I appreciate that. I hope to be able to help lots of people over my career.

Even if this specific person is as aggressively uninteresting as possible, Benden Weyr is still going to make a hole through the stone wall to gain access to Milliways, and Verlan is still going to hold the door open until then, minus any time he has to spend sleeping or to let Bella out if she wants to leave.

She's not in a hurry! She can hang out chatting with Bar and being available if they have more therapy cases!

In that case, a blue dragon will eventually contact her about his rider being constantly miserable.

If your rider would like to talk to me I can probably triangulate them off your mind but it'll be tricky to do much work at a distance.

I could tell you about his problems now so we know if it's worth him going down into the Lower Caverns to find you when the hole is big enough?

Is he okay with you doing that?

All right, if you think it'll help, the rider says tiredly. Bella can hear the echo of this through the dragon.

I don't know if I'll be able to help. I don't have a lot of experience. But there might be something relatively obvious I could do.

The dragonrider seems to keep dwelling on his family, who lived in a coastal fishing settlement four centuries ago. He promised his sister that he would visit regularly to make sure she was safe and make sure their elderly parents had company and more than the bare minimum care in their old age. And he did, for a decade. And then duty called him here, or rather now, four centuries in the future, and his whole family died never knowing why he disappeared.

He had plans for his retirement. He was going to visit his family more often. He was going to take his nephew to visit Telgar Hold. He was going to lie on the beach with his dragon. He was going to go see just how often any settlement anywhere on the continent had a Gather (a sort of market fair with dancing) and go to as many as he could. For his entire life, he knew exactly when he would retire, assuming he survived. He knew exactly when he would get to stop fighting. The flesh-devouring rain was going to stop -- did, in fact, stop! But then the future was unprepared and needed him.

So he came here to help and he hasn't been okay since.

Whoa. How did the time travel... happen.

Dragons can do that. Lessa and her dragon Ramoth went back in time to ask most of the dragons of the time to come forward.

And they can't go back?

They’re still needed here. And their Weyrleaders wouldn’t let them. And there doesn’t seem to be a record suggesting that they already have.

...is the time travel too expensive or something to just, uh, take vacations in the past, and not leave records then.

Some people died on the trip here and it took days and there's always some chance someone would notice them. And the weyrleaders wouldn't allow it because... why this specific pair? If they let everyone do it who wanted to for personal reasons they'd never be able to keep it quiet.

...it's probably not therapeutically relevant to know why they need to keep it quiet but it might be practically relevant, what are the pair's present obligations regarding telling people about what happened to them?