## Chapter 505 — Ian and Arliss

Arliss was alone when Ian appeared inside her office. He had chosen the moment carefully enough that no clerk was passing the open stretch beyond her door and no second assessor had reason to be nearby, but the appearance itself was not subtle: one instant there was an empty patch of floor between the visitor's chair and the wall, and the next Ian stood there smiling.

“Hello, sorry to appear out of thin air, but I don't think I could walk here without a significant amount of subsequent paperwork. Not for me.” He let the apology sit with the smile rather than trying to make the arrival look ordinary.

Arliss's surprise showed only in the first sharp movement of her eyes. Her hand did not go to a weapon and no cold gathered around her fingers; instead she checked the door, then the room's wards, then Ian, in that order.

“At least three offices would argue over whose paperwork,” she said. “Possibly four if somebody decided the failure to see you arrive was itself a warding incident.”

She set down the report she had been reading and looked at him more directly. The missive had vanished as soon as she signed it, so seeing him now confirmed at least that her answer had reached wherever it needed to go.

“You received my answer. You asked to talk again, and I said yes.” Arliss glanced once towards the corridor. “I would prefer this conversation not become something Crownholt assesses merely because it happened in one of its rooms. Is that possible?”

“We can go somewhere else, if you want?” Ian asked.

Arliss looked around the office, then towards the corridor beyond the door. “Yes. Private, not impressive, and somewhere I can leave whenever I choose.”

The corridor outside remained quiet, but it was still a Crown corridor. Every familiar ward and labelled file made the room feel less private once she had decided the conversation should not belong to Crownholt.

She stood and gathered nothing. “I have spent enough of my life in important rooms.”

Ian reached towards her hand, stopped before touching it, and withdrew his own a little. “Brace yourself.”

Warm air replaced the office before Arliss had time to prepare for any intermediate sensation. Soft sand settled beneath her boots, salt arrived on a gentle breeze, and a quiet bay curved between grey rocks and light woodland with no road, house, boat or person in sight.

Arliss turned once, taking in sea, tree line, rocks and the complete absence of anything she recognised. Her attention came back to Ian.

“You said somewhere else. I agreed to that.” There was no alarm in her voice, but the distinction mattered. “I also said somewhere I could leave whenever I chose.” She glanced along the empty coast again. “At the moment I don't know where I am, which means leaving appears to depend entirely on you. Have I misunderstood something?”

“Ah. Yes, I... I should've explained things, shouldn't I?”

Arliss watched him for a moment, then gave a small nod. “Yes. I agreed to go somewhere else with you. I did not think to ask whether *somewhere else* meant a place I couldn't identify and had no independent route out of.” Her gaze moved briefly across the bay before returning to him. “So before we do anything else: can I get back without relying on you?”

The beach itself supplied no answer. Sea, woodland and empty sand were pleasant enough, but none of them told her how far she had been moved or what route existed in the opposite direction.

“If you wish yourself back to your office, you'll go there. If you wish yourself back to me, you'll come back here. The latter will stop working when we're done today, and the former on your final return.”

“Please give it a go now,” Ian said.

Arliss regarded him for a second, then closed her eyes.

The beach vanished. Her office returned around her exactly as she had left it: desk, chair, shelves, wards and the familiar weight of Crownholt beyond the walls. She checked the room almost automatically, then wished herself back to Ian.

Warm air and sea returned. Arliss looked down at the sand beneath her boots, then back at him. Some of the tension had gone from her posture.

“That is considerably better. I would still have preferred to know before we arrived, but yes. I can leave.” A faint edge of amusement appeared. “And apparently come back.”

“Yes, that part was probably useful. You handled that quite well after a brief moment of unintended abduction!”

Arliss gave him a long, level look. “Unintended abduction is still abduction.” The corner of her mouth moved despite herself. “But you corrected the problem immediately, and now I know the exit condition. That makes this substantially less alarming than it was thirty seconds ago.” She glanced along the bay, reassessing it now that the place was no longer a trap. “Next time, tell me the route home before you remove the room.”

It was still unknown ground, but it was no longer ground she depended on Ian's continuing cooperation to leave.

“Yes, sorry.” Arliss nodded once.

Ian sat on the sand near her, though not so close that the distance itself became an assumption. “I can tell that you have been trained, as you've not screamed, sworn, slapped me, run off, or cast something chilly.”

“I'm not quite sure where we are, somewhere on the west coast.” The bay itself supplied no sign that would make the answer more precise.

A line of foam thinned across the sand and withdrew.

“I considered something chilly. Mostly because it would have been reassuringly familiar.” Arliss sat as well, choosing her own distance. She glanced at the hand he had stopped before touching hers. “You reached for my hand before we came here. Was that part of the transport?”

“It felt a bit forward. Grabbing women isn't my normal approach. Although it feels a more natural way to teleport, I think?”

“So habit rather than mechanism.” She gave a small nod.

That reduced the hand to a practical detail rather than a condition of travel. Arliss let it drop once the distinction was clear.

“There is no effort either way; it's more reassurance for the passenger,” Ian said. “Did you like the chocolate?”

That earned him a more obvious smile. Arliss folded her hands loosely over one knee while the next wave reached a little farther up the sand and withdrew.

“Yes. I checked it for poison, spellwork and ward interaction first, then ate it anyway.” She glanced at him. “The chocolate mattered less than the fact that you left something ordinary after a conversation that was not. Was that deliberate?”

“I'd like to say I'm that clever. I thought you just might like some chocolate. It's a good cure-all for a heavy day.” Ian let the explanation rest for a moment. “Maybe it was partly an apology for the Voss questioning that might follow my... visit.”

“Voss did not question me immediately, which meant I spent a useful amount of time preparing answers to questions he never asked.” Arliss's expression flattened at the memory, but not with resentment towards Ian.

The possible Voss aftermath sat between them without taking over the conversation. Arliss had already spent enough time deciding what belonged to Crownholt and what did not.

She watched the water while deciding how much of her own reasoning to disclose. “I wrote myself conditions for when I would tell him more: threat, harm, a safety problem, a request that I use the institution on your behalf, or material new evidence that changed the risk. Curiosity was not enough.”

Her gaze returned to Ian. “The chocolate did make you harder to reduce to an administrative problem. I am not sure whether that was helpful.”

“I did get told off for *kinda* changing people's minds, indirectly, to let me walk around the place. Sorry about that. It wasn't intentional.”

Arliss became still in the way she had when he first reproduced her frost. The assessor in her displaced the person who had been discussing chocolate.

“*Kinda* is doing dangerous work in that sentence. Do you know that you altered minds, or do you know only that you produced a result in which people accepted something they otherwise would not have accepted?” She leaned slightly towards him. “Those are not the same thing.”

“I just told reality ‘they let me through’; that left it a bit ambiguous what actually happened.” Ian sighed. “It's really quite difficult being omnipotent and also being a normal man.”

Arliss stared at him for a beat, then looked down at the sand between them. She had spent too much of her life with wards and overlapping causes to accept a convenient label for an unknown mechanism.

“Professionally, that is worse than deliberate enchantment. Not morally worse—evidentially worse.” She traced a short line in the sand with one finger. “A deliberate enchantment usually gives me a caster, a mechanism, an intended effect and some boundary I can inspect. You specified only the result.”

The wind moved quietly through the trees behind them while she worked through the possibilities. The guards' acceptance was an observation; by itself it did not identify what reality had changed to produce it.

