“We need to talk.”

I say it with as little emotion as I can. [Insight]’s echoes are still ringing, and every peal tells me something I’ve missed, within the set of things in the last day - literally, a planetary rotation, eighty six or so kiloseconds. Well, things I can remember well enough.

Since most of the stuff I’ve missed in the past day is, well, Amber related, as little emotion as I can is very little. I’m no stranger to fucking up in a relationship, and I’m no stranger to shoving the emotions to the side so that I can talk something out.

I’d have spent a lot more nights a lot colder and lonelier, otherwise.

“Unless the subject is tactics, Adam, there’s nothing to talk about.” Amber looks casual and calm, cool and collected and relaxed, but I’m not buying it. “And somehow I don’t think you’re talking about tactics.”

“I mean. Uh.” I look around the antechamber. After the stark plainness of the rest of this half of the floor, even the light furnishings and details are distracting as hell now that we’ve lost our forward momentum. There’s textured walls with striations, some carpets and tapestries, light fixtures, a bench, and a water fixture in the shape of the o-stroke null set icon; it’s a room that could pass muster as reality, my first since the Temple started playing desperate catchup on the second floor. “I’m sorry I -”

“No.” She cuts me off. Exasperated, the last gasp of [Insight] tells me. “Look, we made the mistake of being distracted, and we made it together. The fire saved-” She cuts herself off, takes a deep breath. “What do you think would have happened if the blighted beast had bitten you twice?”

“I play a trick I would rather not. It… wouldn’t have been good times.”

“So you wouldn’t have -” She cuts herself off again, closing her mouth with a snap. It’s two breaths this time, and I wait. “Died. You wouldn’t have died. Fine. It was still the right choice to do whatever it took to avoid being bitten a second time. It was still my right choice, to heal you first, and my duty. My lord.” A certain tension goes out of her face, and she’s smiling this weird, tiny, faint smile. “It’s not just duty, and I’d make the choice a thousand times.”

There’s no dry irony in the honorific, and I know enough to interpret that as a bad sign. I forge forwards anyways. “That. That is exactly the problem. That level of pain, and you’re smiling about it.”

“Do you object to my loyalty, my lord?”

Her voice isn’t dry, this time, and it’s not level like it was before. It’s frigid, with a cold anger that makes my lips and throat go dry and the words flee my brain. I scrabble mentally for purchase, fighting the urge to go cold myself. “I object to your having been made with that loyalty.”

“You object to my having been made, then. My lord. For were it to have been so, she would be another, and not myself.”

“I…” My eyes are itching, but I force my hands to stay down, jittering in my lap. “That’s not exculpatory. I made you, a person, who’s … constrained, I made you, my subconscious made you, to be this fulfilment of an old man’s puerile, lecherous fantasies, it’s grotesque. You’re a marvel.” I stop there, and she doesn’t say anything, just looks at me with that flat gaze of hers. The thought keeps coming, and I can’t not say it. “You’re a marvel. But your creation was a crime, and I was the perpetrator of it.”

“You are not -” She stops, takes in a deep breath, lets it out. There are tears rolling down her cheeks and the shame eats at my belly, that I’d caused that. “I was going to say, Magelord James, that you are not so old as that, that the desire to not be alone is not so puerile as you pretend. But it is difficult to be kind, even when that kindness would be truth, when you strike at someone I love.”

That’s like a punch in the gut, and I go hot with embarrassment. Anger follows on its heels in predictable measure, and shame. “What -”

“You say I am constrained.” She barrels over me, and I shut up and let her out of long habit. “Everyone is constrained. Everyone. Kazir tells us that the reason we must grow the variety of crops we grow is so that even if one is lost, to blight or weather or error, there are legumes and grains and the green vegetables and roots, for just as crops must have the hidden virtues within the soil along with water and sun, so must people eat of the varied bounty of His harvest.” Her voice goes sing-song for a bit, like reciting a familiar, worn-smooth saying, and there’s a pang of longing in me for the obvious faith she has at the same time that there’s a spike of confusion that she has it at all. “Forfend the loss of teeth and the shortening of limbs and some diseases of the mind through His edict; and to each of the Thousand there is a dictate to follow, and we are all constrained. Parents raise their children as best they can, within and without the strictures, and parents and children alike are constrained!”

There’s a blaze in her eyes and I can’t look away, but my curiosity gets the better of me, almost like a compulsion, worse than someone sliding me a new math puzzle ever was. “Your people’s parents raise their children?”

She stares at me with such rank astonishment that even I can tell what the expression means. “Yours… do not?”

“No?” I blink at her. “Biological suitability, what kinds of gene-traits the Worldship or Fleet needs or is trading, it doesn’t have anything to do with being able to raise a child. We…” I stop for a second, the implications of what I saw on my Status sheet when I could still open it bubbling up from my memory. I clear my throat; I’m soldiering on anyway. “Maybe two in ten adults work the creche at any given time. That way doesn’t just maximize the chances that the child … grows up to be a productive, healthy member of society, it means, having all these people loving them means it’s not… one person, two people, forming someone. Shaping them.” The idea of it is roiling in my stomach, the shape of it both terrifying and grotesque.

