About two weeks after they came back from Letrela, Alyson got up to leave the office after one of the servants announced that lunch was almost ready. Iztris, having taken to standing in the corner you couldn’t see in when you first entered the room, stayed there while the king and Alyson left—as far as she was aware, he didn’t even sit down.

Lunch was the quickest meal—more like a snack than anything, but it was seen as something of a symbol of how easy food was to come by in Cheryn—so Miles, still working on schoolwork, simply pushed his books aside while they ate. He welcomed Alyson by waving her over.

“Can you help with my stuff?” Miles asked.

“History?” Alyson guessed. When Miles nodded, she took a seat to his left. “We can go over it after eating; I don’t make any promises, but I can try.”

Miles gave her a little smile, and as soon as Jacob came in decided to ask after stories—he was convinced more happened in Letrela than what actually occurred, so he almost demanded stories whenever both of his siblings were there. Neither of them were quite sure what level of privacy Iztris would prefer in regards to his own grave, so they more-or-less just said that nothing happened.

After lunch, Alyson tried to help Miles; the king opted to take Jacob back to the office with him, and the queen helped clean up a bit before she eventually left the castle. The kind of stuff Miles was going over was things that Alyson knew she should remember, but after a decade of not looking at it the information was gone. She skim-read the pages while Miles tried to find the paper his teacher gave him to keep track of information, trying to remember when she had to do this.

Someone walked into the dining hall after about five minutes—Alyson assumed it was a servant or Jacob until Miles looked up. “Oh! Servant Iztris!”

Alyson looked up and did see the servant god. “I thought you were going to work a little longer,” she noted. “Normally you—supposedly—take your breaks at night.”

“The king and Jacob conspired against me,” Iztris muttered. He started walking over to the table. “They decided I was ‘working too much’ and Jacob practically shoved me out the door—and then put things in front of it so I couldn’t get back inside.”

“You can probably just shove the door open,” Miles cheerfully suggested. “That’s how my door’s broken—Aunt shoved Father into the door when they were little.”

“Alas, I don’t have much physical strength,” Iztris replied. He sat down in the chair to Miles’s right, looking at the little prince. “I was told you needed help with schoolwork. I can stay until they decide to let me back in.”

“You’re really, really old, right?” Miles asked curiously. “Like…Grandmother’s age?”

“I’m older than your grandmother,” Iztris said simply, sighing a bit. “Mentally, at least.”

“I think that’s impossible,” Miles replied bluntly. Alyson chuckled a bit. “Last I checked, she’s still hanging around the vacation castle—and she must’ve lived a long time before that, too. But! If you say you’re older than her, then you must’ve lived through most of this book.”

“Just show me what you need help with,” Iztris said. Alyson knew he was trying to suppress another sigh. Would it be wrong to say that Iztris’s trouble with Miles amused her?

Nonetheless, Miles didn’t notice any annoyance and pointed towards a specific part of the book. “My teacher said I had to know when this person showed up in recordable history,” he said.

Iztris read the page and nodded. “I can help with that.”

Alyson leaned over so she could reread that specific page. “That’s the person who mediated a lot of conflicts—but they always left if the peace talks started getting violent.”

“That was Elsyn,” Iztris said. Alyson looked up at him curiously, while Miles seemed to recognize the name as something mentioned every now and then. “Their original role—technically, it’s still their role—was to promote peace among mortals, as I’ve said before. When they couldn’t prevent conflict, they tried to bring the nations to peace talks.”

“Why leave when it gets dangerous?” Alyson asked. “Very few wars in this area was solved with a document, and a lot of countries were satisfied with fighting until the other needed to retreat—especially when it came to Letrela, and sometimes Cheryn, too.”

Iztris replied while flipping through the book to gauge how much it covered. “When the gods bring a mortal to join them, that new god usually doesn’t have much physical strength—it stops them from creating a nigh-immortal mass murderer. That does, however, mean that beings like the gods—myself and Elsyn included—are more likely to die than kill others.”

“Does that mean all the stories about gods waging war and killing people are wrong?” Miles asked curiously.

“One or two can deal enough damage to kill a person,” Iztris explained, “But precious few can do more than give someone else a paper cut. When you also take into account that these forms are actually easier to stab through, it’s ultimately better for us to avoid fighting.”

“That explains why you were trying to retreat when we ran into people back in Relan,” Alyson noted.

“That, and I don’t trust that you and Jacob can actually fight,” Iztris replied. He looked back at Miles. “All that said, let’s get back to this. I can give most of the instances I know of Elsyn intervening with mortals—you’ll just have to check in the book if I miss any.”

Miles nodded, and Iztris gave the basic scenario for Miles to write down so he could look in the book for more details. Iztris helped for about an hour before leaving to see if the king and Jacob would let him back into the office—considering that he didn’t return, Alyson took over with helping Miles and they got most of his history work done.