“It could have changed what they noticed, what they remembered, what they thought was permitted, the circumstances around them, or something neither of us has thought to name.” Arliss looked back at him. “Can you specify what reality must *not* change as well as the outcome you want?”

“It's not clear if I did alter their minds, but I just need to be more precise. I have a number of friends who are good at keeping me in check. The mortal ones are probably better.”

“That I believe. Mortals have extensive experience telling powerful idiots that the sentence they just spoke was not as clever as they thought.” Arliss let the humour take some of the edge off the point before continuing. “When one of them tells you you've specified something badly, do you listen?”

The discussion had stopped being about one awkward entrance into a palace. Arliss was interested in whether Ian could turn mistakes into information instead of merely correcting them afterward.

“Yes, I'm normally quite good at doing what I'm told.” The claim about his friends mattered more to Arliss than obedience in the abstract. “This power doesn't come with a manual.”

He pondered that a little longer. “I could ask reality to make me a manual, I wonder how that would work.”

Arliss looked genuinely tempted by the problem. “Poorly, if you phrase it like that.”

The idea had stopped being a handbook and become a record of experiments: claims, observations and cases where the two failed to match. That was something Arliss knew how to interrogate.

She settled into the question as though it were a ward specification. “A useful manual would need examples: what you asked, what you meant, what happened, and where those stopped matching. Ambiguous cases. Counterexamples. Whether wording or intended concept controls the result when they disagree. What reality treats as implied and what it does not.”

Her attention had moved entirely from reverence to method. “Then somebody should test the manual instead of believing it because reality wrote it. It should also tell you where the limits are.”

“There are no limits.” The sea kept moving beside them.

The claim was too large to fit comfortably beside talk of manuals and badly phrased instructions. Arliss let the silence lengthen instead of answering the scale of it with another abstraction.

Arliss looked at him for a moment. “How do you know?” There was no challenge in her tone for its own sake; she had simply stopped accepting the premise. “You've discovered that you can do things which should be impossible. That isn't necessarily the same as discovering that nothing is impossible.”

She shifted slightly in the sand, attention sharpening. “Have you ever asked reality for something and had it refuse?”

“No, nothing. I've asked for some wild things—time travel, placing the world inside itself, higher-order dimensions... if I can imagine it, explain it, it happens. It's ... difficult, worrying and fascinating.”

The examples did more to persuade Arliss than the word *omnipotence*. They were concrete enough to be absurd and varied enough that an undiscovered nearby ceiling no longer seemed like a useful working assumption.

Arliss was silent for several seconds. “Then I believe that you have found no limit.” The distinction was deliberate. “I still wouldn't write *there are no limits* in a report. Those are different claims, and the second one is probably impossible to prove.”

She looked out across the bay, visibly rearranging the problem in her head. “But time travel and putting the world inside itself are sufficiently absurd test cases that I'm not going to comfort myself by assuming the missing boundary is conveniently nearby.” Her attention returned to Ian. “The worrying part isn't really the amount of power. It's that you don't appear to have the usual relationship between difficulty and consequence.”

Arliss frowned. “For anyone else, attempting something larger, stranger or more complicated demands more preparation and creates more opportunities to fail before anything happens. With you, apparently, the difficult part is deciding exactly what you meant.” She considered that for another moment. “That is a very peculiar kind of dangerous.”

A mage could spend years learning where a technique failed because the failures arrived before the result. Ian's account inverted that useful cruelty: success could arrive first, with the flaw hidden inside what reality had chosen to satisfy.

“It is. I can also will it to undo what it's done. I haven't had to do that, but... it provides me with some comfort from a future error.” Arliss did not answer at once.

Arliss's expression did not quite match the comfort. “Does it undo the instruction, or restore the world to the state it would have been in if you had never given it?” She drew a short line in the sand with one finger, then another beside it. “Those are not necessarily the same thing. If something happens because of your change, and then something else happens because of that, what exactly counts as part of the mistake?”

Her eyes came back to Ian. “I would find the ability to reverse an error reassuring once I knew what *reverse* meant.”

The question had become testable at last. Arliss's attention moved from the impossible scale of the claim to the ordinary trees behind the beach.

Ian pointed towards a tree. “I can demonstrate on that tree?”

Arliss followed his gesture to the tree, studying it for a moment before looking back at him. “You can demonstrate. But tell me what you're going to change first, and what you expect *undoing it* to restore. Otherwise I won't know whether I'm seeing reversal or merely another change that happens to resemble the original state.”

“I was going to get you to ice-magic it then restore it to how it would have been if you hadn't, perfectly without loss or imperfection.”

Arliss looked from Ian to the tree again, and this time her interest sharpened. It separated his claim from his own ability to create both the damage and the repair, and gave her a before-state he had not authored.

“That is a much better test.” She stood and crossed the sand towards the tree. Rather than make the demonstration theatrical, she placed one hand against the trunk and worked cold into it with deliberate control. Frost spread through the bark and along the lower branches; leaves whitened, curled and stiffened, and a narrow section of living wood cracked under the sudden temperature change. She stepped back once the damage was unmistakable.

“There. I know exactly what I did to it.” Arliss looked towards Ian. “Show me what *as though I hadn't* means.”

It was as if nothing had happened. The frost vanished. The split in the wood was gone and the leaves uncurled. Arliss approached and inspected the tree in silence; beneath her hand the bark held the same warmth and texture it had before she touched it.

Her fingers traced the place where the crack had been, then moved to one of the leaves she had watched whiten and die. No scar remained, no stiffness, no residual cold, nothing she could identify as repair rather than absence.

“That is not repair.” Arliss stepped back from the trunk. “A repaired thing has a history of damage and intervention. This does not look repaired; it looks uninterrupted.” She looked at the tree again. “There is no evidence that my spell ever touched it.”

Her attention returned to Ian. “If that's genuinely what you're doing, then *undo* is the wrong word.” She frowned, searching for the more accurate description. “You're removing the event from the tree's history.”

“Yes, but not sending it back in time. It is what it would have been, had you not done it. Its memory, if it had one, would be what would have happened if you hadn't iced it.”

The distinction resisted the vocabulary Arliss normally used for spells. Nothing she had inspected in the tree suggested reversal through an earlier physical state.

“I'm not sure that makes sense.” The restored bark looked unchanged beside them.

“Yes,” Arliss said slowly. “I think it does.” She returned to the tree and rested her fingers against the bark again, not because she expected to find anything now, but because the distinction was easier to think through with the evidence under her hand.

“You aren't moving it backwards. You're asking reality for the present state produced by a different causal history—the one in which my spell never occurred—and reality supplies that state.” Her brow tightened. “Including whatever internal record the thing would have accumulated along that path.”

That interpretation made the untouched bark less reassuring, not more. A perfect surface repair would have been extraordinary; replacing the consequences that led to the surface was a different category of act.

She looked back towards Ian. “That is considerably stranger than reversing damage.” Her attention shifted briefly to the sand beneath the tree, where fallen frost and ice had touched more than the trunk itself. “If my spell had caused something else to happen—a branch falling, an animal fleeing, someone seeing it and making a decision—when you restore the tree *as if I hadn't*, how far does reality follow the consequences of that missing event?”

“All of it, if I wanted. There is no limit.”

