It's been a couple of years since the last time the Lord of the Howling Mountain crashed a party in Oroshe; he shouldn't be due for another year at least, probably more.

Of course, the Lord of the Howling Mountain is not exactly known for keeping to a consistent schedule.

A bolt of lightning from a clear sky strikes the roof of the manor with a flash and a crack, somehow extinguishing every lamp and candle in the building. Then a pillar of flame roars up from an open spot on the floor, and when it subsides, Serik Tanaikon is standing there, surveying the crowd with a slight, amused smile. The lights in the ballroom come back up one by one, starting with a quick spiral around the chandelier above his head and ending a few seconds later with the farthest of the wall sconces.

Now that is impressive.

...That is also the Lord of the Howling Mountain, she should probably be terrified. On the other hand, it's not like he's known to kidnap entire partiesful of people, there's lots of pretty girls here, and when else is she going to get a chance to see something so gloriously dangerous? Yeah, okay, positive feelings approved. Positive feelings and blending into the crowd as much as humanly possible.

He strolls around the room. People edge out of his way, or freeze in place when he looks at them. His entrance was dramatic enough that no one's had the courage to slip out a side door yet.

There's a pair of guests near him, a man and a woman who were dancing when he arrived, standing frozen with their hands clasped between them. When Lord Tanaikon steps closer, the man lets go of the woman's hands and turns to face him, stepping in front of her as though to shield her from that smile.

Lord Tanaikon leans in and whispers in the man's ear for half a minute or so, then straightens up with a laugh and passes them by. The man collapses into the woman's arms, trembling visibly.

Rude. 

She does not in fact want his attention like at all so she'll keep as still as the people around her and not tell him off even a little bit.

Someone near the edge of the crowd sidles toward a door.

"Ah?" he says, looking in their direction. They stop moving. "Thank you."

He's getting closer to Siva. No one seems to have caught his eye yet, although he pauses a few times, looking at this or that guest.

She squeezes her eyes shut on the grounds that this is much better for Blending In than actually looking at him with any plausible look on her face.

Then it might take her a few seconds to notice the crowd thinning out around her as Lord Tanaikon draws closer, until at last he is standing in front of her and the nearest other guest is five feet away.

...Oops. 

Okay, whatever, playing the frightened little mouse was getting old fast. At least if he takes her he probably won't take anyone else.

(Ironically, only now is she actually starting to be scared.)

"Good evening," he says, smiling down at her and offering his hands. "May I have this dance?"

(The music has stopped, of course; the hall is nearly silent, except for a few frightened whimpers here and there, quickly stifled.)

"To what music, milord?"

He chuckles.

"Take my hands and find out."

She gives him an assessing look, then decides "fuck it" and takes his hands.

There is a moment of - dissolution, a transition from being a solid and embodied thing to being a part of the air, a perspective without a presence, sense without form.

As soon as the air has her, it twists away and flows out an open window to spiral up into the sky. The lights of the city glitter beneath her like golden stars.

And then she's solid again, and so is he, standing on thin air almost level with the peak of the Howling Mountain to the east. Lord Tanaikon is laughing. The wind swirls around them, whistling some thousand-year-old song. The air under their feet supports them as firmly as stone. The amount of magic he's wasting on this must be outrageous; no wonder he's rumoured to be a god.

Amazing. She laughs in delight. If he does kidnap her to torture for the rest of her life she hopes it doesn't make her forget this, this is so beautiful.

She does not know this song but she is good enough at dancing to improvise.

He is an excellent dancer and seems entirely, genuinely delighted to dance with her in midair to songs sung by the wind. When the first song ends, another starts, and then another; he leads her through more and more intricate steps as he gets to know her skill and style. Finally, he's tired enough to let the music fade, after spinning her into his arms one last time.

"Well?" he asks, a little out of breath, letting go but not yet stepping back. "Was the music to your liking?"

"That was glorious."

"I'm glad you think so. What's your name, my dear?"

"Siva Jialo. And I'm not your dear."

"No? My apologies," he says. "I hope I haven't ruined the moment."

"Nah."

"Good."

He steps back slightly, to make enough room between them that he can offer her his hands again.

"Would you like to see my castle?"

"Is that actually a question, because I don't really like when people play silly buggers with me."

"I assure you," he says, "it's a question to which I genuinely want to know the answer."

