He dropped into a huge, appropriately overbuilt chair, his retainers flanking him to either side. Zel took the hint, seating herself in turn and kicking her feet up on the table. A brief chuckle emerged from the man-bear, resembling the rumble of distant thunder more than a human sound.

“Good. Now we can talk. I will not keep you in the dark - Jorfr called in a blood-price with me. The boy I remember was hopeless, but he did save my hide once. Pure luck on his part… But a blood-price is a blood-price. He asked me to wait for you to come to me. He said nothing of nudging you in my direction. I have not agreed to his claim yet. I wanted to see for myself that you would be worth the price equivalent to my life saved. I understand why he would call in the token, now.”

The back door opened. The barman slipped in and set a huge pitcher alongside two tankards on the table, then vanished like a ghost whence he came. Kyriak took the pitcher and poured both tankards full, tacitly prompting Zel to drink as he himself took a long sip. The liquid was brownish red, almost akin to dried blood, and smelled of honey mixed with alcohol and other, strangely alchemic compounds. Zel felt her nose raising the alarm about poison, but seeing that her host openly drank the substance, she took a sip as well. It went down smoothly, but symptoms akin to inebriation set in instantaneously. She felt her head turning and balance skewing, and instinctively impelled her body into breaking the foreign substance into its base building blocks to create countermeasures as she would for any poison. A few minutes and half a tankard later, the feeling of inebriation subsided.

Kyriak’s look of curious amusement turned to surprise as he witnessed his guest down the rest of her drink, seemingly unaffected.

“...More?” he asked expectantly.

Zel nodded, holding out her hand. He eagerly poured more, and she drank it, having already prepared an antidote in her second stomach. The strange brew induced its effects through Rubedo-based compounds, making it a simple proposition to neutralize before it could even be absorbed. She could see herself needing to resupply on Viriditas if she ever had to drink a substantial amount of this stuff, however.

“I admit, I may not be a good partner for a drinking contest. Poisons only work on me once,” she grinned after downing the second full tankard. She conveniently omitted the fact she was bolstering her natural defenses with pre-emptive countermeasures. The fact this brew had clearly been devised to deal with a cultivator’s resistance to ethanol as an intoxicant was not lost on her, and she fully intended to enjoy its effects later.

“That means the opposite! I can think of ten people just in my clan that I would like to see drunk under the table. Why, we have legends of a man who could drink an ocean of mead without becoming drunk!” the man-bear laughed, pouring another.

As they drank, more slowly now, his attitude became noticeably less silent.

“You have an advantage. Because you are foreign,” he said.

“I don’t think in the context of your local politics,” Zel guessed. Kyriak nodded, gesturing for his retainer as he drank, grunting.

The retainer elaborated as if translating that grunt: “Many forget that anyone can challenge anyone in a contest of physical prowess. They get caught up in ranking politics too much. Too many are happy to indulge the delusion of er…”

The retainer looked to Kyriak, who grunted again, prompting him to look back to Zel and continue.

“...Irreproachability. They tell themselves that they cannot be challenged by those of lower rank than themselves. They begin to believe the lie after some time. It is not pretty when they get dropped a rank during the Seven Suns Solstice.”

Kyriak finished his tankard, slamming it to the table with a guttural sigh.

“I wanted to tell you this - no matter what others say, anyone can challenge anyone. That was the Revenant King’s intention,” he said, picking the pitcher back up and swirling its contents about as he looked into it.

“Tell me, Kyriak - why do you lift?” she asked. She wanted, needed to know. If anyone had a truly profound personal reason, it had to be him.

Pouring himself some more mead he turned his eyes to her, his expression shifting to that of deep contemplation. His right-hand retainer glanced at the pitcher and slinked off through the back door, presumably to request another.

“For the difficult,” Kyriak nodded.

“For… The difficult?” Zel raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think my Borean is good enough to understand that.”

“He means for the difficult times in the future as well as for the difficulty of lifting,” Kyriak’s left-hand retainer explained. Kyriak nodded in profound agreement, echoing the sentiment: “For the difficult.”

“...I may begin using that phrase as well.”

Once more, Kyriak gave a profound nod. He then echoed Zel’s question: “Why do you lift?”

She shrugged: “I can’t help it. I see something heavy, I want to lift it. I see someone strong-looking, I want to fight them. I see evil, I want to destroy it. I just have this… This urge to impose myself on the world around me.”

The whole time she spoke, Kyriak nodded along.

“You understand,” he said. “The Buhaugs and Ramdalls will hate you because of that. When you lifted the block, that figure… Was it-”

“Yeah.”

“The beast self… And you have it under control?”

“We have an understanding.”

“Good. So there will be no problems when you go to the Spirit Grove.”

A raised eyebrow sufficed to make him explain - or at least, grunt for his retainer to do so in his stead.

“You intend to mend a broken spirit weapon. A ritual site will be needed. Preparations, sacrifices, anything. Kyriak will vouch for you so that you may use the Spirit Grove. It would be a problem if you could not control your Beast Self there. It is a site of power where spirits become manifest.”