Siren songs can control hearts.
The words had followed him through the celebration hall like a second shadow — quieter than his real one, considerably more troubling.
He had not looked for the people who said it. He had not slowed his pace or done anything to indicate he had heard it at all. He had simply walked, and absorbed it, and turned it over as he went.
Control hearts.
In his old world, siren mythology had given the singing a specific function: lure sailors, draw ships toward rocks. Always described as compulsion — not suggestion, not influence, but a direct override of will. A weapon. A beautiful and terrible one.
This world's version presumably operated on similar principles, or similar enough that the word control had been used without irony or exaggeration.
He was thinking about his own voice — the resonance he'd noticed in it all day, that carrying quality present even in panic, the warmth underneath every word that seemed structural rather than performed — when the servant appeared at his left elbow.
Young, narrow-faced, slightly pointed ears suggesting partial elven lineage, a formal uniform in Dragon court dark red and black. He was carrying a tray from which he had just delivered drinks, and on that tray, by happy accident, there remained exactly one small cup of the amber honey drink that had lowered Arnav's shoulders one centimetre approximately fifteen minutes ago.
The servant noticed him notice the drink.
He offered the tray immediately, with the attentive professionalism of someone trained to notice these things.
Arnav took the cup.
And said, without thinking, because it was simply the thing you said when someone handed you something:
"Thank you."
Two words.
He heard them in the air and went still in the way you go still when something unexpected has issued from your own body without warning.
He had spoken today — yes, his name, small exchanges with attendants — but in each of those instances he had been simultaneously managing several layers of overwhelming situation, which had apparently prevented him from fully hearing himself. He had registered the resonance the way you register a notification on a phone you're too busy to check.
Here, in a brief pocket of relative calm, he heard himself.
Thank you.
Warm. Smooth in a way that wasn't performed or cultivated but structural — built into the architecture of the voice itself. Not the warmth of someone trying to be pleasant, but something underneath the pleasantness, like the difference between a room heated by a machine and a room warmed by sunlight through old stone that has been absorbing heat all day. Layers under the surface.
In his old life he had possessed an entirely ordinary voice. The voice of a man who had spent eleven years in accounts receivable, audible in meetings, never memorable. Functional. Forgettable.
This was not that.
He was still processing this when he registered the servant.
The servant had not moved.
He was standing with the tray at exactly the angle he'd been holding it when Arnav took the cup, and he was looking at Arnav with an expression that lasted approximately two seconds before professional training smoothed it back into neutral attentiveness. But those two seconds had been unmistakable.
Not stunned. Momentarily arrested — the specific expression of a person who had been going about their evening with normal competence and had unexpectedly encountered something that caused their brain to pause its regular programming for a brief unplanned interval.
Over thank you.
The servant collected himself, gave a small bow, and moved away. Perfectly professional. Efficient. As though nothing had happened.
Arnav watched him go.
He looked down at the cup. Back up at nothing in particular.
Oh no, he thought, with great precision and considerable alarm.
Because if thank you — two completely ordinary words, the minimum unit of social politeness, words he had said ten thousand times to cashiers and colleagues and the chai stall man outside his building in Pune — if thank you in this voice produced that in a composed professional who had presumably been around interesting people his entire career —
What happened when he actually tried to do something?
What happened if he sang?
He set the thought aside quickly, before he could examine it properly, and focused on the immediate practical problem: the natural resting state of this voice, used without intention, was enough to generate that response. Which meant every interaction going forward required a level of monitoring he had not anticipated. He needed to understand what he was working with before he used it freely again.
He needed, essentially, to treat his own voice as an unknown quantity that might accidentally cause problems.
He brought the drink to his lips and thought: I need to know what sirens actually do, how it works, what the limits are. I needed that information approximately six hours ago.
He was adding this to the growing list of critical gaps when he became aware, with the specific sensitivity he'd developed over the last several hours for registering the Dragon King's attention, that he was being watched.
Not the ambient attention of the celebration hall. Something more directed.
He did not look immediately. He took another sip. Let his gaze move naturally across the room — the elves, the werewolves, the east wall — and then, as though arriving there by coincidence, found Vaelthar.
Standing approximately eight feet away, in the small clearing that had formed around him the way clearings always formed around the Dragon King. A drink he hadn't touched. Not looking at the hall.
Looking at Arnav.
With the particular quality Arnav was beginning to recognise — that focused, ember-red, unhurried attention that gave the impression of someone who had decided to observe something carefully and had no interest in pretending otherwise. His head was tilted, fractionally.
Not curiosity exactly. Or not only curiosity.
Recalculation. The expression of someone who had watched the servant's two-second pause and was now revising something they had already been thinking about.
Arnav met the gaze and held it. He had been doing this since the dais — not looking away, because there was something in Vaelthar's way of looking that seemed to respond to being looked back at, a small settling, a slight reduction in focused intensity, as though what he was checking for was presence rather than submission, and presence had been confirmed.
The moment stretched.
Around them the hall continued being loud and celebratory and full of creatures from mythology drinking things in improbable colours, and in the middle of it, across eight feet of noise and light, the newly married pair looked at each other in the particular silence of two people placed into significant proximity by forces outside their control, still in the early stages of trying to understand what the other one is.
Vaelthar moved.
Three steps, the same measured unhurried pace he seemed to use for everything, and then he was closer — close enough that the ambient noise of the hall receded slightly, close enough to speak without the room hearing.
He looked at the servant's retreating back. Then at Arnav.
A brief pause. The expression of someone who has been thinking something for a while and has decided to say it.
"You truly don't remember anything, do you?"
Quiet. Not accusatory — no edge, no suspicion or challenge. A genuine question from someone who had been watching carefully and had arrived at an observation and was now testing it.
The ember-red eyes were steady on him, direct, with the layered attention that Arnav was learning saw considerably more than he wanted it to.
Arnav looked back at him.
And thought, with the focused calm of someone standing at the edge of the most delicate moment he had yet encountered in this world:
What, exactly, does he think I should remember?