"...I see. I can probably provide a steady stream of magic, if you do not mind it being Black Mist."

"No, I came here expecting to eat nothing but Black Mist. I actually have before, before I properly woke up I spend a couple decades around the neck of an undead pirate. But. Yes I would really rather not break anything nice."

So a bit of the black oily mist around him, which is no longer coming out of his chest and is instead just hanging around him, swirls in her direction instead.

It is extremely dense and concentrated and probably has several hours maybe days' worth of magic for her.

"Ooo," she says, and she carefully reaches out to catch it and channel it into one of the little beads adorning her amulet. ... Several of the little beads, actually, this is a pretty respectable amount of power. They turn a deep black as they're filled, now available for her to siphon in to the ever-hungering magical maw powering her consciousness. She'd had a decent amount stored, before, but shielding herself from the psychic spirit scream caused her to deplete them quite thoroughly. While she always eats mana, doing difficult things causes her to devour it faster, and 'trying very hard not to die or go mad' definitely counts.

Once everything is neatly tucked away in her mana storage solution: "Thank you, that's very helpful. Now! You mentioned I could also help you? I would love to."

"...what do you know of the history of the Shadow Isles?" he asks, as he starts walking towards the palace.

"I'd studied here, when I was human and they were the Blessed Isles. But everything that came after, just the broad strokes of 'something went wrong, now everything is terrible.' There are a lot of rumors of what happened, but I'll spare you them."

He shuts his eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath. "I confess to curiosity about them, but you are probably correct that they are not worth knowing. What happened was..." He pinches the bridge of his nose, and pushes the door into the palace open. They lead to a large courtyard slash hallway with wide windows in tinted glass along the way, offering a beautiful view of the more public gardens and the rest of the city. It is very much the same city of Helia Avedra will be used to, just... with a different aesthetic. "You are partly a spirit. You knew of the covenant between the Monarchs and the spirits?"

"Yes. I'm, uh. Also from a spirit and a human coupling, so. I had a somewhat personal interest in the matter."

He takes a moment to process this then nods. "I was the Prince, and he was a spirit of—I don't even know. He was so, so flighty, he never stood still. I met him for the first time when I was a child, and he was of course grown, but when he saw me he made himself small so he could talk to me and I felt so condescended to I refused to reply. I just stared over his shoulder and resolutely ignored him." Again that half-smile playing on his lips, for a second, before it vanishes again. "The covenant was... we..." He shakes his head. "The marriage had to be for love. Yes, there was politics, I could never have married a human if I were to inherit, but nevertheless, it would only count if we actually loved each other. So I did. I loved him, and then... then...

"...then we killed each other."

"I'm so sorry," she murmurs softly.

He shakes his head once more, as if trying to wave away an insistent fly. "He had a point. The Blessed Isles were so much more plentiful and bountiful and prosperous than anywhere else. Of course he of all people would be the one to notice, to think of it. It would never have been enough for him, to just settle for being King of a country where nothing ever went wrong, when there was so much wrong elsewhere. Each minute was another person, another child who died who didn't need to." He turns right at a T-junction and then left into a set of stairs going up in a spiral. "But people wouldn't trust it and just accept it. We couldn't show up at their shores and declare ourselves their rulers. We could trade with them, and offer humanitarian aid, but it was not enough, never enough for him.

"And he had a point, damnit," repeats the King, pausing at the top of the stairs to punch a wall hard enough to crack.

"Yes. Yes he did," she agrees, still so whisper soft. He still has something of a point, too, but now it's buried under confusion and guilt and pain and spun round and round in a torturous loop of forgetting and remembering.

He walks in silence for a bit longer until they reach a door, then he opens it and gestures in. It's a room, nice and spacious, with a bookshelf that has actual books and a pretty rug, the walls decorated with some pretty abstract magic artwork, a table and a desk, a door leading to a washing room, a sofa, a bed. The windows open to the rest of the city, which from here can be seen to be bustling with activity, indistinguishable from a normal city of her youth except for how everyone is dead.

The King walks over to a padded chair and sits there, making his green crown of magic fade into nothing. He closes his eyes and leans forward to rest his head on his hands then says, "We have several guest rooms available, seeing as we so seldom have guests. There's a map of the keep on the bookshelf somewhere but of course there's no way to remember everything first time. And you don't have to stay here if you don't want to, but I wished to offer you the choice."

