Val always seemed to stick her foot in her mouth around Arius, but she had really done it this time. The last thing that she wanted to do was inadvertently bring up his father.

Throughout the silence between them, she tried her hardest to strengthen Keep the Peace to make him feel better again. The harder that she tried, the less results that she got. Arius restored some of his Mind Shield, further shutting her out.

Where her abilities failed, Val would have to try to use words. “Arius, I don’t know if you want to talk about it at all, but there is something that you should know about Evalaite. She can edit memories.”

The long pause continued until Arius spoke up with a hollow voice. “Can she actually do that? Did Tavras inform you about that?”

“No, um, I found out about her abilities for myself.” In the end, she decided to be honest about her own abilities. “I can see the past. I saw your fight with Tavras in the Serpent’s Circle, and how you rescued Evalaite.”

“Wait,” Arius lurched to sit up out of excitement. “You have been stalking me too?” The massive smile on his face made him look way too happy about this.

“Have you actually been stalking me?” Val asked in return.

“Well, I did find out where you live and showed up there twice in one day.”

Val laughed because he was acting like a stalker. If he were not so useful, she would absolutely hate his guts. Instead, she found herself laughing because Arius was not so bad. “Who knew that I would have the Ravager for a stalker?”

He laughed too. “I promise that I can’t be bothered to stalk anyone else—only you.”

“I feel so special.”

“You should feel special because you are.”

“Aw,” she said sarcastically, but his remark genuinely made her feel a little fuzzy inside.

After their banter, Val dropped her voice to a more somber tone. “The day that you had saved Evalaite, you thought that you had slept with her then, didn’t you?”

Arius turned his head the opposite way.

“You don’t actually have to answer that.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Right, yeah.” It would be weird to explicitly acknowledge the intimate nature of Arius’s false memories with Evalaite.

“So…” Val drawled on, “that was not what happened in reality. Actually, she tried to kill you. She made you pass out and stuck a knife in your neck, but when she realized that you could come back to life, she changed her mind. Evalaite wanted to manipulate you to kill your father, Suvier.”

After hearing all of these things confirmed during the fight between Tavras and Evalaite, she did not care what consequences there would be for her. Hopefully, Evalaite could be considered a traitor. Then Arius could justifiably end her life. A hard gulp slid down her throat. Val did not know since when she could come to hate someone so much, but she did indeed want Evalaite to die.

Instead, Arius revealed the extent of his complicity. “I… already knew this about her. The way that she would suggest and imply things, she clearly was trying to encourage me down that path. I never even could write her off as purely power hungry, because a part of me always wanted to agree with her.”

Both hands drew over Arius’s face like he had a headache, and he laughed through his grimace. “I have no good memories of Suvier—literally none at all. Clearly, I do not think of him as my father since I do not even call him that. He is God Supreme to me as he is to everyone else. My siblings have much fonder memories with him, and supposedly everyone calls me his favorite son. You would think that I would like him the best! Did Evalaite distort all of my memories of him?”

Val pursed her lips together. Thinking back to that vision of Tavras and Arius’s fight, she tried to recall his demeanor before he had met Evalaite. “Um, after your fight with Tavras to bring him under the God Supreme’s control, I think that he compared you to him. Your eyes turned a little darker red than usual, but otherwise, I don’t think that it bothered you that much.”

“Hm,” Arius said. “This is hard. I don’t even know if I have any memories to reference! Tavras compared me to Suvier a lot, or at least I think that he did, and the Sea Itself has always hated me. Maybe it did not faze me much because I expected him to say it. I’m not able to determine if a slight reaction like that means anything or not.”

Val wracked her brain. The only way that she could assess the extent of Arius’s rewritten memories would be through delving into the past. Arius could give her the pieces of information that she would need to seed Past Insight with, then she could see if any of his memories had genuinely happened or not in reality.

That seemed like a ton of effort for another time perhaps. Val would have something to bribe Arius with if she ever needed his help.

“Oh! Right,” he said, alarmed. “If you saw me fight Tavras in the past—I’m glad that you happened to see that, by the way. I did a good job some eighty years ago, didn’t I?”

“Um, sure.” While Val did not approve of the way that he had hurt Tavras, she did view something else as praiseworthy. “You did a good job at killing all of those sea serpents.”

A burst of laughter came from him. “I did! Do you not like sea serpents either?”

“No, I hate them.”

“That’s great! We have so much in common. Anyway….” Arius’s focus returned to the serious matter of his edited memories. “You would have seen Rakurruakanthor when he was alive! He did not like anyone calling him nicknames aside from me. I called him Urru, right? Did he call me Tongueless?”

“Yes!” That much, she knew for certain. The weird nicknames were unforgettable.

A big sigh fell past Arius’s lips. “Okay, yeah, I think it is fair for me to say that I would hate Suvier regardless of Evalaite, then.”

“Why?”

Arius waved one hand in the air. “Never mind. Thank you for informing me about this. I have no idea if it even matters, but at least I am aware of the fact that my memory has been compromised.”

This time, Val fell silent for a while. In her attempt to say something that could make Arius feel less bad, she had made him feel even worse. This was becoming an unfortunate trend for her.

Hastily, she tried to get to her point. “I did not mean to unsettle you more when you already have a lot on your plate. I just wanted to say that what happened with Evalatie was not your fault. You never had the intention to sleep with her that first time. I mean, you were basically psychologically raped. Nothing physical ever happened between you and her—not ever, if Tavras and Evalaite’s conversation is to be believed. Likewise, she did not actually sleep with Suvier. I think that she violated his mind in the same way that she violated yours.”

Those last words felt weird on her tongue, expressing how the God Supreme could possibly be vulnerable to a psychological attack. Hopefully, Arius could feel better overall at least, knowing that his girlfriend had not actually cheated on him with his father. None of this had been his fault to begin with. Arius was a victim of the situation that Evalaite had created.

All of that had to sink in. Arius did not say anything for a long time. “Here, I had always figured that I would be cheated on at some point since I was not dating my soulmate. It would only be fitting as a god of war. You get what I’m saying, right? With my luck it just had to be my father, or so I thought.”

A big sigh of admission left him. “It should make me feel better that this was not the case, it’s just…. It sucks. I fell for everything! The price for that is not even knowing what is real in my head anymore.”

While her words could offer little comfort in his situation, she repeated, “This was not your fault.”

“I just… don’t particularly want to talk about this. At least this fixes the other problem. When I thought that Evalaite was in bed with Suvier—literally—I figured that she would pose a threat to your identity. I was thinking that I would have to kill her, just not in a fit of rage. I would not want ‘murder is a break-up’ as part of my reputation if I could help it, you know?”

Val laughed. His reputation did not even matter though. Being who he was, Arius could probably kill every girlfriend once he got bored with them and still date whoever he wanted.

“Val, I am ‘Exhibit A’ on why having a strong Mind Shield is important! At least Evalaite taught me how to make a much stronger one, I suppose. She probably always kept me weak enough to control though," he muttered. "Anyway, the important thing is that I will be able to teach you all the better.”

“Thanks, Arius.”

That part of their conversation had finished.

At Arius’s earlier mention of soulmates, her thoughts wandered to that. Somehow, Tavras and Evalaite were soulmates. It just seemed so wrong to Val that her teeth clenched together just thinking about them from here.

If there were anything that she could do, she might as well ask a god of love what he thought.