What. This is very confusing. 

- why is he still dead - he doesn't know how long it's been but surely longer than it takes to cast Resurrection - where's Carissa - also dead, presumably - or at least he hopes so, it's also hard to retrieve his memory of what was happening when he died but he knows the alternatives are all worse - 

It's so hard to keep track of what's happening, there are voices saying words but it's a struggle to string any of it together into a coherent timeline. 

It seems like it's probably important?

Mhalir isn't even sure if he can speak but he tries anyway, "you have Alloran," and then he stops because whatever is going on here this probably doesn't help his case at all, but - it's true and relevant and so he's saying it, that's the sort of shape he is... 

"Pause to speak to our client -"

"Granted."

"Do you know your name," one of the voices with associated vague impression of officiousness and dustiness says to him.

That's a weird question, why wouldn't he, but he answers on automatic. "Mhalir four-three-seven-six." 

"Do you know where you are."

"...No?" 

"Filing a request for accommodations under the Fair Trial Act -"

 "Yes, yes." Impatiently.

"He was briefed!"

"There's no procedural defense to not meeting the first six provisions of the Fair Trial Act, and conducting a trial while the defendant doesn't know where he is is a very clear -"

"The request was granted, argument on it will cease."

Someone addresses Mhalir again. "Does it sound to you like we are speaking in a language you understand, using words that you are familiar with, at a speaking speed you can follow?"

"Yes." Which is confusing, come to think of it, because he's not wearing a host body right now. In fact, he doesn't think he has a body at all. "I - am finding it hard to remember what was said in order, though. I know I am dead? Is this how it is supposed to work - I thought it would just be...magic...?" 

"It's got to be the species thing," someone says. "The appropriate boosts to working memory look different."

"I'm working on it."

"The court requests an investigation into why this wasn't determined before trial."

"The court will recall that we're pretty godsdamned overwhelmed right now, which is in part the defendant's fault -"

"That's prejudicial."

"Sorry. I'm missing my best friend's funeral."

"That's prejudicial."

Someone...does something... and now Mhalir is sitting in a room with six other people at different desks. One of them is an angel in a pressed formal military uniform of some kind; one of them is a spinning ball of interlocking bits of metal, one of them is a scowling devil, one is a cat, one looks like an aged and dignified human and sits at the nicest desk in the middle, and one is in the corner, perched on his desk, taking notes. 

"Do you know your name," says the cat.

"Mhalir four-three-seven-six." Did they ask him that question already? He thinks so but it's already slipping into the indiscriminate fog of 'not now.' 

"Do you know where you are."

He looks around the room. It's still not quite clear how he's doing this, because he's still not in a host body, but - magic, presumably. 

"Somewhere in the Golarion afterlife. You are - deciding where I will go?"

He was about to ask if they were deciding whether he would go to Hell, but one, he doesn't read Lawful, and two, he doesn't know if there still is a Hell. 

He vaguely wants to apologize to the one who's missing their best friend's funeral but he doesn't know which person at which desk that voice corresponds to. 

"Yes," says the cat. "Every soul is entitled to a trial, at which it is decided which afterlife matches their actions and choices while living. The trial takes place in the Boneyard, the Neutral afterlife. You are allowed to speak at the trial if you would like. Does it sound to you like we are speaking in a language you understand, using words that you are familiar with, at a speaking speed you can follow?"

"Yes." 

"Do you understand that you had, while alive, the capacity to take actions, and that those actions had effects on the world and on other people?"

"- Yes." This seems self-evident enough that he's confused why they're even asking.

"Do you understand that the purpose of this court is to determine your alignment and which afterlife you are assigned to?"

Mhalir starts to say yes, and stops, because he's suddenly overwhelmingly sad and confused.

"I - I thought Aroden would raise us..." He trails off, too late, unsure how much information the court has and whether he should be trying not to reveal things - but surely it's pointless, surely they can read everything out of his mind anyway. "Carissa, my host - is she here - can I talk to her..." 

It's sinking in, now, that he's still dead. That the court is talking about where to send him, on the assumption that will be permanently.

He's not the same alignment as Carissa. If they both stay dead, he won't ever see her again. 

"You will be able to talk to other petitioners in your assigned afterlife after your trial has been completed," says the note-taker in the corner, from rote. "Trials are sometimes delayed in the case of an imminent anticipated resurrection but in this case there is no imminent anticipated resurrection."

"Are you satisfied with the accommodations," the dignified man says to the cat. 

"Yes," says the cat. 

"Then let's get this started. Jurisdiction-"

"I present the court with three arguments that we don't have jurisdiction over Mhalir's actions before he reached Golarion's star system," says the angel. "First,  from Elysium vs. Ellostar, -2334 - in cases where we have very limited information beyond that directly coded in the soul about events, we lack the resources required to issue conventional judgments. Someone in Katheer kills a rival. We evaluate his situation, his intent, the victim's situation and intent, the local laws, his understanding of the local laws, "the bulk of the information required to determine whether a killing is lawful and whether it could have been reasonably understood to advance a chosen value system is contained not in the subject's mind but in his environment", that's from Hell vs. Izabetta, 2117. Second, jurisdictional overlap, other parts of the universe have their own gods and in some cases their own courts with remit over the souls of the dead -"

"Mhalir was subject to none of those," says the devil.

"If we interpret the law as suggesting that we have jurisdiction conditional on no one else having it, the court will have to do fact-finding on whether that's correct, fact-finding that in some cases the court lacks the resources to satisfactorily conduct, Axis vs Helen, -1820. If we interpret our jurisdiction narrowly, as existing not over the set of all worlds that we do not know to have another legal system but as existing over our own world only, then the court does not have to go try to figure out what other jurisdictions Mhalir may have at various points been subject to. Constraining those domains in which the court must conduct fact-finding to those in which the court has the capabilities to do it to consistent standards of accuracy is one of the primary justifications for jurisdiction, Axis vs Aspex, 4103."

"Axis vs Aspex considers statute of limitations, not spatial jurisdiction, and has historically been narrowly construed," says the whirling ball of gears. 

"Technically," says the angel, "there is not a meaningful difference between temporal and spatial limits to jurisdiction, when we're talking about other star systems."

" - that's persuasive, I'm concurring," says the whirling ball of gears.

Mhalir is more able to track what's going on, now, having a visual helps, but he's also having trouble because he feels suddenly, overwhelming, scared and helpless and tired and sad. 

Trials are sometimes delayed in the case of an imminent anticipated resurrection but in this case there is no imminent anticipated resurrection.

He wants to ask how the fight went in Hell, if Aroden is alive, but he's also scared to know the answer. And he's not sure it'll help anything, here, that devil looks very upset and angry. Understandably so even if Aroden died seconds after he did and they lost the war with Asmodeus, because they had already melted the entire first circle of Hell and much of the second.

And it sort of doesn't matter who won, because he's not headed for Hell, anyway. Presumably he'll end up going to Abaddon, the Neutral Evil afterlife, and probably his soul will be eaten and he'll cease existing, and it won't matter at all what else happens in the rest of forever, because he's already lost. 

Mhalir misses Carissa. He wishes, desperately, that there had been time to - what, say goodbye? 

Vaguely he remembers that he might have said something, before, at some comparable point to this. 

This time he stays silent. 

"Third point on jurisdiction, in general we find adult souls participating in large-scale warfare and conquest aware of, or culpably ignorant of, the existence of Good and Evil, and evaluate them on the grounds that they knew, or could have known, about the existence of the afterlife system. We've modified criminal procedures considerably based on this assumption, over the last ten thousand years, from a baseline where the existence of Good and Evil wasn't widely known, see Heaven vs. Celeolis, -6412 -"

"A nonstandard cite from eleven thousand years ago?" the devil snaps at her. 

"I have the transcript here if the court and arguers want to consult it."

The dignified man accepts a sheet of paper from her. So does the devil. 

The angel continues. "The evaluative standard for persons effecting large-scale change in the world presumes they 'knew or should have known' what Good and Evil are and what probable fate those they killed would face, Hell vs Lee, 3409. In order to conduct an evaluation of actions taken under the reasonable, defensible, justified and presumptively correct assumption that there was no Good and Evil and no afterlives -- from the perspective of a universe that does have them -- we would be "inventing a legal standard from a perspective we cannot reasonably inhabit", Hell vs Zhu, 2281."

"That's not a standard cite either."

The angel passes out more transcripts. 

"Do we have further contributions on jurisdiction," says the dignified man. 

"No, your honor," says the angel. 

"We concur," says the cat. 

"On the first point we hold that the bounds of our uncertainty do not cross the zero point," says the ball of gears, "and reasoning from the lower bound in that case is preferable to throwing the question out entirely.  We concur on the second point, disagree on the third, you can treat murder in a world without an afterlife as precisely equivalent to someone in our world who is trapping and destroying souls, for which there is an established evaluative framework -"

"And approximately eight different applicable principles of nonequivalence," says the cat. 

"I object on all three points," says the devil.

"Noted. I'm going to rule narrowly on jurisdiction, as Heaven proposed -- actions taken in worlds not causally entangled with ours, by agents not natively ours, spatially and temporally distant enough to inhibit serious fact-finding, are not under our jurisdiction, with no implied precedent should any of those conditions fail to hold."

"Fine," the devil said. "In that case, Mhalir's first action of interest to this court was appearing, from the ether, already in possession of a slave he was torturing, and kidnapping and enslaving twenty more people. Evil, several magnifiers present."

"Also several mitigating factors," says the cat. 

Mhalir isn't sure if he's expected to say something here to defend himself.

He...doesn't feel very inclined to, right now. Arguably he should be trying very hard to - something - arguably this is one of the most critical and high-stakes moments of his, not life, of his death, deciding the fate of his soul... 

But he's very tired, in some deep way that has nothing to do with the physical body that he currently lacks, and it's hard to feel anything except helpless in the face of forces beyond his comprehension. 

