Tea With Queen Calmaria

"You've grown up so fast, dearest Pari," Queen Calmaria begins, setting down a teacup of delicately molded dragonfly wings onto a paper-thin saucer of lacquered moon-silver leaves. The tea shimmered a matching silver in its cup. There was a tone to the Queen's words that signaled a subtle shift in their conversation; before it had been polite, inquiring on the Velherem's studies and subtly shifting the responses into different areas of inquiry, bringing new light into potential theories that will, inevitably, be found to bear fruit. But Queen Calmaria's statement now is notable in its way to tell how the conversation has directly changed without even seeming effort to the Queen. What might have been long willowy hair or leafy branches is braided into an intricate golden crown or headdress, and with a wordless gesture, Pari khan'Shald stands respectfully and moves behind Calmaria, beginning the long and arduous process of shifting and changing the strange material, hair that is somehow yet crystalline yet nearly fungal or perhaps furlike. It shifts with every half-blink or peripheral view, always beautiful, never quite true. Long nimble fingers that seem more comfortable measuring instruments of science than doing something so womanly as braiding hair are slow but meticulous in their works.
 
Calmaria continues. "You've grown up so fast, yet I'm sure you know I haven't aged a day, or at least not enough nearly to matter. I've watched you hone your mind to a twisting puzzle of logic and as fine-tuned as a steel-wire trap, making it your weapon and your God. I've watched you in some way ever since you stepped out of that mirror in the Wyldyrsyc. Such a strange thing you were. Even then. You aren't the first mortal something-or-other that caught my eye, but I think you might be the last. My pride and joy, the princess I could only have dreamed of in strange saturnalias. Your work here in Calanthis makes all of us so proud, Pari. But still...you are not the little girl I once found and asked about a ratty cloak from my closet, not the little girl I took under my wing and tutored as best I could in the sciences..."
 
There is another wordless gesture that speaks entire volumes in its casual and regal ordering, and Pari khan'Shald's body is already moving even before it is given, back in front of the Queen, hands clasped at her front respectfully. The Queen eyes her with an even mixture of maternal love and cunning pawnbroker. "Yes. You've grown into the full flower of your womanhood, dearest Pari, and I think it is time that you leave our court and Calanthis and learn about the world beyond what you might in books and in dusty memories of ancient orders. Don't you, my dear? There are entire existences you can find and learn about and make me proud by doing so. Such wonders you could find if you applied your mind to hunt knowledge and take it like the countless young men that think that victory is found in standing gore-soaked and grinning like a barbarian over the corpse of another young man that hoped to do the same. Seek your knowledge of the world outside these halls, Pari, run it down as relentless as the wolf does the deer, and grasp your teeth across knowledge's neck and gorge yourself on its entrails for me.
 
"You'll do that for me, won't you, my dearest Pari khan'Shald? You'll make your queen mother proud, yes?"
 
And of course there was only one answer that the Velherem could give Queen Calmaria.
 
"It will be my pleasure to do this for you, your majesty."