful to understand all these coincidences, and I have no idea how to so much as begin to do that."

"Yeah. Maybe from the other side; pain magic is fantastically versatile."

"The difference in how magic works is also something it would be very useful to understand."

"...Yeah. I should check to make sure pain magic still works here; do you have any convenient blunt objects with which I could break enough bones to check?"

She blinks in mild surprise.

"...If it doesn't work, the most powerful healer in Tairasante is Nahira. I would not be able to find you another soulbearer with healing magic without her noticing."

"Point. Broken ribs aren't too inconvenient until they heal, but I don't think I could do that to myself without risking a punctured lung..."

"If my father decides to ask you what you did with my betrothed, you will have plenty of opportunity to experience pain."

"I did not want to pull an Anlei," she mutters under her breath.

Kelora blinks.

"Anlei is another pain mage," she clarifies. "Tanaikon tried to kidnap her so she set him on fire. Twice."

"I see," she says. "I... cannot, unfortunately, recommend doing that to my father or Nahira. Unless 'set him on fire' is a euphemism for something significantly more destructive."

"I mean, depending on how much pain is involved, there can be a lot of fire."

"There is likely to be a lot of pain."

"Okay.

I'm not scared of your father. I can handle a lot of pain. It's not likely to be fun, in context, but I can handle it. It's Nahira I'm worried about."

"I think you should perhaps be somewhat more scared of my father than you are. You seem to be the right amount of scared of Nahira."

"Well, if I come to his attention I probably come to hers, so it's not like being inappropriately unscared of him is going to do me too much harm."

"My father takes the absence of fear as a personal insult."

"Noted."

"I hope I can protect you from them but I don't think it's very likely."

"Ah."

"I'm sorry."

"Well.

You said they both had those soul things, right? What can they do with them?"

"It's... not simple to explain. Nahira can hurt people, and heal them, and hold them still for her convenience. My father can... well, also hurt people, but differently. A soulbearer's powers are not perfectly static and predictable, and Nahira in particular I strongly expect to have capabilities she has not generally revealed. I don't think my father would hide his power like that but I also don't think he understands it perfectly."

"Hm. Elaborate on holding still?"

"What do you mean?"

"Mostly I want to know if it requires attention to maintain and if it's purely physical or not."

"I don't know."

"So I may or may not be able to set her on fire and if I can this may or may not have any benefit whatsoever. Do you know if her healing is reflexive?"

"I have never known her to be noticeably injured."

"Hmm. Okay. So I might be able to kill her if I can do enough fire fast enough and she isn't expecting it."

"Yes, that is possible."

"Okay. If this is probably going to happen to me, I'd like to plan for it as clear-headedly as possible while I can. It seems pretty obvious that she's--the bigger threat, logistically speaking; but...if, theoretically, I could kill one and only one of them, would it be better to get her, or go for the more-likely-to-succeed option? Especially if your grandfather would have fewer reputational problems with having her assassinated once the one who was related to him was out of the way."

"...If you kill my father, you end up with an unstable political situation in the short term, somewhat better prospects in the medium-to-long term, and Nahira very unhappy with you. If you kill Nahira, you end up with no significant political upheaval right away, a slow disintegration of what little order is left in the province, and my father very unhappy with you. But it's also possible that with Nahira dead I might be able to convince my father to relinquish some onerous administrative duties to me, and in that case I could do significant amounts of good even with my father still around."

"Okay. Well. Maybe we'll get really, really lucky and it won't come to that."

Nod.

"What do you need to do?"

"I should let Ishmiote Odeno go home, if possible, but I know I haven't learned your language very well since we started speaking; have you learned much Nuimena?"

"Uh--some? Not nearly as well as I know Ansati, and I'm not quite fluent in that yet."

"Then we can keep the translation for a while longer. I think it might turn out to be important that you have the ability to communicate without help."

Nod. "I can try. I'm paying attention. But it took me a lot longer than this to get good at Ansati. I mean, there was no helpful magical effect, there, but..."

She nods.

"If there's any specific phrases that would be a good idea to learn I can probably memorize those."

"I don't know if there are specific phrases... I just expect that if things go wrong, you will have a much harder time around my father if you can only make yourself understood when he goes to the trouble of having a translator present. And somewhat the same with Nahira."

"You make an excellent point. Well. I'm paying attention."

"Do you want to know how to manifest your soul?"

"...Yes. Are there any downsides to doing that?"

"Anyone who looks at it will see what kind of person you are. Different souls do it to different degrees, in different amounts of detail, but they all do it truthfully. Once you manifest your soul, it will exist in that form for as long as you are alive and some time afterward. If someone touches your soul, you will be incapacitated with indescribable agony until they let go. As far as I know, neither my father nor Nahira has ever touched someone's soul, but I would not be inclined to rely on them not to try it if they had the chance."

"...I'm not sure I want to introduce a vulnerability like that if you don't think you can hide me from them. On the other hand, I could probably leave it with you if it looked like I was going to get caught and it didn't have good enough relevant powers."

"I could probably keep it safe."

She considers. "...Statistical odds that I'd get something useful?"

"...Everyone gets something that is useful in some sense, because everyone gets something that is suited to them in particular. But you might not get anything that applies to this situation. Soul powers are very hard to predict."

"...Okay. Well. Never let it be said that I am risk-averse for a good cause. How does it work?"

"I have not personally done it but I know the theory as well as anyone. You sit quietly in a context where you don't expect to be distracted, and think about what kind of person you are and what you expect your soul to look like, and imagine reaching for it. If you guess the correct way to reach for it and a correct aesthetic detail and contemplate a correct characteristic of yourself, you will find your soul. Then you imagine bringing it from your mind into the world, and guess what it will look like and think about what kind of person you are in more detail. If you guess something wrong, you have to start over. It takes most people a few hours, and some much more than that if they don't know themselves very well or aren't very good at guessing their soul's aesthetics."

"Okay. ...Should probably wait until the translator's gone, though."

"Yes, that's reasonable. How much more Nuimena do you want to absorb before you try it?"

"...Much as I hate to admit it, I think I might be nearing my retention limit for the relevant amount of time."

She nods. "I'll tell him he can go, then."

And she goes to the other room and dismisses the translator.

"Should I go somewhere else to try it or does here work?"

"There are safer places. I'll show you to one."

"Okay."

The safer place in question appears to be the princess's bedroom.

Are there any chairs or does she have to sit on the bed?

There are chairs.

"I'll leave you here," she says, in now-harder-to-understand Nuimena. "You can come out when you succeed or give up."

She gets the gist. "Yes," she agrees.

She sits down.

She closes her eyes.

She tries to think about her soul.

So, first of all, who she is as a person; she doesn't know enough about soul aesthetics or however reaching works to be as confident about those.

Who is she?

She is Alissiaverene Jialo, Delightful Siva. She loves her name but hates putting it in the mouths of strangers. She loves dancing and books and beautiful things; she adores Serik Tanaikon despite the fact that he tortures people who don't want it. She's part of the reason he's stopping that and she's so proud of that, in a way she finds difficult to articulate and is reluctant to try too hard.

Facts. Not general characteristics. Generalize.

She hates giving her name to anyone she doesn't trust with it. She doesn't care if people see her naked. She's fine with casual sex but not casual masochism but she was willing to go under Tanaikon's knife the second time they made out anyway. She has weird intimacy habits, and that's fine, that's hers.

Okay. That's a trait. Pick an aesthetic.

Aesthetic. She's seen only one soul before, the green hard thing the translator-man was wearing. She doesn't know what it correlates to. Pretty, though. What should her soul look like?

She thinks of the starry sky, the night she danced with the man she had not yet fallen in love with in midair above a city that sparkled with its own lights below. She thinks of stars, and tries reaching for her soul.

She finds nothing, no matter how many directions she tries. Her brow furrows in irritation. Not stars, then. Crystal, maybe...

She tries a few more aesthetic ideas before she hits on one that gets a response--smooth, spherical. It's above her, like an apple just waiting to be plucked from the lowest branch of an apple tree you're reading under.

She is careful not to jar out of her concentration when she finds it--practice not blowing herself with pain magic is surprisingly useful there. She remembers what Kelora said to do next--try to guide it out, guess another detail. She imagines her soul as translucent sea-green and loses it.

Her hands clench briefly on the arms of the chair and she lets out an irritated breath before getting back to it. She knows where it is, now, and enough aesthetic detail to touch it.

Think about who you are in more detail, Kelora had said. Probably harder to fuck up.

Dishonesty annoys her, and lying with the truth even moreso. She values open, honest communication. People not taking it seriously when she tries to do that, also terrible. She loves Tanaikon for that, that he's never been anything but open with her, or when he had things he didn't want to tell her he told her that. She loves him. That's important too, she's coming to realize. Loving him feels like taking a breath for the first time, and for the first time she is bitter, a little, that she never tasted this before, that her own mother could not give this to her. Loving him, making him happy, giving.

And the delight--her own, not his--that's important too, the dancing and the eeing over books and how much she loves riding the wind--

Her soul feels more solid under her fingers. She can almost make out the details, now. She thinks about who she is and what her soul should look like.

She loses it several more times, guessing wrong about this detail or that. But eventually, sitting in her hands, is her soul.

It's a sphere, just a little larger than an apple, perfectly clear except for the suspension of rainbow sparkles within, ever denser farther in until for a few centimeter radius around the center it's completely opaque. The density gradient isn't exactly spherical, though; ripples and twists can be seen in the glittery cloud.

It's beautiful.

When she leaves the bedroom, Kelora isn't there.

...She's going to go right back in, then, because hiding.

She contemplates her soul and tries to figure out what it'll do for her.

...Not all that much, yet, but it's an important not much. It wants to enforce her intimacy boundaries--which means, very importantly, that it won't let anyone touch it. Among other things; she doesn't get an overwhelming amount of detail about what things in the relevant timeframe.

The other thing it does is more voluntary, and more active. It gives her pain.

