[Can’t Opt Out]

“It’s rare that I don’t like people,” Mikhail had said, soon after he and Zavriel had begun travelling together. Their friendship had been fast and easy, falling between them like leaves shuddering free of the towering trees of the Hu’gustar, a sprawling mountain range that was actually part of the Covrex Mountain Range, the more common name for the long line of mountains that split Myristä from most of the southern continent.

Crishar had always been good about keeping their own words for things, a result of how few attempts had been made to colonize it, perhaps.

In Lüshanian, so many of the words had roots in other languages, mutilated by time and the defiance of their people. Sometimes, however, it was easier to accept a new word rather than fight its adoption; sometimes, it was easier to keep a colonialist word, rather than force an ancient word back into the vernacular.

So, to Crisharians, the Hu’gustar was the eastern end of what was technically the Covrex Mountain Range, Zavriel’s mind accepting this reality because the Hu’gustar didn’t technically include the western side of the Covrex Mountain Range; rather, once the Hu'gustar became the Xanxier—a basin rainforest on the western edge of Crishar where a number of those subterranean rivers Mikhail’s friend had been using briefly emerged before sliding back into the earth to twist beneath the majority of Crishar and properly emerge at the Cyrenix Desert and quickly run dry—it was considered another mountain range entirely. Then, once the mountains vanished into the Dunnery of Rwun, the mountains were no longer considered anything at all by Crisharians.

Crisharian had few words for things it never interacted with. Rwun’s mountains was probably the only description for those unseen peeks that had ever existed in Crisharian and—

And the aether forced an ancient word into them. It wasn’t useful: the Crisharian word for Rwun’s side of the mountain range hadn’t been used in over twenty-thousand years. Apparently, this was the last time their nations had been at war, a collection of violent incidents slotting their way into his head. Ironically, they were mostly violent because the Xanxier was a dangerous place, while the wetlands on the Rwun side of the border were… infested with plants that caused rashes and giant, man-eating creatures.

Lovely. Note to self: don’t go visit Rwun?

Regardless of how useless this information was, it did serve to drag Zavriel’s mind back into the moment and his contemplations of his fast friendship with Mikhail. The man was strange—blunt but infinitely friendly. It was such a contrast to the life Zavriel had generally known in the capital, where politics and alliances and court drama ruled. The majenstra were not a kind people—obviously, given that they literally threw children into enclosed spaces with an aetherscar so powerful it mutilated their genetics. They were conniving and always seeking to gain themselves more power.

To say that Zavriel had never had a true friend…

Well, it wasn’t uncommon for young majenstra to try to find friendship; it never ended well for them, and it certainly hadn’t ended well for him and the young boy he had once considered his only friend. In the end, that boy hadn’t been his friend, so when Mikhail had so easily offered him friendship, the aether sliding a true belief in the young man’s friendship into his soul itself…

It meant a lot, was all. It didn’t matter that Mikhail had soon told him he liked most people—was open to friendship with almost everyone, even if it was relatively rare that they would return his friendship.

“I’m not the sort of person most people like,” the young man had explained, easy as that. Clearly, there were stories there, and while Mikhail had spoken of having a few good friends—Codeth, one of the Baalphorians in the group that was trying to meet up with theirs, Halen, far above them, and Emilia—from the beginning Zavriel had been able to tell that he liked many of the people making their way through the city; yet, it seemed to be a one-way friendship.

The young man was blunt, slightly obnoxious at times, but impressively sweet. Porsq, with his ability to feel out the intentions of those around him, was now glued to Mikhail—and for good reason. As awkward as the Baalphorian could be, he was impossibly genuine. Every word he said was truth—a confused truth, Porsq had called it at one point, while trying to explain to Mikhail what his thoughts felt like.

Mikhail had simply smiled and agreed that the little boy’s explanation made sense.

“Figuring things out can be hard for me. Plus, I forget what I was thinking about a lot,” he had laughed, not offended at all.

It hadn’t taken Zavriel long to like Mikhail back. The man was a nice contrast to the majenstra, always lying and watching their words and pulling their abilities into themselves so that those more powerful than them couldn’t pull truths from their tongue or push manipulations into them.

When surrounded by people capable of making anyone weaker than them forget they weren’t doing something immoral, illegal, against their own interests or the interests of the crown… it was a lot, and Zavriel didn’t much miss the place.

