Kairi was absolutely certain she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. Too much had happened, and her mind was spinning with it all. Her master was gone—or more accurately, she, Kairi, was gone from her master. She’d been with the Moonshadow family for almost her entire life, been with Bezdeh almost her entire life. She’d built a place for herself there. It wasn’t a perfect one, she was aware, but things could have been a lot worse.

She was aware there were free humans, out there… trying to survive on the surface, she assumed, dodging monsterkin and living in tiny huts or trees or whatever. But she’d never actually been anywhere but here in the caves of Crian. Hell, she’d never been outside of this specific city. Or… well, she supposed she’d been there and now wherever here was. She actually had no idea where, physically, Khldom’s temple-thing was. She knew, vaguely, that he did have a physical temple where petitioners could go, but she didn’t actually know anyone who ever had.

She stared upwards at the glowing mushrooms framing the too-large bed, which she thought might be about the size of her bedroom. Her mistress had been punished for her sins by the god of justice. By her god, by their god. Kairi had always paid lip service to Khldom, had dutifully recited her blessings before every case and after filing her papers. She had worshipped him in the same kind of cheerful, thoughtless manner as she approached most things that weren’t the law firm. He was a source of cultural comfort, like pickled mushrooms or p’han nero with a thin spread of garum, like her simple slave’s robe that made her invisible in the marketplace.

Kairi had watched him stare into the eyes of her crying, trembling mistress; she had watched the tears that streaked her owner’s black cheeks turn red with blood.

Kairi pulled the excessively warm and soft blankets (plural, for some unfathomable reason) tighter around herself. Not cold, but shivering.

Her mistress was gone, and she was here, and now she had to figure out what to be next.

With all this going on in her head, it was obvious she wouldn’t be able to sleep, which was why Kairi was extremely surprised when she woke up.

The room was dark, and she groped idly for the candle she kept by the side of her bed. It was, of course, not there, because this was not her bed. However, it didn’t matter, because the room was beginning to gently light itself.

Right. The room. The mushrooms. Which magically responded to her desires. Because god said so.

She stopped groping, and considered rolling over and becoming unconscious again, which seemed easier. However, the terrified fog and confused exhaustion that had followed her out of the courtroom had faded with a good shift’s sleep. Or what she assumed was a good shift’s sleep. Khldom had neglected to put any form of time-telling device in here with her, so it could have been an hour’s nap or a full work and rest shift combined, for all she knew.

She supposed it didn’t matter. There was nothing for her to do here.

The thought made her uncomfortable. There had never been nothing for her to do, even on days off. Something always needed tending to. But her old life was over now, and her new life had yet to be born, or something similarly melodramatic. She suspected she was being very silly, but she felt melodramatic at the moment. Everything was too absurd. She was just a slave; the most interesting thing about her was her species. Who would even think up a bizarre scenario like this? And yet she couldn’t do anything else but face the reality.

When Khldom’s friend or colleague or follower or whatever arrived, she’d be whisked away to a new life, which didn’t sound all bad. But the idea of being away from the underground made her feel dizzy and sick. But, she countered her own counter, it wasn’t like her opinion or thoughts on the matter had anything to do with reality. It would happen whether she dreaded it or not, just like everything that had ever happened or ever would happen.

So, if she stopped concerning herself with what just happened, and stopped concerning herself with what was going to happen, what was she left with right now ?

The situation right now, as she understood it, was that she was being temporarily housed in a magical room in a temple to Khldom, god of justice. This was to protect her… to protect her from her mistress. No, her mistress’s state was… unknown, but bad. Maybe dead. So her mistress’s next of kin, which was her mother. Oh. Oh, right, yeah, okay, that made sense now. Her mistress’s mother was a very scary woman, in traditional dark elf matriarch fashion, and Kairi would not be looked so kindly on, having kind of, uh, directly caused her mistress to get obliterated by a god. And in front of a crowd! The family name would be recovering from this one for a while…

So she was here, instead. She looked around the room again, which somehow felt even larger from the bed. There was a chest of drawers, a desk, what looked suspiciously like a fainting couch, and more comfortable seating than was really justified for a room meant to house one person. She could only sit on one chair at a time. But the whole room was excessive. There were bookshelves by the desk and chairs, but also here by the bed, inset into the bed frame itself.

She had time to kill, and she was stuck in a room with a big comfy bed and books. Reasonably, there was only one thing to do. She grabbed one at random.

It was a romance novel. Kairi wrinkled her nose, set it aside, and grabbed another one. This was a law book, which was infinitely better and more interesting, although them being shelved next to each other was a nightmare. She examined it, and realized it was a law book for a completely different jurisdiction, which was pretty wild because there was only one jurisdiction in underground Crian. She was aware that the weirdos who lived on the surface had their own legal system out of necessity, but the only real Crian was underground. This was for Vieilile. She’d never seen a law book for Vieilile, or any of the other associated dark elf kingdoms. They weren’t really relevant to her.

But, she supposed, if she was going to be going elsewhere, it might be. She could hardly stay in Crian, she supposed. Another dark elf kingdom would be easier to adjust to, surely? And she didn’t really have any marketable skills other than being a well-trained house and secretarial/law slave. Kairi chewed on her bottom lip, considering. It wasn’t the worst idea. And this was at least something to read.

And so Kairi read, and read. She moved around on the bed, flopping this way and that. She figured out how to brighten just the mushrooms directly over head, and got distracted for a bit making them change brightness level on purpose and individually. She knew it was childish and silly, but couldn’t help it. She didn’t think she’d be here for very long, and it wasn’t like “magical mushrooms I can control with my mind thanks to a god” was going to be a feature in her life again. Surely she could be forgiven for a little childishness.

But reading law tomes, while interesting and engaging, was problematic in its own way. She kept forgetting where she was, looking up, and remembering. Remembering everything. She wasn’t back home, and she was never going to be back home and she couldn’t even think about it long enough to consider how she felt about that. It was just a big screaming abyss that she refused to look into.

She was in the process of bouncing between existential dread and trying to focus on court manuscripts when something appeared by the door. She wouldn’t have noticed, except for the fact it arrived with an audible ‘ding!’, which startled her so badly she jumped and probably would have fallen off the bed if it weren’t so unreasonably large. As it was, she just flailed around uselessly, and then squirmed around in the bed until she gathered enough traction to pull herself towards the door.

It was a plate of food.

Of course! Of course the food magically appeared in the supernatural god-made mushroom room! The MushRoom! Of course. Kairi was so far outside the realm of belief that she ’d come full circle and this seemed fine and normal. She slipped off the bed for the first time since she’d woken up and wandered over to the dish. She had to pick it up with both hands; it was heavy with food. She had thought maybe she wouldn’t be able to eat; she hadn’t felt an ounce of hunger up until now. But the smell hit her nose and she was suddenly salivating.