It is at that moment that she hears faint footsteps in the corridor, right outside the door. She has no time for anything more complicated than shoving the orb into one of her dress's obligatory water bottle pockets. She can only pray no one notices who shouldn't.

"...doesn't speak Nuimena, you'll need a translator."

"Find one, then."

Tekhesin Seofar's voice is very much like Serik's, accounting for accent.

"I maintain that there is no use in this, Father. Whatever happened to Taliar, she is innocent of it."

And then they are at her bedroom door.

Her heart skips a beat when she hears his voice, and she has to forcibly remind herself that it is not Tanaikon on the other side of that door, it is someone who does not know her, who is everything she was afraid the Lord of the Howling Mountain would be when she tried to evade his attention at that party.

She wants to mutter a quick summary to Tanaikon, but there is no time. She tries to remember what it was like to pretend mousehood at that party, hopes that Seofar is worse at seeing through that kind of act than Serik, and pretends to be more afraid than she really is.

Very reluctantly, she opens the door.

He looks a little like Tanaikon, in the way that Kelora looks a little like Irikaino - more in bearing and mannerism than physical structure, and least of all in surface details.

But the really attention-getting part of him is his soul.

A dark slash of blood-red not-glass hanging wire-wrapped from a silver chain, it speaks of power and cruelty. The picture it paints of his personality is not a pleasant one. He wants to be feared, he wants to hurt people, he wants comfort and luxury, he wants to hold the power of life and death over everyone he meets. He has a kind of moral sense, but it is not a very good kind. He is dangerous and he wants you to know it. He is quick to anger and disdains mercy as weakness.

He's looking at Siva like he hasn't quite decided whether she's a victim to be enjoyed or an inconvenience to be dealt with.

Wow, Tanaikon was not kidding when he said his younger self was a disaster. She vaguely wonders what his soul would look like, if he had one. She still has to resist the urge to do something that would break the 'mouse' act, but it's easier than she was anticipating.

"Is there a particular reason you're keeping her in your bedroom?" he asks his daughter.

"I had hoped she might be safe there."

He laughs. "No fear of that. Get me a translator." And to Siva, beckoning imperiously: "You - come with me."

Her grasp of the language is still shaky at best, but the gesture is clear. She gets up, saying, "Tanaikon, your baby disaster doppelganger came for me," in a courteous tone intended to sound to Seofar's non-Nathuremi-speaking ears like a meek acquiescence, and follows.

Seofar leaves Kelora behind; presumably she goes off to arrange for translation.

He leads Siva through the castle.

Kelora's parts of the castle are definitely the least ominous. There are much more ominous sections available, and they traverse a few of those on their way to wherever Seofar is taking her. Multiple times, someone screams in the distance and Seofar smiles.

Somehow it had never occurred to Siva that, while she knew perfectly well it was called the Howling Mountain for a reason, she had never actually heard any screaming. She has a new appreciation for this fact.

The fear gets less fake--but he still reminds her of Tanaikon, especially when she isn't actually looking at the red not-glass at his throat. Fear and attraction are, she suspects, a dangerous combination here.

But the soul in her pocket is warm against her leg, and something subtler than the two powers she had had time to examine before she showed up wakes in her mind. The next time she looks at the soul at Seofar's neck the similarities to Tanaikon, the foundation that Tanaikon grew from, are much more obvious.

Her posture straightens, a little. The real fear can stay. But the fake fear--feels incorrect.

The next time Seofar happens to look at her, she's much less cowed, and even smiling a little bit.

...He frowns. This is not correct behaviour from someone in her position.

"Something funny, girl?"

"I still don't speak your language," she points out reasonably.

He stares her down for a moment, then shakes his head and keeps walking.

She keeps following! And being less cowed than is appropriate for someone in her position.

And...

Yep that's a bedroom. Stunning view of the city. Slightly questionable decorative taste. The sort of furniture you'd expect from someone who prefers his sexual partners unwilling and covered in blood.

Man, that is not even a thing Siva had thought of. You start taking all kinds of things for granted when your sadist boyfriend can just vanish all the blood.

Nice view, though. She looks out the window admiringly.

He picks her up by the throat and tears her dress off, as easily as if it was made of paper.

...Well.

Being picked up by the throat definitely isn't doing anything for her, and is in fact kind of distracting in a bad way.

But it's not totally distracting, and the rest of the situation is...objectively really bad. But still kind of hot.

He throws Siva onto his bed and her dress across the room. He doesn't notice the sound it makes when it hits the floor.

"I don't need a translator to explain why you should fear me. That much I can manage on my own," he says as he stalks toward the bed.

Don't laugh. Don't laugh. Laughing would be a bad idea. Even if it would be half hysterical.

This is objectively terrible why is she so turned on has her body not gotten the memo that this is not Tanaikon and not some kind of harmless fantasy.

He pounces, pinning her to the bed with a hand around her neck. She's going to have bruises there. Blood-red flames spill out from under his fingers and pour down her body; they don't burn, but they hurt, pure unalloyed pain blooming wherever they touch. In their wake, they leave no marks, but her nerves are so oversensitive that the faintest breath of air on her skin feels like needles or sandpaper.

