It was not until we had reached the very outskirts of Toria’s kingdom of birth that we stopped again, riding straight through the night and day and night again until I thought I was going to fall asleep sitting straight up on my horse. The glow of the inn coming into sight as we crested the hill forced a sigh from deep within my lungs, my body yearned for a soft place to rest and my mind was a whirl with all sorts of thoughts, many of them trying to process what had happened over the past few days. I felt myself becoming more paranoid than I perhaps otherwise would be if well rested, though I questioned if perhaps it was simply a product of my realization of the type of creature my family had allowed in its midst. I did not know exactly what Feros was, but just a tiny taste of his unfiltered magic was enough to set off every instinctual alarm in my body. How he had managed to keep it a secret for so long I could not explain. Surely my father must have demanded proof of his magical abilities at some point and then would have known and understood, though I supposed that I myself had been certain that I had seen the creature perform magic commonly and understood that he was powerful in his abilities, but now that I tried to recall specific instances I could not bring a single specific event to mind. Every time he did something requiring high magical ability like his body switching, it was always done away in secret and completed before anyone knew it was happening and now I understood why.

“Are we not going to the inn?” Toria’s voice was filled with longing for a lie down in a soft bed.

Snapping back to the present, I focused my eyes on the real world around me and saw that indeed we had deviated from the path towards the inn at some point and were instead skirting the edge of the village away from the object of our intense desire.

“We cannot risk a proper inn,” Feros explained, “but I have other plans. Do not worry, I know I have been pushing the both of you to your extremes and we are almost to where you both can rest.”

“You specifically leave yourself out of that need,” I remarked.

The creature gave me his cliche smirk and tilted his head slightly to the side as he pulled his horse up next to mine. “Why bring this up now? You have recognized the differences between you and I for quite a while and it has never warranted a mention before. I believe you are looking back and finding reasons to feel uneasy with me when it has never been an issue before.”

“It has been an issue,” I said, pulling the reins of my horse so it would put a slight distance between Feros and I. Any time I got close to him since experiencing the truth behind his magic my stomach churned thinking about the experience. “I have never fully trusted you, but oftentimes I have not had the liberty to do anything about it. As one of my father’s trusted advisors and trainers you were the default choice that everyone just expected to be summoned and I went along with that. Any time I would voice my discomfort or my worries about you they were pushed aside as me just being too paranoid.”

“I think you are being just that,” he intoned, “you are not bringing up my different need for sleep as something to be wary of when that fact has been true since long, long before you were even born.”

“It is unnatural,” I argued.

Toria pulled her horse up behind us. “That fact is a bit strange, it has made me feel uneasy before as well.”

Feros looked between the two of us and gave a nod of his head. “Before either of you make any rash decisions first rest, making choices when stressed and exhausted only leads to decisions that require deep reflection later. If you decide to cut ties with me after this excursion I will go without a fight, though I do ask you to think clearly on it first.”

A few moments later, Feros turned his horse back towards a hill and led us up and over it, revealing a small, dilapidated farmhouse sitting at the bottom on the other side. The shutters of the house were drawn with several of the slates cracked and a few hanging on barely by their rusted nails. The house appeared to have been relatively fancy for a human dwelling when it had been new, bright white paint peeling and flaking from the siding along with a roof that was made of overlapping wooden boards instead of the sod or thatching that was typical for most dwellings of anyone not of high standing. How any farmer could afford such fancy additions to their home was strange, but not unheard of, sometimes it was wise for a king or other noble to make an example of generosity to a commoner and their family to showcase how good and kind they were right before doing something that might otherwise be viewed badly. It was a common enough practice, though it was unique that a commoner would actually hold onto the money long enough to do anything like build a house with the windfall. One of the reasons not to be too generous with people of little means that was not commonly spoken about was the tendency for people in the same position of struggle to target the family with the new fortune and steal from them to fulfill their own needs and desires. Blind acts of generosity, while they seemed kind in passing, often brought further hardship and even death to the family instead, and left them in a situation where they were not only still very much poor, but also with the nasty knowledge that they could not trust the community around them any longer. The simple solution if someone with the means to truly do good was to lift the whole community up at once so that jealousy did not have a chance to breed and focus on any one person or family, but having commoners with means at their disposal was a dangerous prospect for nobility. The less peasants need to work to survive, the more time they have to think, and the more they think, the more they begin to realize the injustices of their living position, and eventually even the slowest of them will begin to piece together that the source of their troubles generally lies square at the door of those with noble titles.