People, he had found, were terrible. It was impossible to imagine a world where Mikhail could be a terrible person—then again, only a few minutes ago, Zavriel would have said it was impossible to imagine Mikhail not liking someone.

To describe Mikhail’s feelings for this pair of captives that Porsq had led them to as simply not liking them seemed too soft a description! Zavriel rather thought the previously soft and smiling young man would quite happily gut both of them!

It was such a severe shift in the man’s generally smiling, laughing person that—despite the risk that the Baalphorian’s mind might reject any of his attempts—Zavriel briefly pushed his abilities into the man, forcing himself to forget that he and Mikhail hadn’t already talked about why he didn’t like the pair of Lüshanians.

This sort of use of his abilities was rather nauseating—it was essentially forcing time to run the wrong way and yet do nothing of the sort. Within his mind, a conversation played out as though it had already occurred; if the two of them ever talked about their opinions on these men, Cordk and Renton, it wouldn’t play out exactly this way, of course. What Zavriel's abilities were doing was not what those people who claimed to be able to read the will of the aether were capable of doing—although, Zavriel had the sense that, were he able to get the hang of his ability to read and manipulate the universal mind, he may be able to read the will of the aether as well.

Currently, Zavriel thought that, every so often, the aether itself pushed bits of information about the future into him, but it was a vaguer thing than what he knew of how the Sever or the synat or the kolrathi’s abilities worked. In essence, instead of being given visions of the future, he was given splattering of information that was relevant to the future—things like that feeling that, were the city to be entirely destroyed this very moment, so many people on whom the fate of the universe depended would die that the universe itself would be doomed.

This was a knowledge of the future that Zavriel knew wasn’t natural. At the same time, he couldn’t say who the people in question were, nor why the universe was in danger, nor how they were going to save it. Potentially, were he in more control of his abilities and more easily able to pinpoint the source of the information he wanted, Zavriel could figure these things out. Currently, he couldn’t, and instead, he had to accept the information, both kind and cruel, that the aether gave him.

Regardless of all that, when it came to his ability to forget he hadn’t already had a conversation with a person, this was more of a general majenstra ability, although not one that was particularly well-used by many. The problem, as Zavriel had heard it described—he had taken to the ability easily and therefore only knew the theory of the problem most people experienced—was that it was difficult to not inadvertently use one’s own knowledge for the ability, rather than knowledge from the other people involved in the recollection of forgotten conversation that had never actually happened.

This wasn’t meant to be a representation of him simply imagining a conversation with someone based on what existed within his own knowledge of that person. Zavriel could assume what answers Mikhail would give, were they to talk about his dislike of the two Lüshanians, but without his abilities, it would only be based on their brief acquaintance and blooming friendship. For his ability to work properly, Zavriel needed to tug upon Mikhail’s awareness of himself and his thought processes… something that was easier said than done, given the man’s constantly confused thoughts and his random shifts into being unaffected by Zavriel’s abilities.

So far, Porsq hadn’t had any problems using his abilities on Mikhail. Zavriel wanted to test the boy’s abilities on the Baalphorian man—Mikhail’s EEC Dyad friend’s abilities as well. The man had also told them his Censor often interacted oddly with his brain, and Zavriel wanted to poke around and learn more about that as well.

Part of it was that, as they were now friends, Zavriel both wanted to help Mikhail figure out the abilities hidden within him and confirm his assumption about what the young man’s abilities even were. The other part was simply that Zavriel had always loved learning—there was a reason he had accidentally ended up the first majenstra in generations to find themself connected to the universal mind, after all. Within the Crisharian court, however… knowledge and experimentation were both encouraged and dangerous; it was something to be done quietly without anyone else knowing, and that had always been… boring.

The idea of having people to chat with? To bounce ideas off? Mikhail had described his friends Emilia and Halen as innovative and always interested in everything, and Zavriel wanted to meet them—rip into their minds and figure out what made them tick and why they were friends with Mikhail when so many other people weren’t fond of him.

“The problem with Renton and Cordk…” the phantom version of Mikhail who neither existed nor did not said within Zavriel’s memory of a moment that would never happen, his voice trailing off as he tried to find his words.

