"I… rescind your orders? And really hope you don't stab me in the back?"

"Literally can't, vassals can't harm their masters. Okay, now I need your name -" She gets him some paper.

"… Uh, I mean, if I just can't say it aloud, I can lumen it?" he says. "I don't actually– need a pen and paper?"

So he does. Look, wonderful blobby light stuff, currently purple and relatively thin, also quite transparent, hovering in midair, and it spells out "Thario". He has tried to keep it out of sight of any windows if there are any available.

"What is that? - I rescind your orders; never give me an order that I do not expressly request of my own uncommanded will, or that you do not sincerely without mental contortion believe to be in my best interest as you genuinely understand it, except the reciprocal of this one if you so desire."

"I– um, yes, I do wish the reciprocal of that, do I have to say it in full or can I just say that I order you the reciprocal of it?" He frowns. "Aaaand what do you mean what is it?"

He puts the chips away and picks up his bag.

"You can just say 'I order the reciprocal' - and you have to mean it to enforce it - and I mean what is that, it doesn't look like fairylights."

"I order the reciprocal," he says, meaning it. "And– I don't know what fairylights are, so I can't really comment on that, but it's lumen. … Do you not have lumen in weird magical order land – Fairyland or whatever?"

"Suppose not. Fairylights look like this -" The light is sharper, the shape less blobby, more pointilist than anything. "Anyway, let's get out of here, Yellow could be back soon and he flies faster than I do and certainly faster than you can walk."

"Yeah," he says, moving to do as such and getting rid of the lumen spelling his name. "The uncommanded will part of that order – would that mean I can't order you to do anything that you ask for if you've been ordered? And what about if I don't know whether you're commanded, does it do it based on whether I think you've been commanded or whether you actually have been, or does it stop me from ordering you until I find out for sure…?"

"You can't order me to do things that I ask for if I have been ordered to ask for them. Best judgment if you don't know whether I have or not, pretty much."

He nods and asks, "Any particular direction?"

"I need to get you somewhere Yellow won't find you where you can hide while a gate settles. How long can you last on the food you've got?"

"I… uh, I think Rhunes can last like… seven, eight days without food? And I have a small bit on me, so, maybe nine or ten?"

"Okay, that's enough. This way. How fast can you go?"

"Like… 25 miles per hour? If we use the same units of measurement, something like that, maybe more?"

Rhunes are good at running. This one starts moving in the indicated direction.

Promise flings some things into a bag, pauses long enough to turn Yellow's house into a heap of smoldering slag, and flies, keeping pace. "You're faster than I expect a mortal to be."

"… Most mortals, if you just mean people who aren't from fairyland, aren't Rhunes? We're something like a fifth of the population, I think?"

"Never heard of them," says Promise.

"Uh, okay. What have you heard of then? Luna? Thamari?"

"No."

"… People with the strongly colored eyes, we're Rhunes. The ones with the usually-bright hair, they're Luna, and the ones that are kinda bulky and have the stripes, they're Thamari?"

"I've only met one mortal. I'm not sure she was any of those things."

"… It really sounds like we're talking about different mortals, then?"

"Maybe. I didn't think there were two mortal worlds but I guess there could be. Well, as long as you can describe where you want to go well enough it shouldn't matter."

He nods and continues running.

"… Are you sure you don't have lumen? Because, well, I think everyone can do it where I'm from, so, it seems weird."