Nod.

"It's not even that I don't get along with them, I just have, like, so many mixed feelings."

"It sounds like a society in which it's very hard not to gravely wrong your children."

"Sure. And all the people gravely wronging their children were gravely wronged as children etcetera, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"So, lots of mixed feelings."

Nod. "I don't talk to my father anymore but I've turned down anything that'd take me far enough away from home - he'd have drunk himself to death if I didn't keep casting Restoration on him."

"...and you don't talk? You just show up and cast it and leave?"

" - I visit my sister and drop by once he's asleep. I realize this is kind of immature."

"Nah, it makes sense. I think if I were a human I'd have wound up like that but I'm a hundred and twelve and it'd be hard to maintain."

"Yeah, that would be. I keep thinking, you know, he'll probably make Axis, he'll probably be happier there, what am I even doing -"

"What happens to drunks in Axis?"

"Lots of different places have different laws. He might not need it anymore - right now he can't go six hours without it, I have no idea if he'd want to quit if that wasn't true -"

"It does still work, though? Can you drink yourself unconscious? To further death?"

"It still works. I don't think it can kill you again."

Nod.

"He wasn't - uh, he started drinking heavily when he had an injury that wouldn't heal. Fresh start might be all he needs. But I haven't - yet -"

"This was - when you were a kid, and he couldn't afford a spell -"

"Yeah, I was - four? Five?"

Nod.

"Hey Hagan tell us a funny story."

"Seems...disrespectful or something."

"Sorta get the sense you have complicated feelings about your family too. I dunno how. Maybe it's Abadar telling me. Probably it's the compulsive lying."

"'s not compulsive, it's very premeditated. Hmmm. 

Once upon a time in the age of prophecy, there was a princess, and when she was born it was prophecied that every man to know her would cause her harm beyond imagining. Wanting to protect her from this, her father ordered her walled up in a cloistered tower where she would never meet a man and none could hurt her. And he loved her, so he ordered it made beautiful and full of life, with slaves and musicians and exotic foods and beautiful silks and everything a person could desire, and she lived in luxury for all of her days, and the king lived a long long life and grew very old, and on his deathbed he visited his daughter and he said to her, 'my beloved one, I dare now to dream that we have subverted fate, for you have lived in joy and contentment and safety and never had a husband and never come to harm, and you grow old, still safe, and so the prophecy was false.'

'Oh, jailor', she said, 'no it wasn't.'

That's my story."