The only thing more annoying than a squeaky stair was the incessant clanging of a guard he far from needed. His desire to leave was nonexistent, into the fiery pits of the darkest reaches — and he knew the heat well on the tips of his fingers. It dogged his sleep, a constant, squeaking, clanging noise, only silenced by the slamming of a door and the rattle of a cage. Up until someone had the audacity to kick his foot. He nuzzled into his palm and lifted his face out of it into the clouds of a raven-haired prince. "Do you often wake your civil servants by kicking them, Your Grace?"

"No, you're special."

"Yippee." Reyes dropped his hand back onto the tome he was trying to read before his mutinous mind decided to turn itself off. Lists of ailments swam between his eyes and mixed into several letters. On the other side, his copious amounts of notebooks from his early morning adventures into the lower quarters — because he was not a well-known shirker for nothing, and slipping past a couple guards was not out of his lackluster abilities. "Unlike some of us, Your Grace... There's work to be done and we can't just have other people do it." He tickled the air between himself and Senko with his quill and caught up to where he left off, trying to compare symptoms and cross-referencing. "Magic or otherwise."

"Your bedside manner is always a joy early in the morning, Reyes," Senko said and hooked his ankle around the other chair, and Reyes tilted his head back to count the specks on the ceiling. "What did I say about calling me Your Grace? I'd much prefer it if you called me Senko."

"Really? I call your father by name, even adding his title while I'm at it, and you'd thought I kicked his puppy from how his knights react." Reyes rubbed the bridge of his nose before returning his attention to the raven in human form. His apple-core staff remained strapped to his back. Quite honestly, the one surprising thing about the whole exchange. "If you're here to talk to me about anything but what I am trying to do currently, I will snap my fingers and muffle my ears. Feel free to keep talking, though. Royalty likes the sound of their own voice, right?" He waggled his quill again and turned a page in the tome.

"Do you not like the sound of yours?"

Reyes squeezed his cheeks together. "Is this about to be another 'tongue' comment, Senko?"

"Would you like it to be?"

He dropped the quill and put his fingers together in threat and embers danced across his entire body.

Senko grinned — a far cry from the solemn prince of a couple days prior, face to face with old, scorned love. "Mage Reyes, aren't you above the selective hearing of a child?"

"No." He parted his fingers nonetheless to let the other new annoyance in his life keep talking. "Look, as much as I enjoy this back and forth of ours, I am trying to help your people out there." He indicated with his head to the small, dusty window. His only view of the city proper and how the Tervalen's lived their lives in contrast to Abraxa. Knowledge he needed to sort through the odd plague. Symptoms contradicted, but the result was the same. Death. It led him to potent magic and curses on top of the more practical explanations. Think, Reyes... He tapped his fingertips to his brow, threatening to be creased with age he wasn't at. Barely at the latest range of his twenties, he folded in his lips and continued the incessant taps against his skull as if it would shake answers out of it. I need to look at one of the deceased. Fresh. Ugh. Another tap. Bet that won't raise eyebrows. Stupid, dumb Mage. Bet that won't have them going 'oh no, a necromancer!' as if this isn't the process of medicine. He slowed to a stop at the pale-eyed stare of the raven-haired prince. "What?"

"I said I'd help you, Reyes."

"I doubt you know much about the art of medicine." Reyes closed some of the leatherbound texts which failed to provide him answers, sending them back into the stacks. One flung itself at the shelf, and he resisted the urge to punch his own skull. He opened his mouth, found his voice lacking, and rubbed the shadows under his eyes instead. He went to grab his quill once more, but slammed to a stop when Senko beat him to it and, akin to a raven, found it shiny and swiped it out of his reach. Good thing he was prepared. He took out another quill and curled his lips when Senko played with the feather.

"You're right on that front." Senko stretched out his feet, then rifled through the pack he brought. "I like to think I know people though."

"Mhm..." Reyes went to continue writing, then stopped when Senko held out a steaming wrap. "What is that?"

"It's a Tervalen delicacy." He unwrapped it for him to reveal a fluffy bundle of dough. Reyes went to wave it off, but found himself cruelly enraptured when Senko cut into it with a small knife he slipped between his fingers to reveal a molten flow of chocolate. "Looks good?"

