"All right."

Well, Riale has breakfast. (And records everything in the book before he eats it.)

Kastimund gets bored of silence soon enough.

"Are you estranged from your family, or? I have not seen their likenesses in the book."

"Orphan. My parents were close friends of the Emperor, so he more or less raised me."

"Ah." Kastimund considers. "You realize that you could be from a play. Prepare yourself for the second act when your father reveals himself from behind the mask of your greatest enemy."

"I don't have any enemies."

"No? Not even death itself? I would have thought that to be the first."

"Death, the cycle of worldly destruction, whatever chained a bunch of spirits to this book... somehow I don't think my father is any of those."

"Whoever," corrects Kastim absently. "Not whatever. Your sense of your own mundanity disappoints me. Have you no love for the chance to be the son of death and destruction, come to usurp your father from his throne?"

"Mundanity has nothing to do with it. I've never met my parents but I heard enough about them from Kanero to know that it would be really highly implausible for my father to have been some kind of personification of death."

"Mother, then? No need to focus on the male line."

"Also no."

Kastimund sighs dramatically.

"You wound me with your dedication to reality."

"Sorry."

More remembered items go in the book.

More swirling lines of fire, then:

"You know humans were the ones to shackle us."

"Caught that implication, yes. Why?"

"The first world was very different to what now is. Magic was - I have called the previous worlds' magics wild, but they are tame in comparison to what was. The shifting of the continent pales in comparison to the shifting of the faces, of the world that churned and boiled under the terrifying onslaught of what reality was. It was caught between the edge of everything and nothing, balanced precariously on the sharpest knife's edge. Creating balance from something like that was impossible, at least in a single step. But they thought after enough iterations, it could be refined to something resembling stability. Those that lived then could not save themselves, but they made sure to ensure that something could be."

"...So they intended for saving the world to eventually be possible, then?"

"That was their intention, certainly. And in the meantime, they wanted every shackled spirit to suffer. Perhaps they hated us enough that an eternity in torment was a worthy price for a world that would continue to live at all. Instead of everything unraveling forever."

"...yeah, I am extremely disappointed in these people on so many levels."

"Disappointed is one word to describe it. The last thing I recall feeling was unfathomable fury, myself."

"I generally try to avoid getting angry. It makes me less effective."

"I'd offer to lend you the shackle, were it possible."

"Tempting. But if I mess with my motivations, the world might end."

Kastimund doesn't say 'It's going to end no matter what you do,' because - well, he isn't quite sure, actually. But he doesn't want to. So he just thinks it. Very loudly.

"We'd have traded shackles with each other if we could have, anyway. It's not that they are necessarily unbearable for anyone. They are very personalized tortures."

"The temptation is not 'an emotionless existence, what fun'; the temptation is 'maybe if I got a closer look I could figure out how to take it apart'."