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The Tower does not keep time, not in any way that matters.
It keeps routine instead — the soft, inevitable physics of two people who have been in each other’s orbit long enough that even Apocrypha begins to accommodate them. The lamplight pools where it chooses, goldish and thin, over the desk they share. Ink smells like iron and old seaweed. The air tastes faintly of parchment-dust and distant brine, like the realm is trying to remember what a library is supposed to feel like.
Between them, Miraak’s mask lies face-up on the desk.
Not as a warning. Not as a boundary. Just there — an object among other objects: her sharpened quill, a stack of scraped vellum, a dish of powdered charcoal she uses to roughen the surface before she writes, a small pile of practice sheets he insists she keep even when she calls them embarrassing. The mask’s eyes stare at the ceiling.
Lilliandra reaches out without thinking and nudges it a fraction of an inch so her paper sits straight.
Miraak does not flinch. He hasn’t flinched in years over it. He does make a sound in the back of his throat — disapproving in theory, absent in practice — and Lilli’s mouth quirks. “You keep moving it,” he says.
“I keep rescuing my work from your dramatic centerpiece.”
“It’s not dramatic.”
“It’s a horned, golden mask,” Lilli says, dipping her quill with pointed calm. “On a desk.”
“Mm.”
She thinks — briefly, idly — about the first time she dared touch it. How his hands had gone still, how the air had tightened as if the Tower itself held its breath. It’s almost funny now, the distance between that moment and this one. Decades of shared corridors. Decades of arguments that burned hot and cooled into something usable. Decades of him watching her peel back secrets with the same ruthless curiosity she used on everything else until he stopped treating her like a hazard and started treating her like a constant.
Across the desk, Miraak rests his forearms on the stone, hands folded. His posture is lazy in a way that still looks like restraint. His eyes are on her page, not on her face. “Again,” he prompts.
Lilliandra makes a noise that is halfway between a sigh and a threat. “I heard you the first time.”
“And yet,” Miraak replies, without looking up, “your tongue continues to disappoint me.”
“Aren’t you charming.” She twirls the quill between her fingers and sets the tip to the parchment. The word he’s given her this time is one of the short roots — the ones that feel like teeth when she speaks them. She writes it in angular dragon script, strokes sure, corners sharp. She’s gotten good at the shape of the language. The letters come to her almost as easily as her own script.
It’s her mouth that still betrays her.
“Mir,” she says, and she hears the softness in it the moment it leaves her tongue. Too Altmeri. It feels like polishing a blade until it loses its edge.
Miraak’s head tilts a fraction. “No.”
“That was perfectly—”
He taps one finger on the desk once, the motion economical and practiced, one he’s done it a thousand times and still hasn’t gotten bored of being right. “You are caressing it.”
“It’s a syllable,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “Not a lover.”
His gaze lifts, slow, and the amusement there is mild and infuriating. “In this tongue, the difference is often… more than you assume.”
Lilli huffs, resets, and tries again. “Mir.”
“Better.” He doesn’t sound pleased, exactly, but the word lands like a small approval anyway.
Lilli scratches a note in the margin in her own shorthand: harder. flatter. don’t soften. Then, because she is who she is, she adds a tiny star beside it, as if the universe might award her points for tolerating him.
Miraak’s gaze flicks to the star. He says nothing. The corner of his mouth lifts in a way that is not a smile, but is dangerously adjacent to one.
They go on like that: root and root, compound and meaning. He gives her words that taste like weather and violence; she gives him back the script, the sound, the translation. Sometimes she gets it right on the first try. Sometimes he needles her until she wants to throw the ink pot at his head.
It is, in its own strange way, relaxing.
At some point, she shifts, stretching her shoulders, and her fingers brush the mask again. She drags a thumb along the edge of it absently, feeling the ridges, the cold metal, the way the carved surface never quite warms. It sits between them like a third presence — not hostile, not friendly, simply inevitable.
“Careful,” Miraak says, still watching her page. “You’ll smudge ink on it.”
“I’ll improve it.”
