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The capital is boring.
Why is the capital boring? It's the capital! It should have interesting people in it! But noo, everyone she's met so far has been an idiot. Mostly not even an entertaining idiot, just a boring idiot who thinks she should be impressed by their whatever, like, no, in order to impress her you can start by not being an idiot.
On the plus side, the party has free booze, so that's nice.
"He's got this--thing--going, that powers his immortality and all the magic stuff on the mountain, and it feeds on pain and if he doesn't feed it enough it'll go badly for him. And the whole mountain."
"Yeah. I--know I'm not enough to really substitute for even one swan, but...I like to think I might take some of the pressure off."
Necori accepts the change of subject with grace. They can talk about literature for the rest of the evening.
Duplicating the fountains is going to be an enormous pain, but less of one in the long term than regularly flying to the old capital for healing water.
He doesn't notice he hasn't touched his swans in days until he starts to feel the first faint warning signs of impending instability in the mountain's magic. He flies down to the village and picks up Luar, the newest, and takes her to the room at the bottom of the lake with the glass roof. It's beautiful down there. He stays up all night and then falls asleep as the first rays of dawn touch the water, and she cuts his throat in his sleep, and he doesn't even bother punishing her, just takes her back to the village and flies to his rooms in the castle and goes to sleep again.
"We've been having gloriously painful sex for two weeks, and I haven't got enough Ansati, yet, to read the magic theory books--but I want to start learning how to do pain magic."
"I can light a candle or heal something trivial. I've never been part of making an artifact."
"That'll do."
This is a nice sitting room but not so nice that he's reluctant to get blood all over it. He sits down on the couch and beckons Siva to join him.
"So the first thing you need to learn is how to hold pain magic. Picking it up is almost exactly the same; holding it is almost completely different. Normal magic, you don't have to pay any attention to how you hold it, it's just there; pain magic is always in motion, always doing something, it'll jump out and light you on fire if you don't keep up. I can give you pieces of the mountain's power to practice with, if you want, so you can learn the trick without the distraction of being in enough pain to draw power from."
"I thought so!"
He summons a bottle of healing water and sets it on the table in front of him, then says, "Ready? One, two, three, catch."
It's not just active and wild, it's big - a hundred times more power than she's ever held at once, all whirling and sparking and crackling in her insubstantial grip, seething to get out. Keeping hold of it is an act of continually shifting balance, like standing on the deck of a ship.
She manages to hold onto it for a couple of seconds before it blows up in her face.
She is mildly scorched. "Do you want a sip of healing water before you try again?"
"Nicely done." And when she's had her sip of healing water: "One, two, three, catch -"
Catch! Hold! Inevitable fumble after a fraction of a second longer than last time!
Siva may not be getting much out of all this magic blowing up in her face, but Serik kind of is.
Magic lessons first, though. He can keep giving her power as long as she wants to keep trying to hold it.
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