Directly in front of her is an expanse of green grass artfully dotted with colourful flowers and sloping upward toward an enormous, elaborate, stunningly beautiful palace, the sky behind it glowing with the fading colours of a recently concluded sunset. To her right, the steeper upward slope of a mountainside. To her left, a calm lake, and the unnervingly intense wary stare of a girl in a white dress crouching by the lakeshore. The hems of the dress trail in the water, but it is otherwise pristine, not so much as a speck of sand.

--Okay.

Given the curse that stare...probably doesn't mean anything good, but that at least appears to be a woman, so it at least probably doesn't directly mean the obvious not-good thing.

Sigh.

She has no idea what plane she's on--most of the ones she knows of don't have humans, and the woman does appear to be human although she could easily be something else, polymorphed. She might as well try the languages she knows before wasting her Comprehend Languages.

"Hello, I'm very lost," she says in trade jargon.

She shakes her head and says something in a completely unfamiliar language.

Not really surprising. She repeats herself in Celestial, Infernal, Auran, Yretani, Kladzek, Rrrn'thal, Lissamere, and Saljez, although she doesn't especially expect any of them to work.

The woman in the white dress shakes her head once per language, looking increasingly nervous and tense as the list goes on.

Yeah okay.

"Comprehend Languages," she incants in Yretani. Not very creative but whatever.

"Hello, I'm very lost," she says in the language the woman spoke to her with.

"- what are you - doing - how - never mind that," she says, shaking her head. "Leave. Now. Get off this mountain as fast as you can."

She's been in more than enough combat situations to not question it when someone says something like that in that tone of voice.

She tries to teleport.

It fizzles with the unpleasant mental sensation of spell failure.

She grits her teeth at her head's throbbing--that should not have failed, which means--

"I don't think I can. Why should I?"

"Jump off a cliff if you have to, it'll be better than what happens if he finds you."

She sighs.

"Unfortunately, I expect that if jumping off a cliff would work I would fail to do it if I tried. I'm under a curse."

" - what do you mean, a curse -"

"When I was young and stupid I said yes to a god and he subsequently took it badly when I tried to say no and now I can say no as much as I like and it's never going to matter. I have a sort of--quota. Even if I should be able to--fight them off, or get away, it doesn't work."

"- have you also tried killing yourself, because that would be my next suggestion."

"I tried that with the god when saying no didn't work and now I'm immortal."

"...You really need to get off this mountain."

"What is it about this guy that's got you so freaked out?"

"He's an all-powerful sorcerer who kidnaps people and takes them to his mountain and tortures them until the magic he uses to keep them from dying on him makes their minds stop working."

"...Lovely."

"It takes a hundred and fifty years. I've been here for three. If you have forever - doesn't matter if you don't think it'll work, jump off a cliff anyway, you'd be better off anywhere else -"

"How powerful is 'all-powerful'? I'm a seventeenth-tier wizard..."

"I don't know what that means."

"You have sorcerers here but not wizards?"

"- 'sorcerer' just means 'person who does a lot of magic', 'wizard' means the same thing but it's an older word, and they're neither of them very precise because most people - aren't one, couldn't be - the way you get more magic than the tiny bit everyone has is by torturing people and he's nearly the only one who even knows how..."

"...Okay! I promise I didn't torture anyone to progress beyond cantrips. That is not how the magic I'm familiar with works. ...Why do you not have a word for cantrips."

"I don't know, what's a cantrip."

"It's the tiniest piddliest kind of spell."

"Well, I don't think we have them. And I don't think we have things like your curse either. Maybe none of your magic works here and you could just leave."

"...Unlikely but worth trying. Which way off the mountain?"

She points across the lake. "Just keep going down. There's not exactly a road but there's not exactly obstacles either."

"Okay. Thank you." 

She leaves. 

Partway down her legs give out under her.

She gets up and tries to take another step down. She collapses again. She gets up and tries to walk up the mountain. This succeeds. She sighs and walks back to where she started.

The woman by the lakeshore is still there.

"...I'm glad there aren't any gods in this world," she says when she sees Elodea come back.

"I mean, they're not all bad. They empower clerics, who do most of the healing." She sighs. "But I don't blame you for feeIing that way based on my example. He'd probably find me even if I did get get off the mountain."

"- what, how -"

"The curse....manipulates potential attackers."

