"Sure," he agrees.

Off they go, the nook with all of the scrolls. Edarial is back to being quiet. How exciting.

And here they are in scroll nook.

Iobel manages to close the door without putting Cricket down. They've been murmuring to each other in their language softly for the entire walk.

Iobel takes a seat.

Edarial does, too. He murmurs something to Berathyme, who nuzzles him a bit and says something that sounds soothing.

"Soooo..." begins Edarial, because he has no idea what else to say.

"The way I see it, there are four basic options for what to do in the immediate future as far as getting a small prince or princess is concerned which don't involve me packing up and going home. None of them are without drawbacks and none of them are guaranteed to permanently obviate the need to default to one of the others, but we should at least start narrowing it down."

She starts ticking off fingers.

"One or both of us can get to work on inventing a spell for magic-based conception. Failure mode - dead-end of magical research is possible and could take a long time to be obvious. If someone notices and can't keep their mouth shut, it could become awkward to prove parentage. And I don't think the very first test case of completely unprecedented conception magic should be the heir to the throne, just in case it introduces unforeseen problems of some kind.

"We can just do it the way the general population presumably expects us to, but while I have my emotions under control I don't know about what yours are doing and I'm pretty clear that you're not even abstractly interested, so - failure mode: no, we actually can't, maybe.

"I can start - looking for somebody who at least marginally resembles you to have an affair with. Failure mode: I don't find anybody, which seems likely because it's not like I had a boyfriend before and I'm not immediately turning up any possibilities from people I have met even if I lower my personal standards; also, there is a risk of critical failure of discretion somewhere along the line, which could lead to the civil war sort of problem that has you so concerned. Outing your parentage would be less problematic because at least you do in fact have royal blood, but that's not the case if I'm revealed to have produced an illegitimate pretender to the throne, as it were.

"And fourth, we obtain some unrelated child from somewhere that will not miss them and pretend they are your secret bastard recently deprived of their mother, how sad and mildly embarrassing, and that meanwhile I am publicly tragically sterile and willing to take this waif into my heart, aren't I sweet. As a variant I suppose you could also actually father a bastard with someone you find more appealing than me if there is anyone, but Zevros seems convinced you're asexual, so. Failure mode is again the problem with discretion. And also I suppose if I am going to be tragically sterile I had better be exceedingly careful not to actually fall pregnant at any point in time, but I imagine that part I can do."

"We can stall on having to get around to most of these if I announce the occasional tragic miscarriage, but people will start getting agitated if there's more than a couple of those.

"And of course in any of these cases I would want thorough agreement on the forthcoming parenting of the child in question, because your personal examples are terrible, the stakes are high, and in three cases of four it would be my baby and in the other it would still be unacceptable to ill-treat some dubiously sourced infant just because their alternatives involve being relatively neglected and may not be dramatically better."

Edarial listens to her layout of the situation, raptly. He frowns when she is on the fourth method, but does not actually comment until she is done.

"I am not planning on taking child-rearing advice from either of my parents, and would not be planning to try to cut you out of raising a child. Whether it's actually our child by blood or not doesn't matter. If we say it is our child I would prefer we treat him or her like it and - give the child the best chance at life possible," he replies, because that part of it is easiest to answer.

Then, the next part that should probably be addressed before anything else - "Also, I am not asexual. Zevros does not know me as well as he thinks he does." Awkward pause. "I am not interested in sex with someone that I do not have a - proper relationship with."

Edarial tilts his head, then asks, "What do you mean by 'not even abstractly interested'?"

"... Dates, flowers, romantics, actual love? That sort of thing, I haven't had it but I am smart enough to recognize when I want it. Just a business partnership bothers me."

Another awkward pause. "I - am... Somewhat attracted to you. If you were wondering. You are attractive, at least superficially, but I am not going to try to - you seemed like you hated me. So I was not going to bother you."

"At least superficially," snorts Iobel. "I did hate you, I was simply mistaken in doing so, I'm glad you didn't... bother me, but I was further misinformed by the absence, I suppose."

Cricket mutters something and she shushes him.

"It was more important that you have updated information on me, first," he informs her.

"Option one is viable, though I don't think we should rely on it overmuch and I am a little - disturbed by experimenting on what would be our child. If it were a proven method that I knew worked, yes, we should go with that, that lets us have an heir without issue. But it's not proven, so I am skeptical."

He conspicuously skips option two.

"Option three I have no problem with, aside from worry about something happening to the child if its lineage were outed. If the other options aren't viable, we should try it, but when thinking about creating a new life, I am extremely concerned about - that new life's welfare.

"Option four I can do but I think I like it the least of them all - the child would grow up with the stigma of being a bastard. I don't want to inflict that on an innocent life for the sake of convenience."

Pause. "... Option two is probably physically possible. If we try it, though, I would at least want to make an effort beforehand in seeing if there is anything to us besides being able to run a kingdom efficiently together." He then fidgets.