"Well - can I check you're not secretly demons?"

"Demons?"

"There's a big hole in the ground on the other side of the continent and demons live there and they're very horrible and we don't want any in the Forest," says Sunpatch. "But if you're not demons or working with demons or anything then you can be here."

"If you can check for that--non-invasively--go right ahead."

"Okay."

He swishes his tail and squints at Korafen. It's hard to tell in the sunlight, but he seems to be glowing brighter for a few seconds. Then he squints at Ikrifiss the same way.

"Well, you're not demons or soulbound to demons and that's good enough for me," he says.

"I don't know what that word soulbound means but it worries me."

"Sometimes demons do a thing that's sort of like an angel investing power in a priest, only backwards, and more horrible," says Sunpatch. "I don't know much about it but I know how to tell if someone's had it done to them, it's a really simple lifeforce trick if you're a unicorn."

"I did not understand many of the words in that sentence."

"Angels are a kind of person! They look like winged elf-kin - um, elf-kin are elves and dwarves and humans, they're all sort of the same shape but with different details - and they have a special kind of magic that only ever comes from angels, but sometimes an angel puts some of their magic in a person and makes them a priest, and then that person can do that angel's magic but much less powerfully."

"Huh. So what's 'lifeforce'?"

"Lifeforce is... something that living things have. Plants and animals and people all have lifeforce, but people's lifeforce is different. You can do magic to it, and the simplest lifeforce magic is just looking at lifeforce, and since I'm a unicorn I see lifeforce in a unicorn way and that makes it very easy to tell if there's anything angelic about someone and pretty easy to tell if there's anything demonic. So I know you aren't an angel or a priest or a demon or soulbound to a demon."

"Doing magic to someone's...aliveness...sounds dangerous."

"Oh, I don't know, it needn't be all that different than what I do."

"What do you do?" wonders Sunpatch.

"Well, relevantly, I'm a Midera. The Midera's a healing line."

"You have healing magic? That's useful. I do too, because I'm a unicorn."

"Your entire species can do this?"

"...Yes?"

"Wow. A motherline or free line with a strong founder effect...? Unusually stable wild magic?"

"Um, I don't know what any of that means," says Sunpatch. "Unicorns can do unicorn magic because we're unicorns. And angels can do angel magic because they're angels. And fae can do fae magic because they're fae, and dragons can do dragon magic because they're dragons. Elf-kin can only do the kinds of magic that everyone can do, or borrow from angels. Well, I guess Dragonborn are sort of both elf-kin and dragons."

"Huh." It's a bit of a risk, but they don't even have kings here, much... "Can I try to, um, check something about you?"

"Check what?"

"Your, um, bloodline."

"I don't know what you mean by that but if it won't hurt me then sure."

"Won't hurt a bit but I have to touch you."