Speaking to Ilacordin

	Lumalia rolled her shoulders and relaxed her wings.  The water wasn’t great for her feathers, but she could dry them with a bit of effort, and the last thing she wanted to do was insult her host.

	She felt no fear.  No dragon who valued hospitality would dare hurt a messenger, especially not a fey dragon.  She still felt the need to walk carefully.  “Honestly, such pacts are rare,” Ilacorin pointed out.  “Celestial children are too fiercely defended.  Pale Night is still paying the price for the Pact of Ascodel, for instance.”

	Lumalia clenched a fist.  That was the name of a pact between an Eladrin and a demon that had condemned thousands of children to torture thanks to a hidden clause in the text.  Ilacorin saw Lumalia’s spike of hatred, and quickly changed the subject.  “But of course I will aid you in finding him, as promised.  All I ask in exchange is a story.”

	The seething deva settled her breath.  “And what story would you have me tell you, Mistress Ilacorin?”

	“Your own choice, my dear.  Anything.  A grand tale of clashing arms between champions of the planes, the humble story of the quiet force for good changing the world in ways too small and many to notice, the latest activity on Mount Celestia’s unapproachable peak… enlighten me.”

	Lumalia looked down at her legs in the water.  “I see.  Before I tell a tale, I would ask something first.”

	“Hmm?”  The dragon uncoiled and stretched luxuriously, like a cat.  “What?”

	“How does the time-manipulation effect of the forest you mentioned, the Forest of Towers, actually work?” Lumalia asked.  “I rather need to know, to calculate how much time I lost before my cosmic deadline.”

	“Ah… yes, of course,” the dragon purred.  She paused as a few satyresses approached with goblets of wine and water for Lumalia, and a bucket of the same for her.  “Thank you, girls.”

	The satyresses bowed and made their leave.  Ilacorin lapped at her wine as Lumalia silently swirled her drink in the crystal cup.  “Let’s see.  For every month you experience in the forest, twelve hours pass in the world, I believe,” Ilacorin said.  “Yet there is also reversal of time.  Surely you noticed.”

	Lumalia sighed.  She felt her stomach unclench, and she downed a gulp of the wine.  It was awful.  Linus’s cellar had far better vintages.  She managed to not pull a face, and set the crystal cup down.  “I did, yes.  I was having deeply garbled messages filter to me from my mistress, so I figured something was interrupting them somehow.  My food also seemed to replenish itself.”

	“You were probably there for a few days at most, then,” Ilacorin said.

	“What a relief,” Lumalia said heavily.  “What a relief.”  She rubbed her eyes.

	Laughter interrupted further introspection from a pool many dozens of feet away.  Lumalia glanced in the direction of the laughter and saw three bare girls, human-sized but with beastly ears and hair, cupping water and squirting it at each other, then fall about laughing.  A single glance from Ilacorin silenced them, but they kept at their horseplay.

	“Fey are playful creatures,” Ilacorin said.  “It’s best not to expect them to be tactful.”  She turned back to her guest.

	“As for your story, take your time.  Perhaps enough time to choose one in the morning.  You are welcome to stay here until then.”

	Lumalia nodded slowly.  “I know exactly what to tell.  The story of my imprisonment while performing labors in the Prime.”

	“Imprisonment?  A daring character drama of constraint and escape?” Ilacorin chuckled.

	Lumalia flinched.  “No.”

	Ilacorin raised her scaly eyebrows.  “Oh.  That sort of a story.”  She stared down at her guest.  “Clearly, you are taking your quest most seriously.”

	Lumalia looked up and met the dragon’s eyes in silent question.  “If you are willing to reveal a story that will hurt you in the telling, you know that it is highly personal, and that I value personal gifts of knowledge.  Thus, you expect to over-trade it for the information I can give you, which you clearly value just as much, but I do not,” Ilacorin said shrewdly.

	“Something like that,” Lumalia said quietly.

	The dragon sat up on her haunches.  “Then tell me your tale,” she said.  “And you shall get your passage to Sir Lacrima, and the knowledge you need to get him to divulge his secrets.”


	Lumalia did tell her story.  She told it in detail, starting with her conjuring to the Prime, and ending it with her traveling from the Arbor of Innocence to the Ark of Remediation.  She left her deep seat in the water at one point, and moved to sit beside the dragon, so Ilacorin could see the gruesome scars under her wings from the sample collection Khazit Gul had inflicted on her.  Servants brought food and drink to them, which Lumalia barely touched.

	In truth, the telling of the story was not traumatic to her any more.  Her reattunement to her mistress in the Ark had healed her of all the emotional and psychological damage she had suffered, and she had told the story to people she cared about far more than a dragon with a hot spring hotel to her name.  It was an unhappy story, and a sad story, and a lonely, uncomfortable story, but not traumatic to recall.

	At the end of her story, she had still cried twice, both times without letting it affect her voice.  The first time, when the Thayans had butchered her conjurors and petrified her, and the second when she described in detail the infinite compassion Axiopistos and his wives had shown her in her weakest moments.  They were tears of lost emotion, but the wounds she described were healed.  Sometimes, tears of sadness and joy were just the right things to have.

	At first, she had told the story to the dragon alone.  By the end, there was a small audience of fey from the hot spring, and maybe other guests for all she knew, sitting in the water before her.  She was sitting on the edge of the heated platform where Ilacorin had lain all along, while Ilacorin sat beside her.  She let her legs dangle into the comfortable water, or crossed them and leaned on her knees, as the mood struck her.  As the crowd had grown, Ilacorin had at first halfheartedly tried shooing away the interlopers, but when Lumalia showed total indifference to the gathering, Ilacorin stopped too.