Leareth was curled up in his bed reviewing notes and now he is suddenly being EATEN by a GIANT SNAKE. The amount of sense this makes is well into negative numbers and -

- okay probably this is the "jumpscare" variant of nightmare that makes more sense than the alternative and the action to do about it is 'try to wake up' -

This does not work at all, and by that point it's too late to try alternative plans like 'Mindspeak Vanyel and Maitimo as loudly as he possibly can'. Inconveniently this is a situation where 'try to fight back' might ACTUALLY HELP but he's also too frozen to think of that until it's too late to make much difference, so he doesn't bother. 

Weirdly, being eaten by a giant snake doesn't actually hurt? And doesn't seem to result in the expected consequence of "being eaten." 

Instead he's...somewhere else...?

Also, in midair and falling. 

"--Whoah!" she says, not letting go of the bag but reaching out to catch the falling stranger. She checks that all her lines are still taut--yes--did some Seeker push a guy down a well but not sabotage her lines or do anything to her assistant?

Whatever, not important right now. Her legs bend as she catches him, but it's only to help cushion his fall, not because she isn't strong enough to support him. 

They are at the apparent bottom of a stone well, just Leareth, the glowing woman who caught him, and the muck she's standing in, out of which are poking some suspicious-looking white objects. 

Screaming would ALSO have plausibly been useful when he was being eaten by a giant snake, but apparently Leareth has a lot of engrained habits about making zero noise while bad things happen, and they aren't very responsive to whether this is helpful. 

Screaming now probably isn't helpful but is pointlessly tempting. Leareth manages to restrain it to a strangled sort of eeeeeeeep sound. 

Why is she glowing. He belatedly thinks to stretch out his mage-sight. When startled he still sometimes forgets he has it; for a long time he didn't. 

She is VERY VERY VERY MAGIC. 

She is also saying something querulous in a language he doesn't understand. 

Leareth instinctively tries to flail his way loose and get further away from the VERY VERY VERY MAGIC until he can figure out what's going on, before his conscious mind has a chance to think through whether this is in any way a good idea. 

She's very strong. He does not succeed in flailing his way loose. 

If he cares to continue looking around, the well they are in is also very magic, but her magic--her glowing, actually--is suppressing it. 

Leareth struggles for about five seconds, until it's apparent that this won't work, and then goes completely limp. He does manage, a few seconds after that, to keep looking around and notice the various other magic and her apparent magic-suppressing effect. 

He still can't understand what she's saying. Again, it takes a long time to remember that Mindspeech exists. 

- okay the FIRST thing to do is to try Broadsending as loud a mental shout as he can for Maitimo and/or Vanyel. 

She tilts her head quizzically. 

She...definitely did not hear that with her ears. And his lips didn't move. So...

Her signal-line jerks in the coded pattern for a status update request. She signals back proceed as normal. 

That didn't work either. 

Leareth is at this point utterly terrified, and it's tempting to respond to this by just not doing any things, but - probably - maybe??? - this is a situation where trying to do things will make things go better instead of worse. Also he's confused and he hates that. 

:Where am I: he tries asking the glowing magic woman, much less loudly and actually targeted-Mindspeech this time. He tries to open his Thoughtsensing just enough to get only the top surface thoughts; that should let him understand her answer. 

"At the bottom of a well in London," she says. 

Her thoughts carry the pattern of the words she says aloud, but underneath them are other words, more complicated ones; the word that corresponds to "at the bottom of a well" also carries connotations of "in the maw of a hungry beast" and "in the shadow of a cursed god." The word that corresponds to "London" also means "Fifth City" and "Stolen Capital."

None of this is at all familiar, and neither "in the maw of a hungry beast" nor "in the shadow of a cursed god" are places he wants to be at ALL. 

At some point he's going to have to try to form some coherent thoughts about what just happened and where he is, but maybe that can wait until he's definitely not in mortal danger. 

There are...probably...actions he could take about the mortal danger? Other than just staying motionless and waiting to see what magic glowing woman is going to do with him? 

He could - climb the rope? That seems hard and exhausting though and he's likely to just fall again. 

He could try more communication. The woman is baffling but she doesn't seem hostile. 

:Is it dangerous: he asks her. :Can we leave: His mindvoice is remarkably level and coherent given the amount of barely-restrained panic just underneath. 

"It is dangerous, but not very dangerous. Probably. Hm. Well, I'm not leaving without doing what I came here for, but...no, sending you up without me wouldn't be safe either, my light doesn't reach the top of the well at enough strength to keep Mr. Eaten away...I'm sorry, I think it's probably safest if you just wait with me until I'm done."

An assessment of risks weighed and deemed worthy. An uncertainty due to a new variable. The possibility of a third option. The rejection of an idea before it can be fully formed. Light that is law. An incredibly dangerous being whose existence is unlawful. That which is devoured. Compassion in the face of a reasonable fear. Determination to carry through an unpleasant task. 

She sets him down and begins digging human bones out of the muck and stuffing them in her bag. 

Leareth tries to curl into a position where he's as minimally encumbering to her as possible. And then spends a while with his eyes closed, putting most of his willpower into not crying. 

He's in another world. Again. That much is pretty clear; none of the magic is familiar at all. 

This time he has no way back. He can't do magic. Even if he could solve that, eventually, he has no idea where to start; he didn't even see what the snake did, because he panicked and forgot mage-sight existed. 

Okay. Fine. Trapped in another world where glowing magical women inexplicably go on missions to dig human bones out of the bottom of wells, which are maybe metaphorical - no, 'metaphor' isn't the right concept at all - which are somehow related to hungry beasts and/or cursed gods. 

(He is going to try very hard to not-think about "Mr. Eaten" so he can avoid panicking any more, since it would do the opposite of help right now.) 

Instead, he collects himself enough to open his eyes and actually watch what she's doing, with both his ordinary eyes and mage-sight. And, come to think of it, does anything else in here show up to Thoughtsensing? 

The woman's light is relatively straightforward: it is enforcing a paradigm, and the paradigm does not include evil magic wells. The magic that makes up the woman is significantly more complicated. 

The well is ALIVE (or at least AWARE) and ANGRY. It hurts to be in contact with. 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Leareth withdraws his mental probe as fast as possible. He really, really doesn't want the beast/cursed god/Mr. Eaten to be any more aware that he's here. 

It seems unlikely, probably the best he can do here is avoid being actively in the way, but - 

:Can I help you with anything?: he asks the woman. Maybe if so they can leave SOONER. 

"Sure, help me dig these out. We can't get all of them but I'm going to fill this bag." 

Agreement that speed is desirable. Determination to rescue the victims of the angry god. Determined starfish-throwing in the face of a daunting, currently insurmountable task. 

...Leareth likes her, he decides. Or - respects, approves, it's more complicated and real than just liking. She's...fighting for something. 

Leareth was fighting for something, once, when it was - safe, for the world, for anyone, for himself... It's only words, now. All the people in all the worlds. But, whatever her something is, it's more than words to her. 

Having feelings about it isn't productive, right now. Leareth does his best to stomp on them, and focuses on helping her scoop human bones out of mud; he's not as strong or as magic as her, but at least he's not squeamish about the task, and having something useful to do with his hands is a good distraction. 

Eventually, the bag is full, and she grabs both it and him tightly and yanks on the signal-cord to tell her assistant to pull her up. 

The man pulling on her ropes is a slightly sweaty academic in tweed with patches. He wipes his forehead with a handkerchief once she and Leareth and the bag are all safely out and Lucy is untying herself. She dims as they reach the top and stops glowing entirely as soon as they're all out.

"Who's this?" he asks her, nodding at Leareth. 

"--He fell into the well. You didn't see him?" The expectation that two people would have crossed paths. Startlement at unexpected information. 

"No..."

"Hm." The resolution to investigate a thing in further detail later. 

She opens the bag and the two of them start taking the bones out and laying them on the ground. 

And then she speaks one of the complicated words that have been going through her mind all this time. The reunion of violently disjointed parts. 

The magic in the word almost seems to burn against his mage-sight, as several skeletons assemble themselves out of the loose bones. Not complete ones--not a one of them is fully complete--but every bone is lined up with every other bone from the same body. 

And then something in her magic shifts, clicking from one setting to another, and she begins glowing again, but this light is different. This light does not enforce a paradigm, or if it does, it is a very different one: Everybody lives. She glows far more brightly here than she did in the well

The bones grow flesh and organs and skin. Minds flicker to life in their skulls. They open their eyes and breathe and sit up and look around. A few cover their nakedness, a few break down crying. 

What. 

Leareth has been spending the last however-long trying not to have any emotions, and now everything feels far away - like it's happening, but not really to him. 

The sight of bones, some of which he pulled out of the well himself, assembling into living people, still has an impact, but mostly he just feels - dizzy, like he's falling, detached from anything that holds together. 

:Are we safe here: he tries to ask the woman. His mindvoice is noticeably less coherent than before. 

"Uh, define safe?" The uncertainty that anything is ever truly safe. "Mr. Eaten can't get to us outside of the well." An angry god, bound in the prison of its own death. "A Seeker could push us in but they're not going to try that in public while there are people around." The danger posed by the cultists of an angry god. The safety granted by visibility. "A knife-and-candle player could stab us but I could fix that." The frustrating homicidality that some adopt in the face of limited immortality. "Safe enough. I could find safer, depending on what you're scared of." The tradeoff between security and convenience. The willingness to sacrifice greater convenience for another's security than for her own. The uncertainty as to the source of fear. The fact that any place guarded by a force great enough to deter attack may thence feel threatening from the inside. 