"Fair enough. I don't know, it's a hard question to answer. Before tonight, the only thing I knew about the girls you spirited away was 'nobody ever saw them again'. Now I also know 'The Lord of the Howling Mountains dances beautifully and will sometimes deploy his powers to delightful effect,' but that still leaves me with a spectrum of options ranging from 'you only take girls who are genuinely worse off otherwise, like abuse victims and such, and all the awful rumors are completely false' to 'you are totally a demon who will rape and torture me for several millennia before devouring what's left of my soul, and the fancy dancing is just a method of temptation and I'll never see the like again' and I rather suspect that the answer is somewhere in the middle, but it's rather hard to give your question an informed answer without knowing where in the middle it is, and all an uninformed answer would tell you would be--how I was weighing the probabilities against each other, I suppose, but without knowing how I was doing that I still expect it would be splendidly uninformative."

He chuckles.

"Well, fair enough. Let me rephrase, then. I haven't decided what I'm going to do with you, but my castle is beautiful and I want to show it off to you because I think you'll appreciate it. Leaving aside the question of what happens afterward, does that sound like a good use of your time?"

"Ah. Yes it does."

He smiles. He takes her hands. They dissolve into the wind, and it carries them to the mountain.

It is a beautiful castle. Huge, ancient, exquisitely well-maintained, surrounded by beautiful gardens and a beautiful forest and a beautiful moon-silvered lake. They circle it on the wind, and then land atop the tallest tower, with a breathtaking view down the mountain all the way to the city of Oroshe.

"Wow."

Lord Tanaikon grins at her. "Your appreciation is just as delightful as I thought it would be."

She considers this. "I'm glad," she decides after a few moments.

He leans on the parapet and looks at her consideringly.

"I like you," he says. "You're interesting."

"I'm not surprised, if you normally kidnap your girls from the capital. Everyone there was deadly dull."

...He bursts into very undignified giggles.

"And they probably act even less interesting than they are, what with the gibbering terror of torture."

After a moment, he recovers enough to say, "Oh, terror can be interesting in its own way."

"If you didn't feel that way I'm sure you wouldn't have said whatever that was to that poor man at the party. But if everyone acts terrified of you, it probably makes me more interesting that I don't."

He laughs. "You're right about that."

"So what now?"

"I'm not sure," he says. "I liked dancing with you. I liked showing you my castle. I'm thinking of telling you where I fall on the scale between rescuer and demon, but I'm not sure you'll believe me if I do."

"I didn't actually personally need rescuing, in case I was accidentally misleading about that."

"I didn't expect you to."

"Okay. So--when I said I didn't appreciate people playing silly buggers with me you rephrased the question to one I could believe mattered, you told me you hadn't decided what to do with me, and not like a threat. I can't promise to believe you exactly, but I can promise to take what you say seriously."

He smiles. "All right," he says.

"I do kidnap girls and rape and torture them. Not for millennia, though, they get about a century and a half each. And I'm not a demon, just a man with a lot of powerful magic. Anyone could have what I have if they knew how to get it and were willing to spend three thousand years torturing people near-daily. I honestly do like you, and I like the look on your face when I show you something beautiful, and I think I'd rather make you happy than torture you."

"So, I would...need to know you better, but...the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. If the magic needs 'pain' and not 'suffering'."

...he looks thoughtfully at her.

"You just get better and better, don't you," he says. "Pain and not suffering, yes."

"Obviously my ability to experiment with this in the past has been limited, but from what I already know--sharp good, burning bad, physical impact okay on my limbs and torso except the stomach and definitely not on my head, choking bad, tension like from pulled hair or overextended limbs good."

"I think I could work with that," he says. "Although I'm used to girls I can't kill by accident..."

"How do you do that?"

"It's part of how I keep all this magic going - it's not without problems, though. I can't cut someone loose from the magic once they're in it, and after a while it starts burning out their minds, and the easiest way to make them last longer was to add a transformation that turns them into swans whenever the sun's up, so now they get a hundred years before they start to go and about fifty more before there's nothing left."

"That doesn't sound terribly appealing. Does someone have to be in that bit of magic for torturing them to be magically helpful?"

"No, it just means I don't have to think about it, any pain they feel goes straight to the mountain. And they're immortal until I decide to kill them. Which is very useful. I could just go raid the healing fountain in the old capital and be very careful with you..."

"Of course you can get into the old capital. I don't know why that never occurred to me. If that's an option, it sounds...very appealing."

He laughs softly. "It's an option. And it appeals to me too. What did you mean when you said you'd have to know me better?"

