The first thing she sees is light.

Warm golden light with shifting hints of blue and silver, filling the air with spectacular dazzling beauty.

And not just light, either - it's almost alive, this light, spilling over her and soothing away her thirst with its gentle touch. There is a sense of self in it. Boundless energy wrapped in an unshakeable will. Curiosity, integrity, intelligence, compassion; if you are in trouble, this person wants to help you, and they probably can. If you are causing trouble, well, they'll offer you as many second chances as they can afford to, but they won't flinch from war if war is what it takes to keep people safe and happy and okay.

Also she's standing on the roof of a castle looking out over a once-beautiful city now fallen somewhat into disrepair. The whole town is flooded with light; it seems to be centered on the castle itself. Whatever's making it, therefore, is probably inside.

Oh.

It's - it's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen, could ever imagine seeing. Can she mate to light, because she thinks she just did. She doesn't have the words to describe it, doesn't have the thoughts to piece together what exactly's happening, so she just stands, awestruck. Overwhelmed and swept away by the light and its life. If she could cry, she might be tempted.

A billow of blood-red flame shatters a window somewhere below her and roars out over the city. This, too, has life; but of a rather less pleasant kind. It says: this is someone who wants to hurt people, who considers it a right, almost a duty. This is someone who loves violence and abhors mercy, who craves power and disdains affection. Impulsive, angry, cruel, a blaze that burns everything in its path.

She flinches as if bitten. What the fuck? What was that?

... Is it threatening the source of the light? It may or may not be threatening the source of the light, it's certainly thematically opposed to the light. She and it are going to have some problems if it's threatening the source of the light, of the murderous variety.

If it came down to it, could she outrun fire blasts like that? Yeah, definitely. That's good enough for her. This is probably really stupid, but she can't just leave it. She has to know what's going on in there, right now, and if she gets a little bit set on fire she has copied every single part of her own body, and is completely capable of recreating it.

She goes to investigate.

The recently destroyed window offers her a view of two people facing off across the wreck of what may once been a throne room.

The shorter one stands with his back to the window, wrapped in intense golden light. As she peeks in the window, he's saying something in a totally unfamiliar language.

The taller one has a strange amulet hanging around his neck on a silver chain, a dark slash of red wrought in a substance as much like glass as the light-threads were like spider-silk. It broadcasts the same sense of personality as the red fire.

When Yvette looks in the window, he gives her a quizzical look and sends a blast of red flame in her direction. (Curiously, the fire doesn't seem to have actually... burned... anything. It did blow out the window, but with force, not heat.)

She dodges, then after the flame has dissipated, lands and moves away from the window. So she can attract line of fire from - the person that's probably her mate. By process of elimination and his association with the light.

With crossed arms, the shimmering golden-eyed woman fixes the blood-associated man with a look. In sunlight she looks like crushed diamonds; spectacular and breathtaking, a thousand twinkling lights that outshine the sun that lit her. The sparkling is more subtle, shifts with the fluid light from her mate. Her skin catches the light and redirects it in a quieter, more understated fashion. She still glimmers brilliantly and gorgeously, and the effect compounds with her flawless face to make her breathtakingly beautiful, but does not overpower all else.

He looks at her mate, gestures to her, and asks a question that sounds rudely phrased even though she can't understand a word of it.

Her mate spares her a glance and shrugs an 'I got nothing' shrug, with a verbal response presumably affirming this sentiment. (The language they're speaking is very pretty.)

He has an amulet, too, the counterpart to that slash of red: it's golden like his light, with the same shifting hints of blue and silver, and formed in the shape of a stylized bird with wings outstretched in flight. Now that she's gotten a good look at his face, he looks about sixteen or seventeen, although very short for his age.

The man with the fire-and-blood theme lets out a snort of laughter.

She takes a break from glaring at the man with the fire-and-blood theme to look at her mate. Not to bask in his splendor, she can do that later, but to attempt to ask him what he'd like her to do. She has a language barrier to deal with, but she thinks she can get the point across by tilting her head at fire-and-blood man and raising her eyebrows at her mate.

His attention is focused on the fire-and-blood man, but he catches her looking out of the corner of his eye and gives her a confident half-shrug that seems to communicate 'don't worry, I got this'.

