Rethi sat on the floor of Valeri’s room, back pressed up against the side of the girl’s bed, head resting gently against the edge of the padded mattress.

Valeri herself had stayed upon the bed itself, having finished the food that he’d brought hours ago. Since then, they’d simply talked and talked. Before this, he’d known the girl as a slightly haughty and overconfident rich kid, living out a fantasy of training to be a fighter. She’d known him as the gruff and almost heartless trainer, Midday, a man who held power beyond even her current comprehension.

They’d both known parts of who the other person was. Rethi had come to know her as she nervously confronted her own future in the microcosm of combat training, and Valeri coming to know Rethi in his bitterness while he tried to piece together his dawning understanding that he may never truly know exactly why his master might tell him to do something.

As they had talked, only as Rethi and Valeri with no pretence, they had come to find their lived experiences as almost entirely different. A pauper and a princess, a warrior and a socialite, two dichotomous lives standing independent from each other entirely. There was almost nothing that they had in common, not in their personality or in the way they had both been once.

And that was a powerful distinction. The way that they had both been once. Rethi had once been a beggar, and Valeri had once been a dove trapped within a cage, but now they were far more than just that. Rethi was now a Divine Warrior, inexperienced in legitimate combat as he may be, and Valeri had broken from her cage and was now taking her first, rather hesitant steps into the wide world beyond the gilded bars.

So what gave them all that they had in common? Well, that was an easy question to answer.

Maximilian, damned, Avenforth.

It was almost a little scary just how much Maximilian had influenced in Crossroads already, and just how far reaching the effects of his actions were. At the very least, he’d converted Valeri into someone willing to act for the sake of the people, even if that went against her own self-preservation and the fear that she’d held for her father for her entire life.

But Rethi knew that it was more than that. Max had changed him severely as well and going out with Alena to protect her while she healed countless people with a power many were terrified of, Alena herself included. The way that the Skinned Lizard had changed, the people within it acting with more decisiveness to desperately try and match the effort that the other man was putting forwards.

It was likely only the surface of what he was doing, with Rethi not actually being privy to much more than Maximilian’s basic explanations. The change in the Officials and their violence against the Reptilia population became clearer to Rethi as he had talked with Valeri, her understanding of that whole political situation was far more comprehensive than he’d have assumed of the girl.

“–so the Council of Justice have been going after Shed and his little gang for years, but the more ‘moderate’ parties on the Council have been holding back against a majority vote just slightly. But, after my father was…” she stopped for a moment, her expression dropping slightly, “assassinated, it was easy for the pro-gang crackdown members to convince the Council to overturn past decisions and go after Shed’s gang under that assumption.”

Rethi sat in the uncomfortable position he was in on the floor, finding himself too lazy to move, unable to actually look the woman in the eyes as he contemplated a strange sense of déjà vu. It took him a moment of silence to pin the feeling on the donkey.

“You know, you kinda sound like Max when you talk like that.” There was a long, drawn out silence after his words which almost made him move from his strange position, but before he could, he was hit on the head by what could only be a pillow.

“Hey!” She exclaimed loudly, her voice scandalised, before simmering down to a confused tone, “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult.”

Rethi laughed deeply, though keeping himself quieter than the girl had been, subtly reminding her that it was the middle of the night and other patrons—the few that they were—are well and truly sleeping by now. They both quieted down, falling into a more contemplative atmosphere.

“I don’t really know either.” Rethi said, clarifying himself, “Maybe that’s just what a politician sounds like, and Max just talks that way. But at least you both sound honest when you’re talking.”

“Only sound?” Valeri said, mock offense in her tone, “I’ll have you know that I’m always honest!” Though Rethi just snorted at that, rolling his eyes even though she couldn’t see them.

“Yeah. When you’re telling the truth, or at least being honest about not telling the whole truth, it’s pretty obvious. Max is the same, it’s not like he hadn’t been deceptive and downright manipulative in the past, but even when it’s happening you can tell that it isn’t entirely honest. At least you know that he’s obfuscating the truth, or bending it in those moments.”

“Why would that matter, though?” Valeri asked gently, “Wouldn’t that make him just as bad as anyone else with a little bit of charisma and a goal, manipulating their way for their own ends?”

Rethi couldn’t help himself as he barked out a laugh, the horrifically uneven comparison of Maximilian against a someone with a ‘little bit of charisma’ being actively hilarious. Though, the question was thought provoking.

Max’s approach to things, while backed with what Rethi believed to be a strong moral compass and code, was inherently grey. You couldn’t quite call it an evil approach, though it could certainly be used for evil reasons, but it paled in comparison to the option of simply going on a mass slaughter and ‘solving’ your problems that way.

However, it wasn’t a totally morally upstanding approach either, and Rethi would be more likely to attribute that to what Alena was doing, offering her whole support to the communities affected most and allowing them to strive for a better future. Problem is that approach takes way more time.

Time was a resource that they didn’t have much of, and this little city was almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. Maximilian putting forth the effort to fix Crossroads, or do the best he could, was already way underutilising his abilities. By now, they could have easily been within the Brauhm Empire and trying to hinder their incredibly expansionist ideology, maybe even try to correct some of the worst parts of their society as it is.

But they had already spent months here, before the action began and the change started happening in front of their eyes. It was scary, to see the city go from a tense silence straight into what was effectively a civil war on its own populace, though still restricted to some degree.

“I don’t know, to be honest.” Rethi said, laughing at his own insufficient answer, “Sure, his methods are less than typically moral, but my bright idea was to just run around the place and chop the heads off of all the important people and ‘fix’ it.”

Rethi could just about feel the mortification on the girl’s dark complexion, making him chuckle further.

“My God, who taught you that you could solve problems that way?” She groaned, almost amused by the sheer insanity of Rethi’s old idea.

“That’s just the common belief. Someone’s causing lots of problems? Kill them. That’s what they do in small towns, and while I never saw someone be killed, I know that someone was stoned for being unfaithful with another farmer’s wife.” He could hear the squeaking in Valeri’s voice before she managed to collect herself enough to reply.

“No, I guess that’s fair. I really shouldn’t be the one to talk, being witness to my own father’s death.”

There was a cool breeze of silence between the two after she said those words. It wasn’t as if they had just slipped out, they were a tacit confirmation of Rethi’s theory that she’d been involved with her father’s assassination. If she was involved, then Yeram and Maximilian were likely involved as well, somehow.

“Maybe not, but there was more at play there than infidelity, Valeri.” He said, finding the spot in his throat that he could pull Midday’s voice from, an almost natural voice for him now that he’d used it so much. “It probably didn’t help that Maximilian was searching for an outcome like that.”

“Maybe,” she said immediately, her voice a little more confident than it had been when she’d started with the topic, “but regardless of what Max had to do with how Yeram or I acted, the decision was made independently from him. While I certainly don’t like that I could attribute part of the reason of my father’s death to him, it was far from the main part.”

They sat there, bathing in the words that’d been said, both of them trying to scabble together ideas and understandings to formulate into a half reasonable sentence, but they continually failed. Rethi must have opened his mouth to speak five times before a sound came out on the sixth, a random idea from the very base of his skull somehow bubbling to the surface.

“Do you like him?” Rethi asked, the curious thought slipping through his lips as his mind cackled evilly while the rest of his conscience caught up to what he’d just said. He was about to apologise for the question, going way over the comfort line that they’d quietly established between them, but when Rethi realised that she wasn’t answering the question with a scandalised tone…

“Well, I mean…” She said, drawing out the words hesitantly, making Rethi’s neck go slack and allow him to turn his face into the side of the mattress, muffling his voice.

“Oh Gods,” Rethi groaned, “please don’t tell me. It’s so gross.”

“Gross?” She exclaimed, embarrassment layered thickly in her voice, “You’re the one in a teenage relationship! I’m hardly gross.”

“Ew, ew,” Rethi continued to whine, a mix between actual revulsion and mocking, “no way, it’s so much worse than me and Alena.”

“Oh, shut it!” She shot back, hitting the top of his head with her pillow once again, “You’re already with someone, how are you so childish about this stuff? At least be consistently childish!”

“But it’s, like…” Rethi struggled for a moment, trying to come up with a reason for the disgust in his stomach, “it’s like you’re going after my older brother or something. It’s just gross!”

“Boys.” Valeri decreed after a long moment, shaking her head imperiously, as if she’d judged him guilty of a severe crime. Though Rethi just snorted powerfully, actually moving from his uncomfortable spot to turn and look at the woman.

“Oh, so I guess you wouldn’t find it weird at all if, say, Gehne was to go after Yeram?”

The imperious expression on the woman’s face went from placid to entirely horrified within a split second, warping into a manifestation of disgust so severe that it made Rethi burst into forceful laughter, falling back onto the wood floor behind him with a thump. He tried desperately to keep his voice down, but the expression on her powerful features was just so hilariously extreme that he couldn’t even restrict himself.

After a while of laughter, which Valeri eventually joined in on, he was pushed out of the room under the concern that it would become way too late, and that they’d end up getting a knock on the door from Tek asking them to shut up.

Rethi managed to walk down the hallway, only chuckling to himself lightly, trying to forget the absurd expression on the woman’s face. He passed by the room that Alena was sleeping in, and instead walked into one of the other rooms that they’d rented, quickly throwing off much of his clothes and diving into the bed, allowing the soft bed to comfort his body and mind.

He no longer needed sleep, but he had come to realise how impressive Max’s willpower was, to deny himself sleep altogether until his mind and body truly got used to the new reality, he was forcing it through. Rethi had managed to do so with middling success, but he always ended up taking a few hours of sleep every other day, sometimes more.

It wasn’t idea, or even all that efficient, as Maximilian would put it, but it was slowly getting there. Either way, he was slacking on training, mostly because he was trying his best to juggle protecting Alena when she was out healing people and the late-night training that sometimes happened with Tek.

He looked out the window in his room, peering into the dull light that washed over the cityscape, and just quietly wondering what the next day, or what Maximilian, might challenge him with.

Hopefully nothing as horrifying as getting together with Valeri. Not yet at least.