I felt my hands quiver at the unexpected contact. I... wasn’t used to being touched in a way that didn’t involve violence, at least not in the last few years. It helped that it was Sera. I pictured when we’d held hands as children. It had been perfectly normal, even comforting, when we were little. I hadn’t associated touching with pain back then.

Of course, I hadn’t anticipated a firearm being discharged – how novel! – and the guards already did investigate the scene.” She gave me a pointed look.

Father probably expected me to fight back, to compete, to try to prove myself... and for Sera to have to try harder to measure up to that. He’d never understood. His approval had stopped being important to me the moment he’d written his elder son off as dead.

And there is no realer man than I,” Vanniv replied with a nod. “Excepting for the fact that I am a magically created copy of the original Vanniv, of course, and thus completely fake.

Nailing my door shut at night wasn’t exactly elegant, but it was a pretty effective deterrent.

Oh, talking to people. That’s a thing I should do again sometime.

Professor Vellum had no aura at all. That was not a good sign. I began the treatment process by panicking.

No,” he countered, “you owe me two.” He pointed upward. “One is for the repair of my floor.

It wrote me “helpful” comments about each of the rooms I was going through, like, “This is the Room of Eternal Death. It’s like the Room of Normal Death, but somewhat more repetitive.” That sort of thing.

This was both unsettling, since I’d been duped, and a little comforting in that it took away some of my feeling of guilt for my actions. Ah, the sweet power of deflecting responsibility.