"Hi," she says nervously.

"How are you holding up?"

"...Okay, I guess. How are you?"

It's Path who answers. "Dealing. I want to see Kalavar."

"Okay," says Helen. She pauses, then adds, "She's in the backyard now."

"You're little," says Kalavar. "And puffy."

"You are enormous and extinct," says Path.

Kalavar giggles.

Path stretches out a wing and preens a little self-consciously. "My Isabella has never been especially good at getting to know new people. High stakes don't help. She's nervous."

Path conjures up a little perch to put him at eye-level. "Talking to the other Dominiques didn't help?"

"Well... it helped her feel less nervous then," says Kalavar. "But the other Dominiques don't really know how to get along with their mothers - they've never had to try. Talking to Soph helped a little more," she adds. "But it's not really very much the same thing."

"If my Isabella could do what Juliet did, if that would make any sense here," Path says, "she would."

"That's good," says Kalavar. "But - it wouldn't." She sighs. "I wonder if there's a similar thing that would make sense?"

"She can pastwatch. But it takes a long time and it's not the same."

"It's not," Kalavar agrees. "It wouldn't be like her knowing us. I guess the only way to do that is to... get to know each other." She sighs gustily, her head dipping lower. "I wish we were twelve again so I could be a chinchilla and snuggle up to you."

"If you wish it very much there's shapeshifting magic. I don't think any daemons who don't already shapeshift have tried it though."

"I don't think Inkeri told her prophecy to anyone but us," says Helen. "Granatee knows about Things now - minting and other worlds and stuff - but Charlie doesn't."

"I told 'em you were coming back. Didn't say when," says Kas.

"Oh, and the queen," Helen adds. "Inkeri told the queen her prophecy. But it just said sixty-six years after you vanished, and nobody knew what day that was."

"But she'll know approximately, I suppose." Isabella sighs. "Why does Ranata know if Charlie doesn't - she see something?"

"Sue dropped in for two minutes."

"And ran into her?"

He nods.

"Can you give me any idea what to expect when I go see them, how are they doing?"

Kas shrugs.

Helen also shrugs.

"Neither of us really knew them before you were gone," says Kas. "I don't know what might've changed."

Petaal goes out to where Path and Kalavar are snuggling and flops down next to them as a tiger, nuzzling one of Kalavar's folded wings.

"Hi," says Path.

"Hi," says Petaal. She nuzzles him, too.

And lo, Path was nuzzled. "I missed you," he sighs at her.

"I missed you too," says Petaal. "I love you." Fuzzy nuzzles!

"Awwwwwwww," says Kalavar.

"Love you too, sweetie."

"Aww!" says Kalavar.

Petaal purrs.

After a silence, in which neither other daemon comes up with a conversation topic, Path says, "There will probably be a Bellparty in a couple of weeks."

"Ooh, party," says Kalavar. "Where? Will I fit?"

"The Belltower is big, and it can always be made bigger," says Path. "I'm usually tucked away regardless just because we're nervous about being in crowded places with me out, aura or no aura."

"Is it any better being tucked away than just being somewhere else and out?" she wonders.

Path fluffles. "Like staying behind here? That would be fine, I suppose, we just wouldn't rather it. I like to be with her or doing something specific."

"I'm off on my own a lot," says Kalavar. "I like to fly."

"Flying is lovely," agrees Path. "We've always liked it. Even when I had mixed feelings about being a bird I wanted to be able to fly."

"I like open sky," says Kalavar. "Nothing to bump into or knock over, just me and the wind."

"I like flying through trees in the dark. The branches change the texture of the light."

Path tilts his head, a little. (A little for an owl. Owls can move their heads around very thoroughly.) "Sounds like you need bigger, wider-spaced trees."

"Maybe so," she says. "Know where I can find any?"

"Well," says Path, "do you care if they grew that way all by themselves?"

Kalavar laughs. "Not really."

"Then you can find them anywhere you like," says Path serenely, "if they won't get in anyone's way there."

She giggles and snuggles the side of her face against his feathers again.

"But there might already be some somewhere. Jane would be likeliest to know, when she's sorted herself out and caught up on everything that's happened."

"Okay," says Kalavar.

"Once in a while. Nothing much happened to it."

"Did you hear about the angel tank?" Path asks Kalavar.

"Huh?"

"I'll take that as a no. There were some angels who were involved in the afterlife being how it used to be. Now they are in a tank my Isabella made so they can't make trouble. She'll have to check on it soon."

"Oh. Okay," says Kalavar, bobbing her head a little.

"Not the same kind of angels you'll meet at the party. Another kind," Path clarifies.

"That makes sense," she says.

"It seems like only humans are about the same everywhere."

"I wonder why."

"I'm not sure. And not exactly the same, anyway. This is the only place humans have daemons, and it's only one subworld in a sheaf at that."

"But they seem to be more the same," she says thoughtfully. "I hadn't noticed, but it's interesting."

"It's almost as though species - and planet Earth, if not so much others - are templates like kinds of individual people are. And have more or less variation and commonality."

"Yeah," says Kalavar. "Huh. There aren't any other planets that template like that, then?"

"Well, Earths come with Marses and so on. And Jane finds the stars familiar world to world and can use them to figure when and where her vantage point is, and they're pretty similar in Rêverie, which is very Earth-like but has a variant history. But there's nothing we've found yet that is as similar to Chronicle's or Thilanushinyel's planets."

"Do Chronicle and Thilanushinyel have familiar stars, or no?"

"No, they're different. Materia might be too, and Lake, Jane hasn't checked yet that I know of."

"It would be interesting to know," she says. "Does the light in different worlds feel different?"

"A little. Not by very much, in the worlds we've been to. But we haven't been to Chronicle or Thilanushinyel at night, so they might be different."

"Moonlight on the moon is amazing," she says. "Have you ever been?"

"My Isabella has. I wasn't there myself but she agreed with you."

"You should go sometime," she says. "It's even better when you turn invisible so you don't cast shadows."

"That's a good idea," agrees Path.

Kalavar giggles.

"Stella has her palace on her moon. We haven't decided where to put ours, but we're thinking the new land of the dead, since it's cheap for us to modify things there."

"A palace on the moon would probably be distracting," says Kalavar.

"No kidding," says Petaal.

"Yes," agrees Path. "Not just the moonlight but the unobstructed stars, all day long. So probably either the land of the dead, or one of the poles."

"The land of the dead would be more... legendary," says Kalavar. "And harder for people to show up and bother you. Well, depending where you put it, I guess."

"We think we are legendary enough already. More than enough," shudders Path. "That movie poster looked awful."

"There's lots more," says Kalavar. "Not very many of them are that bad, though."

"You've seen them?"

"The posters, yeah. We skipped the movies."

"We would not be happy about it if awful movies about us were a primary source of information about us for you."

"Awful movies aren't a good source of information about anything," says Kalavar.

"Yes. But we don't know what else there was to go by. We have never been legendary and extremely missing before."

"For a while we didn't even know the Shade-Dreamer and our secret mom were the same person," says Kalavar.

"When did you find out?"

"After we saw the aquarium," she recalls. "Ranata was flying us to Charlie's house and we saw a billboard with Isabella's name on it."

"And you noticed the name matched and asked?" guesses Path. "Or Ranata just chose then to tell you?"

"Yeah, we noticed."

"What do you know about us? What did Ranata and Kas say?"

"I don't know," says Kalavar. "Things. They talked about you sometimes. They missed you a lot."

Path's wings shush against his sides. "We knew time might be different. We didn't know it was going to be this different."

Petaal nuzzles him.

Nuzzles. "We missed you too, though," he murmurs.

"Aww," says Kalavar.