“- saying, my lord, that this,” she’s saying when I snap back to the moment, “is a problem because you are repelled by my not having been raised by my village?”

“Look, it doesn’t help your case to suggest that I’m your …” I finally find the word. “Father. That would be… I mean, that doesn’t help your case, okay?”

“No, it… no, Adam, that’s not… no!” She surges to her feet, pacing across the antechamber. I can’t help the ways my eyes follow her every motion; in stillness she’s pretty, but in motion she’s glorious, like someone made a human out of an equation for power and grace. She sees me when she turns, sees how my gaze follows her, and there’s an angry recognition in her eyes. “Is it so terrible, then?” She stalks back to where she was sitting, and I’m blinking rapidly, trying to figure out what she means. “That there is someone you look at in such a way. That when you do, it awakens a familiar fire and delight in me.”

She’s closer than she was when the conversation started, squatting on her heels instead of sitting on a bench. I can’t smell her, which feels weird, and I do my best to wrench my mind away from that tangent - it’s because the goblin charms purify the odor compounds from the air, probably. “It’s not terrible.” My voice shakes. “That you’re gorgeous isn’t terrible. That you react that way is… okay, it’s as wonderful as it is weird. It’s that I made you that makes it terrible.”

“So if that’s how it is, what then?”

“I don’t know.” Our voices are soft, mine uncertain. I can’t read anything into hers, don’t have nearly enough mana to activate [Insight]. “I’m not enough of an idiot to want to part ways in the middle of a dungeon.”

“Temple.” She corrects me absently. “Dungeons, you clear down.”

“Whatever.” That factoid almost distracts me, even in my misery. “Maybe you head out after we clear it and get out. Live your best life.”

“Adam.” Her hand reaches out for my face, drops to my shoulder instead. “My best life is being at your side. Would you have made me otherwise?”

“It can’t be. There’s always someone better, and everyone deserves someone better.” The words slip out of me, and I’m spinning around in embarrassment to hide my face as soon as I realize what came out of my mouth, face in my hands.

She wraps her arms around me. I stiffen, body expecting anything other than the comfort of her arms. It’s long seconds before she speaks, and her voice is gentle when she does. “Will you accept, Adam, my lord, a promise? That if such a person comes along, I will say so?” I start to answer, and she cuts me off, not finished quite yet. “But until that day, I am your captain and partner, your sword and shield; and I will not have you shame me by denigrating yourself.”

“I… what?”

“Is it so complex a notion?” Amber’s voice firms. “We are seen and reflected in each other, in the eyes of those around us. We grow in the soil of each other, nourish each other as though water and the light of the sun. Do you wound yourself, you wound me through it.” She pauses after that, finishing with a quiet “My lord”.

It takes me a while to get my thoughts together. I’m talking before I do anyway, as usual. “There’s a lot fucked up about this situation, Amber. Paladin Ashborn. Void and starfire, there’s a lot fucked up.” I get up, and she lets me, hands sliding off of my arms. I almost want her not to, but part of me knows how long I was trapped, in a prison more comfortable than her chainmail-covered curves pressed into my back, and I’ll do anything to avoid going back, possibly including dying. I lean against the wall, and turn to look at her again, and my heart climbs into my throat. “Can’t even say I wish I could go back and not make the decision. You wouldn’t exist, and you don’t deserve being unmade before your time.”

“An odd way to put it.”

“Your language doesn’t have the right words.” I scratch my head. “Look, everyone dies. I mean, we live longer than we used to, we live until we senesce and the World stops giving us the drugs that keep our body from killing itself, but that’s not even two centuries. That’s death, the end of the Self, but eventually your stories fade into myth, the chant-lines that had your jumps in them get forgotten or the Void takes its due of them, and your name is gone too.” I’m getting distracted, but it’s a familiar distraction. I used to invent variations on the Litany of Entropy when I was younger; it helped me sleep. “But that’s not the unmaking.

“The unmaking, it’s the stars going out, and the children of those stars, and eventually there’ll be nothing but their heavy metal graves, drifting in the darkness. Void, everything. History unwritten, every person unmade. Not just nothing to exist; nothing to have existed.”

She’s smiling. She’s been smiling for a bit, maybe since I mentioned we only live two centuries. Do people here not do that? Was that funny? “So it is mete that I exist, then, since I do.”

“I mean…” My face is red. I missed something, I know. “Fuck it. Yes. And I … I’m glad.”

“And I shall remind you of it, when you open the three pylons that remain.” She smirks; I’m making an impression of a fish, probably. “Six more chambers!” And she’s striding away.