She placed it on the desk and stopped to take it in. There was toasted bread and fried rock snake eggs and slices of meat which, upon examination, she realized must be strips of nox boar belly, which she’d prepared before but never eaten. There were multiple cheeses, hard and soft, and a dull knife with which to spread it onto the bread, and black sesame porridge and blood sausage and she was fucking starving.

Her normal breakfast, it needed to be noted, was generally sargassum soup and plain p’han nero, the black bread that was served here in thick, toasted slices, astonishingly fresh. It was a good breakfast, and if she tried to eat something like this first thing in the morning under most circumstances, she would most certainly make herself sick. It was far too rich. But right now, she was abruptly starving and couldn’t think of anything better than tearing into the boar meat. It was salty and rich and astoundingly fatty and earthy, and she had to follow it with porridge to sop up the excess of flavor it seemed to leave behind in her mouth after she swallowed.

It made perfect sense that a god would eat like a king, and also that a god wouldn’t think anything of giving such a fare to his guests. Kairi informed herself, in between sopping up egg yolk with bread and downing a liquid she realized was honest to god fruit juice of some kind, that obviously it would be unspeakably rude to not eat what she was given when she was a guest. She knew it was a justification. She would feel slave-guilt later, after the boar was one hundred percent completely encased within her stomach.

It was probably the fastest she’d ever eaten a meal. In retrospect, she probably should have savored it. Her stomach grumbled in astonished protest at the richness and sheer amount of food that had just been crammed into it. She was pretty sure she had a visible pooch from just how much she’d swallowed at once.

With an audible groan, she stumbled back over to the bed, crawled in, curled up with her law book, and almost immediately fell back asleep.

The problem with falling asleep at random was that at this point, Kairi had no fucking idea what time or what day it was. She was divorced from the passing of time in this weird little mushRoom, and it was getting pretty disorienting. There were books to read, and every so often, food appeared, always as rich as that first meal had been, but all she had to tell time by was the number of meals she’d eaten. That was no method of telling time at all, because it always showed up before she even registered she was hungry. She had no idea how often it was coming, and she slept randomly and frequently, to an extent that it concerned her. It wasn’t like her to be so lazy.

So for an amount of time she could only register as “five meals worth,” that was her little transitionary life. She read books, slept, and ate. Five meals was how long it took for her to get super, super restless with doing just that.

Even if she told herself that five meals reasonably couldn’t be more than two and a half days—she would have gotten hungrier if she’d been being fed less than once per cycle—she found herself beginning to go a little stir crazy. The room was huge, but it was meticulously clean already. She made the bed in between bouts of sleep. She reorganized the desk. At one point, tired of browsing, she pulled all the books off the shelves and actually put them in something resembling a sensible order, which was how she discovered it was a very eclectic mix of books, with the only notable emphasis the sheer number of law books—some of them ancient.

A lot of the books, law books and otherwise, were in languages that Kairi didn’t recognize. Kairi’s Common was… adequate, but all legal proceedings were done in Elven. Because of that, she rarely used Common, and had only picked up the language because it was simply what was done. Her mistress could speak and read it as well, but they never used it, not in the house, not at work, not at the market. The language was mostly used by slaves and the hunter-gatherers who braved the surface to hunt and trade, going in large parties and coming back with all number of goods. But Kairi had little interaction with either group. Even Khldom, who seemed unclear on exactly how little association Kairi had with anything other than dark elf culture, had spoken Elven with her. Her private diaries were in Elven, for pity’s sake.

At least she recognized the Common language books. Some of the others, she hadn’t the foggiest clue.

It made her wonder what this room was. She didn ’t know how god powers, like, worked. Some of the things he’d said implied he’d generated this room for her to stay in, but that seemed absurd. Maybe it was a modifiable guest house or something? Or, oh, maybe it was a room for priests or clerics. Lucky bastards if so. There had been that desk in the room they’d passed through to get here, which implied there was someone working here and it wasn’t just a big empty temple filled with god. And temples needed priests and clerics and stuff. She’d been past the really big temple to The Silken Mother, and it had a ton. Priests, clerics, slaves, plus, while they might not live in there, there was also the entire Opal family to consider. They were spiritual leaders, but only to do with The Silken Mother. The spider goddess of darkness was ancient and timeless and the dark elves had been worshipping her since before the fall of the elder gods. Khldom was very new on the scene, as far as dark elf lifespans went, and the church was… not, like, super happy about it, from what she’d picked up. She supposed that having to share after aeons of only having one temple around would put anyone out of sorts.

It was all timeless to Kairi, of course. There was her lifespan, and her mother’s, and everything past that was insurmountably long ago and only important inasmuch as older case law wouldn’t hold as much weight if there was newer stuff that contradicted it. It was all just numbers. After meeting Khldom, though… If that was what a young god was like, she sure as fuck never wanted to meet something like The Silken Mother. Not that she had before. A human slave would only meet her if they were being sacrificed, and no one wanted that.

But it would make sense if this room belonged to some ultra-cool priest or cleric of Khldom. That would explain the somewhat eclectic collection of books—she wasn’t going to judge a cleric for the romance novels—in all the different languages. Whoever it was must have been super smart. I mean, if you were serving the God of Justice, that was like being a lawyer and a law secretary, combined and times a thousand, probably! Maybe even a judge, too.

They didn’t have any clerics of Khldom in Crian that she’d ever heard of—and she would have heard of them, given her job and her fami—ex-fam—ex-owners. So she supposed maybe this wasn’t in Crian after all, then.

She supposed she didn’t even know if this was on the same plane as Crian.

Being a slave who specialized in law, Kairi didn’t know much about the planes. She knew about Hell, because she’d heard the word bantered around enough times to have picked up the general gist. She knew about Vathys, the plane of darkness, because that was where The Silken Mother lived.

This could be Vathys.

Please, Khldom, let this not be Vathys.

It was kind of well-lit for Vathys. Could they even have light in Vathys? It was the plane of darkness for fuck’s sake. Probably not Vathys. But it could be anywhere, was her point; gods weren’t limited to the mortal realm. She could be anywhere.

The more she thought about it, the more she was growing curious. She was in a temple of Khldom, she was pretty sure, and she’d thought maybe she’d been in the one she’d heard bits and pieces about, but if there was a cleric here… Well, but maybe clerics of Khldom were just shut-ins. She didn’t actually know much about the like, theology. Khldom was just a name and a concept. Despite all her casual prayers and oaths in his name, she’d never really considered what worshipping him would entail.

It was such a shame to be actually in a mysterious temple of Khldom in an unknown location and to be stuck in a room of books the whole time. Her eyes glanced towards the door and away.

It’s not like she was ungrateful for the really cool room and all the food! She was extremely grateful! It was just, he’d never actually told her to stay in here. If he didn’t want her to look around, she reasoned, the door would be locked. He was a god and she was just some random human. It wasn’t like she could do anything he didn ’t want her to , all he had to do was make her not able to do it. Like by not letting the door open.

