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“A hundred percent failure rate,” Varka sighs, shaking his head. “Are us Knights really so defenseless?”
Lohen just smiles. He flips his switchblade in his hand, catching the blade between his fingers like a sheet of paper. “Oh, certainly not. The Knights are great against monsters. It’s just that people like me are a different sort of monster entirely.”
It is, in theory, the perfect line to kick things off. Lohen pictures it unfolding just right: he delivers the dramatic line, and then Varka looks impressed and says, Welcome to the team, and shakes his hand. And then Lohen will suggest a toast with the poisoned beer, and then Varka will drink it and Lohen will get to deliver his final, even more dramatic line. He’s been workshopping it, and the best one so far is, Monsters like me ought to stay in your nightmares. Which is kind of cheesy. Maybe he’ll just let himself improv when the time comes.
But that doesn’t happen. Instead—
Varka tips his head back and laughs.
Lohen’s brain grinds to a halt.
“Y’know, you remind me of a guy,” says Varka. “You ever heard of Venti? Little bard who’s always drunk off his ass.”
Lohen blinks rapidly. “What?”
Varka waves his hand, still holding the tankard. “He’s got that dramatic rhetoric too. Real classy, when he’s not plastered on the sidewalk.”
“I do not have dramatic rhetoric,” says Lohen, appalled. “I’m—I’m not a drunk bard. I’m dangerous.”
“Uh huh,” says Varka.
Lohen stands back from the desk and crosses his arms. “Don’t underestimate me. Did you forget that your very own Knights did the same, and fell on their own swords?”
In response, Varka puts his hands on the desk and stands. The sun behind him makes his silhouette sharp. At his full height, he’s nearly twice as tall as Lohen. The whole effect is intimidating. Thrilling.
“I think you’re the one forgetting,” says Varka, “that I’m the Grandmaster for a reason.”
He lifts the tankard.
Lohen’s heart roars in his ears. Yes. Yes. This is the battle he’s been wanting. This is the excitement he’s been after. This is exactly how he wants things to go. This is—
Varka downs a quarter of the tankard in a single sip. He slams the mug down on the table. Then he looks Lohen in the eyes and smiles. He doesn’t collapse. Doesn’t sway. Doesn’t even blink. In fact, he appears entirely unaffected.
—not perfect. This is not perfect at all. What the hell?
“Poison my beer all you like,” Varka says, grinning ear to ear. He leans in over the table. “I think you’ll find that the Grandmaster isn’t so easily bested.”
“Oh,” says Lohen. Slowly, he smiles. “Don’t tell me this is an invitation.”
“Take it however you want, Junior Captain Lohen.”
Then Varka reaches out and offers his hand to shake. His grip is firm, and when he lets go, Lohen’s hand feels too warm.
In hindsight, this is where it all started going wrong.
***
So the poison in the glass was too obvious. No problem. Lohen is crafty. He’s had to be to survive—not everyone has the luxury of being built like a bear. Anyway, he digresses. It’s not like drinks are the only place to put poison. Cue plan number two.
It’s a simple affair. Lohen isn’t the best cook in the world, but he’s a fair hand at baking, since it’s so formulaic. Like brewing poison, or making explosives. All he has to do is measure stuff and cackle maniacally while it’s in the oven, and then boom. Perfect baked goods. For this first attempt, he decides to pull out his finest, most impressive recipe: macarons.
“Surprise!” says Lohen, when he waltzes into the Grandmaster’s office.
Varka looks up from whatever the hell he’s doing. “Oh! Lohen, I didn’t expect you.”
“Yeah, that’s why I said surprise,” Lohen says. “Anyway…” He pulls out the tray of macarons. There are six of them, arranged perfectly to give the impression of carelessness while putting one of them prominently on display.
It’s like a card trick. Giving the illusion of choice, but drawing the eye to one specific candidate, so it’s hardly a choice at all.
“Wow,” says Varka, sounding appropriately impressed. “Where’d you get these?”
Lohen’s practiced this many times in the mirror. He puts on his best bashful face. “Oh, Grandmaster! You don’t need to flatter me. I know they’re a bit amateur—I’m sure a real baker would have nothing but criticism for me.”
Varka raises his eyebrows. “You made these?”
Lohen nods.
“Wow! Great work.” He leans in closer, examining the different macarons. “They’re all different colors. Are there six different flavors?”
And now it’s his time to shine. Lohen smiles. “Yes. There’s lemon, vanilla, caramel, coffee… See, the coffee one’s the darker brown. That one’s sunsettia, and the green one is mint.”
The green one is not mint. The green one is poisoned with enough tranquilizer to stun a sumpter beast. Lohen knows—he tried one of them himself, and was out cold for a solid twenty hours. He couldn't even call in sick to work. Amber showed up at his apartment to check on him and was greeted with his practically-dead body. She made him take an extra day off because she was so alarmed.
No matter how strong Varka is, he won’t be getting out unscathed from that.
Lohen doesn’t push. He’s done his work. He’s arranged the plate perfectly to put the “mint” macaron on display. He’s introduced its flavor and sparked some intrigue. He’s ready. Hook, line…
“You know, I think I’ll try the vanilla one,” says Varka.
Lohen’s hand twitches. The vanilla? Really? “Surely you want something more flavorful,” he tries, smiling a little too aggressively. “I worked so hard on them.”
“Can’t go wrong with simplicity.”
With that, Varka takes the vanilla macaron. The unpoisoned vanilla macaron. And then he looks right at Lohen and smiles as he takes a bite.
Fuck.
“Damn, that’s good. If you can bake like this, what the hell are you doing with the Knights?”
Trying and failing to poison their grand master. “Ah, I don’t really have baking experience,” says Lohen, fake bashful again. “The food and safety regulations in Mondstadt are a bit extreme for me. I think it’d limit my freedom to bake professionally.”
“Because you couldn't poison them,” Varka agrees.
Lohen smiles. Of course he knew. “Mm. Exactly.”
“It’s the green one, right?”
“Yep,” Lohen says, beaming. He’s honestly kind of thrilled to be found out. Almost as satisfying as actually poisoning him. “It’s not mint at all. The flavor is actually twenty milliliters of Inazuman electro water tranquilizers.”
“Barbatos give me strength,” Varka mutters at the ceiling. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s a flavor I need to experience.”
“Don’t knock it ‘til you try it.”
Varka laughs. “Next time, put it in the caramel one. Sucrose says caramel has such a strong sweetness that it can disguise most medicines. That way children can take them.”
Lohen’s smile stretches wider. “You’re suggesting I treat you like a belligerent child who won’t take their medicine?”
Varka shrugs. “I’m not exactly keen to get poisoned, so.”
Lohen hums. “Well,” he says sweetly. “I’m very glad you enjoyed the macarons. Rest assured, I’ll make you more whenever your heart desires.”
Varka grins and polishes off the rest of the vanilla macaron. “You know what? Bring these again, and I’ll have you promoted to Vice Captain.”
The next week Lohen brings him a batch of entirely vanilla macarons, no poison. Varka beams and signs the promotion paperwork right there, macaron in one hand and pen in the other. That’s the thing about Varka—he really does mean what he says.
Poor guy, Lohen thinks. He has no idea what’s coming for him.
***
Obviously he’d be suspicious if Lohen cooked something himself. That only makes sense. But what if it wasn’t something he cooked himself?
Lohen learns from his mistakes. He waits for the next official Knights holiday—Aster Day, the Dandelion Knight of old’s birthday, which people now mostly use as an excuse to go outside and have a big barbecue—and then he acts.
The Knights have a potluck in the training courtyard to celebrate. Lohen helps Jean set up, just to show face. Amber brings about two hundred pounds of shepherd’s pie, which she makes Eula and Noelle help her carry. Sucrose makes some suspicious green thing. When Jean asks her what it is, she squeaks and runs away.
Lohen doesn’t make anything. Instead he buys a tray of Good Hunter takeout sandwiches.
Halfway through the celebration, Varka does his big toast and makes his Aster Day speech. He then has a no-weapons duel with Noelle, who manages to get him in a headlock for the first round but loses the subsequent two rounds. When Varka’s finally done, he leans against a table off to the side.
This is Lohen’s perfect opportunity. He walks up very casually, sandwich in hand.
“Hey,” says Varka, winded. “Did you see that? Whew! Noelle’s punches aren’t for the faint of heart, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Especially not for a weak little thing like me,” Lohen agrees, extra sweetly.
Varka snorts. “Ah, don’t give me that bullshit. I know damn well you’ve killed just as many monsters as the rest of us.”
