“Killing things that are trying to kill teenagers is what I have spent approximately every waking moment of the past four years doing, like, this isn’t entirely a matter of what I think is a good life choice. But, like, also, I promised her I wouldn’t let you hurt her while she was in there.”

"That was an ill-considered promise."

He starts walking around the circle again. The breeze follows him. He appears to be marshaling it to blow in a certain way, to bring forth gentle music from the crystal flowers.

“I mean, if you can’t not kill my friend, that separately doesn’t bode well for how good an idea leaving you in charge is, long term. From my perspective if nothing else.”

He gives her a quizzical look, but focuses most of his attention on adjusting the tune produced by the chimeflowers.

Well, if he doesn’t want to talk, that’s fine. She can be patient. She keeps half an eye on him and otherwise admires the chimeflowers.

After he finishes tuning the ever-circling breeze, he takes a step back outside the circle, looks it over thoughtfully, and starts walking the perimeter again the other way. Clouds bloom in his wake, a white rippling curtain of fog that streams out behind him like a banner, twisting and furling and eventually condensing into a sparkling stream of water undulating around the circle in counterpoint to the ever-flowing breeze; then he makes another one, and another, until there's a dozen of them weaving and tangling and racing one another around their narrow course.

He steps over the chimeflowers and back into the circle. Stone chairs and a round stone table rise from the ground with barely a glance from him. He sits in one before it's done growing a comfortable cushion of moss.

"Enough magic for you?" he asks, gesturing at his improvised art piece. "Or would you not be able to tell ahead of time?"

“It’s hard to say. I think, if I tried to kill you and failed, nothing would happen—nothing that originated from me and not from you, anyway. But if I assume that something did go wrong—hm. Let’s say, metaphorically, that what I would do is like…stabbing you with a poison dagger. It’s not very much like that, really, but it’s more like that than like throwing an explosive at you, which is what it seemed like you were imagining. So I expect that if you weren’t a thing that could be stabbed, the blow would glance off you and do nothing. But if something were to go wrong, it would be because, through some mechanism I don’t expect, the blow ended up hitting something else. Having the magic around provides something else to stab, in that scenario. Certainly this is enough that I could stab it.”

"Fair enough."

He gestures at the other chair.

"Have a seat if you like. You've helped me handle my concerns, seems only fair to hear out yours."

She sits. 

“Why don’t you think you are a thing that can stop torturing people?”

"Less that I don't think I can, more that I don't think I will. Because the fact of the matter is that no one can stop me."

He sighs.

"I'm not, like, attached to the part where they're upset about it. To tell you the truth I might even be happier if they weren't. But I've yet to come up with a good way to find people who might not be upset about it and convince them to trust me enough that they actually aren't."

“—Hmm. Okay. That sounds solvable, actually.” She relaxes slightly. “Does your magic do information-handling at all? Yours specifically.”

"—??"

“Do you need me to expand on that?”

"Yes."

“Information-handling means—is there a way to, hm, have magic autonomously move around information or information-bearing objects—like, my kind of magic contains both divinations and magic libraries, those are both examples of information-handling. And when I said yours specifically what I meant was was it a thing that could theoretically be done, even if it isn’t something that anyone else could do.”

"I think... my magic doesn't... think in those terms? Which makes that a hard question to answer without knowing what you're driving at."

“—Okay. So. In my world there is a thing called the ‘internet,’ which is a sort of extremely distributed information network, like a giant library that anyone can access, and people use it to talk to each other, and it’s very useful for, like, finding people who are into a specific thing. In my world I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to find someone who was into whatever it is you specifically like to do, as long as you could credibly promise that they would be able to walk away from it unharmed. If you couldn’t credibly promise that there’d still be someone who was down for it but they’d be some amount harder to find. —Admittedly my world has like seven billion people in it, I don’t know this planet’s population.”

"I wouldn't even begin to know how to invent such a thing. It might be possible but it's sure not trivial. And yes, a lot of the problem is that people don't trust my promises, for which I really can't blame them."

“Have you broken promises in the past or is it just a power difference slash scariness thing.”

"Power difference slash scariness. I try pretty hard not to make promises I might end up breaking, but there's only so much that helps—only so much it can help, when what people remember is the tortured slaves and the people getting thrown off roofs."

"Huh. In my experience people are pretty good at looking past the horrible things powerful people do in order to suck up to them."

"I do my best to avoid that sort of person because when I don't I always seem to end up throwing them off roofs."

"Huh. I...guess...maybe they are less persistent when the ambient death rate is lower. Or when you throw them off roofs but that I would mostly just expect to make them more subtle."

"Anyway, how'd we get onto the subject of people sucking up to me? Do people where you're from like sucking up to powerful people so much that they'd put up with personally being tortured just to be able to shower me with their bad opinions? Eugh. I guess there's a sense in which that's better..."

"So, remember how I said my year had a two-thirds survival rate instead of a one-quarter one? That's not distributed evenly. People with powerful families and alliances have a survival rate of four in five, in a normal year, and anyone who manages to get an alliance with them has a higher survival rate than everyone else. I am not exaggerating when I say that in the environment where my intuitions were formed, sucking up was literally a survival skill."