Arliss looked back at the tree, then beyond it towards the beach. “That makes the word *restore* dangerous.” She considered the problem in silence for a few seconds. “If you can follow every consequence outward, then at some point you are no longer repairing the thing you changed. You are selecting which history counts.”

The frost had lasted only moments, yet even that trivial event had touched air, sand and living wood beyond the first patch of bark. Scale entered through consequence whether or not the original instruction sounded small.

Her attention returned to Ian. “That may still be exactly what you intend. But I would want the boundary stated before you did it, not discovered afterwards.” She glanced once more at the untouched bark. “Otherwise a correction could become much larger than the original mistake.”

“Yeah, that's why I wasn't fully confident it is a perfect oops-corrector, it's something, though.”

Arliss nodded once. “It is something.” She looked back at the tree. “A very powerful something. Just not a safeguard in the way a mage would mean it. A safeguard should fail predictably before the damage spreads. This gives you a way to intervene after the fact, provided you can define what should be restored and how far the consequences should be followed.” Her attention returned to Ian. “I would rather have that than nothing. I simply wouldn't let its existence make me less careful about the first instruction.”

The tree stood intact beside them, useful evidence and no comfort beyond what it had actually demonstrated. Arliss seemed content to leave the untested cases unclaimed.

“I don't think you should be without care when it comes to omnipotence combined with a human man.” The restored tree stood a few paces away, outwardly untouched.

Arliss gave him a dry look. “No. I think the human part is exactly why care is required.” She glanced towards the restored tree. “You forget things. You phrase things badly. You make assumptions. You get impatient, curious, angry, amused. None of that is remarkable.”

Her eyes returned to Ian. “What is remarkable is that reality apparently treats those ordinary human imperfections as executable instructions.” A brief pause. “So I would be more worried if you stopped finding it worrying.”

The conclusion was not a judgement of Ian's character. It was simply the only sensible operating assumption Arliss could find for a power whose failure mode might be a perfectly successful mistake.

Ian smiled. “At least you didn't blame the man part.”

Arliss's mouth twitched. “No. Men have managed to cause quite enough trouble without omnipotence. I see no reason to give the entire sex exclusive credit for this particular problem.” She glanced towards the tree again. “The dangerous part is not that you're a man. It's that you're ordinary enough to make ordinary mistakes, and powerful enough for those mistakes to become extraordinary.”

She looked back towards him. “Which is also why the friends who notice those mistakes are useful.”

They had reached the point where another refinement of the same problem would only repeat it. Arliss let the restored tree remain behind them as evidence rather than a solution.

“I call them friends.” Ian smiled. “Anyway, let's just not talk about how much of a failure I am.”

Arliss let the change of subject stand. “I didn't call you a failure. I called the request badly specified.” A small wave broke and flattened into white water near their feet. “Remember why. We can leave it there.”

She leaned back on one hand. “What did you actually want to talk about?”

The shift was deliberate and complete. The wards, the guards and the impossible tree could remain unresolved without occupying the rest of the afternoon.

“I don't know, really. I wanted to say thank you for not naming me to him. I'm not scared, obviously, but if he tried to find anyone I know, or care for... it would become administratively tiresome.” Arliss understood the practical problem beneath the deliberately mild wording.

Arliss nodded slowly. The institution was absent from the beach, but not from the shape of her answer.

“That was part of why I did not. People imagine institutions become dangerous only when they arrest someone, but they can make a life unpleasant much earlier than that.” She counted the steps without drama. “Ask who their associates are. Follow travel. Compare files. Look for leverage while calling it context. Turn curiosity into reporting duties because the reporting structure already exists.”

Her expression tightened briefly. “I had no evidence that giving Voss your name would make anyone safer. I had quite a lot of evidence that it would make the Crown more interested.”

“It did.” Ian let the acknowledgement stand. “I was also interested in learning more about magic. Proper magic, not my cheating kind.”

That boundary had been easier for Arliss to defend once she separated safety from institutional appetite. Ian's thanks made the private decision feel less abstract without turning it into a promise of loyalty.

“And about you.” The addition shifted the question away from professional expertise.

Arliss's eyes narrowed a fraction at the final sentence. The sea breeze lifted a few loose hairs from her braid and left them against her cheek.

“Magic is easier. I can explain wards, cold work if you want it, containment, alarms, overlapping boundaries and why most people who say a ward is a wall are simplifying until the simplification becomes wrong.” Her mouth shifted faintly. “*Me* is broader. What do you want to know?”

“What do you do for fun?” Ian asked.

For the first time that afternoon Arliss looked genuinely wrong-footed. She glanced away as if the bay might supply a list she had neglected to prepare.

“I read. Travel accounts, histories where the writer remembers that people existed between wars, and terrible adventure stories occasionally, though if you repeat that in Crownholt I will deny it.” She drew a line in the sand with one finger. “I walk without a destination when I have time. I like winter. There is a tea shop in Crownholt whose owner has never once asked me what office I work for, which may be why I keep returning.”

She looked at the list as though measuring it against the question. “Those are not very impressive hobbies.”

Arliss glanced down at her hands. “Work was most of my life for a long time. After Thomas, usefulness became easier to understand than enjoyment.”

The name Thomas changed the emotional weight of the answer without changing its subject. Arliss did not appear interested in using him as a shortcut to explain every part of herself.

She did not linger on the name, and the quiet after it was not an invitation to reopen Crownholt. “I have become better at the second.”

Ian chuckled. “I quite like making maps and domestic servitude. So I'm not going to judge. I also do some garden labouring for a deity who I owe money to.”

Arliss looked at him long enough for the absurdity to assemble itself. “You owe a deity money, and they have chosen manual gardening as the repayment mechanism.”

The absurdity of divine gardening gave the conversation somewhere lighter to stand. Arliss seemed content to leave the deity unnamed until Ian chose otherwise.

The conclusion pleased her in spite of herself. “Maps I understand. Domestic servitude will require explanation at some point. The deity can wait until after lunch.”

“I know absolutely nothing about the history of this world... is there a point in it you really like? A place and a time?”

Arliss's answer did not come quickly. Too much history presented itself at once, most of it attached to records, wars or institutional arguments she had no desire to revisit for pleasure.

“Old Crownholt. A few centuries ago, before the palace accumulated most of the later wings.” Her expression warmed as the idea took shape. “There are archive sketches from the period. Bad maps, mostly, and notes written by people who assumed everyone reading them would already know what they meant.”

She smiled at one remembered irritation. “One clerk annotated a lane with *good pies here* and supplied no useful administrative context at all. I would like to walk the inner city before the later construction swallowed parts of it, see which maps lied, and find out whether the pies deserved archival preservation.”

Ian stood and offered his hand. “Shall we go?”

The offer changed an archival curiosity into an immediate destination. Arliss's interest sharpened, but the mechanism of getting there still mattered before the attraction of the answer could take over.

Arliss looked at the offered hand but left it where it was. “What are the rules?”

She rose. “If we go into the past, can people see us? Can we speak to them? Can we touch anything? If a cart runs through the place where I am standing, do I move, does the cart move, or do you quietly rewrite the cart?”

“You are learning how to manage me quite well.” Ian smiled. “Keep it up; you may have a job there.”

Arliss left the joke unanswered for the moment. A vague promise about the past was less useful to her than knowing what sort of past Ian meant to enter.

