I'm really really really going to be ok

It was hard not to think about Aria and Akibrus, hard not to think about the threats her parents had made against them. Her parents made a profession out of playing the game, so she knew the threat was real. They wouldn’t hesitate to hurt the things Lyric loved if they didn’t get what they wanted. She smiled at the question about the Circle she was in.

I was in Starkhaven. She wondered if he’d question at any point why she hadn’t returned home when the Circles fell over a decade earlier, or at the very least when the Templar/Mage war had ended. She took a sip of her tea, she wanted to say more. She was usually a very bubbly talker, but she was trying so hard not to say the wrong things, that she wasn’t quite acting herself either.

As he asked about her magic, she paused, trying so hard not to show any disdain for the way he’d talked about buying her. As long as her parents were threatening her family, she had to remain on good terms with them, and that meant making sure this marriage happened. She started to speak.

Well my strengths are in nature and mind mage. She was going to do some magic, but then he spoke up about wanting to go outside. She looked at her parents, then back to Tiberius and got up and followed him. She still worried about saying the wrong thing and her parents finding out, but it would at least be nice not to have them directly breathing down her neck while she jumped through hoops.

Lyric followed Tiberius, her heart pounding in her chest. She could feel the weight of her parents' gaze on her back. This was another test, another game to play. She just hoped she was up to the challenge. The back garden used to be her favourite place to play when she was little. She felt a little bit more at ease in the garden, even if she still had to carefully watch what she said, after all, the only thing that she knew about Tiberius beyond where he was from, was that he was engaged to her sister, she didn’t know if she could trust him.