The spell... lands her someplace. Unexpected.

It's a room - the walls are flat, stone; it's lit too dimly to see properly, but not true-dark. Someone's behind her, she can hear them breathing; she spins to face them almost before she realizes they're there.

He is lying crumbled on the ground, naked, both hands swollen around finger-bones repeatedly broken. He has short-cropped hair that's caked with blood and chunks of it are missing. He's shackled to the wall. There's some sort of vicious infection around the shackle. He's bleeding. It's hard to identify a square inch of skin that isn't bleeding.

She can't see him, in the dark, but her mage-sense isn't so limited.

Usually, anyway. She's knocked out of her first attempt at the trance immediately; she has no idea what that is, but it's big and complicated and omnipresent, overwhelming enough that, encountered unexpectedly, she can't keep enough focus in the face of it. The second try, more careful, works, and she extends an invisible, silent tendril.

Well.

She needs to not be here. She thought she'd rather be anyplace but where she was; she was wrong.

He can come too. She's not much of a healer and two-thirds of what she knows could just as easily poison him, but it's hardly as if she could do worse than leaving him here.

She notes the location-signature - not that she intends to come back here, but if he wants to come back to this world at all, it'll come in handy. Then she approaches him, trying to find some place she can touch with reasonable confidence that it won't cause him pain... no luck. She touches his arm, the barest whisper of skin on skin, and he disappears; she follows a scant moment later.

He doesn't stir when the person comes in. He doesn't stir when the person touches him. He does stir when he is moved; he curls up, slightly, notices that his leg is free, curls up even more and does not bother choking back a whimper.

She barely holds back a whimper of her own in response; instead she starts humming, as soothingly as she can manage; her worry and distress come through anyway.

She'd give him a blanket, but that seems like it'd do more harm than good. She starts a fire, instead, building it for warmth, not efficiency.

He doesn't even have the energy to flinch at a fire. He definitely doesn't have the energy to try to find the thoughts of whoever's just moved him. He makes a sort of self-preserving half-assessment of whether being lucid could possibly help and it couldn't so he stops.

She gets the fire going. She has another look at him, with her eyes and her extra sense both; she sets a stone to warm for warm water for washing and another for hot water for soup and then gets her medical supplies - something for pain, first, just one berry, it won't help much but it probably won't poison him, either, and she can give him more once she sees whether it helps at all.

He is not voluntarily going to eat anything but he won't do more than token resistance.

She can tell he's not lucid; she's pretty much chalking it up to that, and she's familiar enough with the problem to have an idea of how to get around it. That and some patience should lead pretty readily to success.

They forcefeed him some drug. He again half-evaluates whether he should be lucid for this; result is 'no'.

Ten minutes before she can reasonably check if that's doing any good whatsoever. She sets up a basin with water and a sponge, while she waits, and starts putting together a poultice for his leg, still humming.

Humming's different. Air feels different. Different can't possibly be good.

She notices the uptick in stress, when she goes to check his pain level. Should she give him something for that? Hard to tell - the usual wisdom is not to bother for people who aren't awake anyway, but this is obviously an extreme case and the usual wisdom doesn't take the mage-sense into account at all. On the other hand, she only has a little bit of the stress plant and it's too late in the season to get much more - and there's a good chance she's going to need it to keep herself going, now. She'll wait.

Stranger seems to be waiting for something. Possibly for him to wake up, so he doesn't. 

Pain level: ambiguous. She'll check again later.

The warm-water stone is ready; she teleports it to the basin, waits another minute for it to heat the water, and then takes the sponge and gets started cleaning him off. She starts with his shoulders, wringing a little bit of water onto them as a warning before gently dabbing at them.

That wakes him, though he tries not to make it obvious. What are they doing? Wax? Metal? The skin's just going to get infected - not that it really matters, he is fairly sure Moringotho's personally ensuring his continued life...

Dab dab, dab dab. Her humming's keeping time with his breathing, now that she's close enough to see it, without her particularly noticing that she's doing so.