"I don't have time for sweets."

Senko dipped his head against his neck with a long smile, tapping his fingers against the table and swinging one leg over the other. Bait. It was bait, and he was stronger than that.

'Are you so sure, Reyes Drazir?' Senko's smile echoed with the voices of his past.

I've played with fire. I love to play with fire. Do you think I can't play this?

Senko rested his elbow on his precious notes and put his cheek in his palm with the wrap held in the other. Underneath a hot desert sun, he hungered for water in the deepest droughts. "Not everything needs magic, Reyes," the raven prince said with a sway of his arm, a dangle of a hook for a fish, and him, the fish wanting the bait more than anything in the world in a moment. "I think you know that, though." His lips curled into a smile, and Reyes squinted at him for the ulterior motive. "Wasting away down here surrounded by books that aren't giving you what you need." He tilted forward, the table too short to keep them apart. "Ask."

"I'm not going to prostrate myself for chocolate," Reyes muttered.

The grey gleam sparkled Senko's eyes and brought the raven to life from his ghostly visage as he shook his head. "No." Closer, and Reyes resisted the urge to lunge to his goal. "Not what I'm asking, Reyes. Try again."

Stuck in the claws of the raven, he said, "I need to see a fresh corpse if possible. Discreetly."

"That's better." Senko placed the steaming chocolate bun in his hands and cupped them. "Consider it done, Reyes. I owe you for revealing the path forward to me — to Keva. And look at that." He reached forward to flick his cheek, and Reyes withdrew out of range. "You can be motivated with the right incentive."

If Keva wants to be found if he's not dead from that blood glamour. Reyes closed the tome full of anatomical drawings with his own haphazard notetaking proving once more the paper-cut curse the Magister beset upon him for his infamous laziness in the classroom. "It's not just bodies, I'll need to check the water supply, the food supply, you know, all those things beneath such an esteemed individual who calls himself a prince." He inclined his head forward to the raven in human form. "But if you're like to get down and dirty with me, a mere peasant, then I shall not complain."

"Yes, you will."

"Loudly and often. You should be getting used to your stave and let me do the job that has been forced upon me with highest honours as your Chancellor called it." Reyes bit on his tongue for falling into Senko's game before gathering up his pack to get to work as fast as possible, to set himself free back into his purposeless life with the broken pieces of a legendary Iceglass who carried the blood of a Starborn and Shadowblood together. Arm hooked into Senko's when the black-haired prince stopped him short of heading for the door to flee the awkward situation, he asked, "What now?"

"It'd help to have someone with magic to teach me, don't you think? You double as a High Mage, do you not?"

Reyes barked out a laugh. "Try saying that to the Abraxan council and they'll think you more of a jester than a prince. I ain't no High Mage. Stuffy know-it-alls, and I'm quite happy with my usual fare." He took another step which caused Senko to leave the chair with a haughty pout. "Besides, you've seen me use my magic." I can't light a candle, let alone a forest. He reached his destination of a doorway which secluded him from the rest of the Tervalen aristocracy within the giant palace which wasted more space than necessary with said massive splendour, but before he could wander out into the onyx painted corridors, he slowed to a stop when Senko came in from his shadow. Magic flickered underneath his skin, and he drew back when Senko came close to his nose with his own.

"You really should give yourself more credit, Mage Reyes."

"Oh, back to Mage Reyes, are we? That was fast." Reyes pushed the door open with his fingertips and found it without any Gilded Knight.

Senko rested his elbow in front of him to stop his escape. "I just think I'm not the one with a problem concerning their magic," he said, and Reyes leaned back when Senko tapped his finger underneath his chin then swiped himself out of the Physician's Quarters. "Come, I'll take you to the mortuary. Your victims of this plague that have not yet been identified by family members will be interred there."

"As long as I don't get accused of necromancy considering the theme I've gotten from Tervale's medical records..." he grumped, then grabbed his bag full of the tools he needed to do his work correctly and without error before rushing to catch up with Senko. Out of the palace made of onyx coloured stone and marble, he kept himself close to Senko whenever people peered at him through the darkness of the downtrodden alleys. Others sat on flat pieces of the roofs, flipping small blades between their hands before disappearing through windows. Senko grabbed him by the shoulder and twisted him down a slope and tapped a sign for him. "What?"

