“I found snacks!” Hurat re-entered Gilnevn’s room, cradling half a dozen pudding cups in his arms like a sleeping baby. Once inside, he hip-checked the door shut and dumped the pudding on the floor. “Couldn’t find a kitchen, so I just raided the secret compartment in one empty room’s floor. I should get one of those, actually.”

A person-shaped lump under Gilnevn’s blankets stirred and the Primus herself peeked out from underneath, eyes glowing faintly in the darkness like silver headlights. “...Wha…?”

“Oh, were you asleep?” Hurat tossed one of the cups over, where it struck Gilnevn on the top of her padded head and rolled back down to the floor. “Sorry, the clock I found says it’s been, like, twelve hours. Figured you could fit even the most monumental of naps into a timeframe that generous, but I was sorely mistaken.”

“I sleep like a bear, it can’t be helped.” Gilnevn got up and wrapped her blanket around herself, extending one hand in a request for additional pudding. “I think I dozed off in a hot spring in Japan with a cloth over my eyes once, and it ended up taking a month for anyone to find me. It happens.”

Hurat split his booty between the two of them. He took the top off of one of the cups and immediately recoiled slightly. “Ugh, store-bought. Sorry for whichever one of your family members I stole this from, I just don’t have much good to say about stuff straight off the shelves. My family has a dedicated chef, did you know that? She rules, I haven't had store-bought food since, I dunno, World War Two.”

“That so?” Gilnevn was still too groggy to be able to process everything that was going on. She didn’t even know to whom the pudding had originally belonged to.

“Yeah, her name’s Quet. You wouldn’t know her, she didn’t come down with us. I hope she’s alright. But, y’know, that applies to all my siblings.” Hurat tasted a small amount of tapioca with his finger, then pushed the container away. “Yeah, no, I’m not having that, that’s nasty. All the pudding is yours now. You’re the pudding god now.”

“Whoop-de-doo.” Gilnevn spread her blanket open so that Hurat could dump his entire share into the depths of her lap. “You seem… more.”

“Yeah, I got some sleep too. Just woke up after an actual reasonable timespan.” Hurat hopped onto the bed opposite Gilnevn. “You know, speaking of concern for our respective families, it seems to me like we’re gonna have to leave and confront Ligivul for real at some point. Can’t just sit around here and wait for her to come to us, you know? I’d say we go the Way of the Boy Scout and try to calm her down enough to make her see reason. If not that, just enough to get in a good backstab. A classic for all superpowered individuals looking to properly confront a long-standing enemy for the first time.”

“It’s too early for this.” Gilnevn pulled the top of her blanket over her head. “Can’t we just wait for her to get bored and leave? Less to deal with.”

“Aw, c’mon!” Hurat rested his head on the side of Gilnevn’s blanket. “We don’t have anything better to do. I was kidding about the whole hug thing, but…” he shrugged. “Your ‘Domain’, as you insist on calling it, interests me. Like, I’ve been around here long enough to tell that things aren’t really peaches and cream between the Norse, so you and Ligivul seem like quite the outlier. I’m actually more interested in her than you, so if you don’t feel like talking more about yourself like the buzzkill you are, that’s always an option.”

“You would say that.” Gilnevn pulled her blanket closer. “She was always kinda weird compared to the rest of us, but basically everything about her started revolving around Sardok’s dumb prophecy. My money’s on that whole prediction making itself happen, actually. Seems like the kind of dumb mind games being able to predict the future would cause. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ligivul’s entire life was the result of her future self’s past-driven actions. Her being caged up like that would line up with everything else in her life.”

“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” Hurat faked scribbling something down on the palm of his hand. “Arbitrary alienation from any emotional anchors for several millennia on end; yup, mm-hmm, I can get the whole violent murder thing.” He paused and dropped the act. “But you said it’s not like her, right? You ever think that maybe the whole kind-hearted, empathetic thing was more of a mask? That kind of thing is more common than you think.”