Lohen makes no comment.
“Except maybe Albedo,” says Varka thoughtfully. “He’s killed more than any of us, but he also brings things back to life with alchemy. I think his kill count might technically be negative.”
“Even so, I don’t think I want to get on his bad side.”
Varka laughs his big laugh. He slings his arm around Lohen’s shoulders. “Smart! You know your stuff already.”
His arm is heavy and very warm. Lohen doesn’t know how to shrug it off, or maybe can’t bring himself to. He clears his throat and conspicuously takes a bite of the sandwich.
“Oh, right,” says Varka. He finally lifts his stupidly big arm. “I forgot there were Good Hunter sandwiches! Are they the bacon ones? Man, those are my favorite.”
“Really?” says Lohen, who absolutely knew this already. He spied on Varka ordering breakfast for a week straight to get that information. He probably could have just asked, but the spying was more for enrichment than actual espionage. It was very fun. “Oh, that’s great. I’ll go get you one, if you want.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Score! Lohen heads for the potluck table. All he has to do is get a sandwich, discreetly poison the sauce, and then deliver it to Varka. The tray itself isn’t poisoned. It’s restaurant-prepared. Lohen’s even eating one of them himself. It’s the least suspicious food item here. Varka will never see it coming.
He brings the sandwich back, complete with a small layer of poisoned sauce on the bun. “Tada,” he says, smiling. “One Good Hunter bacon sandwich!”
Varka looks at him evenly. He smiles, slow and deliberate. “You know what? I think I’ll have some of that shepherd’s pie, actually.”
Lohen falters. He puts on a pout. “Aren’t these your favorite?”
“Not when they’ve got poison in them.”
“They don’t have poison in them,” Lohen says, which is true. Only one of them has poison in it. “Everyone’s been eating from the tray. I’m even eating one. See?”
“Mm. Take a bite of mine, then.”
Damn. Clocked. “Fine,” says Lohen. He takes a large bite of Varka’s sandwich.
Nothing happens for a few seconds. Varka stares at him and frowns a little. “Ah. I’m so sorry for assuming the worst. Was I wrong?”
“Nope,” says Lohen cheerfully. “It’s poisoned. I’m going to pass out very soon.”
Varka blinks several times. “You—huh?”
“Right about now,” Lohen informs him, and then he faints forward directly onto Varka’s chest.
***
By this point, Lohen has concluded that Varka is a worthy opponent. A worthy opponent can’t always be beaten by playing the game normally. No—the only surefire way to beat them is to cheat.
Maybe he’s been going about this all wrong. Maybe he’s been trying to get Varka to choose the poison, when what he needs is to have no choice at all.
The occasion doesn’t arrive for a while. They’ve established that Varka is strong enough to tank a little poison, smart enough to avoid a larger amount. But he’s only human. Lohen is patient. He can wait.
It takes almost five weeks, but at last it finally happens: Varka gets sick.
Lohen knows where Varka lives. He’s probably not supposed to know that, but life would be boring without a little risk, right? Anyway, he shows up at Varka’s house with all the usual suspects: soup, hot water bags, an eye mask, and, of course, medicine.
He doesn’t bother knocking. Instead he scales the wall to the second floor and goes in through the open bathroom window.
“Hellooo,” he announces, making his voice a bit gentle. Varka might have a headache, and he’d hate to exacerbate it. “Grandmaster? Are you home?”
Varka groans in what passes for agreement. “Bedroom.”
Lohen doesn’t know the exact floor plan of his house—he wasn’t able to figure that out from his stalking sessions—but he knows where the bedroom is, at least, so he makes his way there. Varka’s lying in bed, hand on his forehead, looking quite ill.
“Wow,” Lohen says. It’s almost baffling to see their Grandmaster brought low by something as pedestrian as illness. “You’re mortal after all.”
Varka laughs into a cough. “Uh huh. Guess bein’ a little stronger than usual doesn’t mean much in the long run.”
“Well, don’t you worry about that,” Lohen says, smiling sweetly. “I heard you weren’t feeling well, so I’m here to help you recover.” He pulls his backpack off and starts unpacking. “See, I brought you this thermos of soup, and a cold eye mask for your fever, and a hot water bag in case you have any pain in your back or chest. And some cold medicine, of course.”
He pulls out the bottle of pills. They’re branded. He made sure to make it as reputable as possible. He even got pill cases from Sucrose. They’re legit. They’re so legit.
And Varka is sick out of his mind. He’s the perfect victim.
Varka makes a vague sound of assent. “Cold eye mask sounds perfect right now. M’not hungry, though.”
Lohen obediently places the mask over his eyes, like the perfect doting subordinate. “At least take some medicine,” he pleads, making his eyes big and pathetic. Then he remembers that Varka has an eye mask on, and can’t see him. Aw, man. He did all that acting for nothing. “It’ll help, I promise.”
Varka’s shoulders shake.
That doesn’t make sense. Why would he be doing that? Is this actually more serious than a cold? Lohen had been banking on him only being slightly ill. He’d feel shitty if he took advantage of an actual, serious illness like this…
And then he realizes Varka’s shoulders are shaking because he’s laughing.
Lohen bristles. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Me?” Varka asks. He smiles through a wince. “What’s the matter with you? Trying to kick a sick man while he’s down?”
“Well, I’m not giving you the soup, so you don’t have to worry about poison,” Lohen says, trying to sound reassuring. He’s only ever given poison in food before. Surely Varka will take this as a reasonable explanation, and—
“Sucrose told me you asked for pill capsules.”
Fuck. He knew he shouldn’t have trusted her. At least he has some dirt on her in return. “Well, she’s been buying human bones. So there.”
“Oh. I know about that,” says Varka.
Lohen blinks. He does? “But isn’t that, like. Nefarious?”
“If I had a problem with nefarious people, do you think I’d have hired you?”
“Huh,” Lohen says. That’s actually an extremely fair point. “Well, I’m different. I’m not trying to get your bones when you die.”
“Right. You’re just trying to poison me while I’m already sick.”
Lohen pouts and leans against the bed. “When you put it like that, it sounds mean.”
Varka laugh-groans into his pillow. “How’d you know where I live, anyway? And how’d you get into the house? I’m sure the door’s locked.”
“Never mind that,” says Lohen quickly.
Varka somehow manages to give him a judgmental look from underneath the eye mask.
“…I scaled the wall and came in through your bathroom window. Also, I may have followed you home from the Angel’s Share. Three times. Or four, I don’t remember. And I may have also taken your bathrobe.”
Varka pulls down the eye mask. He looks at him. Then he sighs and puts it back on. “Never mind. I’m going to sleep now.”
“If you want something to help you sleep, I’ve got pills that’ll do the trick real nicely,” says Lohen sweetly. “These will knock you out real good.”
Varka laughs. “You bastard,” he says, though it sounds nothing but fond. “You’ll have to do better than that, and you know it.”
“Hm,” Lohen says. Maybe they understand each other better than he thought.
***
Here’s the thing: poison doesn’t have to be ingested, does it?
Lohen wasn’t lying about the bathrobe. He’s still not entirely sure why he stole it in the first place. All he knows is it was lying in the bathroom, right next to the open window, taunting him. And he’s only a man, really. Who doesn’t want to steal a bathrobe, right?
But it’s all clear now. He stole that bathrobe for a reason. He was on a divine mission.
Said divine mission involves coming to Varka’s office the afternoon that he returns from his sick leave, bathrobe folded in his hands. “Welcome back, Grandmaster. I’m glad to see you’ve recovered.”
Varka grins at him. “No thanks to you, yeah?”
Lohen puts on his bashful face. “Well, that’s all behind us now. It was hardly sporting of me to try and poison you when you were indisposed, anyway.”
Varka leans back in his chair, a casual display of strength. “And here I thought you were a monster.” His smile reaches his eyes, somehow at once amused and threatening. “Monsters don’t play by the rulers, do they?”
“Hardly,” Lohen agrees. “But you know me, Grandmaster. I’m an angel.”
Varka laughs his cackling laugh. It’s a full-body affair: chest heaving, throat tipped back, shoulders curved gently in on themselves. Lohen watches his shirt strain to stay in place and tries not to grin too hard. Oh, he’s looking forward to this.
“Anyway,” Lohen says, extra sweet. “I’ve brought back your bathrobe to apologize.”
Varka looks at him like he knows he’s full of shit. “Have you?”
“Why would you ever doubt me, Grandmaster?”
Varka gives him a look.
Okay, that’s so fair. Lohen can hardly concede defeat, though, so he just holds out the robe like a lifeline. “See? I even washed and folded it.” Well, he washed it with skin-irritating toxins, and folded it precisely so that when he’s holding it, his own hands will be just fine. But Varka doesn’t need to know that. “Aren’t I nice?”
“Very,” says Varka. “A little too nice. You’ve never apologized to me before.”
“Well, this was an extenuating circumstance.”
“Hm.” Varka takes the bathrobe and examines it. “Hmmm.”
Lohen inhales. His heart rate is through the roof. Adrenaline. The challenge. It’s all coming back to him.
They usually describe his kind—Imunlaukr’s kind—as fighters, but Lohen thinks they’ve got it all wrong. It’s not the fight he gets excited for. It’s the anticipation. The gamble. He comes from a long line of gamblers. It’s only that instead of money, his kind likes to gamble with lives. Others’s lives? Their own? What does it matter? As long as something big enough is on the line, they’re in.
Lohen is no different. It’s just that his gamble is longer. Delayed gratification, and all that.
This is it, he thinks. This is the payoff he’s been waiting for all this time.
And then Varka puts his nose into the fabric.
Shit. He’s onto him. The one single flaw in Lohen’s plan is that the irritant he washed the robe with has a strong smell. He tried to mask the scent by drying the robe right above Flora’s flower stand, but alas. Foiled once again.
Varka holds the robe. He raises one eyebrow at Lohen.
“Shit,” Lohen says, too impressed to bother putting up a facade. “You’re good.”
Varka laughs. He sets the robe down, still folded just right so that it’s safe to hold. “I never had to be, before you came around,” he says. “No knight in their right mind would try to assassinate their own Grandmaster.”
Lohen leans in and grins ear to ear. “Are you calling me crazy?”
“Your words, not mine.”
“You wound me.”
Varka stretches his arms behind his head, relaxed. “You’re no crazier than the rest of us. If you think you’re the worst of the lot, just watch Kaeya complete a sabotage mission. Or let Lisa see you damage a library book. Or talk to Albedo about basically anything.”
Lohen laughs. This time it’s less maniacal, like he’s starting to go soft. “You know, it’s strange. I spent so long thinking there was nowhere I belonged.”
Varka’s grin softens into something much milder. “Yeah,” he says, looking out the window. “I think that’s true for a lot of the Knights.”
“What about you?”
Varka’s eyes go a little wistful. He’s silent for a while. At last he says, “It’s different for me. I never thought about finding a place to belong. I always thought it was more about creating one. So that’s what I did.” Here he turns back and looks at Lohen. “See? It even worked on you, didn’t it?”
“Huh,” says Lohen. And sure enough, he does feel like he belongs here. “But I didn’t join the Knights to find a home, or anything. I was just bored.”
Varka smiles like he knows something Lohen doesn’t. “And yet here we are.”
“Yeah,” says Lohen, quiet. Funny how these things go. “I guess we are.”
***
He doesn’t even mean to do it, when it finally happens. He makes the Ajilenakh tart exactly as intended. The crust is flaky, the filling is rich, and the top is perfectly piped. There’s not even any poison in it. It’s a perfectly ordinary, genuinely unremarkable dessert.
And yet when Varka takes a bite, he immediately turns pale and chokes.
Lohen blinks rapidly. “Shit, shit, shit—” His hands move uselessly at his sides. “What the hell’s happening? Are you okay?”
In response, Varka grows even paler and starts clawing at his desk.
Okay, well, message received loud and clear. Lohen looks at the tart guiltily one last time, and then swallows his pride. “MEDICAL!” he yells into the hallway. “THE GRANDMASTER NEEDS HELP!”
Jean rushes in immediately and gathers some anemo to help him stop gasping for breath. She calls in her sister, who declares that Varka will have to stay in the hospital overnight while she keeps an eye on him.
“It’s good that you caught it immediately,” Jean says to Lohen. “It could have been very serious if he hadn’t had medical attention quickly.”
Usually this kind of thing would make Lohen disappointed. He’s gambling with a life, and he lost. But this time he just feels relieved. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m glad, too.”
He takes the Ajilenakh tart with him when he leaves. The rest of his own slice tastes like ash in his mouth.
He didn’t poison it. He knows he didn't poison it. It’s not like his body has muscle memory for poison or something, right? He’s not actually losing his mind. Surely Varka just… ate something bad this morning, and it happened to kick in exactly as he was eating the piece of Lohen’s tart! There’s no way he poisoned the pie accidentally. Right…?
Oh, fuck. Maybe he really is going crazy.
***
Lohen can’t sleep that night. Instead, he goes to the hospital.
Varka’s lying unconscious in the hospital bed. Lohen stares at him. Under the gray light of the moon, he looks so strange. Mortal. Fallible. Less like a Grandmaster and more like a man.
Lohen sighs. There’s only one thing to do for his guilt. He doesn’t have to like it, but…
“I’m sorry, Grandmaster,” he whispers. “I don’t—I don’t know what happened. You have to know I didn’t mean it.” He looks up at the church ceiling. “I think I get it now,” he says, even softer. It echoes down to him like a confession. “It was never about the end result, was it? It was always about the process. It was always about making me feel at home.”
He sighs and lays his head down on the hospital side table.
“Forgive me. I don’t know what I did wrong this time. I don’t even know what to apologize for. But forgive me anyway.”
“Well,” Varka rasps. “You could start by apologizing for making a dessert with nuts in it.”
Lohen jolts. “I—you’re awake?”
“Barely.” Varka groans and drags himself upright. “Yeah, I’m awake.”
“I thought you were, like, dead or something.”
“Nope,” Varka says. He props himself against the pillow. “Just resting. Barbara got the stuff out of my system, so I should be fine now. She’s just keeping me here for observation.”
Right. The stuff he had to get out of his system. “I didn’t even poison that one,” Lohen says urgently. “I don’t remember poisoning it. I know I didn’t do it. You have to believe me.”
But instead of looking alarmed, Varka laughs. “I know you didn’t. I’m allergic to Ajilenakh nuts.”
Lohen blinks. “That’s all?”
“What do you mean, that's all? It was super dramatic. I nearly stopped breathing.”
“Yes, but,” says Lohen weakly. “It’s so simple.”
“Like I said, can’t go wrong with simplicity.”
Lohen sighs. Suddenly all the tension bleeds out of his shoulders. He didn’t even know he was worried enough to take a physical toll. Only in the absence of all his stress does he realize how stressed he actually was.
“You look terrible,” Varka says conversationally.
Lohen half-laughs. “You’re the one under observation in the hospital.”
“Point taken.” Varka looks at him more closely. His mouth twitches at the corner, just slightly. “Here,” he says, sliding a glass of water across the counter. “You look like you could use some water.”
He must look really bad, then, if Varka’s offering him water from his own hospital bedside. Lohen gives him a skeptical look.
“It’s good for you,” Varka says, pushing it closer. “It’s got electrolytes and stuff. It’ll help.”
Lohen sighs and takes it. “Well, thanks for looking out for me, I guess.” He takes a long sip of the water. It tastes ever so slightly strange. Maybe that’s the electrolyte stuff Varka was talking about. “Next time, I’ll be sure to make you poisoned desserts without any Ajilenakh nuts. Just regular…” He frowns. “Regular poison. Why’s the room getting warm?”
“Must be a warm night,” Varka says brightly. He’s cheerful. Suspiciously cheerful.
Lohen squints at him.
Ah. The water. The strange-tasting water. It wasn’t water at all. It must have been…
“You didn’t,” Lohen gasps, dizzy but overwhelmingly pleased. “Oh, Grandmaster, you didn’t.”
“You really should think twice about what they give hospital patients to drink.”
“Evidently,” says Lohen, nodding. When he moves his head, the room swims. “Excuse me. I might pass out.” He groans and lays his head down on the bed. “Ugh. I can’t believe I fell for that.”
“Hundred percent failure rate, remember? You’re a real Knight now. You’ve joined the statistic.”
“Damn,” says Lohen. As much as he hates to admit it… “You’re right.” He really is a Knight. He’s failing his own tests. He feels lightheaded. His limbs don’t quite move how he wants them to. This is insane. What did they put in that stupid medicine for Varka? Horse tranquilizer?
“It’s not so bad, once you get used to it,” Varka says. When Lohen’s eyes start to slide out of focus, he swears he sees too much fondness in Varka’s eyes. “Welcome to the team, Lohen.”
“Hhuh,” says Lohen, and then he loses consciousness.
A warm welcome indeed. Maybe this Knights of Favonius thing won’t be so bad, after all.