Kori finished spinning her tale. Afterward, she helped him with the math, reading, and writing assignments she had previously given him, and then assigned him new ones. Kori even had some time after that to teach him a little bit more of the dwarven language. They sat down together on the floor, and Kori retrieved her book of dwarven fairy tales from her dress pocket. She laid a piece of blank parchment next to it, and smiled at Eory.

Eory returned a faint smile, which she found disheartening. If there was one thing the young man liked, it was learning other languages. And yet here he was, only half-heartedly smiling at her for teaching him rather than bouncing from foot-to-foot in excitement like he would have as a child.

“Have a seat,” Kori said to Eory, who had been standing. 

He sat down across from her, absently sinking his teeth into his arms as he did so. Kori frowned, her forehead furrowed with worry.

Kori recognized the biting behavior as something he did when he was nervous. But right now, there was nothing to be nervous about. Is he hiding something?

Kori cleared her throat. “Are you ready to learn, Eory?”

Eory continued to gnaw his arm, but he nodded. 

The waif looked him in the eyes silently for a moment. “Is something bothering you, Eory?”

Eory just stared at her for a moment. Kori studied his face--noticing a slight twitching of his eyes, and a creasing of his eyebrows. 

What an absolute idiot she is. The woman in his head snickered. Her job is to redeem criminals, and yet she can’t tell how much we absolutely hate her.

Eory slowly removed his arm from his teeth at the woman’s voice--wishing she would leave him be. Wishing he could figure out exactly who she was and why she had to intrude upon his thoughts and make them vile where they shouldn’t be.

“Eory…?” Kori whispered, worried for him.

Eory forced another smile. “Nothing’s bothering me. I’m ready to learn.”

Kori thoroughly examined his face, knowing that he was lying, but also recognizing that it was not a good time to press him. “Let’s start, then.”

Kori opened the fairy tale, and began teaching him what each word in dwarvish looked like and sounded like in Common--the language most creatures of Yharos knew as a second language. Normally, Eory enjoyed these lessons to no end, but today, he found himself feeling listless, stuck on the hideous words Kori had uttered days earlier. 

Once Kori had finished her lesson, she left--making the door disappear in a shower of green fire as it had appeared when she first arrived.

 Eory stared up at the ceiling while lying on the sofa when she had gone because he had nothing better to do. Words entered his mind about Kori that he had never dared to think about her before.

He rolled onto his stomach, mechanically drumming his fingers impatiently on the arm of the couch. He chewed on his arm again. What a bitch… Twelve years with me and she doesn’t even care about me enough to even consider releasing me.

He winced at the bad word he thought to himself, wondering where he had even heard such an unkind word uttered before. He realized it must have been from the two guards outside his room who referred to their wives as such many times in one night. Eory would often find himself listening in on their conversations to entertain himself. 

No matter how hard Eory tried not to think ugly thoughts about his caretaker, they kept worming their way into his mind due to her cruel words just a week earlier.

He loved her, even though it was difficult to love her at times, and he hated himself for thinking anything negative about her. He would be dead without her, after all. Not only that, but she was like his mother and his only friend, but…

She was also his warden.

Her goal was never to be his mother, however. Her goal was to make him an asset to society and not a danger. Only then, she would sometimes say, would she feel as though the king would be willing to set Eory free.

While Eory had warm memories of Kori praising him for doing his assignments, teaching him how to read and write, and playing with him, he also had a myriad of other memories where she was cold, aloof, distant, and even cruel. In his mind, it was incredibly difficult to parse out who the woman actually was, and whether she actually cared about him. 

Every time she entered the room, she would expect him to bow. She would expect him to ask her if she was in good health and if she was having a good day, and he was to do it in the most polite and proper way he could manage. Sometimes, she would bring gifts, and he couldn’t tell whether it was because she loved him, or because she wanted to instruct him on how to properly thank her. If she saw he was being rude or misbehaving in any way, she would punish him by cutting her already short visits all the shorter.

She had made him into an overly polite and spineless dog while she dangled the possibility of freedom in front of his nose and made him fight for every scrap of attention she was willing to give him.

To distract himself, Eory stood up, and, with nothing better to do, he opened the top drawer of his mahogany dresser that lay in the corner of the room and took out a piece of parchment.

When he turned around and looked at his room, he was reminded just how small and claustrophobic it had gotten.

When he was younger and smaller, he could make his way through the room easily. In fact, the room felt very spacious to him when he was younger, and cozy, too. Now, he could barely squeeze past the furniture. Everything was too close. His own body felt too close at the best of times, and he wished he could get away from it.

He rubbed the back of his neck with a heavy sigh. He sat at his desk which had a pen and ink on it at the ready.

Rain pattered above his head.

Everything felt like it was suspended in time.

He was supposed to be doing the reading, writing, and math assignments Kori had written for him, but once again, his wrist refused to let him do such dull and unimaginative work.

Pollyanna was always his muse, and so he drew her instead of doing his homework.

You’re kind of like me in many ways… Eory thought to himself as he stared lovingly at his flattering depiction of the maiden who was two-hundred-fifty-seven-years-old but who physically looked like she was fifty. You’ve always been stuck as my family’s protector--despite undermining them and going against them where you could--and I guess I’ll be stuck with this heritage that will most likely end with me. Still, I wish you’d come to get me.