"It's weird that I need to be reintroduced," says Elspeth's grandma. "But okay, let's go for it."

"It's been more than a century for him," Elspeth says, not ungently, "and he barely remembers being human. Most of what I knew about you came from Carlisle."

She sighs.

"- Also," Elspeth says, "he can read minds now; I'm not sure if that came up since you've been awake. Would you rather he not read yours? I don't care, but some people do."

"Well, that depends. If he reads my mind is he going to regret it?"

"Usually he doesn't, but you might be a special case. Why? What are you thinking?"

"That it's upsetting that my son forgot me."

"Maybe you can convince him to magically remember the first seventeen years of his life," suggests Elspeth. "Mama does hers, now."

"That would be nice."

"I think I am happy, now," Edward says after due consideration. Then: "You realize the title of Emperor is almost entirely ceremonial."

"It still means 'married to an empress'. And a damn good empress at that."

He smiles. "She is."

"I've noticed," she says, smiling back. "Hence the gloating."

He laughs, a little. "- So apart from gloating. What do you mean to do now you're alive again?"

"I believe somebody floated the idea of Bella hiring me as imperial personnel officer. Sounds like a nice job."

"Quite possibly. There are a lot of personnel, and it's been handled per department, so far."

"Reasonable. But not the most efficient it could possibly be. I like efficiency," she says.

He nods. "Are you liable to carry on being human? That would make you the only one working for the Coven in any significant capacity."

"I don't have any plans to change my species anytime soon."

"How much of a history lesson have you gotten so far?" he wonders, looking back out the window. They're in Norway right now; it shows a forest.

"Kind of a patchy one," she says.

"In 2005, when Elspeth was very, very young, the Volturi caught me. It was standard procedure, at the time, for Chelsea, or Addy copying her power, to destroy all the magically unprotected relationships of a captured witch. So that in the event we ran away, we'd be less likely to find old covenmates, and spread the story. Chelsea couldn't affect mate bonds. That was it."

Well, that's... upsetting.

"Bella's immune. Of course. And we've had time to - rebuild, since."

"That's good," she says.

"Yes. It is a rebuilding, though, not a - restoration. The initial instinctive things - are gone. For Elspeth too, for that matter. She could remove artificial add-ons but not replace things taken."

"It's handy that Bella killed Chelsea already," she says. "Saves me the trouble."

"Yes. She was just - incandescently furious."

Personally, she doesn't run to the incandescent. She is very room-temperature about it. But Chelsea is an intolerable threat and needs to be erased as thoroughly as possible. So it's nice that Bella took care of that for her. She is a good empress and can have a cookie.

"She doesn't eat cookies, anymore," Edward says, smiling slightly.

"A metaphorical cookie. A bronze cookie on a plaque to hang on her wall."

Edward glances at the wall. "I don't think it would improve the decor, much. Perhaps she'd disagree."

"Hmm, not sure what I'm hoping for there. If she did, I'd have to find a bronze cookie."

"If she wished to hang a bronze cookie from the wall I'm sure she'd conjure one."

"In that case, we should definitely suggest it."

He laughs. "When she's through with the mess around the people Elspeth already somewhat resurrected, I expect she'll come here and we will be able to do so."

"Who gets the job of explaining what it's for?"

"It was your idea," he says mildly.

She laughs. "Fair enough."

"Do you want the rest of the history lesson, while we're waiting for her?" Edward asks. "The twentieth century, the eventful few years after Bella appeared on the scene, the fledgeling empire."

"Go for it."

Edward proceeds with a summary. He pauses to go into more detail whenever she wonders about something, steering between "global historical summary" and "the story of his life" depending on what interests her; let it never be said that mindreading is not convenient.

It's been a few hours of guided summary when Bella slips into the room. She doesn't interrupt, just goes up to Edward and slips her hand into his.

Awwww. She smiles at them.

"Good empress. Have a bronzed cookie."

"A bronzed cookie?"

"You wouldn't get much use out of the edible kind," she says reasonably.

"Is there some use to the bronze kind which is unclear to me?"

"You can hang it on the wall on a little plaque and then look at it and bask in the memory of my approval."

"I believe I will find your approval sufficiently memorable absent the cookie. Are you approving of me for anything in particular?"

"All the people you've brought back from the dead recently spring to mind as an example."