He says something else in the language she doesn't speak.

The fire-and-blood man snarls and holds out a hand toward the teenager, sending a blast of red flame roaring toward him that's big enough to swallow him whole.

(AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.)

If it were her, she would not appreciate a lovestruck stranger getting involved and killing someone over her while she was busy. He seems to be busy, and he implies he has a handle on this. That light's his, and it doesn't strike her as belonging to someone who takes risks lightly. If it were her, she'd want the lovestruck stranger to trust her. That's what love is supposed to be, trust and mutual respect and, occasionally, compromising. If she loves him, if this is more than just crazy mating mojo, then she damn well needs to act like it and have an iota of self control. Her mate would not find the situation improved by an ignorant stranger bursting in with superpowers and meddling. He would not.

She does not do the first thing that comes to mind, which is ripping the fire-and-blood man's head clean off. She does not do things two through ten, which involve interference with varying degrees of violence to this man's person. She does not do the things that come after that, all of which involve more flavors of personal violence, and in one instance, throwing his stupid amulet out of the window.

Instead she decides the most expedient way to distract herself from meddling where her mate doesn't want her is to bite her hand. She does that. It hurts. Which is nice and distracting. Not as distracting as the mate-focused screaming that's going on in her head, but something else to focus on.

(She hisses, softly.)

There are pained noises just barely audible under the crackle of flame. Being engulfed in that red fire sounds like a really unpleasant experience. Fortunately(?), it also sounds like it is continuing to be a really unpleasant experience rather than immediately ending in death.

Perhaps relatedly, the golden light is healing her hand fast enough that she's having noticeable trouble getting her teeth into it.

She does not move, instead staring at the fire, making a noise that is the unholy lovechild of an angry hiss and a pained whimper. Self control, self control, come on...

The fire-and-blood man glances at her and makes a shooing gesture, and the flames reach out in her direction, though slowly enough that even a human could probably run.

...

She does not actually have infinite self control.

Right, let's go with the plan involving tossing the necklace out of the window. That seems like the plan that will fuck everything up the least.

She zips behind him, reaches to snap his necklace off at the clasp -

—and he turns with speed equal to hers and grabs her by the throat with a flame-wreathed hand.

The touch of the red fire feels like turning.

That's alarming, and she spends half a second checking to make sure she is not actually burning, but - that's it. It just hurts. She's otherwise fine.

The bright side of having been through turning is that everything else kind of pales in comparison. Sure, this feels like turning, but not everywhere. She can still use the space she has to think - clearly she's working with something she doesn't understand, but she thinks there are some things she has that could catch him off guard, too. But how does she manage to use them?

She's dealing with someone who loves violence, abhors mercy, and who loves hurting people. Okay. She can work with that, actually. Being hurt needs to look like it matters to her more than it does.

Vampires have a bit of trouble with 'emotional control,' at least when young. She's very young. It's not very hard to let the impotent, agonized anger bloom in her very emotional mind. She probably already has the expression of a vampire who just witnessed a human keeping up with her, but she can play it up a bit if she works at it. A pained whimper here, helpless grasping at the hand at her throat there - she doesn't need to breathe, but she can pretend for his benefit.

He snarls. Her flesh cracks like stone under his hand, and heals almost immediately in the golden light.

And then he throws her across the room, and turns and stalks toward her mate at still-vampiric speeds while she's sailing through the air.

Well, that clearly didn't help.

She lands easily and - does not immediately leap at him again, when it's obvious he's just going to loom ominously in front of her mate instead of ripping him to pieces. He gained that speed from her, does it fade if she just - doesn't - attack him?

Well he's not moving around much at the moment, so it's kind of hard to tell.

He lets the flames fade, except for a lingering aura of fire clinging to his hands and rippling over his skin.

(Everywhere the fire touched her, she is painfully oversensitive, almost as far above her normal sense of touch as a vampire's senses are above a human's.)

Her mate is clearly shaken, but just as clearly not letting it slow him down. He gets up and shoves his hair out of his face and looks up at the fire-and-blood man and says something which, from tone of voice and body language, almost certainly translates as 'are you fucking done?'

