It is absolutely what both participants want! This participant gives a happy hum and leans into him, kissing him back.

Sex in the waking world: a bit messy, occasionally uncomfortable, and a little bit awkward, but in her opinion still pretty great. And they can cuddle and sleep together after! That’s nice, that’s not actually the norm in the dream world.

That sounds stupid, cuddling and sleeping together is like one of the best parts. Other than all the rest.

Going to sleep soon after sundown means that when their lack of curtains brings sunlight into the room they are both of them fairly well-rested already.

Cuddling is perfectly normal, going to sleep together is not! Not everyone wants to sleep if they don't have to! Except here, they have to.

"Why do I hurt more," grumbles Saevetei, hiding from the terrible, terrible sunlight. "This is not faaaaaaaair."

"...more? Oh, than yesterday? Well, that's how it works."

"Nghhhhh it's dumb why didn't I get pulled in here while I had my healing charm onnnn."

"That sounds like a very useful item to have. Well, if you watch Sendhei dancing you'll probably feel better."

"What. Just emotionally, or actually magically doing making me not hurt as much?"

"The latter. His dancing improves healing and cleanses corruption."

She immediately sits up, with hardly even a groan.

"How does it do that," says Saevetei, fascinated.

Shrug. "Magic?" he says, unhelpfully.

She sighs, and pats him. "I'll figure it out. Probably. It's neat, though, I like that there are several mysteries available to figure out, it'll prevent me from getting bored in flower breeding hell."

"'Flower breeding hell'."

"My not so affectionate nickname for the complicated process of plant crossbreeding and magical hybridization to distill multiple qualities of various plants into whatever magic plant I'm ultimately aiming for. It's approximately what it feels like. Flower breeding hell."

"To make those plants you said, that produce iron and all that?"

"Sort of. More like isolating the building blocks for making those plants? Extremely weird plants that produce iron or something need a whole magical ritual to be created, and it's significantly easier to do if I can isolate specific processes that somewhat more ordinary plants are capable of, and essentially tell the ritual, 'Okay. That. Do that, but with this.' Does that make sense?"

"I think so. Is this magic... teachable? It is a lot different from the magics I am used to."

"It is! I have several advantages at it because this body was specifically designed to channel essence in various ways, but once I get things a bit more set up I could teach you things. I expect you will not want to learn all of the flower breeding hell theory, it takes ages to get anything useful out of it and took me ages to wrap my head around it all. But I will absolutely teach you how to use your blood to feed living things and make them grow faster or stronger or differently if you'd like me to, and I can teach you how to distill key elements from things to use in rites. You will get to burn lots of things, it'll be very exciting."

Taharqi laughs. "Well, the burning part at least is one I am used to." He sits up and stretches, which causes more than one bone to make a cracking noise.

She grins, then scoots over to retrieve bits of torn dress to see about piecing them back together. This mostly involves holding once-contiguous pieces next to each other and pressing them together with her fingers. It looks almost ordinary, except there's a little bit of a glow where her fingers meet fabric. All of the tears in her wake are knitted back together, like they'd never even been torn apart in the first place.

"Just setting things on fire will not cut it, a lot of it's burning multiple things at once and channeling the smoke through a filter that catches only the things you want. But yes, burning things."

The sound of drums starts coming from downstairs, making Taharqi look in that direction. "Seems like Sendhei is up."

And it might just be her imagination, but there does seem to be a little qualitative difference in how her soreness feels. Not like it's gone or healed but like it's less... raw.

"Huh," says Saevetei, thoughtfully, still melding her clothes back together. "That's so subtle. The magic, I mean, not the drums. It's absolutely fascinating and I will at some point be an excited magic geek at him about it."

"I'm not sure he knows much about the theory," Taharqi cautions. "But he's very good at the practice."

"I will not tackle him to forcibly interrogate him at knifepoint for the specifics of the theory of his magic," snorts Saevetei.

"I just wouldn't want to get your hopes up," he says, laughing. Up he gets, and starts making his way downstairs.

(The wall directly in front of the first flight of stairs down contains the head of a shaleback.)

She will take a little while to put her robe back together! Yes, everyone else here would be fine if she waltzed around naked, but she'd feel awkward about it, which is enough. Besides, this thing needs to be repaired anyway, so she might as well do it now. And then, once it's all in one piece again, she can put it on and go downstairs.