Her arms tighten and she starts crying again, more quietly.

It's very attractive, but he can guess that she probably doesn't want him to respond to that right now, and - he doesn't want to rape her. He wants to hold her. He wants her to be okay.

In a little while she stops crying again. She lets go of him with one arm to bring that hand up to scrub at the tears with the back of it, and then goes back to hugging him all the way.

After another few seconds, she says, "Nahira was wrong. I never lied. To either of you. But...there's stuff I didn't tell you. Not for the reasons she said. Some of it was--because I was scared, and some of it I didn't think you would believe me."

"My soul does lie detection," he says, smiling faintly. "No one else knows. I never talk about it."

"...Oh.

So, um. You noticed that I don't speak your language, and you...have some idea of how improbable that is, I'm guessing."

"Yeah. I'm a little surprised Kelora even managed to find someone with a translation power."

"So...where I'm from, it is also the case that civilization collapsed a while ago. But not quite as messily. And--before today, I had never heard of soulbearers; the magic I'm used to is completely different."

"...go on," he says consideringly.

"The usual way to do magic is--everyone has a piddly amount of their own. Enough to make a candleflame's worth of fire, or heal an injury not much worse than a papercut or a picked zit. If you put a lot of time into it, or work with other people, you can use it to make artifacts, which are less trivial.

Three thousand and some-odd years ago, the Ansati Empire had a magnificent magical infrastructure, including fountains of healing and youth. The Emperor--wasn't going to die, not naturally. But he wasn't immortal immortal. So his son the Crown Prince decided that rather than be a prince forever he was going to kill and usurp his father.

It didn't work. The country was destroyed by civil war, instead. But the thing is--the way he was going to usurp his father--there's a way for one person from my world to do nontrivial magic by themselves without taking weeks, and that's by fueling it with pain. Doesn't matter if it's yours or someone else's. So when his plans failed, the prince fucked off to a mountain and magicked himself a glorious castle, which he fed--and entertained himself--with the pain of people he kidnapped specifically for the purpose. I don't know where he got them from to start with, but for the past several centuries he's been getting them, one every few years, from the capital of Nathureme, one of the countries that rose in the wake of the Ansati Empire's fall."

"...That sounds... bizarrely familiar," Seofar says slowly.

"That was my reaction when Kelora explained you."

"I can see how it would be..."

He trails off into a pensive silence.

Yeah.

"So when I moved to the capital, he showed up at a party I had been convinced to attend. I--wasn't as paralyzingly frightened of him as everyone else, so he noticed me.

He asked me to dance. I said yes. We did. He was--impressed with me. Said he'd rather make me happy than torture me, and I said the two weren't mutually exclusive, and..." she trails off. "Things--went from there. I love him. He loves me. When I said I fell asleep snuggling my boyfriend I meant him."

"...huh."

He smiles slightly. Making her happy and torturing her are very compatible, he has noticed.

Quietly, almost shyly: "I love you, too."

...he's not sure what to do with that, but... he thinks he likes it.

He hugs her some more.

Hugs. "The other major thing I didn't tell you was that Kelora told me how to manifest my soul and I did it; it's in one of the pockets of the dress you tore off me."

He blinks.

"That was fast," is the first response that comes to mind. "You can't have been in this world more than half a day and you're a soulbearer already?"

"...Among the weird coincidences is the fact that my boyfriend also had a best friend who liked breaking people. He showed me a picture of her, she even looked the same as Nahira. He said if anyone could set something up to come back to life several millenia after dying it would be her and if I ever saw her I should do whatever it took to stay out of her clutches. I wanted every advantage I could get if I was going to be be on the same continent as Nahira, let alone the same castle."

"...that... makes a lot of sense," he says.

He looks over at Nahira's body, trying to decide whether he regrets killing her. He concludes that he doesn't. He hugs Siva.

Hugs. Hugs are really good right now. "So...what happens next?"

He considers this question for a moment.

He concludes, unhappily, "Politics."

"I have literally no idea how to do politics," she says after a moment.

"Mm."

Hug.

"...I might just bring Kelora to the imperial capital, tell my father 'fuck it, I'm done, here's your granddaughter, enjoy cleaning up my mess', and wander off. Except that I don't know where to wander off to. And I don't think I want to be on the same continent as Linsi-kelen Aeleva when she finds out her son vanished from his bed in the middle of the night in my castle."

"If my boyfriend figures out how to come rescue me you could probably wander off to his castle," she suggests. "Or somewhere else in my world."