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?”
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jamie