There are wings trailing from his shoulders, or something distantly reminiscent of wings - a fluttering spray of nearly invisible fabric, floating in the air like faint black smoke, speckled with tiny stars.
Apart from those, he seems more like a human than anything else.
He looks at the girls, and says in mild tones with perfect intelligibility, "What's all this about?"
And if it were up to him perhaps he would wait and see how this plays out, but he has active Queenscourt orders, and whether he interprets her as a threat or a resource he is required to get control of her.
"Hold," he says sharply, enforced for all vassals in earshot.
"My brother will be confused about my husband contacting him via whisper spell. One of the girls' neighbors may have heard me botch the teleport and come to see what's going on. If any student or one of my friends or family members tries to get my attention for any reason and I cannot respond they will be alarmed."
Arcane takes a calming breath.
"I apologize for my conduct," he says. "Can you, easily and without extraneous effects, verify to your satisfaction the truth or falsehood of statements I make?"
"You may, without extraneous effect and where doing so does not distract you from the fulfillment of previous orders, verify the truth of statements I make." Pause. "I am sincerely sorry about all of this. By the same means through which I command you, I have been commanded to secure significant potential threats against my Queen. You represent such a threat."
What's unprecedented is the degree to which she represents both a unique threat and a unique resource. The correct way to handle her from here is very different depending on which interpretation he picks, although neither option looks very good from his perspective.
"I suspect that your entire world represents such a threat, in fact. Is the ability to summon people from other worlds common?"
He needs to secure an entire world.
And he can probably do it, too. Much as he doesn't want to.
But...
His Queenscourt orders are well-crafted, but manifestly not designed for situations as strange as this.
He is forbidden to attempt to compromise his orders, compelled to immediately seek reinstatement of any that lapse or are interfered with - but that's one of the first ones in the set. The orders to handle threats and secure resources, being more recent, take precedence. And he can't take over an entire world while still burdened with all those extraneous commands.
In which case, he had better clean them out as quickly as possible, hadn't he?
Before that, though - "By what means can I be released from this circle?"
"I don't want to conquer the world," he mutters to himself. "But if I'm going to do it anyway I'd better do it right."
Which takes precedence, learning more about the world he is compelled to conquer or getting out of his Queenscourt orders? Orders. He might learn something that triggers a conflicting contingency and prevents him from adequately handling the world-sized threat.
But while he's considering how best to do that, there's a loose end he can no longer justify putting off - "What is your husband's name?" he asks Keo.
"Can you, without extraneous effects, communicate telepathically with me?"
"You may, with maximal such precision, receive telepathic communication from me." Test that, and test that orders work telepathically: You may, without attempting to exploit this permission in any way hostile to my interests, communicate with me telepathically.
So, does he tell her his name? Can't get her to feed him even if there is any food around; she's already his vassal. If he keeps control of everyone involved, having her and her husband know his name isn't much of a problem. And it lets him confine the entire process of unraveling his extraneous Queenscourt orders to private telepathic communication.
In which case...
He will have to be very careful about this. Getting a hostile vassal to mess around with your orders is a tricky business, to put it mildly. He can't allow any chance of Keo or her husband getting the upper hand on him.
<Expediently and without causing or allowing extraneous action, bring your husband into this room.>
"Do not enforce any order that does more than rescind existing orders," he says to all of them; then to Keo and Kanaat, "Do not reveal my name to anyone by any means."
And then to Keo: <My name is Sierulyperinon. Via private telepathic communication, rescind the order that forbids me from seeking or allowing modification of my Queenscourt orders.>
Of course he is not meant to be able to seek modification of the order that forbids him from seeking modification of his orders. That would rather defeat the purpose. But with a later order compelling him to do something as delicate and complicated as conquer a world to the best of his ability, he is not only able but required to ensure that his ability is not hampered by possible conflicts from other orders that may have come later still.
