“I don’t know if I would say eldritch,” says Pal, though given some of what Gideon has told him of Cytherea’s state after his explosion, maybe the descriptor isn’t too far off. “But I’ve had experience with what one might call the cunning interrogation of a powerful and ostensibly immortal creature. I met her whilst she was pretending to be someone else. We had a rather intense confrontation about it.”

Pal squints at the middle distance. “It’s a long story.”

A crazy all-powerful necromancer killed my girlfriend and a bunch of other nice people because she was mad at God, so I blew her up, is not actually that long of a story.