The more Crxyzlsz learned about “people” the less it felt it understood. Not just about them, but about reality and existence themselves. “Felt” was a prime example. Feelings were like knowledge, but less concrete. They were things one was certain of without the requisite information to support it. It was anathema to its understanding of reality and the infinite spaces between it called home.

  It felt like it could explain the concept if not for the crude medium of language these matter-based beings used to communicate. It would take whole libraries of these “words” to even attempt to convey a concept Crxyzlsz could impart with just a thought in its usual state of existence.

  It had tried to communicate in this way, testing it on the beings its summoner had deemed hostile via some unknowable ineffable criteria. The results had left the being quite insane.

  Insanity was something it had entered reality with a very strong understanding of. Its—not people, but other beings like itself—often left the beings that summoned them insane, injecting concepts into their mind beyond their capacity to retain, drinking up the result.

  It had intended to do just that with this summoner but had… lacked the perception to adequately ascertain the situation—overlooked, it realized was the word, trawling through the memories it had access to. The lesser being it had been bound to had not been as lesser as it had believed at the time—assumed? Expected?—language was too crude a medium through which to think, but Crxyzlsz forced itself to.

  The “raven” had once been a “king” and had been transformed into its current form via magic as alien to this reality as Crxyzlsz was. The summoner had thought herself clever with the wording she’d used to bind their agreement, but she’d been limited by the medium of language.

  It had been as if she were a two-dimensional being, drawing a circle around a three-dimensional one, thinking it contained. All it had to do was step over the line and consume her. But something held him back from doing so.

  Feelings rushed into it for the first time. A turmoil of conflicting ideas. Shame, regret, sadness all of which had been acquired far too late in life to have been of aid to that life. Happiness, pride, remorse, all acquired after that life had ended and this new one had begun. Above all of those was a deep sense of obligation to protect. Enough of one to stay Cryxyzlsz’s attack. It took in the experiences while one of the beings present left and returned with liquid matter inside a container of solids.

  When the combination was offered to it, depths were added to the contract, the magics of three realities, fey, material and the unnamable spaces it was from coming together to add a weight of intent that the words of the contract could not.

  It was as if the circle had become a three-dimensional sphere, encapsulating the being within. Only in this situation, Cryxyzlsz exited in more than even three-dimensions. The act had however blocked off all the more direct means it might use to drive the summoner insane.

  Cryxyzlsz hated similes. They were a crutch. A futile attempt to push words together to create concepts of deeper meaning.

  It was okay with this development. Time was nothing to it. That wasn’t to say time was on its side. To use another hated simile, something it had been forced more and more to use over these past units of time, time was to it as a tsunami was to the moon. While devastating to those that experienced it, completely irrelevant.

  To Cryxyzlsz, it had been no delay of any significance since the last time the book had been used to summon it, but in delving the depths of the summoner’s mind, it was long ago.

  Now, Cryxyzlsz—or Newt as his summoner called it—stood on a table between it—his—summoner and her being of moderately close relation—cousin. Newt felt the overpowering urge to also protect this cousin. They were in the room of the building where liquids and solids were ingested by beings to sustain themselves. The building itself served two purposes, this ingestion, and providing a place for the beings to lay horizontally while their brain activity shifts partially out of the plane they primarily operate in. Cryxyzlsz didn’t understand the necessity of either activity, but he found the latter absolutely fascinating.

  From the outside, Newt was a perfectly normal raven, but if someone were to cut him open, they’d find the insides completely filled with teeth and tumorous flesh.

  “How have you been?” the summoner’s cousin—Elsey—asked. “You look… well.”

  She was lying. Newt did not need to read her mind to know this, but he did so anyways.

  How does she look so bad when we are nearly identical? Elsey thought. It would hardly take her any effort to look stunning, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re raised by a bubbling snot monster.

  “Thanks,” the summoner—Ellen—said, “You do too.”

  Why did she get all the beauty genes while I got stuck with the plain ones? Ellen asked herself in direct contradiction to her cousin’s thoughts.