"Sure. It'll be novel, having so much space." She gives a little smile to the very sad king as she sits down. "But you didn't answer my question, did you. How can I help?"

"Why are there rumours about what happened here, instead of knowledge? Why haven't I sent envoys to other nations to explain, to ask for help, to trade with, to establish diplomatic relations with?"

"Because everyone from here creates the Black Mist, and if any of you ever try to leave, you'll kill anyone and everyone you interact with, and maybe raise them to spread the stuff, too." Her mouth twitches. "Good news, I specialize in absorbing, containing, and devouring unwanted magical effects, so I can just work on that a bit more. But I'm also happy to be your singular envoy to the outside world, if you could, uh. Maybe get me a better vessel than a literal box."

He smiles again, head still resting on his hands.

And once more it's gone. "The Black Mist is... Spirits are more emotion than matter, and Zerin—Thresh—was that more than most. It was an accident—we were having an argument, it got more heated than usual, I was tired and said some things I didn't mean, he was stressed and being fuelled by the feelings of all the people he rallied to his cause—he lashed out at me, and that broke the covenant. And so the purpose that every spirit on these isles shared for centuries prior was shattered.

"That's... that's it. That's the Black Mist, from what I've been able to piece together. It's the feelings of disorientation, of confusion and fear and anger and sadness that they all felt, at the same time, when the covenant was broken. And it makes us—the dead—forget the faces of those around us, lose hold of the order in which our memories happened, get our emotions amplified and twisted. And the way to fight it is," and he straightens up to gesture expansively around, "this. Structure, solidity, routine. If we set everything up to remind us of who we are, we remain sane. But the moment that's gone," he snaps his fingers, "so are we.

"So it's not just that we'd spread the Black Mist wherever we went and doom the people we mean to befriend. The very act of leaving, of sending envoys, would doom them to the same fate those poor souls you've seen have met. If anyone tries to leave, they'll soon forget their mission, forget what they're trying to accomplish or even who they are.

"Both edges of the blade that is the Black Mist cut deep."

"It sounds it. Even though, often enough, it's not very black at all," she agrees, because it's clear to her by now that this is the sort of person who appreciates gentle levity. "Right, okay, so. What resources do you need from the outside world the most, and are there things you can offer in exchange? The closest civilization is very, mm. Mercantile, but with less ethics and even more greed. The best idea I've got is to make a dozen protection charms and exchange those for things you want, but that doesn't scale very well because it's... sort of like loaning out tiny bits of myself for a while? So I can't actually hold up an entire island on my ability to enchant things alone."

He nods, then sighs. "I don't know. I never thought—" He cuts himself off, then clears his throat. "I expected I would need to rebuild our kingdom bit by bit over the next centuries until we had enough structure again that we would not throw out the occasional ghost pirate ship and would be able to actually move out from there. What little I know of how the outside world has developed comes from the very rare outsider who dies on our shores and then manages to make their way far enough inland that one of our scouts can bring them in and help them organise their memories. The last time that's happened was seventy-two years ago.

"So, I don't know. You're an unexpected boon and I will need to think on how to best apply your unique talents.

"And there's the matter of what compensation you would want for it."

"Oh. No, I'm fine. I mean, please feed me and continue treating me as a person? But, no, I actually just went in a box and threw myself out to sea on the premise that people were suffering and I wanted it to stop."

"Well. Thank you for your sacrifice."

"It's really not one, I promise that the outside world has not met my basic standards of 'I would like to be treated as a person,' but you're welcome anyway."

"I do hope we do better than that." He stands up and dusts himself. "If I understood what I was seeing correctly, the beads on your amulet should have enough magic now to last you a while, yes?"

"Yep! I can come get you if I need to be topped off, but if there's anything really magical nearby I might need it marked on the map so I can avoid it just in case. My whole mana eating thing is sort of... imagine a whirlpool, I suppose? And I can keep it spinning by continuously pouring mana into it, which I keep containers on hand for. But if there's so much in an area around me, it can get past and go into the whirlpool even if I don't mean for it to." And if the whirlpool stops 'spinning,' her mind turns off and she goes back to sleep, but she'd rather not bring that up right now. He can probably guess.