"How and why would that even work."

"Hmm?"

"I--I can imagine not giving a shit what happens to anyone except your very own personal loved ones. I can imagine not happening to be in a position where you don't have any personal loved ones. I can't imagine not giving a shit about anyone except the hypothetical loved ones you don't have and not being harmed by the absence of having any personal loved ones."

She shrugs, and sits a little closer and drapes a wing over Elodea to keep off the cold.

"Well, I have my brother. Most Endarkened would consider that a weakness, but I find that an unbreakable alliance is very much a strength."

She super appreciates the wingdraping.

"I noticed you have your brother. I'm glad for the both of you. I just feel bad for literally everyone else in your civilization. Which is silly, I know that just because I can't imagine being a way doesn't mean that the way doesn't exist." She sighs. "The not caring about your children thing is still pretty confusing, though. Why even have children if you're immortal enough not to need heirs but not so immortal that any heirs you have anyway might successfully usurp you, and there's no bond of love to prevent that, and raising a child isn't rewarding in the way it is for us, which definitely involves caring about them?"

"We could hardly take over the world if no one we lost in war could be replaced," she points out. "But I don't know why anyone finds it rewarding to have children."

"The idea that it would be advantageous to have a larger population had occurred to me. The idea of being ordered to have children makes sense, it's mostly your father's decision-making I question, what with presumably no one being able to order him to do anything as well as being the most tempting-to-usurp person around."

She raises her eyebrows. "That's exactly why royalty should have children; it discourages everyone else from trying, because if they killed you then they'd have to fight your heir for the title."

"I guess that makes sense. My encounters with royalty mostly amount to 'this one person I know with a really great library is technically the Empress of an Empire that hadn't existed for over a century before I met her.' Also occasional encounters with princes of wherever of the more typical-for-me variety."

"Well, now you've been raped by a king," she says, with a hint of amusement. "You could say you're moving up in the world."

"I consider myself to be moving up in the world when I advance a tier in wizardry. Out of all the ways I could measure my place in the world the social status of my rapists seems like a bad one."

"Fair enough."

"For the record, if I didn't have this curse and did have an antagonistic sexual system like yours I would be 'losing at sex' considerably less than half the time. I don't usually get caught without a spellbook and a seventeenth-tier wizard is nothing to scoff at."

"I believe you," she says. "Part of the reason I'm being so friendly is that you're plausibly impossible to kill and poised to make an enormous nuisance of yourself if we leave you with a grudge."

"Oh, I'd been wondering. Well, if it makes you feel better, I tend to hold grudges based on different criterion than most people. What happened to me was going to happen in some way, I'm more pissed off at Elexarin than your brother about it, and you're not doing it for stupid reasons, so honestly, you two are way ahead of the curve as far as people the curse have thrown at me go." She yawns. 

She laughs softly. "That's good to know."

"Funnily enough, people who do this kind of thing in cultures that frown upon it tend to be annoying in other ways."

"Yes, that does seem to follow," she agrees.

"Honestly, sometimes the most annoying part of the curse is the way it inhibits me from fighting back instead of throwing me at people who could take me anyway. There's a kind of dignity to being overcome by a demon king or a powerful sorcerer-dragon that's just completely fucking absent from being set upon by a random tribe of Minotaurs."

"Oh, certainly. I expect I'd feel the same way in your situation."

"Yeah. It's part of why I don't want people to know about my curse, if I have a reputation as a seventeenth-tier wizard then people who don't know about the curse are significantly less likely to try anything if they're not the kind of person who expects they can take a seventeenth-tier wizard."

"That's very much my kind of logic," she says approvingly.

"Unfortunately it does very little about random tribes of minotaurs because minotaurs live in tiny little tribes and don't keep up with international gossip about incredibly powerful immortal elves. And I think the curse likes to throw them at me because they're like half again as hung as your brother and that's no fun."

—she laughs. "If you tell him that, he'll want to watch."

"If it's going to happen anyway I don't object to any watching he wants to do, my privacy instincts died a violent death a long time ago."