The fields in the distance that surrounded the house seemed to be in decent shape and recently planted, leading me to believe that whomever had lived in the house had sold it along with the land and the new owners only cared about the fertile land leaving the house to rot. It seemed a bit strange that someone would come across the opportunity to live in such a fine house and instead cast it aside for no benefit, though perhaps it would have put a target on their back as well. Something had happened to the previous occupants and perhaps it would have happened to the new ones as well so it was just a necessary cost to leave it and only profit from the land.

“The land was seized by the Church and the farmhouse abandoned as it was decided that placing any one here would only look like the Church was showing disproportionate favor to any one family.” Feros explained as we approached the back of the property. “At least that is what they claimed, I am personally certain that they just could not stomach the idea of putting any of the local peasants in a more fine accommodation and no noble would want to live out in this area.”

“The Church can seize lands?” Toria asked. “I was under the impression that they are in the business of pretending to be on the side of the common people.”

“They would not parade out troops to take property or land, but they do often find ways to have deeds fall into their hands at suspiciously high rates. As in, people with large families already living in the house finding themselves dead with massive debts and a will that no one knew about naming the Church sole benefactor or some other obvious nonsense.” Feros pulled his horse up next to the back of the house and swung down off of it, haphazardly winding the reins around the rickety hand railing on the back steps. “I find it hard to believe that the general populace truly thinks the Church is innocent in all these instances of them suddenly acquiring profitable land, but there is certainly an incentive to keep your mouth shut and not draw attention to your own land and property unless they decide they might do better with it themselves.”

Toria and I tied our horses up at the back next to a door leading to what used to have been a chicken coop from the house and Feros made quick work of starting to feed and settle the horses for their long deserved rest, putting on their feed bags over their heads quickly as the beasts ravenously dug into the grain mixture. We had ridden them for too long and if we were any sort of kind people we would give them at least a day’s rest, two if possible. I had a feeling that there was a slim to none chance we would linger long enough to give them meaningful rest.

“I think this may be the first time I have heard you speak directly ill of the Church,” Toria said with a wince as she shifted her weight to her other leg.

She was a bit better now, at least she could move a bit more freely on her own, but her muscles were still a bit tender and the burns along her legs and back were healing quickly. Luck and the will of the elemental flame had been on her side to leave her with a consequence, but none too dire. The fact that the primal elemental flame had answered her call at all was surprising, but to have it answer a human and not punish them severely for daring to draw upon it was unheard of. The stories of humans being able to interact with the primal elements of the demonic plane were sparse to begin with and every single one of them I could call to mind ended with the human being little more than a pile of ash at the end as a warning and lesson not to mess with forces greater than you could ever hope to become. Perhaps there was something to Toria that made her an acceptable vessel according to the element, though, as much as I felt towards her, I could not yet see myself. Though powerful for a human, I was certain just about any demon, even the lowest of the lowborn I could find would still be able to easily out match her.

“Ill?” Feros paused pumping the small well next to the house to fill up a dilapidated bucket of water for us and the horses. “I do not have over much against the Church besides the fact they are the enemies of my allies. I have generally not traveled much in the human realm to consider them any sort of threat and almost none of them have ever been powerful enough to realm walk. Those that have are closely guarded secrets, it would be very destructive to their methods of control if it got out to people that their power and protection were so infinitesimal compared to what exists in other realms. More than anything I think I find them humorous.” He finished pumping the water and motioned for us to hand him our water skins which he filled up one by one, handed them back, then filled up the bucket again to the brim for the horses. “Those at the very top of the hierarchy are fully aware that this realm is laughably weak and insignificant, but they are at the top of the pile still and holding onto that power is enough for them. I suppose they probably feel like the king of the underdogs and that is enough for them, even if it’s not very much to brag about at all.”

Toria’s face was in a deep frown and she kept glancing away like the conversation was making her uncomfortable. She had yet to fully come to grips with the idea that what seemed like lofty ambitions to her were minut in the grand scale of things. “Well I certainly despise them.”