He is also required to avoid exploiting loopholes and tell the Queen about them as soon as possible, but this isn't a loophole, it's a legitimate unforeseen contingency. In no way would it serve the Queen's interests for him to drop everything right now and seek a way home immediately so he can tell her that her well-crafted orders fail when one of her vassals is abruptly summoned to another world containing strange beings with unprecedented kinds of magic. The Queen's interests as defined in his orders are best served by him erasing most of the orders that compel him to serve her interests, so that he can focus on the single most important goal (contain threats and secure resources) without being forced to sabotage himself by orders given with insufficient foresight.
Which still leaves him being compelled to conquer the world against his will, but that's his problem.
Well.
"Never have I been happier to make a mistake," says Arcane.
And now, he can either try to deescalate the situation as carefully as possible without affording any opportunity for retaliation - or he can relinquish control immediately and hope Keo is as nice as she seems.
"Except for the ones concerning enforcement of orders and revealing my name, I rescind all your orders," he says to the four of them.
Arcane tries the door, which doesn't let him out, and the window, which doesn't let him out either, and then for lack of a better way to occupy his time he starts cleaning the chalk off the floor with sorcery. This world is harmonically empty, which is interestingly novel for now but will probably begin to bore him as soon as he's figured out how to work with it.
"I'M SORRY DON'T KILL ME I'M SORRY I'M -"
"What was that oh shit what did it do -"
"Sit down," Keo snaps at the girls, "and shut up while I do my best to contain your disaster." She's simultaneously relaying the facts to Narax, to his friend Neris whose name and existence haven't been let slip, and several faculty members likewise. (She doesn't know what the deal is with names, but they seem key.) Narax is finishing his scry. Kanaat's looking up remote knockout spells. She's got the room wards up backwards on the girls' room; the summon needed to be let out, which suggests that wards in general may suffice. Not the intended use of the inverse room wards, but it'll do until something more stable shakes out.
"...you have another bro-?"
"Silence."
She tries to erase their names from the summon's memory.
Can't.
Narax's scry is in progress; she piggybacks on his supervision.
And, carefully not listening for a reply, she speaks to the summon:
<I don't seem to be able to directly remove names from your memory. If there is a way for you to let me do this and you prefer it to a more invasive option, raise your hand.>
He does not raise his hand. He writes in the air in large, easily readable arrangements of fairy lights: YOU HAVE BIGGER PROBLEMS.
And, if they're going to try unknown otherworldly mental magics on him, he's going to search his as-yet-unmodified memory for a place outside of immediate Queenscourt influence with harmonics as compatible with zero as possible, so that he can open a gate there quickly if he needs to get away. (He has to guess at the meaning of 'compatible', because he has never personally seen mortal-realm harmonics, but 'similar' seems most probable.)
<And I would very much like to discuss that with you via some method other than carefully avoiding you giving anyone whose names you know a command via elaborate rigmarole.>
Keo sends out an order to evacuate that entire building. Probably overkill, but the students scamper.
My kind is immortal. Queenscourt will find me eventually. Cannot know how long it will take. We can make gates between worlds. When she knows of this place she will conquer it rather than risk any wizard ever summoning her under better security protocol. Rigamarole unnecessary; I mean no harm. You may check.
<You have my name and those of several of my loved ones and that of a student in my care. You are manifestly not consistently acting according to your own preferences even if you can do so right now. I need you to stop having those names. At minimum, I need an ally under an empathy ward acting as a deadman switch for the erasure if something happens.>
I have strong feelings about the integrity of my memory. If you will not compromise on this point, I will leave, attempt to solve your problem without you, and perhaps fail. If you work with me, we can solve it much more easily. Queenscourt will not start looking immediately; I am free for now. There is time to talk.
As my vassal, you cannot harm me. That is what stops you. Can we not discuss dealing with the Queen before we discuss contriving to allow that harm? Planned right, you can neutralize the Queenscourt before they know you exist, and there will be no trouble over my ability to act on my preferences.
"Having met the target or any unique specification of both world and person. She is unlimited by distance but most of her powers will not work transworld, except her mindlink, which should be able to persist even if she and the headmaster are in different worlds. She needs an empathic signature, most conventionally acquired by passing within thirty feet of someone, although she in particular can acquire them from other people whose signatures she has already collected. She can undo conventional forgetfulness but not all forms of magical mental attack if they sufficiently destroy the data in question."
"I expect to be able to adequately specify most members of the Queenscourt. It is likely that the Queen has forgotten her name in the conventional way. If the headmaster's wife can be brought to my world and can target the Queen's mind there, and can retrieve forgotten names, she could acquire the Queen's name and command her from a distance; without the ability to retrieve forgotten names she could still do that to any other targetable person in my world. If she cannot retrieve the Queen's name, the Queen should be summoned and securely confined here and someone should feed her mortal food, which will also work to vassalize her but may be difficult without her cooperation."
"My world's magic functions here. It would be very convenient for you if it functioned here except for gates in particular, but there is no evidence to indicate that might be the case. There is no currently known way for the Queen to follow me here, but advances are always being made. It is just barely possible that if I stayed here forever without ever making a gate back to my world, and no tears ever happened to open between my world and yours, and they never learned to target a gate on a person or do anything else that would let them follow me here, they might go on being unable to find me forever. But forever is a very long time. I don't care to take that risk when your world's freedom is at stake."
"I am not threatening. I am still here entirely because my desire to save your world from probable conquest outweighs my desire to avoid the non-negligible risk that someone will out of poorly aimed caution damage my mind with unknown local magic. If neutralizing the Queenscourt is not a project that you or the headmaster's wife or anyone else here wishes to involve themselves in, then I will look elsewhere for help and have considerably more trouble, but I intend to neutralize the Queenscourt regardless because otherwise, whether in a few hundred days or a few thousand years, the Queen will learn that wizardry and unique green-group dragons exist and she will take steps to eliminate those threats to her sovereignty."
"Omitting the highly advantageous mind magic - prepare whatever resources are required to summon," he thinks it over for a moment, "about three dozen people more or less at once, each isolated so that they cannot communicate with one another or with anyone else by speech or writing. Contrive to feed them all mortal food, whereby they will become vassals to whatever mortal fed them. Command the Queen to describe the structure of her court and disclose any remaining obstacles to dismantling it. If my knowledge is not as complete as I think it is, it may be necessary to summon more courtiers at that point, but vassalizing them will be easier with the Queen available to give you their names. The Queen must be ordered to never give an enforced order and never reveal anyone's name. Everyone else can be ordered to free Queenscourt captives and dismantle security measures and so on, and then returned to where they were taken from. The Queen herself should not be returned to her court until all its unwilling members have successfully fled. And this method will work unless one of the summoned courtiers is clever enough or magical enough to escape your captivity, or one of those not summoned is clever enough and quick enough to find where everyone else has gone and lead an army after them."
"I could have made a gate back to my world, stepped through, closed it, and made another one to come back with outside the ward, and it's possible that there are other generic magical solutions I haven't thought of. Someone whose kind can teleport might have been able to teleport out of it. Someone with other travel-related kind magic might have been able to use that. I know most but not all of the kinds and associated magics that might appear in the Queenscourt, and cannot guarantee that I know them well enough to be sure none of the ones you might need to capture can escape a ward."
"We come in kinds. I am a sky-veil, for example; I can sense harmonics, which you don't have here. The teleporter I was thinking of is a crystalswift. The Queen is the only one of her kind, and her kind's magic is to know all our names, but it does not extend to mortals."
"They are not prepared to address the challenge, but might rise to the occasion and would probably fail gracefully if fail they did," opines the elf. "Additionally, she is very agitated that you are so insistent on retaining her name and those of her husband, daughter, brother, and student. She could have someone perform a memory-altering spell but is concerned you would find a way to retaliate."