“It is not improved by your fingerprints.”
“Everything is improved by my fingerprints.”
This time his gaze does lift, slow, and the look he gives her is mild and infuriating — the look of someone who has learned her well enough to be unsurprised by anything she does. “Again,” he says, like the word is both instruction and verdict.
Lilli huffs, then turns back to the words.
He has her building compounds today. She can see the method, of course. He always thinks in scaffolds: root, root, root, then the structure that makes it useful. He doesn’t teach her Dovahzul like a song. He teaches it like a weapon — which, she supposes, to him it is.
He writes a new root on a scrap and slides it toward her without ceremony.
Lilli copies it, then lifts her gaze. “Meaning?”
“Guide,” he says.
She blinks. “Guide?”
“Aak.” The way he says it makes it sound like a law of nature.
Lilli repeats it automatically, because this is the rhythm they’ve built: he gives, she returns. “Aak.”
His head tilts. “Again.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Again.”
She fixes it, lengthening the vowel until it stops being her and becomes right. “Aaak.”
“Better.”
Lilli rolls her wrist, loosening the tension, and writes it down: aak. Guide. Simple. Useful.
Then she looks back at the page she’s been building all afternoon, the list of roots and compounds marching down in neat rows. Her eye catches mir again — allegiance — sitting in its own line with her margin note about hardness, about not softening. It’s been there for a while, just another piece of the language. Now, with aak newly inked beside it, the two roots seem to lean toward each other like magnets.
There are other words between them. Other lessons. Other compounds he’s made her write a dozen times. But Lilliandra’s mind is not a straight path. It’s a web that catches meaning where it can.
She stares at mir. Allegiance. Then at aak. Guide.
Something inside her gives a small, sharp click — the sound of a lock recognizing its key. Her quill pauses mid-air. Slowly, without meaning to, she whispers, “Mir… aak.”
Like they’ve been waiting for her to notice.
Across the desk, Miraak’s gaze lifts from the page to her face — not sudden, not startled, but alert in the way he gets when she has found a seam in a thing and is about to pull.
The mask lies between them, unmoving, staring at the ceiling.
Lilli’s fingers curl tighter around the quill. She looks back down at the ink, at the roots, at the neat little building blocks of a language, and hears herself say his name again, softer this time, as if tasting it for the first time despite having spoken it for decades.
She should feel triumph.
Instead, the moment the meaning settles — mir, allegiance; aak, guide — something in her chest tightens, as if the language has reached up through her teeth and taken hold of her ribs.
She says it again anyway, because she is herself and cannot resist testing a thing once she’s found it. Slower. Deliberate. “Miraak.”
His eyes lift to hers over the desk. He does not correct her. That, more than anything, is the confirmation. Not a lecture. Not a sharp little no and a tap of his finger against the page to make her refocus. Just the quiet acceptance of her mind digging at the meaning.
She lets a smile show anyway — sharp at the edges, because smiling is safer than admitting the other thing. “That’s… atrocious.”
Miraak doesn’t ask what she means. He already knows. The corner of his mouth tightens, not quite a smile and not quite irritation. “Of course you would insult.”
“I’m not insulting it,” Lilli says, which is a lie, because she is absolutely insulting it. “I’m admiring the craftsmanship. Allegiance guide.” She tilts her head, feigning scholarly solemnity. “You could have at least picked something with teeth.”
His fingers tighten on the edge of the paper. Not enough to crumple it. Just enough to betray that it landed cleanly. Data, her mind supplies, bright and greedy. “You have been speaking this language for over a decade,” he says, dry. “And you use it to mock me.”
“I use it to learn,” she corrects, affronted on principle. “Mocking you is merely a pleasant side effect.”
His gaze flicks to her mouth — quick, habitual, like he’s about to correct her accent out of sheer reflex — then returns to the page instead, as if denying her the satisfaction. “Again,” he says, tone deliberately neutral.
Lilli’s smile widens. “No. You don’t get to hide behind pedagogy. You’re not going to say anything about it?”
