Her landing place is on the grassy shore of a calm lake, past the end of a row of charming little cottages. The peak of a mountain stands to her left, a shallower rise cradles the lake on her right, and straight ahead is the last cottage in the row, with a stunningly beautiful castle looming in the middle distance behind it.

The cottage door opens. A girl peers out. Grey dress a few shades up from thundercloud; blonde hair a few shades down from white.

The heap of bloodied silver-gold feathers and blackened fire-gold hair and twisted silver-blue metal shudders. Her injuries do not look like the kinds of things one survives.

With a groan of pain, she pushes herself up to look around. No demons in sight. That's good enough for her.

She lets herself fall back to a heap with a sound that might resemble a sigh of relief, but for the quiet whimper at the pain.

The girl stares at her for half a minute or so—

—and then comes out and starts trying to push her into the lake.

The heap makes an unhappy sound and twitches slightly at this treatment, but doesn't find it enough reason to move. She's trying to let her internal organs heal while she has the chance.

Actually, the lake water feels rather nice on her burns.

The girl shoves her out into deeper water and then dives and drags her under.

For about ten seconds, the heap doesn't struggle, docilely allowing herself to be dragged under.

Then there's a flare of silver-gold light, and the both of them are suddenly out of the water, and the winged woman is on top of the girl. She is unnaturally strong, despite her numerous injuries, and the girl is pinned beneath her almost easily.

"If that was an intended mercy," she croaks, "thank you, but it's not necessary."

yep it's cowering and shaking time now

Atreia pulls herself off of the girl and returns to being a heap.

"Sorry, I've - had kind of a shit day."

She pulls herself together enough to stop shaking and speak clearly.

"You need to leave," she says. "Now."

"Okay - why, and how far away do I need to get?"

"Off the mountain. Or you will wish you'd drowned."

The heap drags herself up and looks at Luar with an intense stare.

"What will make me wish I'd drowned, and do you want me to take you with me?"

She inclines her head slightly in the direction of the castle without looking at it.

"Don't take me with you, he'll just find us."

"Is he a demon?"

"—he's—"

Something about this question seems to be fundamentally puzzling.

"... Demons are creatures that would be able to sense certain things I could do to escape and I need to know if there are any. Typically contains some but not necessarily all of the following qualities: horns, wings, cloven hooves, forked tails, red pigmented skin tones, often associated with fire and brimstone, another word used is infernal...? They are usually not subtle."

"—that's—not."

"Okay," she agrees, and that has been more than enough talking in a crisis for her taste. "Thank you."

She painfully pulls herself to her feet, wincing. The woman glows again, the air subtly hums, and then - fades, her magic unspent. Atreia frowns.

"Can't aim a plane shift anywhere but where I came from, which - no. Which way do I walk?"

The winged woman does not look like she's in any state to do much walking.

...she points, somewhat dubiously, across the lake.

"Great," she sighs.

This is going to suck. She starts painfully dragging herself in the indicated direction, teeth gritted. It will take her a while to get there, but she'll manage it. Probably. If she doesn't collapse into a heap again.

Yeah this isn't going to work, is it.

Nnnnope. Down she goes.

"... Help?"

She catches up and tries to pull the woman to her feet. Not very successfully; she is not, in fact, all that strong.

"...I don't think you're going to get away," she says. "I could try to distract him but he'd know something unusual was happening even if he couldn't make me tell him what."

"That's exciting. All right. What does he do?"

"—he's—honest," she says. "You can't trust him with your safety, opposite of that, but you can trust him to mean what he says."

"Okay. I'm - going to just lie here, then. See if I can heal to a point where I can reasonably depart."

"He'll find you first. And then—" She shakes her head.

"We'll see," she says. "Thank you, anyway."

And now she's going to stop moving in favor of trying to heal as quickly as possible.

She sits down on the ground in her soaking wet dress and hugs her knees and doesn't say anything.

Atreia twitches her injured wing to a position it will heal better in, and doesn't otherwise stir. Her injuries are healing, but slowly.

She's subtly glowing.

A breeze gently ruffles her feathers, and a tall man wearing red and black materializes standing over both of them.

"Who's this?" he inquires of Luar.

She stares up at him in furious terror and doesn't answer.

Atreia shivers in discomfort at the feather ruffle. She shifts slightly to look at him.

"Esvethatreia. Or just Atreia, since that's less obnoxiously long. Hi."

"And what are you doing on my mountain?"

She considers.

"Bleeding."

"I can see that."

