There are comfortable reading chairs right over there. They are so comfortable. Well lit, too, with the floating magelights that would be stupidly wasteful anywhere else but are apparently standard on the Howling Mountain.

Yeah she sort of got the "stupidly wasteful magic is standard here" thing with the awesome wind flying.

Comfy chairs! Gratuitous number of books! She will basically be here until someone interrupts her or some sort of pesky bodily need makes itself unignorable.

No interruptions manifest themselves. She will have to attend to a pesky bodily need.

Bah. You win this time, physical form. Fine, she will go sleep.

The bed in her guest room is astonishingly comfortable to the point where one might be tempted to accuse it of having more stupidly wasteful magic in it somewhere.

There is something a little depressing about falling asleep on a bed that appears to be made out of torture-powered coziness but she is far too tired to care. Zzzz.

The questionably torture-powered coziness is still there in the morning.

Sheeee should get up. Or something. But it is so cozy.

The coziest!

Well, eventually physical needs other than sleep will drive her out of bed. And once she has taken care of those she can locate the magic table and breakfast. Probably breakfast. What time even is it. It is probably too late for any self-respecting breakfast.

It is shortly after noon, and Lord Tanaikon is sitting at the magic table, eating breakfast. Or at least, eating breakfast foods while comfortably dressed and sleepy.

"Good facsimile of morning. Your beds are frighteningly cozy, I thought for a moment I would be unable to escape entirely."

Giggle.

"Good morning to you too."

"On a slightly less friendly and cheerful note, how exactly does the torture-to-magic conversion work? I mean, if I am less than frugal with use of magical objects, is this going to require an extra few minutes to an hour of torture, because I would really like to minimize the amount of torture I cause."

"Oh, nothing like that," he says. "We passed the point where I have more power than I can possibly use centuries ago. The only reason I need to keep feeding it is that the magic needs to keep growing to stay stable. It's perfectly safe as long as I keep adding more, but if I left it completely alone for a month this entire mountain would probably melt and fall into the sea."

"Oh, good. That's going to make things so much more pleasant. I don't really have any idea how this kind of magic works--maybe I should learn, library permitting."

"See if you get along with Iri, maybe she'll teach you. She's better at the theoretical part than I am."

"That's your daughter, right? I hope I get along with her, it would be awkward not to."

"Yeah. We have our differences. Mainly that she wishes I wouldn't torture people. She's working on making the magic self-sustaining so I won't have to."

"If you can stop, will you?"

"Well, not immediately. But a lot can happen in a thousand years."

"Okay.

I'm sort of curious how this all got started."

"That's a story, all right. It starts with my father being the Last Emperor. I can fill in the rest if you like."

"Sure. That's one of the more plausible things in the stories about you and I still never thought to give it much credibility."

"Well, he was. And I thought I wanted his empire. I thought I wanted it badly enough to kill him for it. I thought... well, a lot of stupid things. And I only noticed how stupid they were when the city I'd grown up in was a mageblasted ruin, my father and my best friend were both dead, and the empire was crumbling around me. At which point I asked myself - well, what do I really want? And the answer was... safety, luxury, immortality, pleasure. So I went up the mountain and built myself a castle and left the rest of the world alone, except for the occasional kidnapping to keep the lifestyle going."