"- manipulates, like, even if they wouldn't have done it by themselves -?"

"That only if they're unusually mentally malleable. More often it arranges circumstances so someone who would has the opportunity."

She has looked awfully edgy this whole time but, it turns out, it is possible for her to look even edgier.

"I think -" she starts, and then shakes her head and tries again. "It's -" no. "If he -" no.

She takes a deep breath and concentrates on getting her words in order.

"If Serik finds out there's someone on his mountain with a curse that makes people want to rape her, I think he's going to have about the same opinion of your gods that I do," she says, with visible effort. "He doesn't like - things like that. You might be better off than I thought."

"...Maybe."

"He's - he doesn't lie," she adds. "He does a lot of bad things but lying isn't one of them."

"Sounds like a character."

"Yeah."

"Also," he says, materializing out of the air, "I hear my name whenever it's spoken on this mountain. You're making interesting choices today, Luar."

She stares tensely at him.

"Was I wrong though."

"You were not."

"Fun," she says, stepping between the two of them and looking him square in the eye.

"Hello," he says. "Do you imagine you are helping."

She stops and thinks for a moment and then says, "Reflexes, sorry."

"Would you mind giving us a moment?"

...She looks like she kind of would mind, but says, "Okay," and steps out.

"Thank you."

He looks at Luar. "I'm impressed, and I'm not going to give you any trouble over this. You can go."

She relaxes substantially, nods, and then picks up her skirts and hurries off along the shore.

Elodea sighs and sits down.

Serik returns his attention to her.

"I'd say pleased to meet you but I'm really not. Why are you cursed -"

"When I was a stupid teenager a god wanted me and I was flattered and said yes and it turned out being wanted by this particular god was less fun than advertised. I tried several different methods of escape before resorting to suicide, after which I woke up immortal, released, and with what was apparently supposed to be an incentive to regret succeeding at getting away from him. Coupla times a century he saunters by and offers to fix it if I come back. I have no idea why the creep's obsessed with me in particular but there we go."

"...I have done some pretty impressively fucked-up things in my time but wow."

"Yyyyep. Sorry for being a bit of a bitch to start, I have had a pretty shitty week."

"I can imagine you might have. Would you like a guest room, I have several."

"That sounds nice. The week has actually been really low on rape, I apologize in advance if the curse gets cranky."

Snort. "Well, thank you for that. Preferences for location and decor? Oh, and my daughter has the northwest wing and doesn't like to be disturbed."

"Not gold. If you were worried, the curse only cares about heterosexual rape, your daughter isn't at risk even to the extent you are."

"'Not gold' -? All right. How about near the main dining hall, it's a reasonable walk from here and the view's nice."

"Sure. I was held captive for about half a year by a dragon with a hoard full of the traditional kind of shiny couple years back, I am kind of sick of gold as an interior design choice."

He laughs as he starts for the castle. "A dragon, wow. We don't have those around here."

"That's kind of funny, given that that poor woman back there described you as a 'sorcerer' and my translation spell is insisting that corresponds to a word in my language that refers to someone who has innate spellcasting abilities due to having dragon blood."

Snort. "No. Means something like 'wielder of semi-mythical powers'. Which is fairly appropriate."

"My powers are arguably semi-mythical but the word for what I do--which my translation spell is insisting on corresponding to 'wizard'--is the same as it was when I was a wee apprentice. And 'sorcerer' could mean someone at my level, or someone who hasn't figured out anything more than a few pretty sparkles."

"...yeah, your magic and our magic don't sound much alike."

"Quite. I don't have to torture anyone at all!"

"I haven't generally considered it much of a burden but I'm aware I have unusual interests."

"I mean, if I did have to, I have a helluvan advantage finding acceptable targets. I can't say I'd be dreadfully put out."

"Acceptable targets?"

"I mean, I'd feel a lot more comfortable torturing someone who'd just raped me than a random innocent."

"Suppose that's fair."

"...I'm trying to come up with a way of saying 'I usually kill them anyway' that doesn't sound like a threat. Um. It is only usually and even if you did most of the reasons don't apply?"

"You can't kill me, and if you somehow could I wouldn't recommend it. Part of the arrangement for my immortality involves a carefully-stabilized supply of enough pain magic that if you loosed it I wouldn't expect this mountain to still be standing afterward."