The one thing his new connection to the universal mind had done to this particular ability was adding more substance to it. Gone was the blank world in which these forgotten conversations had once taken place; instead, trees shifted around them—those falling leaves of the Hu’gustar, as though the aether had pulled on his previous thoughts and created this detailed landscape for him. It wasn’t a conversation set within the current day, the fall of leaves as the coolness of winter came still months off yet; instead, Crishar was currently hot—not as hot as the eastern nations that sat more firmly within the Cyrenix Desert, but hot. The eastern and central parts of the Hu’gustar were never too terrible, many people hiking and camping within the shaded wilderness. The western edge of Crishar and the Xanxier, on the other hand? Miserable fucking places. Zavriel had ended up on the edge of the Xanxier once, at the height of the summer heat, when first experimenting with his ability to make the aether forget where he was.

Never. Again.

Even in milder weather, Zavriel never wanted to return to that basin of torture, the humidity so all-encompassing that Zavriel had felt liable to die in a puddle of wet heat and sweat. The Xanxier might be milder at other times of year, but he didn’t care: he was never, ever, ever going back to that grotesque place.

“Our whole class,” this Mikhail of their collective minds—Zavriel had actually managed to connect to his new friend’s mind, thankfully, rather than been randomly rebuffed—continued, “is really accepting. We have Dyads and black knots and silverstrains. There are people who struggle with their mental health. There’s me, with whatever is happening in my brain. It didn’t matter that no one had met Porsq and that all everyone knew was that he powerful enough that he would become a target for criminals: everyone was immediately accepting of him.”

“Porsq… never did anything bad to the people in the holding cells,” Mikhail continued, Zavriel's falsified memories aligning the man with his current self, holding the little mind eater close as he glared down Renton and Cordk, seeming for all the world like he would die protecting Porsq from their animosity alone. “He was only ever trying to help. Then, he found those two and was still keeping us safe. That didn’t matter. They treated him like he was in the wrong.”

Mikhail pressed his lips to Porsq’s forehead again—a reminder that, regardless of these men’s opinion of him, he now had people who would fight for him, no matter what. Within the memory that would never be, Mikhail’s gaze shifted, and the Zavriel who had been wandering alongside him followed his gaze off towards the lake—the lake where Prince Meridian had an estate, and this was not a normal part of his ability.

In the distance, children and teenagers played in the sands of the beach. A few yelled dares for the others to jump in, despite how cold the water would surely be. Someone with long silver hair sat nearby, several children tucked around her—and was that a prava? A prava… letting children play on it like it was some friendly family pet?

What was the aether on? Pravas were deadly animals. What even.

“All that boy ever did was help them, even to the end. They still treated him like he was an abomination”—and both Zavriels fought down a smile at their friend using such a big word. Mikhail wasn’t stupid, but it did tend towards simpler language. The fact that he wasn’t just proved that he had thought a lot about the way these men treated Porsq—about the animosity and fear and loathing layered in differing amounts through their eyes.

Zavriel could understand now, both why the boy had expected to be cast aside for his abilities and why he had so quickly attached himself onto those of them who had sworn to never fear him, to never demand he keep his abilities to himself.

Porsq had been housed with people who feared him for so long, and Zavriel wasn’t going to let these men make the sweet, traumatized little boy feel like anything more than the perfect thing he was.

Bright-blue eyes, filled with tears, sought out Zavriel’s over Mikhail’s shoulder, something so innocent and desperate in them, and it was impossible to not feel pulled forward to stand beside Mikhail in this. In his arms, Gëon’s little shadow shifted, their fingers reaching out to grasp at Porsq’s, the children sharing a moment of understanding.

In the end, even if Mikhail didn’t yet realize it, all four of them were terrifying things, and if they had to leave these men behind because they couldn’t at least pretend to be polite, so be it: Zavriel would feel no guilt for protecting these children and his first true friend from people who would judge a little boy for his kindness and protection and his escape attempt—yeah, the aether was there, pressing bits and pieces of the things Porsq had done to gain these men’s ire into Zavriel’s head. Mostly, it was the younger one, but the older one…

Well, it was complicated there, and Zavriel couldn’t exactly blame an old man for loving his child despite the man’s shortcomings. At the same time… no, he could.

Zavriel thought he could actually judge these men and many of the other people in the 17th’s holding cells for quite a few things, really, and when he met Porsq’s eyes, the little boy was watching him with something knowing—something that said that he too, if given permission, might judge some of the adults a bit harder for some of the things they both had and hadn’t done, especially for that little missing boy.

It felt mean to judge captives for their failings; these men were no longer captives, however, and they were still failing. Zavriel had no intention of sticking with them, if they didn’t at least tuck some of those failings deeper within themselves.