There was something to [Earthless Glory]—a certain je ne sais quoi, as the widow would have said—that was as grounding as it was liberating. Using it afforded Malwine the chance to act a bit more spontaneously, perhaps a bit more genuinely, than she otherwise would. It also freed her from responsibility to a degree, even if the very reason why she'd come to learn said freedom was not boundless stood before her now.

Sending the double off in her own form was no different than sending it off as the widow, ‘Kunegunda’, or even Rupert—yet it certainly felt that way.

Malwine struggled to hide her discomfort, lest Veit mistakenly assume it had anything to do with the promised conversation. It was hard to ignore just how vulnerable showing herself in this way was making her feel, even if her real form was technically just as safe and distant as it always was when she used this Skill.

Perhaps the knowledge that he now knew who and where she really was was what put her on edge—perhaps it was the act of taking this step. Of choosing to act in a way that left her with only the flimsiest of barriers between herself and the consequences of her decisions.

Now, we can talk. She had told the forester as much. She supposed she had almost meant it as a challenge.

Yet Veit took his time, seemingly paying no mind to her grin. Through narrowed eyes, he watched her. As if waiting, almost.

Malwine didn't let her expression falter, but she tipped her head. Getting stared at was not a good start. “You know, I hadn't thought to bring it up, but you are a forester. Any chance I can bribe you into not looking into this too deeply?”

At that, Veit's eyes widened briefly. Shaking his head, he seemed to soon give up all pretense of keeping up a stern face, and when he spoke, he sounded incredulous. “I beg your pardon?”

“It's a fact, I think. Foresters are notorious for their moral flexibility. Don't tell me you don't know that?” Malwine wiggled her eyebrows. “I've been around, read through more books than I can count. And so I figured, why not put it to the test?”

“No.”

“No to my idea of testing it, or no to taking bribes?”

“You have thirty seconds to start explaining how a child your age not only has a tethered projection Skill, but is past Level 50,” Veit took a step closer, and despite her current status as a double, Malwine found herself suddenly hyperaware of the gap in power between them. “Else, I will start assuming you are not the third generation of the Rīsan family at all.”

Malwine dropped her smile, frowning. She'd been holding on to the hope that he'd actually been too confused by what he saw when he tracked her to stick to a conclusion that pointed to her. That was too much to hope for, wasn't it? “Unfortunately for all involved, Kristian is my grandfather, and for our purposes, that does make me ‘the third generation’. So cut off that line of thinking.”

She made a show of beginning to pace—maybe a bit too earnestly—when Veit didn't immediately respond. Another disadvantage of this double looking like herself was its height—she had to look up if she wanted to even dream of having a conversation. Using any version of the widow or Kunegunda was off the table, if only because she refused to connect them to herself, even now that she'd revealed this Skill as hers to him.

Veit seemed to be examining her, a critical glint to his eyes. Something might have shifted within, but it passed so swiftly it could have just as easily been a trick of the light.

In an ideal world, she could have played the part of a bratty child to him, but it was growing clearer and clearer to her that there would be no getting out of this without revealing at least some of her cards.

Malwine huffed at him. “That's not a good look, buddy.”

Veit did not move away, only meeting her gaze for a split second before continuing to look her over. “What?”

“Threatening children. It's not a good look. Is that a forester thing?”

At last, she'd once again managed to get a reaction out of him—even if it appeared to be sheer annoyance. “Avoiding the question does you no good.”

“Neither does continuing to stare threateningly at a child.”

The forester took another step forward.

“Fine, fine!” Malwine grit her teeth, clenching her fists at her sides with a stump. “How much do you know about my mother?”

Another step.

“Wave take you, you ass. This is relevant,” Malwine matched his gesture as best as she could at her size. It must have looked absurd. “You can't just go around questioning who I am then be bothered by the reaction. But as to how I have a projection Skill? You were there on the past The Harvest, and saw me outside. I certainly remember how you would not leave me alone.”

“You were out there, gathering harvestables as though you were the subtlest thing under the waves. That much is true,” Veit told her. “I did not seek to know anything else about you then, but I find myself doubting your level is a recent development.”

Malwine hid her surprise as best as she could. It would do her no good to get knocked off-kilter here, when that was exactly what she'd been trying to do to him. “I got this Skill from a harvestable. It's great. And I can't help but wonder, if you knew what I was doing then and tracked this double back to me, why did you leave? Enlighten me. Communication is a two-way street, and it'll serve us both to know if we're on the same page,” she squinted. “And quit looking at me like that, while you're at it.”

Veit did no such thing. “I confess my first thought wasn't that the child before me would be the person responsible for the projection of a man that went around asking people about sibyls without introductions or explanations. When my gate led me to you, it seemed likelier that someone would have tethered the projection to the mana your Affinities passively emit, than for you to be directly responsible for it. Not with how young you are.”

