:He is immortal. I went on not being immortal for some time after we met because his original setup had some flaws. Uh, we are lifebonded, which is a thing where when two people have souls of the right corresponding shapes and then hang out together long enough they get glued to each other - we didn't want it but we were distracted enough not to notice for a while. I would rather like to read the sort of books you have where we'd be normal sorts of story protagonists:

"- Wait, okay, wow. I was really not expecting that. ...I'm actually not very into the kind of fiction where there are mysterious soul connections, it weirds me out a bit, but it's popular with some people. Ummmm, now I kind of want to try to make more advance predictions and see if those also hold, even though I have no idea what it would even mean for your life in another world to be something I can make predictions about via romance novel genre tropes. Was he - sort of struggling as a person before he met you? Was he....doomed to failure at his greatest ambitions because he was missing some key piece of the puzzle, which you were able to provide by having your own rare powers or skills?" 

:I don't think he was especially - struggling as a person? I'm not sure what that means but he had his underground lair and so on. And his greatest ambitions might have worked out but they would have sucked without the amendment I came up with:

"Huh. Okay, I'm giving myself half points at best for that, but....still. Wow. I think I want to meet your husband. ...Um, I promise I will not try to steal your husband! I'm not sure that's even really what my romantic fantasy would include, it sounds - really high stakes, as a life to actually have to live. But good for you." 

:I didn't think you were going to try to steal him and if you tried it probably wouldn't work, he's basically asexual apart from the lifebond. But yes, we do rather yank the arc of history around with our teeth:

Giggle. "Wow. Incredible. That...is not giving me less of an impression that you have just stepped out of a popular romance. - Are you happy with it? You seem pretty pleased with yourself about it." 

:It was rough going for some time but now I get to be queen and preside over some rather amazing developments!:

"Oh, um, what...happened?" Merrin's mind is immediately filled with trope-based guesses, but it feels much less appropriate to share those here. "If you don't mind me asking. I understand if you'd rather not talk about it." 

:It's complicated! And some of the details are sensitive:

"Oh. That's all right, sorry." 

Merrin is just going to sit here coming up with wild hypotheses for what could have happened based on her mostly-osmosed understanding of supervillain-gendertrope-focused romance. They were probably separated by the forces opposed to everything Leareth is fighting for, obviously. Belrun might have believed he was dead and that she would have to carry on his work alone? Maybe he was captured by an evil powerful-magical-alien who tried to trick him into working against his true goals, she's pretty sure one of her friends mentioned a book with that plot once. 

:It's all right. Things seem stable now except for this... snake business:

"Mmm. Do you think that - could've been related? Is it something that the gods who are - less in favor of what you and Leareth are working on, could have been involved in?" 

:It'd require a lot of assumptions to be wrong but I suppose it's not impossible? Doesn't explain you at all though:

"No, it doesn't." Merrin sighs. "My life is definitely not nearly as interesting as yours, but - I guess I'm not actually completely uninteresting. I'm not actually the best endurance paramedic in the whole world, I think, when you weigh all the factors, and that would be a very narrow thing to be best in the world at anyway, but I'm....pretty good. It's the one area where I can make up for being significantly below median intelligence by having a lot of other very rare traits that line up just right. ...I'm not married. I would probably not marry someone who if the world was a novel would be the protagonist, that sounds stressful. I have one boyfriend who's kind of going for the supervillain gendertrope but he's a minor one at best - he's a moderately famous author who picks out people who follow his writing to serve him in his volcano base. I don't live there though. Even if he were a best-in-the-world level supervillain I would only want to see him once a month or so, I have a lot of commitments." 

:So your boyfriend actually has a volcano base? It just seems kind of impractical to me! Volcanoes are hot! And sometimes explode!:

"It's a little impractical! I don't want to actually live in one. Although it's a non-explodey volcano. Thoroughly geologically mapped and certified safe to a very high degree of confidence for the next century. There are hot springs which are great but most of the lair is climate-controlled." 

:I guess hot springs sound nice:

Merrin yawns again. "Sorry. So what nice amenities does your husband have in his underground lair? He sounds like the sort of person who might go for a really extensive library." 

:Oh, he does, though most of it is in languages I can't read - he knows a lot of them, being immortal:

"Huh. How many languages are there? That sounds really inconvenient." 

:I suppose it's a little inconvenient, but normally everyone in an area speaks the same one. There are certainly - dozens? I don't know about hundreds but hundreds wouldn't shock me:

"Weird. Do you have any idea why people didn't just all coordinate on one language for simplicity? It must be pretty costly for long-distance trade agreements." 

:...well, there aren't a lot of long-distance trade agreements, since moving things is expensive. Languages just sort of drift over time. Rethwellani and Valdemaran are related but not mutually intelligible, and that's not a thing that they did on purpose, it's just a matter of the two countries not having everybody in them mix across the border all the time:

"....Huh. I - guess that makes sense? That it'd be harder to coordinate on a single language at a tech level where transport was more limited? I never really thought about it before." There's almost certainly fiction that explores the concept, and presumably the Keepers know what dath ilan's actual history looked like, but Merrin herself knows nothing about the time before Baseline was universal. 

:Also most people aren't very good at languages? People manage but it would be very hard for most people to just stop speaking their original languages even if some kind of trade-tongue got popular. So that'd slow things down, and also it would not exactly make it easier to read old books. How long have you all been speaking one language?: