:- I don't know. I... probably not? Van saw Lancir for almost eight years and he tried very hard to fix it or at least mitigate it: 

Thellim's sense of pessimistic concern catches up with her.  :Yfandes, is this line of questioning okay with you?  I know you said you were more resilient than a human but some of your responses have seemed - like you might be close to freezing up yourself.  It's visible that you're tangled up with Vanyel and this would not be a good time for you to also shut down.:

A confused hesitation. :I - I don’t think - I want you to help Van. Please:

(tightbeam to Melody)  :I have no idea how much of this is my guessing versus what 'unawakened Mindhealer potential' could be telling me, but I'm getting a sense we should back off Yfandes.  You?:

:- Yes, I’m noticing something too. Was about to ask you, actually. I...don’t have a very clear sense of what in particular we need to back off on, though, do you?:

:I do not.  She... could have picked up some of Vanyel's trauma through the bond afterwards, even though she wasn't bonded to him when it happened?  It sounds more like a wild vaguely-plausible-sounding guess than something that's actually true.  But she's basically functioning and my own guess says we're supposed to leave her functioning while we see if we can do anything for Vanyel.  If we can help Vanyel, sometime later we can go back and have a talk with Yfandes about risks and tradeoffs and future therapy, after Vanyel isn't in a crashed state where anything going wrong with Yfandes could make it even worse.  The main thing that would contradict that strategy is if we can't do anything for Vanyel directly, and have to work on him through Yfandes's side of the human-Companion bond, which I don't know is even possible.  I mean, I did have one crazy thought about whether we could look at the broken ends of Vanyel and deduce how to transform Yfandes to make her more like Tylendel in those particular ways that would turn their current bond into something more like a lifebond, but that's more a discipline of 'how to have crazy thoughts in case you can turn them into saner thoughts' than my current working proposal.:

:....I would be very surprised if that worked. They're different sorts of bonds, and - as far as I know, lifebonds happen at a level deep enough that Mindhealers can't do anything to directly affect them. I - do think it'd be unsurprising if she had a pretty bad time early on, after bonding to him. And of course she's been under the exact same war stresses, if not more. But...I don't know, it feels like I'm missing a piece. I would ask her permission to peek at her mind too, except I'm not sure if that would add to whatever's putting so much strain on her right now: 

:If looking doesn't change anything - up to the limits of Heisenberg, if that even applies here - then it sounds materially safe.  I have some ethical twinges about asking Yfandes for this when she's obviously desperate and would say yes to anything and it's not her who's frozen up - but - if you have a sense that Yfandes is or even could be part of Vanyel's puzzle - we should ask her permission and take a look.:

:I share your ethical twinges, but she's going to be relevant for sure. If nothing else, stressors for her will affect him too, through the bond, and would make it harder for her to support him - which he clearly relies on a lot. Most Heralds do: 

And to Yfandes: 

:Would it be all right if I peek at your mind as well, with my Sight? I think it could be quite valuable for helping Vanyel. If so, is it all right if I keep sharing my Sight with Thellim?: 

Yfandes doesn't hesitate. :Yes. Of course: 

:I appreciate it:

And Melody turns her Othersenses toward a different mind, the muted glow of Yfandes' shielded mind unrolling like a carpet, threads, patterns - 

Yfandes' mind is a stable one. A square, solid-built weave, sturdy and reliable -

- and with a couple of additions, or extensions, woven deep into her but somehow not of her. It's a little as though some sort of scaffolding has been sewn into place, with a metaphorical material closer to finely drawn platinum wire than to any normal cloth. It looks strong. Almost unbreakable. One of the reinforced areas, rooted deep in the core of Yfandes, spirals out and joins her to Vanyel. 

The other's purpose is less clear. And it's the one currently under significant tension, tugging and warping the shape of her mind. Not to anything near a breaking point, yet - Yfandes is resilient - but something there seems off. 

:Melody, I don't think we should try doing anything to Yfandes right now, but I want to try looking at the added metal wire that's under tension and the threads in the immediate vicinity that it's constraining.  Whatever your Gift can tell you about it without poking it.  And - minds are made of smaller pieces that are made of even smaller pieces.  I don't know how much of that your Gift has let you figure out but everything we're looking at is much larger than the smallest elements of a mind should be.  We're seeing thousands of cloth patches woven from millions of threads; there should be trillions of connections.  It's not the time to start explaining neurotransmitters or synapses or Purkinje cells or cerebellar chips, but unless Yfandes's brain works completely differently from mine, I know the things we're looking at are made of smaller parts.  'Zoom in', if you can, if that request makes any sense to you.:

:...Huh: A wash of almost overpowering curiosity, tamped down quickly by self-control. :Let's talk about that later. For now, yes, the request makes sense and it's something I often do, though...maybe not to the level of detail where a mind would have trillions of components: She sounds awed. :Well, I'll see if I can get a closer look with no poking: 

There's a momentary, dizzying impression of falling, down and in, almost swallowed by it, the particular strained-wires part of Yfandes swelling to fill all of Melody's awareness. 

Melody just looks, calmly and patiently, for a long time. 

:...I can't do a confident interpretation without asking Yfandes for more context: she admits, finally, :but...this area is tied really deeply into her...motivations, I guess you could say. Particularly the, hmm - the moral or ethical kind of motivation? I don't know if your world has better terms for that. The bond with Vanyel is very deep as well, obviously, but it's much more rooted in emotional attachment - love, you could say, though not the romantic kind: 

Yfandes holds herself still and calm under their regard, though she's clearly still tense. 