"I can do it elsewhere, if you'd rather. Just. Sort of hard to move."

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of requesting any such thing."

(The blonde girl is still staring tensely at him.)

"Yes, Luar?"

"—don't," she says, with visible effort.

"Oh?"

He regards Luar thoughtfully.

"And if I said - 'all right, come here then' -"

She stands up. She takes two steps toward him, wet skirts dragging on the ground. Two steps is all that's needed.

He gathers her into his arms and kisses her.

She cries silently and shakes like a leaf, but she doesn't pull away.

After a minute, he lets go of her.

"Normally I tell the 'take me instead' types that they don't know what they're asking for. You have no such excuse."

He brushes tears from her cheek with the backs of his fingers.

"There's more to you than I gave you credit for," he says. "All right, go on. I'll be polite to my guest and I won't come after you for it."

She nods.

She picks up her skirts and turns and hurries back to her cottage.

"Thank you," says Atreia quietly, a little in awe. The words seem pathetically insufficient. She only has a vague idea of how difficult that must have been, but that's more than enough to get by with.

She pauses briefly, almost like she's going to glance back, but keeps going instead.

"Well," he says, turning back to the bleeding heap of feathers. "Isn't today just full of surprises. I'm Serik. Pleased to meet you."

"Pleased to meet you, too." He's better than being dragged off to Hell to be tortured to death. Probably. "So far, anyway."

"As lovely as you are at the moment, would you like some help with," vague gesture to her current state, "that?"

"I suppose that depends on how you'd help. I'll be fine given time, but I don't know how I'd interact with anything you'd do."

"I can go by the old capital and pick up some healing water. It heals things."

"Sure. I'd appreciate that."

He shrugs, and vanishes.

There is a flash of lightning, high in the sky.

About five minutes later, there is another flash of lightning, and he rematerializes shortly afterward with a beautiful glass bottle, which he crouches to offer to her.

She has healed a little in the time he was away, but not very much. It's hard to heal from damage caused by unholy weapons and hellfire.

"Thank you." She accepts the bottle, peers at it briefly to assess it for any hidden dangers, then cautiously sips. Her damaged body begins to knit itself back together, noticeably slower than what the healing water usually provides. It takes the rest of the bottle to heal her completely, but she does heal.

"That's amazing, even with proper healing it'd usually take me a week to be back to normal," she says with a smile, standing with much less trouble than before.

(She's very lovely when she's not bleeding, too.)

"Substantially less amazing than usual, actually, it should've been done with you in less than half a minute and that was more like two. What happened to you?"

"Demons. Some of their weapons cause injuries that resist healing of all kinds. Some of their magic, too, but not as well."

"And what's a demon?"

"Creatures of highly varying intelligence but meagerly varying moral outlook, that as a whole want to slowly torture everything that isn't demonic to eventual death or insanity. Sometimes they like to mix it up and drag unfortunate victims off for breeding purposes so they can make more varied demons."

"Well, I'm hardly in a position to judge anybody's hobbies, but that's pretty fucked up."

"Yep. I uh. Kill them. With a flaming sword." She coughs, awkwardly. "It was really not working out for me that time."

"I noticed."

Snort.

"So I tried an experimental plane shift to dodge the inevitable drawn out death, and here I am."

"Lucky for you that Luar found you first, or we'd be having a very different conversation."

"Probably not one I'd be enjoying," she agrees.

"So what now? Planning to run back to your losing battle?"

"That sounds like a terrible idea. I only know how to get back to right where I was, which would be, ah. Suicide. I can figure out how to get somewhere safer given time, but leaving immediately would just be throwing my life away."

"And that would be a shame. If you need somewhere to stay in the meantime, I have this lovely castle full of until-now-totally-useless guest rooms."

She assesses him.

"And my proximity wouldn't tempt you to do anything I'd regret?"

"Oh, you're much less tempting when you're not lying on the ground in a bleeding heap," he assures her. "And I told Luar I'd be polite. I'm not one of those people who'll move mountains to keep their word, but I don't make false promises either, I wouldn't have said that if I thought managing not to rape one pretty girl was beyond me."

"I didn't know if you might be the sort of person that thinks it's possible to politely rape a pretty girl," she points out. "But yes, all right. Fair enough. I'll take a guest room, if you're still offering. It'll be easier to get somewhere I know from where I landed at, anyway."

"Sure. Are you a books sort of person, a gardens sort of person, an ostentatious decadence sort of person...? So I know which rooms to show you first."

"Books, gardens, possibly some side decadence if it's not too gaudy, in approximately that order."

