"How?"

"Fuck if I know. One of my sisters went into Enchantment specifically with the intention that she was either going to become a legendary archmage herself and crack open his head to find out, or die trying."

Oh good, he'll still have challenges in the future.

Pasenkey is now staring off into space thinking about all the interesting problems involved with reanimating an angel demigod as a lich without her permission.

He doesn't seem to be eating.

"...So, uh, are you in fact the individual in question, because, like, I am genuinely not sure at this point...? And it seems like that's getting awkwarder."

"Hm? Oh. Yes."

"Cool. Word of advice, don't become a ghost." 

"Why would I do that? It doesn't seem as though it would help."

"It doesn't! Lich-Queen Arazni does all the actual running of the country. If your ghost, like, does things, without having been royally pissed off first, I've never heard of it. Like, you strike me as a basically reasonable person! But there is a reason my sister, who is one of the friendliest, most cooperative people I know, jumped straight to magicking his secrets out of him instead of asking nicely. Unfortunately I don't actually know why, except that it prooooobably wasn't on purpose? I think you just, like, died, and it didn't stick. But, like, ghosts aren't even one of the less annoying kinds of undead to be, and even vampires and liches seem like pretty annoying states of being!"

"Oh?" He hasn't had the chance to dissect any vampires or liches yet, thanks to all that nonsense with the civil war.

“Just the normal problems that every undead I’ve heard of has where they stagnate, like, Father was fifth circle when he was turned about a millennium and a half ago and he’s still only sixth circle now. And it’s supposed to fuck with your head in other ways but I have less concrete evidence for that.” Plus, for liches, they tend to lose all their fun soft bits, and Naithrope is so not about that life.

"So you say that even in the future, that hasn't been solved?" He looks almost disappointed. "What was I doing?"

"...Being a ghost, and thus subject to the problem?"

"Before that."

She was sort of hoping to avoid this as long as possible, but oh well, it probably wasn't going to work indefinitely anyway. "Fighting a war with Nex. I don't know what over, just that the two of you got really mad at each other at some point after you both had countries. It went for a very long time and the border area between the two countries is called the Manawastes now." 

Geb does not currently see any particular reason to fight a war with Nex. Nex is an intelligent person.

He shrugs. "I expect I can find something better to do."

"I really hope so but, like, I'm not assuming that the explanation isn't something like the archdevil Geryon forging extremely convincing evidence to each of you that the other was doing something you couldn't not respond to, so like--I think it makes sense to keep an eye out? 'That's dumb, I will simply not be dumb' is probably not the best approach to take when so much of the history of this era has been lost in my time." 

Geb will file that advice in the same place he files all such advice, since it is mostly by and for people who did not reach seventh circle in their twenties.

Geryon is a pretty good answer, though. It's not like there's only two sides, in this war.

He'll make a completely generic mild grunt of acknowledgement.

“I assume there’s been some progress over the past several millennia, though, even if the most important issues haven’t been solved. Unfortunately I won’t be able to cast any of the really interesting necromancy spells I technically know for a few more circles.”

Then she's going to need to go do fantastically dangerous things, isn't she.

"We're going on a dungeon run after breakfast to buy more wands," he says. "Are you coming?"

"--Of course!" 

A dungeon run! Proper adventuring! FINALLY! It's not like she's been wanting to do this since she first met Kexil and got her first spells, or anything.

He nods, and - 

- Refocuses. She is not a person he is talking to right now; she is a part of his team that needs to be optimized to win. What are the concerns on the path to victory? Where might he fail? How might those risks be crushed? What is the first step.

"This is illegal." Pause. There's a second's wait to sink in, like the wait between arrows when an archer reaches into his quiver.

"And dangerous." Pause.

"You will need to obey orders while in the dungeon." Pause.

"Do you understand?"

“—Yes.” She can recognize the shift, the intensity, even if she doesn’t exactly understand the specific things he’s thinking.

And she understands needing to rely on someone in an emergency, and he doesn’t know her. She could tell any of her siblings to do something urgently and they would wait to ask questions until the crisis was over, but she does not have that relationship with this man.

"Have you prepared spells yet? If so, what spells?"