“As you should.” Feros smiled and offered her his arm for the first time since she had become injured. “Let’s get you inside and somewhere to get some rest, we will talk more about how we are going to get your kingdom back and defeat the Church as soon as you are a bit more yourself and healthy. Mistra, would you please find a way to get a fire going in the kitchen and look around to see if there’s any sort of pantry left?”

I raised an eyebrow at his sudden turn towards being caring and concerned with either of our well being, but knowing him there was some reason for it, so despite my promises to myself that I would stop following his lead blindly I did as he asked. He was at least getting Toria to settle in and rest which was at the top of my priority list. I held the door open for them into the house before wandering to the kitchen and looking around. It looked like someone had gone through at some point, most likely the Church, and stripped the house of anything of real value, leaving behind not much but bare floors, walls, and old furniture. The kitchen had a rickety table with four chairs that looked to be much older than myself, the wood rubbed so smooth that any carving work done on the legs or back had been worn away long ago, only leaving behind the faint marks of a carving tool. The hearth had seen better days, but the bricks that made it up were relatively intact and did not crumble when I found an old cloth and began to wipe the thick build up of dust and cobwebs from them. Giving up on making it look as nice as I would want it to be for cooking, I turned to ironwork that held up a large pot that could be swung in to be over the fire or swung out for cooling and cleaning. It took a good amount of my brute strength to get the contraption to budge and it squeaked horribly as it did so having been rusted around the hinge for who knows how long. Pushing and pulling on the arm of the device several times loosened up the rust and gunk clogging the hinge enough to where it was passably usable and I swung it out so I could unhook the heavy iron pot from the end.

“I found a bed for her upstairs and she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.” Feros had returned with another bucket he had scrounged from somewhere and an old scrub brush that looked like it was missing more bristles than it had retained. “She might be hungry, but I think it is important that we leave her to rest for a while before we wake her up again.”

“You are avoiding having her around for the discussion you promised me.”

“Always a clever one.”

“I think she may be upset if she misses your explanation and I have to reiterate everything to her later.”

“Once she awakens and is ready to go her mind is only going to be on reclaiming her birthright, I doubt very much she will consider little else. If she happens to return to the topic afterwards, then we have a perfect excuse as to why we did not involve her, we did not want to worry her before her triumph.” He tapped the brush on the side of the bucket, causing ripples in the bucket of water. “First I think you may want to get that pot clean and get some water on, you are hungry as well and will think better on a full stomach.”

I took the brush and bucket of water from him and poured enough water in the dusty iron pot to get enough to slosh around while I scrubbed it clean. By the time I was finished, Feros had gone back out to the horses to finish cleaning them down and returned with our bags with dried meat and other various travel ingredients. I was by no means a fantastic cook, but I managed something that resembled a basic stew and set it to start cooking over the flames. The dried meat would take a while to rehydrate and soften, giving plenty of time for him to give the explanations I had always wanted from him. I gingerly lowered myself into one of the chairs at the table, fully expecting it to give up under my weight, luckily it held up, though it did not feel the most stable. I motioned to the chair across from me with a serious look, I would not allow him to stall any longer. With a low chuckle he nodded his head and sat, then looked at me with his typical toothy grin.

“Why do you not want her to be a part of this?” I asked.

“Toria? I think you already know the answer to that, but if I need to verify it for you, I simply do not think that she will be able to wrap her head around some of the things you want to know. Her experience with magic will never be anything close to either of us and I am certain that she would make poor decisions based on what she thinks she knows and applying it to my situation. She really does have a rather black and white view of pretty much every topic, the subtle shades of grey are lost on her.”

I drew in my breath to try to defend her, but he cut me off with a wave of his hand.

“I know what you are about to say, yes she is clever and sharp, I am not downplaying her mental abilities in the slightest. If I am to have a human in my corner, Toria would be at the top of my list, she just has a perception issue, she sees what she wants to see and blocks out anything beyond that. We both know that if she approached things a little differently sometimes she likely would have achieved her goals already, but instead she goes with the first thing that pops into her mind and that has to be the route taken and be stubbornly adhered to.”

“In some ways that can be admirable,” I countered, “she is not easily swayed from what she wants and her plan to achieve it. Some rulers change with every single breath of the wind and it causes chaos, at least with House Yser you know exactly what you are going to get and that the plan will be followed to the end.”

