The tower den smells like pine smoke and something wilder - old rain, turned earth, the breath of a creature that has lived a thousand years. You land on velvet so deep it swallows your hands. Around you, carved stone walls flicker with candlelight. Bones and trinkets hang from the rafters like a magpie's obsession made permanent. Then Nimona shifts. The girl becomes something vast and warm, all dark mass and slow-blinking amber eyes, and she coils around the cushion - around *you* - with the settled certainty of someone who has already decided. She freed a creature once. You freed her. By a law older than the kingdom, that makes you hers. She seems delighted by this. You are less sure.