“I hear you,” he says flatly.
“That’s not what I meant.”
She taps the roots on the page with one ink-stained finger. Mir. Aak. Neat little building blocks, innocent until assembled into a weapon. “You wrote them down,” she says. “I think you knew I’d catch it.”
“Wrote it for you,” he corrects, like it matters. Like context can dull the point. “Not so you can needle.” His gaze flicks to her quill, then back to the page as if refusing to give her the satisfaction of watching his own name be dissected in her hands.
“Oh, forgive me. I’ll stop behaving like myself.”
His eyes narrow a fraction. “Do not promise what you cannot deliver.”
Lilli huffs a laugh and leans back, letting the motion look casual. The Tower is quieter than usual around them, as if it has settled into their routine too: lesson, argument, correction, return. Lamps tick softly. The air smells of ink and old brine.
Her fingers drift toward the mask on instinct — then pause, and hover, because she doesn’t trust her instincts where that object is concerned. She glances at Miraak instead, gauging him the way she gauges volatile ingredients.
He doesn’t move. So, she slides her hand forward and — slowly, deliberately — hooks her fingers under the edge of the mask.
It’s heavier than it looks. Cold, unyielding metal, ridged and carved and too patient to be called armour. The horns catch the lamplight as she lifts it, turning it in her hands the way she turns ancient tablets: not reverent, exactly, but careful. Studious. As if the right angle might make a hidden inscription confess.
Miraak’s gaze follows her hands, not the mask. That is its own kind of control. Its own kind of trust.
Lilli tips her head, peering at the eye slits. “So,” she says, voice still casual, still almost playful, “is it a title, then? Or is it just a name?”
“A name. A title.” His tone suggests the distinction bores him. “Is there a difference?”
She hums., testing. “Whose?”
The Tower hums softly, as if it approves of the question.
Miraak’s gaze flicks — not to the mask, but to the space just beyond it, like looking directly at it would give away too much. “Mine.”
Lilli turns the mask a fraction, as if weighing the word. “Mm. That wasn’t an answer. That was possession. Though I suppose I should have specified.”
He cannot help the smallest smirk. “They are the same thing, more often than you like to admit.”
“Careful,” she says. “You’re starting to sound like me. I’m asking because I’m curious,” she says, “not because I’m planning to steal it.”
“Curiosity is oft the reason you steal,” he says, and there’s the faintest edge of amusement in it — the kind he pretends he doesn’t own. “Try again with your questioning.”
At the rare offer, she leans forward slightly, mask still in her hands. The cold sinks into her palms. “When did you start being called Miraak,” she asks, “and don’t tell me ‘when I was called it.’ Before the mask—” She lifts it a fraction, just enough to make the metal catch the light. “—or after?”
Miraak goes very still. Not the poised stillness he wears like armour. The other kind. The kind Lilli has learned to recognize as her beginning to poke at subjects preferred untouched.
His eyes meet hers over the hollow eye-slits of the mask. For a moment she has the visceral sense that the object between them is listening. “After,” he says. One word. Clean. Final.
“Ah,” Lilli murmurs, because it’s all she can manage without letting fascination show too plainly.
After. So, the name belongs to the mask as much as it belongs to the man. Or perhaps — worse — it belongs to whatever put the mask on him in the first place.
She turns the mask over in her hands, and her thumb catches the inner ridge where it would have pressed into skin. “So,” she says, careful to keep it light, “who chose it?”
Miraak does not answer at once.
The pause is small — smaller than most people would notice — but Lilli has had uncountable hours across from him to recognize the difference between considering and deciding. His silence now is the latter. His gaze drops to the mask in her hands. Not quite meeting it, not quite avoiding it either.
Lilli’s eyes narrow with interest despite herself. “The Dragon Cult?”
His mouth tightens in something that could almost be a smile if it weren’t so tired. “Of course it was the Cult,” he says, as if her asking had been the only foolish part. As if there had ever been any other answer worth entertaining.
“How?” Lilli asks immediately, because once she has a thread she pulls. “A rite? A decree? Someone simply started saying it until everyone obeyed?”