"...You know how normal people mind if a stranger sees them naked? I'm like that about--some things. Pain is one of them. I like you well enough, but--some things want to wait a bit."

"Hmm," he says consideringly. "All right. Then I suppose the next question is, do you want to stay at my castle a while?"

"Well, it's bound to be more interesting than the capitol, and I don't have anywhere else I need to be anytime soon."

"I have more guest rooms than I could ever conceivably need; I like decorating them," he says cheerfully. "I'll show you around and you can pick one. Do you like books? I have a magnificent library."

"I love books!"

"Look down there," he says, crossing the top of the tower and leaning over the parapet to point at a huge beautiful round skylight. Beneath it, eight floors of balconies surround a central column of empty space, and behind each railing stand ranks and ranks of bookshelves.

"Oh..." she breathes, looking down. "This must--is there a bigger library anywhere on the planet?"

He grins.

"If there is, I don't know about it."

"This is utterly delightful. You know, if someone had told me a week ago that I'd be glad the Lord of the Howling Mountain had noticed me I'd have--not even called them crazy, just made a rude gesture and told them what I told you about silly buggers. But this is--wow. Do the normal torturees get library access, because I'm not sure that wouldn't be a worthwhile tradeoff in itself."

He laughs. "They could use the library if they wanted to, actually, but they tend to stay out of the castle. Want a closer look?" He offers his hand.

She takes it. "Do they know about the library?"

And they're in the wind, and then they're in the library, standing by the railing on the top floor.

"Some of them do!"

"I can't explain it, then," she shrugs, and looks around, the crane of her neck turning into a delighted twirl partway through. "Flying like that is so cool, is it even better when you're the one driving?"

He laughs again. "Yes."

"If you want any more complicated reactions out of me than 'overflowing undifferentiated delight' you're probably going to have to wait a few minutes!" she says brightly, darting over to look at the nearest bookcase.

"I like the overflowing undifferentiated delight."

The nearest bookcase has relatively modern fiction, where 'relatively modern' means the last few centuries. She might even recognize some titles. Everything is in absolutely perfect condition.

Probably magic. She runs her fingers down the spine of one of the older ones gently, almost reverently. Then she twirls around again. This is so, so exciting, and she's going to need a little time to mellow out before she can stand still long enough to actually think about reading any of them. And she should probably not just abandon her host like that.

Her host seems pretty content to just stand there and lean on the railing and watch her be gleeful.

Her host is delightful on levels she had not previously realized were possible for someone with his horrifying habits! Assuming he's been being honest with her, at least, which she thinks he has. She appreciates that a lot, honesty is important. But:

"I should probably. Get a guest room. Or something. Before abandoning you to dive headfirst into one or several books."

He laughs. "Yes, that's reasonable. I'll show you the closest rooms, shall I?"

"That sounds like an excellent plan!"

So he leads her through the castle to a nearby corridor where there are plenty of guest rooms, all beautifully decorated.

Ooh. "You know, assuming you were serious about being able to leave, I really like the idea of--showing up at the capitol at some point in the future, and just flabbergasting people with the idea that a girl who was spirited away to the Howling Mountain ever came back in one piece."

"I'd say 'think of my reputation!' but I think my reputation would keep right on going," he says.

"Yeah, and after I agreed to dance with you in plain view of everyone people would probably just say I was a wicked sorceress rather than a 'girl who gets spirited away.' Less amusing than my original thought. Oh well."

"People have trouble with nuance. You almost never hear anyone tell stories about me spiriting boys away, even though it happens. Not as often as girls, but often enough that you'd think in three thousand years the gossips would've caught on."

"Yes, because it's not possible to like boys and girls, oh no, that's not a thing at all."

"And it's not as if anyone's ever come back to explain what I do with them. But of course they assume that too, because it fits the narrative. It's a little ridiculous."

"Yeah, most of the stories I've heard about you are not so much the kind of thing to take seriously."

"The ones where I'm a god are flattering, at least!"

"I can see that, although I think it would be more flattering if they had more otherwise accurate information about you."

"Can't have everything," he shrugs.

"Indeed."

"Anyway. Here are the guest rooms. Feel free to wander the castle and grounds, but please stay out of the northwest wing unless expressly invited; it belongs to my daughter. If you sit down at the table in the dining hall, food will appear in front of you. Anything else you want to see before you disappear into the library for hours?"

"Can't think of anything in particular."

"Enjoy! If you need anything, I'll hear you if you say my name from anywhere on this mountain."

"Convenient!"