“Let's say... this is a parallel, identical history that forks in time when we arrive and disappears afterwards...” The proposal gave Arliss a mechanism rather than an answer. “Does that work?”

Arliss frowned. “Not if the branch contains people who continue thinking and living after we arrive. If *disappears afterwards* means the branch ends when we're finished with it, then you've solved our interference by destroying the result.” She looked at him directly. “Does it continue independently after we leave?”

“OK, let's go back in time, no fork in time, but I'll ensure that nothing happens of note to the current timeline—the same people are born/die/do whatever. To make that work without it getting complicated, please don't go stabbing, seducing, or otherwise interfering excessively.”

A single altered conversation could propagate farther than either of them could observe. Preserving the visible present after the fact therefore required some decision about which intermediate changes counted and which did not.

The list almost made Arliss smile, but the mechanism did not. “That still leaves you correcting consequences after we've caused them. If one small change eventually means someone in the present is never born, what exactly do you correct?”

“If you manage to do something which otherwise would erase people in the present, I reserve the right to revert someone's journey through life to what it was before we influenced it, but otherwise, yes.” Arliss's objection arrived before the implications had finished settling.

Arliss shook her head. “No. Then you're replacing one lived history with another after the consequences have already propagated.” She glanced towards the offered hand. “Constrain *us* instead. Prevent us becoming causes in the first place.”

That reduced the problem to their own presence rather than an unknowable number of later consequences. It was the first proposal in the sequence whose boundary Arliss could actually picture.

“I can just make us invisible and non-corporeal; that's probably easier than your high ethical bar,” Ian said.

“That is much cleaner.” Arliss finally took his hand. “Invisible, non-corporeal to the historical world, unable to affect people or objects there, and unable to be perceived by them.” Her expression lightened. “Then I would like to find the pies.”

Ian clicked his fingers for effect, and Old Crownholt replaced the beach. The change was as complete as the earlier one, but this time Arliss arrived already expecting the world on the other side to be impossible.

They stood in the middle of a busy street beneath a sky that belonged to the same world but a different century. The later palace wings were absent, the older keep rose above roofs packed much closer to the hill, and workshops occupied ground Arliss knew only as later stone and administrative additions.

A cart came directly towards them and passed through without resistance, sensation or awareness. Horse, wheels and driver crossed the space they occupied as if it were empty, and neither Ian nor Arliss felt so much as a brush of air from the overlap.

Arliss turned slowly in place, comparing the living city against years of maps and later architecture. The delight arrived before she could make it professional.

“That workshop is wrong. Every surviving plan puts the lane wider here.” She pointed across the street, then looked uphill. “And that retaining wall is earlier than the archive date.”

For several seconds she forgot to say anything else. The missing palace wings, closer roofs and dense little practical city refused the cleaner geometry of the later plans.

“Have I passed the omnipotence time travel ethics test?” Ian asked.

Arliss walked to the nearest wall and deliberately put one hand through it. Stone passed through her fingers without sensation, and she stepped halfway into the building before returning.

“This arrangement works.” She looked around at the city continuing without them. “I am not extending that conclusion beyond this experiment.”

“You're tougher than working for a goddess.”

“A goddess presumably priced your labour before employing you.” Arliss turned back towards the city. “I have only just started supervising you.”

Ian laughed, and the sound belonged only to them. Around it, Old Crownholt continued with complete indifference: vendors called from stalls, apprentices carried baskets between workshops, clerks climbed uphill with rolled papers tucked beneath their arms, and children cut through spaces later generations would turn into walls.

Arliss pointed down a crooked lane. “If the archive annotation is honest, the pie shop should be that way. I would like an answer to one historical question before I become distracted by twenty others.”

“Lead on, expedition leader and moral compass,” Ian said. Arliss ignored the second title and led on.

Arliss followed the lane with the confidence of someone using a bad map she had spent years criticising. The city contradicted it almost immediately: one passage narrowed a full building-width earlier than the surviving plan suggested, another opened into a tiny court the later archive had flattened into a property boundary, and a drain ran openly where later records implied only a service trench.

The pie shop existed beneath a crooked sign, narrow-fronted and busy enough to justify the anonymous clerk's enthusiasm. Inside, a woman moved pies from a hot shelf while a younger man dealt with coins and wrapped purchases in paper and cloth.

“The archivist was not inventing it.” Arliss stared at the counter with the satisfaction of someone vindicated by several centuries of evidence.

They could see the heat shimmer above the ovens, but none of it reached them. Neither did the smell, and that omission became especially offensive when a customer broke open a pie at a standing shelf and steam rose visibly from the filling.

“This is cruel. I can establish that the shop existed and that people repeatedly purchased the product, but I cannot establish whether the archivist had any taste.” Arliss narrowed her eyes at the inaccessible food. “Does our ethical arrangement prohibit evidence?”

Ian handed her a perfect duplicate of one of the pies in front of them. “This is a copy; I haven't changed the future. Other than your future love or hate of pies.”

The copied pastry was hot in Arliss's fingers and smelled real enough to make the historical originals suddenly less frustrating. She took a cautious bite, then another after crisp crust, rich filling and enough seasoning made the archivist's marginal note unexpectedly defensible.

“You realise producing the evidence after the investigator complains is generally considered suspicious. It is very good.” She looked towards the historical counter and revised with more precision. “The annotation was correct. Extremely good pie.”

“Is that the title of your paper on the matter?” Ian asked. Arliss looked down at the remains as if publication standards genuinely required consideration.

“Possibly the abstract. The full paper will need to address whether the quality survived because of ingredients, technique, nostalgia, or your suspiciously perfect copying.” A small smile returned. “Though I admit *That Is an Extremely Good Pie* has admirable clarity.”

The ordinary ridiculousness of the exchange held for a little while longer. People came and went through the shop without ever noticing the two impossible observers standing among them.

“Did you know what was at the bottom of Crown Deep?” Ian asked.

She looked uphill towards the older keep as though stone and centuries might become transparent if she stared long enough. The pie remained in her hand, suddenly much less important.

“No. I knew there were older workings beneath the parts we used, and places where the Crown's maps became less trustworthy than the procedures built around them.” Her mouth tightened. “I knew some routes were old enough that nobody in my office could honestly claim to understand why everything had originally been made. That was already more uncertainty than we liked admitting.”

Arliss glanced towards Ian. “But whatever lay beyond the official workings? No. I never saw it. We did not have reliable maps for the deepest parts we used, let alone knowledge of what might have existed beneath them.”

The historical street moved silently through them while that answer settled. A man carrying a basket passed through Ian's shoulder and continued towards the market without slowing.

“If you're asking whether I knew we were sending him towards something like that, the answer is no. We were sending him somewhere dangerous without knowing how dangerous the world beneath us actually was.” Arliss looked back towards the palace. “That is not the same failure, but it is still one.”

“If he knew what was there, he would have gone to it without you... without Crownholt doing what they did, I expect.” The counterfactual landed as a question about choice rather than absolution.

Arliss looked towards the palace for a long time. The old city made the counterfactual uncomfortably easy to imagine: Thomas arriving by another road, learning that something beneath Crown Deep mattered, and deciding for himself whether the danger was worth approaching.

“I expect so too, or at least I think he would have wanted the choice. That is one of the things which became difficult to admit afterward.” She shifted the remains of the pie in one hand. “We had real reasons to believe the Deep mattered. We had real reasons to think Thomas could do things nobody else could.”

