What you told my brother and my cousin. Is there more I need to know?

Not really, I haven't been saving secrets just for you. Would me wearing my own face make you uncomfortable?

Not at all.

Thanks. So, do you trust your cousin? Would it be a terrible mistake to hand him and his people the knowledge needed to use my kind of magic?

Not at all.

Lovely. Does he have any critics around here?

Probably. It would cause a lot of trouble if I went around courting people with complaints with the High King so they wouldn't have voiced them to me.

By your reputation I'd expect you to know who they are anyways.

I'm not omniscient, just nosy.

They laugh aloud at that.

I've said those exact same words. Very well, then, I will try to find them myself. Apart from giving your cousin magic, do you have any suggestions for what I should be doing?

I like travelling to pretty densely inhabited places that would be very energy-intensive to simulate, personally, and checking whether the people in the streets repeat.

Ooh, that's a good one. I've been mapping people I've run into here to people from my world, some of the correspondences are really close. For the amount of effort put into all this you really aren't trying, it's confusing. Am I at least an interesting feature of your hallucinations? Has Melkor gotten more creative than me, yet?

I will confess I didn't pay the backstory much attention, sorry. Want to repeat it so I can compare?

Oh, sure, would you like the whole life story start-to-finish? It would probably take Melkor's scriptwriters a while to plot out the whole thing.

By all means!

Alright! It may be a bit rambly and out-of-order at times, I haven't done this before.

I was born in Tylantia, the capital and greatest city of the empire of Bael Turath.

They send an image, Tylantia seen from the air. The city fills a mountian valley, stretching from peak to peak. Homes cling to steep mountainsides and cluster along the valley floor. Seven wide, glittering roads paved with glass and obsidian lead to an open city center spotted with street vendors. Elegant stone towers rise above the rest of the city; at the north end of the valley they rise out of a lake, connected by bridges to each other and the shore. The roofs are colored in mild shades, blending into each other in an enormous wheel of color.

My father was a senator. My mother is... Not a person, exactly. She is cruel and manipulative and powerful and she cannot be killed and is older than recorded history, probably. She seduced him, controlled him, used him for his connections, and left him as soon as she had no immediate use for him. She showed up six months later to leave him with me and tell him he would have no other heir. He tried, anyways, with other women, with magic. It never worked.

- ah.

Oh, right. Biologically obligatory monogamy is not a feature of my world.

I was in some sense very lucky, a senatorial family has access to a lot that other families do not. I had private tutors, I was fed. I did not lack for material needs. I did lack for a loving family. He resented me for what my mother had done. He resented me for his inability to have other children. He resented me for being a girl. He resented me for not being a girl, when that he found out.

Raised eyebrow -

Well, I'm not. Gender is confusing and more trouble than it's worth. Bael Turath had strict gender roles for the upper classes, a son would have been most advantageous. A daughter would have been acceptable, especially if he could have more kids, but... I was useless to him, politically. And otherwise.

I left, of course, when I was around twenty. Stayed in the city for a while, living on my own. Stealing, mostly, to survive. He didn't bother looking for me, but eventually someone did. A mage found me, told me that my sister sent him. I didn't know that I had a sister, but I went with him anyway, I thought he was probably loaded with magic items and I could just take them when he slept. We left the city, got on a boat, and. Well.

There was a war. It had been going on for about ten years by then and by all accounts Bael Turath was winning. The giants were pretty much wiped out, the empire was gobbling up Kalziran territory, the Jade Dragon Empire was sitting things out counting on an ocean to keep them safe. Or, it looked that way. There was apparently a big research project to develop something - a spell, an artifact, who knows, the details never got out - something to end the war in one fell swoop. Bael Turath must have caught on at some point, because they got desperate. They started summoning a demon army to end the war faster and. It got loose. Demons are temperamentally similar to your Enemy when free, and, suddenly, they were everywhere. Nobody was prepared for it. People in isolated areas survived, people in small towns were torn to shreds or eaten alive or burned to death or - 

To the best of my knowledge, the populations of the Turathi cities are still, technically, alive.

We were far enough from Tylantia that magic still worked, and the Turathi anti-teleportation wards fell when the city did. The mage had a long distance teleport ritual and he used it.

It turns out, my sister was real. Half-sister, technically, on my mother's side obviously. Her name was Syrilth, and she was a half-dragon - my mother had interesting taste in partners. Alfirin handed her off to two women who ran a shipping business and didn't want to go through the process to have children of their own, probably in exchange for some nefarious favors. Lovely people. They used to joke, sometimes, about how Syrilth had such an excess of mothers. I... I didn't know them very long. Nothing terrible happened to them, just - they were human - 

The three of them - Syrilth and her parents - took me under their wing. I learned a bit about running a business, and a lot about trade and politics. Syrilth and I were close, we worked together on everything after her parents died.

Nod.

Alfirin had her murdered about forty years later. I still don't know why. I heard the commotion but got there too late to do anything about it - not that I could have, I barely knew any magic, I wasn't a great fighter, but. I tried to get her resurrected, after. It didn't work. And then I discovered that someone had forged a new will for her, I was disinherited, and all the money I took out for the resurrection was, in the eyes of the law, stolen.

- your magic does resurrection?