There are a lot of things Leareth meant to ask her. How the well acquired an angry mind-presence; how pulling the bones out and reanimating them helps; what her magic is, both kinds, and what magic the god has, and a thousand other questions, and also he should at some point tell her that he's not from this world, it's relevant context... 

Leareth has been trying very hard not to consider the actually-extremely-obvious hypothesis, which is that he's still in Angband. At this point he sort of has to actually think about it, though. Or...try. 

:I - may I please have a moment: he says to the woman, very politely, and then he curls up in a ball on the ground. 

"Of course." The axiomatic assertion that sometimes people need a minute especially in stressful circumstances. 

She and the Tweed Neophilologist start distributing clothing to the newly-resurrected people and reassuring them.

Okay. Start with what he knows. Might know. There's...nonzero evidence here that actually he's still in the situation where he can't know anything ever again. But it's not like he was absolutely sure before. Just...sure enough. 

How much does this change that. Is he still sure enough.

It's been a subjective year. Or - he thought so, at the time. He has - had - a year's worth of notes to prove it, but not here. A lot of events happened and he's pretty sure he remembers them, along with a lot of very samey days and nights that are nonetheless stubbornly seared into his memory, he was hoping that would eventually make the things that came before this past year less salient.

If Melkor had figured out how to replicate compulsions and Mindhealing, the war would've been over in a week. It's...not impossible, that everything since then was some sort of elaborate game, but - it's not the sort of explanation that actually leaves him less confused?

He is not, currently, being tortured. The situation was baffling and scary but - not in a very targeted-at-him way? Plausibly it was less frightening for him than it would have been for, say, Herald Dara? It's, in a way, more surreal and confusing than frightening. 

Also he's not being asked to do any magic, and he couldn't anyway. 

Fine. Start with that.

If glowing-woman asks him to do magic, or anything else that could have genuine significant effects on the world, he'll refuse and update his probability estimate of still-in-Angband. (On reflection, helping her collect bones was...probably still okay? She was already doing it, he just made the process 20% faster, and he was the one who offered at all.) 

As soon as he has more downtime, he'll check his memories of the last year, make sure they actually do contain a year's worth of real details. 

In the meantime, he will - hold his beliefs about what's happening lightly, but will continue to act on the assumption that this is real and worth updating on. 

This process takes him a lot longer than a minute, but eventually Leareth uncurls, though he stays sitting on the floor. 

:I think I am not from this world: he tells the woman. 

"Not from this world like from the Surface or like from Parabola or like from Axile?"

A choice between exemplary options. The planet's surface, rich with light but under the rule of law. The realm of dreams and mirrors, which Is Not. A separate planet, from whence come creatures of water and slippery flesh. 

:I think - none of those specific places. I...am originally from a world called Velgarth, which is its own planet - likely very far from here, or I would have known of this place. More recently I was in a different world, called Arda, which is....very different from all of those other places, their world is flat and was previously lit by two very large trees and only recently acquired a sun, which is driven across the sky in a chariot by a dedicated small-god: 

Leareth says all of this in a very detached, distant way. 

"Chariot? Small-god? Please elaborate."

INTENSE CONFUSION. The conception of suns/stars as great beings, mightier than anything else that might be called a god and much too big to fit into a chariot and also completely sessile.

This is ESPECIALLY hard to talk about but Leareth tries his best. 

:Arda has - big gods, fourteen of them. Very powerful magic. Not...really embodied, in physical space - made of magic and mind. Control matter around them. And small gods, thousands, same but - less powerful. Their sun was made of fruit from the trees that were destroyed:

He really really really would like to stop thinking about gods now. And about what exactly happened when the Trees were killed. 

"When you say gods..."

Intense suspicion of the concept of worship.

Well, of course. Gods aren't for worshipping. For the most part they don't deserve it at all.

:I have my disagreements with them: he manages. Calmly, though in the process he's semi-involuntarily curling up again, knees pulled to his chest. 

"Okay. Well, I don't have a way to get you back to your world right now but I can keep an eye out."

The resigned addition of a task to an unnecessarily long to-do list.

:- Oh. I was not expecting you would have a way. If I want to go back, I - need to do that myself: 

He wonders, briefly, vaguely, if dying here would send his soul snapping back to Velgarth. That would be one way of solving this problem. Not one he wants to jump to trying, though. Especially since it might not work, and he has no way of checking. 

Nothing on Arda is currently on fire. Well, Vanyel and Maitimo are presumably searching everywhere - and maybe they'll even find him, eventually, that's probably a better bet than him getting his magic back somehow - but in any case, they can cope. The situation will keep. 

...It's very confusing how this is the thought that sends a sudden, sharp pang of grief-loneliness-pain through his chest.

He starts crying, although very quietly. 

"--Hey, hey, it's okay, I help people, I have other things I need to do but I will help you."

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. 

(The resigned expectation that if she doesn't involve herself in a thing, it can't be expected to get done.)

...This is not actually very reassuring, or particularly addressing Leareth's feelings, but also randomly crying in front of her is probably rude and confusing from her perspective. 

:Thank you: He takes a few deep breaths, trying to get himself at least a little bit calmer. 

Eventually he feels able to look up and meet her eyes. :Your world - has problems: 

...Usually this sentence would end in offering help. That - feels too risky, it's verging awfully close to a scenario where he could do serious harm if in fact he was still in Angband and all this was a hallucination, and besides, what can he do. He doesn't have magic right now. 

"It sure as hell does."

EXTREMELY EMPHATIC AGREEMENT.

:I...would help. Want to help. But - complicated, reasons - I...: 

Leareth is realizing that he's not used to having to communicate in WORDS when he's this stressed. It's much easier if he can just make varying depths of his thoughts public at Maitimo, who has all the context on all the things already. 

He really is not in the mood to have to fend off attempted stabbings by a 'knife-and-candle player', whatever that is, when he doesn't even have MAGIC. He has his shield-talisman and it's still working but at some point it's going to run out of power. 

:- Actually can we - go somewhere more safe? Would be easier to think: 

"Alright." 

Agreement to a proposed course of action.

She leads him through bustling city streets towards--

It looks like a giant stone building, carved all of a single piece without mortar or masonry, to ordinary sight. 

To mage-sight, it is also VERY MAGIC in ways that are similar to the woman in some ways and different in others. It's more...developed, in a way, but it's missing some parts that she has, and has a few parts that she's missing. More of the former than the latter, though.

Leareth follows her. He REALLY HATES crowds, especially of strangers, and he's doing pretty well at maintaining his composure externally, but this is a point where Maitimo would notice he was struggling and ask if he wanted to be carried or if they should just call Vanyel for a Gate - and Leareth would say no because not worth the resources but it's surprisingly upsetting not to have the option... 

(He could theoretically ask the woman to carry him but his entire brain starts screaming at the prospect of her touching him again, normally he's better about that lately but he's well past his tolerance for unexpected stress and he doesn't have an exit route even in principle and this is making everything ten times as hard as it should be.) 

They reach the building and he stops and looks at it. 

:What does the magic on it do: he asks the woman, :- also what is your name? I...am called Leareth: 

(In non-shared-language Mindspeech, the name comes across both as a sound, but also with an echo of - stars, the night sky, every light in the world worth saving -)

She smiles at him, radiating approval of the name, but also a sort of wry irony. 

"I'm called the Light-Hearted Wastelander." Light that is life. A barren field of jagged stone that is home. "You can see that the Bazaar is magic?" Curiosity at a new perceptual phenomenon. "The Bazaar is a Messenger." A specific individual as a member of a category. The envoys and chief servants of the Judgments/stars. "I'm sure there's specific magic for going places fast, and of course speaking the Correspondence, but I'm also sure that some of it is just--being a person high on the Great Chain." Superluminal transit, of the form specifically employed by Messengers in conjunction with non-sentient symbiotes. The burning language of the stars. A hierarchy of being, with more powerful beings higher than less powerful beings, with connotations of doubling as a socio-political hierarchy.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!! 

Leareth is not sure how much if any of this particular aaaah he endorses. He tries to take a deep breath. It sort of works. 

:...The building itself is - a person? Intelligent entity? Representing a 'Judgement', which is a star god? - Are they friendly. What - agreements does the building abide by - is there...safe passage for individuals like us...?: 

Leareth is not, generally, liked by gods. Usually he wouldn't go anywhere near a space maintained by one, whether or not most people who weren't Leareth were supposedly safer there. 

"The building itself is a person!" Deliberate camoflage as a result of fortuitous morphology. "It's not representing the Sun right now." A self-assigned task, for the benefit of but not originating from its Judgment. "The Bazaar isn't what I would call universally friendly, but I and it have a pretty comprehensive mutual-cooperation agreement." A close personal relationship stemming from ties of blood and strengthened by personal interactions. "It has some constraining agreements with the Masters, but that's probably not something you need to worry about." An ancient and fraught contract, deeply complicated and with a regrettable history. "If I ask it to keep you safe, you will be safe within its walls." A great ability to protect, called upon when needed. "Anyway, I don't know what you mean by 'individuals like us,' but this Messenger and this planet's Sun are, uh, heretics, it would not be great if the Space Constables got called on them." Uncertainty regarding categorization. Those beings whose existence is contraindicated by the consensus of the Judgments. A star in secret defiance of the will of its fellows. The crime of procreation between links on the Great Chain.

All of this is so confusing and upsetting! 

It would be way easier to think if he could curl up on the ground again, but that will just confuse his guide even more. 