“Ageism goes both ways, you know,” Malwine chastised. She tried not to grin at how his eye twitched. “I was responsible for the old man, yes. It's based off some guy I saw while exploring Beuzaheim. It was the furthest I could imagine from myself, and I wasn't expecting someone to trace it back to me, honestly. I didn't know it could be traced back to me like this.”

“Most things can be.”

“I know that now, thank you very much,” Malwine sighed. “But from how you've been acting, I'm guessing you changed your mind, didn't you?”

“A child being as you are is unlikely,” Veit closed his eyes, strangely enough. “And yet, it'd take more leaps in logic to attribute this to some unknown, different person, than to fall back on the initial result I got. The matter of how to confront you was the only thing that gave me pause.”

“Yet you still ended up settling for threatening a child? Classy.”

His eyes reopened and he resumed his glare without fanfare. “Are you a child?”

“Obviously,” Malwine rolled her eyes at him. “Had we not already established that? I'll say I find that continuing insinuation quite hurtful, so I'll ask again—how much do you know about my mother?”

Veit continued to stare at her as if she were some potentially shapeshifting terror pretending to be a girl. Another long moment passed before he answered. “Beryl Rīsanin, the oldest child of Kristian Rīsan and the late Katrina Skrībanin, both party members of the late Champion Saint. Arguably the most sought-after woman in Beuzaheim, and seemingly gone without a trace. Yet nobody cared, until you showed up accompanied by a system notice to your uncle.”

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“Sounds accurate so far,” Malwine nodded. “Tell me, then, are you familiar with the concept of stasis?”

“Familiar, yes. But only in passing.”

“Very well. You see, I was born at a very young age—” she started, but the man's foot started to shift again. “Oh, you can't really blame me there, my intrusive thoughts get the better of me sometimes. How is that fair in the slightest? Anyhow, my earliest memory is that of being in stasis. As for my level, I have had Skills for as long as I have been alive. It wasn't that hard to just level them. If you want to blame anyone, maybe blame my mother if you ever meet her. Everything that's ever happened to me is probably because of her.”

“You've had Skills since infancy?” a hint of curiosity crossed his visage. Finally. “That would be quite peculiar.”

“Again, send your complaints to my mother if you can, because there sure isn't much I can do about it,” Malwine shook her head. “As for why I was sending my double around, the truth is, I find myself having a problem I can't exactly solve by asking Bernie for anything. I wasn't even sure what the problem was, in any case. I might not have handled it as well as I could, and that led us here.”

Veit had grown eerily still.

“Did you know the house has a basement? I sure didn't,” Malwine told him. “Between this Skill and another ability I have, I found myself having to figure out what a sibyl was. ‘Shattered sibyl’, a level 149 with gold letters,” she passed Adelheid's [Identify] result along. “I didn't know what that meant, so I asked, and once I got that answer out of you, I searched on my own. I researched sibyls with an ability that let me read through the books in Beuzaheim's library, and eventually determined getting rid of one might be a pain and a half.”

“How did you learn of this sibyl in the first place?” Veit asked. His tone was low, almost too soft in contrast to how he had acted previously.

“The reason I got this Skill in the first place was to explore, and explore, I did. I've been to Beuzaheim—fun place. And I've been to the basement, where there was something that looked like a woman pinned to the wall. Here I was, confused—that couldn't possibly be a real woman. But as I said, it was a Level 149 sibyl, apparently. I've read a lot, I want to make that clear. Even before I awoke from stasis, and for so long that I couldn't even put a timeframe to it. Acting like I'm really four is exhausting. My mind sure isn't. But I'm guessing you can guess what the aforementioned problem is.”

The forester exhaled, and his next words carried a measure of trepidation with them. “This sibyl.”

“Yes.”

Veit shook his head. “You haven't the faintest clue as to how serious that is,” he said, and he had the gall to laugh. “I confess, out of everything you've told me, that is why I'd consider believing you. An impostor pretending to be a child would not do this, of all things. It… it takes an impressive amount of naiveté to be taking the matter of a sibyl's presence this lightly.”

“Lightly? You think I’m taking this lightly?!” Malwine found she didn’t even have to fake her outrage here—this bordered on offensive, after all the measures she’d taken to handle OHeidi. “Trust me when I say I’ve done everything but. Do you have any clue as to how many books I had to go through before I found a solution? Do you know how hard it is to set a sibyl on fire?!”

“I— what?”

“Yes, there. Finally, you’re taking me seriously!” she nearly shouted. “There was a sibyl in the basement! And I had to handle her myself! How unfair is that?”

“Girl, you have a family. People work here. Your… grandfather once belonged to a Champion’s party, with all the benefits that entails. Why would you not simply speak to someone?”

I did! I’m speaking to you!

Malwine had to admit she struggled to read his expression now. It didn’t strike her as true outrage. It seemed like a duller yet deeper type of confusion, as if he could hardly believe her words. Yet he did, as far as she could tell.

