The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 293. Druids Are Interesting Creature (And I Can’t Wait To Get My Hands On It)
She looked at the chair by the window, apparently determined it was acceptable, and sat with the upright quality of someone who was committed to occupying as little space as possible.
She was still holding the flowers.
Rex looked at them.
He asked, "Are those for me?"
She stared at her hands as if she had forgotten about the flowers and was now thinking about whether or not to bring them. "Oh... this is..."
"I was practicing in the courtyard this morning, and they just came out that way," she said. "I thought it was rude not to bring something when someone once helped you, so."
She put them on the little table next to the chair as if she wanted to put them down and stop talking about them.
Rex glanced at her for a moment, and the expression in his eyes conveyed a warmth and calmness that Nerith understood. It wasn’t flashy or over the top.
"Thanks," he said, looking at her. "How have you been sleeping?"
Nerith looked at him like he had asked an unexpected question. "Well..."
"It was okay," she said. "And it’s probably better than last week."
As she thought about what had happened, her eyes softened and a smile started to form at the corners of her lips. "I think I’m starting to get back into the swing of things," she said, her voice getting stronger.
"You’re talking about the attack of the undead, huh." Rex said.
"Mm-hmm, and everything that happened afterwards," she said, referring to the truth that encompassed Apollo’s activation and the specific quality of the following week for someone who had been in the midst of it.
"It gets processed," Rex said. "Not all at once, but it gets there."
"Sometimes it takes a little longer than expected," she replied, a hint of determination in her eyes. "But I know if I keep pushing forward, I’ll find my way through it."
She then looked at him with the same look she had been working on since the market district rescue. It was the look that said she was still trying to figure out what to do with all the information she had been getting about him.
"You were in the secondary approach," she said. "I didn’t find out until later..."
"Everyone kept saying you were moving toward the explosion instead of away from it."
He shrugged, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. "Sometimes you have to take risks, even if it means stepping into danger."
"There were people who needed help," Rex said, which was true and was also the version of the truth that produced the most useful effect.
She held his gaze for a moment. "You saved my barrier," she said.
"Your barrier was good," Rex said. "I’ve said that before."
"You’ve said it, but you mean it," Nerith said, with the precision of someone who had been thinking about the distinction for some time. "There’s a difference."
Rex looked at her.
"Yes," he said. "There is."
Rex leaned back slightly against the headboard and looked at her with the unhurried attention of someone who had nowhere else to be and had decided this was the right place to be.
"You came all the way here this early," he said. "That means there was something on your mind before you knocked."
Nerith looked at the flowers she had set on the table. "There was," she said.
"So tell me."
She took a breath like someone who had practiced something and was now deciding if the practiced version was the right one.
"The other druids in my circle," she said. "They’ve been asking about what happened during the attack, especially about the barrier."
"And about how it held as long as it did." She paused. "I didn’t know what to tell them."
"What did you tell them?" Rex asked.
"The truth," she said. "That someone reinforced it from the outside."
"And?"
"And they asked who," she looked at him. "And I didn’t know how to explain you."
Rex looked at her with mild interest. "What part was difficult to explain?"
"All of it," Nerith said, with the flat honesty of someone who had given up on making it sound less than it was. "You’re not a druid."
"You have no connection to natural energy in the conventional sense, but what you did to that barrier, the way you read its structure and supported it from outside, that requires a kind of attunement that most practitioners spend years developing."
"Ever since I’ve entered the academy," Rex said. "I read a lot of books that were written by Elizabeth herself."
"You probably heard that I beat Therion, one of the strongest mages in Aethelgard, and I won using the magic I learned from the books." Rex said this with a lie, though it was cloaked in a kernel of truth.
Nerith looked at him.
"That’s your answer for everything," she said, and there was something in her tone that was not quite amused but was heading in that direction.
"It’s a consistent answer because it’s consistently true," Rex said.
The leaves in her hair shifted slightly, a small movement that he noticed and filed without comment.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"You’ve been asking me things since you came in," Rex said. "You don’t need to announce it again."
The corner of her mouth moved. "Fair enough..."
She looked at her hands. "When you came toward the explosion, were you afraid?"
Rex was quiet for a moment, not because he didn’t have an answer but because he was deciding which true answer was the right one.
"No," he said. "I’m already used to it."
Nerith raised her eyebrows.
"Not because I wasn’t aware of what it could do," he said. "Well, in fact, I was aware..."
"I just didn’t find the awareness useful at that moment, so I set it aside."
"You set it aside," she repeated.
"Fear is information," Rex said. "It tells you something is dangerous."
"Once you’ve received the information and noted it, holding onto it doesn’t help you do what needs to be done."
Nerith was quiet for a moment. The leaves in her hair had settled back to their usual green, but the edges of them still carried a faint warmth.
"Druids," she said slowly, "are taught that fear is a form of communion with natural energy."
"That feeling... it means you’re connected to something real." She paused. "I’ve always been afraid of a lot of things..." 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦
"That makes sense," Rex said, without judgment.
She looked at him. "It doesn’t bother you? That I’m afraid often?"
"Why would it?" Rex said. "You hold a barrier under direct assault with half your connection disrupted."
"You do it until the job is done. Whatever fear was happening on the inside stayed on the inside." He looked at her directly. "That’s not a sign of weakness, but it’s a demonstration of competence."
Nerith held his gaze for a moment and then looked away, which was the specific look of someone who had received something they didn’t know how to hold comfortably yet.
The leaves went amber at the tips.
"You’re very straightforward," she said.
"Is that a problem?"
"No," she said, and then after a pause, "It’s unusual... most people soften things, like Apollo, for example."
"Softening things changes them," Rex said. "If something is true, it’s worth saying accurately."
She turned the small woven vine arrangement on the table, a small motion that meant her hands needed something to do.
"The flowers," she said suddenly, as if the thought had just occurred to her. "In Druid tradition, when you bring something woven to someone, it means you’re acknowledging a debt of care."
Rex looked at the arrangement on the table.
"Is that what this is?" he asked.
"Partly," she said.
"And the other part?"
Nerith looked at the window with the expression of someone who had walked themselves into a sentence they hadn’t fully planned.
"In my circle," she said carefully, "we also bring woven things when we want to remember where something good happened."
Rex looked at her.
"You want to remember this room?" he asked.
"I want to remember the conversation," she said. "This is the first morning in weeks where I came somewhere with something to say and the person on the other side actually listened to all of it."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Rex looked at the flowers, then back at her.
"Then come back to me," he said simply.
"Whenever there’s something to say."
Nerith looked at him with the expression that had been building since the moment she sat down, the one that was trying to sort out the difference between what she had expected from this visit and what had actually happened.
"Just like that?" she said.
"Just like that," Rex said. "No formal invitation, and no occasion required."
"If something is on your mind, the door is open."
She looked at the door and then back at him.
"You said that in the market district too," she said. "Come find me at the inn if you need something."
Her brow came down slightly. "Did you mean it then, or was it the kind of thing people say?"
"I don’t say things I don’t mean," Rex said.
"It wastes time."