--Oh.

The problem she has had with fire has always been the burns; they feel gross and wrong. This--does not. Very does not. She barely notices the choking.

"What is wrong with you?" he snarls - and oh look, the translation is back.

"I am a delight," she informs him, giggling, too high on endorphins to filter.

He chokes her harder, mostly to stop her from saying anything like that again.

Oh yeah this guy means her harm. She's not--quite--able to keep from physically struggling, but she does refrain from setting him on fire in a panic, so there's that.

That's more like it -

But there are still things he needs from her.

He lets her breathe.

"What the fuck did you do with Kazaryne Taliar?"

"I didn't do anything," she says, gasping for air. "When I went to bed last night I was in my own bed snuggling my boyfriend and when I woke up I was in a room full of clothes way too short for me. I suspect that whatever did for me did for him too but I don't actually know what the fuck that is."

He frowns.

"It's true. I don't know anything else. What kind of idiot would I have to be to spirit him off and then stay?"

Ask impertinent questions, get choked until you nearly pass out! An important rule to be aware of when talking to Seofar.

Ulk. Stupid survival instincts.

"...so," he says, his hand still resting lightly on her throat, "you're no use to me at all, and I can do whatever the fuck I like to you without it affecting anything important like my ability to find my daughter's future husband."

She is kind of too busy attempting to oxygenate her blood to respond.

He laughs.

He has very nearly Serik's laugh. Seofar's is just a little less... sweet.

...Body. Body, that blood needs to be near her lungs, collecting oxygen, not farther down.

The aftereffects of the red flames are starting to fade.

So he does it to her again.

Maybe her lungs don't need so much blood after all. If he's trying to make her unhappy the red flames are really counterproductive.

Yes, he's starting to notice that.

"What are you?" he murmurs, staring down at her. "What..."

The fire left her with her eyes closed, breathing heavily with a smile on her face.

When he speaks she opens her eyes and looks at him with what can only be described as a mixture of fear and anticipation. "What do you want me to be?"

He really doesn't know.

It stops him cold, for a moment. He's accustomed to knowing exactly what he wants - exactly what he should want - but this girl is a mystery and he has no idea what to want from her.

When he fails to immediately produce an answer she flops back into boneless contentment.

Why does pleasure look so good on her, why can't he hurt her properly, why does she react all wrong to everything and why does he like it...

He runs his hand down her arm. That's enough to make most people scream, so soon after the fire, but this one didn't scream for the fire itself, so who knows?

He can have anything he wants. He can have her if he wants her. He just - shouldn't want her like this.

She bites her lip and arches slightly when his hand goes down her arm.

He drags his fingernails across her stomach, drawing blood.

"Ohhh," she breathes, and--shudders.

"I should kill you," he murmurs, almost as though talking to himself.

"...What?"

"Shut up." He wraps his hand around her neck again and squeezes, not quite cutting off her air. His voice sounds - distant, thoughtful, not at all the tone you would normally associate with those words and that action. "Why shouldn't I kill you? You're no use to me, and you're..." he trails off without naming the problem.

She focuses on breathing, shallowly. She does not set him on fire, but she does use the pain she's in to carefully, discreetly, fracture her bones in as many locations as she can without compromising the structural integrity of anything that needs it.

But after a few seconds, he loosens his grip and covers her in red flames again.

There is some shrieking, this time, but unless he's remarkably unobservant he won't think this means he's succeeded at making her suffer.

He lets the flames die down. He runs his fingertip along one of the bleeding scratches on her stomach.

More noises, and arching up into the touch.

"Do you not understand what's happening to you, or do you just not care?"

She is not, actually, coherent enough to answer that question.

He puts his hand on her thigh and squeezes. Bruises bloom under his fingers; pain sparks like lightning in her flame-touched nerves. This probably doesn't help her coherence any.

It really doesn't!

Yeah.

He can have her if he wants her. Logically, the fact that she wants him is - irrelevant, and if not irrelevant, not a reason not to take her - but he doesn't trust that logic. There's something about her that's compelling in a way that feels wrong.

But it's very compelling, whatever it is.

He trails his fingertips along her ribs. There's something oddly satisfying about the way she responds to pain. It's - seductive. The effect of the fire fades away, until he's just caressing her, no hidden torture involved.

As the pain fades, she collects her thoughts. As pleasure ceases to edge out every other emotion, others make appearances in her expression.

An almost-tender contentment, first, before she looks at him and seems to remember where she is; nostalgia and nervousness war for a few moments after that, before her face settles into a somewhat wary inquisitiveness.

(Not displayed on her face: her soul--nudges her. She heals her fractured bones, letting the last of the pain she could use drain out of her. She really hopes her soul knows what it's doing.

Her soul informs her that she is not allowed to use pain magic anyway until further notice. She really hopes it knows what it's doing.)

Seofar is looking at her with a hard-to-read expression. Not one she's ever seen on Serik.

No. No it's not. She kind of wants to know what's behind it, but asking would--not go well.

The caressing's nice. She doesn't say so, that would be a bad idea.

The strange expression turns... pensive, maybe.

