"Oh! I can do that."

"- Can you? I would be very grateful. Her name is Carissa Sevar. I am not sure where she is, but she read Lawful Neutral before we died, so - probably Axis. Maybe Heaven." He still doesn't really understand why he's here instead of in Abaddon, but maybe fighting Hell is just inherently the sort of thing that gets one sorted Good. 

"What do you want to say to her? I can only hold it for a couple of minutes."

"I...want to say..." This is surprisingly hard. "That the message is from Mhalir, that I am in Nirvana and - all right. That I am very sorry for being stupid and getting us killed, and I miss her." 

The caterpillar - does something magic. He can see it, just as clearly as if Carissa had Detect Magic up. It's not much like the human Sending spell. 

"The message is from Mhalir," the caterpillar says. "I am in Nirvana and all right. I am very sorry for being stupid and getting us killed, and I miss her."

"- oh," says a startled voice. "That's - good, thank you. Tell him I'm glad he's all right."

"- Can you ask her where she is? And if she has any news of the war?" 

"He wants to know where you are, and whether you have any news of the war."

" - Heaven. And - yes, but I shouldn't - to a random Sending - I don't really know what's common knowledge where -"

This is somehow the most frustrating and upsetting piece yet. That Carissa has a chance to be involved, to do something, and Mhalir doesn't, because instead he's busy being a stupid helpless baby bird. 

"I understand," he says, flatly. "Carissa, I -" None of the words he has are the right ones; it's so much harder to communicate across the gulf between afterlives when he's used to being in her head. "Take care," he finishes, and turns away in a pointless attempt to hide that he's upset. 

The caterpillar lets the spell drop. "I'm sorry," she says quietly after a minute.

There's no good response to that. "Thank you for doing the spell for me. I - am going to go walk around that way."

It's not exactly true that he wants to be alone, he's desperately, crushingly lonely, but talking to Thalie is only making that worse right now, and it seems rude to ask her to go away when she's a caterpillar and not as well equipped with legs as he is. 

She goes back to chomping on her leaf.

The forest is otherwise quiet. There's a stream, and in the distance a deer drinking from it.

Mhalir toddles over to the stream on his baby-bird legs and looks out at the water. The stream looks very wide and very fast, from this angle and this body. He wonders what would happen if he tried to cross it. Probably he would just start drowning because baby birds can't swim, and then someone would fish him out and he would have to talk to them. 

He closes his eyes and curls up, tucking his head into his feathers.

Mhalir has no idea if it'll work here, or work for him at all, but he tries praying to Iomedae. He remembers the words her cleric said to him, it feels like such a long time ago.

Do you want to fight for Good, forever, with people who are also fighting for that?

Yes, he thinks, I want that, I have always wanted that, and I am stuck here now but please, I want to know if there is anything I can do to help. 

She does not answer him. 

This doesn't necessarily mean that she's choosing not to answer him because he doesn't matter anymore, Mhalir reminds  himself. Maybe he still isn't close enough to Lawful Good, or maybe She can only hear, or is only allowed to answer, the prayers of dead people in Heaven and not in other afterlives, or maybe she's just very very very busy. 

(- or maybe she's dead - no, surely something in Carissa's manner would have showed that...) 

Mhalir stays on the riverbank, aware that sitting here being miserable is not accomplishing any of his goals, but it's not like he has any options left to affect the war, right now. And, separate from the frustration, there's something restful in that. He's very tired. 

Some frogs burble in the creek. The sky dims into a beautiful not-exactly-sunset and some flowers bloom. Eventually Caroline flies by overhead and lands in the nest she left from.

He's kind of hungry, and has been alone for long enough that instead being lonely-with-a-random-person sounds better rather than worse than being lonely-by-himself, and the nest would be more comfortable than the riverbank. Maybe he'll see if he can manage to fly up to it now. Mhalir hops to the top of a little hillock, and attempts to leap from it and beat his wings hard enough to fly upward instead of just gliding downward.

This works! It's exhausting but he can get enough altitude to make it to the nest. 

"That was fast," she says cheerfully, and picks up a large seed in her beak to offer him.

"Thank you." He accepts the seed and nibbles it. "I met a caterpillar named Thalie and she sent a message to my friend," he says, once he's done with the seed. "She is in Heaven." He leaves out the part where she has news about the war and won't tell him, because he'll just get upset again. 

She nods. "I have a daughter in Heaven. It feels very - pointlessly tragic, that it is so much effort to see each other."

He bows his head. "It does. Carissa is - was - a wizard though, she is probably already learning the kind of magic that works here." Unlike him, she's not pointlessly stuck being a baby bird that can't do things. 

"They have a century-long integration and training program that turns you into whatever kind of angel you're suited for. - you don't have to do that. You're allowed to rest, or study, there too. But it's the - default."

"Mmm." Mhalir is trying to decide if he would like that better. On some level it would feel less like being dead meant losing all avenues to affect the wider world. It also sounds exhausting. 

She offers him another seed. "In Nirvana the gods believe that - the universe is very old, and will last a very long time, and it needs a lot of things other than soldiers."