The door to our quarters closes quietly behind us as we enter our foyer. And it’s definitely a foyer; the four of us stand, gawking, as the scale and scope of it hits us.

The floor is a gorgeous, shiny red-brown. There’s rather a lot of it, a hundred square meters of it just in the entry room, spotless and smooth but bearing a heavy, natural-seeming grain. The walls are an almost pure-white stone that I don’t recognize but whose smooth, unbroken surface gleams and softly glows, providing most of the light for the room, and the ceiling is more of the red-brown wood, steeply vaulted ten or so meters above the floor without so much as a single cross-brace. There’s very little in the way of furniture; no tables, no chairs, no couches, just some racks along the walls for shoes and outerwear and some buckets and brushes for some unknown purpose.

We drift along, and I get the itch to pop my Visor open. I don’t, and thinking to myself about how very virtuous that is of me is worth chuckling at, even if nobody else can share the joke because I’m too distracted to explain it. There’s undoubtedly magic in the walls, stars, there’s undoubtedly magic in the roof and the floor too, but it’s not like I’ll be able to understand it in just a glance, and I do want to see the general layout of where we’ll at least notionally be staying.

The foyer opens into a staggeringly vast room. It’s probably forty meters by fifteen meters, or thereabouts, with the same ten-meter-high ceilings as the foyer. It’s almost like three rooms that have had their walls knocked out; it goes from couches and huge, overstuffed chairs around a set of low tables to a formal dining table carved out of one single horrifying beast’s skeleton to another group of low tables, these with thick mats and pillows heaped about. There are shelves between the different sections, low shelves that don’t block line of sight and are small enough that they won’t impede foot traffic; the shelves have everything from tea sets to books to—I squint, doing a doubletake, and laughter pours out of the two women who know me so thoroughly.

I look away from the extensive contents of that particular shelf and walk into the kitchen. It’s very much part of the great room, with two-meter-long countertop workstations and then a one-meter gap, repeated five times until the kitchen’s open space ends in a door that turns out to lead to a pantry. A very well-stocked pantry, and the kitchen has a half-dozen very well-stocked coolers and two colossal freezers; if we can trust the food that we’ve been left with, we have months of supplies.

Maybe more impressive than any of the mundane fixtures of the kitchen - of which there are many; heating coils, ventilation, a huge number of cabinets and drawers, pots and pans and a thousand cooking tools and more - is the array of preservation runes etched into the coolers and freezers and across the pantry walls. I can tell that they’re preservation runes because they say so, in the most literal of ways; the glyphs spell it out, spell the actual three-letter root for preservation unambiguously with diacritics made from the energy-storage glyphs.

I realize I’ve gotten distracted despite my best efforts when I feel a pair of strong arms wrap around me, and I lean back into Amber’s chest. I can feel her breath on my neck as she sighs, and the softness of her breasts against my back; a little startled at that, I turn around to pull her into an embrace, savoring the taste and texture of her lips.

“There are five bedrooms,” she says softly, after a brief infinity of distraction. “Beds all sized for two or three.”

“That’s convenient.”

Her lips quirk, but only just, as her hands move to shuck my jacket off, walking me back away from the kitchen. “Sara is inspecting them. I offered her first choice.”

With her body pressed against mine and our lips meeting, I don’t ask why, nor what she got in return; a few moments later, the backs of my knees hit the edge of the couch, and Amber makes her intention clear enough.

She’s all softness afterwards, and I am too, basking in the afterglow and kissing languidly. We hadn’t really taken enough time for even a slight sheen of sweat, but the smell of her is second only to the feel of her in filling my senses, and I’d be content to lie back on the couch’s profusion of pillows for hours.

Then again, that would mean missing Lily’s something interesting deadline, and that thought has my brain dredging up the look of her and the feelings she evoked in me so easily. I kiss Amber, filling my mind with her instead, with the Paladin sworn to me, whose companionship I no longer had it in me to resent.

It’s imperfectly successful, and Amber can tell.

“Vulgar for your thoughts?”

I blink. “You, the objections I had to this that I can hardly remember, presumably a Vulgar is a low-denomination unit of currency but I haven’t actually asked anything about currencies and economic structure.” I breathe in, sigh half of it out. “And Lily.” It’s an awkward admission, and I can feel my face flush in a mixture of emotions that’s mostly shame or guilt.

“She did get to you quite dramatically.”

A hot wash of emotions hits me, barely muted by the post-coital lassitude. I’m eighty percent of the way to starting an apology when I look at her face; she’s smirking, and she leans down to kiss me with a credible degree of passion. “You don’t mind? I’ve been trying not to think about it ever since we walked out the door. Since well before we walked out the door, actually, because every time she’d do the thing I was worried that you were…” I trail off, flushing again under her smirk. “You don’t mind. Why not?”

Amber shrugs, which does deeply distracting things made even more distracting by our positions, with her still mostly straddling my lap. Her arms work their way around behind my head, holding me close, and her voice is a murmur into my scalp. “For one, I am aware, my lord, of what skills comprise your core domain of excellence, and which do not. And for another, watching her toy with you was… fascinating.”

“I’d ask what that even means, but I can guess.” I laugh, wrapping my arms around her. “So it makes you happy that I’m basically oobleck, that’s convenient. Sometimes I forget how wildly problematic it is that the Temple made you, and the role I played in that, and then something like this happens, or you say something like that.”

“The Temple?”

I can hear the eyebrow-quirk in her voice. It’s a note of whimsy and a note of please explain, and it somehow makes me relax a little, smiling at how she dodged most of what I’d said. “Well, I mean, I was literally unconscious at the time.”

“I do recall.”

Her hand rubs my neck and shoulders, and I more or less melt into her, sighing. “You know, way back on the day we first met…”

“All those few days ago.”

“Hey, few but long.” She snorts in laughter, and I soldier on. “After I flashed the second wave in that first room we cleared together, I never did give you an explanation.”

“No, and I forgive you your distraction; I had one from Zidanya, in time.”

Her smile stirs something predictable in me, and I shake my head. “My distraction? It was your demanded forfeit when you won us the fight.”

“You were beautiful. When you turned a room of mana into a lightning storm, when you gave your all to fight a woman who could break you with one punch, when even broken so in body your eyes were hungry for me.” Her fingers tilt my chin up, and she kisses me. “Strength against strength, softness against softness. I know you meant to mock yourself, but you will not find me to be the only woman attracted to the totality of you.”

“You know what oobleck is?” I giggle despite myself, kissing her. “This is ridiculous.”

“Adam, how would I not know? It’s nothing but starch in water! Do give us some degree of grace; we played with it as children. Anyone who cooked a stew has.”

She rolls her eyes at me, and I start laughing. The laughter lasts long enough that it starts to worry me and probably her, too, but I get a grip before it starts to turn into a fit of some sort, kissing the nascent worry off of her face.

I worry that I’m getting used to her, to us, faster than even my normally messed up, fixation-prone personality would explain. But that’s a worry for later, as my hands work their way around to her flat belly and the rough ridges of her muscles before working up again.

If our audience with Lily left Amber’s rockets firing, well, she wasn’t the only one, and any misgivings and reservations I have are left aside as we lose ourselves in each other again.