He remembers that he was confused, and scared, and trying to make the right choices, but 'right' from a framework of wanting his people to win the war, and from an information state he very shortly later realized was incomplete. 

He waits to see if they're going to ask him any questions. 

They take a while to get around to it. Another hour of arguing through everything that he did in Golarion, from first contact through teleporting himself and Carissa into vacuum while invading Hell. They seem to mostly know what he was thinking and what he was hoping for without having to ask him. 

"I have to say, I'm not seeing Law," the dignified man says, once they've gotten through the whole record. 

"We're fine with Neutral Good," says the angel. 

"We're fine with Neutral Evil," says the devil.

"Do you regret anything, Mhalir?" says the cat.

"Yes." Mhalir regrets so many things; in this moment it feels like he regrets his entire life. All he ever wanted was to keep the promise he made to the stars, and he tried and failed to do that, over and over, and failed in ways that were far worse than if he had never tried at all. 

"I - regret Alloran. I knew I was wronging him very badly, I thought it was - a worthwhile tradeoff and - I was wrong. I regret not - noticing my confusion sooner," and he means in Golarion but he also means back in the Andalite war, noticing that his assumptions about his enemy were wrong.

"I - regret - that Seerow is dead..." That's not an action or decision he made, per se, even now he's not sure if there's anything he could have done then to turn history onto a different track, but he wishes so badly that he could instead have lived in the hypothetical world where Seerow never died. "I - I wish I had known sooner how to..."

Mhalir doesn't have words for the concept he means, it's all tangled together in his head, the things Iomedae said to him but he's not sure he understands them even now. He wanted to get an Atonement, he remembers, or was considering it, but probably that wouldn't even work when he doesn't understand Good, or what having allies means, or - something he can't even name because he doesn't understand it and he's too tired to try anymore. 

"A lot of very bad mistakes, which he corrected course from, sometimes into other mistakes, but - always trying to save as many people as possible," says the cat. "Neutral Good."

"A lot of enslaving and kidnapping people, culminating in blowing up an entire plane to secure an alliance to win a war he knew by then he shouldn't be fighting," says the devil. 

"Fighting Evil is Good," says the angel. "Heaven vs Tarelet,1253."

"Murdering a bunch of people in their homes because they're Evil specifically isn't Good. Hell vs Leurdorfell, 2096," he snaps back. 

"The necessary conditions of Hell vs Leurdorfell were that the defendant did not have in mind a mechanism by which the killing would overall make the world a better place inclusive of its effects on those killed, was not acting in alignment with an organization that did have such a mechanism in mind, and had alternatives to bring about the aim he hoped to obtain by mass executions of orcs. In this case none of those hold."

"Hell vs Leurdorfell proposes a balancing test: how much Good achieved? How much harm done to achieve it? Mhalir did lots of harm with good aims in mind, but did he achieve any good at all? Ever? At any point? Would the settlement in Hell be less satisfactory to Good if he had stayed out of it? No Good achieved, then the other arms of the test aren't even relevant."

"Carissa's not in Hell, and otherwise would be, that's Good achieved, enough to consider the other provisions of Leurdorfell."

"She otherwise might not be dead. Killing someone who makes Heaven and might if killed at a different point in their life have gone to an Evil afterlife is not a Good act, Abaddon vs Xar, 2554." He holds his hands up to the sky, his tail twitching. "If he hasn't done anything at all that had Good effects, there's no balancing test."

"I concur," says the cat.

The angel raises an eyebrow. 

"I concur," says the ball of gears. 

"You're playing at something," the judge says irritably to the cat. 

"We argue," the cat says, "that Mhalir has in fact done something that has large Good effects, which is releasing Alloran in Nirvana."

"Manumission of a person you enslaved in the first place cannot grant you in the eyes of this court more credit than you lost for enslaving someone in the first place," the devil says automatically. "Boneyard vs Ket, and Abaddon vs Tarrenar, and Hell vs Dialis, and -"

"The enslaving him is not the remit of this court, the releasing him is," says the cat. 

"That's abusing the jurisdiction ruling," says the devil. 

"I am inclined to agree," says the judge. 

"- but regardless," says the cat, "I identified the action with large Good effects as releasing Alloran in Nirvana, not as releasing him generally. In releasing him in Nirvana, Mhalir took on considerable personal risk and expense in order to cause Alloran to be in a Good afterlife situation, in the hopes that this would make the world better, for example by Alloran realizing the war was unnecessary or being able to communicate with the Good gods."

"Which didn't happen," says the devil. 

"The general intended effect -- the release making the world much better -- did happen. The specific intended effect didn't, but intending one Good outcome and achieving a related one suffices, Nirvana vs Greer, 2280, which explicitly considers the relevance of a Good effect intended generally but not specifically to Leurdorfell."

"Not a standard cite."

"I have the transcripts. Also Nirvana vs Eluar, 2471, where it was concluded that the defendant merited partial credit for the Good done by his released slave since he had released the slave in the specific hope that his bravery and courage would inspire him to the defense of Taldor, and his bravery and courage instead inspired him to slay a dragon."

"Also not a standard cite."

She hands him some more paper. "And Nirvana vs Sidduo, 4520, which finds the defendant merits credit for paroling a criminal in the hope that he would be able to feed his indigent family before they starved, as even though the defendant was unable to do that, he became an adventurer, raised them, and founded a soup kitchen..."

"I have heard of none of these cases," the judge says irritably. 

"Your honor, Alloran designed us a computer system so we can search through all of the cases for which transcripts exist and automatically see the most relevant ones. I recognize that at the moment it presents a slight inconvenience to the court but it also means that research for trials can happen much faster, so there are fewer delays, and much more accurately, so that relevant precedents are respected and widely known. Nirvana and Heaven have been using it for cases since the Godwar began. I have the transcripts here for the cases I just referenced. They're good law. I'm not trying to sneak anything past you."

"We want access to that," the devil says. 

"Build your own," says the cat. "Your honor, I argue that Mhalir released Alloran to Nirvana believing that if he became Good it would make the universe a better place, and that happened, and I have 6,468 more cases like that if you want to satisfy yourself there's enough precedent for counting it -"

"I don't want 6,468 more cases like that."

"So - enough Good done, then, to consider the other provisions of Leurdorfell?"

"Let me read these."

"It's not a fair trial if you have access to those and we don't," says the devil. 

"The Lawful afterlives having a better lawyer training system than the chaotic ones does not make the trial system unfair, Pharasma vs Calistria," says the angel, "it's applicable - do you want a transcript."

"I know Pharasma vs Calistria and I'm damn glad you're missing your best friend's funeral, you sanctimonious feathered-"

"ORDER," says the judge. "I'm very sick of this. Fine. He did some Good, we look at Leurdorfell -"

"Had in mind a mechanism by which the killing would make the world a better place, working closely with Iomedae, lacked alternatives to bring about the desired end, inapplicable, we fall back on Tarelet," says the cat instantly. 

"I concur," says the whirring ball of gears.

The room gets fuzzy, and then the sensory input he's getting stops resolving as a room, and then it's very quiet.

Mhalir - has very little idea what just happened. There was a lot of happening and it got very fast toward the end and then it stopped and -

...Your honor, I argue that Mhalir released Alloran to Nirvana believing that if he became Good it would make the universe a better place, and that happened...

In the midst of grey weariness, he feels a single note of satisfaction, that in the end, even if it wasn't a specific plan he carried out that achieved a particular goal, at least something worthwhile came out of this entire goddamned mess. 

- where is he - ? 

He is a baby bird, in a nest, on a tree. The sky is blue. There is a gentle breeze. There is a mother bird, perched on the edge of the nest, looking out at the forest.

"Oh, hello," she says. "I'm Caroline. Nice to meet you - do you need anything -"

Why is he a baby bird. Why is any of this happening. Mhalir would desperately like it if, at some point, things started making any kind of sense. 

At least this doesn't look like Abaddon, he thinks vaguely, not that he knows what Abaddon looks like.

"I am very confused," he says to Caroline. 

"This is Nirvana. You are here because you died. Usually people can remember how they died, but not always; if you can't remember you shouldn't be too worried that anything is wrong with you. Your mind should work the right way here but the getting-here can be a little sketchy. After you died, there would have been a trial, but people typically remember fairly little of their trial. My understanding is that when you don't have a body they have to do magic just to be able to interact with you, and they don't have a good way to help you form long-term memories or retain the structure to interpret the memories you do have."

"That makes sense. I - do remember how I died."

(A Dimension Door into hard vacuum, and in Carissa's final conscious moments he said - something - to her, he doesn't remember what and maybe he'll never know, and slipped out of her head, on the general principle that the devil might try to pull her back into the ship, or retrieve her body to raise her, and it was strategically preferable for him not to get Mhalir too in that case, even though more than anything in the world he hadn't wanted to die alone...) 

He remembers a few fragments, he thinks. He remembers something that made him feel pleased and proud, if only for an instant. 

"...I was Neutral Evil," he says, finally. "I would not have thought I should end up here?" 

"Everyone has lots of different instincts in them, some Good and some Evil and some Law and some Chaos, and Nirvana goes to trial for all of them, on the principle that the Good is the part of them they'd choose, if they really got a chance to."

"Oh." 

It's sinking in, now, that he's dead - must have been dead a while, for the trial to be over - and no one has raised him.

Also he's in Nirvana, which means that theoretically he could run into Alloran by accident. That sounds like the most awkward thing in the world and he really hopes Nirvana is very big - it must be - or has some sort of special magic to conveniently prevent things like that. 

"Did - are you allowed - can you tell me if Aroden lost the war?" 

"We don't know exactly what's going on in the other planes. Some people went off to fight and they're mostly not back yet. That probably means it's not over but it could mean it's over and none of them will be coming back, or that it's over but there's lots of humanitarian work to do in the Material Plane which they stayed for."

