>>5629702>>5629693You set aside your ambivalent feelings about Irinnile (and what, if anything, should be done about them) to focus on the increasingly-pleasant feelings which Eka inspires in you, and vice versa. Over the next week, you never leave the palace grounds—in fact, rarely leave the palace at all-and yet it’s hard to feel like you’re missing much. In truth, the two of you actually grow quiet close. In Eka you find something truly unique: a sort of kindred spirit.
Oh, there are differences, to be sure—fundamentally, unbridgeable gaps between your life experiences and yours. However, the similarities only seem to grow as you spend time with her, revealing themselves piecemeal until you behold a patchwork tapestry of a soul not unlike your own beneath the squishy, stuttering mammalian exterior—an exterior you’re ALSO fairly fond of. Eka, like you, has a certain FIRE in her, you learn: a need to know, understand, and to experience. She cares deeply for her people and her nation, for the hearts and minds, their fates and fortunes. She is curious about the outside, of course—the exotic, the other—and curious without automatic judgement or condemnation. It’s this that allows her and ‘Long Wang’ to bond by day.
You aren’t left alone together, of course—not after your impulsive kiss was reported—but the two of you are permitted to continue your courtship within the confines of the Princess’ favourite area besides the garden: the palace’s extensive ‘study’, a place stocked with books on the world’s peoples, politics, geographical wonders and legends. Having seen relatively little of the richly-populated surface world yourself, you can’t help but find it all fascinating, and Princess Ekaterine seems to delight in educating you on her favourite fancies.
“…And of course, just as before, the so-called ‘Eternal Empire at the Centre of the World’ shattered, again, because of a dynastic dispute, AGAIN, and the so-called ‘barbarians’ whom they underestimated swept in to establish a new dynasty… AGAIN. How many times have we heard the same story, there as here? With the humans of this world, the dwarves in their won way..."
"The elvesss in theirss," you agree, recalling the succession crisis which led to the bitter estrangement of Wevenore's dark-skinned Drow from their surface-kin, in their own histories.
The mammals really do rise and FALL with shocking speed, and perhaps with some regularity. The thought is, of course, a comforting one to an enemy of the current order.