He grins, waves, and dissolves into a breeze that whisks away down the corridor.

She--

doesn't unpack, because she didn't bring anything with her. She should probably have asked about clothes. Is there a wardrobe or anything in the room?

There is indeed a wardrobe, which, when opened, contains clothes that fit her! They're all in centuries-old styles, of course.

Pretty, though, and it's not like there's anyone around who'll look at her funny for dressing in centuries-old styles.

But first: back to the library!

The library is still there and still full of books. So many books.

So many books!

She's going to start with that one shelf she saw to begin with on the eighth floor, and she's going to explore on her way up.

It seems to be organized with the most recent books at the top. If she goes down to the bottom floor, everything is in Ansati. Maybe in a few centuries there'll be a ninth floor.

Yeah she doesn't speak Ansati she's just going to leave those alone for the moment. Maybe she can learn Ansati, that sounds fun. But later.

The modern(ish) Nathuremi books on the eighth floor are right where she left them!

Ee.

Are there comfortable reading chairs in evidence anywhere or should she just sit on the floor.

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."

"I'm sorry about your father and your friend. Am I the first--un-kidnapping?"

"Yes you are."

"In three thousand years? Well don't I feel special."

He grins at her.

"To be fair, the kidnapping and rape and torture is a pretty reasonable deal-breaker for most people to have."

"True."

"I don't think I actually knew I didn't, before last night."

"It's a little interesting that you don't."

"I mean, nonconsensual torture is definitely bad! But it's not like you do more torture if I like you, so why not?"

"Very logical!"

"And so far you have been delightful on basically every level except that, so."

"I like delighting you. It's not something I get to do often and I am rapidly developing a taste for it."

"That seems likely to be pleasant for both of us."

"Yes it does!"

"So on a moderately related note, I've been wondering if being able to get into the capital to access the healing fountain means also being able to get into the capital to access the youth fountain."

"Yes."

"Because considering the statistics for violent death over the course of a normal human lifetime, and the fact that I don't anticipate wanting to kill myself like a normal kidnappee probably would, that seems like a much better bet than the swan thing."

"There's definitely something nice about not having to worry I'll kill someone by accident, but yes, I'm not surprised you'd prefer the fountains given the drawbacks of swanhood."

"Yeah. I mean, it would be nice if everyone had access to the fountains, but the old capital is basically deadly to people who aren't, well, you, and if it suddenly stopped being deadly people would probably fight over and break them."

"People do have that unfortunate tendency to be people," he agrees.

"Yeah. Do you do your immortality with the fountains or something else?"

"Something else. It's in the foundation of the magic. Which is why I haven't offered it to you already - I'd have to tear the whole thing down and start over, and, well, imagine trying to juggle a hurricane."

"Aha. I hadn't currently been planning on asking, I figured you had a reason."

"If I could make you immortal with a wave of my hand and not have it destroy you in a century, I would definitely want to do that."

"You say the sweetest things."

He laughs.

"If you did have to rebuild the spell from scratch for some reason what would you change?"

"Assuming I could juggle the hurricane successfully? There's hundreds of things I could make more efficient - not that I need the extra power, but who knows, I might find a use for it someday - and if I was rebuilding it all from scratch anyway, I think I could change the way it keeps my girls so it just made them immortal and turned all their pain to power and didn't wreck their minds eventually. That would be nice."

"Yeah, I wasn't suggesting you actually try it, I was just curious."

"It's a rush, working with that kind of power. But it's very hard to control."

"I'd say 'I can imagine' but actually I have no idea."

He laughs.

"Well, have you ever done magic?"

"A bit."

"Well -"

He holds up his hand and makes a tiny flame dance above his fingertip. It burns steadily, hopping from finger to finger as he turns his hand. Not nearly as impressive as anything else he's ever done with magic, but still pretty impressive by ordinary standards; you need a lot of mental discipline to play these kinds of tricks, and the flame moves smoothly, never stuttering or freezing even though he hardly seems to be paying it any attention at all.

"Ordinary magic feels like... holding a cup of water," he says thoughtfully. "It's very... controlled, very safe, very tame, and there isn't very much of it." The flame goes out. "The magic of pain isn't like that. You break someone's arm, and pick up the pain like you'd pick up your own power to light a candle with, and it's like wrestling a river. Active, wild, dangerous. And that's the absolute tamest it gets. What I've built up over the years is much, much more than that."