“Keep talking.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Hurat leaned away, planting his head on the pillow. “You kinda learn to pick up when someone’s putting on a brave face when you’re in my position. Leaders of Domains like myself- and now you- pretty much all do it. Particularly during hard times like the stuff that’s pretty much been constantly happening since the Nabbing. But it’s not just us. I mentioned Quet earlier and…”

Hurat had to be persuaded to continue by a nudge from Gilnevn. “I told you to keep going, didn’t I? This is my house now, you follow my rules.”

Hurat snorted. “Fair play. Yeah, you can spend centuries around someone and get nothing but the impression that you’re only seeing one side of them. Quet was… I don’t want to call her weird, and ‘special’ sounds infinitely worse. It was more like- No, stay hopeful, it is more like she has her own thing going on. This is just me talking from a vague impression of what life in your Domain was like, but I think Quet ended up a lot like Ligivul, but none of us actually knew it. I definitely tried to make things easier for her, I always try to keep an open mind when it comes to my siblings. But she never really caught on to what the rest of us were doing.”

“Kinda seems like you’re blowing her problems out of proportion to compare them to Ligi’s,” said Gilnevn.

“Obviously, only one of them started trying to murder her own family. I’m just saying all this stuff about someone I’m more familiar with so that we can both wrap our heads around what went wrong with your sister-slash-bestie, through the translation method of my own sister-slash-co-bestie. Why exactly did you decide to take her under your wing, by the way? Did you feel sorry for her?”

Gilnevn’s eyes narrowed.

Hurat held his hands up. “Don’t mean anything by it, just asking questions.”

“I’ll be honest-”

“You can’t not be.”

Gilnevn growled.

“Right, right, yeah, I’m done.”

Gilnevn continued. “I acted mad that you said that, but I actually kind of agree with you. I guess I just felt like she needed it. Protection from… something. Didn’t exactly work, of course. But I felt like she needed someone.”

Hurat nodded. “But you pushed her?”

“I pushed her.”

“Yeah, that’ll do it,” said Hurat. “That’s the thing. You think you know what’s best for someone. Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. You can’t really know until you go through with it. If you force them, it can either turn out okay or nightmarishly bad. Because it’s easy to see what’s wrong with someone, but only they can know how that should be fixed. It takes time to be better, and everyone trying to help needs to know what you’re all doing. If it’s sink-or-swim, that’s just you taking needless risks.”

He was beginning to figure out the meaning of his own words. “I guess that’s the thing. You tried to get Ligivul out of bad situation by fixing her, but it wasn’t her that needed fixing. I… Yeah. I was always trying to think of a way to make Quet happy to be with the rest of us, beyond just giving her the chance to do what she loves by herself. Guess I just never really thought to ask beyond that, huh?”

“I guess we’re both screwups in the end,” said Gilnevn.

“Guess so.”

-

Ligivul was back at the base camp of the besieging vanguard, after spending more than two full days prowling the shattered remains of her home. Things had changed since she had left for the hunt. Passing soldiers gave her hesitant but angry looks, instead of the passing reverence she was familiar with. At the tent being used as a canteen, she heard an abundance of conversations decrying the painfully slow rate at which she did her duty.

She stayed in Tarbella’s command tent. The hostile atmosphere elsewhere in the base camp was making her nervous.

“Lady Veil, are you sure you’ve searched everywhere?”

Ligivul nodded with her back to the monster, her mind immediately going to the sanctum her Domain had found. Could she find a way to smuggle them out of the siege? Would they even listen to her attempts at communication long enough for her to convey whatever ideas she ended up getting?

“And you are quite certain that assistance from my own troops is unwise?” More of Tarbella’s questions.

Ligivul nodded again. She could tell that even Tarbella was getting anxious. Probably worried about when the main force would arrive. The prospect worried her as well.

“A-as you wish, Lady Veil.” Tarbella shifted nervously in his padded seat and ran a hand through his hair, his hand sliding all the way down to the nape of his neck before his armor interrupted the hair. He’d donned the armor earlier that day. According to the calendar and schedule the Leviathan Council had given him, he’d be needing it.

His thoughts were interrupted by Ligivul perking up from her reverie over the map. She’d heard something. Made faint by the chatter of the monsters outside the tent, she couldn’t make out anything in particular. But something was approaching the camp. Judging by the echo, it was very loud.