"So we'll see what you think of the hall nearest the library." He turns to start walking toward the castle, along the path that separates the line of cottages from the lakeshore.

She trails along behind him, idly cleaning all traces of blood from her armor with magic as she goes. She'll need to repair it, too, but for now she can try to keep tempting the man of questionable power to a minimum.

"I have a daughter," he adds, "her name is Irikaino, she lives in the northwest wing. I'd rather you didn't go there uninvited."

"I won't," she agrees, nodding.

"Thank you."

"... What's she like? If I may ask?"

"...We have a somewhat difficult relationship, mostly because she's a much better person than I am."

"Ah. I'm sorry."

"Thank you."

Walking!

"To continue my trend of invasive questions, what makes raping pretty girls, ah. Appealing? If it wouldn't make being polite more difficult to answer."

He shrugs. "I can talk about it just fine but there's not a lot to say. Making attractive people suffer is hot. Especially when they bleed. Or cry. Or both. Also if I stop torturing people for a week this mountain explodes, but that's my own fault and you needn't feel sorry for me about it."

Blink.

"Why will the mountain explode if you stop torturing people?"

"So, pain magic. It's a thing. Notoriously unstable, but I invented a way to build structured spells out of it anyway because I'm just that good. Except that in the early days when I was designing myself immortality I wasn't good enough to make the structure fully stable, so the best I could do was to make it stay stable as long as I keep pouring power into it. I've been refining it ever since, but given that if I fuck it up it will kill me and my daughter and also level a handful of cities, I'm not just going to tear the whole thing apart and rebuild it from scratch, so it's slow going."

"So then there are two separate dilemmas here. Is there a quota of torture you have to reach per week for the mountain?"

"Yeah. Two separate dilemmas?"

"There's the fact that your mountain will explode if you don't torture anyone for a week, which is unfortunate but straightforward enough. Then there's the more personal and difficult dilemma of - I hesitate to phrase it as 'not having anyone that matches your kinks around,' but can't think of anything else that's quite so diplomatic. Would you be happy with someone that enjoyed suffering and was happy to be your victim?"

"I wouldn't object to volunteers, but it's been three thousand years and I haven't had one yet. Well, a handful of 'I told them they'd regret it and I was right' cases, nobody who actually enjoyed being tortured."

"Well, what kinds of torture do you usually conduct?"

"I don't exactly keep a list. Why, are you offering?"

"That would depend on the torture," she points out, a little wry. "I'm not offering to do anything I don't know the full scope of. But I dislike suffering and want to help you find something you find personally acceptable that avoids it."

"...I really can't just give you an exhaustive list ahead of time of all the things I might ever want to do. But if you did offer, it'd be 'all right, let's try some things', not 'okay, you're mine now', you know?"

"... All right. If I were to offer, what would you be tempted to try?"

"Depends. I don't want to risk killing you but it seems like you're harder to kill than I'm used to."

"You would have to try very hard to kill me," she agrees. "Essentially you'd have to not only make me want to die, but sincerely believe in my soul that I will never want to spend another second alive no matter the circumstances, including 'my torture is over and now I have hot chocolate and eternity to get better.'"

"Impressive. Well, I'm definitely not going to do that."

"Thank you. That would be the fate that I recently dodged; demons have a lot of practice at killing celestials."

"Sounds unfortunate. Also really hot," he says.

Snort.

"I'm shocked. So, knowing that you're definitely not going to kill me by accident, what would you want to try?"

"I'd like to see you bleed again. And - I've never met someone with wings before. What's it like having your feathers pulled?"

"Depends on which feathers you pull. Flight feather removal is anywhere from having a fingernail to a finger ripped off, depending on which of them you pull. Down feather removal is more, hm. The intimacy of ripping off one's eyelashes, but at a lesser degree of pain than the flight feathers. But that's relative, my wings are very sensitive."

"Hmm."

"Touching a celestial's wings without permission is approximate to certain types of sexual assault," she adds cheerily, for clarification.

"Hm." And now he's looking speculatively at her wings.

She looks faintly amused with this.

"I think I'd want to save wing play for a later date, though. I - very recently almost had one sawed off." She shivers a little, despite herself.

"Is that 'don't touch them at all' or 'nothing violent', because I admit to being very curious about how sensitive they are in a - nonviolent context."

"Nothing violent. Gently testing sensitivity would be - sort of soothing, actually. After."

"All right."

They reach the castle. The interior is tastefully decorated and lit by pretty little lamps which appear to be floating in the air for no reason at all. He leads her down a hall.