He laughs, and says something with no such obvious translation.

Right. Okay. Her first instinct of trusting her mate looked to be pretty on the mark, actually. Good job, Yvette. Unfortunately, she did not have infinite self control. She does not really want to try to solve this problem by making the exact same mistake again.

She hisses, then stalks off, leaving the room so attempting to rip his head off is less tempting.

She can still hear them talking as she leaves. The tone of the conversation is - strangely friendly for the circumstances.

Though occasionally punctuated by a roar of flame.

She might also notice that although she has yet to see the red flames actually combust anything, several of the doors she encounters appear to have been blasted off their hinges by a heat so intense that it melted some of the surrounding stone. In a few cases, a noticeable warmth still lingers.

Relatedly, after a few minutes of this there is a noise from the former throne room that sounds like what fire wants to be when it grows up.

Her mate walks out of the room. He is holding the red amulet, which has changed its message from this is who I am to this is who I was. Molten silver drips down his hand, leaving a smoking trail that heals near-instantly in his golden light.

Yvette winces whenever there's a roar of flame, but doesn't return to the throne room. She twitches at the final flame burst, torn between 'But he's in there' and 'I would not help at all' and 'I am extremely flammable,' but stays right where she is. It is unpleasant.

She noticeably relaxes upon spotting her mate with the amulet, though she does still look at him like it is very personally important to her that he be okay, and like she needs to reassure herself of this fact yesterday.

He looks at her thoughtfully and says something in the language she still doesn't speak.

"I'm afraid I don't speak your language," she says apologetically. "But -" She repeats a few of the phrases she heard upon arrival, starting from whatever blood and fire guy rudely said. I have a perfect memory.

...he laughs. He says something else, and makes a come-along gesture with his free hand, and starts walking in an exitward direction.

She follows, of course.

And then instead of continuing all the way to an actual exit, he turns off the trail of blasted doors and down a side corridor. The remains of the silver chain finally cool down enough to stop dripping, and the aftereffects of the red fire fade from her skin and presumably also from his. Some of the tension goes out of him. He must have one hell of a pain tolerance to have been so casual about all that.

(Up ahead, there is the sound of someone going through some papers. They may well be the only other living person in the castle.)

She'd be tempted to ask about where everyone is - they probably ran off, that would be the sensible thing to do - but there's a bit of a language barrier in her way.

"Yvette," she says, pointing at herself. Now that she's noticed, it's kind of upsetting that she doesn't know her mate's name.

He glances up at her, nods, mirrors the gesture - "Taliar."

Is that a smile? It certainly looks like it.

He smiles back, a little.

He turns another corner and makes a wait-here-please gesture and proceeds down the corridor toward the quiet rustle of paper.

She waits, running through all of the things a vampire must do in order to be a bit more human. It'd probably be kind of creepy if she didn't blink and stood with perfect stillness. She wants to keep that sort of thing to a minimum. Now that she's not torn between trying to act human and trying not to kill people, she can just focus on acting human.

He goes to the correct office and opens the door and steps inside and murmurs something in the local language.

And the person doing paperwork gets up from the desk and comes around and hugs him very tightly and cries quietly into his hair.

Wince.

She wishes she could give them privacy without running off somewhere humans would have trouble following, but that's sort of not a thing she can give them. The best she can do is to distract herself and try not to pay attention. She wonders is vampirism is suiting Rosalie any better now that she's had some time to get used to it, and if Blair's tracking power will extend to whatever weird place she's landed.

After a few minutes he says something else - probably explaining the unforeseen complications.

She nods and lets go of him and composes herself and comes out to meet the unforeseen complications.

"Yvette - Kelora," he says, with appropriate indicative gestures.

"Hello," she says, inclining her head slightly.

Her mate related anxiety is muted by vampire stillness and control, but not entirely absent. They'll probably pick up on it. She looks at Taliar, then away, like she's torn between wanting to look at him and feeling like she shouldn't for too long. Which is accurate, because that's precisely what she is.

"A morhiari mi Tairasante," Kelora says wryly.

They confer for a few sentences, and then Taliar leaves Kelora to her paperwork and resumes leading Yvette out of the castle.

As much fun as meekly being led to new and exciting places to wait is, can they maybe get started on getting her some vocabulary? Not understanding a word anyone says is getting really old. She can point at things and name them in English, then motion towards Taliar in a 'now you' gesture?

...this is the face of someone who would really like to tell her something that is beyond the power of their shared vocabulary to communicate.

He shakes his head and starts naming objects, faster than she was and with more commentary.

... She's looking at him strangely, but is clearly listening to everything he's saying.

He proceeds in this fashion all the way out of the castle and down the deserted street and—

"—lamp-post, a broken lamp-post to be specific—"

—suddenly, although he's still speaking the same language, she understands every word he's saying the moment he says it.

"- Ah, that makes a lot more sense now. Hello."

"Yeah sorry I had no way to tell you I was headed for a translating soulbearer that was more efficient than, uh, going there. If Kelora had told me he was more than ten minutes away I would've gotten to the vocabulary lessons ahead of you, but as it is..." shrug.

"It's all right, I can tolerate a bit of confusion. You have the situation in hand, right, I don't need to flee from the next sadistic soulbearer on your list?"

"Nope, Seofar was the last one."

"Congratulations on a job well done. I assume."

"Yeah, it's... been a busy few weeks."

"I'm sorry. I really don't think I've made your next few weeks boring, too."

"Hmm?"

"Hello, I'm a vampire. I was human once and decided to stop. We are super fast, super strong, live until killed, flammable, drink blood for sustenance - animal blood is unpleasant but will suit us fine, I've had nothing but - and have some bizarre quirks, some of which are psychological. One of which is currently highly relevant to you. I, ah. Vampires occasionally fall in love at first sight with someone that's supposed to be mutually compatible. ... Once."

"You're right," he says, "that does kind of complicate my life a little. Um. Are you - okay?"

"Physically, yes. Emotionally, um. Seeing you get set on fire was unpleasant but I'm coping okay enough, and the rest of my okay is a little dependent on whether or not an extremely foreign vampire fits into your life and if I can get home or not. If you, ah. Would like me to just leave," she does not look like she wants to say these words but presses on anyway, "then I can just leave and stop being your problem. I knew what I was signing up for when I turned, I can face the consequences of my own actions."

"That... doesn't really..." He shakes his head. "...things are my problem to the extent that they are problems I have the right and the ability to solve, I can't just tell you to go home, that doesn't sound like it'd help at all."

"Probably not, no, but if I didn't open with 'you can tell me to go away' and mean it, that would be an entirely different set of problems. If you'd like to not send me packing, excellent, that sounds great to me."

"Well, fair enough."

She smiles.

"I'm sorry about putting you in this situation, I know it's a bit awkward."

"It is not the most awkward my life has ever gotten!"

"Really. There was something more awkward than a vampire from another world showing up in the middle of your dramatic final confrontation to confess that she is vampirically in love with you. Well, now I'm curious, what could possibly top that?"

"Maybe I should start from the beginning. ...the beginning is plausibly two thousand years ago but a lot of the middle bits summarize well."

"I don't mind listening to a very long story. Go on?"

"Okay. So - soulbearers. There was a time when not everybody knew how to manifest their soul. The first time the knowledge went public, there was a war going on and both sides suddenly had armies of soulbearers and this turned out to be a terrible idea and they completely destroyed each other. Everyone else collectively decided that armies of soulbearers are really bad and nobody should ever use one. Thus ends the first Soul War. A few centuries went by. People being people, somebody eventually decided that the war they wanted to win was definitely worth starting that shit up again, so they fielded an army of soulbearers, and things got real fucked up, and more and more countries kept getting pulled into the conflict until eventually there weren't any left - and I don't mean 'weren't any left not fighting', I mean weren't any left - and those were the Soul Wars and it took two thousand years for the world to recover to the state it's in now."

Eyebrow raise.

"Charming. Glad to see you've recovered."

"Yeah. Uh, so then Tezru Zierni Diakor united the world, by which I mean conquered it, which improved the situation tremendously, and now we have a world-spanning empire, and then when he died his heir turned out to be paranoid and horrible and tried to have all his remaining living relatives assassinated, including my grandmother, so my grandfather and his friend who happened to be a distant Zierni cousin got together and had themselves a nice coup and now the emperor of the world is Dekha-fanshel Zierni Esarkan, and it's going to stay that way, because Esarkan's soul is self-resurrecting, if you kill him he gets up half a minute later and makes a sarcastic comment."

He gestures with the dead soul still in his hand.

"Esarkan's son, Tekhesin Zierni Seofar, did not like that at all. Tekhesin Seofar thought he should get to rule something and not just be a prince for the rest of his life. So he came down here to one of the southern island provinces and just barely didn't declare himself king of it and dared his father to take it back, while making it very clear that if anybody came after him he'd absolutely make a Soul War of it because he was exactly that kind of idiot."

She nods, gravely.

"So that's been going on for a while now, and for some reason last month when I turned seventeen Esarkan decided to send me down here to marry Seofar's daughter. I have no idea what he was thinking, I wasn't even a soulbearer at the time and it's dangerous to try to manifest your soul if you're under twenty, but, uh," he glances down at his shining golden soul, "clearly he had the right idea, because I got here and noticed how utterly fucked up everything was and the morning of the wedding I and my newly manifested soul went to Kelora and asked if rather than get married she'd prefer to run away and organize a rebellion against her father, and she said that sounded like a great idea, and we did, and we won."

"... The marriage itself being a political move to attempt to placate Seofar? Or an excuse to get you near him?"

'Running away to organize a rebellion instead of getting married' is not quite the same thing as 'let's never get married,' but she - doesn't quite feel she has the right to ask for clarification.

"Both of those, I think. Except I can't figure out how he knew - like, maybe he guessed I'd probably manifest my soul, but I'm - probably the most powerful soulbearer in the world and it seems insane for him to have sent me here expecting that to happen, I didn't expect that to happen until I was actually holding my soul in my hand. —speaking of which, never touch a living soul, having one's soul touched is the most horrible thing it's possible to experience. Holding a dead one is fine because they're not around to feel it. You can always tell the difference."

"I suppose that makes my 'steal his soul, throw it out of the window' plan even more inadvisable," she observes, a little wryly.

...snort.

"I ah. Did actually attempt it, while you were - indisposed. I'd planned to trust you and not interfere, and then the prick shooed me and I did not handle it well when combined with. How you were indisposed."

"He was kind of rude."

"To put it lightly."

"...it's, um, really not that big a deal."

... Nod.

"Right. Okay. Sorry."

"I—I don't mean—I'm not trying to say you don't have a right to be upset about me getting hurt, just—it genuinely wasn't as bad as it looked?"

"I didn't feel like I don't have a right to be upset or like you were telling me to stop, but I understand why you'd rather not have a stranger having strong opinions about what is and isn't horrible in your life. That being said, it's not a set of feelings you can really soothe with reassurances that it wasn't as bad as it looked. I'm upset with him in a very visceral fashion because, essentially, he tortured the person I love most in the world in front of me, with me standing helplessly by with no way to fix it and no real idea what to do or what was going on. It helps that you didn't find it unbearable, but the problem is not that the torture met some arbitrary quota of awful, the problem is that you were tortured at all and I am going to have a flinch reaction to your suffering no matter what. And then there's - I don't think it was as tolerable for everyone he hurt. I am not feeling positively disposed towards this person regardless of how he interacts with you."

"—okay."

"I -" she stops, and looks away. "Was trying to clarify and maybe went overboard and clearly upset you somehow. Sorry."

"Um. Do you think I should try to explain, or should we just give up and move on."

"Explain, please?"

"...it seemed like you - really thought I experienced something a lot worse than I did - and it seemed like a good idea to tell you otherwise, and then... you told me you understand why I'd rather not have a stranger having strong opinions about what is and isn't horrible in my life, and then - told me I was tortured? And really didn't seem like you'd appreciate me trying to say I wasn't?"

"... Yes, I did do that, didn't I. I apologize. I didn't mean it in - it was less about specifying exactly what he did and more about trying to clarify my feelings of what it felt like to watch, without actually having to think of any specifics. I certainly don't want to argue with you over it."