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Neither of them paid much mind to Verbum on the ground and as concerning as whatever had happened out there was, it at least eased Ben’s worries. Not knowing what had caused such an intense level of death and destruction had been worrying but finding out it was just something his girlfriend did made the entire area a lot more easy to deal with.

“Sooo, should I be calling you my lovely evil goddess now?” He teased. “I’ll convert away from Myriad in a heartbeat for you, don’t worry about that.”

“Ben, this is embarrassing enough.”

“Ha, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. So will you tell me what all of this is then so we can give this guy some peace of mind whenever he wakes up?”

He hoisted Verbum to his back as he said it, carrying the other man and gesturing for them to go back to the cart, letting Thera take a couple minutes to get her thoughts together.

“Look, I was just having a really bad time and needed to distract myself a while ago,” She tried to explain but largely failed, her embarrassment over the whole situation combined with Ben seeing what she’d done making it harder to think straight.

“I think Verbum is going to need a bit more than that by the time he comes to,” He told her, leaning over to give her a light peck on the cheek. “But take your time to get your thoughts in order. No rush.”

“Um, do you not, I mean, feel weird?”

“Not going to lie, it freaked me out when we got there, but knowing it was you means it’s fine so don’t worry about what I think. As a treat, I won’t even tease you about it if you’re really that uncomfortable.”

He gave her a gentle smile and patted her head, just enough reassurance for her to calm down.

“Look, it’s not like I did anything bad,” She began. “It’s just, while you were stuck in the dead god’s trial I was having a bit of a rough time handling things emotionally so I threw myself into training my magics and I didn’t really think about how it looked but in hindsight it obviously looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? But that was really all it was and I would really appreciate it if we didn’t focus on it because like I said, it was a pretty emotional time.”

The golden glow of her face wasn’t fading, even as she explained herself and saw no judgment from Ben. Looking back on things, she couldn’t deny that she’d gone overboard in her grief. It was easy enough to ignore at the time, she’d needed to lose herself in something just to handle the fact that everyone thought Ben was going to die, and immediately after she’d been too busy with other things. Even if they were at different scales, entering a relationship and witnessing the invasion points being marked didn’t give her much leeway to reflect on the past. Being confronted with it again so suddenly changed things in a big way as she was forced to remember everything she’d done.

Ben took her hand, placing the unconscious Verbum into a precarious situation as he moved to reassure her. “I’m sorry. I’ll do my best to ensure I’m never kidnapped again though so there’s not going to be anything to stress you out in the future.”

At least, it was meant to be reassuring when he said it, but what it did instead was leave her laughing.

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“You really are the last person on the planet that should be promising these things,” She told him, finally looking a bit more comfortable. “You’re tempting fate.”

“There’s no such thing as fate in this universe. Myriad keeps promising me as much.”

“Then you brought some of it with you from your old one.”

…That’s not possible, is it? No way, there was no fate back in my old reality either, right?

It was something he made a mental note to question Quilith on the next time he spoke with the grey as they made it back to the cart and buckled Verbum in before moving to go to their next destination.