Luto sips her tea and fishes out some of their trail rations from the bag as Ridaya prepares her spells. She sets out some for Sophie (though none for Ridaya?), and eats some dried meat and cheese for herself. 

Sophie suspects, with the only-sleeping-two-hours, that Ridaya may not need as much sustenance of various sorts as an ordinary human. It's no difference to her, except that their rations will last longer. (Assuming she can't just work up a cake like she does the tea, which is hardly guaranteed.)

Once she's broken her fast, she starts in on those reagents. She finds it easiest to keep a memory of power tied down if she attaches it to a physical object, something small and unimportant; she's good enough at finger-crochet to make little snarls of yarn for them. Pull the thread, and the memory rushes back into focus just long enough to make it count. She's disadvantaged, right now, in what memories she can actually access, but necessity is the mother of any number of virtues. She can begin with an invocation of the old wound in her hip, then stretch that with Torgue's cleansing rite and a Labhitic tincture into a winning move... maybe she can get through a Thunderskin paean, too? It'll be tight, in fifteen minutes, but it's a useful thing to have on the tip of your tongue.

Luto watches all this happen with interest, though she doesn't interrupt.

Fifteen minutes later, Ridaya puts her magical book back in her bag, and pulls out... a pair of gloves, a mummified hand on a string, a cloak similar to the ones she and Luto are wearing, and a headband.

"Sophie, I found a few magic items that you might find interesting, earlier. And... " She holds up the cloak and headband, looking uncomfortable. "...These belong to Vakt, but it would be a good idea  for you to wear them, until we get her back. They'll make it harder for hostile magic to harm you."

"...thank you. Truly."

She accepts the cloak, putting it on immediately, and begins removing her hat to fit on the headband. The gloves and... hand... she examines as she does so. Obviously they're magical, but... "What do these do? Do you know? There are ways I could find out myself, but not trivially."

Then she gets the headband secure, and

oh.

Oh, this is not good, is it.

Because – the thing is –

the thing is, that Sophie's mind has up to now existed in a careful balance between the self-awareness necessary to function, and the self-awareness that would lead her to understand that she is miserable, and that she is slowly going mad, and that she is killing herself by half-measures.

It's not that it's more relevant than it was a moment ago. It's more salient, certainly. It's more obvious. It feels like noticing suddenly that she's drowning, like looking around and seeing that she's been talking to a mannequin. Like noticing that she's been writing out an extended letter to an acquaintance, disagreeing with their literary opinions in the most uncompromising terms, while her fucking house is on fire.

There is really very little that she can productively do about this, especially right now, some part of her says. She tries to fold this little breakdown away, to put it in a little cabinet in the corner of her brain, but her very English repression fails her. She cannot repress this, not anymore. She will face herself, and the lingering traces of her first and greatest mistake, or – there isn't anything else. She will.

(She's gone very pale.)

Luto notices first, interrupting an explanation Ridaya had just barely started. "...Sophie, are you okay?" She puts a hand on her shoulder hesitantly.

(Luto has had Owl's Wisdom put on her many times, now - Uma makes her drink a potion of it before they get into fights with spellcasters. Mostly it feels like like having an Imaginary Vakt in her head giving occasional commentary on her thoughts, which is kinda nice, but also... Imaginary Vakt is noticeably worse at this than Real Vakt is, and talking to Real Vakt isn't a second circle spell and also often comes with snuggles, so on the whole she's never been especially impressed with the experience. Though it would be nice now, because Real Vakt is NOT HERE,)

...oh. Oh dear. "Sorry, I should have mentioned, the headband works by, um, by making it easier to notice your thoughts and reflect on how your brain works, which occasionally people can find to be kind of distressing. It's not permanent, you can take it off if you want,"

"My life is a hell of my own design," Sophie says, slowly.

-Worried glance at Luto. Help?

"I'm so sorry_sympathy*," she says, because that sounds like a very scary thing to realize all at once!

"Do you want to tell us about it? Is it something we can help with?"

(Almost unconsciously, she opens her arms to offer a hug.)

*: Celestial has different words for sorry_sympathy and sorry_apology, of course.

Sophie collapses slowly into her arms.

"I was born other than I am," she recites numbly. "I have forgotten the name she was given. She lived her life, and grew old, surrounded by family and a few friends. But she had heard of the music of the Roost, those gods who take the form of birds. They said if you listened, you'd lose your mind, your soul, your skin... and that it would be worth it. And she was old, and thought she had little to lose. She studied the occult ways, and found where the aviform gods would roost this year. And she went, and she listened.

"She lost her mind; only scraps of memory remain. Her soul was shaped into something else. And her skin..." Sophie scratches at her arm. "I'm still her. In some ways, ways that matter. But she's dead, too. I lost everyone she had, and the music... it haunts me. It's the most beautiful thing I ever heard. It shaped me around it. I can never have it again. I've been running from it ever since. I became the Librarian because... it meant that no one would rely on me, if I couldn't take it. But it cuts both ways. I'm so lonely, I could die without anyone noticing. I don't even know if they've noticed I'm missing yet. The music still eats away at me. I've been flinging myself into danger, hoping to stave off the realization that I just had for as long as I could."

She doesn't say the second half: or die, before I had to face it.

Luto holds Sophie close, gently rubbing her back, her breath regular and gentle against her neck. That sounds... so horrible and scary..

"-You aren't alone, not anymore," she says, gently but firmly. "We would know, and we would be very sad, if you died. ...We would try and get you back, unless you told us not to." There was a lot else, there, but she glances at Ridaya, because she knows what she's good at and it's not this.

Ridaya is rotating all of that in her head! It's quite a lot. (She does flash Luto an encouraging smile from where she stands behind them, and reaches up to put a comforting hand on Sophie's shoulder.)

"...that's it, I think. Because it's my duty to go back, even though I've found you here. I've had a taste of human comfort, and it'll kill me to give it up."

She squeezes Sophie's shoulder. That makes sense. 

Hmmm... "Do you have to go back very soon? And would you need to stay there all the time? I think... there are maybe some ways we could help you with your song-problem... Maybe not right away, but our world has... different kinds of powerful magic than yours, I think. And I would come visit you sometimes, if I could."

"I would too."

"Maybe," she whispers. "Maybe I could... take a holiday."

She squeezes Sophie a little. "It seems like you could really use one," she says kindly.

"...Do you want to make yourself some of that tea? It really helped me, earlier."

She starts a cup. "...it was her recipe," she mentions. "The one before."

Ridaya has so many questions and most of them seem like they'll have answers that are predictably horribly sad!

"Is the recipe itself magical, or just - the way you are making it?" Did she do magic, too, before she decided to unravel herself into song?

"There isn't always a sharp distinction. She learned it the same way she learned the songs that make one swift and unseen, or the way I learned how to turn wood into extremely good pears. – on which note, if you have any miscellaneous wood in your luggage, you should let me know, they're extremely good pears."

"We do not have any random wood on-hand, though... depending on how much wood it takes I could paint up a few small pieces?" It's not an especially wise use of the paint, in most cases, but it seems like the kind of thing that mind cheer Sophie up (both the paint and the pears, really).

"Ideally you'd want a good-sized branch, for the stems to grow off. It's not any kind of priority... speaking of which, we've gotten quite badly off-track. You were explaining the items you'd allocated me."