"How long has it been." 

"About a month."

"Oh." That's even longer than he had expected, and - not a good sign, though he's not sure what he had been expecting, there wasn't time to form predictions. 

"Can I - is it possible to talk to people in other afterlives? I - my friend..." 'Friend' doesn't seem like the right word for what Carissa is to him, but 'host' will just be confusing to this person, probably, and besides it doesn't feel right either, or at least not complete, it puts Carissa in the same category as Alloran with no distinguishing markers. 

"You can learn to do magic, and then magic can be used for interplanar communications, though it's tiring and hard. Or you can try to find someone who knows how to do that and ask them to send a message for you."

"Oh." 

"Is there - any way I can get to the material plane, to - see if they need help there..."

It takes a great deal of effort to ask because Mhalir finds that he very, very badly doesn't want to do that. He has to, of course, the stakes are high enough, but he's so tired, and some part of him is frantically hoping that this is impossible or not allowed. 

"Eventually that too can be learned with magic. I think - it might be a good idea for you to take a few years before you worry about any of that."

That should be a relief and it is one and so Mhalir isn't sure why it also hurts so much. Maybe because it feels like otherwise they expect him to just keep breaking things in his attempts to help? 

- except there's something he was happy about, and it's very frustrating how hard it is to remember anything from the trial. It wasn't the verdict that he would go to Nirvana, he didn't know that was where he was until Caroline said something. It was...something had helped - something he did, not with precise aims, with remembered confusion and pain and falling through the pieces of a worldview that no longer fit together...

He thinks maybe it had to do with Alloran, but he can't retrieve anything else. 

"What am I supposed to do for a few years except worry about that," he half-snaps at Caroline. 

"...you're supposed to heal. That is what Nirvana is for. Healing."

...He knew that, it's what the cleric of Sarenrae said to him, but it was just words and it's still just words and he doesn't know what it means, in practice. 

He remembers a fragment of conversation with the cleric. 

What would your god's philosophy advise me to do, in this situation.

     Ask for help. If your people are in danger the Good gods will help you willingly.

If there is help to be had then I want it but I do not understand why your goddess would offer it to us.

     Well, we have one word on the subject so far, and it is 'Nirvana is for everyone', which seems promising."

I do not understand how that is a goal or motivation. 
 
     ...I don't think it's hard to understand at all! She saw this unholy wasteful tragic mess and she said 'hey, all of you ought to be safe forever and rest and have time to stop hurting each other!'

He remembers the cleric talking to Alloran. Finding out facts about his life that Mhalir had never known despite spending fifteen years in Alloran's head, because he never looked. 

He left Alloran in Nirvana even though it was tactically stupid - and in fact got him found out and Carissa captured, which ended up being fine because it was by Aroden but they couldn't have known that at the time so it was still stupid - but he did it anyway because he wanted Alloran to be all right. Because however little he understood about Good at the time, it feels like so long ago, he expected they would take good care of Alloran. That they would try to explain to him what Good was. 

He remembers thinking that maybe the Good gods couldn't answer Alloran's prayers, at the start, because he didn't understand Good well enough, and that if he ever did come to understand that, he wouldn't want there to be a war, anymore, he would want the Andalites and Yeerks to be able to coexist peacefully - that he too would see it as an unholy wasteful tragic mess, and just want it to be over...

All of that is a digression from Caroline's words to him, because apparently those were very uncomfortable. 

"I do not think I understand what that means," he says, flatly. "I want to go back and fix things, I made a promise, and I cannot do that from here, and so I am not sure what is the point of anything that happens." 

"Part of fixing things is understanding what they look like when they are whole. I think it will make you better at fixing things, if you know what it is like when things are all right and the background conditions of the world are not causing great harm to everyone around on an ongoing basis."

All right, fine, that's a not-unreasonable point. 

Mhalir is still for a while, absorbing it. 

"I want to try to find someone who can send a message to Carissa," he says finally.

(He wants Carissa to be here, he misses her very badly, but that is probably not achievable– he's suddenly scared that she might have somehow gone to Hell, despite her Atonement, and also somehow before it was fully melted, and then what if she got slagged to ash and nothing along with the rest of the souls they murdered horribly... Probably that hasn't happened but he's not sure.) 

"That makes sense. Can you spread your wings?"

He tries this. 

"Hmm, okay. I think you can't fly very far right now but if you practice, maybe by the end of the day, and then you can try to find someone who has a communications-spell."

He's morphed birds so many times in Alloran's body, surely he can figure out how to fly. It's very irritating that he's specifically a baby bird, though, and it doesn't seem like he can change this by thinking about it very hard, even though presumably his having a body at all is magic. 

Mhalir inches out to the edge of the nest, spreads his wings again, and peers over the edge. 

It is a lush forest of some kind. "We call it Summerfall," Caroline says. "All of the fruits and seeds are good to eat. You shouldn't try to eat the animals, they're people - it won't work but it'd be startling and rude."

"I will not try to eat the animals," Mhalir tells her, and he launches himself off the lip of the nest and tries to fly. 

His baby bird wings are weak and his feathers are limp but he manages to glide to the ground reasonably gracefully. It's soft. 

He looks back up at the nest, considering whether it's even possible for him to make it back up there. It seems like a lot of work, and it won't get him much closer to getting a message to Carissa or affecting the material plane in any way, so maybe instead he'll just flop here for a while. 

"You all right?" Caroline calls down.

Some part of him is briefly tempted to yell at her to go away and leave him alone, but this wouldn't help with anything. "I am not sure how to get back up," he admits. 

She lands next to him. "Why do you think you are a baby bird?"

"I assume because you are trying to make it so I cannot leave." He's getting very annoyed with it. 

"I did not make you a baby bird. Nirvana did, because it thought that it was the best way for you to learn the first thing that you need to learn here."

"My understanding was that Nirvana is just a place, how does it have thoughts." 

"Nirvana does things that cause the people there to heal, and when it does things it is usually because they'll cause the people there to heal. I don't know what the underlying process feels like from the inside but it is easiest to imagine by imagining a person who really wants us all to heal but can only do environmental things to achieve this."

What a weird concept. Mhalir kind of hates it, right now, although possibly it's just the being dead that he hates, and Nirvana in the abstract is fine. 

"Well, it seems like Nirvana thinks that I need to feel helpless," he mutters, more at his surroundings than directed to Caroline, "and maybe it has not considered that I am very tired of that and would really prefer anything else." 

"Do you want to talk about that or should I leave you alone for a little while and go get some food for us."

The question is incredibly frustrating, mostly because he's in a mood where everything is incredibly frustrating. "You can get us some food," Mhalir says. He will sit here on the forest floor being a baby bird. Probably nothing will eat him because all the animals here are people. 

She flies off. It is quiet. A caterpillar clings to a leaf, right near him.

It takes Mhalir a few minutes before the quiet peacefulness of the forest soaks in and the frustration subsides enough for him to remember that probably the caterpillar is a person too. 

Which doesn't mean he wants to talk to it, of course, but eventually he's very bored. "Hello?" he says cautiously. 

"Hello," it says agreeably. "I can't see you, who's there?"

"Oh, do caterpillars not have eyes? My name is Mhalir. Right now I am a baby bird for some reason." 

"My name is Thalie. I have eyes but they're awfully unhelpful." She nibbles the leaf she is on. "I haven't done a baby bird. Did you hatch?"

"- Not that I remember, I just woke up like that a few minutes ago. I - have not been in Nirvana very long. Have you had many different bodies here?" 

"Yeah. I started out as a lion, I think because I needed to check what would happen if I ran around biting everybody. It turns out what happens if you do that is you have no friends, eventually. So I did an antelope, to have a herd, and then a kind of fish that moves in schools, and then a starling with a flock, and then I felt like I'd explored that so I did a rockeating dog and dug a cave, for some friends I'd made to live in as bears, and I spent a while being a bear with them, and then I started going for beetles, bats, deep ocean squid, things with weird senses, and eventually I decided to try a caterpillar. It helps with - noticing what you care about and what you don't really care about and what caring about it feels like in your body."

Mhalir has morphed lots of animals with weird senses and wouldn't have said it helped him notice what he did and didn't care about, although in general he doesn't think he's been that confused around what he cares about? Confused in how to achieve it, sure, that seems different. Having no friends seems to him like an extremely predictable consequence of biting everybody, even here where it seems like they try incredibly hard to be welcoming and forgiving, he's not sure why Thalie was confused about that. 

"Can you decide to be different shapes after a while, then?" he asks her. "I tried to change myself into an adult bird instead but it did not work." 

"Yeah. It works a bit differently for different people but for me I have to - understand myself, and what I want, and what I'm curious about, and think about how my curiosity and my interests are best realized by a different shape, and it takes a couple of days, sometimes, but eventually it clicks. I know someone who said that for her, she just has to retreat to a sense of - security in herself, the sense that she's not under threat, and then imagine her limbs, but it took her a hundred years the first time because she was always always scared. And I know someone who has to study an animal for months before they can shift into it. And I know someone who was able to shift easily from their first day. In general it gets easier over time because hopefully over time you are learning about what you need and what's good for you and what kinds of worlds support you and which don't, and that's - generally related, to shifting forms, knowing that stuff."

"That seems very unfair," Mhalir says before he can stop himself. It seems so stupid, if he can't think himself into a less vulnerable form because he's scared and feels helpless. 

"Hmmm, say more about that?"

"That Nirvana will - punish you, for feeling threatened? I really do not need to learn what it is like to be in a body that is small and helpless, I know all about that already." 

"How would you make it work, if you were deciding how it worked?"

"...I am not sure, it is probably complicated with many factors, I just..."

He trails off, yet again he's run out of words. "Do you know anybody who can do a Sending?" he asks instead. "I want to get a message to my - friend - who I think is in a different afterlife." 

"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."