Bella laughs. "Yes. Anyone else I should pick up and haven't yet?"

"My aunt would be nice."

"Any special instructions on how to wake her and introduce her to the world?" Bella asks, poising her hand over her new Jane-gem.

"Mentioning that I got resurrected first might be a good idea."

"Anything else?"

"Nah, I think that covers it."

"Jane, you heard her," says Golden, tapping the gem.

[That's nice,] says the appropriate Chris. [Where can I find her?]

[I can pick you up and put you where she is, if you don't want to ask me any questions first.]

[Lizzie first. Questions later.]

Yoink.

Hug!

"Of course he did."

"I feel like I should clarify that at the time he married me I was only an immortal vampire, and it was his doing that I was even that."

"And at what point did one of you get the power to raise the dead?"

"A few hours ago."

"Keeping busy, I see. Somebody get the girl a cookie."

"Somebody get me a cookie, then."

Obediently, Bella conjures up a large, soft chocolate chip cookie and offers it to Chris.

Helpless giggling over here.

"Up until I was just resurrected, I did not know that magical powers were a thing," says Chris.

"That doesn't rule it out, but it does make it less likely," muses Bella. "I didn't know I had mine until I met Edward." Pause. "He reads minds, by the way."

"Of course he does," she snorts.

"It does not surprise me even a little tiny bit that Lizzie's kid turned out to be a mind-reader."

"I would!"

Presently Elspeth appears in response to brainphoned summons; Jacob is trailing her, as unobtrusive as he can be at his height. "Hi, Chris, welcome to one of many lands of the living. I'm Elspeth."

"Hi, Elspeth! Who's your barnacle?"

"I can see I've got a lot to catch up on," says Chris. "But first things first: how do I make cookies appear out of thin air? Because that is a kind of magic I want."

Golden gives her a little bracelet of glowing golden squares and triangles. "Wishcoins," she says. "These are small ones. A square will conjure a non-magical object. Triangles do smaller things. Flick lightswitches without having to get up and so on."

"Ooh, shiny."

"I'm glad you like them."

Mine look like this, Elspeth adds, with illustration, but don't let on, it upsets Jake.

Chris raises an eyebrow at Elspeth.

Wolves get extremely protective of their imprints, and wishcoins are made out of pain. Not much, for little ones, but enough to bother him. Oh, this is my witchcraft - you can answer [like this.]

[Magical,] says Chris.

Yes, very!

"Good," says Bella. "It is 2031 and none of us dabble in time travel, so if you wished to go back to something more familiar it would be inconvenient to arrange."

She snorts.

"Perhaps you'd also like a summary of the last hundred years or so," suggests Bella. "Edward will do better at that than me; I don't have even half a century under my belt yet. Although Elspeth could manage it."

"With pictures and sound, and from multiple perspectives," agrees Elspeth.

"Ooh, pictures."

Elspeth laughs, and launches into a comprehensive illustrated history of everything that has gone on of importance since Chris died. She is much faster than Edward, since she goes on being comprehensible even if she talks a little faster than her audience could normally track.

It is fascinating! Chris is fascinated. Best great-niece.

Elspeth is the best and all her relatives should be glad to have her.

Someone should give her a cookie.

Elspeth can in fact eat cookies! She can even keep talking while eating them without violating any commonly accepted etiquette guidelines. Is someone going to give her a cookie?

Yes.

Elspeth noms the cookie.

Elspeth is an adorable granddaughter.

Presently she is an adorable granddaughter who has finished summarizing. "Those are the highlights. There's always more detail to be had, of course."

"Whew," says Chris. "Okay. Now, do us dead people have anywhere to live, or do I have to sleep in the creepy empty room?"

"There are spare quarters for people with humanlike needs in the wolf village," laughs Elspeth, "we can show you."

"Great."

To the wolf village! Both of these people are Downside-style dead, so Elspeth doesn't bother with imprint warnings. "Do you want to share a place or have your own?" she inquires on the way.

Chris looks at her niece.

"Share."

Elspeth puts them in a charming little house, which is stocked with miscellaneous amenities and edible nonperishables, and also appears to have been serving as extra fridge space for someone who really, really likes eggs.

"Why the eggs?"

"Eggs are very popular among the high-metabolism set," laughs Elspeth. "Someone must have stashed them here. You can eat them, you can wait for whoever it was to run out of their own fridgeful and hand them over."