It's lovely.

"Are the floating lamps common, here?" she wonders, as she marvels.

"They are not!" he says, grinning. "I'm the only person in the world who can afford to throw magic around like that, and I enjoy being extravagant when I can get away with it!"

"Ah, I see. They're not precisely common where I come from, but there are a few uses to having floating, mobile lighting, and they're not difficult to make, so we have them. Not quite so numerous as these."

"Most people only know how to do ordinary magic, which is - very limited in scope. You can use it to build artifacts, slowly. But I can do in ten seconds what would take most people two months, so why not?"

"Makes sense. If we could make them in ten seconds we'd likely have them everywhere, too. It takes a few days to make one, for us."

"Yeah. How does magic work where you're from?"

"Celestials create a sort of personal aura of magic that we can direct to do different sorts of things. Without direction, it assists us in minor ways; augmenting healing, strength, volume of voice when singing or calling to a crowd, that sort of thing. Minor assistance with tasks. With practice, we can specialize and become better at augmenting specific uses for it, or switching between what it focuses on. With training, practice, and hopefully a smattering of talent, we can specialize further and learn how to push it in directions that aren't instinctual and use it to do a number of things, including shoving it into objects to enchant them to do various things."

"Huh. The way it works here is that everybody has about this much magic to start with," a candle-sized flame appears in the air over his hand, "and it can do a lot of things but nothing that affects more than that big a space at a time, and artifacts only slowly; but it's very stable and predictable, it never just goes off and does something you didn't tell it to. Then there's pain magic, which doesn't come in amounts smaller than about fifty times that, and if you don't keep on top of it the whole time you're trying to use it for something, it escapes, almost always in the form of an explosion. I set myself on fire a lot when I was first learning."

"That sounds uncomfortable. I can't say I've ever set myself on fire. The amount of magic we have available varies a bit, roughly scaling with personal contentment."

"Huh. A much friendlier power source than mine."

Snort. "No kidding. And no explosions if I mess up."

"I like playing with pain magic but I acknowledge that it's not the most convenient imaginable system."

"No. Mine isn't either, but it's certainly more so."

"Yeah."

They pass by a dining hall, which has an enormous window with a lovely view of the lake. "—I suppose I shouldn't take for granted that you eat the same things we do—"

"I can check if something's going to be nutritious or if it's going to horrifically poison me. With ordinary substances, anyway, I don't naively think it'll handle all magical substances well."

"The food here isn't magical, strictly speaking, it's conjured but once it gets here it's perfectly ordinary - you sit down at a table where food belongs and it appears in front of you. Took me a while to build that one, but it's amazingly convenient, I love it."

"It sounds it. I wouldn't even know where to begin in order to do that with my magic. It's less for outright creation and more for augmentation, though light and heat are both easy enough to make. But I'm getting distracted, shall we see if I can eat the food now, while we're here?"

"Sure."

She turns a chair sideways so she can sit comfortably with her wings, then accordingly sits. She was promised food?

Food appears! And dishes and cutlery!

"None of my furniture is designed for people with wings," Serik says wryly.

"That makes sense. Fortunately, chairs are a solvable problem! But it might be a bit more of one with, say, a really small bed. I might knock things outside of the bed over while stretching, or something."

Hmmm. This food is unfamiliar, but after a quick magical survey, it looks edible. She nibbles on something. Yep, tastes edible too, if kind of foreign.

"Unless I spontaneously collapse in half an hour from shock or something, I think I can safely eat your food," she pronounces.

"If you spontaneously collapse I'll dump a bottle of healing water over your head," he promises. "I'm pretty sure there's a room with a big enough bed on the hall I'm thinking of, but if not there's hundreds more. And I can always conjure you a bigger bed."

"Thank you. Conjuration's so useful."

He grins.

She smiles back. Then she looks thoughtful.

"... How willing would you be to perhaps help with the demon problem?"

He shrugs. "Depends. If it's possible they could actually hurt me, I don't especially want to go near them, but on the other hand if it's possible they could find my lovely mountain and bother me here, leaving them alone until they eventually do that seems like a poor choice."

"I don't know if they could actually hurt you or not. I could make a, a demon demo and poke you with an unholy weapon or something, if you like. I'm one of the few celestials that knows how to make them. It's possible they could eventually bother you here, though if it's anytime soon, it'd be to follow me, which. Uh. Sorry about that. I expect some investigation, but they, ah. Just became rather busy. They might not find the time to disentangle the complicated mess that was my experimental planar shift, and it would take time. But they might decide that an angel managing to make it past their enchantments is worth making time for. I don't really know."