"Even armies need a lot of things other than soldiers," Mhalir acknowledges. "Though - I am not sure how suited I am to doing anything other than leading a war." It's encompassed so much of his life, at least the part of it not confined to his Yeerk pool and the walking range of a Gedd host. 

"Because you've never done anything else?"

"...Little else. I did not want that to be the world - I wish..." 

He wants Seerow to not be dead, and he doesn't even know where to start explaining the context there. 

"There is a lot of work to do in the world that isn't war. And - even if you end up deciding that war is the thing you are best suited for, I think people are more competent generally, when they can see more angles on things."

Mhalir doesn't even disagree. He can see, now, how having too-narrow angles on things was upstream of so many of his mistakes, before. Somehow this isn't helping with being less frustrated, though. 

It would be easier if he knew, he thinks, even if he were unable to affect things for a long time. Not knowing is the awful part. 

"- There is something I am trying to remember," he says. "It was during my trial, I think. I learned something and I was happy about it, I remember thinking at least one good thing had come of my being in Golarion. I think I would be less frustrated about things if I could remember it. I - am fairly sure it had to do with someone who I brought to Nirvana six months before the war started, I - I had done very bad things to him - he was Evil, and I thought if he could be here maybe he would learn how to be Good, and that would be better for the world... I think what I learned had to do with that? I should not look for him, he would find it upsetting and might try to murder me, but I wish I knew." 

"Do you want me to go ask around? I couldn't share anything he didn't want shared but if he's doing something or building something someone might know about it."

"Yes, I would appreciate that. His name is Alloran, if that helps." 

She nods. "I don't like to fly at night but I can go talk to people in the morning." And she settles herself in the nest and extends a wing so as to suggest he could sleep under it, if he wanted.

Mhalir has very confusing feelings about the prospect of sleeping under the wing of someone he just met - and it being probably A Metaphor For Something - but one of the feelings he has is that it sounds nice, and sleeping seems hard. 

He wriggles up under Caroline's wing. 

It is warm and fluffy. Her breathing is very even. 

He closes his eyes and tries to sleep instead of being formlessly sad about the world, since the latter isn't accomplishing anything. 

In the morning everything is covered in a thin layer of dew, and the sky is pink and gold, and birds are singing. Caroline does not join them until it's clear Mhalir is awake but then joins with fervor.

It's nice. Mhalir decides that he can notice it's nice without deciding he's fine with being dead and the overall state of the world and the fact that Iomedae won't answer his prayers and Carissa won't tell him what's happening. 

"I am looking to learn about Alloran and what he has been doing?" Caroline asks.

"- Yes. Please." He had almost forgotten about that. 

She heads off. "I'll try to be back by midday. You can shout, if you get yourself into a situation you need help getting out of."

"All right." 

Mhalir sits in the nest for a bit, watching the sky until the sun is fully up and the sky is bright blue again. He wonders if it ever rains here. 

Eventually he decides to fly down and look for seeds. ...And maybe fly up a bit first, see if he can reach the treetops or higher. He hops to the edge of the nest again, and hesitates only a moment before leaping out and flapping as hard as he can. 

It works! The breeze seems to be helping, and now he's above the treehouse, tiring quickly but definitely gaining altitude. He's in an unimaginably vast mountain valley with tall purple peaks in the distance on two sides, and the sea in another direction. There's fog everywhere, but it's starting to burn off in the morning light.

It's beautiful. 

Mhalir stubbornly keeps flapping, trying to get higher, and eventually has to admit exhaustion and - all right this was maybe not very well thought out as a plan. Maybe he can just glide down? 

He glides down pretty sharply and lands in some tall grass with a thump but no real injuries. 

Well, that could have gone worse. He rests for a bit and then hops in what he thinks is the direction of the stream; he can't see very far due to the tall grass. 

Helpfully, the stream is noisy; he can reach the edge of it pretty quickly. A raccoon is drinking from it.

Mhalir is thirsty after the flight, and hops down to drink as well, then looks at the raccoon. "Hello?" he says after a moment. 

The raccoon startles slightly. "- hi. Uh, hello. I didn't realize we could - talk."

"Oh, are you new here as well?" Mhalir frowns - or tries, he has no idea how this ends up working on a baby bird face. Or how it works that he can interpret the other animals' expressions and body language, come to think of it. "Did you wake up alone?" 

" - there were some other animals around - are they all people? - but I wasn't really in the mood to be around anyone, so I ran off. About... a week ago, I think. Eventually decided I should - stop that."

"I was informed they are all people, in the context of warning me it would be very rude if I tried to eat them. My name is Mhalir. ...If you would prefer not to talk I will be quiet." 

"Nah. I don't think you're supposed to spend the afterlife being a hermit. Just - wasn't ready, you know?"

"I know." He ducks his head. "- Do you have any questions? Not that I have been here very long, so I may not know the answers." 

"We're - in Nirvana, right?"

"Yes. I was told that the initial shape we take here is based on what Nirvana thinks we need - it is somehow sort of intelligent in that way. Also I was told it is normal to have trouble remembering how you got here." 

"Well, some bastard stabbed me with a greatsword, I'm clear on that part. I just -" Shrug. "I wish we could go back."

"I know. So do I." He doesn't say anything about his hopes that someone will raise him eventually; it seems cruel, and besides, he's less and less sure as time passes that this is ever going to happen. 

"How long have you been here?"

"A day, I think? But I think I died a month ago, so the trial and sorting must have taken a long time." He shrugs with one wing. "I was not expecting to end up here." 

"Well, you never really know, right. I don't - I wouldn't rather be elsewhere except for how I'd rather be home."

"Mmm. I - think here is fine, if I have to be dead." He scuffs at the riverbank with his claws. "I - you do not have to talk about it, if it is upsetting, but I am curious if you know much of what was happening in the material plane when you died. At the point when I died, I was not aware of any violence there yet." 

" - oh. There's a war. Cheliax invaded Rahadoum and Rahadoum turned out to have a massive army in preparation for this and we were - helping them, right, no one deserves Chelish rule- and Aroden's back, or people were saying so - and also there's been awful thunderstorms out of nowhere, tsunamis, stuff like that, because the gods are fighting -"

"- I suppose that is not surprising. Aroden is back, that part is true - not as a god, he came back as a human somehow, he was undercover as the leader of Rahadoum but then Asmodeus found out." He hesitates. "Where are you from?" 

"Andoran."

Nod. "Thank you for telling me. It was stressful, not knowing anything about what was happening in the world." 

"Yeah." He paws at the water. "Why a raccoon. What is that a metaphor for."

"If you figure it out you should tell me! I am still not sure what Nirvana wants out of making me a baby bird." 

"I'd take a bird over a raccoon! You can fly, I assume?"

"A bit. Not very well. I hope I will get better at it with practice." He's trying to think what raccoons are good at. "- You have hands, at least more than I do? You are less tiny and so could carry bigger things if you needed to." 

"...I guess." He frowns at his hands. "I can't really think what would need carrying." He dips his hand in the river, comes up with a handful of pebbles. One of which shows up to Detect Magic as having some kind of faint evocation aura. He sighs disgustedly at them and drops them back into the water.

Mhalir kind of wants a closer look at it, but not enough to go swimming for it. 

"I am going to go look for seeds to eat," he says to the raccoon. "All the plants here are edible, by the way." 

"I guess that's nice. See you!"

He tromps off.

Mhalir goes back to wandering around. He wonders what Carissa is doing right now. If she's still miserable about what happened to Hell and Cheliax. It's not like there's much he could say or do to comfort her about it, but he still wishes he could be there. 

He finds some seeds and eats them. 

Caroline returns only about an hour after she left.

Mhalir flies up to join her at the nest. It's still tiring but maybe a little less than before. He waits, suddenly and mysteriously unable to make himself ask. 

"It didn't take very long because lots of people have heard of him," she says. "I have a friend who does trials -we send someone to every trial, to try to argue they should get Nirvana. He's been helping with that. I - didn't understand the details but I can repeat them to you in case they make more sense to you?"

He nods hopefully. 

"There have been about thirty billion trials. They have transcripts of all of them. They have a big library of them, because you can use the judgment in any trial as an argument for a similar situation. But you can't possibly keep track of that many, even with magic, so they mostly have people review cases and find good examples to illustrate various situations that come up a lot and then most of them are forgotten. Alloran built them," a confused fluttering of wings, "a ...search...engine?"

"Oh! Yes, I know what that is - it is exactly what you would want for finding particular cases out of thirty billion." What an incredible number. "Implementing the system would be a major production, I am surprised if it was done so fast, but I suppose maybe some if it could have been done with magic..."

Mhalir is suddenly so curious to hear all of the details. And probably won't have a chance, because why would he. Also he's near to bursting with half a dozen different shades of emotion, pride and relief and obscure regret and others even harder to name. He curls up against the bottom of the nest. 

"Do you want me to ask if you can drop by to learn more?"

He does and also the prospect is nerve-wracking; he has to assume that anyone who's interacted with Alloran has heard how Evil he is. "Yes." 

"They were really happy about it. They said it makes it go way faster, to prepare for court, they can make a stronger case and it's easier to keep up with the caseload and they might not be desperate for personnel, after the current surge is over. They're always desperate for personnel."

"I am not surprised, that is a lot of trials. The current surge is - because of the war?" He shivers a little. Some part of him wants to apologize for it but that's kind of stupid on multiple levels. 

"Yeah. I think it's really bad, out there. Lots of new people." 

He wants it to not be happening, and he has no levers left to touch the situation - at most, he theoretically has the ability to help a little in Nirvana, greeting the newly dead people. 

Mhalir curls up into a small tight ball, tucking his head into his feathers again, this is probably rude but right now it's very hard to care. 

She doesn't seem bothered. She takes off a few minutes later. "I'll ask if they'll have you over," she says as she leaves.

Mhalir doesn't manage to speak, even to thank her. He stays curled up in the nest and does not, currently, feel inclined to ever leave. It feels safe, here, which is a mostly-unfamiliar feeling to him, and he doesn't really trust it, but he can still appreciate it a little. 

She is gone longer this time. The not-sun gets high in the sky. There's a light afternoon rainshower. She comes back as it's ending. 

"You are welcome if you'd like to go," she says. "The nearest lawyer training site has a thing for the search engine and they're showing it off in the hopes of getting more people interested in being lawyers."

"- Thank you. Maybe I will go later." Given the givens, one of his better options here is to offer to train as a lawyer, except probably that takes a long time and he won't be much use during the war, and also it sounds exhausting. 

He curls up again. 

"There is no hurry," she says, watching him concernedly and putting a wing over him for protection from the rain. "You are very badly injured. You will need lots of time to recover."

"I do not think I am injured?" 

"Your -" flutter - "soul, not your body. It is injurious to the soul, to live in a world with so many terrible things in it."

He's not sure what to say to that. Empirically, it does seem like he's been - behaving in ways that don't not look like some kind of metaphorical injury. He wishes he could stop doing that. It was easier to just - do the sensible thing and not wallow in the terribleness of the world, when there were urgent problems to solve. Which there are. He's just stuck here, dead, small and nearly helpless and pinned down with weariness. 

He stays under Caroline's wing. That one part is sort of nice. 

"Do you want to learn birdsongs?"

"...All right, sure." 

Then she will teach him some birdsongs! Birds do not sing with the same voices they speak in; their speech sounds ordinary and human but their birdsongs sound like they come from birds.

"Where're you from?" she asks, once they've sung for a while.

Learning birdsongs is surprisingly pleasant and relaxing. 

"I am from another world," he says. "A different one from where Alloran is from, but nearer to it than either is to Golarion. I - our worlds were at war, before. I had almost finalized the peace agreements but then the attack on Hell went badly and I died. I very much hope the peace between our peoples worked out." Sigh. "I suppose I cannot do anything to affect it now." 

"That sounds like it might be difficult, or upsetting..."

"Obviously it is upsetting! I want - I had a responsibility to my people and I cannot do anything and I thought that Aroden would raise us but now I am not sure if something went very badly wrong such that he cannot or if he does not even care!" 

"It seems like both of those possibilities would be really scary!"

"Yes. And Carissa is in Heaven and she - knows something, about the war, but she said she could not tell me in response to a random Sending..." 

He misses her so much. 

"Tell me about her?"

He's not sure why she's asking, but sure, he can do that. "She is very clever, and - ruthless, in her own way, she knows how to achieve goals. She was a wizard in Cheliax. She– it taught her to keep herself so small... Then my ship arrived in the Golarion star system and I - kidnapped her." He feels a bit - he can't say he regrets it but he feels sheepish about it, or something. "And proposed a collaboration, which she accepted - it was very mercenary, at the start, I bribed her with large quantities of spellsilver since we can mine it from asteroids..." 

He can say a lot of things about Carissa. How she was starting to learn not to be so small, to stretch out and grow into the brilliant ambitious person whose shape he could almost see as an invisible negative space around her - how upset she was about the war against Hell... How they got along, how she kept thinking he was nice and considerate and even charming... 

"And she's in Heaven now?"

"Yes. She got an Atonement to Lawful Neutral, I thought she would go to Axis, but maybe allying with Iomedae to fight Hell is enough to have one sorted as Good..." Shrug. "I did not expect to be sorted here. I read as Neutral Evil before." 

"Our reading in life is based on everything we did, and how we related to it as we did it. If you - go back, and change how you relate to your past actions - it can fail to reflect that. And of course  in Nirvana we bend the rules to try to grab everyone we can."

"I noticed. There is a reason I brought Alloran here instead of anywhere else." 

"What is he like?"

...That question is much much harder to answer. Mhalir hesitates for a while, shaping his thoughts. 

"He is - like me, I think, in many ways. He is very competent, he will be ruthless when needed to achieve his goals. I - thought of him as rigid, before, but I - enslaved and tortured him so I could wear his body, for many years, and I think that was not the ideal circumstances under which to get to know him at his best. I thought he wanted all of my people dead, but this is rather understandable on his part. He murdered a planet of innocent people rather than let us win there, I thought in monstrous at the time, but under his ethical system I think it does make some sense..."  

He recounts the pieces he remembers from the conversations he let Alloran have, with Carissa and with the cleric of Sarenrae. 

"It - sounds like it is good that he came here eventually."

"I think so. I - am very glad of it, I wanted...." He trails off, running out of words again. "I am still not sure why I did it. It was tactically stupid. I - was so confused - I wanted to achieve something and I am still not sure what it was and I am not sure it counts for anything much if good came of this by accident..." 

"What're you confused about?"

"What Good is. If - if it is even real, if the things people say are - reflected meaningfully in what actually happens... Also what it means that Nefreti Clepati said I was the same shape of person as Malduoni, who I later found out was literally Aroden, I am very confused about that, but it is a separate thing." 

"I don't think there is a - pure pillar of Good somewhere to consult about anything. The courts decide how people sort, and Detect Alignment approximates the same thing with a little less nuance. There are people trying to make things better, and I think many of them are trying very hard. - I haven't heard of that second thing."

Nod. He hadn't really been expecting answers. "Do you - trust - the Good gods?" He isn't sure 'trust' is the right word or concept, here, he's grasping at something that still doesn't quite hold together for him. 

" - I expect that we'll get people to every trial and that everyone who comes to Nirvana will be okay eventually even if it takes them a long time? I - don't think they lie to people. What does trust mean to you?"

He considers that for a while. 

"If I were to make plans based on - taking their claims about Good and its motivations at face value - would my plans work." 

" - I think that depends a little bit on how good you are at planning. But there isn't a different account of their motivations and values than the ones they give which would be better to use for planning."

"Really? My experience is that people very rarely say the thing they actually mean and I had not expected gods would necessarily differ on this." 

"I think people on the Material Plane are often very bad at knowing what they really want and don't see much reason to try to make themselves really and truly understood to other people. Because things are very very bad, on the Material Plane."

"And you think things are, in fact, less bad here." It's what everyone has been saying this entire time and it still feels very hard to believe. 

" - here in Nirvana? Everything is lovely here in Nirvana. The problem is the entire rest of the universe!"

" - it's not your problem right now," she says uncertainly after a little while. "You will have the chance to do things once you've taken a little time to heal and recover, and you'll be stronger for it."

He shivers. "I - am scared there is not going to be time for that. If Aroden loses the war." 

"I very much hope that the forces of Good win the war. But there will be time for growing and getting stronger even if they lose. Nirvana is not finite, like Hell. It cannot be destroyed. No matter what happens in this war, there will be more to do, and we will keep trying to grow into people who can do it."

He should go back. 

He's not even sure how that would work but he should be - talking to everyone he can, finding someone who can cast Plane Shift, someone he can bribe, someone who can get a message to Aroden or Iomedae or anyone left alive... 

It's definitely a 'should', though, and not a 'want', and that fact is interesting in itself, right, that isn't the way he thinks, it feels like a deeply alien way to be relating to his goals and plans.

He wants everyone to be all right but it would be very convenient if, in fact, for a while it could stop being on him to make that happen. 

"I - am confused," he says eventually. "I do not understand my feelings about - the current situation." 

"Are you confused about what feelings you're having? Why you're having them?"

"- Both, maybe? I was noticing that maybe it was easier to - only have the feelings I endorsed having, that were useful, when there was an emergency that needed dealing with. Although, I think this is not completely new... Before, when Carissa and I were both sharing her body, we remarked that it seemed concerning how frequently neither of us wanted to be in control for the next thing, and that was a new problem to have, for me, it was very mysterious. And now... I - keep expecting that I would want to go back, and I am not sure that I actually do, and - I felt as though I should want to go visit where they have Alloran's search engine, but I did not actually want to go, which was very strange." 

"I think you are very traumatized, and you need some time to recover before you can do things without hurting yourself further."

"That seems very stupid and I wish I could decide to not do that." 

"It makes sense that you would feel - resentful of yourself for being traumatized, or angry with yourself, or disappointed with yourself, if it feels like that is getting in the way of doing important things."

He thinks about that. "I do not think I feel any of those ways? That would not help either. I, just - I keep being surprised, and trying to - decide to do something else more productive, and usually that works but I think maybe it usually working was contingent on there being an emergency and my having - actual power to do things about it - and when I do not have that, I - I feel..." 

The thing he feels is incredibly scared and also this is getting in the way of saying words again, which is very obnoxious of it really. 

Patpat.

He wants to not be scared. This seems like a reasonable and straightforward thing to want and also completely impossible and possibly incoherent as a concept. He can curl up under Caroline's wing, though, and this isn't the same thing as being safe or not being scared but at least it's a thing he can have. 

Caroline goes back to birdsong, once he has gone a little while without saying anything. The sun sets.

A very magical flock of bats wheels across the sky.

They're pretty. 

"Why were you here when I woke up here?" Mhalir asks her eventually, because he sort of took it for granted at the time but he doesn't actually know. 

"I decided I wanted to help someone adjust, so I made a nest. I figured someone would show up in it, when the right person was sorted here."

"Oh. That is kind of you." 

"You showed up much sooner than I expected! Sometimes people wait for months. Years, if they're difficult to get along with, or thinking about helping someone adjust in a way that's going to take an unusually good match in order to work out at all."

"Well, I heard that a lot of people are dying right now." He wishes it felt less like this was his fault for not doing something cleverer at some point, he doesn't know what. 

"Yes. Once you fly the nest I might do it again, it's been really nice and it's an unusually valuable time to do it, I think."

"Mmm." He wonders how long she expects him to stay in the nest, but doesn't ask, because it feels like the answer will probably somehow be upsetting from both directions at once. 

She watches the bats and does not say anything.

"Is there standard advice for how to be less traumatized so I can do things." 