"I will not retaliate, I will just be perpetually slightly upset about it for the rest of eternity," he predicts. "In case the headmaster's wife has not yet extracted this fact from my mind, by the way, the Queenscourt will begin to look for me in about a hundred and twenty days. Our day length may or may not correspond with yours."
In three thousand eight hundred years at least one of the involved mortals might have found a way to extend their lifespan, but in three thousand eight hundred years Arcane plans to be back in his own world, floating high in the sky over sparsely populated areas, listening to harmonics, and not interacting with any people in any capacity. He would like to begin doing that just as soon as he has dealt with the Queenscourt, and then continue doing that for a very, very, very, very long time.
He can try just granting permission and seeing if she notices. She seems likely to notice.
Arcane deeply regrets ever beginning to interact with other sapient life. It has brought him nothing but trouble. Well, it did bring him sorcery, but he would have figured out sorcery on his own eventually.
It doesn't work very well.
His mind itches.
"I am wary of the implications of this not entirely unwelcome coincidence," says Arcane. "We are in a mortal world that I strongly suspect is different from the usual one. It's harmonically empty and contains several varieties of magic that don't work anything like ours. One of those varieties belongs to a mortal with seemingly near-arbitrary mental powers. I managed to make a legitimate mistake that let her wipe out all my Queenscourt orders before I had to conquer the planet for threat/resource reasons, but now she's reluctant to take the obvious next step. And she erased all local names from my memory. The absence itches."
"Unknown potential failure rate if someone's kind-magic lets them escape local magical restraints, or if one of the mortals involved makes a mistake through lack of familiarity with vassalization. Otherwise, yes. I arrived here through an untargeted application of local magic, and it can be targeted, and set up with wards so that the summoned individual is unable to leave the area they were summoned in."
"I'm stuck here through some kind of mistake in my summoning that wasn't fully explained; it was implied that summoned individuals can usually be returned with trivial effort. I haven't yet tried gating back to the fairy realm because I want to minimize the amount of information about this world that is even theoretically available there, so I don't know if it's possible, but I can't afford to assume it isn't. And if you came through a tear, that suggests gates are also possible. If you came through some other unknown phenomenon, I have no idea what that suggests."
Partway through his explanation, his voice abruptly goes silent. He cuts himself off mid-word and listens.
("Hello, Arcane. I am a representative of the local national government. You can call me Shrike.")
("Hello, Shrike,") he replies. ("Interesting method of communication you have.")
("It's called a whisper spell. Not everyone has access to arbitrary mind magic.")
("I would be somewhat better off if no one did,") Arcane says dryly.
("No comment. I've been told to assess the dangers and opportunities involved with your presence.")
("The danger is that the Queenscourt will eventually discover that your world exists, become terrified, and seek to conquer it, and without extensive countermeasures they will almost certainly succeed. The opportunity is that using local magic you can conquer them first.")
("Not much of an opportunity.")
("It's much better than you'd be getting if I hadn't managed to dodge my Queenscourt orders.")
("While I'm sure that's true, it seems like you're focusing on this Queenscourt problem to the exclusion of all else,") says Shrike.
("I wonder why I might be doing that,") says Arcane.
("I'm sure it's because you consider it the most important concern right now.")
("Yes.")
("Would you like to explain to me why that is?")
("The fact that your world will be conquered if you don't do anything about it is not sufficient cause?")
("Be assured I am very concerned about my world being conquered. I'm just not sure why you are also very concerned.")
("Why wouldn't I be? An entire world full of unsuspecting mortals is about to be folded into the Queenscourt!")
("You were a member of this Queenscourt yourself, weren't you? What is it like?")
("It was comfortable for me in particular. It can be much less comfortable for other people. It's not the worst court out there, but given the opportunity I am happy to dismantle it. The fewer people there are eternally drowning in bowls of water, the better.")
("...I'm inclined to agree,") says Shrike. ("I'll whisper-spell you again shortly.")
"Well," says Arcane. "That was a... marginally more cooperative mortal."