Her gaze stayed on the unfinished palace above them. “Those facts did not require us to confine him, separate him from Isha, or turn access to her into part of the machinery around his cooperation. If we had told him what we knew, including what we did not know, he might still have walked down there.”

A group of labourers crossed the street below the palace carrying timber between them. Arliss watched until they were gone before finishing the thought.

“He might have done something even more dangerous than what we asked. That would not make our choices necessary.” She looked back at Ian. “It would only mean we took ownership of a decision he may have made anyway.”

“Can I trust you not to tell Voss about what it is?” Ian asked. The question was more careful than the disclosures that had brought them here.

Arliss did not answer immediately, because trust in confidence was not the same as promising silence about an unknown active danger. She had already chosen not to give Voss Ian's name merely because the Crown would find it useful, but she was unwilling to make a broader promise blindly.

“If you are asking whether I will report it simply because Voss would want to know, no. I will not.” Her gaze stayed on Ian. “If what you tell me reveals an active danger to people now, I am not going to promise in advance that I would keep silent while someone walks into it.”

She glanced towards the unfinished palace, then back to him. “But if this is historical truth, or something which does not create a present threat merely by my knowing it, then yes. You can tell me in confidence. I will not turn it into Crown property merely because I happen to work for the Crown.”

“The Demon Lord is gone, so this is historical information. Beneath Crown Deep was the first of the three seals that had imprisoned him,” Ian said.

Arliss did not move for several seconds. Old Crownholt continued around them as though nothing had happened: a cart crossed the place where Ian stood, someone laughed outside the pie shop, and the unfinished palace remained merely ambitious to everyone living beneath it.

“The first seal.” Her voice had become very quiet. She looked towards the keep again, but differently now.

Beneath Crown Deep lay part of a prison older than the kingdom above it.

“We thought Crown Deep was old infrastructure layered beneath newer work. Strategic, dangerous, partly understood.” Arliss paused. “You are telling me part of it belonged to the prison itself.”

Her eyes returned to Ian. “And the Crown did not know.”

It was not really a question. The absence of that fact from every restricted report she had ever seen answered it well enough.

“That could explain why some of the deeper records never fitted the ordinary history of the workings.” Arliss stopped there before one true fact became an excuse to invent the rest. “Do you know whether the seal was still functioning when the Crown was using the Deep?”

“It had failed,” Ian said. “With one of the three gone, the prison no longer suppressed his influence completely. That contributed to the demonic pressure and leakage which caused so much trouble in the west.”

He let her absorb that before adding, “His siblings were the ones who imprisoned him.” The final word changed the scale of the story again.

Arliss had still been looking towards the old keep. At the final sentence she turned back to Ian, pie forgotten in her hand.

“His siblings. You don't mean other Demon Lords.” Her expression sharpened as she followed the implication rather than guessing past it. “You mean the beings who built the prison were the same kind of being he was.”

The busy street made the scale of the claim harder rather than easier to absorb. Ordinary people crossed above a structure tied to a conflict between beings their religions had never described to Arliss in those terms.

“What was he before he became the Demon Lord?” she asked. This time curiosity and professional caution had become the same thing.

“One of the five builder gods. He represented—if that's the right word—night, death, void, silence, endings, boundaries and the space between destinations. According to reality.”

Arliss absorbed that in stages. The title *Demon Lord* had always implied corruption first and identity second; Ian's account reversed the order.

Night and endings were not in themselves monstrous things. Boundaries were necessary, silence could be mercy, and even death belonged to the structure of a world whether anyone liked it or not.

“Then those things were not themselves the danger.” Arliss looked towards the old keep. “And the other four builders did not create a prison for something alien to them. They imprisoned one of their own.”

She turned back to Ian. “What happened to him?”

“He, they... fell... Became corrupted, maybe. That's a massive simplification on what they told me.” Arliss waited through the hesitation without trying to name it for him. “He was unpleasant.”

The inadequacy of the final description almost made Arliss smile. She looked instead at the city pressed around the palace, trying to fit Ian's account against everything Crownholt had understood about demons, seals and the age of the Deep.

“*Unpleasant* feels underspecified. If you're uncertain about the word *corrupted*, I'd rather keep the uncertainty than turn it into a cleaner explanation than you actually have.” Her attention returned to him. “And the others? The four who imprisoned him. Are they still themselves?”

“I think I've helped them, some of them, become better.” Ian shrugged. “Time will tell, I guess. I took the Demon Lord's power away so he can't do any harm anyway.”

Arliss's attention sharpened immediately. “You took his power away.”

She did not ask where the Demon Lord was or what had happened to him afterward. Those were separate questions, and Ian had already made it clear that some parts of the story were his to withhold. The mechanism was another matter.

“When you say *took his power away*, what exactly changed?” She frowned slightly. “Did you suppress something he could otherwise still use, remove something from him, or alter what he actually is?”

“I'm not actually sure what reality did. He cannot exert his power—if that means it's blocked, or whatever gave him the power has been disabled, I don't know.” Ian let the uncertainty remain explicit. “Given the thousands he tortured directly or indirectly, I don't think I have any sympathy for how reality did it.”

Arliss nodded slowly. “Then we know the effect, not the mechanism. He had an ability before. Afterwards, attempts to exercise it failed. *Power removed* is a useful description of the result, but not yet an explanation of what reality changed.”

The distinction mattered more to her than filling the gap with a convenient theory. Ian's judgement of the Demon Lord could be entirely justified and still tell her nothing about implementation.

Her expression tightened slightly at the rest. “Whether he deserved your sympathy is a separate question. His deserving punishment wouldn't make one mechanism more likely than another.” She looked back at Ian. “What stayed the same?”

“Shall I ask reality?” Ian asked. “That's normally what I do when people more clever than I ask such things.”

Arliss gave him a brief, dry look. “You may be making my profession dangerously easy.” Then her attention returned to the question itself. “Ask it, but ask for the distinction rather than a label. If reality simply tells you *his power was removed*, we've learned nothing we didn't already know.”

The humour passed quickly. What mattered was framing the question so that the answer could distinguish between competing mechanisms instead of merely repeating the observation.

She thought for a moment. “Ask what changed in him, what remained unchanged, and why attempts to exercise that power now fail.”

Ian asked reality to answer only the question Arliss had asked, as floating text in front of them, without names or unrelated circumstances. Dark, perfectly legible words appeared within the same isolated observer-state that held them apart from the old Crownholt street.

**WHAT CHANGED**

**The divine authority formerly available to him is absent. It is not being suppressed, contained, exhausted, or prevented from reaching its effects. The capacity by which his intention could directly impose his divine principles upon reality is no longer part of what he can exercise.**

**WHAT REMAINED UNCHANGED**

**His body, memories, identity, personality, intellect, knowledge, experience and ordinary physical agency remain his. Whatever duration, agelessness or immortality belonged naturally to the being beneath that divine authority was not altered.**

**WHY HIS ATTEMPTS NOW FAIL**

**There is no remaining divine authority available to execute them. His attempts do not encounter a barrier or opposing force. There is no inaccessible reserve waiting behind a lock. He intends an effect for which he no longer possesses the means. Nothing answers.**

Arliss read the text twice, then a third time. “So *removed* was more accurate than either of us knew.” Her attention lingered on the final sentences. “Not sealed. Not restrained. Not even disabled in the way I would normally use the word.”