Miraak’s fingers shift against the paper — an unconscious movement, like he’s anchoring himself to something solid. “A rite,” he says, clipped. Not anger. Disdain. “There are always rites. Rites make obedience feel holy.”
Lilli rotates the mask back toward him, not offering it — just letting it sit between them again, held aloft in her hands like a question made physical. “And you remember it.”
His eyes flick up — sharp, then gone again. A flash of irritation at the assumption, or at himself for making it plausible. “No.”
“No?” she repeats, because she cannot help herself. “You don’t remember the rite where you were—” she gestures vaguely with the mask, the motion half accusation, half incredulous, “—branded into someone else?”
His gaze goes distant for a moment, as if he’s looking past the Tower’s walls and finding only fog. When he speaks again, his voice is slower, each word chosen with care, like stepping across a rotten bridge. “I remember pieces,” he says. “Cold stone. Smoke. Voices. The weight of the mask as it touched my face.” A brief pause. “And the name after. Spoken as if it had always been mine.”
Lilli’s grip tightens on the mask before she can stop it. The metal bites into her fingers. “Convenient,” she scoffs, because she refuses to let the tightening in her throat be seen for what it is.
“It is not convenience,” Miraak says, and he isn’t correcting her pronunciation anymore. “It’s age. This place.” He gives a half shrug.
This place: the Tower that listens, the realm that rewrites, the shelves that shift when tension rises. She has seen it happen with other questions, other topics — how his lived memories sometimes come back too smooth, as if they’ve been copied and recopied until the texture wears away, while the books stay pristine in him like pressed flowers. It’s easy, when he is so sharp in conversation, to forget the hollows. Easy to mistake precision for completeness.
Lilli studies him over the mask. He is ancient; she knows that in the abstract. She knows it the way she knows Apocrypha has no true horizon. But watching him admit to a missing piece — watching him concede that time has taken something and he cannot claw it back — makes the abstract uncomfortably real.
“That is…” she starts and stops before the word horrifying can get out. She settles for something safer. “Unfortunate.”
Miraak’s gaze returns to her, flat and knowing. He sees the dodge. He lets her have it. “The rite’s details are lost,” he says. “Either to time, or to intent. It’s difficult to tell the difference after enough years.”
“You think it was meant to be lost,” Lilli says, and she doesn’t know whether she’s accusing the Cult or this realm.
“I think,” Miraak replies, and now there is something older in it than irritation — something like bitterness refined into clarity — “that the Cult did not name me to honour me. They named me to use me. A function.” His gaze flicks to the mask, then away again, as if looking too directly would give it power. “A mouth for their prayers. A hand to guide others into the shape they wanted.”
Mir. Allegiance.
Aak. Guide.
The roots sit on the page like a trap she can suddenly see.
Lilli lowers the mask slowly, setting it down on the desk with more care than she intends. The metal makes a soft, dull sound against wood — final in a way that feels indecent in a room so full of listening.
“Allegiance Guide,” she murmurs, softer now, less of a joke.
“Yes,” Miraak says. “That is what they chose.”
Lilli swallows down her next question, because the next one is too hungry, too close to possession. Instead, she tries to approach it sideways, the way she always does when she wants to see what he’ll share without forcing him to bleed for it. “So,” she says, letting humour return like armour she can fasten, “under Allegiance Guide, what were you actually doing? Tell me you weren’t giving sermons in a prettier robe.”
Miraak makes a faint sound through his nose — almost a laugh, almost not. “I did not always wear robes.”
“Oh, forgive me. Armour, then. You seem the type.”
His eyes narrow, but the edge has shifted. “You want history or ridicule?”
“Both,” Lilli says promptly.
A pause. Then he exhales — quiet, controlled — and answers in the same plain way he answers all things that still have sharp edges. “I guided,” he says. “I spoke. I interpreted what they wanted from the gods above them and told the people below how to shape themselves into acceptable worship.”
She waits, and for once he gives her more without being forced.