"You may need to start reading up on Tervalen customs if you're to live here," Senko said with a corvid-like sense of mischief and glee. "We take our dead very seriously."

"I could tell from the necromancer hole." Reyes clicked his willow staff against the ground to set the gemstone at the core alight with his embers. Easier to control, not the fatal wildfire of the falling star. "Try it. Imagine a sparking flame within the focal point of your stave, and once you have that clear in your head, strike it forth."

"I thought you were not a teacher."

"I'm not, I'm a begrudging Court Physician. How I've moved up in the world." Reyes moved into the darkness of the burial temple and morgue.

"Were you truly so content with your lot in life in Abraxa? I got the sensation you hated it more than you hate it here."

Reyes stopped underneath an archway of black stone and Tervalen mythos. A falling star pierced the empyreal world upon white marble tapestries. He dug his fingers into the weeping willow's tears, the spark fluttering into a dead coal for all it was worth in his hands. "I was taken as a child, away from my home, because it was discovered I was Starborn," he told the raven-haired prince, who brought his knuckles underneath his chin. "You can labour to believe it, Senko, I'm very hard to satisfy — but I have been in worse situations than this one. At least here, I feel like I am doing something. I've got nothing left. Shall you lead me to where they've interred the plague victims or shall we go back and forth underneath an archway that looks suspiciously like bones?" Reyes peered at the masonry with the help of a nearby, dim lamp. He twisted around at quiet footsteps, finding his resolve when the raven picked up its curiosity for shinies — with him as the shiny.

Senko inched closer, nose to nose. "Your bedside manner will always be a delight, Mage Reyes. Have I said I like you?"

Reyes drew out a breath and buried a groan. "I've always wanted a monarch to like me," he air-quoted with a huff, and Senko drew back with a smile which hid a thousand intents. "Yes, you've mentioned it, and we can discuss my bedside manner when we're not busy." He tapped his stave against the lamp, then pushed the power of heat through the rest. It bounced along the candelabras to light up the area further. He hooked a lantern onto the end of his stave, bringing it with him as the magic in the conduit shed and kept it alight. Dampness struck into his nose with the quiet layer of permafrost within the Tervalen lands, so close to the mountains which shed off their cold air from the peaks.

"Got a distaste for monarchs?" Senko said as he drew out a set of keys, heading over to a suitably ominous wrought iron door.

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Reyes huffed and nudged past him into the quarantined area of bodies, stopping Senko short to send a protective air barrier around their heads, prodding him in the center of his heart with his stave to spread the shield to prevent contamination, then reached for the boxes to grab masks. "Wear one, and I warn you, Your Grace, this might be too much for your blue blood." He wrapped his own mask around his head, then tugged gloves over his hands with a huff. "Never pleasant to dig through plague-ridden corpses..."

"I shall materialise a fainting couch with magic if that's the case."

Clever raven... "Materialise it off to the side when you do." Reyes opened the metal vault door to the morgue, and the sterile stench wafted and hid the decay. Tombs slid into holes in the wall of the massive labyrinth of a mausoleum, but Reyes followed the paper trail left by the Tervalen morticians while Senko waved one off who lurked in the corner. He started to wonder if ominously looming was a beloved Tervalen past time, but gave no mind to it when he reached the cold section to pry out one of the slabs and moved it to an examination table. He checked on said raven which chose him as a shiny object before tearing off the cloth.

He drew himself back at the bulbous appearance of the preserved corpse. Senko tilted his head. "It looks like this one drowned."

"So... why is he among the plague victims?" Reyes mused as he readied some tools to dig into the flesh of truth. He raised his head when Senko held out another tool with a smile on the edges of his mask.

"Isn't that we're here to find out?"

"We?"

Senko raised an eyebrow at him. "These are my people suffering. Don't you think it's my duty to figure out the truth?"

"You are odd."

"I'm sure I'll grow on you eventually," Senko said and tipped back and forth. "And if I am odd, why, Reyes, that's the nicest thing you've said to me so far."

"Don't get used to it." Reyes threw up his stave to create a ball of light to shed light around the morgue, then dug for answers and a way of escape to his freedom from responsibility.

He was nothing but a fallen star.