:...I would be deeply grateful for your protection and - I cannot think of any way that the other - Judgements - could know of my existence or have opinions, but...I lack context on your world. What manner of things causes the Space Constables to be called?: 

"The Seekers are trying to do it, but they've been trying to do it since the Third City and haven't succeeded yet. The odds that you come to any Judgment's attention are slim to none unless I bring you to the Surface and introduce you to the Sun, which I don't have any reason to do."

The cultists of the dead and angry god. The pursuit of revenge for the god's death and devouring. The alerting of the Space Constables/dragons to illegal activities perpetuated in this solar system, including by the culprit and by the Bazaar, who did not prevent it. Time measured in centuries and in the Fall of three cities. The apathy of Judgments towards life as low on the Great Chain as humans. A beloved ancestor. 

Leareth is mostly managing to parse that, despite the buzzing lowkey-panic encroaching on his thoughts, but right now everything that the Light-Hearted Wastelander says is only opening even more questions. 

:- All right. I will go in with you if you think it is a good idea: 

She nods. 

She opens her mouth and says another fiery star-word. Enthusiastic greetings to a beloved ancestor!

Another voice rumbles words of fire into the air. The building is very much a person. Warm greetings to a beloved descendant. Inquiry as to the nature of a companion. 

The project to rescue the victims of that-which-is-devoured. An unexpected fall. An individual from an unknown world, she responds. 

Amused assumption that if the one addressed is involved, things are sure to be interesting, the Bazaar replies. 

Warm, amused agreement, Lucy says, and a door swings open, and Lucy leads Leareth inside. 

Leareth is quickly running out of slots in his mental stack to keep track of individual elements-of-confusion, which is frustrating but also makes it easier not to have any particular emotions about THAT baffling exchange. 

He follows Lucy and peers around with mage-sight. 

The place is VERY VERY MAGIC. 

Lucy leads him to a small suite containing comfortable furnishings. 

"You can just rest here, if you want, or you can ask me questions."

Concern over Leareth's apparent exhaustion. Curiosity and the desire to exchange information. 

:Thank you. One moment: 

Leareth sits down, props his elbows on his knees and cups his face in both hands and tries to block out everything for a moment and calm down. He can get...part of the way to calm. And he is tired, but it's - hopefully - going to be easier to relax once he has enough context on this place to even form a model about what's going to happen in the next few hours. 

:I have many questions: he says to Lucy. :Could I - have something to write on, to keep track?: 

She nods, and produces a notebook and pen from a pocket in her skirt. 

:Thank you. I need a couple of minutes: 

He takes notes, in rapid shorthand; his hands are shaky, but at this point Leareth is used to trying to take notes in the middle of a panic attack, and he's adapted his penmanship a bit so it's still legible despite this. The process of writing things down is - not quite soothing, but it does make him feel steadier, like there's definitely solid ground under him. 

(He wants a HUG but that isn't happening right now so he acknowledges the want and lets it drift past and keeps writing.) 

:All right. I - where to start - how long have there been these sun gods, 'Judgements' - did they create humans like you or vice versa?: 

"Judgments came first, but they didn't create humans. Humans evolved independently. Also, I'm only half-human." 

The extreme timelines that the Judgments and their servants operate on. The classification of 'animals' as a category low on the Great Chain composed of beings who came about through the process of natural selection. The crime of amalgamy: cross-breeding between different species. 

:- What, can these...god beings...interbreed with evolved humans? How does that work, biologically speaking?: 

"My father isn't a Judgment, my father is the Mountain of Light." The great Mountain of the Elder Continent who created the Light that is Life. "I don't know how it worked, uh, anatomically speaking." The extreme disinclination to speculate on the topic of one's parents having sex. "I could probably work it out with a human partner who wanted to experiment with my natural form, but so far I haven't had any lovers at all." An experiment, theoretically considered but never executed. A life too busy to bother with casual liaisons. A lack of extremely desirable romantic prospects. 

:...Wait, can you shapeshift?: 

"Yes. Just between this form and my natural one and in-between." The capacity to imitate a part of one's ancestry. 

That does not seem like it should work at ALL but...clearly a lot of things here are different, down to the level of fundamental physical laws. 

Leareth spends a minute trying to organize his remaining confusion into categories, and not making that much progress. 

:...Can you tell me how magic here works? Sorry, I know that is unspecific, just - my world also has magic and it is very different and I am not sure where to start with questions about yours: 

"Well, there's lots of magic," she says thoughtfully. "And I don't understand it all myself. There's light, and the Correspondence, and Parabola, and all the different kinds of people--the Axiles, the Devils, the Curators..." 

An extreme diversity of ways to act upon the world, most of which are suppressed by law-light. The admission that one is very young and a relative neophyte. The light emitted by celestial beings, law and life and hypothetical other forms. The burning language of the stars, which can force its meaning upon the world. The world of mirrors and dreams. A vast diversity of kinds of person. The aquatic beings of the planet Axile: giant sea urchins and strange glowing insects that cling to the roof of the Neath and human-sized squid people. Egg-thieves. Batlike beings which take special interest in collecting certain items. 

Leareth tries to keep up in his notes, flipping to new pages and marking out shorthand headers to be filled in later when he understands more. 

:Can you explain 'law light' more?: 

"The Judgments have a consensus about how reality should work, and Law-Light enforces it. In the absence of a stronger, conflicting light, anyway. That consensus excludes just about any magic besides the magic of the Judgments and Judgment-approved agents such as Messengers." 

The consensus reality law of the Judgments, as separate from the not-metaphysically enforced laws which govern the behavior of the Judgments themselves. The power of celestial light, which infects all light. The many and varied wonders of the Neath, which evaporate on the surface. 

:Ah. Thank you: Leareth isn't sure he fully understands, but he's run out of specific questions to ask, at this point he's bottlenecked on having time and some peace and quiet to process all the new information.

Which he should probably...ask for? This is a nervewracking prospect, though, for no reason for the usual, expected reason, which is that he still has a lot of instincts pointed toward 'when overwhelmed, stop trying to influence the world in any way.'

Also he still feels very disoriented, but it's unclear if this is a feeling where more information would help, or just the predictable emotional response to 'unexpectedly being eaten by a snake and ending up in a bizarre different world.' 

:Do you have questions about me or my world: he pushes out eventually. 

"What's your magic like? What are your gods like? What are the biggest problems people face?"

The nebulous, unknown shape of a potential resource. Wary interest in powerful factions. Perusal of low-hanging fruit for helping people. 

....Can he talk about gods right now. It's unclear whether he can manage to do that. 

Start with magic, then. There's a lot to cover there and he's given explanations of it in the last year so he has some scripts to run off. He can spend a while explaining Velgarth's various Gifts and what they do.  

"That's a lot more...structured and consistent than I'm used to," she says thoughtfully. 

The contrast between a neatly ordered set as exemplified by a garden versus an apparent chaos as exemplified by a field of wild flowers.

:It seems so. In your world, there is - contrast, tension, between physical-law-as-enforced-by-Judgements, and...most of your forms of magic? Velgarth does not have that. Magic is just one of the ways that our physical laws work: 

Leareth isn't sure how long it's been since he landed on top of her in the weird angry-dead-god-well, but he's starting to feel vaguely lightheaded and woozy. And - oh, right, when he actually takes a moment to check what sensations are happening in his body, which he's been trying hard to ignore because it's mostly 'panic', he is INCREDIBLY thirsty. Plausibly he would be hungry too, except that he's spent multiple hours running on adrenaline and mostly he just feels sick to his stomach.

...Also, inconveniently, he's extremely exhausted and his emotions are doing the thing where they declares he's BANNED from making any explicit requests because his plans might be wrong in some unspecified way that will destroy everything somehow. This is frustrating and pointless but he's too out of willpower to override it. 

:I think I - would benefit - from having something to eat and drink and then some time to rest: There, that is not a request it's just a statement and so it's allowed. 

"Oh--of course, I'll be right back."

Embarrassment at not having realized something obvious. 

She rises and leaves the room. 

With one fewer distraction around, Leareth scans the surroundings again with mage-sight, checks his own shields - still up at full power - and then -

PANICPANICPANICPANICPANIC this is so incredibly stupid It's very predictable, actually, he knows what to do about this. 

Unfortunately the usual 'what to do about this' is to ask Maitimo to come hold him and sing to him, or if he's busy ask Vanyel to come and just do the singing part, and he can't do either of those things ever again and he's shockingly miserable about this. 

It often helps get this over with faster if he stops trying to suppress externally-visible physical reactions, which seems acceptable now since Lucy isn't here, so he spends a while shaking and hyperventilating and not trying to force his mind or body to do anything else.

He keeps his Thoughtsensing extended so that he'll have some warning if Lucy is about to get back. 

Lucy comes back several minutes later, carrying a tray with a plate of food (heavy on mushrooms) and a bottle of water and a bottle of some kind of alcohol. 

This is enough warning that Leareth has time to mostly control his breathing, though he's still pretty shaky. 

:Thank you: He accepts the tray of food with his best attempt at a grateful smile, and starts off by gulping most of the water in one go. 

"You look really tired. Should I come back later?"

Concern, of the form: wishing to avoid overtaxing another's resources.

Aaaaaaaaaaah it's terrible being asked QUESTIONS about his PREFERENCES when he feels like this.

:...If there is nothing else urgent to address, then - yes, I would appreciate that: 

"Okay. You'll be safe here." 

Acquiescence to a course of action. Assurance of security. 

She scribbles a map indicating directions between here and where to get food and then leaves. 