"Noted."

"How much do you remember? I can fill in most of the rest," she says. "Your father didn't have much to do with raising you."

"Almost nothing. Faces, half faded out. I knew your name, and that I was a Junior before I started using 'Cullen'. I could probably find the place we lived, if I went to Chicago. I have - automatic answers to standard autobiographical questions, and not all of them are attached to the various cover stories. Beyond that, nothing much."

"Well, let's see... you had no grandparents," she says. "At least three of them were dead when you were born, and I wouldn't have known my father if I passed him in the street. Not that I was allowed to tell you that, because Edward Sr. had very definite ideas about which parts of my life were acceptable for polite company. You did have an uncle on your father's side - nothing on mine except Chris, until she died. Is that the kind of information you're looking for?"

"Some of it," says Edward. "Yes." He half-smiles. "Bella is also curious about whether my historical tendency towards 'melancholy philosophizing' is really about being a vampire or if that's just a shape it took."

"Melancholy philosophizing. Yes, this is a tendency I recognize," says Lizzie, smiling.

"We had an argument about souls, once, that she found very exasperating. I suppose it's all been rendered quite moot; it has been more than demonstrated that vampires and humans appear in the same place and it couldn't reasonably be called Heaven."

"I never previously believed in an afterlife, but I'm happy to be proved wrong."

"Did I pick up all my opinions on the subject from Carlisle, then? And attach my own melancholy philosophizing flavor?"

"Hard to tell," echoes Edward. "Yes, I suppose so. I have no special talent at reading my own thoughts."

"No, that's your wife's area of expertise. Although I guess you could always ask her for tips."

"I have, occasionally. I think it requires more... self-esteem, than I tend to default to."

Well, now she kind of wants to hug him.

He considers this for an imperceptible fraction of a second, and then holds out his arms.

"Yes."

He laughs softly.

Well, she is. She's his mother; it's her job. Hugs and all.

"I have been wondering if I should introduce you to Esme. And reintroduce you to Carlisle. Or if that would be uncomfortable."

That surprises a laugh out of Edward. "I don't know if 'mother' would be the best way to describe the relationship, anyway, except for convenience's sake, inadequate words for the odd configurations that crop up in covens - we often presented that way, but just as often I posed as her brother. Once as her nephew. Carlisle I do have more of a filial feeling for, and she's his wife, in addition to being a generally motherly person."

Edward laughs. "I'm glad. Particularly considering you picked him out for me."

"Well, there wasn't exactly a vast selection on offer at the time. But if there had, I'm pretty sure I still would've gone with him."

"Very lucky," Edward agrees. "The Denali coven were the only other vegetarians active at the time, and I don't think I'd have fit in as well with them as creators instead of cousins."

"I take full credit for this near-total accident."

"What would you have done, if it hadn't been Carlisle? I'm not sure why anyone else would have been here, but it wouldn't be unheard of. Alice came from a hospital that had a vampire working at it, albeit not one dedicated to treating the flu."

"Alas, I have no examples ready to hand. The one in Alice's hospital was studying her witchcraft, which does not apply."

She shrugs. "I would've found out how to get them to, anyway. Carlisle was easy; if you poked him with something sharp, altruism would pour out. Metaphorically speaking. I understand you folks are pretty much impervious to sharp objects and there's not much pouring going on when you aren't."

"Quite impervious, not particularly liquid," agrees Edward. "He did require prompting, though. I was the first person he turned, and he'd had prior chances. He wasn't sure it was right to do that to someone. I wasn't either, for a long time. Bella, of course, could convince me that the sun was blue and the sky yellow."

"But he didn't exactly take much of a push once I put the idea in his head. Convenient, that."

"He'd recently met Esme. And managed to leave her where she was. He was intensely lonely," says Edward softly.

"Lucky for him he managed to scoop her up again later."

"Very. Occasionally I wonder if he would have eventually broken and gone looking and I'm not sure. I tried to go away from Bella, once, when I was afraid I'd snap and drink her blood; I lasted less than a week. Carlisle didn't have that concern to hold him back and he managed, for years, until a sheer coincidence put her in his path."

"I say again: if you poked him with a sharp object..."

"I'm not going to disagree with you," laughs Edward. "I admire him intensely."