Shrike whisper-spells him again.
("Hello. How fast can you fly?")
("Extremely. Why do you ask?")
("I would rather have subsequent parts of this conversation in person and on solid ground, and I can't teleport to your current location but I believe I could create a visible beacon for you to approach. How fast is extremely?")
("I believe the adverb speaks for itself. I could reach an edge of this ocean in fairly trivial time.")
("Then I will go create a beacon. I'll contact you again afterward to be sure you saw it.")
The spell ends.
"The marginally more cooperative mortal - he calls himself Shrike - has announced an intention to create a beacon on an edge of this ocean that I can approach with fast-flight, so he can talk to me 'in person and on solid ground'. Do you suppose I should tell him about you before we arrive? He said he would contact me again."
"I gave it to her myself, in the course of altering my Queenscourt orders - given that one of them was compelling me to conquer a strange world full of unforeseen circumstances, getting out from under the rest served Queenscourt interests better than the alternative. And then she exploited a loophole to lift that one too. If only she had turned out to be more cooperative when I gave her her freedom."
In the distance, a bright light flares against the dark sky.
("Can you see the beacon?")
("Yes.")
("Good. I'll wait for you here.")
The whisper spell ends. Arcane takes Promise's hand. "Now would be the time to turn invisible if you're planning on it."
And there is the beacon - an extremely bright light, sustained with local magic a hundred feet above the ground - and there presumably is Shrike, standing underneath it. When he sees Arcane approaching, he dismisses the light and creates another one at a considerably smaller scale, closer to 'lamp' than 'lighthouse'.
He notes that Shrike brought chairs and a table and paper and writing utensils. Reasonable supplies for this sort of meeting. One of the chairs has an... obviously wingless design, and the other is more of a backless bench; Arcane sits on the latter and lets his wings trail behind him.
"The Queen is of a singular kind, whose singular magic causes her to know the names of everyone native to my world. As I believe you're loosely aware, there is a property of my world such that knowing our names makes us her vassals, meaning that we cannot harm her and she can give us arbitrary magically enforced commands. With this advantage she effectively rules the world, although in practice she only directly commands one part of it, called the Queenscourt. Other courts exist; one of my occasional duties with the Queenscourt was to conquer any that the Queenscourt wished to absorb, if they proved difficult to acquire by other means. At this point it is inevitable that the Queen will find out this world exists: either I will return to her and the information will come out in the course of standard security procedures for a Queenscourt vassal returning after an absence, or I will not return to her and she will seek me out and find me. The moment she learns of this world's existence and the magic its residents are capable of, she will seek to conquer it, precisely because this world's magic has the previously unprecedented capacity to capture her and dismantle her court without interacting with any of her normal defenses."
"If you are able to arrange for about three dozen people to be summoned at once, into wards that prevent them from moving around or communicating with one another by any means, and for at least one but preferably all of those people to be immediately and regardless of their objections fed local food by a person who is present and able to communicate with them, that will take care of the Queenscourt. There are of course details and precautions, but I believe that is enough of a sketch to tell you whether this is something you can accomplish."
"As implied, feeding is an avenue of vassalization. The strength of the claim varies according to several factors, and weaker claims sometimes fail to take hold especially in the presence of many competing claims, but no claim can hold if the one feeding is already a vassal of the one fed, so the Queen cannot be vassalized this way except by a mortal - someone from outside our world. Across that boundary - if a mortal eats food from our world, or the reverse - such claims are extremely strong. Do not eat food from my world."
He reflects for a moment, then adds, "I'm sure someone will realize that there was another world involved, and I'm sure after that someone will try to gate here. No one has yet tried to take over the mortal world we're used to, and this one is more hazardous on multiple levels, and the individuals or minor courts who might try it don't pose nearly as much of a threat as the Queenscourt, but I still suggest that you encourage people to conceal their names, particularly from winged strangers. The name that counts is the first one you have; subsequent nicknames, if unrelated to the original, are safe."