"Depends. I don't want to risk killing you but it seems like you're harder to kill than I'm used to."

"You would have to try very hard to kill me," she agrees. "Essentially you'd have to not only make me want to die, but sincerely believe in my soul that I will never want to spend another second alive no matter the circumstances, including 'my torture is over and now I have hot chocolate and eternity to get better.'"

"Impressive. Well, I'm definitely not going to do that."

"Thank you. That would be the fate that I recently dodged; demons have a lot of practice at killing celestials."

"Sounds unfortunate. Also really hot," he says.

Snort.

"I'm shocked. So, knowing that you're definitely not going to kill me by accident, what would you want to try?"

"I'd like to see you bleed again. And - I've never met someone with wings before. What's it like having your feathers pulled?"

"Depends on which feathers you pull. Flight feather removal is anywhere from having a fingernail to a finger ripped off, depending on which of them you pull. Down feather removal is more, hm. The intimacy of ripping off one's eyelashes, but at a lesser degree of pain than the flight feathers. But that's relative, my wings are very sensitive."

"Hmm."

"Touching a celestial's wings without permission is approximate to certain types of sexual assault," she adds cheerily, for clarification.

"Hm." And now he's looking speculatively at her wings.

She looks faintly amused with this.

"I think I'd want to save wing play for a later date, though. I - very recently almost had one sawed off." She shivers a little, despite herself.

"Is that 'don't touch them at all' or 'nothing violent', because I admit to being very curious about how sensitive they are in a - nonviolent context."

"Nothing violent. Gently testing sensitivity would be - sort of soothing, actually. After."

"All right."

They reach the castle. The interior is tastefully decorated and lit by pretty little lamps which appear to be floating in the air for no reason at all. He leads her down a hall.

It's lovely.

"Are the floating lamps common, here?" she wonders, as she marvels.

"They are not!" he says, grinning. "I'm the only person in the world who can afford to throw magic around like that, and I enjoy being extravagant when I can get away with it!"

"Ah, I see. They're not precisely common where I come from, but there are a few uses to having floating, mobile lighting, and they're not difficult to make, so we have them. Not quite so numerous as these."

"Most people only know how to do ordinary magic, which is - very limited in scope. You can use it to build artifacts, slowly. But I can do in ten seconds what would take most people two months, so why not?"

"Makes sense. If we could make them in ten seconds we'd likely have them everywhere, too. It takes a few days to make one, for us."

"Yeah. How does magic work where you're from?"

"Celestials create a sort of personal aura of magic that we can direct to do different sorts of things. Without direction, it assists us in minor ways; augmenting healing, strength, volume of voice when singing or calling to a crowd, that sort of thing. Minor assistance with tasks. With practice, we can specialize and become better at augmenting specific uses for it, or switching between what it focuses on. With training, practice, and hopefully a smattering of talent, we can specialize further and learn how to push it in directions that aren't instinctual and use it to do a number of things, including shoving it into objects to enchant them to do various things."

"Huh. The way it works here is that everybody has about this much magic to start with," a candle-sized flame appears in the air over his hand, "and it can do a lot of things but nothing that affects more than that big a space at a time, and artifacts only slowly; but it's very stable and predictable, it never just goes off and does something you didn't tell it to. Then there's pain magic, which doesn't come in amounts smaller than about fifty times that, and if you don't keep on top of it the whole time you're trying to use it for something, it escapes, almost always in the form of an explosion. I set myself on fire a lot when I was first learning."

"That sounds uncomfortable. I can't say I've ever set myself on fire. The amount of magic we have available varies a bit, roughly scaling with personal contentment."

"Huh. A much friendlier power source than mine."