Some people in this situation might be freaked out by being locked in a room and not want to know for sure, but Kairi was a slave and being locked in a room was pretty standard. Trying not to think overly much about whether it was technically a good or bad idea, she snuck—there was no need to sneak but she did—towards the door and, after a lot of hesitation, carefully tested the knob.

It turned.

She turned it, and pulled.

The door opened.

It really felt like it should creak ominously, but it didn’t, opening smoothly and in perfect silence. The light from her room cascaded out into the hallway, which was completely unlit. Kairi frowned. Right. Dark elves barely lit anything, ever. Back home, she’d always had a supply of candles, but she hadn’t exactly worn her work pack into the courtroom. She was woefully without supplies.

After hemming and hawing for a moment, she closed the door briefly and went over towards some of the mushrooms growing above the bed. She jumped, failed to reach, and then climbed up onto the bed and halfway up one of the bedposts. She stretched her hand out until she could brush up against some of the dangling, glowing spores. They were on there a little more firmly than she’d thought, but with a bit of shaking, she managed to knock some loose into her hand.

Kairi slid awkwardly down the bedpost and then, glowing spores cupped in one hand, opened the door again.

The hallway was long and ominous, seeming like it was built for someone much taller than her—which, to be fair, it was. She was short for a human, and Khldom was tall for a dark elf. Or maybe it was a god thing. Gods probably got a couple of extra inches.

There was a variety of doors, which she hadn’t noticed the first time she was coming through. She tried a few door knobs, but three in a row were locked. She was beginning to think Khldom had, in fact, locked her in, just one room further along than she’d thought, when one of the door knobs turned.

She opened it a crack, peeking through. She told herself she wasn’t sneaking around, she just didn’t want to disturb any worshippers or clerics of whomever might be here. She was curious, not an asshole, that was all.

Oh, it was the room she’d come through before! That made sense… maybe she was in some sort of wing of living quarters, and the other rooms were also bedrooms, locked from the inside. Maybe she could have locked hers somehow. It hadn’t occurred to her at all to look; generally speaking, the rooms she inhabited locked from the outside if they locked at all.

She opened the door a little wider to get a better view, but the room looked empty. All she’d really noticed when she’d come through before was that it was like if an office was also a temple. Now, looking in, it seemed even weirder. The desk had caught her eyes before, but looking at it now, it was on a raised dais at the very back of the room that sort of separated it off. The rest of the room was largely empty, and yet it still felt claustrophobic. Even with her spores, the darkness felt oppressive, like it was pushing down against her. The roof was high enough up that her dim light didn’t reach it, but rather than feeling cavernous, like The Silken Mother’s temple did, it felt… intimate was definitely the wrong word, but she was struggling to find one that fit better. If intimate could be intimidating. Intimatidating…?

It was empty, though. She was more sure of that the further she crept in. It was dead silent—unfortunate choice of words, perhaps—and it wasn’t like there was much to hide behind. There were some statues, but mostly it was occupied by the desk.

As if putting off the inevitable, she padded quietly over to one of the statues, examining it. It loomed tall, but if she held up her light and peered, she could see enough contrast to make out what it was. A woman—dark elf, obviously—carved from black stone, blindfolded. In one hand she held up a pair of balanced scales, and in the other, she held a terrifyingly realistic sword. The whole thing was too realistic. It felt like she might come to life and lop Kairi’s head off with that sword. Kairi shivered. She was familiar with the symbolism. Justice was meant to be blind, the scales represented balance, the sword represented power. She’d read somewhere that there used to be a lot more of these sorts of statues around courtrooms and stuff, but most of them had been modified to depict Khldom. This was the first time she’d actually seen an unmodified Lady of Justice… how weird that it was here, in a temple to Khldom. Kairi would have thought there’d just be statues of him, symbols of him. That was how The Silken Mother’s temple was, at least.

She looked away from the statue, and explored the rest of the room, bare feet padding quietly against stone. There really wasn’t much in it, save the desk, which she was circling back around to. There were two other doors besides the one she’d come through, but she was wary about exploring further. This room, at least, was quiet and empty. She really didn’t want to bother anyone.

Finally, the desk on the dias. It was deeply ominous, in a way, but Kairi thought that might be be because it was designed for someone larger than her. That wasn’t uncommon. It probably belonged to a cleric or priest that worked here. As before, she couldn’t help frowning at it. It should be a crime to have something so disorganized be so prominently displayed. It was one thing if the desk in one’s room got a little cluttered time-to-time, although even that Kairi had a relatively low tolerance for. But this was a desk on a freaking dias! It was elevated! Even if this was just someone’s private office, it felt disrespectful to have such clutter on proud display. Particularly in a god’s temple, for pity’s sake. There were disorganized piles of paper spilled every which way, stones and charms and baubles strewn haphazardly here and there. Quills that weren’t even properly in their rests! Just looking at it was making her twitch.

To Kairi’s credit, she managed to resist for about three whole minutes. She told herself she had no place touching someone else’s things, that she didn’t even know who this desk belonged to or if it was in use at all. But in the end, the siren call of disorder overcame her entirely, and before she knew it, she was organizing papers into neat piles, clipping relevant case files together, cleaning dried ink off of quills and setting them neatly in what holders she could find, and even wiping the desk clean. She couldn’t do a proper job, with no cleaning supplies readily available, but even just dusting was a step up for this desk.

When she was done with the top of the desk, she found that the drawers were even worse. Doing her best to keep to the general order of where things went, she organized, cleaned out, and carefully unfolded and flattened crumpled pages. She didn’t throw anything away; anything and everything could be important. She just organized. Made sure everything was where it ought to have been based on what little rhyme and reason there was to find amongst the chaos. She may have labeled a few things, just to make it clear where certain things could be found.

All told, it was an infinitely more satisfying way to spend her time than locked in a cool room. For the entire time she was cleaning, Kairi did not think once about her current circumstances or her old master. There was only the task in front of her, simple and satisfying.

At least, until the door opened, anyway.

Kairi looked up, eyes wide, from where she stood organizing quills by nib size. She had been lulled into a false sense of security by the quiet as time rolled past, but this was, in fact, a temple, and those did, in fact, tend to have people in them. Kairi was expecting to see a priest, but what she saw instead was much worse. Who had walked through the door but Khldom, god of Justice, himself?

Kairi leapt away from the desk, putting the quills down with a clatter. The room seemed to compress inwards, and it wasn’t just her anxiety—it was the pressure associated with being around divinity, which she’d experienced in crushing amounts in the courtroom and to a lesser extent in the time she’d spend in Khldom’s presence since. If the room had felt ominous or intimidating before, the effect was tenfold or more now. Kairi stumbled off the dias as if gravity had increased and was pushing her down.

“What were you doing at my desk?” Khldom asked, and Kairi felt a wave of dizziness; she couldn’t tell if it was coming from an internal or external source.