"Why aren't you afraid?"

"...I'm not...not afraid. But it's not like I can do anything, about any of this, so--being afraid doesn't do me much good."

...he makes an amused noise.

"The world would look very different if people were only afraid when it did them any good."

"I'm aware I'm unusual," she shrugs.

He smiles slightly and runs his hand along her leg; red flames trail in its wake.

She gasps in pleased startlement.

"You are unusual," he says.

It feels wrong, but - he wants to know, and he can have anything he wants -

"Would you want to be here, if you had a choice?"

 She considers the question carefully.

"I wouldn't have chosen to come here, but if you offered to let me walk away no-consequences and I believed you I wouldn't do it," she says after a moment. Her voice carries a note of uncertainty, but she's sincere.

(Her fear reaction and arousal reaction both go up a small but noticeable tick.)

"Why not?" he says, confused and frustrated.

"I'm...really not a risk-averse person. And you're really hot. And the fire thing is fantastic."

He almost says, I want to make you regret that choice.

But - he doesn't, not entirely. He wants...

...he wants to do the opposite of that. He wants to make her scream with pleasure. He wants to see her smile in dazed exhaustion. He wants to hold her down and fuck her and he wants her to like it.

And he can have whatever he wants, can't he?

Yes...

He pins her to the bed with a hand around her neck and reaches between her legs to stroke her with flame-wrapped fingers.

What was that first thing he wanted? He can have that. He can so have that. She's only pinned at the neck; her hips have a relatively free range of movement to buck up into his touch.

It's beautiful, she's beautiful. He wants her -

- so he takes her, burning with red flame, and again as the flames fade -

It's nothing like with Tanaikon; this is more of a surprise than it probably should be.

But he's cheating very, very hard.

He can have all of the things he wants. He can have a lot of them.

For hours. Until her voice gives out. Until she can barely move.

Without healing water or access to her own magic, her voice and mobility do go. But oh, what a way to go. It's so good it's so good and she comes until she can barely tell whether she's actually having an orgasm or not anymore.

And then they are interrupted.

He ignores the knock on the door for a few minutes, but then leaves Siva on the bed with red flames licking at her skin and goes to answer it.

"What do you want?"

"The girl, of course."

Siva glances over

...The exhausted pleasure vanishes from her face as soon as she sees Nahira, replaced immediately by a bone-deep terror more intense than anything Seofar was able to elicit by several orders of magnitude.

"I think she's heard of me!" she says brightly.

"You can't have her." He tries to close the door.

The door refuses to close. Nahira raises her eyebrows. "Can't I?"

"No." He pulls harder on the door, then gives her a disgusted look. "Don't fuck with me, Rysher."

"But I want her, my prince."

He snarls.

...He's not just handing her over. That's. Good. And presumably her soul won't prevent her from setting Nahira on extreme amounts of fire, if it comes down to it.

"...I assumed you were just thinking with your cock as usual, but now I'm beginning to wonder if she hasn't bewitched you somehow," says Nahira. "Look at you, all protective."

He glares. "I like her how she is. If I let you touch her, you'll ruin her."

"She's obviously responsible for the disappearance of the Kazaryne boy."

"Did you imagine that wasn't the first thing I checked?"

"I don't trust your methods."

Siva attempts to defend herself with the impertinent question that made Seofar choke her earlier but her voice is still gone.

"Go away," sighs Seofar.

"If she had bewitched you, wouldn't you want me to save you from her?"

"She hasn't fucking bewitched me, Nahira, you're just saying that because you want to ruin my new toy. Fuck off."

He tries to close the door again. It doesn't budge.

"And let go of my fucking door or I will make you let it go."

"Touchy!"

She steps inside the room. Seofar finds himself unable to move to follow her.

"You'll thank me later," she says over her shoulder.

Crap crap crap crap.

Her voice is still gone but she lets out a sharp breath that would have been a whimper if she'd been able to vocalize it.

"It's so nice to be appreciated," says Nahira.

She stands by the side of the bed and touches her fingertips to Siva's throat; pain flares at the contact, but then her voice is healed.

There's a lovely floral scent in the air. Nahira's soul looks like a ball of dark amber wrapped around a twist of red smoke. It says: here is a person whose favourite pastime is breaking people.

"Good afternoon," she says. "I am Den-aminde Nahira, but I think you've figured that out already."

Lilies are an incredibly poisonous flower, she remembers saying. But these are daffodils...

"Are daffodils poisonous?"

"What an odd question."

"Lilies are lovely, and direly poisonous. Like you. But you're wearing daffodils, not lilies."

"I don't think I like your tone."

"I don't think I give a fuck."

"Oh!" she says, brightly. "Defiance!"

She steps away from the bed and looks around until she finds a small sharp knife. Then she comes back, sits down next to Siva, and starts methodically skinning her.

Well. That's gross on a similar level to burns. And Nahira doesn't at all remind her of someone she loves, or any positive things at all. She still has a pretty high pain tolerance, but--ow.

She stops when most of Siva's stomach and chest is all bare.