"Are unholy weapons the worst they can manage? You wouldn't get far trying to make my life difficult by messing with - this," he gestures at himself.

"No, but they'd need time to figure you out before they could do much more. It'd be unholy weapons and hellfire to start. At a naive guess, if they figured out your mountain explodes if you don't torture anyone, they'd try to prevent you from doing that. First by transporting you somewhere with no one to torture, in order to wait you out. After that, I think they'd start trying to meddle in the workings of your magic, see if they can upset the balance you have, but I have no idea if they could manage it or not. I know how some infernal magic is structured, but with large scale complicated stuff I'm less able to predict what they can do."

"Sounds like I should put some time into figuring out travel between worlds."

Nod. "That'd be smart, yeah. If your magic can do it."

He gazes at nothing in particular for a moment, and then says, "Looks like it can."

Smile.

"All right, then."

"One of the very convenient features of magic in this world - both kinds, actually - is that when you try to do something with it, you get hints, and if the thing you want to do is impossible the hint amounts to 'no'."

"I don't have that, it's more trial and error. I suppose your magic wins in convenience at one thing."

"Apparently so!"

"And conjuration," she admits. "And probably a number of other things we haven't figured out, yet."

"With the slight flaw that you have to torture people to get to the really good stuff. And one of these days I'll figure out how to make my foundation spell self-sustaining and that won't be a problem anymore."

Nod.

"Oh, that reminds me, what's the weekly quota of torture required?"

"Mm - it's not very easy to describe. If I abandoned finesse and entertainment and just set somebody very aggressively on fire once a week until the spell settled down, it'd take a few hours or so."

"... Hellfire hurts more than ordinary fire," she observes. "And I've been engulfed in that often enough."

"I'm not sure how that compares. Especially because - if I burned you to ash, how fast would you come back?"

"It'd take a lot of effort to burn me to ash, the closer I get to being obliterated the more my body resists obliteration. If I did get completely burned to ash with ordinary fire, it'd take, mm. Six hours or so to regain corporeality, a day or two to full recover without magical aid of any kind. But when I'm conscious again I can focus on healing myself, which speeds up the process. Nine, ten hours total, if my magical aura doesn't take a hit out of nowhere and I were free to focus on healing, I'd estimate?"

"Yeah. With the kind of immortality I'm working with, it's a few seconds at most. The worse the damage, the faster you heal. So 'a few hours on fire' is - different, when it's that much fire and you're healing that fast."

She nods.

"Makes sense. And maybe it wouldn't match up the same way, I can't say I've been the kind of immortal you work with and then set on fire for hours, so I can't accurately compare. Hellfire's not the worst I've been through, just the obvious example of comparison. I'm not brushing off the experience, but I have had a while to gain a high pain tolerance."

"Hm."

Slight smile.

"Anyway. Onwards with the tour?"

"Sure."

Onwards!

Onwards!

The castle is so pretty.

It is!

Soon they reach a hall full of guest rooms. Serik wanders down it, looking thoughtfully at doors, and then opens one. "Yeah, see what you think of this one," he says, gesturing invitingly.

Well, in she goes, of course.

What's inside?

A really big bed.

Goodness!

"Yeah, that'll do," she asserts. "I like your decorating skills, by the way, this is all very nice."

"Thank you! Interior decoration is one of my favourite hobbies."

"It suits you. I enjoy gardening in my spare time, personally."

"I have gardens too but they get less personal attention. I have absolutely no use for all these guest rooms - well, until now - I just really enjoy making them look pretty."

Snort.

"I suppose offering your services to others is out of the question, otherwise I'd say you should go build houses for people and decorate their rooms."

"I really, really doubt I would get any takers."

She nods.

"I suppose that means I am your first client!" She looks at the room. "I'll take it. There, that was easy."

He giggles.

"Now I'll just need to unpack my things and settle in..." She glances around. She's not holding anything. "Done! Off we go, then."

Snicker.

Smile. ... Thoughtful pause.

"... Actually. I could use another set of clothes so I can peel off my armor, if you don't mind conjuring clothes. It's not actively painful but it's slightly uncomfortable."

"Magic wardrobe!" he says, pointing.

"Oh?" She checks the magic wardrobe, then smiles at the clothes inside.

"Well okay then, I continue to have no complaints about my guest room."

He grins at her.

She smiles back!