After a few minutes, she pauses to trance and check on him again.

Conscious, exhausted, in terrible pain, terrified of her but in sort of distant abstract way.

There's not very much she can do about most of that, but if he's awake she can at least introduce herself. She lets her claws click on the stone floor as she moves to sit where she can see her, with the just-rinsed sponge in her lap, then stops humming and makes a louder questioning noise.

He shudders even though it hurts to do so.

She winces, sympathetically, and tries again.

It's trying to introduce itself. Possibilities: it's another prisoner in his cell, or a new creation of the Enemy's, or a psychological game that involves him coming to believe one of those things only to later somehow be betrayed.

Nonetheless.

Hello. What's your name?

..........

Well that's, uh, straightforward.

"Kobold."

Kobold, he says seriously, as if this is very important. 

She nods, dubious about this whole exchange, and then shows him the sponge - I'm cleaning you up; I'm sorry it hurts.

You could just kill me.

I'd rather not. I'm not much of a healer but I don't think it's that hopeless.

Not the injuries. I could help those along, it's just not worth the bother because they'll reinflict them. I think they'll stop you if you try but the best thing to do for both of us is to kill ourselves if we can.

Oh. We're - we're not there any more. I think that wasn't even the same world.

I don't understand how your telepathy works, I'm not sure I'm doing it right or what besides very simple things I can do with it.

Oh, this is a fake escape. Okay. Please don't bother me. I'll heal myself if you leave me alone a while.

Wow getting out of there was the right call.

Okay. If you want anything, let me know; I'll have soup ready in a while.

He wants to die, but if the fake escape'll drag on a while longer he may as well play along, insisting on dying will probably ruin their fun.

He slowly starts prodding his body to heal.

And she goes and makes soup, trancing every now and then to keep an eye on him.

After a few hours he is too tired to stay awake and has patched the places where he doesn't have enough skin to stand a chance against infection and he falls asleep again.

The soup doesn't take that long. She brings him a bowl when it's ready, but he's obviously busy and she ends up eating it herself. She arranges the rest to stay warm, and then with nothing else to do she huddles miserably by the fire until he falls asleep, at which point she gets herself a blanket and goes to sleep as well.

When he wakes up everything is unfamiliar, and he's stressed, and then he remembers it's another rescue hallucination. He sets to work on healing some more burns and gashes and broken bones.

She wakes up a while after he does - for just a moment, the presence of someone else lets her think that the past six months were just a bad dream, but then she remembers, and groans. She only lies there for another moment, though, before getting up to stoke the fire and check on him.

Hungry?

No thank you.

All right. Let me know.

What do you eat? If you can get by on mostly meat we'll probably be fine, but if you need plants or anything I'll need to go gather it before the season turns.

I won't eat meat. They've already done the feeding-him-other-prisoners but he doesn't have to voluntarily participate.

She spends a few seconds thinking about the state of her food stocks and how much someone his size probably needs to eat - the results, based on her speculations, aren't good at all, but she's also badly overestimating how much food he needs.

Okay. It's not going to be a very comfortable winter - this is an understatement, she expects him to be near-starved and herself to be badly malnourished by spring - but I'll try to keep us alive at least. Is there anything else you can't or won't eat?

There are lots of things I cannot eat. You needn't feed me out of your stores. Is it supposed to be currently winter?

It's nearly winter, first snowfall will probably be this month or early next; not a good time to be setting out on your own in a strange place even if you weren't injured and it was safer here. And I consider myself responsible for you; I brought you here - I can't do as good of a job of that as I'd like, but I'm not going to just give up with someone else's wellbeing on the line.

No, I mean, I don't think I'll die if I don't eat all winter. Your thoughts suggest you would. And I don't mind dying, and again you would.

What.

I would. It seems implausible that you wouldn't but I guess you'd know better than I would.

I'd mind dying less than you'd think - I was expecting that spell to kill me, not put me where you were - except you'd be in trouble if that happened and that's not okay.