"Oh, good, I'd been worried that it was the kind of thing that didn't show gains until you were abducting a lot of different people to torture, but this sounds like I could learn to get things done using a knife, my leg, some water from the healing fountain and a surface easy to clean of blood."

He laughs. "Depends how badly you're willing to hurt yourself, I guess. And how well you can concentrate while you're at it."

"How bad is it if I fuck up?"

"Depends what you're trying to do and how you fuck it up exactly," he says. "If you just pick up the power and then drop it, it goes off in your face like fireworks. If you're trying to do something in particular, and you slip, you might get part of what you were trying to do and then have the rest of it explode. And while it's obviously possible to do complex permanent spells with pain magic, fucking those up will only sometimes blow up in your face right away; there's all kinds of subtle mistakes you can make where if you leave it lying around a while you'll come back and find the magic went weird while you weren't looking - a lamp gone from making light to making cold, a self-inking pen pouring floods of ink all over everything, a floating lamp that wobbles so badly it crashes into the wall and sets fire to the curtains."

"I've never been near fireworks up close; is that the kind of thing liable not to leave me in a condition where I could drink healing fountain water under my own power?"

"It might, if you're unlucky enough."

"Is there anything in particular I could do to avoid being that unlucky?"

Shrug.

"Well, if you let me teach you, you'd have someone around to heal you if you couldn't do it yourself. Failing that... try to work on as small a scale as you can until you get the hang of it? But trying to work with too little power makes it much easier to drop it by accident, if you're right on the edge where if you had any less it wouldn't work at all. And even with the bare minimum, if you fumble it the wrong way you can end up blind and on fire. Happened to me a few times when I was first learning."

"Noted. I am...interested in being taught, but in context that's pretty much the same category of thing as consensual torture and should therefore wait."

"Yeah, I thought you might say that."

"I would offer you a prize for guessing if you weren't, you know, the Lord of the Howling Mountain, and I weren't a girl who had come here with nothing but the clothes on my back."

He giggles.

"There's not much I lack for, it's true," he says. "Although I don't think that means you have nothing to offer me."

"I think the things I have to offer are mostly the kind of thing I would much rather give you because I wanted to than because you made a good guess."

"That's fair."

"So, important question: the flight thing, is that in the 'requires abductions' category, or in the 'plausible with knives and hammers and supervision until I'm confident I'm not going to drop anything' category?"

"You could ride the wind without abducting anyone, but you'd have to get very good at handling power before I'd expect you not to fall out of the sky. Unless you built it as a permanent spell, which takes time and power and delicate work."

"So what I'm hearing is 'stay low enough to the ground that you won't crack your head open when the spell slips for the forseeable future' and 'it's a good thing the fountain of youth suddenly became relevant to your life.'"

He laughs. "Yes, if that's how you want to see it."

"Flying is fun!"

"It is!"

"And flying for myself is something I can do with magic that's not rendered redundant by living here."

"True."

"I won't claim I'm disappointed that that's such a small category, but it's nice that it's not empty."

He smiles.

"I can teach you how to conjure, too," he says, picking a glass flower out of thin air - a pink carnation, its petals gleaming in the light. "It's tricky, but once you get the hang of it you can make anything you please, as long as you understand it well enough."

"Ooh!"

He spins the flower by its stem. "And that's how I manage to make a hobby of decorating guest rooms."

"It's a cute hobby. The guest rooms are lovely."

"Glad you like them!"

"So are the beds magically cozy, or are there just materials that soft?"

"There are just materials that soft, if you conjure them carefully enough!"

"Conjuration sounds very convenient."

"It is."

"If anyone had told me a week ago that being a masochist would be good for more than a little fun, I would have been...not as disbelieving as if someone told me I'd be glad to catch your attention, of course, but skeptical."

"If someone had told me a week ago that I'd dance with a girl and take her home and not make her a swan... I'm not sure I'd have been skeptical exactly, but I'd have been very curious about why I'd do that."

"I expect I would still have managed to surprise you."

"You are an excellent surprise."

"I'd say I try but no, this is just me."

Giggle.

"I was scared of you, when you asked me to dance. I just didn't think cowering would have helped anything."

"And look how right you were!"

"It's very gratifying!"

Giggle.

He picks up the glass flower again and twirls it in his hand, then makes it vanish, dissolving into the air in a reversal of the way it appeared.

"We seem to have exhausted the obvious conversational outlets, despite the charmingness of your company, and the capacity of my stomach, despite the deliciousness of a significant fraction of the offered food, so unless you can think of something else I'll be heading back to the library."