"... I um. Would you be willing to help with the armor? I'm pretty sure it's bent in a way to make it trickier than usual to get out of, I could possibly get myself out of it but it would take a while and might suck a bit."

"Sure," he says. "Is it magic, should I be worried about what will happen if I turn it into air and back to get it off you? The healing water travels fine that way but I don't know if your magic would."

"It is magic! And I have no idea, I've never dealt with enchanted things getting turned to air and back before. I could quickly enchant a really simple light and we could test it? If we break the armor, it's not the end of the world. I can enchant another set, it'll just take some time and a set of armor to enchant. Which you can presumably make?"

"I can, yeah. Sure, we can test it with a light."

"Can I have a small object to bestow light upon, then?"

Conjuration: so convenient!

He holds out his hand, and by the time he finishes the movement there is a glass flower in it, ruffly pink petals surrounded by a palm-sized spread of dark green leaves. "Does that work?"

She looks wryly at the flower, then back at him. She is kind of charmed by how he casually shows off his power.

"Yes, thank you. Give me a little while, this will take a few minutes."

Atreia takes a seat in the bed, wings unfolding to a comfortable position. She holds the glass carnation in her hands and closes her eyes.

There's a subtle hum to the air, and both she and the flower glow faintly with silver-gold light.

"Pretty."

"Me, the flower, or the visual effects? Because that second one is awfully self congratulatory," she teases, eyes still closed.

"The visual effects were what I was talking about, although you and the flower are both also pretty."

"Thank you."

The light around her dims and the light around the flower brightens incrementally, until she doesn't glow at all. The hum fades, and she opens her eyes.

"Here is your self congratulatory glowing flower."

He picks it up. It vanishes, and reappears in his other hand.

It still glows!

"All right. That seems good enough to test with part of my armor next - uh, do you have enough finesse with the air thing to just grab my gauntlets? They wouldn't take as long as the rest of it to re-enchant if they break."

"Sure. Here."

A gauntlet vanishes. It rematerializes in his hand. He offers it to her.

She peers at it.

"Enchantment's fine!" she happily proclaims. "Right then. Rest of the armor too? Leaving the padding and clothes under it, please. I prefer slightly more preamble before all of my clothes disappear."

—he snorts.

The armour vanishes, and reappears piled neatly on the floor.

"Thank you. Give me a few minutes to change?"

"Sure." He smiles at her and vanishes.

"That's going to take some getting used to," she says wryly, then she closes the door and gets changed. It's sort of hard to verify if he's out of the room, but - well, he's absurdly powerful and completely capable of doing whatever he wants anyway. Worrying about if he's peeking while she's changing is more than a little ridiculous.

Once she's changed, she pokes her head out of the door. "All right, ready."

He materializes in front of her.

"Hi again. —Oh, you should probably know, if you say my name anywhere on this mountain I'll hear it and whatever you say after it. In case you want my attention when I'm not around."

"Oh, all right. I'll remember. Was that teleporting away, turning to air, or something else?"

"Turning to air! I can't teleport. But I can ride the wind, and lightning if I'm in a hurry."

"I can teleport. To places I've been, anyway, and not too often."

"Sounds useful."

"So does your transportation method," she says, wryly. "I usually can't get to new places very quickly. Plane shift's my exception, but plane shift doesn't really do precision aiming."

"I'd say I could teach you my magic and you could build yourself windriding eventually, but I bet you won't go for that."

She considers.

"Well, would I be powering it directly through my own pain, or through a more esoteric method? Because I think I'd find it hard to focus well enough to keep control of magic while in agony, and I'm just. Not at all willing to torture people for magic."

"I could give you the power, I've got more than I could possibly use, but then you'd need to ask me every time you needed some."

"Could I, given time and practice, conceivably build myself a - a net to catch the power from myself to use later?"

"Yes, but if you figure out how to keep it stable in the long term I'd love to know, because solving that exact problem is what stands between me and not having to worry that my mountain will explode if I stop feeding it."

"... Right, yes. Sorry. Just thinking out loud. It doesn't sound like I should ignore it entirely, anyway."

"Hmm?"

"Avoid learning your magic, I mean. Occasionally exploding will be a bit tiresome, and I'd hate to pester you for magic too much, but I do want to learn it."

He laughs. "All right."

"If I explode in front of you, can you just funnel my pain into your mountain?"

Shrug. "Yeah."

"So there's a bright side to having to pester you for magic. If I explode in front of you, it can do something other than just be personally uncomfortable."