Why were you trying to kill yourself? And why would I change that?

She shudders just slightly and hugs her knees to her chest.

Kobolds aren't meant to be separated from our tribes. I can hold on if someone needs me to, but by myself... not really.

How did you get separated from your tribe? And how did you end up in Angband?

Sigh, huddle. When I got my teleportation magic, they misunderstood and thought I'd been hexed - had hostile magic done to me so I was dangerous to them. We exile people for that, it's the only safe thing to do, but it's still pretty awful to be on this side of.

Angband is where you were? The spell I did... I thought it was going to just teleport me away and not put me anywhere, but it put me there instead. I used a couple spells I already had to bring us back; I'm not sure I could cast there, there's something weird about it.

You can teleport?

Yeah. Only to places I've been, usually, but obviously that's not the only way it can work - I checked the location-signature of where you were, I might be able to figure out how to get you to someplace else in that world from that.

Don't take me back. Please. I'll do whatever you want.

I know. I know. Not there. Somewhere else, and only if you want to.

Don't think so.

I do want to learn to teleport.

She considers.

I can teach you, but it'd be slow or very dangerous or both, I only know teleportation and it's a really bad kind of magic to learn with. But if you just want to be able to teleport, without being able to cast your own spells, I can do that.

I want to be able to teleport.

Okay. Each spell needs a specific destination and its own trigger - I use 'intending to teleport to the place the spell goes to' for mine, but I can do other things. Spells on people don't break; I can make a spell go dormant after a period of time or a number of uses or some other trigger, if you're not completely sure you want it set up a certain way, but it's totally possible to just have it be permanent, that's actually the easiest thing to do.

I want it to be permanent.

Yeah, thought so. To here? Does intending to teleport here sound okay for the trigger?

Who knows this place?

Just me. In theory someone else could find it, but I have traps set up; it'd be really hard for anyone who couldn't teleport to get in, and nobody else knows how.

Okay. 

All right. She closes her eyes. I need to see the mindstate you want to use as the trigger; intend to teleport here, please.

He intends to teleport here. With some hesitation, but he can always not do it if here seems worse than his other options.

Got it, she reports, and then a few seconds later, done. It won't teleport you to that exact spot; you'll be able to tell if it works if you want to try it.

Moving would open up most of the wounds I'm trying to close. Maybe later.

Sure, whenever you want.

Is there anything else I can do for you?

Maybe after I sleep.

Okay. I'm going to go out for a while, then, if you think you'll be all right.

I will.

He's already mostly back asleep.

And she teleports out and spends a few hours gathering firewood and food and medical supplies.

He's still sleeping when she comes back.

She puts away her new supplies. She eats. She sits and watches him for a little while. She wraps herself up in a blanket and sings to herself, quietly.

Eventually he wakes up. He doesn't open his eyes. He searches for her mentally. All her public thoughts are uninformative and harmless. 

Water?

Sure. She fills a little bowl and brings it over. How are your hands?

Don't think they can hold things, if that's what you mean.

Yeah. I expect you don't want to be touched but it's probably unavoidable, then.

If you can drip it that'd be better. I can't fight you much if you'd rather hold me down.

Dripping works. I can do that by magic, actually, I think... A moment later, a trickle of water starts flowing from midair over his mouth.

He only drinks a few sips, and he coughs violently. Thank you.

The trickle stops. I can set it up so you can start and stop that yourself, if you'd rather. You'll need to move enough to touch something to activate the spell, though, or talk or something.

I'd like that. I can talk.

Okay. Let me see... she takes a little while to think through how the spell should work: sound trigger, pause of a second or so, a few seconds of trickling water and then it should shut off automatically, the spell itself running from a nearby spot on the floor, so that he doesn't have to speak loudly to activate it, over to the basin she's keeping full of water, where the actual teleportation will happen. Then her thoughts go private as she begins to cast the spell. Say the word you want to use?

"Water?"

Got it.

Done.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

She puts the bowl away and returns to sit by him, vaguely worried about the future and not sure of what to say.

Well, he's not going to be helpful, he's barely conscious again.

She goes out again. Hunting, this time, for something big enough that its hide will work as a blanket for him. No luck; she returns at sundown.

He's conscious again. 

Hi, kobold.

Hi.

Pretty sunset tonight. If you keep healing at that rate I can probably bring you up to see a few before it gets too cold, if you want.

Sunset?

...does she want to know how long he was in that damned place, no, no she does not.

Yeah, the time between day and night, the sky gets really pretty. It does the same thing in the morning, with different colors, but it's already too cold for that to be comfortable to watch.

Like to see something pretty.

Nod. Let me know when you feel well enough to move, then - sitting up would help but you don't need to stand or walk, I'll be teleporting you anyway. I know a couple nice places for scenery, too, if you want to go out during the day.

Day?

...when the sun is up? We, uh, have, days, here - the sun comes up and it's bright and gets warm, and then the sun goes down and that's night, it's dark and gets colder, and it repeats. It's usually safer during the day, since it's easier to see things and most of the dangerous animals hunt at night; nights are longer during the fall and winter and days are longer during the spring and summer.

Okay. Angband's dark all the time. Whole world's dark all the time I think, now.

Definitely a different world, then. It's going to be the darkest part of the year soon and we still get hours of sun every day.

Okay. 

As soon as you're ready, I can take you up to see it.

Okay.

Maybe in a few days.

Nod.

I have some things that help with pain and stress, if you want them. I'm not sure if they're safe for your species, though, they are for mine and aren't for tigerfolk.

No thank you. I don't like being drugged.

Okay. She hugs her knees to her chest again.

Sorry if this is awkward. I feel like I shouldn't be leaving you alone, but I don't want to ask you to talk about anything you don't want to and I'm kind of out of practice at being around people.

I'm happy to talk about anything the Enemy already knows. 

I have no idea what that means.

I think you work for the Enemy. It's likelier than that teleportation magic exists and you've rescued me. So I won't tell you anything that the Enemy doesn't already know, but I'll happily tell you other things.

...all right. I still don't know enough about anything to guess what that means in practice, though.

Fine. I'm also happy not talking.

Okay. She looks slightly more miserable.

He picks up on that, but very distantly, and the Enemy knows what he's like and can use it against him and -

sigh.

Tell me more about sunrises.

They're never quite the same, but it's... she pulls up a memory, and sends it without realizing as she describes each stage. The very first bit is that the sky brightens, goes from black to grey to blue...

He sighs contentedly.

Oh good. Oh good she needed that and it's not even slightly okay to demand it of him but she needed to know it could happen, she feels so much better now.

I'll definitely have to bring you up to see one, sometime.

It's beautiful.

...your magic gets more than just words, huh. It might be a good idea to explain more of that to me, it wouldn't be good for you to get my magic by accident. But...

Here's more sunrises, and sunsets, and beautiful vistas and interesting flowers and songs at night around a campfire. She can keep going for quite a while; it seems to be doing her good, too, to remember it.

After a while his breathing gets steadier and he falls asleep.

She sits by him for a little while after that, much calmer than she has been, and eventually she has something to eat and goes to bed.

The person is still around when he wakes up. Having a person around stresses him but not being around him stresses her, and not being useful to him stresses her, so he shouldn't say anything. 

He tests whether he's healed enough skin to move. Nope. 

He should eat something, it'd help him heal, but he doesn't want to.

She sleeps in, some, but she's still awake not very long after he is. Good morning, she sends, as she fixes the fire. I'm probably going to spend most of the day out - do you have any preference for what kind of fur your blanket is made from, I assume you're going to need one, I can't keep the fire going like this all winter - but I'll check back in every couple hours, is there anything you want before I go?

No, thank you. 

Okay.

She finishes off the soup and cleans the bowl, goes to check on the supplies she's keeping in another chamber of the cave, then comes back in and checks on the water basin. I need to refill this soon, but it might startle you when I do - I'm not sure how noisy it is when I teleport the water in. Should I wait?

