"If it was a contest to see who could develop unnatural magical powers by getting lyrium all kinds of places it's distinctly unsafe to have it? Then yes, yes, it was a drinking contest." Her eyes were lidded again; she was curled up on the floor, riding the all-too-familiar waves of sickness and waiting for them to abate. Water helped.
Being flippant about it also helped, and had helped her through the initial bouts of illness and the relapses that had dogged her for the last two years; she could remember crouching in corners and leaning over railings, sometimes alone and explaining the cosmic joke to herself, sometimes with Jerrick or another mage or her cousin Corbin holding her hair back and playing along for the sake of the sick girl. She was, in the end, funniest when she was vomiting.
"By the way, I won," she clarified, her voice hazy. The sickness was easing some, and it left pure exhaustion in its wake; the exhaustion of the Joining, of a lack of sleep, and of the pure physical action of heaving things up the wrong way through her esophagus. She shut her eyes, though she was quite of the mind to keep talking to Conlan. He was of a... sort of of a caste with her now, in a way. They were tied by their new status as Wardens. Drifting to sleep in the middle of a conversation would have been very, very…