"Much better!" she says. "Would you like to tell me what you did with young Kazaryne?"

"I didn't do anything. I went to sleep last night in my own bed at home and woke up in his room with him already missing. I think whatever got me got him too. What kind of idiot do you think I would have to be to have a way to get people out of here and not use it for myself?"

"I think you have no reason to leave. You've got Seofar's mind in your grip and you're merrily twisting it into knots. Whether it's magic or just skill, I suppose I can't know, but I do know you're bending him to your will one way or another."

"Seriously?"

"He tried to protect you from me! You can't expect me to believe his sudden affection is some kind of coincidence."

"All I did was be a masochist at him! It's not my fault if that makes me an interesting novelty!"

"Dear, we have met masochists before."

"Okay, a really extreme masochist."

"And on that basis alone you're so fascinating that he'd rather fuck you all day than deal with his daughter's ruined wedding? Look me in the eye and tell me you've done nothing else to capture his affection."

She looks her in the eye. "I also displayed situation-inappropriate absences of fear. Other than that, nothing."

"I think you're lying."

She tugs sharply on a loose flap of skin.

Wince. "How very futile for you. Since I'm not."

"We'll see."

And back to the skinning.

This continues to be multiple kinds of unpleasant!

The way Nahira keeps smiling at her probably doesn't help anything!

It really isn't.

Siva tries not to give her the satisfaction of eliciting a response, but--she isn't entirely able to keep quiet. The resulting noises are very different than the ones that resulted from Seofar trying to hurt her.

Nahira appreciates those noises very much.

She stops again when she's done both arms down to the wrist.

"Feeling more cooperative?" she inquires.

...Despite the large amount of discomfort, Siva still manages to give her a "you are an idiot" look. "I have been cooperating. I'm not lying."

"Do you think I don't know you're hiding something? Well, I'll have it out of you eventually, and then Seofar will be thankful that I stopped you before you had him completely."

Back to the skinning.

...She starts crying, quietly, little hitched sobs and occasional sharp whimpers.

Nahira is delighted by this development!

Fucking bitch, why can't she at least do something that hurts enough to set her on fucking fire--

Well, she isn't.

A particularly awful sweep of the knife produces a bitten-back shriek.

This feedback will be taken into account going forward!

That was predictable in retrospect. Which would be more helpful if the noises weren't involuntary anyway.

She tries harder not to give any tells. It doesn't entirely work.

Nahira is having such a lovely time.

But eventually, one does run out of skin.

Luckily, she has healing magic! A deep red glow washes over Siva's body, and she's as good as new, though surrounded by scattered strips of her own skin and paralyzed by the power of Nahira's soul.

She hates her so much--she can think more clearly, now, but without pain and under the paralysis there's not much she can do--

But they're not the only people in the room.

Seofar is angry. Nahira's suspicions sound unnervingly plausible, but Siva never lied, Nahira is wrong - and even if she'd been right, that doesn't excuse paralyzing Seofar in his own bedroom, that doesn't excuse taking what's his -

- that doesn't excuse hurting her -

It's wrong to feel compassion. Mercy debases his soul. But he's not sure he cares. He wants to tear Nahira limb from limb and hold Siva in his arms and ask if she's all right, and if he can't have what he wants then what's the point of being Tekhesin Seofar?

When he sees Nahira heal her, he renews his silent struggle against the paralysis. If he's going to somehow fight his way free, it had better be now, before Nahira skins her again. Seofar has no healing powers. He'd have to call for one, which would probably do even worse things to his soul than rescuing her in the first place.

He isn't sure he cares about that.

A blaze of crimson light fills the room, edged in deep orange with hints of yellow shading all the way up to white. Blood and fire. The sensation is indescribable, like his soul is turning inside out. Fuck what feels right, do what feels good, it seems to tell him.

Well, who'd argue with that?

It feels very good to shatter his paralysis and lunge for Nahira and wrap her in gold-edged crimson flames and throttle her before she can draw breath to scream.

What--

She doesn't realize what's going on, at first, it's so sudden--all she knows is there is red and gold light and the bitch isn't over her anymore--

And she sees Seofar strangling her and is overcome with a fragile but overwhelming hope.

If she looks, she can see the exact moment when Nahira's soul turns from this is who my bearer is to this is who my bearer was. Her paralysis breaks at the same time.

Seofar drops her, and looks uncertainly at Siva -

- flinches slightly, like he expects something bad to happen -

- but the rescue hasn't debased his soul at all, it works on new principles now, it's glowing gold-edged scarlet, more exalted than it's ever been before. This is not how souls are supposed to work. What the fuck.

Well, she feels it when the paralysis wears off.

She looks at him, and looks at his soul, and at Nahira's soul and body, and starts laughing, a hysterical thing that dissolves into sobs after a few seconds.

He hesitates, looking at her, for several seconds after that.

Then he steps over Nahira's body and sits beside her on the bed.

She keeps crying for a little while.

Eventually, though, the sobs peter out, and she lies there for a few more seconds before slowly levering herself into a sitting position.

"...Thank you," she says tentatively. She doesn't look afraid, exactly, but--lost.

Seofar's soul has changed how it displays his personality. Everything that was there ten minutes ago still is, but now on top of that there's a vague sense of ...but it's complicated; and, on top of that -

- it doesn't come in words, but if you had to write down a label, maybe it would go: learning compassion.

He doesn't say anything. He looks pretty lost himself.

Yeah she's just gonna. Sit here a minute.

Finally she leans over and tentatively hugs him.

...he wraps his arms around her and rests his cheek on the top of her head.

Her arms tighten and she starts crying again, more quietly.

It's very attractive, but he can guess that she probably doesn't want him to respond to that right now, and - he doesn't want to rape her. He wants to hold her. He wants her to be okay.

In a little while she stops crying again. She lets go of him with one arm to bring that hand up to scrub at the tears with the back of it, and then goes back to hugging him all the way.

After another few seconds, she says, "Nahira was wrong. I never lied. To either of you. But...there's stuff I didn't tell you. Not for the reasons she said. Some of it was--because I was scared, and some of it I didn't think you would believe me."

"My soul does lie detection," he says, smiling faintly. "No one else knows. I never talk about it."

"...Oh.

So, um. You noticed that I don't speak your language, and you...have some idea of how improbable that is, I'm guessing."

"Yeah. I'm a little surprised Kelora even managed to find someone with a translation power."

"So...where I'm from, it is also the case that civilization collapsed a while ago. But not quite as messily. And--before today, I had never heard of soulbearers; the magic I'm used to is completely different."

"...go on," he says consideringly.

"The usual way to do magic is--everyone has a piddly amount of their own. Enough to make a candleflame's worth of fire, or heal an injury not much worse than a papercut or a picked zit. If you put a lot of time into it, or work with other people, you can use it to make artifacts, which are less trivial.

Three thousand and some-odd years ago, the Ansati Empire had a magnificent magical infrastructure, including fountains of healing and youth. The Emperor--wasn't going to die, not naturally. But he wasn't immortal immortal. So his son the Crown Prince decided that rather than be a prince forever he was going to kill and usurp his father.

It didn't work. The country was destroyed by civil war, instead. But the thing is--the way he was going to usurp his father--there's a way for one person from my world to do nontrivial magic by themselves without taking weeks, and that's by fueling it with pain. Doesn't matter if it's yours or someone else's. So when his plans failed, the prince fucked off to a mountain and magicked himself a glorious castle, which he fed--and entertained himself--with the pain of people he kidnapped specifically for the purpose. I don't know where he got them from to start with, but for the past several centuries he's been getting them, one every few years, from the capital of Nathureme, one of the countries that rose in the wake of the Ansati Empire's fall."

"...That sounds... bizarrely familiar," Seofar says slowly.

"That was my reaction when Kelora explained you."

"I can see how it would be..."

He trails off into a pensive silence.

Yeah.

"So when I moved to the capital, he showed up at a party I had been convinced to attend. I--wasn't as paralyzingly frightened of him as everyone else, so he noticed me.

He asked me to dance. I said yes. We did. He was--impressed with me. Said he'd rather make me happy than torture me, and I said the two weren't mutually exclusive, and..." she trails off. "Things--went from there. I love him. He loves me. When I said I fell asleep snuggling my boyfriend I meant him."

"...huh."

He smiles slightly. Making her happy and torturing her are very compatible, he has noticed.

Quietly, almost shyly: "I love you, too."

...he's not sure what to do with that, but... he thinks he likes it.

He hugs her some more.

Hugs. "The other major thing I didn't tell you was that Kelora told me how to manifest my soul and I did it; it's in one of the pockets of the dress you tore off me."

He blinks.

"That was fast," is the first response that comes to mind. "You can't have been in this world more than half a day and you're a soulbearer already?"

"...Among the weird coincidences is the fact that my boyfriend also had a best friend who liked breaking people. He showed me a picture of her, she even looked the same as Nahira. He said if anyone could set something up to come back to life several millenia after dying it would be her and if I ever saw her I should do whatever it took to stay out of her clutches. I wanted every advantage I could get if I was going to be be on the same continent as Nahira, let alone the same castle."

"...that... makes a lot of sense," he says.

He looks over at Nahira's body, trying to decide whether he regrets killing her. He concludes that he doesn't. He hugs Siva.

Hugs. Hugs are really good right now. "So...what happens next?"

He considers this question for a moment.

He concludes, unhappily, "Politics."

"I have literally no idea how to do politics," she says after a moment.

"Mm."

Hug.

"...I might just bring Kelora to the imperial capital, tell my father 'fuck it, I'm done, here's your granddaughter, enjoy cleaning up my mess', and wander off. Except that I don't know where to wander off to. And I don't think I want to be on the same continent as Linsi-kelen Aeleva when she finds out her son vanished from his bed in the middle of the night in my castle."

"If my boyfriend figures out how to come rescue me you could probably wander off to his castle," she suggests. "Or somewhere else in my world."

"That sounds like an excellent way to avoid getting vengefully incinerated!"

...She giggles. "Just don't piss off Anlei."

"Oh? And who's Anlei?"

"She's another pain mage. My boyfriend tried to kidnap her so she set him on fire, twice."

Snort.

"And then they made up and she introduced him to her girlfriend who is, like, wayyyyy more extreme a masochist than I am."

"...really," he says, intrigued.

"Yyyyep. As in, if he can figure out how to inflict enough pain without killing her, my boyfriend could run the whole castle off her without bothering her."

"The castle takes maintenance?"

"Yeah, if he doesn't keep feeding it it'll blow up, taking a decent chunk of Nathureme with it. Pain magic's pretty volatile."

"Huh."

"It's also tricky to control, the first few times I tried doing anything with it it blew up in my face. Fire is basically what pain magic does if you don't tell it to do something else instead."

He laughs softly. "Sounds like my kind of magic."

"Well, it would, considering."

He finds that he is petting her hair. This seems like a good thing to be doing. He continues.

It is a good thing to be doing. She approves. ...She considers something. She asks: "Can I kiss you?"

...he blinks, then smiles. "All right."

She brings one hand up to his cheek and then leans in and kisses him.

This is not an activity he has a huge amount of experience with, but he enjoys it anyway.

His lack of experience isn't deterring her from enjoying it either. She makes a sort of pleased sighing noise.

That is a good noise. He wants more of that noise.

Mm, he can have it, then.

Good! He likes getting things that he wants!

And Siva likes giving people she likes things that they want! What a convenient arrangement this is.

Mmhmmmm.

After a little more kissing, he waves a hand and casually incinerates Nahira's body. Her soul rolls under the bed.

Siva glances back at this, makes a mildly inscrutable facial expression, and then goes back to kissing Seofar.

This is a good thing for her to be doing.

Yes, yes it is.

"It's a pity I didn't have any healing water on me, when I vanished," she muses between kisses. "After what she did to me I could use some bleeding from normal wounds, as a palate cleanser..."

"I could find another healer, but I don't know of one offhand..."

"Pain magic can do healing," she says thoughtfully. "I have some experience with it. We'd have to be careful, though, it's slow and I'm not very good at anything other than straightforward repairs, it's not like with the healing water where I can take a swig and go from death's door to perfect health in seconds..."

"I like the sound of this healing water." He kisses her again.

"It's incredibly convenient. And the reason I wear dresses with pockets that can conveniently hold my soul, so that I can carry bottles of the stuff around. But it would be uncomfortable to sleep like that, so sadly my pockets were empty." Kiss.

Kiss.

"Well." He glances at the remains of her dress. "I'm a little sorry I ruined it, then."

Shrug. "The dresses come from magic wardrobes in the castle, it's no big loss." Kiss.

"But you don't have a magic wardrobe here," kiss, "so you'll have a harder time finding pockets conveniently big enough for your soul."

Kiss. "Everyone else seems to," kiss, "wear theirs openly," kiss, "should I not?" kiss.

"It takes time to get it set so you can wear it - the jeweler can't touch it, see - and yours will be harder than most, it's big for a soul that shape."

Kiss. "I'm not sure I want it set in something. I was thinking more, like, wrapped in wire that I could take it out of when I wanted to fiddle with it. I expect to want to fiddle with it." Kiss.

Shrug. "It'll still take time." Kiss. "Do you have a soulname yet?"

Kiss. "No." Kiss. "Explain the custom?"

He laughs and shakes his head. "I'm sure you'd be better off asking someone else, but all right... Soulnames represent something about your soul. What it looks like, what it does, who you are. You pick one when you become a soulbearer, and then it's a title that can supersede all other titles - Tekhesin Seofar, Dekha-fanshel Esarkan. People only call me Prince when they want to insult me by reminding me I don't technically rule anything by right."

"...I dunno which language I wanna pick mine in."

He laughs. "Well, do you know what you want it to mean?"

"Delightful."

...he giggles.

He has Serik's giggle.

Aww.

"So what's Nuimena for delightful?"

"Nentiane." Kiss. "Which you certainly are."

"Nentiane. It's pretty. I like it," she decides, and kisses him again.

Mmm, kisses. This is a good activity.

"At some point we should go tell Kelora we're getting the fuck out of here," he observes idly after a minute. "But no rush."

"...Yeah, although I really should let her know I'm okay. She's probably--not worried, exactly, but..."

"...yeah."

"...Fair warning if we're ultimately fucking off to my boyfriend's castle, uh, he has a daughter too. And she lives there. And doesn't hate him anymore."

"...how the fuck did he manage that?"

"An exchange we had the first time I talked to her--I told her that the fact that he tortured people didn't deter me from liking him because me liking him didn't make him do it any more than he otherwise would, and she said it had taken her several centuries to reach the same conclusion."

"...huh."

"Yeah." Sigh. "Part of me wants to reassure her sooner rather than later and part of me wants to self-injure attractively and then have more sex with you."

He laughs.

"I think I know which one of those I prefer. She'll keep."

"Okay--I'd better grab my soul, first, though, it does pain and it takes more than I'm willing to inflict on myself in injury right now to heal."

"Sure." Kiss.