"Helluva deadman's switch. Yeah, that'd be one of the reasons--it probably doesn't speak very well of me that I'm more likely to hunt down rapists who can't put up enough of a fight to make my life even more unpleasant but there we are.

I killed the silver dragon but that was because he was an ongoing problem, if he'd just fucked me and flown off I wouldn't've bothered."

"I'm also not going to rape you but I figure you'll notice that on your own, the other thing would've come up as a nasty surprise or not at all."

"I hope you won't take offense if I don't entirely take your word for it? I mean, I totally believe that you intend not to rape me, but, uh, if the curse didn't think it could make you one way or another it probably wouldn't've let me get dropped here. Or would've let me walk off the mountain."

"Your curse evidently doesn't know me as well as it thinks it does."

"Either that or it's got more mind-control options up its sleeve than its displayed so far, I suppose."

"...I'd say I can leave if you don't want to risk getting mind-controlled, but, uh, I demonstrably cannot do that. No hard feelings if you wanna dump me somewhere, though."

"I'll think about it."

"Sorry. It probably doesn't have more mind-control options up its sleeve, for what it's worth, I went a month without getting raped once a few centuries ago and it didn't pull anything like that then."

"How'd you manage the month?"

"Stuck in the desert with five other people, three of whom were women and the other two of whom were delightfully honorable. Slept with one of 'em anyway, he was a real sweetie, but sadly the curse isn't appeased by consensual sex."

"I really don't think much of this curse."

"It's really dumb and petty. And, like, I can game it a little--if I tell someone about it and swear up and down I won't have any hard feelings if they succumb to it but don't, like, actually invite them to have sex with me, that works at least sometimes."

...he laughs.

"It's a fine line, very easy to be just a bit too consenting-by-implication."

"Sounds inconvenient."

"It's so inconvenient. On the other hand, it's not quite as inconvenient as being dead, of old age or otherwise."

"True enough."

"How old are you?" she wonders. "You look human, and humans usually live less than a century, but you did say you were immortal..."

"A little shy of three and a half thousand."

"Oh, huh, that's more than three times as old as me. I've never met a human older than me before."

He laughs.

"And I mean literally never, there weren't many around where I grew up, I didn't meet one until I was a hundred and ten."

"It's been thousands of years since I wasn't the oldest person in the world."

"Do you have literally anything other than humans here?"

"Nope!"

"Well, humans and one elf now, I guess."

"Guess so."

They've reached the castle by now and are navigating the corridors; they pass by a dining hall, which has a huge window with a stunning view of the lake.

"Your castle's really pretty, by the way."

"Thank you! I'm proud of it."

"Oh, did you make it?"

"Yep. And have been improving it ever since."

"Ooh, how long ago?"

"I was twenty-six when I moved up here."

"Wow."

"Hmm?"

"Mostly the fact that this place makes way more sense as the product of three millennia of development but with a dash of curiosity about things that're probably none of my business."

"Hm?"

"Which things?"

"Why'd you move, is that when you became immortal, how are you immortal..."

"The story of my misspent youth! I was an imperial prince, my prospects of ever inheriting weren't looking good, I tried to take over, fucked it up very badly, realized standing in the mageblasted ruins of the imperial capital that I hadn't really wanted an empire to begin with, and decided to find out what I really wanted and do that instead, and it turned out to be this."

"That's pretty impressively disastrous! Why were your prospects bad, least favored of the proverbial three sons?"

"Nope, only child, but in those days we had fountains of youth and healing all over the place and my father didn't have any exciting hobbies."

"...Fountains of youth?"

"Mm? Yeah, why?"

"Most forms of birth control aren't very reliable when you have a lot of partners not interested in cooperating with them and my immortality isn't heritable."

"I can almost always catch it before--before it's really a baby--and the immortality doesn't cover them while they're in the womb, either, but--

I've carried to term six times in my life and given the child up each time because I couldn't bear to raise a son or daughter and then watch them wither and die."

"—the original fountains still work, in the old capital—mind you, the old capital is a clusterfuck of ancient magical hazards—"

"The first five are almost certainly dead of old age by now but--the youngest one's still a baby--I have antimagic--"

"...antimagic?"

"Yeah?"

"That's - not a concept, here, I'm not sure what'd happen if you tried it. I can visit the old capital just fine, anyway, but the youth water works a dose at a time, I'd have to keep going back every half-century or so."

"She's half-Elf half-dragon, is a half-century how often you'd have to do it if she were human? Because elves and dragons both live a lot longer than humans."

"Yeah. Well, I suppose we don't know if our humans are your humans any more than our sorcerers are your sorcerers."

"How long do humans live, here?"

"A hundred years or so at the outside, without help?"

"Sounds about right. Elves live about five hundred years, and dragons--actually vary by subtype, but silver dragons can live up to two millenia if they don't force seventeenth-tier wizards to involuntarily experience the miracle of childbirth."

—snort.

"When I said he was an ongoing problem it wasn't actually the keeping me captive thing."

"...mm. Yeah."

"So now I get to hope one of the spellbooks I looted from his hoard both is decipherable and contains plane shift, I guess."

"Mm?"

"I don't actually have that one and would need it to find her."

"...that's not exactly the answer to my question..."

"...My magic comes in discrete spells that you have to prepare from spellbooks?" she tries.

"There we go. Mine - not exactly. D'you want the basics of magical theory? Luar seems to have gotten as far as 'sometimes there's torture' but I bet she didn't get into the details."

"She got as far as 'you can do tiny stuff without but need torture for anything bigger than I'm assuming the equivalent of a cantrip.' I would love the basics of magical theory."

"So - there isn't a word here for 'someone who can do magic' any more than there's a word for 'someone who has a nose'. Everyone can do the tiny stuff. You have to put in a little time if you want to figure out how, but you don't need to learn it out of a book or anything, it's safe and reasonably easy to figure out by yourself, just a little tedious. Light a candle, heal a pinprick, make a tiny ball of light - that general scope of thing. The other thing you can do with ordinary magic is make artifacts, like a magelight - " he gestures at one of the floating lamps hovering by the walls. "They usually don't float, that's just me showing off. One of those would take somebody between a week and a month to make, depending how good they were and how fancy they wanted it and how much time they put in per day. More than one person can work on the same artifact, though, and that's where things really start getting exciting. It took thousands of people almost a hundred years to build the first fountains, back in my grandfather's day. They built a lot of excellent things that way, but the fountains were the really important part. And then I came along and ruined everything, of course, which brings me to the subject of pain magic."

"Very different from what I'm familiar with," she nods.

"Normal magic is very safe and static. You'd have to get pretty clever to do any major damage with it on purpose; it's almost inconceivable that somebody might manage it by accident. Pain magic, on the hand - the most common result of learning how to do it is accidentally setting yourself on fire. Much more than a candle's worth. It's - active, it moves, if you don't keep on top of it it'll jump out and do something, and the thing it does is usually explode."

"I think wizardry is more like nonpain magic than pain magic. All my explosions are deliberate."

"Yeah. Well. I happen to be really good at handling power. Which means I'm really good at pain magic, probably better at it than anyone else in history, and I figured out how to do structured pain magic - things like spells and artifacts. 'Spell' is barely even a word anywhere but this mountain, because you can't really build one with ordinary magic, it won't hold still long enough without something to attach to. I was still figuring out the concept when I built my immortality, which is why a lot of the pieces are tied to the mountain when they don't strictly have to be. Pain magic is way more powerful than ordinary magic, but structures made with it tend to come loose after a while and start shifting around, or unravel completely and explode, and I really didn't want either of those things happening with my immortality. The best I could manage at the time was something that'll be fine as long as I keep feeding it more power. Since I was planning to torture people anyway, it didn't seem much of a hardship. All my other stable spells are built on the same foundation, more or less."

"...Wow."

I kinda wanna see if my antimagic works against your magic."

"I kind of don't want to test it in any context where it might make my foundation spring loose."

"That's fair. Under what circumstances might it do that and not do that?"

"Well, since I haven't the faintest idea how it works..."

"My heaviest-hitting antimagic is Mordenkainen's Disjunction, which destroys nearly all magical effects within a forty-foot radius."

"...If you did that anywhere near me or my castle and it succeeded even partly, I'd expect big trouble. Maybe not the entire mountain getting blown off the map, but trouble."

"Yeah. A normal antimagic field would probably be safer, if I wanted to try it anywhere near here. Ten foot radius and it suppresses magical effects without destroying them."

"Might still fuck things up but I could at least probably handle it."

"Naively I'd expect that if it did anything at all--and you were outside the radius--it would make a bit of castle not actively do magical things, but not affect the underlying structure."

"Yeah. But if for whatever reason it decided some crucial piece of the whole thing was a 'magical effect'..."

"I don't think it would work like that but then I don't know your magic very well. Can you, I don't know, enchant something separate from your base spell and then carry me somewhere out of range of the mountain and get out of range so I can experiment on it? ...And this couldn't be today, I can't cast either of those spells today."

"Just as well, that wouldn't be trivial to accomplish. —what do you mean you can't cast them today?"

"I didn't prepare them this morning. --I have to prepare spells ahead of time, and I have to get a minimum amount of rest between instances of doing that."

"Your magic sounds kind of stupid."

"At least it doesn't do anything worse than give me a headache if I fuck it up."

"That I will grant you. I still prefer my way."

"Seems more convenient if we each like our own best."

"Suppose so. Anyway, I'm sure I can come up with a magelight or two by tomorrow. What do you think of these guest rooms—" he gestures down a cross corridor.

"Nice!"

He smiles.

"Why do you have cool guest rooms?"

"I just really like decorating them. I have never as such had a guest."

"Victims don't count by virtue of victimhood or by virtue of not staying in the castle?"

"Little of both?"

"Fair enough, I suppose. ...Um, awkward question but kind of inevitable once I started comparing the swan thing to my own captivity: you said you had a daughter, was her mom a swan?"

"She was not. Iri was four when I fucked up everything. I did my best with her but, since unlike me she is a good person, she still doesn't like me very much."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I sort of hadn't expected to be, given that, uh, you are in fact kind of a terrible person, but there we go. Oh well, at least you seem to be the genuinely affably evil type instead of the faux affably evil type."

He snorts. "There's types?"

"Oh, sure. I mean, not that you can fit any person in a nice neat little set of boxes or anything, but people do tend to have things in common."

"So what defines the difference between 'genuinely affably evil' and 'faux affably evil'...?"

"Real affably evil is when you do things like torturing people or sacrificing virgins to dark gods but also have, like, genuine relationships with people who don't happen to be your victims and can generally be taken at face value when being nice. Faux affably evil invites you to dinner and offers to let you stay over in their very cozy beds when it turns out to be raining and then dusts the pillows with poison or arranges for a knife in the back in your sleep or what have you."

"The first one's a reasonable description of me. Second thing sounds exhausting."

"I mean, it's also possible to be both, have a family and friends you love and be a snake-in-the-grass to everyone else, but I don't disagree."

"I hate being deceptive and I do as little of it as possible."

"Neato. That sounds much easier to deal with than the alternative."

He laughs. "Yeah."

"If there's one thing more tiring than lying all the time it's dealing with people who lie all the time."

"Yeah, you're not wrong."

She starts to say something when one of her legs suddenly spasms, not a lot, but enough that she falls over and hits her head against the doorframe. She crumples to the ground, scarlet blood bold against her silver hair and grey skin.

She makes a choked sobbing sound, tries to rise to her feet, fails. The blood is getting kind of everywhere.

He stares at her for a long moment, and then - vanishes.

She lies on the floor until the wound on her head scabs over and she can stand without being so dizzy she falls over again, considers a bath, decides she is not competent to do that and can just prestidigitate the sheets clean in the morning, and collapses into bed. You are really not supposed to go to sleep with a head injury but the reasons do not apply to her. She sleeps.

In the morning there is a cluster of very pretty bottles of water just outside her door.

Ooookay?

By the time she discovers this, she has bathed, magicked the bed blood-free, and prepared new spells for the day including antimagic field and Mordenkainen's disjunction. She opens one of the bottles and sniffs it in case it's some obvious non-water thing that just happens to also be transparent.

A note tucked under one of the bottles says, From the healing fountain.

Huh. Okay.

He showed up pretty promptly when Luar did it...

"Serik? I've got the spells prepared, whenever you're ready."

Half a minute later, he materializes.

"Hi! The water bottles were a nice idea, but I was fine by the time I found them." She no longer bears visual evidence of last night's mishap.

"They're for next time. It seems obvious there will be a next time. You wouldn't have needed five just for last night."

"For next time--oh. I hadn't actually put together that it was the curse that did that, possibly because of the head injury."

Snort.

"Of course that sort of assumes that next time I'm either near enough my room to take advantage or it didn't break on a fall down the stairs or something. Ugh, my stupid fucking curse."

"They're not going to break, and," a bottle materializes in his hand, "I've got plenty more." The extra bottle vanishes. "I just figured while I was going all that way I might as well give you some too."

"Well, thanks. I do appreciate it."

Shrug. "So. Should I take you somewhere off my mountain and give you some artifacts to play with?"

"Sounds like fun to me!"

"Fly you there?" He offers his hand.

"Ooh, flying, sure," she says, taking his hand.

And then they are wind. It's - definitely an experience.

They fly out of the castle and down the mountain and past a considerable number of hills to a charming little field of wildflowers, where they materialize again.

She stumbles but doesn't fall over. "Wow."

—he grins.

"That was cool! My flight spell is nowhere near that trippy."

"If you think that's trippy you should see lightning."

"Ooh. Is that an offer?"

"On the way back, if you want. I don't like to fly lightning too often; it gets me places fast but if I'm going any distance then everybody within ten miles of the route knows I went by, and that's flashier than I generally like to be."

He materializes three very pretty lamps and hands them to her. "Will this do for experimenting?"

"Should do!"

She carries the lamps about fifty feet away from him, and incants, "antimagic field."

Absolutely nothing happens.

"...Huh."

"Huh," he agrees.

She cancels the antimagic field, and utters a short, harsh word.

There is an impossibly bright light and an impossibly loud noise, and then there is a problem.

Everything is pain and he has no idea what's happening but he's very sure he needs to be doing something about it. Before he really has time to think, he pulls power and reaches for make it stop.

Making it stop turns out to be fairly simple, just a matter of throwing a lot of power at it very quickly. He can do that. The enormous seething blob of something-more-than-fire where Elodea used to be first slows, then stops, then shrinks, and finally disappears.

The charming little field of wildflowers is gone. Several of the hills are gone, and the ones beyond them seriously damaged. The air smells scorched.

He steps up to the edge of the smoking crater and peers down into it. As an afterthought, he materializes himself some clothes to replace the ones vaporized in the blast.

At the bottom of the crater is a blackened skeleton, already starting to un-char and regenerate its viscera.

He whisks down there as a breeze, materializes a bottle of healing water, and pours it over her.

She regenerates the rest of the way, and then there is a beautiful woman lying naked at his feet, streaked lightly with the slight bits of blood that had leaked out because of nonzero viscera and zero skin and breathing heavily.

"You all right?"

"Ow. What the fuck."

"Don't look at me, I don't know a thing about how your magic works. Looked like you turned everything in a forty-foot radius into what fire wants to be when it grows up. I assume it's not usually supposed to do that."

"I have cast this spell before! It did not do that!"

"I recommend not trying it again. If I hadn't been here, this crater would be a lot bigger."

She looks around.

"...I wasn't lying when I said my magic doesn't do accidental explosions, this is genuinely a first."

"I believe you. It's probably something like 'in this world, everything not being made of fire is a magical effect, sucks to be you'. Want me to fly you back to the castle? ...maybe not with lightning."

"Yeah, I think taking a rain check on the lightning is a good idea," she giggles.

He smiles wryly. He offers her his hand.

She takes it.

Whoosh.

The destruction of the landscape is even more obvious from this perspective. But it didn't get as far as the mountain, and there were no inhabited areas closer by than that.

They materialize in her guest room, her hand still in his. He lets go and steps back.

"The wardrobe'll give you clothes in your size, though I can't promise you'll find them fashionable."

"Thanks. I'm just glad I got paranoid about the disjunction and didn't bring any of my magic items, those'd be way harder to replace."

"I can imagine, yeah. Well - feel free to explore the castle. If you sit down at a table that looks like food belongs there, food will appear. There's magic bathrooms. You can call my name if you want my attention for some reason."

"So probably if I get lonely enough that hitting my head on a doorframe or what have you sounds more appealing than being alone. I'll see if I can decipher anything to the tune of plane shift, then."

"Have fun."

He whisks away on the breeze.

She retrieves clothes from the wardrobe and puts them on and sets to cryptography and magic study. She takes her meal breaks more based on when she gets bored than most strict definitions of mealtimes. She decrypts and studies magic some more.

It's almost a week later when she says "Serik," again.

He materializes.

"Yes?"

"I am so fucking bored."

...he laughs.

"Magic is, you know, cool, but I am slightly oversaturated on it right now."

"Well, what do you want to do instead? I could show you my library but that might be too much like more of the same..."

"Does your library contain books that are not about magic or cryptography?"

"Lots!"

"Might as well try it, then."

"It's this way."

To the library!

"Any luck so far?"

"Not yet."

"Mm."

"There's a lot of material to decipher, though. I'm kind of frustrated but I'm not discouraged."

He nods.

And here is the library! All eight floors of it.

"Nice library."

"Thank you!"

"I think this might be in the top ten biggest libraries I've ever seen!"

"If you know of bigger ones, my daughter will want to see them. Or just send me to copy all their books."

"This is great and way bigger than most libraries I have seen but the very biggest I've been to is much bigger. Fortunately I am friends with the owner of that one."

"Oh?"

"She's one of a small handful of people who knows about my curse and has, uh, similar opinions to you on the god in question. She's also technically-an-Empress of an empire that no longer exists, but I don't think she's the one who ruined it."

"How many ruined empires are there? I wouldn't think they were that common."

"It's a big world. I wouldn't say a lot, but..."

"Heh. Mine was world-spanning."

"That's probably easier when the world only has one species of person in it."

"Oh?"

"Some species are easier to emper than others! I can't really imagine most dragons recognizing an emperor."

"Well, I guess I wouldn't know."

"Yeah. 'Course, I shouldn't call myself an expert."

"Mm?"

"I'm a wandering vagabond of a wizard, not an anthropologist."

He laughs.

"And a lot of kinds of people I've encountered have mostly been--in the context of the curse."

"—yeah."

"So don't ask me about minotaurs. I have met dragons in friendlier context, though."

"- well now I want to ask you about minotaurs."

"Mostly nomadic, travel in tribes, significantly better-hung on average than most humanoids. To a painful degree."

...he laughs. "I admit I'm a little surprised you answered."

"Really? Why?"

"I would've thought you wouldn't want me thinking about it."

"Enh, if your self-control is good enough to survive what the curse throws at you, a little flirting is probably not gonna tip the scales."

"Well in that case, thank you very much for that mental image."

"You're welcome."

He smiles at her.

She bites her lip and flutters her lashes at him. "They're also very big on sharing."

Traces of the smile are still visible but now he mostly looks like someone who is very, very into the thought of her being gang-raped by minotaurs.

She giggles unrepentantly.

He shakes his head and grins. "You're really something."

"Well. I kinda had to be, to be okay all this time."

"Yeah."

"You're very hospitable."

"I'm trying to be!"

"It's working!"

"Glad to hear it!"

"You're very cute."

"Aww, thanks."

"You're very welcome."

She looks at the eight floors of the library again.

"If I try going up one of those staircases I bet the curse'll try to tempt you by throwing me down it."

The floor they're currently on is second from the top.

"You could just stick to this floor," he suggests, "it's at least all in Nathuremi - that's the language we're currently speaking."

"Oh, that doesn't matter, I finally permanentified my Comprehend Languages the day of the disastrous antimagic experiment."

"Well, that's one thing your magic does better than mine - I wouldn't have the first idea how to build a translation spell at all, let alone one that could do any language you put in front of it."

"It's not a terribly high-level spell, but unfortunately while I've managed to hack it enough to remove one of the more annoying features I haven't solved the bit where one can only cast it on oneself."

"Annoying features?"

"Normally it's a first-level spell that requires the caster to touch the person they're talking to or object they're reading in order to understand them; I managed to hack it to a second-level spell without that requirement."

"Neat," he says. "I think trying to use your magic system would make me want to set things on fire, but Iri might like it."

"Conveniently, my magic system has many options for setting things on fire!"

Giggle.

"Or ice! Or lightning! Or acid!"

"Fun!"

"There's also magic weapons that do those things, if you want the nifty special effects without trying to wrestle with the actual magic system."

"Ooh, that sounds like something I'd like to play with."

"Yeah. ...In the interest of trying to maintain a Good alignment, if I show you where to find, like, acid daggers, your victims aren't going to regret it, are they?"

"Trying to what?"