Leareth finishes his water, which is maybe a questionable plan; he spends a while holding still and taking deep breaths until he feels less like throwing up, and then picks his way through about half of the food while he tries to think. 

First priority, piece together an actual model of this world so he can– no, stop. Before that. 

Priority one: sort out his internal priors around the question of 'still in Angband, yes/no', and then he can decide whether it's even worth trying to have beliefs about reality. 

This is inconveniently hard to reason about, because his instincts have some very strong, and conflicting, opinions on it. Five years' worth of "not even worth trying to assess, assume still in Angband" and a more-recent but less-total-time year of redirects toward the various arguments against, which are more or less convincing at various times but he tends to fall back on the thing where no one is asking him to do things and that lowers the stakes. Or he stops trying to do reasoning about it and just obtains hugs until his brain stops screaming. 

Not an option, now, but he does have paper. He can do this. Just think about one thing at a time, and write it down, and then it's there... 

Leareth spends a long time methodically going through the past year in his head - and skimming over a lot more of the years-before than he would really prefer, but he has five years worth of memories and they're even mostly in order now and it does seem important data to check whether this whole situation is...at all on-theme...for any of the Melkor rescue hallucinations. 

It's not, really? Melkor doesn't lack creativity but it generally wasn't pointed at 'detailed and very very weird alternate magic systems'. There are a couple of fake-rescue-memories that involved ending up in some third other world, but via accidents with more recognizable-to-Leareth magic than "being eaten by a fucking snake", and they have less random peripheral detail. And - there are rescue memories where supposedly years had passed, but Leareth also remembers going over those with Melody and noting that the 'years of subjective time' were mostly backfilled-and-inserted memories, which might pass muster at a quick glance but aren't convincing otherwise.

In particular, at least according to the supposedly-recovered memories and subsequent processing, Leareth has a cached conclusion that Melkor...never really figured out how to interface with Leareth's internal mnemonic system? Sometimes there would be backfilled record-keeping, but that, too, was never quite convincing. 

After several hours at this, Leareth is tired enough that his vision is swimming, and also EVERYTHING including the concept of being a person who exists over time is starting to feel very fake. He should....probably sleep? 

...How does sleep work again. Right. Lie down, close his eyes, wait for...oh right he usually has Maitimo sing him to sleep. Not an option. Probably if he just lies here for long enough then the sleep thing will eventually just happen to him...? 

Leareth spends a long time waiting for this, mostly stuck in random miserable thought-spirals, occasionally fuzzily almost drifting off and then snapping awake again with his heart racing because he drowsily tried to check his room-shields and they weren't there. Unfamiliar surroundings are TERRIBLE. 

This is such a stupid pointless problem, and eventually Leareth gets up and chugs the entire bottle of alcohol that Lucy left for him, maybe that will make sleep happen. Hopefully it doesn't taste too horrible. 

It tastes like fermented mushrooms. Not that terrible if you're expecting fermented mushrooms, but. 

Leareth was not expecting fermented mushrooms, but he's experienced a variety of weird fermented drinks and was expecting something in that space, and besides, 'bad-tasting drink' is really not that high in his ranking of possible unpleasant experiences. 

It's hard to know how much alcohol is actually in the drink, but he's already exhausted and it hits him hard. Leareth flops on the sofa and feels dizzy and sick and like the room is rotating, but also the sharp edges of the world are sort of padded and muffled, and his thoughts feel less like jagged broken glass, and eventually he sleeps. 

- he's drowning and the surface of the water is in sight but it's too far to reach, his body isn't working - 

- a blurry form seen through the water, diving to reach him, silver hair streaming back in the water and Leareth recognizes it - 

- carried, lying on wet sand, a melodic baritone promising that everything will be all right

- vaguely tries not to pay attention or feel anything but fear and hope and horror and gratitude are all tangled together anyway - 

- cold, so incredibly cold, trying not to do any things but can't stop shivering - 

- silver haired man murmuring to him, lighting a fire -

- anticipation of what's coming, no no nononoNONO - 

- and of course the suspense is drawn out and for a while nothing happens and it's only when he starts to relax again that Sauron wearing Vanyel's face takes a burning branch and brings it to his cheek -

All of this is being projected VERY LOUDLY in involuntary Mindspeech at whoever's within range. 

Dreams are strange in the Neath. The people in range are not the people in the vicinity of his physical body. 

He is watched by the denizens of Parabola. Many of them drink in his fear with relish. 

One forward-thinking soul slithers off. There is favor to be curried, if information reaches the right hands. 

"Alright," she says to the snake in her mirror. "That's very good to know. I'll be right over." 

She pulls a bottle of honey out of a drawer, and takes a spoonful, and vanishes. 

She reappears in an intensely green forest. 

The dreams hit her at once. 

She closes her eyes briefly, then strides towards the dreamer, and shakes him--not awake. But lucid. Here. 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. 

What - where - 

Leareth tries to make eye contact with her for a second, but he's confused and dizzy and everything about this is too bizarre to interact with and probably anyone with a face is actually fucking Sauron again and he doesn't want to play. 

He lets his entire body go limp, drops to the ground in a heap, doesn't move. 

"Your powers are very inconvenient," she observes. 

The unwanted consequences of a collision between two systems.

Leareth is only half processing that and besides, what is he supposed to do, apologize to Probably Sauron?

He doesn't move. (He is at least not projecting anymore.) 

She sighs and pillows his head on her thighs and gives a pointed look to the surrounding Fingerkings and starts singing. 

It isn't a human voice she's singing in; it's her words of fire, in a voice like crystals tumbling in a rushing river. She sings about freedom and life and self-determination and not having your body snatched by mirror-dwelling snakes. 

Leareth tenses briefly when she touches him, but goes limp again, his eyes still squeezed shut. Events are going to happen, probably, and Leareth is neither trying to form any predictions nor take any actions about that. 

...Her singing is very distracting. 

For a long time, it drives out all the experiences other than hearing her voice and feeling the emotions and concepts she's singing about, and then eventually he's calm enough to leave room for thoughts as well, and he can try to piece together the last few hours - try to sort out which experiences were real and which ones were nightmares, but this is a lot harder when literally everything is weird enough that it could be a nightmare, and also right now kind of feels like a dream. 

A long time later:

:Where am I. Is this real: 

"You're in Parabola. You're dreaming, but it is real." 

The realm of dreams and mirrors, created from the slain egg of a Judgment, blurring the distinction between reality and unreality.

He wants to wake up. Specifically he wants to wake up in his room in Tol Eressea with the wards that Vanyel put on the walls. 

He wants everything to stop.

He wants Maitimo there. 

Wanting isn't safe– no, that isn't true anymore but he's so tired and confused. Probably he needs to...make a plan? Take actions about the situation? It feels way too hard. 

Instead he starts sobbing uncontrollably, which is arguably an action although not a deliberate one. 

She pets his hair and keeps singing.

Having his hair petted is initially VERY WEIRD in the context of, well, mostly interacting with Elves. Judging by her surface thoughts, though, she doesn't mean it that way. 

Everything else is...well, mostly it feels confusing and meaningless, right now, but it's something that could be comforting and reassuring if she were a person he trusted? 

Leareth barely knows her and has no real reason to think it's a good idea to trust her. He has only a couple of brief snippets and he could easily be pattern-matching to the person he wants her to be. 

But he's so lonely and scared and - at first it seemed like maybe he could cope with this place (if any of this is even real, of course), but now he's less sure. He's so tired, he's depleted all of his willpower and mental resources, and resting feels impossible if there's no one here he can trust. 

He will...tentatively trust her, he decides. Ready to change his mind later, even if that will hurt a lot. 

:Sorry: he manages. 

"You have nothing to be sorry for."

The fundamental limits to the resources of any being and the lack of virtue in pushing past those limits to the point of damage.

Interesting - is that concept just a word in her language? 

Something he can worry about later. 

He's cold, or maybe he's just shivering for unrelated reasons; whatever the cause, he curls up closer to Lucy, and listens to her sing, and his mind doesn't exactly stop making random flailing motions in the direction of things he can't have, but eventually it's less emphatic about it, easier to let go of. 

Probably this is inconvenient for his - host? rescuer? whatever she is - but he tries not to worry about that right now. 

She notices his shivering, and pauses briefly in her singing to speak a word that warms the air.

It's still hard to tell, subjectively, if he's cold or just terrified, but either way the warmth helps. 

Leareth drifts for a while - vaguely follows her voice as he slips in and out of lucidity and just-dreaming, but not nightmares, her singing leaves no room for anything except freedom and life and self-determination and, and, and - 

Eventually, just by dint of utter exhaustion, he sinks fully into deep (dreamless) sleep. 

He vanishes out of her lap. 

She stands and dusts off her dress and speaks to the various Fingerkings, and then leaves the forest. 

She's going to need to figure something out if this happens again, but she's extracted a promise from the Fingerking who brought her the first time to let her know if it happens again tonight. She's going to need to do something really nice for them soon.

The honey wears off. She reappears in her room. She pockets a hand-mirror and goes about her business. 

Leareth is VERY tired, and sleeps dreamlessly for a while, but eventually, most of two hours later, he's back in Parabola, though oblivious of this fact. 

It doesn't start out as a nightmare, just one of those disjointed mundane-life dreams - in this one he's trying to find a particular book in his records except for some reason he can't read the categorization system and also whenever he puts a book down it turns into a snake. (In the dream this doesn't seem weird, just a bit startling and inconvenient, he was using those books.) 