Should I expect a loud noise?

Maybe. There's never been someone on this side to hear it before, so I'm not sure. We should be okay for a couple days if you need that to get to a point where flinching isn't painful or something, though.

If I'm warned I will be fine.

All right. I'll go do that now, then, it'll only take a few seconds to start, and she disappears.

After the promised few seconds the sound of churning water comes from the basin; it's not very loud but it is pretty sudden. After a few minutes it stops, just as abruptly as it started.

He is pretty calm. 

She pops back in a minute later. Sun's not up yet, I'm going to wait a while before I go out again.

Okay.

Things are currently - better than they'll get if he messes anything up. Not tolerable. He tries to send her appreciation.

...

She sends a wordless acknowledement, and then goes still, her thoughts careful but not guarded. Something's wrong, she caught that; she doesn't know what it is, she doesn't know if it's something she can fix at all. She's still doing better than leaving him, she thinks - she flinches away from the thought, aware that he's probably watching, but it's still a reassuring touchstone. Beside the point, though; there's a long way between 'better than that' and 'actually good enough'. So, what might the problem be... basics, food, water, warmth, safety, companionship... she still doesn't quite believe that he doesn't need to eat. She'll bring that up again later. Water, warmth, sorted out as well as she can. Safety... they talked about that a little, but she can certainly go into more detail about it... if that would even help, which it probably wouldn't, if he thinks she's just lying. That might not be one she can fix; at very least probably not anytime soon.

She can ask, though. Is there anything I can do that will help you feel safer?

I do not think so, no.

Maybe a way to teleport somewhere definitely fatal but you said you tried that and ended up in Angband. 

I mean, that wasn't exactly a well thought-out suicide attempt. 

Do you have ideas that are much surer and, if they fail, do not land one in Angband.

Sigh. Yeah. Don't want to, it'd involve more... thinking about what I was doing, which is why that's not the impulse that grabbed me. But I have hunting spells that'd work.

Can I have one.

I know you don't believe that this is real, but I know it is.

But. Yes. If that's what you need.

If this is real, then I am not currently a prisoner and want a way to prevent it from ever happening again.

Right. I...

She takes a deep breath, lets it out, shakily, takes another.

Okay. What kind of trigger do you want.

Desiring to activate my suicide spell.

All right.

Show me.

Got it.

She shudders.

Done.

I'll be back. She disappears.

So she doesn't see him relax substantially and almost smile.

She's gone for nearly three hours. If he's paying attention, he may notice the quiet sounds of things appearing in a nearby cave.

When she does reappear, she's accompanied by a furry brown animal skin larger than she is, which she carefully wrestles over to the other side of the fire and spreads out to dry.

He's paying attention. 

Congratulations?

Don't want to talk about it.

Well, that's good, because he does not want to talk at all.

She works on the fur, her thoughts focused on the work at hand, or planning for future projects, or speculating on the weather of the next few weeks and how it's likely to affect what she can gather. She thinks of him only distantly, as a factor to take into account in these things.

After a few hours, she goes down to her pantry and returns with some fruit, which she bakes. These wouldn't keep anyway, it won't hurt anything if you'd like to have some.

If you want to try dissolving sugar in water for me to drink I could attempt that. I sincerely don't think I could eat, it's been too long.

Sugar?

Do you not have that? Uh, berry juice?

Sure, I can make juice. She sets to mashing the fruit.

Thank you.

She still seems vaguely distressed. He tries to sing something - not aloud, broken ribs, but over osanwe. 

She freezes. Not tensely, she's not afraid, she's just stopped moving, almost stopped breathing, until the music swells and she lets out a quiet, awed whimper.

Should hear my brother.

It takes her a few seconds after the music stops to be anything but awed, and another few to work out that she's been spoken to and should respond.

...brother?

He was good at singing.

That's not what she was asking, but okay.

Kobolds sing, but nothing like that, that was amazing.