“Y,” she squeaked. “Your desk?” She risked a glance upwards, and was slightly relieved to see that Khldom was not looking directly at her—she had seen exactly what his gaze could do in the courtroom—but at the desk, which he was walking slowly towards. Or maybe it only felt slowly because she was existing in some kind of twisty-turny upside-down reality made up entirely of anxiety and the side effects of divinity.

“Indeed. No one else is here,” he said. She was too out-of-it to read his tone, but she didn’t think he sounded angry. Not that that would mean he wasn’t, of course. “So it could not belong to anyone else.”

“No one? But… but this is a temple, you said, I thought, that is,” she stammered out.

“It is.”

“The… priests…”

“I have none.”

“The worshippers…”

“Visit only when they have exhausted all other options. You did not answer my question,” he informed her.

Question? Oh. Right.

“I was just cleaning it!” she squeaked out. “I swear!”

“Cleaning it?”

“I-thought-it-belonged-to-a-priest,” she rushed. “I was just… straightening up.”

Khldom had stepped on to the dias, circled behind the desk, and sat down on the grand chair that she now knew was grand for a good fucking reason. He was examining the desk, flipping idly through paper stacks. She saw him lift up one of the little notes she’d written and her head swam with panic. She’d fucking cleaned God’s desk. She’d been rummaging through his things without even knowing what they were. She’d just recognized mess and legal documents and set to it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which, to be fair, it was to her.

He glanced up at her and her entire world seized down to the just his shockingly green eyes, seeming as bioluminescent as her mushroom spores in the dim light. Her heart might have stopped beating as the moment before the inevitable punishment stretched out.

Then he blinked.

“Why are you on the floor?”

Kairi was unable to break eye contact, but realized from the context her body was giving her that she had, at some point, collapsed onto her hands and knees on the stone floor.

“Uh?” This really did come out as more of a squeak. She didn’t want to not answer a direct question again, but also didn’t know that ‘abject terror’ was the answer he’d want to hear. “Because I love… floor?” she attempted.

Khldom squinted at her, a slight narrowing of the eyes. “Are you feeling ill? Perhaps the food has been too rich after all.” He stood up. “Let’s get you back to your room.”

He looked away to step off the dias, and that broke whatever had been freezing her in place.

“Oh-totally-fine-I-can-get-there-myself-I-know-the-way-of-course-I-do-haha-I-got-here-myself-didn’t-I-sorry-about-that-by-the-way-I’m-leaving-now-sorry-bye.” She half scrambled, half ran out of the room and, not looking back, all the way down the hallway, to her room, and slammed the door shut behind her. She sunk back down onto the floor immediately, legs trembling, back against the door.

For fuck’s sake. She’d been here for three days and she’d already managed to do a sacrilege. Was this a sacrilege? It felt like one. She’d cleaned a god ’s desk. She whimpered quietly to herself, just relieved she’d managed to get out of there without being immediately smote. She was so frantic and relieved in equal measure, in fact, that it took her several hours to calm down enough to wonder why a god’s desk had been so untenably messy in the first place.

Khldom, god of justice, ran an idle finger along the edge of the paper he read. It was thin and weak, cheap paper that was so worn with age–despite only being, by his calculations, under two decades old–that it had to be held in a transparent sleeve to prevent damage. It was court evidence, all of it; all of the miscellaneous papers scattered across his desk were, for a dozen different cases. He rarely had to deal with the paperwork, although people did so insist on giving it to him. Being a god now, he could simply see the truth of the matter. Being a god, he was also not particularly bothered by the concept of due process. He was, quite literally, the embodiment of justice. Due process was the arduous steps mortals took to attempt to reach him. That was what he told people when they asked him about paperwork. It mostly worked.

Outside of his–one could call it an office, he supposed, but when gods inhabited things, even offices, they tended to become temples… Outside of the room he occupied was the girl–woman, now–who had run a quill against these thin pages, spilling her misguided hopes and dreams and vocabulary practice across them in cheap ink. She was attempting to muffle her choked sobs, but the desperate, gasping breaths of crying were unmistakable. It did not particularly bother him. He heard it extremely often. Innocent and guilty alike had a significant tendency to sob wildly when he was around, for one reason or another. He had not been at this god business for so terribly long, but one simple truth he had discovered quickly was that the innocent are, if anything, more concerned that they have definitely done something deserving of punishment.

That wasn’t why this girl was crying, of course. That would be all the latent trauma, he suspected. Humans were quite well known for their tendency towards dramatic displays of emotion. He suspected many of the things he had learned in the course of his mortal life would not hold true, particularly things about other races. He had, after all, learned them from other dark elves, and his people were not altogether known for being welcoming to outsiders. But as far as he could tell, they had gotten humans and high elves pretty much right. High elves were pompous, arrogant jackasses who were in competition with his own people for who could commit the most injustices per decade, so far as he could tell. Humans were emotional and short-lived, and ruled by both of those facts in roughly equal part. Hence, the sobbing woman outside his door, who, he suspected, was crying because the woman who had enslaved her for most of her life had been perfectly willing to sacrifice her loving slave to save her own skin.

Of course she was. Only a slave–a particularly stupid slave–would ever have thought otherwise. There existed no real affection between owner and object, no matter what lies the object told itself.

That fate had been adverted, of course, thanks to him. That lawyer had been heinously guilty, as had everyone involved in that particular ring of corruption. If the human woman’s desperate prayers hadn’t caught his attention, the stench of that much sin in one room surely would have. It had been a pleasure to deal with them all in one fell swoop.

At first, he had been a bit bemused to be summoned by the prayers of a human, of all things, but it made sense after his cursory glance through the court papers that had been shakingly thrust into his arms by a terrified, somewhat nauseated, and very relieved judge. She had spent her whole life studying dark elf law. She would obviously be very familiar with the god of justice, relatively new as he was to his post. Some of the older dark elves could still remember a time without him, but to the brief lifespan of a human, he suspected he appeared as eternal as he now technically was.

He was not the youngest god, however. No, that dubious honor belonged to another; another whom, unfortunately, he would be in need of shortly. In his deific infancy, Khldom had struggled with what to do with all the aftermath and baggage that came with dispensing justice. He was of the opinion it should not be his aftermath and baggage, as he had significantly more important things to be dealing with at any given moment, but he had learned that, much like the papers thrust into his hands by the trembling judge, it was going to be thrust upon him regardless. If he left these things up to the dark elf courts, they just created more mess. Slaves were property, to be transferred to next of kin. Next of kin were generally not exceedingly kind to slaves in the position of this girl, slaves who had been rescued while their mistresses had been judged and found wanting, left twitching and comatose on a courthouse floor, living out every minute of the false sentences she had imposed on others within the prison of her own mind.

And so, it fell to him. But dark elf slaves were often a useless bunch; many had been born into slavery, others captured, and all broken to some extent or another. What did he know of the slave’s mind? Teleporting them out into the light of day had not gone very well, particularly not for the humans, and dark elf slaves had less than nowhere to go, the surface completely inhospitable to them. The task of repairing any slave’s broken mind was so far outside his wheelhouse as to be comical. When something was outside one’s wheelhouse, the only appropriate action was to… outsource.

That was where the youngest came into play.

Eager to get rid of the sobbing girl outside his door–the sobbing did not bother him, but the general presence of a person did–he pulled a vial of noble’s blood out from a desk drawer. It was exceedingly easy to get, with how many nobles he wound up dealing with on a regular basis. A branch–he always used the proper kind of branch, even if one didn’t technically have to–a few stones, and a prayer handled the rest.

Generally speaking, this would immediately cause an extremely annoying, extremely loud high elf to appear in his office. This time, there was a long silence. Well, no need to be concerned. This happened sometimes. He had to imagine that being summoned was inconvenient in general. He certainly knew that prayers came at incredibly annoying times, and he wasn’t particularly compelled to deal with them immediately, as his younger counterpart was. He waited. And waited. After what felt subjectively like half an hour but was, objectively, more like forty-five seconds, a lone petal appeared in the middle of his office, and floated to the ground.

Ugh. Great.

An IOU.

Kairi, who had spent the last twenty years, essentially her entire life, as Kairi, house and secretarial slave to Bezdeh Moonshadow, was sitting in a comfortably dark hallway on an uncomfortable stone floor, grappling with the very beginnings of how to cope with just being Kairi.

The last few months had been a blur. She’d known something suspicious was going on at the firm, she had. She’d just been trying not to notice it. She’d been trying so hard not to notice it, to rationalize every increasingly weird occurrence away. She’d been focusing so hard on not noticing, on keeping her head down and doing her job, so distracted with her own little concerns of managing her work load and avoiding the lawyers. Maybe if she’d been paying more attention, or paying less attention, none of this would have ever happened. Maybe if she’d been better at her job, they never would have been caught. Maybe if she’d been worse at her job, they never would have been caught. Did she want them to never have been caught?

A few hours ago, she would have said yes, definitely, one hundred percent, because a few hours ago, she had been on trial. Not at trial. On trial. For the falsification of evidence in multiple major trials, including one involving the fucking Obsidians. The fucking Obsidians. The family for which the slave breeder she’d come from had worked for, distantly at that. So far above the level of her reality as to be comical. She may as well have been accused of attempting to kill a god, for all it seemed within the realm of possibility for her. And yet. And yet.

And yet even that metaphor paled, now, because there was a god in the room at the end of the hall. There was a god in the room at the end of the hall and she was in the hall and there was one door between her and him, or her and it or her and majesty or her and incomprehensibility. The door did nothing to contain him, she could feel the pressure of his presence beating against the side of her mind. It felt like what she’d always imagined an aboleth would feel like, when she’d read of them in the massive and deeply horrifying encyclopedia of cave dwelling species she’d gotten into as a child. A psionic pressure, worse the closer she got to him, a sensation that made her want to fall to her knees and beg.

Or maybe that was just her reaction to anything particularly scary. She had lived a fairly charmed life up until now; sure, she had nothing on the treasured pets of the noble families which she sometimes saw in ostentatious leashes and collars at the upscale markets where her mistress sent her for supplies on occasion. But her mistress had been well-off, and she’d only ever had the one since she was seven. Like most human slaves, she was spared from hard labor by stint of being human; humans were notoriously hard to keep alive underground, especially wild caught ones. Because of that, it was even harder to produce her, a healthy second generation human slave, accustomed and adjusted to life in the caves.

She could have been a wealthy noble’s pet, her mistress had often told her, because of her social clout, and having had a taste of what social clout was, she had been immensely grateful, her entire life, to be a lawyer’s secretarial slave instead.

And now this. And now this.

She would have been put to death in probably such a horrific way as to be comical. The crimes of which she was accused were so beyond the pale for a slave, so beyond shocking, that by her own calculations, she could have been convicted of five different death sentences simultaneously. There had been a case where a serial killer, convicted of multiple death sentences, had been killed, resuscitated, and killed again for each count.

She felt bile rising in her throat, the familiar, all-consuming terror that had been her whole world for long enough to seem like eternity. That had been her fate, inevitable, and all her legal knowledge had been unable to assist her, because she was not a secretarial slave anymore. She was a criminal. There had been nothing to do but face the dragon… that was, until, a much, much, MUCH bigger dragon had showed up.

She’d heard of Khldom, god of justice, of course. She was a fucking secretarial slave. Yes, sure, the oldest of dark elves could remember a time before his presence in their legal system, but that just served to cement his legend, because occasionally one might hear from someone who remembered when it happened. And in the here and now, there were statues of him in courthouses. His name was never invoked in proceedings, because everyone was a bit too worried they’d catch his attention, but things were done with him in mind. At least, in theory.

In reality, most lawyers were probably like her, in that the idea of a god, even a god of the thing she did, was a very distant concept. It wasn’t as if he’d show up at her work desk and demand to see if her papers were in order. It wasn’t as if he’d appear in court.

Except for the times he did.

Except for today.

Generally speaking, Khldom was only ever brought into disputes on purpose, and often as a bluff or intimidation tactic. The idea of escalating her case hadn’t even been mentioned, although in retrospect it clearly should have been. Her defense lawyer had been one of the ones spared, so she’d clearly been trying, but it hadn’t occurred to her at all to consider pulling a god into the situation. Then again, it hadn’t occurred to Kairi either. Cases in which he appeared didn’t make it into law books. She hadn’t read about them. There was nothing to be learned from them, other than a warning. He was unactionable. The most literal sense of an Act of God.

But occasionally, it did happen. An act of corruption so grandeur that it summoned him, name unspoken, into the courtroom.

It had been like someone had sucked all of the air out of the room, she remembered, although she had barely been able to breathe to begin with. He had introduced himself, but there had been no question as to his identity. His presence had been absolute. She’d barely felt able to process words, and yet she could recall each and every word he’d spoken, the emphasis of syllables, as if they were branded into her mind with a hot iron. The corruption of the lawyers. The egregious abuse of justice. The cowardly sacrifice of a loyal slave. His words. Not hers. He’d laid out a case of corruption bigger than she could comprehend. Not all of them had been in the courtroom, and even fewer had been the ones on trial, but the ones that were present were enough that still, hours later, her mind was a cocophany of their pleas for mercy and agonized screams.

She’d lived a fairly charmed life up until now. She’d never been present for a death sentence; at worst she’d heard the desperate wails of the convicted. She had never, not once, heard screams like that. Now it was all she could hear.

Gods were very real, and could, on occassion, be very present. Those who witnessed them had a changed air about them, spoke about it in reverant or haunted tones, often both. She supposed she was in that category now. Or would be, if she ever regained the ability to speak.

Except it wasn’t past tense for her, just yet. Because he hadn’t simply stopped with dispensing justice. Twice, his acid-green eyes had seared into her, obliterating all thoughts from her mind. The first, it had been to declare her innocence. The second, it had been amongst the echoing choir of screams. It seemed like he spoke softly, but his voice had been so clear over the hellish din, so he couldn’t have, and nothing about him could be described as soft anyway.

“As for you,” he’d said, and she’d remembered being so stunned by being addressed directly, a comically stupid thought to be having in such an unreal moment. “I will provide justice for you Myself.”

And now she was here, on the floor of his temple, uncomprehending. He had told her to wait here. There had been no force of presence behind it, no stunning blow to her mind like she’d seen befall countless others around her in the courtroom. Nonetheless, she would have sat there, unmoving, if the room had caught on fire, content to burn to death while waiting here. She didn’t know why she was waiting here, but she didn’t question orders from her highers, and it quite actually did not get any higher.

And after what could have been hours but probably wasn’t days, the door at the end of the hallway cracked open.

She was unable to not turn and look. Dim light spilled from the opened door, cast back into blackness by the shadow of, well, god, who was very tall and had a lot of shadow to cast. She found his presence was slightly less ominous than before, or possibly she was adjusting, or possibly, she had dissociated the rest of the way and was so far out of her body that her brain could no longer process fear. It was all possible. Anything was possible, since this had happened. Was happening.

“Human child,” he said, by way of a greeting. “Your route to safety will be secured shortly. Not shortly enough, however, and I am aware humans require regular food, water, sleep, and access to light.”

She stared blankly at his knees, which were comfortably at eye level and also, beneficially, were not his eyes. She had stared directly at them twice in the courtroom, as if every ounce of her manners had been obliterated out of her by the force of her awe. She felt fuzzy and unreal, but at the very least she could pretend to be properly domesticated.

“I have formed a room in this temple that should suit. Follow me.”

A command was something even her scrubbed-raw brain recognized. She scrambled to her feet, eyes remaining no higher than waist level, which was made easier by the fact that he was a good head and shoulders taller than her. Kairi was used to this to an extent; humans were shorter than dark elves on average, and she had been almost a full head shorter than her mistress, but this felt a little absurd. Gods, she supposed. Larger than life and all that.

What a stupid thing to think about. She thought she could maybe feel her brain dribbling out of her ears.

Khldom, actual god, led her through the doorway into the dimly lit room, which looked an office, a little, if it were also a temple. There was a desk in the back, and that made something an office, probably. It was dimly lit in the way of dark elf dwellings, with a number of faintly glowing blue orbs. The desk, she noticed, was very messy, and the fact she noticed that made her think that maybe she really was losing her mind, to be thinking of the necessity of keeping a clean workspace at a time like this. Really, though, if you were a cleric of the god of justice, it just seemed like you really ought to. Whoever owned that desk should be at least a little ashamed of themselves.

Through another door, down another hallway, and another door. This one, Kairi winced as it opened. The dim blue light had not been enough to adjust her from the near-complete darkness of the hallway to the brightly-lit room in front of her. Some of the light was obviously coming from a fire, crackling cheerfully in a large hearth, but it seemed too bright for even that.

She had hesitated too long in the doorway, squinting and blinking at the sudden and unexpected light. Khldom had entered the room, and turned around, as if to see why she was not still behind him. She scrambled forward immediately, stumbling through the door. She was immediately made aware of the source of the light. One wall of the room was completely dominated by what was easily the largest bed she’d ever seen in her life. Staring at it, she thought it might be so large as to be completely square, and she suspected it was long enough that the god of justice himself could have laid down on it comfortably. Perhaps even stretched a bit. Growing over and around it, almost like a protective canopy, were mushrooms. Giant mushrooms. Giant mushrooms with brightly glowing spores mixed around in their gills, some even dangling down gently, as if they might fall like ash.

She’d heard of this, she thought. They called them light forests, and the dark elves had long since farmed such areas in order to grow produce, such as wheat, underground. She had known, objectively that such things must be quite bright, but she’d never seen them in her life, and whatever she’d imagined in the past fell significantly short of the reality. There were more of them, too, growing along the wall near a small table on the other side of the room, spiraling around near a set of drawers, and even, she realized as her neck craned backwards, smaller ones growing from the ceiling, dotting the ceiling like a cavern embedded with sparkling gems.

Her breath was still gone from her lungs, but for a moment, it had nothing to do with her fate or the presence of a god. It was beautiful, but damn was it bright. She still had to squint, and looking down helped, but only so much.

“Will it suit?” asked the literal, actual god, who had saved her life and then led her into a freaking fairy tale room. “You shouldn’t have to stay here long.”

“Huh?” she asked blankly, and then realized immediately she would have to, for the rest of her life, deal with the fact that stupid word was the first word she’d ever said to a god.

Khldom regarded her–she could tell, even while staring, mortified, at his shoes–for a long moment, and she considered at length that it might also be the last and only word she’d ever say to a god. She could feel the pressure of him pulsing at the front of her mind. The echoing of courtroom screams had chased her down the hallway.

“You will stay here,” he said finally, explaining as if to a child. “Until someone can come and get you. They will take you to where there are other humans.”

Kairi’s head whipped up, almost to his eyes, but to do that she would have had to crane her neck and she fortunately caught herself somewhere around his neck and darted them back down. His chest did not feel like a safe place, so she lowered them further to his waist. There, that felt polite enough. She was desperate to ask questions, but terrified to do so.

“You will be safe there.” There was something odd in his voice, a tone she could not recognize at all. It made her nervous; she was normally good at reading tone, expression, body language.

“Safe… from what?” she managed, her voice coming out like a dormouse’s squeak upon being trodden on.

“The reach of the Dark Elf Empire,” he replied, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. Her head raised again, her expression baffled, and she made it almost to his chin this time before adjusting her gaze to somewhere over his right shoulder. His face was in her periphery, flirting with poor manners, but she couldn’t understand his tone and his body language was more stiff than a soldier’s. She was praying his expression would give her some clues. Praying? Ha! To whom? Him? He was the one she normally invoked, and here he was in front of her.

“My colleague can explain more.” His expression looked a little exasperated, which made her flinch into herself. Great. She was annoying a god. Leave it to her to manage that. “They will take you back to the surface, somewhere safe.”

Back… to the surface? Back?

Suddenly, the brightly lit room made sense. Memories clicked in her mind. Humans were hard to keep because they were from the surface, and more sensitive than most creatures, certainly more than any elves or beastkin. They needed light, and anyone who wanted to keep one needed to regularly expose them to it, lest they grow ill. Even then, it was tricky to keep them alive long enough to breed, and harder still to raise one through its delicate childhood. But Kairi was a second generation slave. Her need for light had been dulled with magic while she was still in her mother’s womb, and both of the mistresses she’d had in her life had taken excellent care of her diet. She had grown up in the caves, and while her vision was absolutely pathetic compared to any dark elf, or even the lesser elven slaves, she was used to light no brighter than a candle or a kitchen flame. If Khldom thought her from the surface–a fairly safe assumption, in his defense–then he must have lit this room just as bright.