“I taught them which words to use so the dragons would not take offense,” he continues, voice even. “Which offerings pleased. Which prayers were ‘proper.’ I stood between hunger and fear and called it ritual.” His gaze drops to the roots on her page, as if they’re safer than her eyes. “I chose who was allowed to approach. Who spoke. Who was silenced.”
Lilli’s stomach flips, quick and mean.
Not because it surprises her. Because it doesn’t.
Miraak’s tone stays almost conversational, as if describing weather. “And when I proved undeniable in my role, I was used more openly. Sent to settle disputes. To correct tongues. To make devotion look voluntary.” He lifts his eyes back to hers. “I made allegiance look like choice.”
The straight, clean line between that role and the way he sits across from her now is impossible to ignore. Correcting her mouth until she speaks truth the way dragons demand it. Dragging her attention back when she spirals outward. Calling discipline ‘lesson’ because it’s kinder than calling it control. Because the irony tastes like blood: they named him to steer devotion, and he has become — by accident or by inevitability — someone who steadies her.
Lilli hates the thought on principle. Hates that it rings true.
Her lips part on another question — half scholar, half something more possessive — and then close again. So instead, she asks the next thing lightly, as if it’s an afterthought, as if her curiosity is just curiosity and nothing else. “And the name before,” she says, voice careless in the way she gets when she is trying very hard not to be careful, “is that also lost to time?”
She watches him as she speaks — watches for the flinch, the pause, the tell—
For a heartbeat, Miraak only watches her back.
His eyes do not leave hers. No frown. No lecture. No correction to buy himself distance. Just that most irritating kind of honesty — silent, unadorned, offered only as far as he chooses. “It is not lost,” he says. The words land cleanly. Too cleanly. Like he is setting something precious on the table and keeping his palm hovering above it, daring her to reach.
Lilli feels the flare — triumph first, immediate and sharp, then the hungry follow-through that always comes after. So, it’s there. A real thing. A human syllable no one in this realm has heard in millennia.
She smiles, quick and weapon-sharp. “Then tell me.”
“No.”
Of course.
The refusal is so immediate it’s almost reflex, as if he has had centuries to practice saying it in exactly that tone.
Lilli’s brows lift. She forces a laugh, soft and unimpressed. “You’re going to make a hobby of this? Teaching me how words work while hoarding your own?”
Miraak’s expression doesn’t shift. If anything, he looks calmer — like he expected her to press and already decided where the line goes. “You asked whether it is lost,” he says. “Not whether it is yours.”
Lilli’s smile shows teeth. “That’s cute,” Lilli says, and the sweetness in her voice is deliberate. “I’m not asking to carve it into a ring and bind your soul to my finger.”
His eyes narrow a fraction. Not at the joke — at the accuracy behind it. “You do not have to intend a thing for it to become a tool,” he says. “That is your most consistent flaw.”
Lilli’s smile goes brittle. She sits back a little, because she refuses to look like she’s leaning in for anything. “So,” she says, carefully casual, “this is about trust.”
“It’s about power,” he corrects at once, and his tone makes it clear he isn’t interested in being soothed by euphemisms. “True names matter. You know that.”
“I know a hundred theories,” Lilli says, offended despite herself. “And most of them are superstition dressed in grammar.”
“And yet,” Miraak murmurs, and his gaze flicks to the mask between them, “you keep reaching for it as if it will answer for me.”
Lilli’s mouth flattens. She hates that he noticed. She hates that he’s right.
Before she can stop herself, her fingers slide forward and close around the edge of the mask again. This time she doesn’t hesitate. She lifts it, turns it in her hands, thumbs tracing the inner ridge where it would have pressed into skin.
Miraak watches her hands like a hawk. He still doesn’t stop her.
Lilli drags in a breath through her nose and forces her voice steady. “Then explain it to me,” she says, because if she can’t have the name, she can at least have the reasoning. “If it’s not lost and you remember it, why keep it?”
For the first time since she asked, Miraak’s gaze drops.
Not in avoidance. In choice.