My people think we need beautiful things to stay alive. We're wrong. The Enemy can sustain us anyway. But beautiful things are nice.

...ah. Food water warmth safety companionship beauty, got it.

Kobolds like beautiful things, but we do fine without them; we sing for companionship.

I understand.

She goes back to her mashing. I should work on some new spells soon, and I'm still not sure that's safe around your telepathy.

What's unsafe?

The knowledge transmits. Usually by touch, and usually only when someone's casting, but you've gotten things I wasn't intending to share a few times now and I'm not sure you wouldn't get that. And I got to skip the dangerous bit of learning to use it, because it's my Gift, but I don't think you would.

I would like knowledge of how to do magic.

I think you need to at least figure out what you want to do in the long term, first. If you're staying, learning magic might be a problem - having those spells on you might, too, but less of one - spellbearers can be dangerous, but mages always are; it'll come up if you want to go live with other people unless you keep it a very close secret, and I'm not actually sure a proper mage wouldn't be able to tell you were one anyway.

I really shouldn't live with other people until I know if I'm a danger to them.

Uh?

People who escape Angband sometimes go mad and kill everyone nearby. I don't think I escaped Angband but if I really did you should be aware of that.

Okay.

That's definitely a reason to wait on learning the magic - the only real defense against a hostile mage is staying far enough away from them, and 'far enough' is pretty far - but unless you have some kind of magic I don't know about I should be able to stay safe enough aside from that.

It's not like he hijacks your mind and can deploy you against his enemies, more like they snap and lash out with whatever's close. 

You can't shoot a hostile mage?

You can if you can find them; it's very possible to cast through walls and things, or while pretending to be asleep or something.

I can read minds.

That doesn't help if you're the one who's gone hostile.

Like I said, it's not systematic or clever like that; it's lashing out, not becoming a servant of the Enemy. Means I can help with other hostile mages.

She nods. Still a bad idea, though. If you attacked me physically, I could teleport away, you might hurt me some but it's hard to beat 'wanting to go' for quickness. If you attacked me with a spell, I'd have to be lucky to notice you were casting at all, and that's the only warning I'd get.

Okay. I won't listen to your thoughts while you're casting.

Thanks. She sends the impression of a grin.

Also, the chance of us running into a hostile mage here is pretty much nonexistent - most likely I'm the only person you're going to see at all unless you go looking for people, at least until spring and probably even then.

And I'm not sure if I should, need more information. No one in this scenario has heard of the Enemy?

It takes her an extra moment to process that. Right. The local species of people are kobolds, who hide from anyone outside their tribes and will panic if you find them; tigerfolk, who are generally all right but will probably be nervous about you; and elves, who are awful and dangerous.

Will they torture us if they capture us.

Can't promise they wouldn't try. They're not hard to stay away from, though, especially since we can teleport.

I can only teleport back to here.

'Here' is three hours of hiking through a trapped cave system that they have no reason to explore and the entrance isn't even slightly close to their village and is too small for them to get though, if we're not safe here we're not safe anyplace, but I can see if I can find a decent second place to give you a spell to teleport to.

Thank you. Who are they terrorizing? Can't guarantee I can help you stop them but I might be able to.

Were, us kobolds, a few decades ago. They've been leaving us alone since I was tiny, I don't think they're going to start that again unless something provokes them - which knowing I can teleport would, by the way - but it was pretty bad while it was going on. They give the tigerfolk some trouble, too, but nothing systematic.

Okay. I'll take a look once I'm better.

Better not to. We don't actually know why they stopped, and it's hard to guess what might provoke them, and things are mostly okay. Plus they have mages and I have no way of telling if they've hexed you.

She pops down to the pantry for a moment and returns with a dried leafy branch, which she starts using to strain the mashed fruit.

What am I expected to do in this scenario, then?

Nothing, since it isn't one. She shrugs.

Wait for the plot hook. All right. Thank you.

I'm going to be doing my level best to give us a nice safe quiet winter, I hope it's not going to bother you too much if I succeed at it.

