In that moment, the specter stared, not with eyes, for it had none, not really; it had diamonds and bells and a veil and an awkward, regal, empty beauty, but not eyes. Eyes were the windows to the soul and no matter how much it pulled, it would never have that. It could never understand that, if it could understand anything at all. Not understanding it, it did not desire it. Instead, it desired something else, and as Genny hesitated, it took it from her. Just like that.
Would she ever even know? In this moment, she likely did not.
Instead, she said her words. Instead she expelled him.
It was a sobering experience, quite literally. Though he likened it to a poison or to spirits, it was magic afflicting an imbalance in his own brain. Or at least, that was how he best understood it, no matter how he explained it. A shock to the system like this? Well, there was not telling how it would affect things. Every new stimulus was unpredictable. There were healers and physicians and phrenologists but those operated in controlled environments. This was a mix of a decade of damage, of six different schools of magics so different that the word hardly contained their nature, of a lifetime of real psychological trauma both natural and unnatural. One wrong move could right the whole ship or burn it to embers.
Here, whatever she did seemed to steady him at least, mentally if not physically. He seemed to have no interest in getting up out of the prone position he had somehow ended up in. Still, his voice was steady enough even if it was half spoken to the floor. "Do not apologize. Maybe apologize for coming without warning, for entering without heeding my warning." The words came quickly, not due to inebriation, but instead due to necessity. "Apologize for not recognizing the breadth of failings, current and former." Then, not an apology, something far from it actually, though at least, just barely, an admission. "I've known for just a short time, a time that I have not been fully well. That was not how I intended to tell you," and here, restraint returned, he held off on those few other words: if I was to tell you at all.