He laughs. "No, go on. Enjoy the books."

"See you later!"

Library!

It has books in it!

And there's someone sitting in one of the comfy chairs!

That is almost certainly the daughter and not a swan. Scratch that, the sun's up, that is definitely the daughter and not a swan.

She should go say hello, that would be the Smart And Mature thing to do.

"Hi."

"...You are not a swan," she observes.

"I am not. I have unusual reactions to fear, i.e. not cowering, sooo I sort of stood out at this one party your father decided to gate crash, he asked me to dance, I decided that if I was going to be kidnapped and tortured for the rest of my life I wasn't going to go down like a mouse, I said yes, there was dancing, it was delightful, I was apparently charming enough that he decided he actually liked me. Also flying is amazing."

"...hmm," she says. "That's... surprising, but perhaps not as surprising as it could be. I'm glad you're all right." Pause. "My name is Irikaino," she adds. "I am his daughter."

"I guessed that! From how you are also not a swan."

"I wasn't sure he would have mentioned me."

"He did! You disagree with him about whether torture is okay, good for you, you're trying to figure out how to make this thing self-sustaining, also good for you, and I am to stay out of your wing unless I have your permission."

"That's an accurate summary."

"He, um. Also agreed to teach me torture magic. Which, when I say that, let me assure you, what I mean is--I'm actually a masochist? I'm not talking about torturing anyone else."

"I would've assumed either that or letting you use a tiny bit of his own power," she says. "Most people don't enjoy torture, particularly not in the necessary quantities."

"Yeah, I checked to make sure using magic things wouldn't mean he needed to--more. I don't like that torture is happening, but." She shrugs. "It's not like not liking him for it would make him stop, so."

"It took me a few centuries to arrive at that conclusion, personally."

"I feel like I should make some kind of sympathetic remark concerning your relationship with your father but I don't really know enough about it to do so with any particular accuracy, nor am I under the impression that it's actually my business, so."

She shrugs.

"It's been three thousand years. All the sharp edges have worn down by now. He is what he is."

"I should probably be saving my sympathy for the swans. Except that I'm definitely going to be interacting with you, and...if I hadn't gotten lucky like this, I'm not at all sure that I'd be okay with meeting someone who had."

"I've mostly given up trying to interact with them. The best I can do for anyone is work on the magic."

"Anything a second person who hasn't spent millennia researching the magic is likely to be useful for?"

"Well, you could start learning now and in a few hundred years maybe you'll be able to help. Or it could be less than that."

"Well, there is that. I assume there are books on magic in this library."

"There are. Although many of the most relevant ones are in Ansati."

"Okay, well, step one, learn Ansati, I guess."

"I've heard it said that teaching something helps the teacher understand it better, not just the student," she adds. "It might be useful for me to teach you some of the magical theory."

"That sounds really great."

She smiles slightly.

"Probably Ansati first, though."

Nod.

"Where should I look to start on that?"

"Fourth floor, southwest quarter, near the back -" she conjures a scrap of paper and a pen, writes down directions.

"Okay. Thank you."

"You're welcome. Good luck."

"Thanks." And then she is off to investigate books.

Books on languages! If she wants to learn Ansati, this is indeed the place to start!

Oh good. Siva has never tried to learn a language before, are there any books obviously geared towards beginners?

Not exactly, but she might be able to get somewhere with this phrasebook and maybe those dictionaries.

She can roll with that. She opens a phrase book and starts memorizing and dissecting phrases.

It's a very pretty language, and a direct ancestor of modern Nathuremi, so the learning experience is definitely better than it might otherwise have been.

She looks up phrases, and words, and...

hmm.

She goes to see if the other woman is still there.

She is!

"Do you know where I could get pens and paper?"

"Certainly."

She conjures a stack of blank pages, a notebook, and a self-inking pen.

"I have got to learn that," she says admiringly. "Thanks!"

"It's useful."

"Seems it!" And she can use the objects to practice what she's picked up so far, writing short and simple stories.

Irikaino goes back to reading centuries-old poetry.

That seems like a sensible use of one's time when one is a millennia-old immortal. Siva will sit here and compose stories until she gets tired of that, and then she goes back down to where the language materials are and looks up more vocabulary, and when she has made as much progress as she comfortably can for the moment she escapes back to the modernist stuff on the eighth floor.

The eighth floor has many relatively recent books and she can read any of them that she likes. What a good library.

Such a good library! Such a good rest for her brain after all those language books.