"This is true! So what would you like to do now? Learn magic? See my library? It's a very impressive library, at least locally, I have no idea if eight floors of books is impressive to you."

"Reasonably impressive," she says, amused. "I'd like to see it."

"This way," he says, grinning.

It's a short walk to the library, which does indeed have eight floors, with a round skylight over a central open space ringed by railings.

Atreia smiles brilliantly, and lets herself have a moment of delighted awe. It's a lot of books.

Serik beams at her.

After a moment, she turns her smile on Serik himself.

"Reasonably impressive," she asserts, again.

"I am delighted you think so."

"Any books you'd recommend in particular? Normally I might be tempted to wander, but in this case it would take a while."

"Well, I don't know what kind of books you like," he says reasonably.

"I tend to like clever writing that doesn't stumble drunkenly around the point, and have a bit of a soft spot for anything where the heroes are heroic instead of cynical and dark and complicated. When I'm in a certain mood I like to read really terrible books and rip them to pieces. Metaphorically, not literally, your books are not in danger."

"Oh, the books are immortal," he says cheerfully.

"Of course they are. I suppose now I'm free to indulge in the more literal destruction of terrible literature without guilt, but I can't say it's particularly appealing."

Giggle.

"More seriously, I'm glad they're immortal. We have enchantments on ours for preserving them, but only the really important ones are protected against, say. Being set on fire."

"If you get a chance and have books you wish were more fireproof, bring 'em here, I can copy them and add an extension to the library."

"All right. Thank you, I appreciate it."

Shrug. "I like having a really big library, it's useful when you're planning on living forever. Even though I don't like books that much. Still nice to have them. And Iri likes them a lot more."

"Smaller libraries can be a bit disappointing when you've had centuries to read all of the books in them," she agrees. "Do you collect them yourself, or is there a spell to - I don't know. Catch published books?"

"Oh, I wish! I have to go out and pick through them and decide which ones to copy. I probably don't do it often enough, I bet lots of really good ones are getting lost to time."

"That does sound like a pity. Hm. I suppose no one's willing to participate in a, a, book drop off. Send in your books for sorcerous preservation and copying, and you pick out which ones you'd like to keep."

"You can pretty much assume that nobody in this world wants to do anything that involves being near me in any way."

"That also sounds like a pity. Though it sounds like you don't so much have trouble with loneliness?"

"I do not," he confirms.

"But you don't hate all social interaction, since you seem perfectly happy to keep talking to me. Unless on the inside you've wished I would just go away and leave you to your swans and pretty castle?"

He laughs. "Yeah, I don't hate it, I just don't need it either."

She nods, thoughtfully.

"It seems sad, though. For everyone in the world to never want anything to do with you."

"Eh, can't really blame them."

"No. I wasn't going to insist they tolerate you despite your flaws because it's a little bit sad that you're bereft of purely positive personal relationships, just. I'm a celestial. It's sort of our thing to insist that Heaven's for everyone."

"Hmm?"

"Sorry, that didn't translate. Heaven's an actual place, but it's also a concept. The idea is that it's supposed to be a place where everyone has everything they want without strife or suffering or grief, where they're free to just be happy for the rest of forever with everyone and everything they love. The actual place doesn't quite meet this lofty ideal, because it's not really something you can ever just have, it's a thing to be worked towards. There are a lot of ways to cheat at it by only including the right sort of people that work with your paradise, people that haven't done anything wrong in their lives and don't subvert authority and all think in the same sort of way and need the same sorts of things, but cheating at it misses the point. Peace and happiness and safety's for everyone."

"Huh."

Smile.

"I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure you count as a member of everyone."

He snorts. "Suppose so."

"Anyway. That seems like quite enough of the long winded declaration of celestial intentions, any more and I risk melodrama."

He giggles.

"I try to avoid melodrama where I can. Doesn't always work, because, well. I'm a woman who flies around with a flaming sword, occasionally rambling about how she's going to save everyone. Bit of a rough start, that."

"Just a little!"

She smiles at him again, then at the library. It's a reasonably impressive library. She can spend a little while just smiling at it.

The way she looks at his library is so good.

She notices the way he's looking at her, and beams at him.

He beams right back.

He's very cute when he's being happy about someone else's happiness. As much as she makes a point of presenting herself as very composed, she's not unmoved by this quality of his. Neither is she unmoved by how she very closely dodged almost certain death, and that the act of dodging it was highly unpleasant. She has a habit of drowning out unpleasant experiences with things that are very pleasant, and she doesn't exactly have a long list of people to make pleasant experiences with right now. Leaving the mountain to expand her list of candidates sounds like it'd be annoying, and might not be worth the trouble.

She gives him a considering look.

He smiles at her.

Atreia hums thoughtfully, then takes a measured step closer and looks up at him. Her eyes are a pale and subtly shimmery grey green.

"Has anyone ever told you that you have a lovely smile?" she wonders, almost innocently.

"Not that I recall, no."

"Well, you do. Especially when you're - basking in someone else's joy? Like you've just found an updraft and you can sail further up into the sky on it."

"Aww. That's a really cute way to put it."

"Thank you. It just - seemed like the most accurate way of describing the thing. I suppose flying metaphors are more obvious to people with wings." She flutters her wings a little, inclining them towards him slightly. They're close enough to him that he could reach out and pet them.

He smiles again, watching her feathers flutter.

She considers him some more.

After a little while, she offers, "You can pet them. If you'd like to."

"I would!"

He reaches out and gently runs a hand over her feathers.

They're very smooth and soft, like the feathers are woven from silk. The wing shivers a little when he touches it, but doesn't pull away from him. If anything, it presses closer.

Atreia hums appreciatively and closes her eyes, faint blissful smile on her face.

"Aww, you're soft," he says delightedly. Pet pet!

"I am," she purrs, with a quiet little laugh.

Mm, pets.

So soft! So cozy! Pet pet pet nuzzle.

He is very rapidly persuading this celestial to resemble a blissful puddle. Can she just lean on him? She'd like to just wrap her arms around him and lean on him for support. Standing under her own power is starting to become a risky endeavor.

"Would you like to go somewhere more comfortable?" she murmurs into his ear. "I haven't really been introduced to the nice big bed in my room..."

He giggles. "Yes, that sounds like a fine idea. Can you walk there or should I carry you?"

"I could likely walk there, but being carried sounds more fun."

Scoop!

He looks at her like he can't imagine anything more delightful than holding her in his arms, and then starts carrying her back to her room.

She giggles a little on the way there, because look at him he's adorable.

He is! He's very cute! And gazing adoringly at her!

And then he sits down on her bed and cradles her in his lap and resumes petting her wings.

Atreia hums happily and melts in his arms, practically purring. She closes her eyes and leans on him, shivering a little.

He holds her and pets her and smiles at her like she's the most beautiful thing in the world.

After a little while, she adjusts to look at him through half lidded eyes.

"M-may I -" she begins, but there's an odd warble in her voice that causes her to stop and try again. "May I kiss you?"

"Sure."

So she does. Slowly, gently, and sensually. She's built up a lot of experience over the years; she's not awkward or hesitant about it at all.

Mmmmm lovely cozy kisses.

Serik has some experience himself, although it may be best not to think about where he got it.

She's absolutely not going to think about it! Instead she's just going to enjoy kissing him and not think about where he got any of his experience.

If she adjusts herself slightly she can wrap him in soft, feathery wings without disrupting wingpets. She introduces him to this concept languidly enough for him to get used to the idea; just engulfing him out of nowhere seems like it might be an unwise move. Serik can be slowly engulfed by silky silver-gold feathers instead.

Well that is just about the best thing. So cozy! So soft! So snugglesome!

That's the idea! Once she notices his delight with being wrapped in her wings she gently maneuvers to straddle him for Maximum Wing Snuggle. Also other reasons. The other reasons are relevant too. The kisses become a little more hungry, too. What a mysterious coincidence.

This is a good plan and he approves of it. There will be many snuggles and many kisses and many wingpets.

"Thoughts on how far we take this?" she wonders between kisses.

"Mm..." Kiss. "Well, what do you want?"

"It's a habit of mine to drown out awful experiences with things that are distinctly not awful." Kiss. "Sex is the most common one. I've been resisting the urge to tackle you because it seemed rude, but I can change that policy if you'd like me to."

"I like you. But - I don't want to end up breaking my promise, and I assume you don't want that either."

"I don't. It's all right if you'd rather not push it."

"Yeah." Kiss. Pet pet.

"Okay."

Kiss! She can resist tackling him in favor of long, snuggly kisses. This is nice, too.

Long snuggly kisses are so good!

They are!

After a while, though, she needs a break. Not because this has stopped being pleasant, but because she needs to remind herself that tackling him is against his preferences and she should respect that. She gives him an affectionate peck, then pauses in kissing to breathe.

He smiles contentedly.

"You're very sweet," she murmurs, adjusting to pillow her head on his shoulder.

"Thank you," he says, petting her hair.