"Different things work for different people. Often it's helpful to talk about the things that happened to you. Often it's helpful to give yourself some time when you aren't trying to achieve anything or do anything, and see how you feel and what feels appealing or interesting. Often it's helpful to do physical activity - flying, or swimming, or hiking. Singing. Some people go to see specialists, who have particular experience helping others with trauma recovery."

"Singing was nice," he agrees vaguely. "I - am not sure what it even means to find things appealing if I am not trying to achieve something? ...I suppose it was interesting talking to the Andalite scientist about morph research even though it was not the top strategic priority, I wish there had been more time to do that." 

"Lots of people enjoy - painting, or exploring, or collecting magic rocks...lots of people enjoy learning magic..."

"I would probably like learning magic." He hasn't been thinking about it much so far, maybe because he's still vaguely hoping that Aroden will resurrect him and Carissa soon, despite the fact that on some other level he's hoping that won't happen at all. "Is it much like arcane magic in the material plane?" 

"It is - drawing on the same underlying features of the world as arcane magic in the material plane but most of how you approach it is different. And it's slower. There was a balance of power agreement across all of the Outer Planes, and it's better for us for it to be slow, even though it can be frustrating. The thing to keep in mind is that you have eternity, it's okay if it takes a couple hundred years to learn the magic you knew in the Material Plane."

It doesn't seem okay at all for doing anything to take hundreds of years, actually, but - he can see her point. It does sound absorbing, and better than dwelling on things he wants and can't ever have even here, like 'Seerow being alive'.

He tries to notice whether or not he actually wants to start learning magic. He's noticed a few times now that he can see it, here, probably he could figure out how to play around with that even if Caroline doesn't know... 

Not really. It seems good in the abstract, but not appealing in a right-now way. 

"I seem to just want to sleep," he says, irritated. "I assume I do not even need to sleep, technically, since I am dead." 

"You do not need to sleep or eat, technically, but many people like to. I think that if you want to sleep that is information about what will help you with trauma recovery and what will help you is sleep." She offers her wing.

He snuggles up under her wing, with less hesitation this time. Maybe if he sleeps enough then eventually he'll wake up to a world with something different in it. 

The world looks pretty much the same in the morning.

Mhalir considers whether he wants to try learning magic, or fly around, or learn birdsongs, or go ask questions about Alloran's search engine. It's not that none of those sounds good but they do sound very hard, like there's a wall in the way, and maybe actually what he wants to do is shuffle around and hide from the light under Caroline's wing and sleep MORE, since apparently no one is going to stop him from doing that and it's not like he needs to eat or drink. 

No one is going to stop him from doing that at all!

In that case Mhalir is going to do SO MUCH sleeping. Nothing hurts when he's asleep, or in the half-conscious moments between sleep and waking - though sometimes he has nightmares, but that's different - and on some level he's being stubborn about it, daring the universe to do something to him for his obtuse refusal to do anything or make any plans or be clever or careful at all, because surely there's nowhere in the world where he can be safe while refusing to try to be. 

Eventually, it must be multiple days later, he wakes up with the sun and considers immediately going back to sleep and concludes that he isn't, actually, tired enough to do that. 

He checks if Caroline is awake before starting to sing. 

She is! She's moving motes of magic in the air and will sing with him.

He sings and watches the magic, expecting the whole time to be suddenly tired again, but eventually concludes that no today seems to be an awake day. 

"Maybe I want to fly over and visit the place where the lawyers have Alloran's search engine," he muses. "How far is it?" 

"It's about a mile. I could go with you. You'll want to take breaks along the way."

"All right. I would appreciate if you came with me." 

He glances back to check if she's ready, and then jumps from the nest again and beats his wings, trying to gauge if he feels stronger this time. 

He does! Which is a little odd, since he's done nothing but sleep, but maybe Nirvana works like that. 

They only need to take a couple of breaks to reach the place. It's a stunningly pretty wood building built among towering thousand-foot trees; there are hundreds of animals gathered there, more than he's seen in one place anywhere in Nirvana.

Mhalir wonders how long he would have to practice to be able to fly as high as the tops of those trees. 

He doesn't try now, though; he flutters down and lands and tries to see what the people are gathered for, which is hard because most of the other animals are less tiny than him. 

There's lawyer training! There's a separate lawyer training for people who are his height right now; when he lands, he gets directed towards it.

Interesting. He watches, curious what the lawyer training here involves. 

They explain the process for court cases. People who die get a trial, though they can waive it; trials and trial preparation happen in magic time dilation so the sheer numbers are manageable at all; even with that, there are substantial delays when there's a sudden surge in deaths, as there is now. Nirvana sends people to every trial. It takes years of training to be competent to argue a case, but you can help with research right away, and helping with research is the best way to learn what you'll need to competently argue a case. Running trials can be very demoralizing; by definition most of the time you will lose, since the majority of people are not Neutral Good. You'll see lots of people condemned to Hell or Abaddon or the Abyss, and separated from families and things that would help them heal. It's very frustrating. But it's still important that everyone, even if they look like an open-and-shut case for Hell, has someone in the room who believes they deserve to be okay forever and is going to do whatever they can.

And sometimes you win. They go through some examples of some cases where Nirvana rules-lawyered particularly cleverly, shared now with permission of the subjects, mostly from hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And they're winning more often now that they have a reference tool called a search engine; up to about 15% from 10%, and they're not even done feeding the search engine all the transcripts or figuring out how best to leverage it.

And they explain that you form ongoing relationships with Pharasma's judges, over time, and while it might be tempting to be misleading or to be rude or to refuse to concede a point, that makes the judge respect you less and listen to you less; earning a reputation for being right and being worth listening to is more important than dragging your heels on any given case, what with that not being a winning strategy anyway. 

Trial work is not recommended when you are new. It takes a lot of healing to get to a place where watching people be condemned to evil afterlives all the time because you didn't know how to convince anyone otherwise isn't really really bad for you. It is reasonable for that to take a lot; it is awful. It is traumatizing. It is something everyone should hope to eventually be in a positiont o do at least once, because it's an important part of understanding the world, but for many people that takes thousands of years and that's fine. Nonetheless they're grateful for the interest and will train anyone who wants to try to learn.

The explanation leaves Mhalir with a lot to think about; he spends the first few minutes once the lecture is done just doing that, standing by one of the thousand-foot trees and trying to fit his mind around the worldview that seems to be universally agreed-on here. That everyone, no matter who they are, no matter what they've done, deserves to be okay forever.

'Deserves' is a concept that hasn't previously fit well with the rest of how Mhalir thinks, so often it seems to be trying to slice up the word along a purely subjective angle that reality doesn't care about and that's mostly based on the viewpoint of whoever's making the claim, right now, about what's fair and right and ought to happen, and so you get Yeerks who think that their children deserve to have eyes and hands, and Andalites who think that all Yeerks deserve to be dead or at best trapped in pools forever, and there's no resolving that, because it's not a fact you can prove by logic or by measuring objects in reality. 

- but there's something almost objective about Nirvana's concept of it, there's an elegant symmetry to it - the sense that they do mean something that he understands. And they're not like Iomedae, but they are, in a sense, ruthlessly trying to do whatever it takes to win, in this one specific game, and it's a long game and so the best strategy is a patient one... 

He tries that on for a while. 

- He's not going to argue with their claim that he isn't ready for trial work, Mhalir decides eventually. He isn't, and that doesn't just mean it would hurt him to try, it means he would be more likely to lose. 

He does, however, eventually go looking for the instructor who was explaining the search engine, to tell them that he's also knowledgeable about search engines and would like to help them figure out how to use it effectively. 

The instructor is happy to show it to him and explain what they're doing so they can help! The interface they're using looks like a set of matched rings for correspondence over a distance; you can speak words into it and then it replies with a list of potentially relevant court cases. 

Oh, interesting! He had been wondering how they were implementing it, and fortunately it looks like magic lets them skip over a lot of the really annoying interfaces of early-stage computers.

He explains that humans on Earth tend to use search engines with a visual interface, because it's easier to process a lot of information that way, and particularly while they're still figuring out keyword categorization, the search engine is likely to often misfire because it doesn't quite understand the query. He's curious how they're indexing the records, too, whether it's all manual coding by people or whether they're feeding transcripts to software which finds patterns and organizes them, either way he has ideas for how to improve it. Ideally they would have users able to add metadata to files when they're incidentally pulling them up, so that over time the system gets better and better categorization just by being used, if that makes sense? 

That sounds really useful! Right now it is all read into one of the rings by people, and they're only about 5% of the way through all their files but they prioritized the cases likeliest to be relevant so they think they're getting around half the benefit already. Their understanding is that the software can do some finding patterns, but it'd be really valuable if lawyers could mark cases as unusually useful for one another. A visual interface would be great but no one has yet figured out how to build it. 

Reading it into the rings sounds very slow and he's impressed they've made it through 5% of the backlog already! Probably he should talk to whoever knows how the magic they're using works. They might want to use something like a crystal ball and adapt the scrying spell to scry 'objects' that are in the search engine rather than physical space. 

Talking about this is interesting and fun but Mhalir is also finding that he's very tired again. Can he come back tomorrow? 

Of course! Or whenever is convenient for him.

He thanks them for their time and looks around for Caroline. 

She is perched on a tree up above and can accompany him home.

He needs more breaks on the return flight, and at one point is briefly tempted to just sleep on the forest floor instead of flying further, but the nest is the place that feels safe right now, and even though he still half-suspects that's an illusion, the promise of it keeps him going. 

"I think I should try to figure out why Nirvana wanted me to be a baby bird," he says to her once he's flopped there and rested for a few minutes. "It is confusing because I do not like it, and one would think that disliking something would not predict it being good for healing." 

"That is confusing! What shape would you like being?"

"- I mean, if I were choosing between anything, I think I would want to have an Andalite body again, to be - fast, and able to defend myself, and ideally to have morph and then I could be a hawk if I needed to fly places." 