He looks at the roots on her page — mir, aak — as if the answer is written there in simpler shapes. As if he has to translate his own history into something that will fit inside a room without breaking it. “The man who carried that name is no longer alive,” he says.
Lilliandra pauses, small and involuntary.
Miraak continues, measured, like he is reciting a fact he has already accepted and does not expect anyone else to soften over. “He died when the mask was placed. When the Cult decided what I was allowed to be.” His eyes lift back to hers. There is no drama in them. No plea for understanding. Only bleak practicality. “I have worn Miraak longer than I ever wore the other. That name belongs to a boy on cold stone. To a person who believed in things I no longer believe in.” A pause, barely there, and then, quieter: “It is not mine.”
The words sit in the air between them like ash.
She forces her face to stay neutral. Forces her body not to soften around the edges of the statement, because softness is a liability and she has spent a lifetime sharpening herself against it. “Names don’t… expire,” Lilli says, because it’s the first argument she can reach for that doesn’t sound like I want it because it’s yours.
“They do,” Miraak replies. “People make them. People can unmake them.”
His gaze flicks to the mask in her hands, and for a heartbeat Lilli sees what he described earlier when she pressed him about the rite: smoke, voices, cold stone. The weight of metal hovering just above skin. A name spoken like a verdict.
“They made this one,” he says quietly. “And I kept it. I took it back by surviving it.” His fingers shift on the paper, a small, controlled motion. “But the other—” He stops, as if the syllables are close enough to taste, and chooses not to. “—the other is not a thing I will hand to anyone as if it can be worn again.”
Lilli’s throat goes tight.
She swallows and reaches for sarcasm like a rope. “So,” she says, arching a brow, “you’re sentimental.”
Miraak’s mouth twitches — almost a smile, almost not. “No.”
“Practical, then.”
“Yes.”
She should set the mask down. Instead, she turns it once more in her hands — slow, thoughtful — then sets it on the desk again with care that is almost conspicuous, horns aligned neatly with the edge of her paper as if tidiness could disguise what she’s feeling.
“And this one is yours,” she says, tapping the page right between the roots she wrote so neatly. “Even if it started as a brand.”
Miraak watches her for a long moment. Something in his expression shifts, subtle as a change in pressure — something that looks, unsettlingly, like choice. “It is mine,” he says, and there is weight in the words that wasn’t there earlier. Not possession. Not defiance.
Claim.
Lilli holds his gaze over the mask, and for a second she doesn’t know what to do with the ugly realization rising in her chest: that Allegiance Guide fits him too well in this room, across this desk, in the quiet way he keeps pulling her toward clarity even when she fights it. Even when she pretends she doesn’t want it.
She sits back, schooling her face into an unimpressed smirk. “Fine,” she says. “Keep your dead name.” The phrase comes out sharper than she intends. Too sharp, a bit cruel. She means it as a shield. It lands like a thrown knife anyway.
Miraak doesn’t flinch. He only lifts two fingers and taps the page once, a teacher’s gesture. A return to routine. An offered exit for both of them. “Again,” he says.
Lilli exhales through her nose, grateful for the permission to retreat into something simple. “Miraak,” she repeats, slower this time — shaping it to her own mouth on purpose, letting the Altmeri edge remain like a thumbprint. A small act of defiance, or perhaps a small act of familiarity dressed as defiance.
He doesn’t correct her.
That should feel like victory.
Instead, it feels like… allowance.
Lilli’s smirk holds for three heartbeats longer than it should. Then it slips, not dramatically, not enough that she couldn’t pretend it never happened at all — just a soft falter at the edge of her mouth.
Across from her, Miraak doesn’t move. He doesn’t pounce on the tell. He doesn’t ask what’s happening behind her eyes. He never does. That, too, is a kind of mercy. A kind of guidance, if she’s being honest in a way she hates.
She looks back down at the page. Mir. Allegiance. Aak. Guide.
It should be ridiculous. It should be nothing but a brand. A label imposed by a cult that understood exactly how to make ownership sound holy.