Most of Leareth's dreams turn into nightmares sooner or later, though, and this one is no exception, though it's a pretty boring garden-variety nightmare, just a lot of orcs suddenly smashing down the doors to his room and revealing that it's been inside Angband the entire time and then torturing Vanyel in front of him and laughing. 

Sometime around the shift-to-nightmare, he starts projecting terror and despair again, though more quietly and with less additional sensory-impression leakage, he managed to check his shields before falling asleep. 

Parabola being what it is, this doesn't really merit comment. 

Eventually Leareth claws his way out of the nightmare and fully awake, though with an obnoxious interlude where he's mostly awake but still can't move. 

With a jarring effort he shakes his way loose of that too - in the process, projecting a brief bolt of frustration/panic/confusion to the immediate physical surroundings - and sits up, holding his head in his hands. He has no idea how long he's slept, but going back to sleep isn't appealing at all. 

(In fact it's been about five hours, counting the semi-lucid time with Lucy in Parabola.) 

It's still dark out. It's always dark out, underground. If anything that happened since he fell asleep wasn't just a dream, there's no proof of it here. 

Leareth remembers, vaguely, Lucy telling him that he was dreaming but it was real? 

The realm of dreams and mirrors, created from the slain egg of a Judgment, blurring the distinction between reality and unreality.

The lack of any physical evidence of this entire interaction is disquieting. Also Leareth's entire body is achy for some reason - probably the reason is 'not enough sleep' - but he makes himself get up and pace back and forth anyway, until some of the glue in his head clears. 

Okay. Still in the bizarre other world with its powerful alien magic. Still no sign of Maitimo or Vanyel. He's on his own. This seems INCREDIBLY UNREASONABLE on reality's part. 

...He remembers making a decision to provisionally trust Lucy, but it's unclear how well he was able to think at the time, given that he was asleep. 

Can he find her with Thoughtsensing? 

She's a little ways off, but well within range. 

All of his emotions are suddenly convinced that if he interrupts her then she's going to be angry and hurt him, but also he feels that way a lot and it's usually not very correlated with the actual situation. 

:Are you busy: he asks her. 

:Give me five minutes and I'll be there.:

The amount of time in her fire-word is not precisely five minutes; it actually gestures at a range of time from about three to seven minutes, measured in the half-lives of several radioactive isotopes. 

What an excellent concept to have! Leareth adds it, quietly, to the tally of things that seem actively good about this world assuming anything is real and that "is this real" is a coherent question worth asking.

He's abruptly way too tired to keep pacing, and sits down to wait. 

She arrives in slightly less than six minutes. 

"Are you okay? You were having nightmares." 

Concern over the well-being of the referent, specifically of the form: their state of rest. Unpleasant dreams, often but not always caused by hostile forces in the Neath. 

Wow, that is kind of an impossible question to answer. 

:That happens often: he says, without much inflection in his mindvoice. :Not your world's fault: 

"I'm sorry to hear that." 

Regret at the vicissitudes of the world which causes such phenomena. 

:Anyway. I am done resting for now. Can I help you with anything: 

"What can you tell me about how you got here?"

Hypotheses discarded and not replaced. 

Okay. He can probably manage to talk about this coherently, as long as he's careful. 

:I was in Arda - the world I described to you as flat with the Tree-fruit chariot sun. I was - not doing anything special, and suddenly there was a very strange sort of snake and it...ate me. And then I was here: 

"That...might be a Fingerking?"

The snakes which dwell behind mirrors.

:I did not get a very good look - not with magic senses at all, I was...caught off guard. It - I think it had a mirror where I expected its face to be. Or just held in its jaws, maybe, unclear: 

"Fingerkings are the only thing I know of that combine snakes and mirrors but of course I haven't heard of everything." 

A set with only one known element. The confession of ignorance. 

:There are almost certainly more than tw– than three. Worlds, I mean. And kinds of magic to go with them: Leareth shakes his head, sort of half-shrugs. :It - did not seem related to any of my existing enemies, either in Arda or in Velgarth where I had travelled from: 

"That is true. If I can get access to magic from other worlds, maybe that's the lever I need to challenge the Judgments."

Acknowledgment of another's point. An infinite array of possibilities spreading out in front of one. The necessity of challenging the powers of the world. 

...He feels respect and admiration for her. Over and over, the things she says - or the much-less fakeable thoughts and feelings behind her words - keep reminding him of that. 

It's not enough to bear weight. Not yet. But at some point he would really, really like to stop feeling like he's falling, and have something - someone - solid, to hold onto. 

Asking what the Leareth-before-Angband would have thought of her is an impossible question. He's shortcut that in the past, because he can check what his past self thought of Vanyel, it's written down. And Vanyel approves of Maitimo, and that's enough.

There's nothing so verifiable here, but...maybe he can at least ask his imaginary mental model of Vanyel. That's a more coherent and answerable question. 

He takes a deep breath and looks up at Lucy. :I - think that I probably want to help you. To find magic you need. To challenge the Judgements, if that needs to be done. But...I will have to be more certain that it does need to be done. To know why you came to this conclusion: 

Leareth closes his eyes. :And, and - and also it is hard for complicated reasons that are not really about rational arguments and are very inconvenient I am sorry: 

Nod nod. 

"The reason the Judgments need to be challenged is that one of the laws that their light enforces is that the dead stay dead. That's not all of it, but it's a big part." 

The laws of the Judgments, as iron-hard as the Judgments can make them. The refusal to allow those low on the Chain the eternal life which the Judgments enjoy.

That is a VERY GOOD reason, and - and Leareth has FEELINGS about it, and he doesn't, actually, want to cry right now, it won't especially get in the way of Mindspeech but it'll be distracting for him and Lucy both. 

:Do you know if they have a reason for deciding on this policy, which they are willing to communicate to mortals: 

"Judgments are not...as a rule...willing to communicate with mortals. Our sun is to some extent an exception but they're still not going to talk to any human being who tries to talk to them. I mean, for one thing, human languages can't reach. I can talk to them, and translate for my mother and brother, when I brought them up to introduce to them, but unless you come to be able to speak Correspondence your ability to communicate with them unfiltered is--I mean maybe there's some other workaround but there isn't an existing communications channel."

The arrogance of Judgments that sees the lowest rung of the Chain as beneath notice or moral consideration. The example of a specific individual as exceptional in willingness to defy the dictates of its kind. The nature of human language as carried purely through vibrations in air which is largely absent between the planet and the star. The ability of Correspondence and its magic to reach through space. A willingness to communicate with the kin of one's beloved descendant. An openness to novel possibilities. 

Leareth is unsurprised. He does not, as a general rule, expect gods to care about communicating with mortals, or to be very good at it even if they try. 

(Melkor being an unfortunate exception and he is going to not think about that right now.) 

:Can you explain the Correspondence in more detail: 

"The Correspondence is a magical language innately spoken by various beings mostly above a certain height on the Great Chain. It's possible for people who don't innately speak it to learn words in it, and even use them magically, but they can't create words and they almost never understand all the layers of connotation that a word in Correspondence carries." 

The word she thinks is the Correspondence's name for itself; it carries all these characteristics and more: that it is capable of reshaping reality, that it burns, that it exists in every medium which has ever been used to communicate. 

:You have spoken words in this language while I was observing, yes?: 

"Yes. For magic, and to communicate with the Bazaar."

The state of having performed a referent act. The reality-altering traits of the Correspondence. Speaking with a beloved ancestor.

:I could see the magic. I think - maybe - I could learn it...: 

The prospect is incredibly terrifying. 

:...I...do not have access to most of my magic right now. Because–:

....no, in fact, this is too hard to form words about, let alone entire sentences.

He curls up on the sofa and hides his face against his knees and shivers. 

She wishes sometimes that her light could heal hearts as well as bodies. 

She waits. 

All right. The bare-bones version of what happened in Arda isn't complicated. If he is, in fact, still Melkor's prisoner, it's not like describing the two-sentence version of what happened will give them any new information. And in the scenario where this is real, it's...at the very least relevant context for Lucy to make sense of him, and also explaining much about Arda's magic or the interactions between the two worlds requires mentioning it. 

Fine. He can do the mental motion that's a little like imagining he's reading a very dry neutral battle report or history treatise, about events that happened very far away and that he doesn't care about. (Melody makes such faces when he does this, but it's not like she's ever had a better idea for what he should do instead.) 

:There was a war. In Arda. After I arrived. I - fought with the local - not mortals, they come back when they die, but otherwise similar...: 

"Coming back when you die is good." 

The impermanence of death in the Neath. 

:Yes. Good: 

A pause. 

:They were fighting an evil god: 

Another, longer pause. This is the hardest part and Leareth is pretty sure that he's never, in fact, had to explain it in actual words to someone else. It's very unfair. 

:I was captured. I was a prisoner for - for five subjective years. It was........bad: 

"Oh, shit."

Extreme profanity.

Leareth doesn't say anything. 

"...We have some evil gods also. I've dealt with the Thief-of-Faces, but I don't have a solution for Mr. Eaten yet, or Storm, or the Vake."

The terrible consequences to a loved one of the intervention of evil gods. The hatred of a state of the world where one cannot yet simply make people cut it out. 

:They - my allies - won. In Arda. Defeated the evil god. I was rescued. They...blocked my magic. Not - safe - could not trust me... The evil god - can give prisoners arbitrary hallucinations. He - tried to - I...:

At this point Leareth is not really aware of his surroundings anymore. 

She has drawn her knees up and her face is buried in them. Her hands are trembling with anger. 

When she has control of herself, she says, 

The heartfelt, bone-deep belief, permeating every cell of one's body and every wisp of one's soul, that everyone, no matter their place on the great chain or in society, ought to exist with happiness and self-determination.

