"Understandable, really. Uh - you've been taken over by the immortal spirit of the Empire of Scandinavia for the past twelve years, and have recently been freed, except before you were freed you were kidnapped by fairies, and we're trying to fix that now."

He undoes the locking mechanism and then repeatedly slaps him in the face. 

"There we go, now I can square up with my brother and we'll be all set. - don't look at the cage again. No more looking at the cage. Maybe we should take him back to our room?"

"Yeah, we can do that."

- he's still really confused but these people don't really seem hostile, for people who just repeatedly slapped him in the face.

Their room has some leaves on the floor, and a box. The man kisses the woman. "I'll be right back," he says, and leaves.

" - hey. So. Sorry about the - everything. Um, the slapping you was about paying off the magical debt that you've incurred since you got here, fairies have a thing where anything they do for you including giving you food or answering questions or showing you pretty art like the cage incurs debt, which then has to be paid off, and one of the fastest and easiest ways to pay it off is violence. Separately you should not tell anyone your name, or else you probably can't go home ever, and we would like to send you - home-ish, if possible, although we can't really exactly send you precisely home because it's been a decade and also if people became aware that you were alive then you would become the emperor again and then you would be possessed and at that point we might as well have killed you. Does that much all make sense?"

"...no."

"Okay. I think it should be safe enough for you to ask me questions, I don't think humans track debt between each other and if I'm wrong about that I guess I can always - we'll figure it out."

"Okay. Where am I."

"Fairyland. Technically very small inside a tree somewhere in Germany, I think, but relevantly, fairyland. Which is really not so much a place as a speed, you're going very fast right now and this makes it impossible to interact with the world normally."

"...okay. And who are you?"

"I'm - not going to give you my name and not immediately sure how else to identify myself. Um. I was the court poet of Scandinavia until I came to fairyland, which I did because when you were being controlled by the emperor you, uh, kidnapped me and - we sort of had six kids together and I am not immediately sure what that makes us. Um."

"Okay."

"....we can figure out that stuff later. Anyway I was - trying to get the spirit to stop possessing people and I suppose I have in some sense partially succeeded."

"I suppose so. And now this - spirit - is controlling someone else."

"We think so, yes. Seems to be tied to the title of the emperor. I'm not sure if there's a way to remove it from the title. It's probably also stuck in fairyland, probably in Norway right now. We're still deciding what to do about it but we thought we'd take you with us."

"I suppose I have nothing better to do. Apart from - my wife, my children, do you know - "

"Your wife was the Empress of Scandinavia until a moment ago. I - have no idea how to get you back to her, exactly, but she's safe. Your children - the children you had before you became emperor - they're all twelve years older, but they're all alive except for Toke, he's dead. I'm sorry. Illness. It's - it won't be safe for you to go back to them unless we can destroy the spirit first. And it'll be difficult to destroy the spirit without wiping out its entire male line, although I guess probably technically there should be a way to successively free them all first, the way we've done for you."

"I see."

She sits on her leaf.

"I'm sorry. I know it's a lot. 

"...would you like a story?"

"I suppose I might."

"All right."

And she tells him almost the same thing she told Tyelcormo when she first entered the fairy ring, about herself and the emperor, but also about Dyre, so that he'll have some idea where they stand. And then she tells him how she came to fairyland, and learned its laws, and how he then came to be here, and that should leave them about as caught up as they can be until he finishes processing most of this.

And eventually he comes back. "All right, we're heading out. Not-emperor, can you walk?"

"I can walk."