"I can tell."

"I think that's a great idea."

Lizzie answers it.

There stands Carlisle, smiling kindly. "It's good to see you again," he says.

"Likewise. C'mon in."

She doesn't have quite a good enough read on Carlisle to decide whether or not he would be amused by all the commentary about sharp objects, so she doesn't volunteer it.

"Which reminds me," says Carlisle, "Addy has been asking permission to check to see if your particular brand of insight is magical or potentially so. I believe she's hoping to get a better reception by going through others rather than inquiring herself."

"Eleazar is the other option. He isn't as convenient, but he might be more pleasant," says Edward. "Perhaps the next time we're relatively near to Alaska."

"I could imagine using coins to determine if you have witchcraft at all, but I'm not sure how to design a wish to also provide the sort of detail Addy or Eleazar could," says Edward.

"Starting from the premise that I probably don't have witchcraft, the wish might be more efficient, depending on size. Except that since I am going to meet both of our resident magic-sniffers, there isn't much point to wishing about it first."

"I don't think Eleazar would describe himself as a magic-sniffer," says Carlisle. He omits Addy from this remark.

"And a good alternate term would be...?"

"I think Eleazar would prefer 'sensor'," Edward says. "Addy, I imagine, will assent to any description that gets you to let her touch you and check."

Lizzie shrugs. "Okay, magic sensors."

"Eleazar used to work for the Volturi, longer ago than Addy did, and one of the things he did while he was there was work on the categorization of witches," Edward says. "He left with his mate, when he met her."

"Aha," says Lizzie. "Sounds like a useful person to know."

"Quite. He doesn't get all of Addy's fine detail, but he's got some advantages - he could sense Bella, when her guard was down; Addy can't copy her unless her shield is down," says Edward.

"Which means not at all, if I remember correctly?"

"Not for Addy," Edward says. "For occasional brief moments she can let someone through. Me, Elspeth. Until she's distracted or loses focus. She's had less success with people she isn't close to, none with Addy so far. Addy is of course confident that eventually Bella will trust her to the point of being able to allow it."

"Addy is very simply put together. She almost prides herself on it. She runs on novelty and discovery. Predominantly of magic, although other things can interest her too."

"It's the details that get you," says Lizzie.

"Yes. The Volturi ought to have been able to control her, and didn't - she had blackmail on the one of them who understood her, and the other knew enough about that to take her out while he was gone, but not how to manage her."

"And Addy proved willing enough to work within Bella's rules," says Carlisle. "I have some hope for her developing beyond her original motives."

"How much hope?"

Lizzie laughs. She is imagining Carlisle with a halo again. It suits him. Maybe somebody should wish him one.

"And fluffy little wings," she says cheerfully. "You could turn them off whenever you needed to go anywhere."

"Halo or bust," Lizzie says firmly. "The traditional kind, where it's like your head is a golden lightbulb."

Carlisle shakes his head, laughing softly.

"It's even thematically appropriate!" Golden lightbulb, Golden Empire...

"It's perfect," says Lizzie. "You could wear it for state occasions, like a uniform. Imperial Angel."

"I'm already titled Imperial Ethicist, which is more than enough."

"Angel would be cuter. But it's probably a good thing that that's not how Bella runs her empire."

"Probably," agrees Edward.

"And we will just have to live with the necessary sacrifices."

"I'm sure we will all muddle along somehow," says Carlisle.

She laughs.

"Did you want to meet Esme today, too, or would that be too much all at once?" Edward inquires.

"By all means, I will meet Esme."

"How have you been settling in? I know it must be something of a startlement to wake up all of a sudden, so much later than you remember."

"Considering what I woke up from, it's been pretty great, actually. And Edward gave me enough of a history lesson that I'm mostly not surprised by the little things."

"Yes, people are very helpful around here. I appreciate it. Although it does tempt me to start distributing halos."

She giggles. "Sorry. I was joking earlier that someone should give Carlisle a halo and fluffy little wings, because he's so angelic."

"I think that's a pretty appropriate comparison," says Lizzie, "except that none of the Greek gods were this nice."

"We should all be more grateful for the lack of disturbing swans in our lives," she says, laughing. "Also showers of gold. And bulls. Zeus had a weird idea of what mortals were into."

Lizzie cracks up.