In her language that's a single word? 

The realization steadies him enough that he can slightly think again. 

:Tried to trick me. I - did magic for him. Against my allies. When I - realized that...: 

There aren't, really, any words that describe it. 

Leareth just pushes across the vague tangle of thought, in its entirety. 

- he is nothing and no one - not safe to care - not safe to try - in the hands of a power that will twist his skill and effort to its own purposes and there is no longer any way out - 

RAGE at wrongs done that fundamentally and utterly SHOULD NOT BE. 

(- what even IS this language, how is that ALSO its own single word -) 

On some level Leareth notes that, while on another level his stupid instincts are calling for PANIC because someone is ANGRY and definitely (according to his emotions) every time this has ever happened in the history of the universe they were angry with him personally this is SO STUPID...

His pulse is racing again and he thinks he might be crying again but it's hard to even tell; either way his chest is clenching so tightly that he can't, really, manage to breathe - or at least it feels like he's suffocating, but as Maitimo used to point out, he has never, yet, managed to die from having a panic attack. 

Focus. 

:Want to help you. But. Not useful. Because. That: 

Okay there, now he's DONE, he's said all the important things and he can STOP. 

She slides to the floor, approaching him on her knees to be less intimidating. 

"My older sister grew up in the grasp of an evil god," she says quietly. "She's not okay. She's never been okay. But she will be someday. And you're human. Humans get better faster."

A child taken at birth. Great suffering. Great destruction wrought upon the perpetrator. Lingering trauma. Slow healing. 

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. 

:Oh: An intense wave of empathy, shared grief, but - less lonely, for sharing it. 

Leareth is having a stupidly hard time Mindspeaking when his body is still yelling loudly at him that he can't get enough air, even though this shouldn't actually be related. 

:It was a year ago: he forces out. :I - was getting better - just - unfamiliar place - dangerous - no one I trust -: 

:- want to trust you. But. Scared: 

"I don't expect you to trust me," she says immediately. "--I mean, it would be nice. But I'm not expecting it. I won't be disappointed if it doesn't happen at all, let alone on a schedule."

The understanding that the world is a dangerous place full of people who will betray you and figuring out who those people are is difficult.

:Thank you:

Being physically embodied is so stupid sometimes. Leareth's head is pounding and his chest hurts. 

After a long pause, :- I am probably not actually dying, it was never the case before, but I feel - very bad - it would be reassuring if you had a way to check: He says this remarkably calmly. 

"Well, not check, exactly, but..." 

She glows at him, the light that regenerated the skeletons. 

"If you were dying, then you aren't now." 

The substitution of a hopefully acceptable alternative. 

Leareth feels better. Not calmer, exactly, but...a lot more rested, less like the insides of him are drained empty, and the headache isn't as bad and his stomach isn't upset anymore. 

:Thank you. ...Need a few minutes. Sorry: He can get the rest of the way to calm on his own, but it's going to take a while. 

"Sure. Should I step out?"

The importance of privacy. 

Leareth thinks about this. 

:No. Can you - please - stay. And sing again: 

"Sure." 

She starts singing. The same Correspondence-voice as in the dream, although the song itself is different; this one is about traveling between stars in the High Wilderness. 

Leareth puts his forehead down on his knees and listens. Tries to breathe slow and controlled, in time with the song-phrases. 

It takes about five minutes before he feels collected enough to sit up. Now what - it feels like he's forgetting something - hmm, what would Maitimo say if he were here... 

:I think I ought eat and drink again: he tells Lucy. :Also I am very bad at remembering that I need to do that regularly: 

She nods, and rises, and leaves to fetch more food and drink. 

Leareth waits, trying to put the rest of his thoughts in order. 

She comes back with much the same as last time. A little less mushroom, a little more meat.

This food is going to get very unappealing with much more repetition. Leareth eats it dutifully. 

:What were you planning to do today?: he asks Lucy. :Is there anything where I could help without using magic: 

"I was going to talk to my scientists at the University." 

Collaboration with compatibly-minded fellows. Those who pursue knowledge. A center of learning. (The art of breaking the Great Chain.)

Aaaaaaaaah it is very ambiguous whether that's an invitation to accompany her or not. Leareth hates ambiguity. 

He grits his teeth. :May I come with you: A hesitation. :...I would prefer not to be here alone all day when I do not know anyone else: 

"Sure! Do you want to try to learn the language. Your telepathy seems to be serving you well but I don't think it will let you read." 

The wry acknowledgment of the ephemeral nature of realtime communication.

It's a concrete goal that seems robustly useful in a variety of circumstances and also unlikely to destroy anything if he's wrong about the nature of reality. :Yes. I would like that: 

"Great. If I write down our alphabet now, do you think you could benefit from studying it on the way over?"

Pleasure at having identified an achievable goal. The process of breaking a goal down into manageable steps. 

:Maybe? Depends on the method of transit and how distracting it is: 

"I was thinking we would walk." 

Bipedal locomotion [the mechanics thereof].

:Walking is fine. I am not sure I will manage much useful studying on the way, but I can try: Leareth still tends to be very distracted and on-edge when walking through public spaces, especially unfamiliar ones, and he expects this to apply even more to places where he might randomly be assaulted and stabbed or pushed into a cursed well by cultists of an evil god or something. 

She writes down the English alphabet, hands him the sheet, and leads him out into the streets. 

Leareth is, indeed, immediately distracted by stretching his senses, magical and otherwise, to their full extent, trying to orient to what's happening around him. He sticks very close to Lucy. 

There is a lot of magic. Most of it is less than Lucy or the Bazaar or the well, but there's at least a little of it almost everywhere. 

The crowd isn't quite as bad around her as it is otherwise. People mostly recognize her and get out of her way. 

Mage-sight would be a lot more informative if he recognized any of the magic. Leareth tries to file away as many details as possible for future consideration. 

Eventually he shields his Othersenses a bit more, so he can sense the presence minds and magic but not too much detail. Having all the information makes him feel safer in a way but it's also overwhelming and giving him a headache. He's grateful that at least being next to Lucy means no one physically colliding with him. 

He does manage a few glances at his alphabet-reference paper. It's a good distraction. 

They reach the University. Lucy leads him across campus and towards a laboratory. 

"Hello the house!" she calls as she pushes the door open. 

"Hello, sister." 

She bounces over and hugs him. 

"--This is Leareth, can you teach him English?" she asks him brightly. 

He turns to Leareth and raises an eyebrow. 

Aaaaaaaaaah a person he doesn't know. 

Leareth steps on the attempted spike of PANIC and tries to smile at the man who is apparently Lucy's brother. :I arrived here by accident from a different world. I have Mindspeech but as Lucy pointed out, it would help if I also knew the local language: 

"Mindspeech," he tries out the word. "Alright. That will work." He bows and offers Leareth a chair. 

Leareth nods. Sits. 

:Lucy?: he adds, privately to just her. :Are you leaving - how far -?: 

"I'll be right here," she clarifies. Some other scientists enter the room and she beams and waves at them. 

:Oh. All right: 

He tries his best to focus on her brother for his language lesson. 

Her brother is patient, saying words out loud and thinking their meanings clearly, then asking Leareth to repeat them. 

Leareth spoke a lot of languages, back in Velgarth; he can manage nearly all the phonemes without difficulty. He has a very good memory, and asks for pauses to take notes on especially key bits, phonetically using the Rethwellani alphabet since he doesn't know the letter-sound correspondences for the English alphabet yet. 

Once it becomes clear that Leareth is using a different alphabet, Wilbur switches to teaching him the latin alphabet. 

He is very upfront and apologetic about how insane English's spelling is. 

:- It is not the worst I have seen. Though...it ranks highly in terms of insane spelling. I will do my best: 

If nothing interrupts them sooner, Leareth's attention span for language-learning will be around three hours, during which he can cover a lot of ground. When he starts getting tired, though, the first side effect is that trying to listen to more words sort of hurts - which he's willing to push through, this is important - but after a bit it's very hard not to start crying with frustration. 

"Alright, we're done," Wilbur says firmly at the first sign of this. 

Leareth has been trying to answer mostly out loud for the last hour, now that he knows a basic set of words. 

"I - all right," he concedes, and looks around for Lucy.

Lucy is examining something through a microscope. 

Leareth is curious what she's looking at, but also worried about interrupting if she's doing something delicate, and also-also the thought of having another conversation sort of feels like dragging his brain over sandpaper. 

He painstakingly pieces together a coherent-and-grammatical English sentence no too hard, he'll go for "comprehensible string of words", for his request to Wilbur.

"Can I -" no wait, "Can you - rest place - show me? I tir– I am tired." 

She looks up immediately. "Oh! Of course! Back to the Bazaar, or somewhere closer?"

"What is -" okay nevermind ow, the entire auditory-processing-and-language part of his brain is hurting. :Whichever is most convenient for you, I do not mind: 

"--You don't look up for going through the city again," she diagnoses, and ushers him off to a quiet alcove with a cot. 

Oh, amazing, a surface to be horizontal on. 

:- Is it going to cause a problem if I fall asleep again and have nightmares in Parabola?: he thinks to ask. :I can try not to actually sleep, if it would be inconvenient: 

"No, don't worry about it, Parabola is plenty weird already," she assures him. 

It seems like the question is mostly moot, anyway; whatever resurrection/healing magic she did to him seems to have mostly substituted for 'a good night's sleep', and he's tired but not all that sleepy.

