"Close enough. I'll take you to see the king."

"Is the king by any chance sarcastic, amoral, a good friend of yours, and with a name that sounds vaguely like Zierni Esarkan?"

"Yes, yes, yes, and not really, unless you can find an appropriate resemblance in 'Dalvor Iserra Zaranye Aluvanna'."

He turns and heads for the surface.

"My grandfather's name is Kazaryne Fariol. And my mother is Kazaryne Aeleva and my father is Nirahn Corino."

"...My son is Azair Kevarsin and his wife is Kyralaine Evniar. And their children are Ashras, Inlaith, and Elarron."

He teleports periodically to keep up.

"Mother as a man and Father as a woman, that's going to be interesting. And you didn't recognize me, so something odd is going on in this family tree, unless - are your grandchildren girls, it's ambiguous and I don't know how to read local names for that...?"

"I can see a little Kevarsin in you if I look hard, but I might be fooling myself, and you're too Ceirene anyway. If you recognized me as your grandfather, though... I'm going to guess that you take after your father and he looks nothing like Kyralaine. And perhaps that all of you live on your planet's exterior."

"Planets don't commonly have interiors like this, actually, you'll find just about every human in the multiverse looks - 'Ceirene' to you."

"Bizarre. And you said the Enemy came in through a network of Spheres?"

"Is that what these little worlds are called? Yeah. Worlds don't customarily have edges, or portals between them. They do have an adjacency thing going on but you could roam the whole place and not know there was another one next to it unless you happened to have the right magic-or-whatever."

"Interesting implications there. ...Do you not know what a Sphere is?"

"Not any more than you know what a soulbearer is, I bet," he says, indicating his glowing golden pendant.

"You might have noticed I have wings," says Faidre. "Anyone can get them but not everyone does. Winged people don't age past adulthood, are harder to kill, and have Spheres. We can make portals to our Spheres from anywhere we happen to be, and close or reopen those portals at will. A portal between the Spheres of two living people requires both their permission to open and can be closed by either side, but a portal between two dead Spheres that's open when the second person dies stays open forever. Between a dead Sphere and a live one - or a live one and the outer world, but I suppose you're implying that what I think of as the outer world is also a dead Sphere - the portal is entirely under the control of the living Sphere owner."

...And he can't even tell Raika-seren because world-spanning osanwe doesn't reach through the maze. Well, it might not be the insanely useful breakthrough it appears to be.

"I'd love to experiment with how that holds up outside this, uh, cluster of worlds," he says. "I had to sneak past the genocidal aliens to get in here, but I might want to take a winged person with me on my way out."

"Snuck past them all by yourself, eh? With your numerous magical powers?"

"Pretty much. I killed a god once," he says cheerfully.

"The resemblance to my eldest grandson just gets more and more striking," says Faidre, swooping down to land on a balcony. This stone building on a hilltop is probably a palace, although it's not nearly as impressive as the one in Nuime.

He pops onto the balcony beside Faidre.

"I can't wait to..."

A column of white light wraps around him, extending upward into the for-lack-of-a-better-word sky. When it clears after a few seconds, he has acquired a pair of wings, massive and elaborately feathered, glowing in the colours of his soul.

"...meet... him...? What—?" He stretches the wings, folds them around in front of him to study them, runs a hand along the edge of one.

"...Ah," says Faidre.

"One gets one's wings by accomplishing something. Apparently it's possible to do retroactively."

"Well," says Taliar. "That's... going to be interesting, isn't it. Okay, your call - do I talk to your king first, or fuck around with my exciting new powers?"

"King first," he says. "This way."

"I have wings now," he says, following Faidre into the palace. "This is weird."

But then - there's sort of a - he does something, takes an unfamiliar but somehow entirely natural action, and the wings vanish. Reverses it, and they reappear. "Okay, that's convenient."

"Isn't it? I suggest keeping them out, though. Prestige."

"I'm about to meet an alt of Esarkan. I don't need to look prestigious, just useful."

"Well, the wings can be a good proxy for usefulness."

And here they are.