Chapter 143: Chapter 144 – The Commitment of Favors

Lily is there when I wake up in the morning, lounging on the bed. I’ve curled around her, one arm wrapped around her waist and my forehead on the small of her back; as I stir, she idly reaches down with one hand to run her fingers through my hair, and then that hand returns to where she’s making small, circular motions with her fingers in the air.

I recognize those motions, even if it takes me a moment for my sleep-hazed brain to match how my own fingers are flexing in sympathetic movement.

“Cribbing my Interface?”

“Good morning, Adam.”

I snicker, which is probably impolite. I don’t care; I’m too full of joy to care. “It really is a good morning. You’re absolutely right.”

That gives her pause, and she leans down to kiss me lightly on the lips. “What does it mean when you do this motion?”

She demonstrates on my chest, and I make appreciative sounds until she stops. “That’s two gestures.” I rest my fingers on her thigh, thumb and three fingers with the pinky left to float; there’s maybe a centimeter between each of my fingers. “This one is a rotation, but it serves more than one purpose. You can rotate just the tiniest amount back and forth to latch onto an interface element, or you can, like, actually rotate; you get velocity if you put some wrist into it, and then it stops when you press.” I show her as I talk, with a smirk that’s probably inappropriate degrees of smug.

Well, maybe it’s appropriate to be this smug when you got fucked by a goddess.

“The other thing,” and here I slide my fingers outwards, so that the first joints are almost straight out from my palm and the other joints are only bent a little more than that, enjoying the feel of her thigh, “is an expansion, a zoom, a focus. Putting the two together, the tiny back-and-forth rotation followed by the slide-out zoom is like saying ‘I want this, yes, this specific piece of interface, to be bigger relative to other interface bits’.”

“Mmm.” She leans down to kiss me, then slips out of the bed, reaching back to hand me a mug with a straw in it. “Drink. Your friends are waiting.”

It turns out to be water in the mug, cool but not too cold. I drink from the straw, not because my hands are unsteady but because Lily is wearing a dress that goes down maybe halfway down her ass, and it would be rude not to stare. She’s still working through my library of Interface gestures, with what has to be intentionally-visible-to-me recordings that she’s copying from, which I think is mostly a way of subtly teasing me for where my eyes are.

“Thanks.” There’s a table by the bed, and I put the empty mug there. Drank that faster than I expected. “For more than just the water, I mean.”

She looks back at me like she’s surprised, but there’s only a sense of steel and warning in her eyes. “Did you doubt my promises?”

“I’d literally sooner doubt Amber’s… anything, other list shorter.” I grin at her. “Can’t I be grateful even for things that I knew would come to pass?”

She doesn’t move a muscle in her face that I can see, but I get a sense of eyes rolling and exasperation. “You, and that smile, are at risk of becoming tedious in your wholesomeness. Go inflict yourself upon your companions.”

“Heh.” My laugh comes out in a snort, but obedient to her instructions, I slide off the bed and onto my feet. I bend deeply at the knees, experimentally, and am half gratified and at least ten percent horrified as my joints make a truly impressive series of cracking and popping noises. “You’re a good person, Lily.”

I don’t know how to interpret the look that gets me. “A thousand and one benedictions, Adam; may all the Gods smile upon you.”

There’s a resonance to that, something that is more than words but that I can’t perceive more than the barest edges of. “May the—” I stop myself just in time. “May you be blessed,” I improvise, carefully not invoking the Void. “May you be sustained. May you be seen, and the world and its mysteries open before you; and may peace be…” I pause for a moment, then shrug. “Found,” I say after a moment. “Found and created.”

That gets me a smile, a weird one. I can’t interpret it, which I think means Lily’s done doing the thing where I can interpret her expressions. I take that as my cue to start heading for the door, but she stops me without a word or motion, just a little metaphysical nudge.

“Pants on the side table.”

“Thanks?” I look down at myself, and then feel myself blushing from the tips of my ears down to my neck. My clothes are absolutely wrecked; shirt shredded, skirt crumpled, legging-ties snapped and the leggings themselves ripped. “Thanks.”

There turns out to be more than just pants; from thick socks and a pair of perfectly-fitting boots to a shirt that feels like the finest cotton I’ve ever touched, it’s a whole outfit.

“Adam.”

I turn to look at Lily, at Lady Sheid. She’s paused in the movement of her hands and fingers, not looking at me but giving off the nigh-physical notion of attention.

“I can’t guarantee that it’ll be me, if you visit again. You won’t find the other Architects as pleasant. Don’t go pining.”

“Lady of the Crossroads.” I bow to her, unable to stop grinning despite being totally serious. The bow is carefully calculated, but only in the sense of as deep as I can without falling is a calculation. “Your gracious wisdom illuminates my world like the stars in the void.”

She waves me onwards towards the door, cracking a smile—good. She gets it.

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I’d rather travel the unanchored Void to new stars than come back here.

The door opens onto a hallway I definitely didn’t walk through on the way here, closing quietly, unassuming in its simplicity. I drift towards the sounds and also the wafts of mana, visible through my now-functioning-once-more Visor; the hallway is all dungeonstone, and there’s a visible—well. It’s not visually discernible, or discernible in whatever the original bit of esoteric sensorium is that got arbitrarily translated into compatibility with my visual cortex, but there’s a measurable gradient as the dungeonstone soaks up the mana scraps that diffuse into it.