At some point she notices that she is hungry again and goes off for some meal that shall remain unlabeled in order to spare it the indignity of occurring at what is surely an inappropriate time for whatever label could be applied to it.

The dining table does not judge her. It produces food when she sits down and vanishes it when she stands up.

Oh good.

She vaguely wonders where Tanaikon is. It would have been silly to expect him to happen to eat at the same time as her, but since the last time she saw him was at a meal it does make her think of him.

...She glances out a window.

The enormous window taking up most of one wall shows a beautiful view of the lake, with the castle's shadow stretching across it as the sun descends in the west. Tanaikon is not visible out there anywhere. There are a few swans in the water.

Poor swans. Well. She knows where he's likely to be soon-ish.

Meh. No point in dwelling. Back to the library.

The library welcomes her. Well, no. The library is just sort of there. But in a welcoming way.

She appreciates the library's impersonal welcomingness. And she spends another little while beating her head against Ansati and then head back to the delicious delicious novels.

The delicious novels are extra welcoming!

Yay novels!

She reads for a while longer, makes a mental note to ask about timepieces so she can develop something reasonably approximating a schedule, since if she continues to just do everything including eating and sleeping whenever she's going to start feeling yucky eventually, and eventually goes to bed.

Bed: still the coziest.

And not even torture-powered on an ongoing basis! So delightful!

Cruelty-free coziness!

Well, it did take cruelty to create. But that's not the poor bed's fault.

She wakes up in the morning, or at least some point in time when the sun's up, enjoys a little more luxuriating snuggle in her cozy cozy bed and not at all swan-shaped body, and gets up and dressed to go eat something.

The table is deserted again.

Makes sense. It occurs to her that he said she could say his name anywhere and he would hear, presumably she can call on him if she wants to.

She'll try looking around to see if she can find any timepieces on her own, first. Why not explore a bit, that sounds fun.

The castle is lovely and well-decorated and does in fact contain several clocks! There isn't one in her guest room in particular, but there are in a few of the neighbouring ones.

And what time is it now?"

It is two hours before noon!

Ooh, she got up in the actual morning! Nice!

She can't exactly schedule when she wakes up except by scheduling when she goes to sleep. After some consideration she decides to schedule things a few hours later than she would be naively inclined, considering how...nocturnal...some things are here.

The clocks can neither judge nor congratulate her.

Inanimate objects are like that.

She considers her options and the facts at hand, and decides to Library for a few hours. Memorise some more Ansati and then go read some novel.

She is left alone to do exactly that.

Yep. Are there any clocks in the library?

Yes there are!

And what time is it now?

It is now four in the afternoon!

Okay that's longer than she was planning. Next time she's finding a cozy chair nearer a clock. She should probably eat now. She will go do that.

The dining table is once again completely unperturbed by her lifestyle choices.

Predictable.

And once she has eaten and stood up from the table she says, experimentally, "Tanaikon."

Nothing happens for half a minute or so -

And then he materializes in front of her, smiling. "Yes?"

"I haven't seen you since yesterday breakfast and I didn't want to test the name thing under higher-stakes circumstances."

"Sensible. Have you been enjoying your stay so far?"

"I'm used to being around people more, that part's less than optimal, but everything else has been great. I've started learning Ansati."

"Yeah, if there's one thing my castle definitely lacks it's abundant company."

"Yeah that would sort of be the other reason I said your name. I noticed I wasn't running into you much--over the course of like a day, but still--and I...wanted to see if I could get your help in--managing my expectations? About that?"

"It's a big castle. I sometimes go months without running into Iri. But feel free to call my name if you get lonely anytime after noon; that's when I wake up, most days."

"Okay. I'm probably not going to take advantage of that every day, but it's not going to be months between unless something I'm not anticipating happens."

"All right," he says agreeably.

"Your daughter was kind enough to conjure pen and paper for me when I wanted them for my language studies; if I run out and she's not around and you're not awake should I just wait for you to wake up or is there somewhere I can get things like that?"

"Oh, yes. The corridor coming south off the seventh floor of the library. It's all offices and studies and so on."

"Thanks."

He smiles. "You're welcome."

"I assume you're not going to mind if I ask you a rude question that just occurred to me but manners being manners it can't hurt to check."

"Go right ahead."

"You've been at this for thousands of years and only have one child; does the swan spell sterilize?"

He laughs and shakes his head. "No, that part's separate."

"That's much less horrifying than the answer I was worried about. Which is 'no, they just miscarry every time they transform'."

