The gods have to be laughing at him right now – also he is having such weird feelings about the age difference here, not that there's really any way for it not to be weird when you're two thousand. 

They step through the Gate. He's opened it directly into the building where everything is kept because why not.

The walls are plain stone. There are sturdy shelves of wood treated with preservation spells, and boxes on the shelves, and the boxes are full of books and notes. There are a LOT of notes in this room. 

"Wow. Should I not look at them -"

"I think most of these are in ancient Kaled'a'in or the language of the Eastern Empire, if you read either of those I will be very surprised." 

"No, just the two." She picks up a book at random.

It is full of neat, dense handwriting, interrupted with line breaks and what are presumably dates. Without being able to actually read it, it looks more like a high-level summary than her own notebooks do. 

She flips through it, scans pages, puts the book back gently, picks up another. When she's looked through that one too, she sits down on the floor of the room. "Wow," she says. "Two thousand years old, gods are mad at you, and this is the first time they try this strategy, really? I mean in theory you could have just cottoned on earlier before but you were surprised -"

"I am very confused! I did worry about it for centuries and eventually assumed they were not able to do it - I have not noticed failed attempts, though I suppose they could have failed because I never met the intended people." 

"Books were ambiguous on how compatible people have to be."

"Hmm. From the very limited information I have about you so far, it seems we are rather compatible in some ways – the tendency to keep copious documentation of our lives being one – and rather incompatible in others. Which I am beginning to suspect could be the point. I do not make a habit of caring what others think of my choices, but if a lifebond - forces me to care - then perhaps they wish to change who I am so that I stop doing the things they dislike. I am not exactly pleased about this." 

"Is there something I should know about here," she says. In mid-sentence she gives up trying not to look directly at him and turns around to face the opposite wall instead.

His records room is very well-shielded and it's not as good as being up in the far north but it's probably safe for a longer conversation. Leareth gets down a crate to sit on, offers Belrun one as well. 

"I became immortal because I grew up in a kingdom with a large number of problems," he says. "I wished to fix them – to eventually build a world where nobody was suffering for stupid reasons such as hunger or disease or war. I have been very ruthless in doing so, especially once I realized that the gods were the cause of all the implausible accidents disrupting my plans. I am willing to do many things that are unethical in the process. I suppose we could go through the list and you can scream at me about it." 

She sits on the crate facing away from him. "I... guess there are worse reasons... is screaming at you going to help somehow or is it just so bad you expect me to scream involuntarily."

"I expect you to be upset and angry?" Why does he caaaare so much this is miserable and it's a kind of misery he has no practice dealing with at all. "Shouting is not going to help at all with anything but it seems very possible it would happen anyway." 

Sigh. 

"In the long run I am very against death. However, in the shorter run, I am willing to use plans that involve killing people and I generally do not feel bad about this, if I judge it to be the correct strategic move. I suppose I could give you examples of times where this has come up in my history." 

"Well, you're immortal, that's new and different, do you think you can fix it later or -"

"Reincarnation is already something that happens in the world, and some of the gods have ways of doing it that include memories of the past life. My method does, though - not all of them, which is why I keep such thorough records. I think I can eventually fix it." 

"Well, congratulations on the relatively defensible in expectation murder, I guess."

"I have also been quite willing to use blood-magic when it seemed strategically justified, even though nearly everywhere in the world this is much more taboo than murder. I do not think it is actually worse than murder, in the contexts where I used it – there are some considerations such as damage to the local magic flows, but this can be mitigated. I legalized blood-magic as a source of mage-power in the first empire I founded after my...initial death and return. Everybody was doing it anyway and there was no other reliable source of energy to, for example, fix the weather so that crops could be harvested successfully – I ran the numbers on this, anticipated deaths from starvation versus the blood-magic, and it seemed a clear win. Also it meant that I could select the - victims - to be convicted criminals, rather than mostly farmers' young children."

Leareth feels strongly like he is making lots of excuses in hopes to avoid being yelled at, which is not a motivation he endorses, but it's happening anyway. This isn't even the part he expects her to react worst to. He really should have opened with that, gotten it over, but - aauuugh. Stupid lifebond. 

She doesn't yell, just rests her chin in her hands, still looking away. "Okay," she murmurs.

She is taking this surprisingly calmly but that...does not actually make Leareth any less terrifying about the emotional backwash he's sure is about to hit him when he tells her the next thing. 

He grits his teeth. Get it over with. "The way I think does not generally involve treating any specific thing as sacred. There are some things I recognize are quite bad and am willing to do anyway when I judge it is strategically justified. These things include using Thoughtsensing to read people's minds when I am worried about a threat in my surroundings - I did this in the library although not to you because you have shockingly good shields," feels important he specify that right away, and then say all the rest fast before the screaming can start, "and I am also willing to use compulsions or order other people to use them and this was also something I legalized in the empire I mentioned and now you can scream at me if you want." 

She doesn't scream or even turn. She does shiver a little. He can tell without looking that she's miserable anyway, of course.

This is agonizing, Leareth's entire hindbrain is screaming that Belrun is the most important thing and hurting her is the worst thing he can possibly do and it needs to be fixed right now - and he is fully aware that this has to be exactly what the gods want - and trying not to be as furious about this as he would naturally be because the last thing this conversation needs is more emotions sloshing around. 

"–also my method of immortality involves reincarnating into the bodies of my descendants who are appropriately mage-gifted and this kills them or rather evicts their soul to get reincarnated somewhere else, I tried half a dozen magical methods for immortality and this was the only one that survived the Cataclysm and worked and I also tried the version that didn't involve evicting the body's original inhabitant and sharing instead but it was changing who I was and I decided that was riskier than killing a small number of additional people."

He says all of that very fast in a flat monotone and then turns around to face the wall because aaaaa. 

This still doesn't get her to yell.

She holds very still, pinched-off emotional backwash rippling all over the place for a minute and then stilling like she's concentrating on something, and then it dips into a low murmur of grief and she starts crying very softly, wrapping her arms around herself.

Oh no this is awful - he doesn't understand why she's crying but it is clearly his fault and this is terrible and he is suddenly feeling overwhelming guilt and shame, neither of which are emotions he has chosen to feel in the last several decades because they generally aren't helpful, but this means he has no idea how to usefully redirect away from them. 

"I am...sorry...?" Apologizing for the entirety of who he is as a person is so pointless. Leareth wants to personally storm out and murder the god who decided this lifebond was a clever idea because - they can mess with him, they do that all the time, he is completely used to being murdered horribly, he's even pretty desensitized to the inevitable collateral damage - but they made a mistake when they went after Belrun. 

He wants to offer her a hug, which is both bafflingly outside what is normal for him and also won't help at all. 

Actually, "You could hug me. If you want. I'm not sure I'm interpreting right."

All right wow this whole feelings-communication thing is bizarre and creepy and also very slightly useful. "I...seem to want to? Will it actually help at all? My model of how humans work is that generally when people are very upset at someone for hurting them, they do not in that moment want a hug from that person?"