I’m sorry, but I can’t provide a verbatim translation of this passage due to explicit incest content. Here’s a non-graphic summary in English that preserves the tone and key plot beats:

In those few days, Adelaide asked Varie what “seron” meant; Varie hunched over a map like a hawk over prey, tossed her the bare meaning, and shooed her away with a flick. A great lion clamped Adelaide by the collar like a cat with a kitten and carried her out, and chance never came again, so she swallowed the question like a stone.

She asked anyway, at the worst time, like tugging a scab she knew would bleed, yet her voice held a thin thread of hope. Adelaide wasn’t blunt; she was hungry—for a more fragile Mira, like a moth nosing toward a candle.

“That word mattered to the beastfolk, right? Otherwise why did the lioness drop her weapon the moment she heard it?” Adelaide’s temples throbbed like drumbeats in fog; the air’s mana stirred like restless mist.

“The Arm of Symbiosis,” Mira said, voice from behind the steam-gray curtain. “It’s a title. A gift the Nacha Tribe gives to someone they trust.” Her silhouette nodded like a reed in rain. “Each Nacha tribesperson gets one chance. They carve a special mark on the one they trust with their whole heart. When the bearer speaks ‘seron,’ the mark lights, showing other Nacha Tribe that the speaker holds a tribesperson’s trust—proof they’re a friend.”

“So that’s why it didn’t work when I said it?” Adelaide remembered the pale gold spilling from Mira’s mouth like dawn through a slit in cloud, and displeasure rose in her like bitter tea.

“Who marked you?” she asked, voice lowered like a blade kept close.

Silence pooled like cold water. “She’s gone.”

“Gone?” The curtain breathed with Mira’s slow inhale, and Adelaide heard the soft, nearly invisible “one, two,” like pebbles dropped into a well to calm the ripples.

“Crossing the desert with the slavers, I was locked up with a Nacha girl,” Mira said, words moving like wind over dunes. “I shared half a bread with her. After that, she kept close, like shade at noon.”

“She’s the one?”

“Mhm. On the day we reached the Empire’s border, she said she’d show me magic.” A pause, two heartbeats of rain on stone. “She carved the sigil on my back. She wanted me to see gold light when I spoke. But before I could say ‘seron’ to her, the slavers dragged her away.”

The water pattered on, a thin silver chain never breaking. “At the auction, a noble who liked to pinch little throats bought her,” Mira whispered, voice a lantern cupped against wind. “She died during the ‘inspection.’”

Mira shut her eyes; the steam hung like unshed tears. “I thought I’d never tell it out loud. And still, it came to use.”

Adelaide parted her lips, purpose met and ash in her mouth; the air turned heavy as lead. Displeasure, restlessness, and guilt tangled like brambles round her ribs. “What does the mark look like—” She bit the words in half, set the towel aside, stood with a stiff smile like cracked porcelain. “Kidding. I—staying in the bath makes me dizzy. I’ll step out and—”

“Do you want to see, sister?” Mira asked, a thread of hesitation and struggle trailing her words like a drooping kite string.

Adelaide’s breath hitched; her heart kicked wrong, a sparrow in a net. She should refuse; she told herself slow rivers don’t flood. Instead, her hand lifted like a tide and drew aside the only curtain left between them.

The veil rose. Mira sat with her back turned, skin pale as moonmilk and flushed like dawn, water beading and trickling through hollows like rain slipping off stone. Near her left arm, a line of faint gold in desert script lay like sunlight on sand, a foreign grace on an already breathtaking back.

Gratitude should have bloomed like a flower; jealousy sprouted instead, green and strangling. Adelaide finally knew the taste of her earlier displeasure—her claim, marked by another, a brand burned into her chest like frostbite. She stared at the gold line; scent, warmth, and nearness struck like thunder after heat.

She moved. The moment turned headlong. There was a startled struggle, a rush of water like a river hitting rocks, and Adelaide’s hunger showed its fangs like a storm showing lightning. Mira pushed back, breath thin as glass, and kept Adelaide’s mouth from the not-yet-healed wound at her shoulder like a hand barring a door. With cheeks burning, Mira revealed an old bite scar at her neck, the place she’d once offered to steady Adelaide’s frenzy, like a lighthouse lit in squall.

“Not there,” she said, voice trembling like a drawn bowstring. “If you must, here.”

What followed stayed behind steam and water, an intimate, blood-bound exchange where need met consent like two currents braided into one rope. Names were murmured like prayer beads; time slowed like snow, then melted fast. The bath kept singing its silver song, and their breath rose and fell like tides against stone.

That day, they remained in the bath for another half hour.