Leareth lies there for an hour anyway, sort of drifting, but never going past a few minutes here or there of half-dozing, and eventually he finds himself awake and staring at the ceiling. He's not feeling eager to leap out of bed, exactly, but the prospect isn't agonizing either, so he gets up and heads to rejoin Lucy. 

Lucy is gesturing enthusiastically at some strange-looking magical substances. She turns and smiles at him as he approaches. 

"Feeling better?"

"Yes. Thank you. What are...thats?" He's blanking on the actual correct pluralization of 'that'. 

"Those," she corrects. "That one is molten warm amber," the concept warm amber points at doesn't mean higher-than-room-temperature fossilized resin, it means something completely different and definitely magic. "That one is an interesting slime mold, and that one is--well, mostly my blood."

"Ah. Thank you." 

Leareth stares intently at them with mage-sight; his Sight is a bit rusty in terms of getting down to fine detail, he mostly lacked access to it for five years and then in the last while he hasn't been using it for work. The old habits are still there, though. 

Does any of it look similar to a particular kind of magic from either Velgarth or Arda? How are the three different from each other? 

All three of them look something like how a powerful mage's reserves might look--but there's more in them, and the thing that's in them isn't mage-energy per se, it's the life-giving light Lucy gives off. 

It's beautiful, and it gets a brief, but genuine smile from Leareth. 

"What does -" ugh this is too hard. :How did you discover the 'slime mold' and do you understand why it is like the other two things? It is - a simple lifeform, no?: 

"Slime mold isn't so much like these other things as it is like apple trees, actually. My father, the Mountain of Light, there's a garden very near him, the apples of which can be processed into a cider which--anyway, living things can build up reserves of life-light, when there's more than they can use for just themselves. The slime mold seemed like a potentially convenient storage medium for completely different reasons than the other two."

"Hmm. I see." 

Leareth stares harder. Tries to see if there's any magical signature where this is reflected, some feature that the two others have in common where the slime-mold is different. He's not expecting too much, though, he's really out of practice at this. 

All three things are pretty different. 

The slime mold is the most different, because the only magic thing about it is the light that it's storing. The warm amber...it looks sort of like Healing-energy, in a completely different way than life-light looks like Healing-energy. Warm amber filled with life-light looks more like Healing-energy than either of them separately, but still very very distinct. 

The blood is less like a vessel that happens to be holding life-light and more, well, a substance that produces life-light. The difference between a bowl and a fountain. 

It's beautiful. 

After staring for a long moment, Leareth pulls back. Looks at Lucy. "What you– what are you using for?" 

"There are, right now, only two people who can safely give off life-light. The Mountain of Light is sessile and I can only be in one place at a time. I could just chip off glowing chunks of myself, but those can...be used for other purposes besides healing people. All medicines are poisons, in sufficient concentration. What I want is to be able to reliably distribute safe doses of vitality to people who are in places where I am not."

"And - all this– all these - have life-light? How - if I eat it, healing -?" 

"That's the idea. It...probably actually isn't a good idea to eat any of those, we're on an early stage of experimenting and none of these specific storage media are necessarily safe for human consumption. The slime mold probably wouldn't do anything to you that the healing-light wouldn't fix but, uh, definitely one hundred percent do not try to eat either of the other two." 

"Right. I will not eat." 

After a minute of thinking, he switches to Mindspeech, it's still a lot easier at this point than hunting for words he just learned. :I can see the magic directly. I...could try to advise you on what changes, when you do experiments?:

If he had his mage-gift working, he might be able to separate out the life-light directly. He doesn't, though, and also that thought is incredibly terrifying and he steers away from it. 

"Ooh! That sounds potentially very useful. There might be a learning curve, our magic can get very weird...hm. Do you think you would be able to glean the meaning of Correspondence symbols by looking at their magic?"

"Worth try?" 

She pulls out a sheet of paper and a pencil and scribbles out a sigil. 

It's definitely magic, as soon as it's drawn. Not dazzlingly bright like Lucy, but there. 

It's...structured? It has some of the same stable, leashed-potential impression that a mage-artifact like his shield talisman does. 

(...His shield-talisman is running really low on stored power and he should tell Lucy about that before he starts panicking about it, but it can wait until after he looks.) 

The structure is very different from anything he's seen before, and doesn't make it instantly obvious what the sigil means, but it does feel like it's meaningful. Like it will start to make more and more sense, the closer he looks. 

:...Change?: he guesses, to Lucy. :No, growth - becoming something else - something brighter, stronger -: 

"Yes, that's right!" she says brightly. "Apotheosis." 

:Oh: There's so much in that word. 

- a lot of it sort of hurts to touch. It would have made sense to him before, when he wasn't...broken. 

Leareth pulls back his mage-sight. 

:I have a problem: he tells Lucy, levelly but with rising tension in the overtones. :I - had a protective shield, but I cannot re-power it on my own and it is going to stop working and I - I - it will make it much harder to feel safe anywhere: 

"Yes, I see how that could be a problem. May I see it?"

Without actually taking the talisman off, Leareth tugs the focus out from under his shirt and shows it to her. 

She picks it up, careful not to tug on the chain. 

Her eyes do something, under mage-sight, changing the way they look at the world. 

She purses her lips thoughtfully. "I think I can work with this...hm. Give me a moment." She releases the mage-focus and goes off to a workbench, where she opens a drawer, pulls out a box of blank lenses and a stylus, and starts scratching Correspondence symbols onto one of the lenses. 

Leareth, abruptly exhausted for no reason, sits down on the floor to wait while she does that. 

One of the scientists offers him a pillow. 

Everything is loud and overwhelming and Leareth flinches back involuntarily when they approach, but manages with another jarring effort to control his reaction and smile. "Thank you." 

"You're welcome." 

Lucy comes back with a lens with several sigils scratched into it and places it in front of the talisman and puts her finger behind it. 

The finger glows. 

The talisman slowly starts refilling. 

Leareth tries to 'read' the sigils with mage-sight. 

The sigils basically have to do with the way Leareth's mage-gift integrates with his brain and tell the light to treat the talisman as a living thing which should have more energy. 

The process is lossy. A lot less energy is going into the talisman than is coming out of her finger.

Leareth points this out to her, with a tone of curiosity, and thanks her. 

And then puts his head down on his knees again, because suddenly being in a room with open space around him and PEOPLE in that space is awful and unbearable, and he doesn't have the energy to do anything more reasonable about this than "pretend that not seeing them anymore is the same as hiding." 

"Oh, I knew that. This wouldn't scale well. But it's doable, I can give off nigh-arbitrary lumens." 

She puts a blanket over his shoulders when he curls up. 

:Thank you. Sorry, I - stuck - happens sometimes...: 

"I've seen way worse," she assures him. 

Leareth spends a while shivering under his blanket and trying to wrangle his mind back into an orientation where standing up and going back to looking at Lucy's work seems like a possible course of action. 

Eventually, he's pretty sure that he could but also that it would hurt. 

:I - think I may be too tired to do more things in public places today without it being very costly: 

"Okay. Do you want to go back to the cot, do you want me to carry you back to the Bazaar." 

OVERWHELM!!! Also his emotions are doing the thing again where communicating any information at all about his preferences - or trying to figure out what his preferences are - feels very dangerous. Maitimo can usually tell when he's running into that problem, and handle it gracefully, but of course he can't realistically expect that of Lucy. 

:I - I am having a hard time with decisions right now: he manages to squeeze out finally. 

"Okay," she says.

She picks him up and carries him to the cot and firmly closes the curtains. Then she puts up some sigils for dark and quiet. It's her current best practices for situations like this. 

Leareth is not tracking things very well right now, but he can sort of sense that she has a sense of her current best practices for what to do, and it's...reassuring. 

Falling asleep is probably a bad idea but he's out of mental resources for trying not to do things that are probably a bad idea. 

- and, predictably, he is eventually back in Parabola and very very loudly projecting a formless nightmare about being repeatedly set on fire. 

Lucy gets a tap on her pocket-mirror. 

She really has to do something about this. 

She takes her honey and appears in Parabola. 

Leareth is doing his best to impersonate a puddle on the ground. Puddles do not have preferences or goals or beliefs about reality at ALL. 

She elucidates him. 

He does not, immediately, find the wherewithal to move. 

...Oh, right, this again. 

:Sorry: 

This is a much higher density of the REALLY bad nightmares than usual - he's been down to only projecting content once a week or so, in the last couple of months - but he's been stressed and that makes it worse. 

"Do you need laudanum."

He needs Maitimo to be there but he can't have that ever again. 

:What is that?: 

"It's a drug that makes you not dream. It's kind of addictive, though." 

:Oh. I - would want to avoid that long term. I suppose it could be a short term patch since this is very inconvenient for you:

"I'll figure out a way to prevent it in the long-term. Laudanum addiction does wear off. Faster with life-light."

:All right. In the short term I - would really like to be able to sleep here. Though if I am going to be drugged I want to be in the safest possible place and probably that is the Bazaar? ...Sorry. Unless that is too inconvenient. I will manage: 

"No, that's extremely reasonable." 

:...Do you need me to do anything right now: 

"No."

Then Leareth will just lie on the Parabola forest floor. 

The lucid-dream part of Parabola is nice, he thinks vaguely, as long as he can manage to stay lucid.

He wishes, distantly, that Lucy would sing again, but expressing preferences is very hard and he doesn't. 

Once she's assured he doesn't have anything else to say, she does start singing. 

It helps. A lot. It's much easier to keep his mind in the here-and-now, and not drift toward a thousand different memories that he has no particular desire to revisit. 