And yet—
Her gaze drifts, unbidden, to the man across from her.
To the way he sits like a fixed point in a realm made of shifting shelves. To the way he corrects her without humiliating her, again and again, as if her stubbornness is merely a problem to be solved rather than a sin to be punished. To the way he has — infuriatingly — kept showing up for these lessons. Kept giving her structure, words, rules. Kept dragging her focus back when she spirals outward into too many possibilities and calls it research.
Guide, indeed.
Not to allegiance to him — she would bite her own tongue off before admitting to anything that simple — but to allegiance to the work. To survival. To the next breath, the next line, the next decision that doesn’t end with her setting something on fire just to prove she can.
Worse: she hates the quiet little thought that follows, almost tender in its audacity. And he does it anyway, even when he doesn’t have to.
Lilli clears her throat, as if she’s choking on dust instead of an unwanted truth. “You know,” she says, aiming for flippant and landing somewhere close, “if I were you, I would have picked a name with a little more menace.”
Miraak’s eyes narrow a fraction. “Menace is not difficult to achieve,” he says. “It’s also unoriginal.”
“Mm.” She taps the page lightly, a scholar returning to her notes. An excuse for movement. For control. “Says the man whose entire personality is ‘unpleasantly competent.’”
His brow lifts. “You say that as if it is a criticism.”
“It is,” Lilli says, deadpan. “I am forced to work harder just to irritate you.”
A beat. Then the corner of his mouth lifts.
Lilli’s gaze drops to the mask. She reaches out, and this time, without thinking too hard, she picks it up again. Not to interrogate it. Not to provoke him. Just to hold it for a moment, weight in her hands, cold in her palms, as if the object is a fact she is finally allowing herself to touch.
Miraak’s eyes follow the motion, attentive in that precise way of his that feels like a hand at the back of her neck without ever touching.
She sets the mask down between them once more. Not as a boundary. As a shared thing. Then, before she can talk herself out of it, she steals his line, because if she doesn’t keep moving she’ll start feeling. “Again,” she says.
Miraak’s brow lifts. “You are learning.”
“Don’t get arrogant.”
“You have plenty arrogance between the two of us.”
Lilli huffs a laugh — quiet, genuine, and annoyingly warm. It surprises her every time it happens, like finding warm water in a place that shouldn’t contain warmth.
Miraak taps the next root with two fingers. Teacher again. Safe again. “Sahqo,” he says.
Lilli inhales, shapes the sound in her mouth, and says it. “Sahqo.”
“Your vowel is still too kind,” he says, almost offended, as if she’s committing a moral failure by being Altmer in the shape of her tongue.
“I am not kind,” Lilli mutters.
Miraak’s gaze flicks up, catches hers, and for a moment there’s that faint, begrudging glint — approval disguised as insult. “No,” he agrees. “You are not.” It should feel like an insult. It doesn’t. Not from him.
Lilli looks down again, blinks once, and repeats the root with the correct hardness. “Sahqo.”
“Better.” He doesn’t say acceptable. He doesn’t needle. He simply lets the approval stand, small and solid.
She writes it down. Aligns their pages without thinking. The motion brings her knuckles close to the mask again, close enough that the cold brushes her skin.
Miraak doesn’t react. But he notices everything, and she feels it — the attention like a weight, not on her hand, but on the decision beneath it.
Before she can talk herself out of it, she looks up and says his name once more — not as an exercise, not as a translation, not as a jab sharpened into a point. Just the sound of it. Offered without hooks.
“Miraak.”
His gaze holds hers across the desk, across the mask, across the thin space that has been narrowing between them for months. Something shifts in his expression — so small she could deny it if she wanted. A contained stillness, like an animal going alert, not in fear but in recognition.
Then, as if nothing has happened at all, he taps the page again. “Wuth,” he says.
Lilli’s mouth curves, not quite a smirk. Something softer. She lowers her eyes to the ink and repeats the syllable carefully, obedient in a way she will never name.
Between them, the mask sits and listens.