Sleeping, in her own quarters

Vel did not need to knock before entering Adeline quarters, she was quite insistent about that, but Vel lightly rapped on her door even so. There was no reply, so he let himself in. His sister was sprawled out on top of the covers, wearing only her undergarments. Vel felt his dick twitch at the sight. It was a bit early in the day for a nap, but it sure had been an eventful morning, so he figured Adeline deserved some rest. He’d just have to sort out his feelings on his own or try to push them aside for now.

A thought struck him. Should he reach out for Adeline’s mind, the way he had with Rose? It seemed like a bad idea. For one thing, she was sleeping, and he had only been able to read surface emotions so far. At most it might give him some insight into whether her dreams were pleasant or not. More importantly though, this was Adeline. Adi. He realized he found the idea of doing that to her distasteful, like it would be a violation of her trust. Should he have had qualms like that with Rose too? He sure hadn’t, even now that the question had occurred to him, he still didn’t. Was it because she was his servant, or was Adeline just the one person he felt this way about? Vel clutched his head with his free hand and tightened the grip on his cane with the other. He’d come here seeking clarity, instead he’d added another conflict to the mess inside his head. And on top of that was a question he had kind of been avoiding. What the everloving fuck was this? Why was he suddenly able to push his mind out and read people’s emotions? Was this magic? It was certainly not like any magic he had ever read about. It certainly wasn’t normal either. Did it have something to do with that strange beast? He was sorely tempted to wake Adeline, but instead hobbled back out the door.

Vel had flagged down a servant on his way to his own quarters and told him to have lunch brought to him. He was currently sat at his table, distractedly eating said lunch while looking through all his tomes on the subject of magic. Magic was real enough, all sources agreed on that. But it was a rare thing, at least among humans. Sadly, there wasn’t agreement on much else. How magic worked, what kind of forms it took, why some few could wield it, pretty much every scholar seemed to have their own take on those. He also found absolutely no mention of what he had been doing. As a matter of fact, he had only found one mention of any magic relating to the mind, and that was in a copy of an almost 200-year-old text called A Treatise on the Schools of Magic. The author, one Dondeloron Gragheim of the University of Cravvenburg, had argued that magical powers could be sorted into various “schools” based on what they could affect or manipulate. One of these was the school of the mind, but the section about it was brief and basically boiled down to just saying that any magic affecting the minds of people or animals belonged there. There were no other mentions of mind magic, and the next tome he found dealing with the so-called schools of magic was by a different scholar and was a scathing critique of everything Gragheim had said.

The old farts who wrote the tomes were no help at all, but Vel was determined and kept looking for hours. The sun was setting by the time Adeline pulled him out of his books to go to supper.