  Newt didn’t understand beauty. How could a lump of matter be appealing in one configuration, but that same lump spread across a room induce screams of panic? It did however understand genetics. That was easy to comprehend, it was just information. He could accept that there was some trait beyond his understanding that was passed down through generations in a random means—though from his analysis both girls had identical genetic information in a way that he suspect was not possible for such distantly related humans.

  “How is grandfather doing?” Elsey asked, scratching Newts head.

  “A lot better actually,” Ellen said. “Ever since I bonded him with an eldritch entity, he’s been a lot better in a fight.”

  “You what!?” Elsey asked, allowing feelings into her words to give them another dimension of significance.

  “He agreed to it!” Ellen said. “We talked about it, and I told him to just leave if he didn’t want to be a part of it.”

  “He must have felt obligated to do it! Felt bad over all he did to us,” Elsey said.

  “You know that man never felt bad for anyone but himself his whole life,” Ellen said.

  “Yes, but isn’t that why our fairy god…person,” Elsey said, stopping herself from saying the title. “turned him into a raven? To teach him a lesson. Maybe he’s learning.”

  Newt felt the fey magic thrum around her as she spoke the words, vanishing as she diverted.

  Ellen laughed.

  “It better than he deserved,” Ellen said, dodging the implications of what Elsey said.

  “Fine,” Elsey said, dropping the topic neither of them could do anything about at this point. “So… are you seeing anyone? That Syril seemed nice enough.”

  Ellen laughed at that, spitting up some of the wine she’d just sipped.

  “Gods no,” she said. “He only goes after the nobility and the ‘great beauties’ He actually asked after you.”

  Ellen and Elsey both shared a laugh at that.

  “You are a princess,” Elsey said. “Clean up a bit and you’d be be—”

  Ellen cut her off.

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  “I’m not interested in him. He’s a good party leader, a good man—honestly—but hardly my type. I was in a relationship with Bill, our meat shield, but that experience has finally hammered home the rule no inter-party relations.”

  “Oh, he was handsome enough,” Elsey said. “What was wrong?”

  “He was married for one. Then he died, but I don’t want to get into all that,” Ellen said. “What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Elsey said, grabbing Ellen’s hand. “How are you taking it all?”

  Ellen began to pull away but stopped. It had been years since she’d seen her cousin. Years in which she’d told herself she hated her and blamed her for half her troubles. But it was easy to blame someone who wasn’t there as the good memories slowly fell out of memory. Now, being with her here, she recalled all the times they’d sat, just them, in a deserted fey tavern talking as they cleaned. Elsey of course hadn’t needed to help. But she had. Frequently.

  “Oh,” Ellen said, parsing what she just said from Elsey’s perspective even as she had the emotional revelation. “No, I wasn’t sad he died. I was relieved I didn’t have to break up with him myself. The probable is he came back. Now, don’t dodge the question.”

  “We are still talking about you,” Elsey said. “Tell me how you really feel.”

  Ellen dismissed her first reaction which was a snarky deflection, and her second which was a flat out rude deflection and let out a long breath.

  “Not well. I don’t know why I care, but I keep trying to impress the stupid man,” Ellen said, taking a deep drink from her ceramic mug of wine.

  “Of course you are,” Elsey said.

  “What?” Ellen asked, stopping mid sip.

  “You’re feeling inadequate and trying to compensate for the rejection. You usually end it with men before they can end it with you because you don’t handle rejection well.”

  “Nah uh!” Ellen said, when her brain failed to come up with an actual response.

  Elsey lifted her wine glass to Ellen.

  “Well put,” she said, going to take a sip.

  Ellen reached out with her magic and tapped it, allowing the curse in her to transfer into the glass stemware, transforming it into a ceramic mug with “Very Expensive Wine Glass” written on the side.

  “You’re a child,” Elsey said, but smiled and took a sip.

  “You know, I think I actually missed these cups,” she added, holding it out and looking at it.

  “How’s your sleep been?” Ellen asked.

  Elsey smiled, “Great.”

  “How!” Ellen demanded.

  In their escape from the fey realm, each cousin had incurred a curse as part of the price of their departure. Ellen’s had been to turn all glass she touched into ceramic mugs, while Elsey’s had been more classical. If she slept on anything but a perfectly bed, she’d feel every imperfection.