"If you imagine that you'd woken up here with an Andalite body, what do you think you would have done first?"

He has to think about that for a while. "I would probably have looked for an open space where I could see everything around me while I oriented a bit, and then morphed hawk to scout, and figured out where I wanted to go." 

"I don't know if Nirvana can make you capable of shapechanging at will if you aren't relating to yourself in the way that causes shapechanging in Nirvana."

"I suppose that makes sense, it is already - more than I would have asked for - that it allows it at all, and lets me have a body without needing a host. I am also confused about why shapechanging works the way it does, though, I talked to somebody about it and their explanation of it felt...unfair." 

"Oh?"

It's oddly hard to think about, but Mhalir fumbles through recounting the story about the one person who couldn't shapeshift for a hundred years because she was always scared, and how it seems mean of Nirvana to put him in a shape where he feels vulnerable and unable to protect himself, when feeling that way will cause him not to be able to shift to a better body. 

"I wonder what that person would say about it if we asked her. It does seem bad for people, to feel vulnerable. It is very important to feel safe if you want to start feeling all kinds of other things."

"I spent so much of my life being small and helpless, I am tired of it. I - am not sure I have ever felt safe. The world was not a safe place for my species." 

"It is possible that the process that starts people as things made a mistake, but it also seems possible that learning you are safe as a bird is more valuable to you and a better foundation than learning you are safe as an Andalite."

"Am I safe? I could run into someone like the person who needed to be a lion and bite people to see what happened, I could - fall in the river - I could try to fly too high and get tired and fall..." 

"You are safe. People who are violent don't start near other traumatized people. The kind of bird that we are isn't damaged by falling. I do not know exactly what would happen if you fell in the river, do you want me to jump into the river for you and find out?"

"- Maybe? Although you are an adult bird and I am a baby bird so I am not sure it would be an accurate test for what would happen to me." 

"I can be a baby bird." She settles herself in the nest and focuses on it and gets younger, just barely quickly enough that it's perceptible change.

That's so fascinating! The most interesting part, maybe, is that she's just - willing - to do that. Not scared. 

Once she is a baby bird she clumsily makes her way to the edge of the nest. "Should we check now?"

"All right." He flutters down from the nest with her, landing next to the riverbank. 

And she makes her way over to the water and plops in. She floats, apparently, and is whisked gently away downstream.

- probably this shouldn't be scary, but in fact it's terrifying!!! 

Mhalir tries to take off from the ground, fails and tumbles over, hops to one of the little hillocks and takes off from there and flaps hard, chasing after her. 

When she observes him doing this she starts beating her wings against the water and splashes herself to shore in a bedraggled feathery heap. "I'm sorry, Mhalir, I didn't mean to startle you - I'm right here -"

He lands, more clumsily than usual, and hops to her. "- Are you all right?" 

" - yes." She sounds slightly confused by the question. "I think the stream gets us to some other part of Nirvana. Probably I should have asked someone, I'm sorry."

Mhalir doesn't say anything, just huddles up against her, shivering, and tries to burrow under her wing, which works less well when she's also a baby bird. He's still kind of panicking, which doesn't make all that much sense because it seems like in fact nothing bad happened, but - it feels to him that this isn't the point, the point is that if something had happened he wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. 

She leans against him and pats him with her small baby bird wing. "That was really scary for you."

Why does Caroline always feel the need to say things which are extremely obvious. 

Patpat.

"I - do not actually think that helped with feeling safe," Mhalir says eventually, shakily. "Can we go back to the nest now." 

"Of course." She has been getting gradually more grownup bird shaped, but still flies slowly and shakily back to the nest.

Mhalir follows her; he's actually less shaky, since he's more used to his baby wings and also not wet. He lands and huddles. 

"- I feel very stupid," he admits. "Like - either I should have predicted accurately that would not help, or I should be not scared because actually you are unhurt and nothing bad happened..." 

"I don't think you should feel stupid! I have lots more experience with trauma and I did not predict that that would not help, or I would not have suggested it. And people cannot usually decide to not be afraid of frightening things, it takes time, and examples of the thing going well - and it does not count if the thing technically didn't hurt anyone but was scary again, that won't help you learn to expect it not to be scary."

"I can usually decide not to be afraid if being afraid is unhelpful! ...Maybe that is not exactly true. When I was alive I could usually decide to - put the fear somewhere else, where it would not affect my decisions or thinking very much." 

"That sounds like it could be useful in some circumstances but also mean you don't get much practice at being afraid."

Huh. Mhalir never thought of it in that way, where 'being afraid' is something where practice would help. It...sort of makes sense, though, maybe. 

"I want Carissa," he says, miserably. "Or at least I want to know that she is all right, and - she is in Heaven so probably no one is hurting her? But - to put weight on that I would need to trust that what everyone here says about Heaven is true, when I have not seen it myself, and..." He shrugs helplessly with one wing. "And I hate that I am trapped here and cannot go see for myself and no one will tell me what is happening with the war and maybe they need my help but I am not there - "

"It's very unfair, that we can't go to the other afterlife planes and the Material Plane."

"I do not see how I am supposed to feel safe here when being here means I cannot achieve any of the things I care about!" 

"Do you prefer not to feel safe or be okay while so much is wrong with the universe?"

"I - that feels like the wrong framing - whether I am okay is not the point, the rest of reality is not checking my okayness before being the way it is, and - I made a promise - I cannot just decide not to care about that, that is not how anything works..." 

"Of course not. It is very frustrating that we cannot affect the Material Plane, here."

It's so frustrating.

"I feel as though you are trying to say something else and I am not following your point," he says eventually. 

"Hmmm.

Almost everyone who comes to Nirvana is angry and frustrated that we can't affect the Material Plane. It is hard and unusual to have lived a life that didn't involve making promises. People leave children and elderly parents who will starve without them - mine did. People leave projects that were important, wars they must win. That is what death is. We lose so much. There is nothing anyone here can do to get you home again. The not-going-home - that is not a decision Nirvana makes to help you heal. That is one of the awful things about the universe people have to somehow heal from."

He's suddenly so angry. "I cannot do that." 

"What do you mean by that?"

"I cannot just - be okay - with the universe containing things that are awful. I made a promise that I would fix it. I - Iomedae's cleric asked if I wanted to fight on the side of Good forever, and - and I am so angry if, if they do not want my help anymore even if I wish to offer it - Iomedae was not answering my prayers..." 

"I think there is a difference between - being okay with the universe containing things that are awful, and being okay in a universe that contains things that are awful. Being able to heal within it does not require thinking it's all right. And - it is not the case that in Nirvana we can do nothing to make the world less awful. With time, we can become more powerful, powerful enough if we wish to answer summons from the Material Plane. But the specific things that we set down - we cannot pick those up again. No one here can send us home."

"...I think I am still finding it hard to understand the difference between being okay in and being okay with." 

"That makes sense. Hmm, imagine if you did not feel scared whenever anything happened that you couldn't control, and you understood your own feelings and motivations and where they were coming from, and you didn't feel tired or scared or overwhelmed when unexpected things happened, and you could think about upsetting things but not be consumed by feeling upset. Do those seem like changes that could happen without - changing what you want the world to be like and what you care about?"

"I - maybe? I think I was better at that before. Or - thought I was, at least, I am not sure. I seem to be very bad at it right now and I disprefer that...I think maybe it was already getting worse from the time I came to Golarion, though..." 

"Often, when a person is being traumatized, they learn patterns of thought and reaction that work well enough under the circumstances they're facing. They don't notice that there are problems until they're out of that situation and safe or in a different kind of danger. The soul tries to hold itself together, whatever the cost, while the danger is imminent."

"...I am worried that learning patterns of thought suited for a place where one is always safe is actively bad if I ever want to return to the material plane where that is not the case." 

"I think there are some patterns of thought that would be bad for that, but mostly - habits are not just a variety of skills for situations, with none of them better or worse than others. Healing is not just learning the habits for a safer world, it is also learning how to notice your own needs, and what it feels like both to listen to and to ignore trauma-based instincts, and how to tell when you're pushing yourself and when you're harming yourself. People who get very good at the things Nirvana tries to teach are able to spend most of their time trying to save people from eternal damnation and usually failing. That doesn't come from a habit of expecting things to be okay, or of deluding yourself about how bad things are, or of deliberately not-thinking about things, or of surrounding yourself with gentleness. The skill it requires is also one that would serve someone who fights wars, I think."

"That...makes sense. I do want to be able to do that - I was trying, before, to be able to live in a world with many awful things and not give up. I - am not really sure what it means, to be able to tell if something is harming me, separate from whether I think it is bad?" 

"Some things are bad but not in a way that interferes with your ability to form predictions about the world and act on your goals and make sense of the things that happen to you. And some things are bad in a way that interferes with predicting and acting and sense-making. If I try a fancy flying trick at high speeds in a rock canyon fall badly and break my wing that will be annoying, but it will not interfere with my ability to predict or make sense of the world. If you broke your wing right now I think it would interfere with your sense-making, since you are trying to predict that you won't come to random harm, and since it'll feel less possible to do things that you care about doing."

"- Honestly I think that if something bad happening interferes with my ability to form accurate predictions or make plans that will work, that is a very stupid cognitive error to be making and I should do something less stupid instead." 

"Hmmmm, what does 'stupid' mean, there?"

Mhalir mulls on that for a moment. "It is - objectively recognizable as a mistake, to anyone assessing it from the outside? It would cause me to be more wrong rather than less, it is...the opposite of learning from experience, in a sense, if observing something causes my model of the world and my ability to achieve my goals to be worse rather than better." 

"I think it is a mistake and one that people get better at avoiding as they heal. But - it's very hard, in a world that keeps hurting you, to build the skills that might let you escape the hurt."

"Why?" 

