Maybe she does rot. Maybe her own poison will slowly kill her from the inside out, insidious and undetectable to a girl who keeps the company of the dead. If there is any effect, she does not know. She imagines that her power gives her the ability to simply remove any poisons sent coursing through her, to manipulate anything that might try to harm her so that it no longer could. But if he tried to create something new and foreign, she would not stop him. Curiosity killed the cat…or perhaps, it just made the cat stronger.

She tilts her head in response to his answer, considering. Suffering, he says, and she cannot relate, for she has never felt as if she’s suffered. This is probably far from the truth if you asked an outsider - she watched Beqanna swallow her mother whole (she did not care), she had been tormented by ghosts before they became her friends (it just felt like a challenge), and she will spend her lifetime walking the blurred line between life and death (and she cannot imagine it any other way). Iris simply didn’t suffer. She just never saw life in that vein, but then again, she’d never experienced what he had either. ”I cannot say I relate,” she says simply, without pity for him or for her or any emotion. It is just a fact, and Iris has always been rather factual.

“They don’t like when you pry,” she says simply, noting their rising panic and catching a few yelps of displeasure and protest. “They are far more useful to you if you respect them.” She can command them too. Perhaps not at the same level Jamie could, for he clearly has power she cannot hope to wield, but still, she can call to them. She can force them. Instead, she asks, and they come willingly. She never pries into their mind but waits for them to offer information, praises them for their usefulness, and they love her all the more for it. Straia ruled by fear - and Iris didn’t disagree that fear has its place - but love and respect are powerful weapons too.

He asks a question, though she doesn't answer right away. Her ears flick, listening to the whispers of the ghosts as they share his secrets. She grins slightly, something highly satisfied in that grin. Not at his misfortune, but simply at the ghost's willingness to help her prove her point. “They tell me that you were not always so powerful. Quite the opposite, in fact. A weak thing, struggling to breathe, afraid of the sun. You should not have lived, it seems.” She pauses, ears flicking for a moment as one of the ghosts suggests that they would have preferred the magician of death had died long ago. Too late for that, though. ”Shall I see what other secrets they know?”

”Show me,” she says without hesitation. There’s something of a challenge in her voice, a curiosity, and she wonders if she is capable of suffering. She is capable of feeling pain, yes, but does that equate to suffering? Was pain such a bad thing? She’d never experienced it enough to know, and she is unafraid of what he might do to her. Pain is temporary. Dying is something she has no reason to fear. And though she has no reason to, she trusts him. He has done nothing to harm her when he clearly could and instead seeks permission. Why should she not?

At least, she trusts him with herself. She cannot say the same for her trust in him where the ghosts are concerned. Perhaps she is protective of them. He clearly has more claim to death than she does, and yet she feels as if she stands sentinel on its border, ready to fight and die for a world she does not entirely live in. Yet it is her world, the world of the unseen. It is not necessarily the world of darkness and shadows that he lives in, though is certainly can be. There’s just so much more to it. If any truly know suffering, it is the ghosts that are trapped there. Trapped in a cage of their own making.

Is that the sort of suffering Jamie feels? Does he seek pain and death because it is familiar, because it is controllable? She is not sure, but perhaps.

”And who’s fault is that?” she asks, not with condemnation but certainly pointedly. She could have chosen a different path in her relationship with the ghosts. Perhaps her life might have felt like a challenge if she had let her relationship with the ghosts stay challenging, if she had let them bully her or if she had learned to bully them instead.

He is a surprisingly open book in his response, something one doesn’t expect from a man that cloaks himself in shadow. And yet in this whole conversation she has never gotten the sense he’d tried to hide anything about himself. No, he only seemed to hide his physical self, cloaked it in darkness and shadow as if he might never fully be comfortable in a body. Given what the ghosts have just told her, she is not entirely surprised by this thought. ”Who else wishes you had died? And why?” Again, there is no condemnation. She was the child of a murderess, of the harbinger of chaos and war, and so who is she to condemn anyone? No, Iris is simply a curious cat. Knowledge has been her weapon for so long, she will never stop wielding it.