(3rd Person POV)
Ilseveire stared at the man standing a few paces from her bed.
Every part of her was telling her one thing: danger.
It wasn't a thought. It was older than thought. The kind of warning a small animal feels when a shadow passes overhead. The kind of warning princesses were never supposed to feel about a foreign merchant in their own bedchamber.
Arthur smiled. The expression was easy, kind, exactly the sort of polite smile she had seen from him at every reception he had attended in the past few weeks.
"Your Highness, you jest. I'm just the merchant, Arthur Pendragon. You remember me, surely." His tone lightened. "An ordinary man trying to make a living."
Ilseveire's lips parted. "Or — ordinary?" Her voice climbed a half step before she steadied it. "Hmph. Stopping time is what we're calling ordinary now?" She gestured stiffly at the frozen maid beside her bed. "And the part where you claim only the two of us are moving in this entire world? Am I supposed to believe that came from an ordinary man?"
Arthur chuckled. He didn't argue the point.
"And there's more." Her voice was steadier now, but only because she was holding it in place by force. "You knew about the Fragment. You said you cut it down. No one can cut a Fragment of the Goddess of Night. It isn't bound by physical laws. Spells slide off it. Blades pass through it. I know this because I've lived with one inside me since I was a child."
She drew a breath. Her hands were clenched in the sheets without her noticing.
"A man who can do that, and stop the world for the two of us standing in it..." Her voice dropped. "Just who the hell are you?"
Quiet settled over the room.
She had no Fragment to lean on. No cool, untouchable weight at the back of her mind to keep her face still and her voice flat. For the first time in her adult life, every emotion she had was landing fully, with nothing in between to soften it. And what was landing right now was the kind of fear that did not allow pride.
Even if the Fragment had still been with her, she suspected she would have felt the same. There was no version of this moment in which a woman could stand across from a man who had just frozen the world and pretend she was his equal.
It explained the question marks. The ones that had blanketed his profile when she'd used «True Appraisal» on him in the theatre. Of course the spell had failed. It had been trying to read a deity with a tool meant for mortals.
"I can understand the shock, Your Highness." Arthur's voice softened a fraction. "And since we're past the part where I pretend otherwise — I'm not just an ordinary merchant. To be honest with you, I'm a deity."
Ilseveire's mouth fell open.
"You — you're a deity?"
He was amused by the sound she made. He nodded once.
"Yes."
"That's — that's not possible." Her voice was thinner than she meant. "Deities cannot interact with mortals. They cannot. The Origin doesn't allow it. They remain in their Divine Realms — that's the whole arrangement, that's what protects the world. How are you here?"
Her eyes searched his face.
"If you're a god, then you must be an avatar. Or — your body must be a puppet. The way mine was. Something a higher being uses to walk among us. That's the only way this works."
Arthur let the silence stretch a moment before he answered.
"Neither." His voice was level. "I'm not an avatar. I'm not a puppet. I'm a deity, in the flesh, standing in front of you."
She shook her head once before she could stop herself. The motion was almost involuntary.
"However." Arthur's tone shifted slightly. "I'm not from this world. I'm a deity from another world. In your texts, the word would be — Foreign Deity."
Ilseveire's eyes widened beyond what she thought they could.
"A — a deity from another world..."
The phrase belonged to the old archives. Childhood stories her tutors had read to her with the same tone they used for myths. The Lord of the Sun, Solarus. Aegis Eveningstar, Lord of the Evening. Names that had been categorized in the royal library not as history but as speculative theology — closer to fiction than fact, useful for understanding old beliefs and nothing more.
And now one of them was standing six paces from her bed, watching her with mild patience.
"But..." Her voice came out almost a whisper. "From everything I've read, a Foreign Deity shouldn't even be able to enter this world. The Origin wouldn't permit it. How are you possibly...?"
Arthur lifted one shoulder.
"How I got in doesn't really matter. What matters is the reason I'm in this room talking to you." He held her gaze. "Because of you, I've made an enemy of a goddess."
"What...?"
"You see, when I cut the Fragment off you, I didn't just remove a parasite. I crossed the Goddess of Night herself."
Ilseveire studied his face for a long moment.
She had been raised in courts. She knew when she was being given the shape of a request before the request had been spoken out loud. She knew the rhythm of it.
"...What can I do for you?"
She kept her voice low. The loss of the Fragment was, in truth, more of a relief than she could yet admit out loud — but that wasn't the point. The point was the man standing in front of her, and what he had just told her about the trouble he had taken on.
"Name it." Her hands relaxed on the sheets. "Influence. Connections. Resources from the Crown."
Arthur laughed under his breath. It was quiet, almost gentle.
"Do you really think any of those would matter to me? I'm a deity. I just stopped the world."
She swallowed.
'Right. Of course. Those are mortal currencies. He has no use for them.' Her mind moved quickly behind her face. 'But if he had nothing to gain from me, he wouldn't have walked into this room himself. He wouldn't have shown me time stopping. There's something he wants.'
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
'Could it be... he wants what the Goddess of Night wanted? To use me. To spread him through this world. To collect faith.'
She tested it carefully.
"Do you want to use me to spread your worship? To convert people. To gather faith for yourself."
Gods only ever recognized one currency. She knew that much from the temple.
Arthur tilted his head.
"Sharper than I expected." His tone had warmed slightly. "But no. Faith matters to a deity, yes. I'm not lacking in it. I already have people who worship me in my own world. And in others."
Others.
Ilseveire's heart skipped.
The casual way he said it — and in others — made the floor feel uneven beneath her. He hadn't just crossed into one foreign world. He had multiple. He had to be a being far above any god this world had ever known, far above whatever rules the Origin enforced. He had to be at a level where the Origin's reach simply did not catch him anymore.
Beneath the fear that thought brought up, a much smaller and much more dangerous thought began to lift its head.
'A man like this. If I could stand on his side...'
She masked it quickly.
"Then..." Her voice came out level. "What do you want from me? You saved my life from being the goddess's puppet. Aren't you interested in making me yours?"
"No." Arthur shook his head. "I don't want you as a puppet either."
He paused.
"And I can't use you to spread faith for me. I don't belong to this world. Worship here doesn't reach me cleanly."
"Then..."
He met her eyes, and his tone settled into something quieter.
"There is one thing I want from you."
She waited.
"I want you to become a follower of my wife." He did not look away as he said it. "The Goddess of Art and Fate. Firfel."
Ilseveire's mouth opened wider than it had at any point so far in this conversation.
"...Firfel? Your wife is a goddess too?"
Arthur nodded.
"Yes. And if you accept, she's prepared to offer you Divine Blessings that go well past anything the Goddess of Night ever placed inside you."
Ilseveire sat very still as a strange braid of emotions worked through her.
She had spent weeks studying the elven woman at Arthur's side. Cataloguing her. Measuring her. Filing her away as a beautiful mortal with an unusually patient husband.
A wry, almost helpless smile twitched at the corner of her mouth.
'Of course. A deity's wife. What else could she have been.'