Miles formed two adult-sized chairs, given that there was only one present in the room made for a child. He took one and motioned for Kessa to sit in the other, watching her face closely.Her worry eased as color crept back into the room. He slowed its return to a standstill. If she believed the color meant the mansion’s destruction was reversing, he would use that belief to sweeten his questions.He was tempted to ask why she had regressed from a T2 mage to T1, but that was idle curiosity. He started small.“How long have you worked here?”“A little over sixty years,” Kessa said, meeting his eyes.He nodded. The number fit. She looked roughly a hundred by mage standards, about thirty or forty to non-practitioners. For a T1 mage, that was half a life.“So you must have seen at least a hundred kids come through this place,” Miles said.Kessa’s gaze wavered before she set her mind. “Why didn’t you just force me to answer like you said you could? Why put me through all of that and hurt the guests for no reason?”The question surprised Miles. He had worried she might be catatonic after what he’d done, but she obviously wasn’t. The screams she had heard from the ballroom were only an illusion. He had brought no one but her into the mirror dimension. Still, the question puzzled him.“Are you willing to sacrifice your sense of self to stop what you saw me do?” he asked.“What?” Kessa’s confusion sharpened.“The level of manipulation needed for specific answers is never harmless,” Miles said. “I would have to pull on the memories tied to each question until the rest blur at best and warp at worst. It turns you into someone else, and usually someone worse.”It was one of the earliest lessons a mage learned, and those in power condemned the entire branch of magic. That stopped weaker mages from delving too far. For Masters, the threat of their peers’ scorn did the same. Not that most Master-tier (...)