She ought to clear up the misconception, but she had no idea how, when she could barely squeak out a single word in his presence. She simply stared, like the dumb animal she was.

“Until then, you can remain in my temple,” Khldom continued explaining, as if she might need small words–another fair assumption, given her eloquence at the moment. “Food and drink will be provided. Rest, and regain yourself.” He gestured broadly towards the bed, and something else clicked, as if for the first time.

“Me? Here?”

God help her, no wonder he clearly thought her an idiot. Even she thought she sounded like one.

“Does it not suit?”

As if a drain had been unclogged, unnecessary words poured out all at once. “No, no, it’s great, um, it’s huge, it’s like, the biggest room I’ve ever seen, it’s, wow, I mean, super bright, but, um, thanks, that is to say, thank you my… l-lord?” Her voice squeaked higher at the end. Her training had not included how to speak to divinity. It hadn’t needed to.

Khldom considered her, for too long. She really, really, really wished he would stop doing that. His face was, unmercifully, unreadable in her peripheral, and, cheeks turning red, she resumed her vigil of his shoes. Which meant, she noticed that he was reaching for her when the shadow of his arm fell over her, and not second sooner. She flinched. The reaction her body had wanted to have was ricocheting backwards, out the door and into the hallway, but a lifetime of training had her instincts on a tight enough leash that she managed just a flinch. Even that was rude, although dark elves rarely minded a show of fear, in her experience.

Before she could even properly anticipate a blow, however, his hand settled briefly on her head. She had just enough time to steel herself for a cruel twisting of her pale copper hair which never came, before she felt a chime in head. It wasn’t like his normal presence, it was like a reverberation, the echo of sound when it’s so loud you can hear it, but without the accompanying pain of the ears. By the time she had processed it, his hand had been removed.

“If you need it to be dimmer, to sleep, or brighter, for energy, the mushrooms will respond to you.”

The mushrooms will do what now.

“I will leave you here. Later, food will be brought. Rest.”

And with that, he swooped past her and out of the room, the door closing with an echoing click.

Hi! My name is Kairi. I don’t have a last name! I’m starting this journal to practice my handwriting. My new mistress says I can read very well and speak e l o q u e n t l y, eloquently, but my handwriting is u n t e n n a b l e, untennable. She is my brand new master! I was just sold to her today and she has already given me this journal. I don’t know what to write about but she told me to practice and said to fill at least ten pages per day.

My old mistress had a bunch of information about me listed when I was being sold at the market. Most of it was things I didn’t know, so it was very interesting! I am seven years old. I am healthy and weigh one and one quarter stones. Several mistresses who looked at me commented on my eye color. It was compared to several things, such as emeralds, moss, and algae. From this, I have s u r m i s e d, surmised, that they are green. My mother’s eyes were not green, so I think my father’s must have been. I have not met him; my mother told me he belonged to another mistress, and that this is very normal because there are not very many humans underground. We do not do well underground and are difficult to keep (this is what my old mistress told me). I was bred to be sold, which is a very steep investment, because we g e s t a t e, gestate, for a long time, and then grow very slowly (this is what my old mistress told me). I was being trained as a house slave, like my mother, because if you are going to go to all the trouble of keeping a human, why would you not show it off (this is what my old mistress told me)? She was planning on my training going on longer, until I was ten, but something bad happened and a lot of her slaves went missing all at once, so she decided to sell me to r e c o u p, recoup, her losses. And now here I am!

My new mistress is an a t t o r n e y, attorney. This means she practices law! She wanted a slave who could read and write, who also knew how to cook and clean. She wanted a slave that was intelligent. She bought me, and that means I must be all those things, which is very exciting. She says I will be her house slave and also her s e k s e c r i s e c r e t a r i a l, secretarial slave. This was a new word for me and I have had to look it up! Secretarial means “noting, of, or pertaining to a secretary or a secretary’s skills and work.” A secretary is “a person employed by a public body, by a company or by an individual, to write orders, letters, dispatches, public or private papers, and the like.”

My new mistress saw me using the dictionary and seemed pleased. She asked me what I was looking up, and I told her. She said “maybe I’ll get your cost out of you yet” and laughed a little. I think this is good. I think this means I am going to be valuable. My mother told me it was very good to be valuable, and that I should always try to have as many values as possible, because then I would “go to a good home.” I didn’t realize it then, but I think she meant this. I am sure my new mistress will be a very good home, especially if I keep up my value! I’m going to

still in school. This is why it’s okay that I am so young and still learning also! This makes me happy, because it’s sort of like we’re learning together. It’s hard for me to tell how old mistresses are–their skin they are always so flawless and mother says we don’t live nearly as long as them–but I think my mistress might be younger than my mother’s. I might think that because of her mother, though. People with mothers who are still learning feel much more like me. I can say this because mistress never reads these journals. I think she would not like me to say it out loud, because mistresses don’t like it when you compare, even if it is in a good way. My mother said it’s because it’s an insult to have anything in common with slaves, but that seems a little stupid silly to me. If we didn’t have anything in common, we would make terrible slaves. The slaves who can’t read are much less valuable, and I am going to need to learn about law too so that I can be useful as a secretarial slave, I’m sure!

Mistress’s mother is scary the way older mistresses are sometimes, but once I a d j u s t e d, adjusted, I thought she was actually nice. My mother says you have to “read between the lines” with older mistresses, especially the upper class ones. My last mistress was older, but not upper class, but now I think I see what my mother meant. They are nice in a way that seems mean at first. At first I thought she was very strict, but I think actually she is very proud of her daughter. The money that my mistress bought me with was a present for getting into the school where my mistress is learning to be an attorney. I think she is very pleased that her daughter used that money to buy me. She said I was a Smart Investment. An investment is “the action or process of investing money for profit or material result.”

I love being a Smart Investment.

I think it was a complement for her daughter, for being smart with her money, but secretly I feel like it is a complement for me too, because it means she thinks my value will go up over time! This makes sense, as that is what my previous mistress said about me too. She said that raising me was worth the expense because of how much more I would sell later. She had to take less than she wanted for me because she had to sell me early. Perhaps this made me a good deal for my current mistress. All of this makes me very happy, because mother always said my value was the most important thing. I am going to work very hard and always make my value go up so that my mistress will be praised for her Smart Investment, and that way I will be a good and helpful thing that is always valuable! I have been reading

Mistress finally graduated today! There was a very large ceremony; mistress said her mother and sisters all came. She seems extremely happy. I made all her favorites for dinner, to celebrate. This is very exciting for me as well, as it means I’ll start helping her with work! I am not sure how much, however. After her years in law school, she now has to be an apprentice for a while. Being an attorney is very serious work in Elven society! I am not sure how much she will use me for as an apprentice, because I am sure her law mistress will have her own slave(s) that is/are much more talented than me. I am only twelve, which is younger than secretarial slaves are meant to be. But I have been training very hard! I read all my mistress’s old textbooks and everything. There are a lot of books in her library, but I am reading all of the relevant ones to increase my value. I have been doing this for a long time, and I will admit, journal, that I am a little anxious to show off my value. I have been doing the same kind of work around the house forever. I don’t think I am valuable enough as a house slave. As a human, a large part of my value comes in the form of social clout, and mistress almost never has anyone over to the house, so no one sees me. I am also too young to go to the markets alone; mistress says “some princess will snatch me up in a second.” So that’s a lot of value my mistress is not getting out of me right now! But it is common for secretarial slaves to work in offices with their mistresses and sometimes they are even used in court. I will be much more valuable in such public places.