"Metaphysical moral higglety-pigglety."

"...?"

"...Okay, so there's these two moral axes, Good Neutral Evil and Lawful Neutral Chaotic. Some magic stuff interacts with where on the alignment chart you fall."

"...Have I mentioned I think your magic system is kind of stupid sometimes?"

"You have!"

"Well this is another one of those times. So there are actual magical consequences if you give me fun toys and I use them on my swans? Despite the fact that I have been doing this for thousands of years and it's not like new toys are going to make it worse?"

"Swans? Anyway, I didn't say if you use them on them, I said if they regret it."

"Oh, they turn into swans when the sun's up because I designed their immortality really badly and it burns out their minds after a while and the transformation slows it down. Having fun new toys is not going to make me any more terrifying than I already am."

"And you say my magic system has issues."

"It's not the system's fault, it's mine! If I'd known what I was doing I wouldn't have this problem!"

"Okay, fair."

"I don't mind so much when my problems are my own fault, because then at least I can learn from my mistakes."

"Anyway it's not just the magic system, I also risk your fellow Technical Imperial being disappointed in me if I meaningfully enable your torture habits."

"My torture habits were going along just fine without you."

"I was just checking!"

"Reasonable enough."

"I should hope so. Anyway, I've got a few shinies tucked away in my extradimensional storage space; if you want anything I don't have on me I can show you where I left the majority of the silver dragon's hoard I didn't take."

He beams.

"--Oh, fuck."

"What?"

"If I figure out plane shift and go back for the baby and optionally the dragon's hoard and you're not going to satisfy the curse after all there's a decent chance it wouldn't let me plane shift back."

"...that's a problem."

"Yes it is."

"You could - stay a while, try to figure something out - I might be able to duplicate the fountains and I could try to get them small enough to send with you," he says. "In case you can't come back."

"I don't mind staying a while--she'll be little for some time yet--but I've been trying to do something about this curse for over a thousand years to no avail."

"We don't have any minotaurs but I'm not the only rapist on the planet, I don't think it would be that much worse for the curse's purposes to have you here if it wasn't trying to keep you stuck on a mountain with the one man around who refuses to play its game..."

"Come to think of it I haven't actually tried leaving under my own power since you found out about the curse."

"I have no idea whether it still thinks it can outplay me."

"It's possible that it would continue to try to provoke you as long as I'm in your vicinity without forcing me to be in your vicinity."

"Maybe you can go another month without trouble that way!"

"Maybe."

"Mm?"

"Not really looking forward to what comes after that."

"...what, does it insist you catch up?"

"Not exactly but basically yeah. --It's as likely to enforce extra-horrible rape as extra quantity of rape."

"I genuinely can't tell if that face is 'your curse is awful' or 'I am imagining you undergoing rape that would kill a mortal woman and it is hot'."

"Oh, it was both."

"Why that man built lava golems with dicks I will never know. Because he is dead. Because that's what happens when you attack fifteenth-tier wizards with lava golem dicks."

He cracks up.

"I was picking volcanic ash out of places the sun don't shine for weeks."

Half-sympathetic snickering.

"Or that one time someone cast a size-increasing spell on a mountain ogre."

"What are mountain ogres normally like?"

"Ten feet tall and proportional."

"...nice."

"Less so from this end of things."

"True. But I assume you wouldn't be telling me these things if you didn't want me enjoying them."

"Partly that and partly that it's nice to have someone I can gripe to."

He smiles. "Happy to help."

"But yeah, decent share of the first thing."

"I definitely appreciate it."

"I know. It's cute."

He laughs.

"I wonder what kind of thing it would even arrange, here..."

"Its best bet would definitely be me if it weren't for the slight problem where I am absolutely not going to do it."

"Well, yes. But given that you aren't that doesn't give me a lot of information."

"Nothing nearly as exciting as lava golems or mountain ogres is available outside of this mountain; you're pretty much limited to ordinary people with at most ordinary amounts of magic, and it's hard to get really impressive when you can't affect an area bigger than the end of of your thumb. I suppose somebody else out there might've figured out pain magic but they won't have been doing it for centuries."

"Yeah. Maybe I'll just get kidnapped or something."

He looks at her thoughtfully.

"Hm?"

"Mm. Being tempted to ask for more stories."

"Well I do have rather a lot of them."