Reputation is important, she nods, giving him a squeeze. But I doubt that's something you did wrong; you can't have had many opportunities to make one, yet. I'm not seeing anything you did obviously wrong.

"There must have been something I could have done," he insists quietly. He doesn't want to believe their deaths were... inevitable. Being responsible is better than being helpless, right?

No, she sighs. That's how war is.

He closes his eyes, nodding, curling in on himself. He believes her about that. 

He thought, before he was sent out here, that he'd be fine with the actual fighting. He's talented at it - they say he's as good as the king was, at his age. But - 

"I hate this," he says, "The killing. The dying. I can't just... not fight, though." This war isn't going to leave him alone because he doesn't like to actually hurt people. Neither will the king. 

Yeah, this is the hard part. She hugs him, rather than reply.

He hugs back, curling into her arms, shuddering a bit. His hold is firm, but not tight. 

She might notice her shoulder getting a little bit wet. 

Stormsinger also shudders, or at least his emotions give the impression of it.  He can still feel what's going on around her, through their link, though it's muted in comparison to before. This feels like every mental hug he's ever gotten, but ten times as intense. He wonders vaguely how much better it would be if it were actually him being hugged. 

There's a thread of fondness for Stormsinger, but she's mostly focused on Ilek, petting his back and watching his emotions as he cries.

This will go on for a while then. 

Slowly, his tears slow, his grief and anger drain out. He feels hollowed by their lack. 

He doesn't stop hugging her. His eyes are heavy, and the world feels foggy. He might just fall asleep like this, sitting up. 

She lets go slightly to scoop him up into her arms as she stands, and then settles the both of them into bed a moment later, pulling the blanket over them telekinetically.

She dreams of plants, tiny seedlings and great trunks in the sunlight, growing into strange and wonderful shapes, intermittently disturbed by the chaos of battle, the pull of the lightsaber in her hands, the smell of burnt flesh.

He startles a bit at the scooping, but settles down quickly enough. 

(He dreams of deep water, and falling stars. He stands before a pyre that is simultaneously the one from that night and much, much too large to be that, playing a song on his harp, which he can't hear over the roar of the flames.) 

(Stormsinger doesn't dream, but he pays attention to her emotional state, when he can, beyond the warmth and comfort of their embrace. He sends those feelings to her, if she seems distressed.)

DZ returns, quietly, half an hour or so before sunrise; she takes in the scene, tidies the room a bit, and sits to watch her master for a few minutes.

Deskyl's doing well, she sees. Recovering more slowly than she might be, perhaps, but she's happier, more satisfied. It's more obvious what the poetry was for, now, seeing what she gets from being out in the world. It's good that she has that; the fact that she needs DZ less for it - maybe does matter, actually; she wouldn't have noticed, not so long ago, but the practice Deskyl has demanded of her seems to be working.

Her programming is clear on the matter; she's not supposed to make demands of her master about anything that doesn't interfere with her ability to serve, not supposed to bring herself to her master's attention unnecessarily, not supposed to talk about herself at all. Deskyl has been clear, too, though, that she wants to know whenever DZ notices herself wanting something, and that that's not, really, a demand, to tell her what she needs; she'll do something about it if and only if she wants to. It's still uncomfortable, going against her programming, but - this is what Deskyl wants, and it's her purpose to serve, no matter how uncomfortable it is.

She sets that line of thought aside and gets back to the near-infinite paperwork. It's good to be useful.

He wakes feeling sad, and frustrated - emotions spilling over from his dreams. It takes him a few moments to place where he is. He blinks slowly at Deskyl, piecing together memories of the night before. He doesn't try to get up. 

Deskyl wakes up shortly after Ilek does, his alertness waking her. She's confused - not surprised, but confused at the lack of surprise - at the presence of other people in the room, and a little alarmed at the lack of lightsaber at her side, until she uses a sense she hadn't used in Stormsinger's presence yesterday to check on it, DZ, and the general state of the room, which indicate that she allowed this, set it up, didn't want to risk waking alarmed and hurting someone. The whole process takes just a moment, before it occurs to her to try to think back to the previous day; she grins, when she does, though the memories are vague, more impressionistic than detailed. Morning, Love, she sends, and gives Ilek a gentle squeeze.

Good morning, he sends back, fond. I take it your memories survived the night? He is pleased by this evidence that she is recovering. 

Ilek squeezes back, but doesn't say anything. 

He isn't sure what to say. Last night feels like a dream, in the light of morning.

He feels a lot better for the talk, and the tears. Not happy, but better. 

What do you say to someone you broke down on after only hours of properly knowing them? Even with a night's rest between then and now, he doesn't know what to say - how to thank her, for her advice, for being there.

I pushed it a little, looks like, but yeah, mostly. Daisy'll remind me of the rest. Or you can, I guess.

It's okay, she signs to Ilek. It's good that you're feeling better.

He nods, shallowly, a small smile forming on his face.

(The runestone is in one of his pouches, hung up with his sword, but he doesn't need to be touching it for it to work - just attached to it with a thread.) 

"...Thank you," he murmurs anyway. It's not enough really, but it's there.

He sits up, slowly, leaning against the backboard, staying close so they're still in physical contact. 

"...Do you have time? To talk? I... feel like you know me, but I don't know you as well as I'd... like." 

He doesn't have anywhere to be, given the siege. The training fields, if he wanted. He's not sure if that's true of her, though. 

I would be happy to remind, should I notice something you have forgotten, Stormsinger agrees.

Thanks, she sends.

Yeah. She could turn around so she could see him - and so he could see her more easily - but she doesn't need to, and it'd mean breaking contact. Is there anything specific you want to know?

(Translation runestones are convenient that way.)

He stalls, uncertain. What does he want to know? Well, what does he know of her? 

Not a lot. Or. Maybe a lot, in a way. She's... kind, clearly, or at least has been to him. She's powerful, and from so far away the place likely can't be reached again. She's protective - possessive - of her loved ones - the silver woman, DZ (who he has not yet noticed), and the Blade which is a perfect match to him. Something terrible happened to her, recently, which has left her with terrible mental injuries. 

He doesn't want to ask about that, though - doesn't want to make her sad. Maybe... 

"...What's it like, where you come from? The world."

You can tell a lot about a person from the place they come from - not so much from the place itself, but from what they think of when they talk about it. 

Much bigger than this. We have space travel; I've lived on two planets and visited a couple dozen, and I'm a little bit of a homebody. It's nice to know it's out there, though - we have technology to let us communicate very quickly, so I've gotten to work with people from all over - mostly Sith, but that's all right, Sith engineers are pretty okay. And - I'm not sure you have the technology to have magazines, yet - we're able to make books very quickly, and a magazine is basically a very short book on a particular topic, and they make a new one every month or every few months and send it to people who've paid for that. The ones I liked would collect poetry from all over all the worlds and print it up to send out, with different specialties.

He listens with interest (so does Stormsinger), "I'm not sure I know what you mean by 'space'?" He comments first of all. "We have publishing houses," he adds, "And poetry books - but not those short books. And the quickest communication we have is the mirrors - well, we can use active space spells to do it, but it's so expensive almost no one ever would. The mirrors are very expensive to make but they cost less mana to use." 

Very few people where I'm from have magic at all; we use technology that runs on electricity for most things, and electricity is easy to make. Space is - she gestures up - if you go far enough, the air thins out, and there's just nothing at all, for incredible distances. The stars are other suns, very far away, and they have their own planets, and some of them are places people can live.