But first, I need to be competent, so I keep reading the law books. I suppose journaling like this is a bit of a waste of time, now, as my penmanship is good, and I scribe so much every day for my mistress that sometimes my hand hurts and the thought of writing in my journal makes me tired. But my mistress never told me to stop, so even though she never reads these, it feels like I should definitely keep doing it until she tells me not to anymore. After all, it

–hate to be right. On one hand, they do enjoy me at my mistress’s firm, and it’s wonderful that she’s made junior associate so quickly. Everyone keeps saying it’s the fastest anyone’s ever made it at the firm. Of course, I can’t take any credit for that, but ever since mistress made junior associate, she’s been placed on so many more cases, and I’ve been working around the clock. I think mistress spends twenty hours at the office for every ten she spends at home, and she’s even started leaving me at the office. I don’t like wish she wouldn’t am scared appreciate the amount of trust this implies she has in me. However, I wasn’t quite aware of what “social clout” looked like, I think, when I imagined my value. They enjoy me very much at my mistress’s firm, but not the right way not for my handwriting or legal knowledge not as a clerk

I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate

I don’t particularly enjoy the company of the partners, especially when my mistress is not there. I have told her that I can focus better at home, but she doesn’t care she won’t listen it doesn’t matter I can’t always go home when I want to. We do very important work, and mistress might be on track to become partner at an excelerated rate. Maybe then she can tell them to stop. I’m told the work load really slows down at that point, although I suspect maybe less so for a clerk. I’d love for my mistress to get more rest, though. Her temper

A brand new journal! I always love new journal day. This actually isn’t the journal I had set aside, you know! That’s right, mistress took me shopping today, if you can believe it! Well, I suppose it’s more accurate to say she took me WITH her while she was shopping, it’s not as though she took me like one would take a pet. Could you imagine the absurdity? I’ve heard there are some people who baby their pets like that, and some people who have slaves for pets, but it seems patently absurd to me. If I hadn’t witnessed court cases with those sorts of people, I’d honestly never believe it myself… but I’m getting side-tracked! While we were out, mistress bought me this incredibly nice notebook! I suppose she saw me lingering on it while I was picking out her writing supplies. She’s in a frightfully good mood, obviously, and now I’ll finally let you know why…

Mistress finally made partner! I can hardly believe it myself. It’s been years, and after all our her hard work, and a sizable investment in the partnership, she’s finally, officially, one of the partnered lawyers. I hardly need to tell you that this is going to change everything. I’ve been practically living in the office these past ten years, and at this point they might as well just give me a bedroll. Although that might be a little on-the-nose, in some ways, so maybe not. The last thing I need is to give anyone a comfortable location, although I suppose in the end it would at least save my knees some grief.

Still, just as I always suspected, it’s like a weight is lifted off my mistress’s shoulders. She was shopping today for a celebratory dinner her mother is throwing. The whole family will be there. I’m not going, of course; outside the court room, she never really shows me off. Honestly, I think the other partners enjoy showing me off more than she does. I suspect, however, that “social clout” is a bundle deal, and I am QUITE happy that the mistress has never showed any interest in such a thing. She even said I could work from home that day, since she won’t be getting home until “quite late.” A fancy new journal and a day off from the office? I could not be any happier. I’m glad she never reads this garbage, because I can at least say that a day without the other partners is a day in

–believe they finally got me a room at the office. On one hand, it’s been excellent for my back, since I’m sleeping so much less at a desk. But I feel less and less like I’m my mistress’s and more like I belong to the firm. Not that I can say any of this, of course, and I know she won’t sell me to them I’ve heard them ask because of my “social clout,” and maybe also because she likes me? Mistress is more like her mother every day. I don’t know how, considering I’ve spent my whole life with her, but I swear she’s getting harder to read every year.

To be honest, I’m probably sleeping even less than when I was endlessly running back and forth from mistress’s home to the office. My room at her home was nicer, and while I appreciate them going to the trouble of fitting an actual bed into that closet, it’s quite claustrophobic, especially when there’s anyone else in there. I only ever sleep after everyone’s left for the day. We’re They’re overseeing so many important cases lately, that no one really even bothers me much during work hours, and ironically, the junior associates leave me alone unless one of the partners

something weird last night after everyone left. I was going over some of the documents for the Obsidian case, and I swear there’s some files in here I’ve never seen before. I thought they were new, but they’re dated from three months ago… We must have had them the whole time. I can’t imagine how in the hells I would have missed them, and I swear I’ve never heard mistress or the other partners discussing the evidence in them… which is absurd, because it’s damning evidence. I can’t understand how I missed them. I’ve been over this case a thousand times over the last few months–of course I have, it’s the mother-loving Obsidians–and I swear… I mean, at the end of the day, it’s good news, good evidence. I guess I’m just… disappointed in myself. Maybe the lack of sleep is finally getting to me. I might have to risk catnaps. If I wake up with someone inside me, well, that’s a lot better than making this kind of a mistake again.

getting weirder. I heard my mistress and two of the other partners discussing the embezzlement case. Real open and shut case, honestly, but the way they were talking about it… I don’t know, they sounded on edge. You know I’m not good at reading elven expressions, though. Mistress always tells me, no matter how many court cases I sit through, I am absolutely incapable of reading emotions or figuring out of someone’s lying. It’s a good thing I’m not actually a lawyer, honestly. I wouldn’t be any good at it. Not like the firm, that’s for sure. They win damn near every case they

doesn’t add up. I know this evidence wasn’t here before, I know it. I catalogued every single bit of it. But there it is, in my records… even though I never wrote it down. And the thing is, it looks like my handwriting, but the ink is wrong. This is vampire squid ink, the stuff the partners use. I never use their ink, I’m not a fucking idiot a bad slave. I use my own supply, bought with my work allowance, and it’s just plain soot ink. Someone else mimicked my handwriting and wrote it into my ledger. But what I can’t understand is why in the dark anyone would do that? If I made a mistake, no one would just… go in and fix it. It would be paraded around for everyone to see I’d be feeling it for weeks I would have been made aware of the situation, or at least my mistress would have. I suppose it’s possible she’s the one who did it, to save me some grief. I just don’t know. Things have been so peculiar lately. I think everyone is just tense because of the Obsidian case, but I don’t