If given the chance, with about thirty minutes of peace and quiet he'll fall back into a non-dream sleep. 

Lucy does not leave Parabola immediately. 

She finds the Fingerking who has been so useful to her, and the two of them talk. 

Leareth's circadian rhythm doesn't currently feel that this is nighttime, so he wakes up a few minutes later. This inside of his head feels a lot less raw than before; it's definitely helping with restful sleep, at least, that while he's still having nightmares at all, he isn't spending that long trapped in them before Lucy interrupts. 

He sits on the side of the cot, yawning, and waits for Lucy. 

Lucy appears out of thin air a couple of minutes later. 

Leareth, who does not currently handle being startled very well, flinches so hard that he nearly falls off the cot before managing to parse that it's just Lucy. 

:- I was not aware you could travel there physically, with your body: he says faintly. 

"Yes, Prisoner's Honey does that," she says, picking up the jar illustratively. 

The jar of honey is definitely magic in a way clearly connected to the magic of the dream-realm. It looks sort of like a Gate, in a way, except for how it's completely different. 

:Why is it...called that...?: It is not one of Leareth's more pleasant associations. 

She blinks and looks at the jar in her hand. 

"I...do not know."

:It looks like - a little like a kind of transport magic in my world: 

Leareth shivers. Shakes himself a little. 

:I have been trying to think about...what I need, to be less -: Vague handwave. :To be able to do things better. I - think it would help to spend a while, a few days or maybe weeks, somewhere that can - feel like my place? And then I think it will be easier to push through doing things that are stressful, if I know I can go back and recover if I need to: 

"Okay. I assume the Bazaar won't work for that."

:I am not sure. It might? I - I would need more explicit reason to trust the Messenger but I am going to panic about it if I try to interact with them right now. What would the other options be?: 

Expressing preferences is REALLY STRESSFUL and Leareth is curling up again. Having a blanket around him helps. He sort of pulls it half over his head.

"I could...build you a house somewhere outside the city where no one will bother looking? You could stay at my mom's house?"

:What is outside the city like? What kinds of protections does your mother's house have - what is your mother like? I...need a long time to get used to strangers: 

"Mother is kind and good and very open-to-new-experiences. She's hard to knock off balance. My mother's house in particular is guarded by a very large number of very sharp rocks that are very, very hard to traverse safely without at least one of flight, knowing the area very, very well, or being rock-hard oneself. I know the area very, very well, and I still shift into my natural shape to go between London and home. Other places outside the city have comparable dangers-in-the-way or just security through obscurity."

Leareth considers this. 

:All right. I - would like to at least meet your mother, I think? ...It feels stressful but if I imagine talking to friends back in Arda they would say I should not be living somewhere alone: 

He hugs the blanket more tightly. :Also - can you - explain some context to her. I...think it helps, that you know, but I...would really prefer not, not to talk about it again -:

"Yes, I can definitely do that. Fair warning, one of the people I know who's doing worse than you is also staying there right now, it's not literally just her."

:Is that person - doing worse than me in a way where they are likely to behave unpredictably in ways I would find startling?: 

"I don't think so. He doesn't leave his room much."

Nod. :...I am curious what happened to him but you do not have to tell me: 

:Don't spread it around but he was trapped in the body of an immobile snake while suffering from the effects of an agonizing poison he couldn't die from for three thousand years and change. People knew about the snake but not that it was a person and there are people who'd be real interested to know what had happened to him.:

:That is - so awful.... I will not mention it to anyone else. But, no wonder he is doing worse than I am: 

:Yes.:

A singular tragedy as exemplar of a larger clusterfuck.

There isn't, really, anything to say in response. 

...there's something a different Leareth would have said, but that was a long time ago, and when he reaches for it all he can find is disorienting fragments of a shattered tower and a bloodstained sky. 

Lucy wraps up her current batch of scientific inquiry and then:

"Are you alright to walk to the edge of the city, or should I carry you?"

Leareth considers. Tries standing up, gauging his current stamina. 

:- I think I am fine for the walking, if it is - not more than a mile or two - but I am already feeling overwhelmed and I expect that to be difficult. I - sometimes it helps if I am holding someone's hand and just following, it feels less like I am - making any of the relevant decisions: 

He is aware that this is kind of a stupid way for his emotions to work, but he's tested the bounds of it a lot. 

:Okay.:

She takes his hand and leads him through the city, past a carnival, to the edge of a jagged wasteland. 

She starts taking off her clothes. 

...There isn't any sane reason for this to be terrifying and awful, it's not even like it's that closely adjacent to any of the things Sauron did while wearing other people's faces - Lucy doesn't look anything like Vanyel - but it seems he's going to be collapsing to the ground and curling up anyway, that is now the thing that's happening. 

"Um? Are you okay?" she asks, covering herself with her dress without putting it back on. 

Leareth has no idea what 'okay' means. It's stopped seeming like a real word. 

:...Probably not. - can you carry me the rest of the way: 

"Yeah, definitely," she assures him. 

Then she turns into a giant diamond crab. 

"Crab" is maybe not exactly the right word. Her shape is definitely crab-like in many respects. But it's easy to see how if she burrowed into the ground she would look like a smaller, transparent version of the visible parts of the Bazaar. 

Leareth does not observe Lucy's giant crab form because, right now, he has his eyes tightly shut. 

He does extend mage-sight after a little while, since it seems like that could help him feel oriented without risking tripping him into the pit of stupid torturememories. 

Lucy is not only VERY MAGIC but also at the moment VERY BIG. Still smaller than the Bazaar, but compared to a human, very big. 

She picks him up in one of her claws and starts scuttling over the razor-sharp rocks. 

He curls up tightly and hangs onto her claw and feels - surprisingly okay about this? Not safe, exactly, but he's less tense than he would have expected if someone had described this situation to him in the abstract. 

They reach a clearing in the rocks. Lucy puts him down and turns back human and pulls her dress back on. Then she offers him a hand to help him to his feet. 

Leareth is still watching with mage-sight, so notices her reaching for him, and opens his eyes. He's able to get himself to move, though he's a bit unsteady on his feet and stumbles into Lucy; being tired and shaken does that. 

He looks around. 

They are standing in a clearing in the jagged stone, surrounding a three-story-tall house. Lucy leads him up to the door and knocks. 

An older woman opens the door. "Lucy! And..."

"I will explain later. His name is Leareth and he needs a room." 

"Alright. Pleased to meet you, Leareth."

Those are words he knows! Leareth nods to the woman. Doesn't quite manage a smile. "Pleased to meet you. I should call you...?" He would like an actual NAME to slot in place of "Lucy's mother". 

"Lavinia Whitman. The erstwhile Pale Adventuress, but I don't adventure much anymore."

Leareth has no idea what that means so he just nods, trying not to sway on his feet. 

"--Yes, you definitely need to get in off your feet, come in, come in. I'll put you in a ground floor room for now so you don't have to deal with stairs, you can switch later if you prefer."

“Thank you.” Leareth will follow her. Mostly keeping his eyes on the ground; he’s too frazzled and worn-out to muster much curiosity about the house right now.

She shows him to a bedroom. 

"If I'm not available when you come out, the pantry is just that way," she says, pointing. 

"Thank you. I - appreciate - welcome." 

Leareth closes the door of his room behind him and heads for the bed and lies down. He's very tempted to just - stay there - until something else happens. Sometimes back in Arda he would stay in bed for a week straight, just to confirm that Maitimo and Vanyel would keep coming and bringing him food and singing to him even when he was incredibly useless. 

He's not quite tired enough to sleep, though, and after a few hours he's incredibly bored. He starts hunting for more paper, or really anything that he can write on. 

The room has a shelf full of books in the local script. If he investigates the bedside table, there are a couple of blank journals in there. 

Leareth gratefully grabs one of the notebooks, and tucks his paper with the alphabet between the pages.

He tracks down something to write with, and starts trying to take notes on everything that's happened so far. After a while he notices that he's thirsty, but the room feels - not quite safe but closer than anywhere else - and he can't bring himself to get up to do anything about his thirst. 

He keeps struggling through writing out a timeline, and eventually falls asleep in the middle of writing out a sentence, the notebook still open under his hand. 

Lavinia goes about her ordinary business, including talking to her daughter, taking care of the ex-Cantigaster, writing letters to her son, taking care of her little garden, and so on. 

Eventually she notices that nothing in the pantry has been disturbed, makes up a tray and sets it down outside Leareth's door. 

Leareth is curled up on the bed being inexplicably miserable, after failing to stay asleep for more than a few restless minutes of half-dozing; he's trying very hard not to fall deeply asleep because he might have dreams.

Or maybe he's explicably miserable. He's in an unfamiliar place and he still can't quite fully relax and he misses Vanyel and Maitimo and his safe familiar room with the wards on it... Also he hasn't had anything to eat or drink in a while, which could well explain misery. Usually Maitimo would catch it earlier than this, if he was failing to get himself food or water. 

Hiding under the covers and feeling sorry for himself isn't going to accomplish any of his goals, though. 

When he hears footsteps outside the door, he manages to sit up, wait for the footsteps to recede, and then stumble over and collect the tray. 

Eating and drinking does, in fact, help a little with the MISERY. Also he's very drowsy. But sleeping is a bad idea. He'll probably just ruin Lucy's day again. 

Lucy had a plan, or at least a short-term solution - he could go find her... 

Once he's consumed everything on the tray, Leareth manages to haul himself to his feet again, and heads out into the hallway, extending his Thoughtsensing to find either Lucy or the closest person he can ask about Lucy's whereabouts.