"It's... not exactly that?" he says. "I'm - I might have mentioned I'm a problem-solver by nature. You have problems. I'm not sure how to solve them. But making you aware of all the cool mortal stuff available seems like a better plan than not doing that, for the goal of generally improving your existence, you know? I am also entertaining some hope that if I offer you lots of cool mortal stuff I might get cool magic stuff in return, but, I don't know, I am a bit freaked out by this accidental magical liege lord thing and may be overcompensating."
"I want pretty simple things to start. I want to be safe. I want privacy and my own tree and a way to eat on a regular basis and to be safe. After I'm... more confident of that... we can talk about getting me a planet. But, um, making it look like you really really want cool magic stuff makes me wonder if you want it more than to not so much be my magical liege lord."
"Well - I see your logic," he says. "And I'm not sure what to do about it because most of the things I can think of to say that would be very reassuring to me would probably not be helpful to someone of a less twisty paranoid mindset, and if it were just me on the line I could tell you my name as reciprocal security I guess, but it's not, it's an entire galaxy full of hundreds of billions of other mortals who I would be putting in harm's way if I turned out to be misjudging your intentions badly enough."
He makes a pass over his lovely mountains and turns back toward the lake. (There are some lakes up here, too, and a few mortal villages visible from the air.)
Promise peers at the villages. "Fairies usually don't live in groups that large."
"Well, sometimes courts get that big, but it's hard to hold that many. You have to be really good at it and accumulate a lot of vassals."
"...oh," he says.
He contemplates this mental picture.
It seems to be a lot to process.
"I met a mortal once before so I know you don't arrange yourselves like that but fairies... pretty much always live alone or in vassal nets of one sort or another."
"Does that turn out as badly as it sounds? Because it sounds like it turns out pretty badly but I only have limited information to go on."
"My master was unusually bad. Many of them are better than that." Shrug. "I may mind being a vassal more than the average vassal, too."
"Sorry. I can stop talking about how upsetting I find the fundamental rules of your existence if you prefer. Well, I can try, anyway."
"Well in that case: the fundamental rules of your existence are really upsetting! The immortality part's not bad, admittedly, but in context it also means that the magical unilateral liege relationships have more staying power. If I had somehow found out ahead of time that I would be meeting a magical immortal fairy and somehow believed this information I would've predicted my reaction was going to be 'immortal, you say? where do I get some of that?', but in fact it's mostly," he lifts one hand from the lightflyer's controls briefly to make an expressive gesture and accompanies it with a somewhat self-consciously dramatized moan of dismay.
"...sorcery continues to be very exciting but still not exciting enough to make up for the existence of vassalization," says Silver. "It's like... I can't think of an analogy." Reflective pause. "I can think of an analogy but I'm not sure you'll understand any of its component parts so it isn't a very communicative analogy."
He sighs and looks out the canopy at his beautiful, beautiful mountains.
"Do fairies have families?"
"Some kinds. ...It is however very different because if you have one or more parents, well, they name you."
He looks at the mountains again.
"So I was going to say, 'it's like inheriting the Countship'. Because the Countship I'm going to inherit from my father one day will come with many advantages, some of which are pretty exciting taken out of context, none of which will make it okay."