  “Why do you think I became a worshipper or Cland?” Elsey asked conspiratorially.

  When she saw Ellen’s mine racing and coming up with no answer, she provided it.

  “He blesses his adventurers so that they always wake up well rested,” she said, unable to hide her massive smile.

  “That’s not fair,” Ellen said, crossing her arms in a sulk.

  “I’m sure there’s some god of glass you can find to worship that will reverse your own curse,” Elsey said if false reassurance.

  Ellen decided they’d talked about her enough, and asked again her question from before.

  “How has your love life been since I’ve last seen you?”

  Elsey’s eyes shot to the from her cousin to the performer up at the front of the room. The performer, a being in the “female” flesh configuration caught her eye and smiled back as she played her instrument.

  This too confused Newt. He had not realized that the flesh configurations could change, but he had formerly known that performer as the half-elf of the male configuration Syril, and now she was going by Sylia—still a half-elf—but now configured as a female. Names had power. Newt knew this from both his own memories and those of the raven he inhabited.

  Could changing one’s name change the form?

  “Her!?” Ellen asked, scandalized. “She’s way out of even your league. How did you manage that?”

  “Speak for yourself,” Elsey said, trying to hide a blush, “I offered to buy her a drink between songs, and we got to talking.”

  Newt read Elsey’s mind as she spoke, and she was not thinking about talking. Newt was familiar with the way beings in this plane procreated, but by his understanding they were not doing it correctly. There was both a dearth of necessary components and a redundancy of others.

  “What do you know about her?” Ellen asked, genuinely interested the first time.

  “Not much,” Elsey said. “We mostly spoke of our interests, not our past. She’s just come into the city. She’s unattached to a team at the moment, and she’s looking to make a name for herself. And… she’s very strong.”

  Elsey blushed deeper as Ellen’s eyebrows rose at the last.

  “Well,” Ellen said, taking in the performer. “I doubt it will take her long. She’s already made it here, and this is the nicest inn in the city.”

  They talked about many things after that, and Newt tried to follow each and glean as much from the words and thoughts as he could. Eventually the conversation died down, and Ellen asked a question that had been at the forefront of her mind, a brilliant signal distracting Newt from her thoughts the whole night.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I, uh, think I already told you that,” Elsey said again, thinking of the failed mating ritual.

  “No, I mean in the city,” Ellen asked. “Did the fathers send you for me?”

  “They did send me a message,” Elsey admitted, “But that was only after I told them I found you—I swear I wasn’t looking.”

  “I believe you,” Ellen said, and Elsey relaxed noticeably even to Newt’s eyes.

  “They want us to come home,” she said. “They want to try to make amends and be a family again. They want us to be the court wizards for our brothers.”

  “I’ll pass,” Ellen said. “You feel free to go back to our uncle fathers and stepfather uncles and play nice, but I’m done with our family.”

  Elsey’s face dropped at that, and Ellen hastily amended.

  “Them,” she said. “I’m done with them .”

  Elsey seemed unconvinced, and Ellen pulled a slip of paper from her robes, passing it to her cousin.

  “Here’s the means of getting around my anti-scrying ward,” she said. “I meant to get this to you, but I couldn’t very well send it to you via message spell and not expect it to get out.”

  That act mollified Elsey.

  “Well,” Elsey said. “Gods know I’m not going back without you.”

  Ellen looked up at the ceiling with feigned wariness.

  “Are you allowed to blaspheme such as a worshipper of Cland? Have you no fear of being smited?”

  “Isn’t it ‘smote?’” Elsey asked.

  “Grom says its smited,” Ellen said with a smile Newt knew to be related to some deception but didn’t understand the concept of faith and blasphemy enough to fully parse.

  “Well,” Elsey admitted. “He would probably know. How did you get wrapped up with a cleric of Cland anyway?”

  “That’s… kind of a complicated story,” Ellen said, and gave a rough outline of events, keeping clear of all the outright blasphemy lest her cousin prove to be more devoted to Cland than she suspected.

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