The grin already on his lips twitched slightly at the corners and he crossed his arms in front of him. “Do you remember back when I was still training you here in this realm and told you that it seemed that you were becoming lost in your feelings for her? I remember that you were adamant that your pairing was mostly political and that you would not be so silly as to allow your emotions to cloud your view of things.”

My cheeks flushed and a mixture of anger at his accusation and shame that he was right flooded me. At some point along the way I had dropped any pretense of my consort ship being strictly political in a way that made looking back on it now hilarious.

“It is the way of things,” he continued, “you are far from the first political couple to start off trying to make it strictly business and end up making questionable decisions just to keep the other happy. I have yet to meet a creature that can keep romantic feelings at bay forever and that is not always a bad thing, Toria will very much benefit from having someone like yourself looking after her.”

“That implies that you do not believe she does the same for me.”

“This line of conversation will end in you being more upset than you need to be and will not change your mind about anything,” he said with a light laugh. “Besides, your stew needs a stir.”

The gentle burble of the soup in the pot was starting to rattle the lid and after a quick stir and adjustment of where I had it hanging over the fire it settled back down to a gentle simmer. I stood tending the pot longer than I needed to, using the time to consider how things had changed over the past year and I found I could not deny that the Mistra of a year ago would call the Mistra now a fool. Whether I agreed with that assessment I was not sure of yet, things were much more nuanced and complicated than I thought they could become. It had seemed like a no brainer move accepting Toria’s invitation to be her consort and gathering more power than I had hoped to wield on my own and I had started with no intention of allowing myself to be emotionally tied to her in a way where I would not be able to untangle myself from her if another, more promising opportunity came along, but I did not think that I would be able to do that any longer. In a way I had gone back on a promise I had made to myself long ago, to put myself above everyone else and pursue what would be the best for me and me alone.

“I envy it,” Feros said suddenly.

Snapping back to reality I replaced the lid on the pot and returned to my seat. “Envy what?”

“Having someone that you feel comfortable with exposing all of yourself to and being vulnerable. That has always been much too dangerous of an idea for me.”

“You had Ana,” I pointed out, “she seems to know quite a bit more about you than anyone else.”

Darkness shadowed his features for a moment and with a shake of his head it was gone. “She was one of the closest I have ever come to revealing my whole story to, yes that’s true, though I still very carefully kept many things from her for the safety of the both of us.”

“So there is very little hope of getting the full truth out of you.”

“The full truth?” He laughed with legitimate mirth, a gleam of entertainment in his eye. “My dear Mistra, I’m not sure there is enough time in your lifetime, whether that be human or demon length to go over my version of the truth, but I will tell you what I safely can. Perhaps start at your most pressing questions and we can go from there.”

“Are you going to answer honestly?” Even if he answered in the affirmative I probably was not going to be able to fully trust him, there was too long a track record of him feeding half-truths, but it was the logical place to start.

“As honestly as is safe for the both of us, I can promise that. If it makes you feel better, generally my lack of transparency is generally due to an omission of the truth, not spoken lies. I do not intend to cover up anything with a fabrication, if I am unwilling to answer your question or explain myself further I will try to just say so.”

Surprisingly, his admittance that he would not tell me absolutely everything was somewhat reassuring. At least he had enough decency and respect for me to admit his inability to be fully honest, it was more than I had been expecting. Any answers would be better than the almost none he had been willing to provide prior.

“Can you read minds?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

“I want to hear it from you directly.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “to a certain extent I can.”

“What is that extent?” If there was any way to shield my thoughts from him I wanted to know how.

“It is something I have to focus and intend to do, it is not something passive that just happens to me, that would be extremely overwhelming and annoying otherwise, I imagine,” he explained. “I do not do it all the time, not even a majority of the time, just when I feel it is important to do so.”

“I know you have been listening in to my thoughts quite often, so is there something about mine that has been particularly important to you?”

He leaned back in his chair and took on a look I instantly recognized as the visage he donned when he put himself in the position of a teacher. “There are some things that I could outright explain to you, but there are some that I think you will get more out of by working out yourself. I have managed to keep this ability secret to everyone else around me, yet have slipped up in letting you in on my dirty little secret, why?”