She looked towards Ian. “The thing that made his intention authoritative simply isn't his anymore.”

“Reality is quite clever, really.” The old street continued around the floating answer, indifferent to a description of divine authority none of its inhabitants could see.

The answer had behaved less like an interpretation than a privileged report.

Arliss kept looking at the words. “Yes. Which may be more important than how much power you have.” She turned that over for a moment rather than reaching for a conclusion too quickly. “If it can answer questions at that level of distinction, then it isn't merely obeying language mechanically. It is resolving concepts, preserving categories, and apparently understanding what information would actually distinguish one mechanism from another.”

Her attention came back to Ian, thoughtful rather than impressed. “That may be the most useful thing you've shown me all afternoon.”

Ian smiled. “I'm glad this is interesting to you. No-one else has been really *interested* in it before.”

Arliss had been treating the display as evidence. Ian's remark made the contrast with everyone else's questions explicit without making those questions foolish.

Arliss considered that. “I can understand why. Most people who discover what you can do are going to care first about the consequences—what you might change, whether it affects them, what you intend to use it for.” She glanced towards the floating answer. “Those are sensible questions. They just aren't the only interesting ones.”

Her attention returned to Ian. “I want to know what the thing actually does. What counts as an instruction. Whether intention and wording can disagree. Whether reality answers the concept you meant or the sentence you gave it. Whether two apparently identical requests can produce different results because you understood them differently.” A faint crease appeared between her brows as more questions occurred to her. “And now I want to know what *asking reality* actually is, because that answer was far more discriminating than a spell interpreting a command.”

She looked thoughtful rather than reassuring. “So yes. I'm interested.”

The list had already outgrown the immediate question of the Demon Lord. What Ian called *reality* was becoming an object of inquiry in its own right.

“I think it literally is asking reality—the thing that creates reality is the thing I ask.” The answer was simple enough to leave almost every mechanism underneath it unresolved.

Arliss was quiet for a moment. “That would explain why the answers don't behave like ordinary interpretation.” She looked towards the words hanging in the air. “If the same thing that determines what is real is also answering the question, then it may not be inferring the mechanism from evidence at all. It may simply know which mechanism it instantiated.”

Her expression sharpened. “You said reality told you about the Demon Lord's original nature, too. That gives us an interesting distinction to test later.” She looked back at Ian. “Whether it answers questions about things you have never asked it to create or change in the same way as questions about your own interventions—and how much of either we can check independently.”

Arliss let the question remain open rather than trying to design the next experiment in the middle of Old Crownholt.

Ian smiled at her. “I don't mind you being curious. It is your world after all. I now consider two of them my friends. The Sun Father is still a bit of a dick.”

That finally broke through Arliss's careful composure. She laughed, brief and genuine, then glanced instinctively upwards as though centuries of religious architecture might object on his behalf.

“I have spent a considerable portion of my life around people who would regard that sentence as either blasphemy or a uniquely efficient method of suicide. It is strangely reassuring to learn that personal acquaintance with the divine apparently permits ordinary irritation.” Her amusement lingered. “Which two?”

“The female ones, obviously.” Ian sniggered. “The Lifegiver and the Waykeeper. I'm not sure how widespread their names are.”

Arliss gave him a look which suggested the first sentence had confirmed something about him she had not previously needed to classify. The names themselves drew a different reaction.

“Obviously. Not widespread in Crownholt, at least not like the Sun Father.” She repeated them quietly, testing them against what she knew rather than pretending recognition. “We have road saints, household traditions, old guardians, regional names and enough contradictory religious scholarship to keep several archives employed.”

She glanced towards the people moving unknowingly through old Crownholt. “But if someone had told me yesterday that *the Waykeeper* and *the Lifegiver* were two of the beings who built the world's foundations, I would not have known what they meant. Which makes it rather strange that you know both well enough to call them friends.”

Her eyes came back to Ian, amusement returning around the edges. “What is the Lifegiver actually like?”

The names had given Arliss categories but not familiarity. She was still building her picture of the builders from Ian's personal encounters rather than pretending Crownholt's religious vocabulary already contained the same model.

“She's gor... she's nice. She employs me. She has her flaws, but I think she's changed, for the better.” Ian's correction was too obvious for Arliss not to notice.

Her eyebrows lifted, but she allowed the abandoned word to pass. She had spent too many years listening to people revise statements under pressure not to recognise one being revised in much less threatening circumstances.

“If it helps you be further confused, I had dinner with them and some friends the other day.” Ian smiled, enjoying the incongruity.

It worked. Arliss stared at him for a moment, then looked down at the half-eaten historical pie in her hand as though it had become the more comprehensible part of the afternoon.

“You had dinner with two of the beings who built the world. Not an audience. Not a ritual. Dinner.” She gave each absurd component its proper weight. “And one of them employs you.”

The earlier remark about gardening for a deity finally acquired a much more specific shape. Arliss gave a quiet laugh and shook her head.

“I am beginning to understand why you described domestic servitude as a hobby. Apparently your social life requires categories I don't possess.”

“They didn't do anything godly; I told them not to. I thought being around normal people doing normal stuff helps ground them in reality a bit, maybe.” Arliss heard the uncertainty in the idea without mistaking it for a proven method.

“There is something appealing about responding to divine corruption with dinner.” Arliss looked at the pie still in her hand. “Although I suspect your definition of *normal people doing normal stuff* has become unusually broad.”

The city around them had waited patiently through the cosmology. A delivery boy ran through both of them carrying a basket towards the market, and neither so much as disturbed his pace.

“Sorry, I am distracting you from history. Let's talk when we're back; you should enjoy this experience,” Ian said. The apology redirected her attention more effectively than any reminder about the time.

Arliss glanced around the old street, and the historian displaced the assessor, mage and Crown official. “You're right.”

She finished the pie, brushed the crumbs from her fingers and set off with renewed purpose towards the older centre of Crownholt. With no need to avoid carts, crowds or locked doors, she could follow streets exactly as surviving plans claimed they had run and then enjoy every place where the city contradicted them.

Within minutes one supposedly straight lane acquired an inexplicable bend around a stone house absent from every copy she had studied. Arliss stopped in front of it with undisguised satisfaction.

“I knew it.” She moved straight through the wall and disappeared inside before Ian had any reason to answer.

Ian let her explore, stayed a little back from her, and watched her enjoy the experience. He remained close enough to follow but far enough that Arliss could forget for stretches that the impossible afternoon belonged to anyone but her.

She slipped through walls when surviving plans suggested a room ought to exist, doubled back when the city contradicted them, and stopped simply to watch things no archivist had considered important enough to preserve. A workshop practised a vanished trade; children cut through a courtyard that would later disappear beneath administration; an elderly clerk carried records across a square Arliss knew only in its enclosed form.

The pleasure on her face became less guarded as time passed. She muttered corrections to remembered maps under her breath, smiled at architectural details nobody had recorded, and once spent nearly a minute watching two masons argue over the placement of a drain.

Eventually she glanced back and realised Ian had been keeping his distance. “You're being very quiet.”

There was no suspicion in it. If anything, she seemed pleased by what the quiet meant.

“Thank you for that.” Arliss looked around at the living city again before turning away from him.

Ian nodded and smiled. Arliss accepted that as answer enough and turned back to the city.

