"This is surprisingly difficult to do. She's nice, but for a large portion of her life being nice got her into more and more trouble. So she hides it, disguises it and lashes out because she was hurt and doesn't want it to happen again. Does that make more sense?"

"Yeah. Defense mechanism."

"Pretty much. It's actually kind of depressing."

"It sounds it. Poor Zeviana. I hope she likes the clan better."

"Me too. If she doesn't, though, I think she'll do better in this plane in general because the people who hurt her aren't present."

"Until we import a lot of refugees."

"Actually, most if not all of the refugees wouldn't be people that hurt her. But if that changes, then - well. I will tell them to stay away from my sister."

"Does that tend to work?"

"It usually does, because Ana kind of frightens a lot of them."

"I guess that's reasonable."

"She has been known to cause large amounts of property damage when they try to make her do things. That probably helped."

"What did they want her to do, besides get married and pop out babies?"

"To be a good little girl and do exactly what she was told," says Adarin in a deadpan.

"Well, yes - but what is the content of 'what she was told'?"

"Where to be at a certain time, what to wear, how to act, what to say, how to eat, what sorts of hobbies she could have - that sort of thing. They wanted her to be perfect."

"That seems like the sort of thing with an obvious backfiring risk."

"It worked on my mother. So I suppose they thought it would work for her, too. Technically they did the kind of thing with me as well, but most of the things I like to do were fine with them. So."

"At what point did she run off to live in a planty maze?"

"Well, we technically first escaped when the world got invaded. Some things happened, but immediately after that she ran off to live in a pretty maze."

"'Some things happened', huh?"

"Shortish story? I knocked myself out holding up the shield, Ana wanted to kill all invaders ever, but she couldn't because the mages were leaving and taking me with them, so she went, too. Right after that was when she got upset with me, because I didn't want to just - leave the people in their influence. She just wanted to get away."

"I can kind of sympathize with her, but most of my impulses lie more along the lines of pathological amounts of helpfulness, so..."

He snickers. "I love you. Yeah, I'm about the same. I get where she's coming from and didn't try to stop her any more than presenting my argument, but I couldn't make the same decision."