They’re mostly done having breakfast by the time I show up, but they’re there. My party, my three companions, are waiting for me in the pylon room. The tangible reminder in their very presence, in their grins and raised eyebrows and every centimeter of Amber’s body language, doesn’t so much ease a tension but rather adds another ingredient to the solution of joy that suffuses me, and I grin back at them as I slide into a seat at the simple wooden table.

“How’d you get this out of Keyhome?”

“As reflective of needs the demesne of this artifact is, hath not an answer ready yourself?”

My head spins at that, and I glance at Amber with desperation in my eyes. “We needed one,” Amber explains kindly, “so Keyhome provided.”

I pull out the chair that had been left for me, and something clicks. I squat down to look, to confirm, and I’m smiling even wider when I come back up. “That’s a clever mechanism! Those little levers, right? Push, push, pop, and then it all folds up, and once it’s folded those chocks are clear and you can fold the legs. Looks like the legs might have some fair wiggle, though.”

“Please do not destructively test the table until after we have all eaten. Sir.”

I give Sara my best side-eye. “Your sense of humor has really drifted towards Amber’s, hasn’t it. Is that because it always was, and you’re more comfortable now? Or is it because you’re mirroring her? Either way, stick—” I’m interrupted by a savage growling from my stomach, and everyone around the table bursts into laughter, myself included. “—some food onto my plate, I guess!”

The table isn’t, in fact, as steady as it would otherwise be, and the chair isn’t as comfortable. The food, thankfully, doesn’t need a whole bunch of sawing and cutting; bread slathered with something that turns out to taste of fat and cheese-tang and oil and sweetness, all one comfortingly smooth texture over the mellow chewiness of the bread. There’s some kind of juice and two kinds of tea, which I skip over in favor of water, and before long the headache I hadn’t even noticed—or maybe I’d noticed and just didn’t care—is banished and I’m reasonably full, drifting in a pleasant haze.

“—upon our return.”

That gets my attention. “Wait, what?”

There’s a shared look that flickers around the table. “We were discussing,” Zidanya says with what has to be deliberate slowness, “that which we had committed to doing upon our return to the surface. A flower laid upon a gravestone; a message left with a family.”

“Oh.” I don’t know why Zidanya’s speech had shifted so dramatically towards a slow, flat intonation that is so unlike her, but I set it aside for the moment. “That’s… good? Sorry. I was spacing out. I’m kind of, um. Fuzzy? My brain is fizzy. I don’t have the right word.” I blink a few times. “Food was good. Thank you for the food!”

There’s another one of those shared flickering looks, and both Zidanya and Amber start snickering. Amused, considering, and with a sense of you were right, Amber slides something glimmering and round along the top of the table, right to where Zidanya’s hand is waiting. “I hope my lord will be recovered soon.” Amber’s voice is dust-dry, but I can hear the deep amusement and no small amount of compersive joy beneath it. “A Reca might be concerned about personality alteration.”

“I have no idea!” I lean back into my chair, barely noticing the discomfort. I’m having trouble staying focused in the moment; with my immediate physical needs taken care of, my memory just keeps straying back to the night before, prompted by the… aches and twinges, the tangible reminders. “Stars, I feel like I’ve been living on linear measure and someone just rescaled my world to logarithmic.”

“Chase the artist a thousand years, if she be a handsbreath beyond reach, ‘twill only seem so for her choice of pace. No masterpiece is crafted but by a master.”

“Lily said something along those lines.” Something about the notion feels like I’m missing something fundamental, but it’s—

“Was it… anything in particular, Adam?”

I sit upright at that. There’s layers of worry in Amber’s question, layers that I hadn’t noticed earlier but had definitely been there, even under the joy. “Hey, hey.” I basically bolt from my chair, almost tripping over the leg and barely catching myself before falling. “None of that. I spent one night with Lily Sheid, who, yes, fucked my brains out like I’ve never had before; I’m gonna spend the whole rest of my life with you.”

I’m in her lap without any conscious traversing of the intervening space, and also without checking to see if she’s wearing armor. She’s not, conveniently, and she wraps me in her arms and I can feel some of the tension bleed out of her. “I admit to being somewhat possessive of the primacy I enjoyed in my lord’s attentions.”

“Present tense.” I turn my head up, and she kisses me, long and sweet and firm. I break the kiss eventually; regretfully, but the words want to spill out. “I had at least one revelation, sure. I know a whole lot more about myself than I did yesterday, and I can’t wait to show you and to explore with you what that means for us. You’re… you’re who I want to feel this way with, and there’s so much I want to say about that but not in front of people who aren’t interested.”

She nods at that. It’s a slow nod, a tentative nod, but I can tell that she understands that I’m serious, and something eases inside her that she never wanted to let show in the first place. “We should not, my lord, inflict that upon Miss Evetheri here.” That gets her a round of snickers, and she lifts me casually off of her body, kissing me to lighten the sting.

“Nor take the time. Fate twists, Magelord.” Zidanya’s voice is drawn, firm and worried. “Yon two are yet young, but even the Reca feels it, so strong as it is. Make ready, that we might have done with this demesne. I hunger for the skies, and but for this shiver of my soul, I’d have since hied from the Lady’s grasp without you some hours ago.

“Something comes, so powerful as to warp the world in its forewake, and I fear what it may be.”

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