Arliss did not hurry after that. The need to verify maps loosened into simple enjoyment, and she wandered where curiosity took her: through an old courtyard later swallowed by government buildings, beneath an arch whose replacement she knew better than the original, and across a narrow bridge over a watercourse that would eventually be culverted and forgotten beneath Crownholt's streets.

At one point she stopped in front of a modest stone building wedged between two larger properties. Nothing about it looked important, but recognition altered her face.

“That shouldn't still be here at this date.” She walked through the front wall, remained inside for several seconds, then came back out looking delighted. “The records were wrong by at least nineteen years.”

She glanced towards Ian, evidently tempted to explain in exhaustive detail, then restrained herself with visible effort. “I promise this is exciting if you've spent enough of your life arguing with municipal archive dates.”

“It's nice watching someone enjoy things.” Ian's comment caught her somewhere more personal than the history had.

Arliss turned towards him and, for once, had no immediate answer waiting behind the look. The old building remained at her shoulder, utterly unimportant to anyone except the woman who had spent years arguing with its paperwork.

“I don't think I realised how much I missed being interested in something without having to justify its usefulness. Even after Crownholt became less... consuming, I still tended to measure things by whether they mattered.” She looked back at the building. “This doesn't matter at all.”

A small smile appeared. “And I think that's why I like it.”

“Well, let's keep going until you're full of history.”

The city offered fresh contradictions faster than she could settle the old ones. A doorway, a gutter line or a missing wall was enough to pull her attention somewhere new.

Ian stayed a little way back while Arliss kept exploring at her own pace. Arliss gave him a look that suggested she considered being full of history an unlikely physical condition. “That may be dangerous wording.”

She resumed walking with less concern now for whether each turn matched a surviving plan. The city had become less a puzzle to solve and more a place to inhabit for an afternoon.

She stopped to watch craftsmen at work, followed an old drainage channel through three later-demolished courtyards, and spent several minutes inside a records office whose shelving arrangement appeared to vindicate an argument she had once lost to a dead archivist. By the time they reached the older market quarter, her delight had settled into something quieter and more sustained.

Rain began lightly over the square, passing through both of them without leaving so much as dampness behind. Arliss stood beneath a timber gallery that no longer existed in her Crownholt and watched the drops darken wood and stone around people who would never know they were being remembered.

“I think I could do this for days.” She smiled at Ian after admitting it. “But perhaps not all at once.”

“We could come again, or somewhen else. If you want,” Ian said. The offer seemed to settle differently from the rest of the afternoon.

Arliss looked back across the rain-softened market square. The offer immediately multiplied the historical questions she could imagine pursuing.

“I would. Somewhen else, especially.” Her expression brightened with renewed curiosity. “There are at least six historical arguments I would very much like to cheat on.”

She looked back at Ian. “Would you let me choose the next one?”

“Of course.” Ian's answer came without condition or qualification.

Arliss looked back over the market as if the next destination might already be hidden somewhere beyond it. Centuries of unresolved arguments had just become possible outings.

Arliss's smile widened. “Then I am going to be intolerable about choosing.”

For a while she stood beneath the gallery and watched rain pass through the century around them. She appeared content simply to store away details no surviving map or archive could have given her.

Eventually she exhaled and looked around once more. “I think this is enough for today. Better to leave while I still want more than stay until even impossible history starts feeling ordinary.”

She looked around the old square once more. “And I definitely want more.”

And they were back on the beach, old stone and rain replaced without transition by warm air, soft sand and the hush of gentle water. Arliss stood still for a moment while her senses caught up with the change.

She looked down at herself as though half expecting to find rain on her clothes or crumbs from a pie that had existed centuries ago. Nothing remained except memory.

“That was extraordinary.” Arliss looked back at him. “I think I understand now why you asked me for a place and a time.”

“I am not sure why I gave you that, you seemed genuine and not a monster.” The first reason was flattering only by comparison with the alternatives. “I also don't know many people here, is that a bit of a lame reason?”

Arliss considered the question while the last impressions of Old Crownholt were still close enough to compete with the beach around them. “Lame is not a useful measure.” She looked out over the water. “*Not a monster* is a fairly low standard, and one afternoon does not tell either of us very much about what a friendship would be. But wanting company is an ordinary enough reason to start talking to someone.”

The distinction mattered to her because the afternoon had been unusually easy to enjoy. Enjoyment was information, but it was not a category on its own.

She glanced back at him. “Do you want to know more people here, or only the ones you happen to like?”

The question about other people moved them away from the spectacle of the afternoon and back towards Ian's ordinary difficulty. Arliss seemed to take that problem at least as seriously as the impossible travel.

“The problem is having to hide or lie about what I am.” The empty coast made the problem easier to discuss than an ordinary town would have.

Arliss's expression changed slightly. She appeared to imagine the problem in ordinary streets rather than divine realms or empty beaches.

“There is a difference between hiding something and lying about it. You don't owe every person you meet an inventory of everything you can do.” She nudged a shallow groove into the sand with the edge of her boot. “I don't tell a shopkeeper what wards I can break, or everyone I speak to what I did during the war.”

She let the comparison go only as far as it could honestly go. “But with you, the omitted part is rather larger. Eventually someone asks where you're from, what you do, why you know something, why you aren't frightened of something you ought to be frightened of, and every ordinary answer starts needing another ordinary answer underneath it.”

A faint smile touched her mouth. “If you actually begin to care about someone, letting them know a version of you that isn't true presumably becomes harder. That may explain why you've told me rather a lot today.”

The empty beach made disclosure cheap in practical terms. Nothing here could overhear them, record a name or turn an odd detail into another Crown file.

“I... did overflow a bit, didn't I? Sorry about that.”

Arliss's mouth curved. “A little.” She let the silence remain for a few seconds, filled by water and the faint movement of leaves farther up the beach.

“I wasn't objecting. You asked whether you could trust me before you told me the part that mattered, and you stopped short of things you clearly weren't willing to share.” Her expression turned faintly amused. “Although in the space of one afternoon I have learned that you know the people who built the world, employ yourself as divine gardening labour, have opinions about the Sun Father's personality, and can take me sightseeing in history.”

Put together, the list was absurd enough to resist becoming solemn. Arliss let that absurdity do the work instead of trying to classify every disclosure before the next one arrived.

She looked back towards the water. “So yes. There was some overflow.”

“He really is a dick; he burnt my body to a crisp.” The statement sat between them for a moment before the second followed. “Although his brother did try to destroy me as well, so I guess it's a family trait.”

Arliss stared at him. The humour took a moment to arrive because it had to make its way past the fact that Ian had just described two attempts by builder-gods to kill him as though comparing difficult relatives.

“I was going to object that *family trait* is an irresponsible conclusion from a sample of two. Unfortunately, one of them burned you to death and the other tried to remove you from existence, so I understand how the hypothesis arose.” Her amusement faded as she looked him over with new attention. “You let the Sun Father get far enough to do that?”

“Yeah, it was unpleasant for the people with me. They knew I wasn't really dead, but... I didn't like it. He didn't like it when I just got up fully recovered and turned his stupid bright sun down. I was really struggling for a way to get through to him. Arguing with gods is *really, really hard*.”

Arliss listened without interrupting. The casual way Ian described standing up after his body had been burned no longer surprised her as much as it probably should have, but the admission that he had not liked it landed more heavily than the impossible recovery.

His recovery had not spared his companions the sight of it, or made the encounter one he liked. Arliss kept that beside the rest of his account.

“I imagine power makes an argument harder when the person you're arguing with has spent a very long time treating power as evidence that he is right. And I suspect getting up after he killed you did not immediately make him receptive to criticism.” Her mouth curved faintly. “Turning his sun down, however, is an exceptionally petty piece of rhetoric. I approve.”

“The people I took with me were far more articulate and attempted reason. With all of them. I just did weird stuff with reality. It worked 3 times out of 4, eventually. Not convinced about the Sun Father—the only thing holding him back is fear of me, I think.”

Arliss considered that while watching the water reach up the sand and withdraw again. Ian's conclusion sounded like one explanation for the Sun Father's restraint, not yet the only one.

“Fear is enough to explain compliance while you're present and able to punish him. It does not, by itself, explain changes that persist when you aren't applying pressure, or choices he has no immediate reason to perform for you.” She glanced towards Ian. “If all we observe is restraint under threat, call fear sufficient. If the behaviour survives outside that condition, then fear alone is incomplete.”

A faint trace of amusement returned. “And *I just did weird stuff with reality* may be the most modest possible description of your contribution.”

“Sun Father did start to exhibit *some* changes... I guess I was hoping for a magical solution.”

That added a little evidence without settling the cause. Arliss looked back towards the water, considering what a magical solution would have done to the question itself.

“If you simply rewrote them, afterward we could not distinguish growth from alteration. The result might be preferable, but it would answer a different question.” Her attention returned to Ian. “If what you wanted to know was whether they could change while remaining themselves, using your power to produce the change would contaminate the observation.”

She let the conclusion remain narrower than approval. “So whatever happened with the three who changed, at least some of that result is evidence about them rather than only evidence about you.”

“Anyway, I'm talking *again* non-stop.”

Neither of them had produced a solution to divine corruption. Arliss seemed comfortable leaving improvement as incomplete evidence rather than demanding a final moral category.

Arliss smiled. “You are.” She let the silence sit between them for a few seconds before adding anything else. “I was following. If I hadn't been, I would have changed the subject.”

“If you're sure?” Ian asked. “I'd like to learn about magic, and you some more, too.”

“Gods are interesting, I suppose.”

The subject had occupied enough of the afternoon that returning to ordinary magic felt almost practical. Sand, sea and the restored tree remained around them, all less abstract than another argument about builders.

Arliss gave him a sideways look. “That is an impressively casual conclusion after everything you've just told me.”

She settled more comfortably on the sand, drawing one knee up and resting an arm across it. The subject of magic seemed to give her an easier path back towards something she could actually teach.

“Magic is easier to begin with than me. It has rules, even when people misunderstand them.” Her mouth curved faintly. “I am less well documented.”

For a moment she looked out across the bay, deciding where to start rather than filling the silence automatically. “If you genuinely want to learn, I can teach you the way I would teach someone who already understands that power and technique are different things. That may actually make you less annoying to teach than most talented mages.”

The smile stayed. “And you can ask about me as we go. I reserve the right not to answer.”

That was as much structure as a future lesson needed. Arliss did not try to define what else another visit might become.

“Understood. I think that's enough metaphysics for today, though. Might I come visit again?” Ian asked.

Arliss considered the request, then nodded. “Yes. Preferably with slightly less divine history and slightly more magic, tea, or badly researched adventure fiction.” Her gaze moved briefly towards the sea before returning to him. “And next time, you may simply ask. You don't need to bribe me with impossible historical tourism first.”

“It's not bribery. Or maybe it is; I am unsure how to make friends, and I like people being happy with what I can do.” The distinction apparently failed to settle itself. “OK, maybe it's the *good* kind of bribery.”

The admission sat more awkwardly than the joke. Arliss did not hurry to turn pleasure, gifts and friendship into the same thing.

Arliss considered that. “Those are not quite the same thing. Giving someone something because you enjoy their pleasure is not necessarily bribery.” A small smile returned. “I simply wouldn't use their pleasure as proof of friendship either.”

“Till the next time, Arliss.”

“Until next time, Ian.” Arliss held his gaze for another moment, still smiling. “And you don't need to bring anything.”

Her office returned around her with the familiar desk, shelves and wards exactly where they belonged. For several seconds Arliss did nothing, because Old Crownholt still felt nearer than the corridor outside: rain passing through her face, masons arguing over a drain, the misplaced house that had bent a street around itself, and a pie whose quality had survived several centuries of archival neglect.

Then she noticed the plate. A single After Eight mint sat in the centre of it, its thin dark chocolate square carrying the sharp scent of mint when she lifted it.

Arliss laughed. “You don't need to bring anything,” she murmured to the empty room. The mint made the line absurdly well-timed.

She sat and let the afternoon arrange itself in her head. Ian had trusted her with information that would have made half the senior offices in Crownholt tear through restricted archives for weeks: the purpose beneath Crown Deep, the nature of the Demon Lord, the existence of the other builders, and the uncomfortable fact that at least some of them were still present enough in the world to have dinner with him.

He had described the Sun Father burning his body and then complained about the man's personality. None of it belonged in a report.

That decision came easily enough. There was no active danger requiring disclosure, and Ian had not offered the information to Crownholt through her; Voss's curiosity did not convert confidence into institutional property. She would remember what Ian had told her, question it where appropriate, and keep watching for anything that changed the terms under which she had agreed to silence.

Ian himself remained harder to classify. He was immensely dangerous no matter how pleasant the afternoon had been. He could give reality an ambiguous instruction and only afterward discover how it had fulfilled it. He could move through time, replace one causal outcome with another and take divine power from a builder-god. The tree had made one part of the problem clearer rather than smaller: correction was itself another use of the same power, dependent on how well he defined what ought to count as though it had never happened.

Arliss had spent too much of her life around systems that became dangerous when people mistook capability for justification. Ian did not fit neatly into that lesson. He was curious about his own power, sometimes careless in how he described it, willing to be corrected and still capable of making assumptions as ordinary as taking someone to an unknown coast without first explaining the way home.

That last part was almost reassuring only because it was so mundane. Almost.

She had liked the afternoon. More specifically, she had liked him. There was little point pretending otherwise after signing one invitation, spending hours talking on a beach and wanting another meeting when it ended.

More unexpectedly, she had liked having his power become a question instead of merely a fact. The tree had separated repair from counterfactual restoration; the floating answer had separated observed loss of power from its mechanism. Reality itself could apparently be queried about what it had done, and neither of them yet knew where that privileged knowledge ended. Arliss already had more questions than one afternoon could hold.

None of that proved her judgement correct or made the gifts less distorting. Enjoying what he could do told her little about what friendship with him would actually be like. Arliss preferred to keep those questions separate.

Old Crownholt had been extraordinary because *she* cared about it before Ian ever offered to take her there. He had noticed the interest, provided the impossible access and then mostly left her alone to enjoy it.

Arliss picked up the chocolate and bit through the dark shell. Cool mint spread across her tongue while the familiar office stayed exactly as mundane as it had been before he arrived.

There was no missive in the drawer to revisit. The note which had invited this meeting had vanished the instant she signed her answer, leaving only the memory of writing *Yes. I would like that.*

She had signed it because she had wanted another conversation. Now she wanted a third.

Arliss finished the chocolate, folded the empty little wrapper once between her fingers, and smiled. If it was bribery, it was working. That did not make it evidence.