“I want you to put yourself in my shoes for a moment, Veit,” Malwine exhaled slowly, suppressing the urge to emphasize his obviously false name. “I don’t know where my mother is, or why she left me. I don’t know why I was in stasis. I don’t even know how old I am, because I know she somehow slowed or stretched time for me, even if I don’t understand it. The only constant throughout my entire life has been that I’d be in so, so much trouble if anyone ever found out about me and my Skills. I don’t know if my mother told me that, I don’t know if it’s just an instinct—all I know is that I’ve never wanted anyone to know, then ended up in a situation where it was unavoidable. Then you showed up, and left me with no choice but to put myself even more at risk.”

Trying to shift the blame there to him wasn’t the most sportsmanlike of moves—she could recognize that much, and still do it. At the end of the day, keeping herself from further consequences was and always would be the priority, and if she had to twist the truth even more so, she would.

“I can recognize that, even if I must confess I cannot truly understand it,” Veit said after she was done. He hadn’t returned to where he’d initially stood, but his posture had slackened somewhat. Much to her relief, he didn’t seem poised to react at a moment’s notice anymore. “Let us say, for the time being, that I believe you. I believe that you are Malwine Rīsanin, daughter to Beryl, and not an impostor, though I question how you act and speak if that is the case.”

“Have I not given you justification enough?” Malwine furrowed her brow. “I’ve told you, Veit—I have a strange relationship with my life’s timeline, and most I’ve learned comes from the books I used my abilities to read. I can’t speak to anyone, I can barely do anything, without having that fear of discovery looming over my shoulders. So forgive me if my first choice when dealing with a problem is to try and do it myself.”

“What you’ve called ‘gold’ is the stage of Immortality, girl,” he paused, seemingly reconsidering. “Malwine. I don’t care how little like a child you feel. You still are a child. Even if you are past the 50s, the 60s, as far as level goes, you are still young enough that you must be in the Early Esse. You cannot expect to handle something of that magnitude alone. I’m going to have to beg of you, put your safety before secrecy, always.”

Malwine huffed despite herself. That was exactly what she was doing! The sibyl presented a threat to her, and Veit clearly had his doubts about her, so she was killing two birds with one stone. “Why do you care, honestly?”

“Because there would have to be something wrong with me if I didn’t,” Veit shrugged. “Given my function here and my… my actions, if there is a sibyl around, the responsibility of handling it would fall to me. Not to some random child who found it.”

“When you said forestry was about patrols, I figured it might be about animals. Or those monsters you kept insisting exist,” Malwine admitted.

“It goes further than that. Forestry is about patrolling this place, but it’s also about enforcing the privacy of this territory. The fields within, those from which The Flowers rise, are not for all to access. If intruders or other undesirables enter, it ultimately falls to me, to deal with them as necessary,” Veit told her. “In the case of a sibyl, and an Immortal one at that, I would be expected to handle it, as I must have let it through in the first place.”

She narrowed her eyes, but chose not to press further—this benefited her, after all. He’d taken the blame for that a bit too easily, though she doubted the first sibyl had actually snuck past him—while making the census, she’d learned he was among the newest employees, and OHeidi appeared to have been maimed by the long-dead Katrina. “I have to say, I don’t even know what an Immortal is.”

“You wouldn’t. I suspect your education on the matter is lacking—but if you’ve kept your family in the dark about your Affinity and past, I suppose they’d have no reason to teach you anything, let alone that.”

“I take suggestions, if you’re offering,” Malwine wiggled her eyebrows again. “While on the topic of offers, if you do take bribes, I could use a lesson or two.”

Veit let out a cackle, shaking his head. With how fast he straightened, she could only guess he hadn’t meant to loosen up that much. “I did promise you a conversation about safety. But no, I do not take bribes.”

“Here I was thinking that was just a forester thing.”

“From all you claim to have read, I gather?”

“Yes. Foresters are the shadiest of people.”

“Has no one ever told you not to poke holes into your opponent’s boat when you’re also on it?”

“I can swim.”

That got another reluctant laugh out of him. “You are impossible. You will have your lesson on safety,” he paused, stoicity taking over his features. “But I must see this sibyl. Urgently.”

“Which one?”

“Which one?”

“Why, yes. I don’t really know how it works, but the one in the basement has a friend in the mangal,” Malwine nodded along, borrowing the phrasing Adelheid had used. “I actually think I handled the one in the basement just fine. I set her on fire with a candle harvestable. Those things really are convenient. Unfortunately, I don’t know where the other one is, exactly. That might have been why I wanted to talk to you about this. Maybe.”

Veit’s hand went to his forehead, and he exhaled as if deflating. The sound devolved into a groan.

Malwine put her hands on her hips. “What?” she asked, to no response. “Seriously, what?”

He finally looked down to meet her gaze again. “Just show me this sibyl. Please. Before I come to regret ever coming to this place.”