"Well, it's hard to learn to swim when you're drowning. Because the immediate panic about how you are not getting enough air and your head is sinking below the water is going to take priority over skill formation or reasoning things out or anything like that. - this is both an example and a metaphor."

"I...think that makes sense. But I was not usually in situations of immediate panic, before, I did make time to practice skills and reason through things. - I did not always get it right, but..." 

"I think there is a lower-level version of 'immediately panicked' that everyone in the Material world and many people in most of the Outer Planes is subject to almost all of the time, and that has similar kinds of effects to being actively drowning, though of course to a lesser degree. It is the state of - fundamentally not believing that you are safe and loved no matter what you do, and fundamentally not expecting anyone to catch you if you make mistakes, and so being alone, at the edges of your strength, without even any way to imagine things being different than that."

For some reason Mhalir is suddenly, overwhelmingly sad, and his thoughts tug to Carissa; he remembers her fear, and how much he wanted her to be less afraid...

"I - mean - that is how reality works? It does not generally catch you if you make mistakes, and in the world I come from, there is nobody to catch you when you die, either, you just - cease to exist and are gone forever. And the only way to change that is to become strong enough that you will not fall. And then try to catch everyone." 

"Yes. That is how lots of places are. And so everyone is almost drowning all the time which makes them not very good at learning to swim."

"Nirvana is not like that. There are things to catch you if you fall. You are not alone. And once you have learned to swim then you will be more effective even if you are plunged back into the world where everyone is slightly drowning."

This gives him a slightly clearer conception of what he needs to do, Mhalir thinks, but still not much of a map for how.

"I think you are saying that there is a kind of being scared and not feeling safe that is - like drowning and panicking about it, it makes one less able to reason or learn things? And so my mind would work better and I would make fewer mistakes in reasoning if I were less scared in that way?" 

"I think so, yes. Talking about minds is hard, though, and there isn't a good vocabulary for it."

"That is inconvenient." Sigh. "Is there standard advice for how to be less scared here." 

"Sometimes it is a good idea to do things that are just a tiny bit scary, so that you can start to train the expectation that those things will go well and not go badly. Sometimes it's a good idea to talk about what scares you, in a lot of detail, what is the worst thing that might happen and what feels like the likeliest thing that could happen and what would make the situation feel safe."

"The worst thing that might happen is...if Asmodeus wins the war between Heaven and Hell, and uses Wish to kidnap Aroden to Hell so he can destroy his soul forever, and then resurrects me so he can interrogate me and destroy me as well, and Carissa too, and - if the Andalites betray the peace treaty I wrote up as soon as I am no longer there, and win the war with my people, and everyone who matters to me is either gone forever or has lost everything they care about, and I cannot - fix things - because I do not exist anymore..." 

"That does sound like about the worst thing that could possibly happen. Does it feel like - there ought to be something you could do that would make it under your control -"

"- I... not starting from here, I do not have enough levers, but - if I had been smarter, before–" He cuts off. "Nevermind, I thought of a worse thing that could happen. If Rovagug escapes while the other gods are distracted and then destroys the entire universe, that would be worse." 

"- yes, that would be!"

Now Mhalir is feeling very overwhelmed by the weight of possible-awful-things that could happen, and the smallness of his current existence, and - it doesn't feel logically coherent, that he could ever feel safe in a world where that remains true. 

He curls up very small again and says nothing. 

Caroline grooms herself and eats some seeds and doesn't say anything.

Mhalir struggles against it for a long time. The horror is too big to fit into himself; it seems like it should be too much to fit into the world, it shouldn't make logical sense for it to be possible, but of course reality is reality and it is the way it is, and... 

Eventually he stops struggling, in some confusing metaphorical way that feels a little like giving up but also not like giving up at all. 

"I - can live in a world where that might happen," he says dully. "Because I am, right. That is what 'can' means, just - this is where I am, this is how things are." 

" - yes. I think that's a good way to put it. You do live in a world where that might happen. Everyone does. There are better and worse ways to live in it but there's no way to live not in it."

"And - living in it is better than not existing at all. I - maybe it is more sensible to compare it to the world where I do not exist at all and notice that existing is better even if I am very small, instead of comparing it to the world where I already fixed all the problems and - being afraid that I am not strong enough to do that and will fail." 

"Maybe. I personally find that it is not really worth comparing my situation to any other situations other than ones I can go do if I'd like."

"- I mean, I think I have to compare the situation I am in to other possible situations in order to notice that I want things to be different because I think they would be better that way? That is - what having goals in the world means, almost, that you are here and you want to be there and you chart a course between those points." 

"Hmmm. I think that's not how I make goals but it does seem like a perfectly good way to make goals if it is working for you."

"How do you make goals?" 

"Usually I am curious about something, and so I decide to try things until I figure it out."

"Oh. I do that too but I had not previously thought of it as having a goal, just as - being curious. It was - nice, when I had time and could afford to just do that, but it did not happen very often." 

"It sounds like you were very busy."

"There were always many urgent things to do." 

"That is some of what I identified earlier as a bit like drowning."

"...Maybe." 

"I did not feel that way when Seerow was alive. I - felt - I remember - it was like the world had opened into something vast and beautiful, it felt abundant, I thought we had all the time we needed..." 

"Tell me about him?"

"He was an Andalite scientist. He studied our planet. Realized we were sapient, no one had recognized that before. He thought it was tragic that we lacked more than rudimentary technology, so he shared theirs with us. He - I thought he was my friend - 

- he betrayed us. He had expressed unease before but nothing stronger than that - I had not been expecting violence at all... He died." 

"I'm so sorry."

"I miss him. I wish he were not dead; I want him back. But - I do not think that there is anywhere for souls to go when they die, on either of our homeworlds." 

"That is very terrible. It shouldn't be like that."

"It should not." 

"I - live in the world where that happened. I can exist here, obviously, because I do. But I am not sure I can be okay in the world where that happened and nothing I can ever do will bring him back." 

"When you say that, what does not being okay mean?"

"...That it will always hurt to live in this world where he is dead. That there will always be something I want and cannot have. Many things. He is not the only person who died in the war." 

"Yes. I think that's probably true. It will probably always hurt, that there are people who are dead and cannot be rescued, that there are people we can't see again and roles we can't play in their lives anymore."

It helps, somehow, hearing that; it doesn't hurt less but it feels less dissonant. 

"It did not previously stop me from wanting other things or having other goals? I am not sure why it feels so - in the way, right now." 

"It might be that you are allowing yourself to have more feelings about it now that it is less dangerous to do so. Or that you are usually able to push those feelings into motivation to do things, and without anything to push them at they hurt more. Or that you should not be doing things right now, but your unconscious mind does not know how to communicate that to your conscious mind, so it makes random things loud in the hopes that'll get you to listen."

"I do think it is easier when there are problems now that I have tools to solve and I can - prioritize my feelings based on whether they help with that." He shivers. "...I find it very distressing to consider that I 'should not' be doing things right now, and I am not sure whose 'should' that would be or what that even means." 

"It is possible that it is most conducive to your long-term ability to learn to metaphorically swim if you try to not do any things in particular right now."

"That does not make any sense. 'Learning to swim' is doing a thing, even if it is metaphorical and actually a different skill." 

"Let's say you are in the middle of the water and you are trying to learn to swim but you are impaired in learning by the fact you're panicking and desperately distorting all your movements to keep your head an inch above the surface. And also let's say that actually you can breathe fine in water. Then the first advice someone might give you is to stop trying to not drown, and just see what happens, and get used to it, and then start trying to swim."

"Huh." He is giving her such a puzzled look. "...Can we breathe in water, here?" 

"I don't know! I bet not in this form or I would've discovered it when I jumped in the creek, and instead I floated."

"I - am trying to figure out better what 'swimming' is a metaphor for, here - in the version where I could actually breathe underwater, metaphorically - so I know what to even stop trying to do. Maybe...it could be a metaphor for - being in control of my surroundings, knowing what is happening and having tools and plans to change it if something bad would otherwise happen..." 

"Hmmm. Maybe. Or for - fighting wars, for expecting that the only way to get what you want is to have the resources to insist on it -"

"Maybe. I mean, it is not as though I even have the option of going and fighting wars right now, so I suppose I am forced to practice not fighting wars and instead...hoping that Iomedae or Aroden will make sure things turn out all right? Except I am scared that maybe both of them are dead and that things will not be all right at all." 

"I think probably we would have heard about it if Iomedae was dead."

"I suppose. And I do not have any good plans right now because I have very few resources to work with and - I am not trying that hard, I guess. I am very tired." 

"If you are resurrected later, I think the thing you'll be gladdest you did while you were here is - rest, and process, and learn better ways to process things. And if you are not resurrected later that will still be a useful thing to have done."

"Mmm. What are better ways to process things?" 

"It depends on the person. Talking about them. Painting, flying, swimming, building things. Talking about - what predictions they lean you towards making, and whether you think those predictions are right."

He nods. "That fits. The last thing would be very useful, I think, to understand how I think and what my feelings about things are doing for that, I keep being very confused about my emotions." It also sounds like such an insurmountable amount of effort, though. "...But right now I am tired and I want to sleep, I think." 

She extends her wing.

Mhalir snuggles up against her, and if he doesn't quite feel safe, well, he feels closer to it than he ever has before. He falls asleep without too much difficulty. 

- in the middle of the night he has a nightmare where Iomedae accidentally releases Rovagug, thinking that he'll be confined to eating Hell, and instead he eats the entire planet of Golarion as well, and then the rest of the planets, and the sun, and he wakes up just as the last light from it is fading, in that moment filled with total conviction that Rovagug is in fact free and coming for Nirvana next - 

It is dark. The sky is starry. Caroline is asleep.

For some reason it feels impossible to move or speak or take any action on purpose; he tries to make a sound, and it takes multiple attempts even for that to work. 

Caroline wakes once he makes a sound. " - are you all right?"