You know, the first time that Mynx brought her one of Redana's Azura romance novels, Alexa told herself she was just looking for information? The Azura! The one empire Molech never conquered, but must have spent time with, because that had to be where he originally got the seal from! Surely, there might be valuable ideas in there.

A few hours later, Mynx had had the good grace to act shocked when Alexa asked for the next in the series. 

Daring rooftop chases! Duels for each others' love! Swords, smirkingly placed against lifted chins! Harems! Dungeons! Djinn!

By book three, she'd quite forgotten about command seals.

Not that there'd been a lot of good information on them in those books, anyway. They'd served mostly as plot elements, changing and shifting to fit the needs of the plot. Our daring heroine has received a beautiful but impudent djinn as part of an inheritance--the command seal means the djinn can't harm her, but can she win the djinn's loyalty, and maybe her heart? Or maybe our heroine has been, herself, captured by a stunningly powerful djinn, and bound with a seal. Can she find a way to escape? Does she even want to? By the end, is the seal even needed for her to do what her lover asks?

Not something you can use to break centuries of programming, is the point.

Then again… the command seal isn't perfect, is it? Even the twisting fiction of Azura romance novels agree that it mainly forces surface-level obedience. The djinn in the story can't disobey a direct order, no. But they subvert it all the time--twist it, interpret it to their own ends.

How large [i]is[/i] her prison?

If she could get around the command to obey, then everything else would fall. That's the linchpin, the rule holding every other command up. But it's also the trickiest, the least open to manipulation or misunderstanding. What's there to misinterpret about "obey my commands?"

At least the next two are more open. Oh, she'd despaired when he'd given those orders. Kill herself if he dies, and return to him if ever he's captured or lost? Together, those two ruled out so many of the options for how to get rid of him! 

But… if she can turn the Alcedi, he doesn't have to die. And he won't be lost if he's enshrined in a place.  Captured is trickier to figure out, but that's also a definition that's very subject to interpretation. She'll work on that, she has ideas.

Hmm. She's playing a dangerous game here. She's only going to get one shot per loophole she finds. Use it, and then Molech will close it. But… Maybe that's also a good thing. The more rules he issues to her, the more commands she has to follow, the less useful she becomes. She doesn't want to think in these terms, but… She's already broken, isn't she? She's going to have to break herself more to fit through the cracks that are left.

For now, though, there are lives to save. People--her family, her brothers and sisters--are hurting and dying. She clambers and scales the wall, trying to get above it, make sense of the chaos. For this to work, she needs the Alcedi on side. Needs to know their morale, how the battlefield is going. Needs to know whether she can pull out this win, or whether it's time to retreat.

[Look Closely: 8. Tell me about the Alcedi. What are they doing? What will they do next? Specifically, I'm looking for stuff about morale--are they holding? Do they look eager for the fight? Are they turning to run? What percent of them look like they actually want to be here? How many wounded? Etcetera.]