Furrowing my brow in thought, I had never considered that perhaps there had been an ulterior motive for my knowing about his mind reading. It had been my gut instinct to just assume I had managed to work out something he had been trying to hide and deny, it was an entirely new line of thinking that maybe it had not been an accident of my being particularly clever. In hindsight, it actually seemed very silly of me to think that I had somehow managed to out wit him on something.

“You wanted me to figure it out,” I said. “Even though that does not seem to make sense to me as to why. If I had ever really pressed the issue seriously with my father and forced him to believe me, that would have at least ensured that you would be exiled from the kingdom. You know as well as I do how paranoid he is on his best days, he would have never entertained having you anywhere near him if he knew. I very nearly did pursue it in earnest, it has always bothered me that you seemed to be always listening in.”

“Not always at all.” He waved away the idea with his hand like it was absolutely ridiculous that I would have thought that at all. “Only here and there when I felt it was necessary to refresh your memory that I was able to do such things.”

“Then if you were not doing it specifically to manipulate me in some manner other than for me to keep conscious that you were doing it, why run the risk of me outing you to my father?”

As he already stated, he did not say anything, only raised his eyebrows and patiently waited for me to figure it out myself.

“You knew I would not, or at least figured there was a good chance that I would try to figure it out on my own without pressing the issue to a point where you would be in danger. Though that leaves the question as to why, especially when you have said already that you have never truly trusted anyone with your secrets. Perhaps this is simply not that big of a secret for you.”

“In the grand perspective of things, no, not even close,” he admitted. “Mind reading is not even that deviant of an act in many realms, there is just a certain level of courtesy extended that is mutually agreed upon. Humans and demons have a strange visceral sense of privacy in regards to their thoughts, perhaps it is because they generally lack the magical talent necessary to make mind reading a regular occurrence. Though, it would have completely closed off the demon realm for a while to me to allow enough time for people to forget or perhaps re-branding myself as someone entirely different so it would have been inconvenient overall if you had decided to out me.”

“Since it is not something I would generally think was possible, that makes it even more telling that you purposefully made sure that I knew about it. You are always working so hard to think ahead to all eventualities, maybe you wanted me to eventually demand answers from you so you would be backed into a wall about letting some of your secrets out.”

“I dare to repeat myself in complimenting you on how clever you are, my dear. I do not expect you to be able to extrapolate any further what my reasonings are for letting you in on my secrets, I am sure it probably seems counter to everything else I have ever done to preserve my anonymity.”

I nodded my agreement, it did seem counter to everything else I knew about him.

“I am simply tired,” he chuffed, “I do not think there is a way to give you perspective on just how long it has been for me, though I have tried to give you glimpses before. I have never exaggerated on just how long I have been around, thinking about it in terms of age has even become ridiculous after all this time, the number would be astoundingly large and meaningless. During this whole time, I have had to be a lone wolf and I am not sure exactly what has changed, but at some point that fact has worn on me. By no means am I wanting things to end, I still very much intend to live this life as long as is possible, but the bleakness of viewing the millennia alone has become a bit unbearable. If that means that I need to start taking a reasonable amount of risk, then so be it. I want someone to have even a small fraction of understanding of who I am and what my story is.”

“And I am who you have decided is safe?”

“Out of everyone I have known in recent memory, yes, honestly perhaps even longer. There is something about you that inclines me to trust you even more than I did Ana, I feel certain that you will not use anything you find out to my destruction. Your soul is steadfast, Mistra, there is a quality to you that is hard to find in many. While you push yourself to focus mostly on yourself and you have tried to adhere closely to the demon idea of selfishness to attain power, that is not who you are at your core. I have said so before and I will continue to say so, you are a shining example of what hybridization can do, you have taken the positives from each of your family lines and boosted their effects. There is a reason that I so readily came to you when you called for my training once more and have not left your side, though you will come to discover during our conversation today that it would behoove me to disappear from your life entirely and that I am taking a huge risk by sticking around.”

“You make it sound like you are in love with me,” I joked. It was a ludicrous idea that I regretted even vocalizing as soon as the words left my mouth, surely he was going to use the statement to tease me mercilessly for having it cross my mind at all. I did not expect him to go completely silent, eyes trained on me for an uncomfortable amount of time.