"Nice imagination you have there," he snorts. "No, they don't do that."

"My imagination is a vast and bizarre place."

He laughs.

"I've been writing stories in Ansati for practice. They're short and simple but they are pretty out there in terms of content."

He giggles. "That's charming."

"Not all of them are," she amends. "But some of them."

"It's strange sometimes, being one of the only two people alive who grew up speaking Ansati," he admits. "I think I'm glad you're learning it."

"It's a beautiful language," she says, in Ansati.

He grins. "Yes, it is," he agrees in the same language.

"I probably can't have a conversation much more complicated than that, yet," she says wryly, not in Ansati.

"It's a start," he says, smiling.

"It is! And it's not as though I'm terribly time-limited in learning it."

"All the time in the world," he agrees.

"Not that I want to take too long, considering that the magic books are mostly written in Ansati, but, you know, soft limits versus hard limits."

"Yeah. Oh, speaking of death," he materializes a lovely crystal bottle filled with water and hands it to her. "I went by the healing fountain earlier. There's a few dozen of these sitting in one of the other guest rooms on your hall."

"Oh! Thank you!"

"You're welcome!"

"I don't anticipate needing them in the immediate future, but I'll definitely carry one with me. Better to have than not, in case of an accident."

He nods.

"I've gone my whole life without that kind of accident but better safe than sorry!"

"I'd be very disappointed if you fell down the stairs and died!"

"Talk about irony."

He laughs.

"Who expects a girl taken by the Lord of the Howling Mountain to die in his castle by accident?"

"Certainly not me!"

"Well, I shall be very careful and keep this on hand," she waves the bottle a little, "and it shall not happen."

"Good."

She puts the bottle in a pocket. "You're--I can't think of a better way to say this than 'really good at this for someone with so little practice.'"

...he laughs.

"I'm serious!"

"It's funny because it's true!"

"Maybe you just have good instincts."

"Could be. Or maybe it has something to do with being three thousand years old."

"I dunno, you spent a decent chunk of those three thousand years torturing people."

"True."

"Not exactly an activity famed for building hostmanship skills.

Well. In most contexts."

"People do tend to find being tortured very inhospitable, most of them."

"Masochists are pretty rare."

"You're not the first I've met, but yes, they are."

"Now I'm curious."

"I've had swans who liked pain. Not enough that they enjoyed my company, but enough to notice."

"Well, that's...probably better than not. And, yeah, I wouldn't be too thrilled to be a swan either, I already told you I'm picky."

"I remember."

"I didn't think you didn't."

"It was memorable."

"Somehow I'm not surprised."

He grins.

"I'll probably be heading back to the library, then. Thank you again for the water."

"You're welcome. Enjoy the books."

"No doubt of that."

He grins.

Library! Language-learning!

It is such a good library and such a good language!

It is such a good language! Siva studies it, and reads a novel so she doesn't burn out on it, and keeps an eye on clocks, and at a reasonable hour (calculated from previous mealtimes, not from conventional definitions of reasonableness) goes to dinner.

The table hasn't had time to figure out her food preferences yet, but it still provides more delicious things than otherwise!

What a good table. She will help it with its learning curve and then go back to the library and read some more and go to bed and get up and have breakfast and go back to the library and so on. Schedules: useful.

The library continues to be full of books. The castle continues to be enormous and very pretty. She has only seen a fraction of it so far.

Hmm. True. And there's a question she's been vaguely wondering about for a while, and it's been a few days...

"Tanaikon."

It takes him a minute, but he shows up. "Yes?"

"Question about the library: is it okay to remove books?"

"Yes. If you leave one out for a year, it'll go back to its shelf."

"That's convenient! I've been thinking about exploring, but any given place has less value if I can't read there."

He laughs.

"Is there anywhere in particular I ought to see, other than the library?"

"Depends what you like. The place is big enough and I've been working on it for long enough that if I tried to list its most attractive features I'd probably miss a few. The ballroom is particularly lovely," he suggests.

"Ballroom?"

"It's never been useful in its life, of course, but I try not to hold that against it."

"Poor thing. Want to go put it out of its misery?"

He laughs. "Why not. Shall I fly you there?"

"Yes!"

He grins.

He takes her hand and they're in the wind. A dizzying trip through the castle later, they're standing in an absolutely enormous ballroom, looking up at a crystal chandelier the size of a woodshed. It sparkles with magelights.

!!!!!

"Beautiful."

"I'm glad you like it!"

"I do!"