:...she's mind-controlled to have a particular set of ethics and support Vanyel?  We so did not need to deal with this right now.  Melody, what's the version of the story that you know for where Companions come from?  I heard one version, I don't know if there are others in circulation.:

:- That's - it's not what I would've said first but it's not wrong: A mental sigh, though none of it leaks through in her expression or body language. :The story I heard is that King Valdemar was worried about the future of the Kingdom and particularly about corruption - he'd fled a corrupt Empire to the east - and so he prayed to every god he'd heard of for a miracle to help protect Valdemar forever. And also that he was a very powerful mage and cast some kind of spell, and then the first Companions showed up fully-formed in the Grove in Haven and Chose his son the heir and a few others. There's a song about it but it's not very specific on the details:  

Melody feels VERY UNHAPPY about the Yfandes-related discovery. It's not entirely clear why. 

Thellim is not liable to notice this mystery.  It is too obvious for her why somebody would be unhappy.

:It seems very unlikely that Vanyel is the perpetrator here.  That being the case, I think we deal with Vanyel's ongoing immediate medical issues, and only later figure out what to do about the giant mind control plot by mages or gods or both.  It's at least conceivable that what we're looking at is consensual, although the way that Yfandes was freezing up during questioning does not look like the sort of mental help I'd ask for myself.  And, though I hate to say it, depending on how the mind control works, it could very easily be integral to who Yfandes is now and ripping it out could be the equivalent of killing her and creating a different person.  For all we know.  Too many complications drop all this.  We should go look at the place where Yfandes is joined to Vanyel, where she's supporting the broken lifebond, before we look at Vanyel again.:

:Does seem like the best approach: Another frustrated mental sigh. :All right - let's have a look at the other area: 

Another dizzying shift–

The silver-wired area that links Yfandes to Vanyel is not under any particular internal strain. Yfandes' resolve to help and support Vanyel seems practically infinite, and unlike with the other scaffolding, there's no sign of this conversation putting tension on it. 

Some of the nearby tapestry looks - knotted, or repaired with darning, or some other metaphor like that. 

:- She's worried and scared for him, but she's not conflicted: Melody notes. :She's not - in the other place it looked like she might be fighting herself on something, and here it doesn't at all. And...hmm, I do think there's some old trauma here, experiences that were painful for her, but scars, not wounds, at this point, she's dealt with it and it's in the past. I - she's very, very committed to standing by him. I think it could withstand - almost anything: 

The 'almost' seems to hang in the air between them. 

:It sounds like the - uncontrolled part of Yfandes - is fully on board with supporting Vanyel.  At least that avoids some ethical dilemmas.  Even if there was some previous Yfandes who wouldn't have liked what she became, the current person takes ethical priority over the past person.  I'll have to do some thinking about any bad systemic properties that stance might imply when facing mind-controllers, but I'll do that later.  For now, if we see a way to help Vanyel from Yfandes's side of the bond, I won't feel bad about taking it.:

:So let's look next - if we can - at what Yfandes's mind is doing to support Vanyel from this side of their bond.  The part right at the interface to Vanyel; see if we can figure out what the tapestry is doing, maybe zoom in on one of the threads making it up and ask what just that one thread is doing.  The clever-idea that comes to mind is to synchronize Mindspeech activity-reading with Mindhealing state-reading, but if you can't already do that, it's probably more of a research project.  And asking for a full mind-activity-read of Yfandes, or Vanyel, probably comes with all kinds of security implications... it's not clear that we're desperate enough to ask for that right now.  Normal techniques first.  What can we see, from this vantage point, about what Yfandes's mind is doing to support Vanyel's mind through their bond, that partially but not fully replaced the lifebond?:

:Synchronizing Mindspeech and Mindhealing... Hmm, that does sound like something I've done before, actually, though it wouldn't be practical here – it's very invasive and pretty gruelling for the patient, even aside from the security aspect. But, sure, I can go in closer on the interface...: 

Melody concentrates, and her viewpoint backs 'out' again, then swoops 'inward' on a different area – the region where Yfandes' and Vanyel's minds are linked. 

The area where the silver-wire framework of Yfandes' bond link to Vanyel, is placed as closely as possible to the edge of the missing, damaged area. It's evident even at a high-level glance that it isn't and can't be the right shape to patch that gap entirely.

...Up close, the edges of the shattered lifebond are ragged, and it's almost as though the void holds some sort of sucking vacuum, constantly pulling and straining all the adjacent connections. Some of the torn tapestry looks like it's been rewoven, tucked back into itself – part of this looks intrinsic, as though Vanyel is retraining his own mental habits, some is silver-wire-reinforced, and yet other parts are...not Vanyel, but not Yfandes either, but as though his tapestry has been darned with a different kind of yarn. 

:That's another Mindhealer's work: Melody explains, before shifting her 'focus' to pick out the Yfandes-specific modifications in particular.

:The denser area here is...hmm, something to do with interpersonal attachment, and feeling safety or belonging, I think? And other than that, there's a lot of - just steering his thought-patterns away from repeatedly noticing the damaged area, I think, or being reminded constantly of memories associated with it. But incompletely - it's causing him pain all the time, I reckon. Yfandes is - sort of stabilizing the edges so it doesn't collapse the rest of his motivation and ability to want things or enjoy things? Maybe? I don't exactly have a lot of experience interpreting this sort of thing in particular: 

She dives in even closer. :...She's - sort of interwoven with his mind on a really fine-detail level - especially right here at the 'edge' of where his mind would've used to link up with his lifebonded, but not just there. I don't really know what this means or if it's normal for Heralds, honestly, usually I don't go in so close with my Sight: