Val stood across from Tavras at the kitchen table, indignant with the direction that this conversation had gone. Her teeth gritted together hard enough to make her jaw ache in protest.

“Sit down,” Tavras ordered her. “You have nothing to worry about.” Adding on wryly, he said, “Those gods just want to kill you.”

“If I don’t have to worry about it, then do not even mention things like that!” Her upset stress sounded clearly in her voice.

Of course, she was outraged at the suggestion of being reduced to an object. Val wrinkled up her nose, remembering how Tavras’s sexism always shone through here and there. Why did she ever like him again? She really did not know what she had been thinking up until last night.

With Divine Judgenment as her fail-safe, nothing truly horrendous could ever happen to Val.

“I’m sorry. This is a terrible topic of conversation. It is extremely awkward for me too, so stop looking at me like I had just kicked Foofy.”

Val looked over to her wonderful Dobie and gave him a couple of pats on the head before stroking along his sides.

His ears twitched nervously and he stayed pressed up against Val’s side. Intensely, Foofy set his eyes on Tavras. As always, he was a perceptive dog and recognized the tension between the two of them.

“Good boy,” Val whispered to him. “You are such a good boy.” Slowly, she sat back down.

An annoyed sigh left her, but it was also in a bit of relief. Val had thought that his main point had been going in that inappropriate direction, but she was happy enough that they could dismiss the idea. Of course, she should not relax just yet.

After suggesting that some awful gods might want to use Val’s good genes for breeding, Tavras took this conversation to new levels of horrifying.

“Now, what if someone wanted to overthrow Suvier? A lot of times gods like to burden the next generation with their problems and make some new allies to fight alongside them. Since you know about your lineage, let me tell you that you exist for this very reason.” Tavras said with a sneer and a smirk. “Baldu and Kierla never loved each. They were pushed to the edge of the world when Suvier took over. What better way to restore their world order than by sending in some kids with destinies manipulated their whole lives to practically guarantee victory?”

Val fidgeted in place. While she did not care much for these grand schemes, she did not know what other choice she had, being who she was.

Tavras reached his hand across the table to hold her fidgeting one steady. “You’re doing fine. The time it takes for well-bred demigods to reach full potential has been going down, even as their maximum capacities increase.” As an aside, he pulled away and muttered, “I really hate young immortals.”

Without missing a beat, he continued to explain, “This brings us to Arius—the son of Suvier who Evalaite so kindly manipulated for us—but sadly, he is not quite strong enough to off his father just yet.” Tavras’s voice flitted around, higher and lower in his mocking tone. “Based on what I’ve told you, do you know what his most obvious next move is in his situation?”

“Is he… supposed to start a family?” she tried to say. With that, Val lost her appetite. That felt oddly disgusting coming out of her mouth. The fact that she barely knew him and also their relationship as soulmates made this topic profoundly uncomfortable.

Tavras nodded grimly. “His options for good… mothers are kind of limited though. As I said before, Suvier already surrounded himself with the finest fertility goddesses. Unless Evalaite’s little game had been an attempt to introduce him to sexual competition with his father, I really don’t think that he is going to go for an affair with his father’s women and half-siblings’ mothers. There’s just too much room for conflict in that area.”

And with that, Val could only gape at Tavras. Why did he feel so compelled to analyze Arius in this incredibly crass way?

Worst of all, he would not stop. “In the good, old days, a god like Arius would just pair up with one of his half-sisters and be done with it.”

“No!” Val exclaimed. She jumped up again, wanting to run right out the door.

Of all things, Tavras found that humorous enough to laugh. “Yeah, exactly. Everyone is so touchy about that subject these days.” Sticking both hands into the air, he clarified, “I followed the development of modern science enough to understand why incest is bad. I’m just saying that if Arius were an old god, then we would have nothing to worry about.”

Val heaved a sigh, feeling glad enough that fewer old gods existed year after year. Besides, Arius still did not seem like much to worry about. She decided to sit back down to defend his name against Tavras. “I still don’t see how Arius is all that bad, here. He’s offering to help me, and frankly, your analysis of his reproductive options is the creepiest thing in the Nether.”

Tavras raised his eyebrows and shook his head like he could dismiss her complaint. “It is just my suspicion, but after seeing his behavior and talking to Evalaite, I think that this is his goal. If he can hide the traitorous daughter in plain sight and seduce her, then he can have both you and any of your children to help him overthrow Suvier.”

Once more, Val had nothing else to say aside from shouting, “No!”

Babies were the furthest thing from her mind right now. This might always be the case since she did not have a biological clock that would ever start ticking. She was going to become so much more than the so-called breeding stock for some god, as Tavras had put it.

When Val got up for the third time, she spun around and pointed at Tavras. “We are never, ever mentioning this again.”

“That’s fine.” He shrugged. “I never wanted to talk about this either. Just, you needed to be aware of what his intentions might be with helping you. Remember who Arius is,” Tavras urged, “and the reputation that he has earned. The Ravager is the one god of war. He will do nearly anything if it means winning.” That was said with special emphasis on ‘anything’.

Most startingly, Tavras might not have been too far off the mark from Arius’s intentions, despite his weird phrasing. They were soulmates after all, though not for that reason, Val did not believe.

Tavras's point withstanding, Arius had requested that Val not tell him that they were soulmates for an excellent reason. The tidbit of information about them would only confirm his theory in the worst of ways.

“I still want Arius’s help,” she insisted. While Val looked down to her phone to text Arius, she tried not to let anything that Tavras had said bother her.