I very much prefer that. Thank you.

Me too.

She's satisfied with the consistency of the juice, and tries a sip. This isn't great, but it's probably the best I can do without cloth for straining - I might be able to get some but it won't be very soon.

I only want a few drops anyway. But thank you.

Mmhmm. Same way as the water, and I'll only send a little, let me know when you're ready.

All right.

Drip drip. It's pear juice, with a tea-ish flavor from the leafy branch.

He can't taste flavors beyond noting if something is obviously poisoned. It isn't obviously poisoned. It has sugar; he can see how his stomach reacts to that.

She keeps an eye on him for a couple seconds, and then takes the remainder of the juice and the strained pulp and starts setting up another batch of soup. Will it bother you to smell me cooking with meat?

You should do what you need to.

Mmhmm. It's no problem to set up a cookfire someplace else, though. Maybe I'll finally put together that oven I've been wanting.

Good for you, he offers vaguely.

...sorry. Won't bring it up again.

Hmmm? I'm not offended by the topic.

Didn't think you were. But when I said I wanted to give us a nice winter I meant not upsetting you, too.

The thing I find upsetting is that Angband exists. Everything else is just a stem off that.

Sure. I can still try to do a better job of not bringing it up.

Yeah but trying particularly hard isn't really needed.

It's not a problem, except that I don't know what topics to avoid yet.

If you want to talk about it, that's different - not that I want to know, but I know that helps sometimes - but it should be your choice.

I do not want to talk about it and don't expect I ever will.

That's fine too. I'll keep working on not bringing it up.

He sighs. Okay.

It's for myself almost as much as it's for you, if that helps anything. Anyway, let me go see what I can find to make this edible, and she disappears down to the pantry again.

He closes his eyes again.

Lots of roasted pumpkin, a handful of lentils, and some spices to balance the flavor, and the soup turns out pretty good. When she's done, she leaves for most of an hour and then returns to start on the fur, working some sort of goop into the inner surface of it.

He watches through her eyes so he can follow all this while keeping his own eyes closed and not moving.

It's not very engaging work, but she's very methodical and patient with it, making sure every bit of the skin gets three coats of the goop.

After a while he falls asleep again.

She finishes gooping the fur. She goes to the surface and sits and pokes at her spellcasting capabilities for a while. She heads back in and checks on the fur and applies more goop to it where it needs a fourth coat. She goes looking for a suitable place for a new cookfire. She returns and has more soup for lunch.

Eventually he wakes up. 

How long is winter, what needs are you anticipating during it, and what are the preparations in progress?

It's around a hundred days long, and I'm actually pretty well prepared for my own needs - it's late enough in the season that storable food is hard to come by, so there's actually not much more I can do about that anyway. Boredom's going to be the bigger problem, if you're right about not needing to eat, but I have drawing and painting supplies and my magic to figure out, plus whatever projects come up.

Right, people get bored. That is a thing about people. 

How many things about people is he missing?

Well, as an example person the kobold certainly is one. If he keeps paying attention he can probably figure some more of them out.

Do you expect to need or want anything in particular over the winter?

No.

Okay.

Foodwise, you can eat, once you're ready, it's not that big of a deal - I was only preparing for myself, but I did put up extra in case I was injured or anything, and I don't need as much of my diet to be plants as I was planning to have be.

I really don't think I'll be ready to eat.

All right.

I'm pretty close to having a spell done that I think you'll like.

Hmm?

It looks like my magic can do portals - one way, not a safety risk - that you can look through. So we won't have to go up for you to see the sky.

That does sound nice. Does this world have stars?

Mmhmm. At night, the sky's too bright for them during the day.

The place I grew up was too bright for them.

Ah. Well, I can set the spell up to go inactive at night, if you'd like.

Hmm? No, I think I liked the stars.

Yeah, me too.

I can try casting it now, if you want, but I kind of expect the light will bother you, it's midday.

Probably. 

Tonight, then.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

He hasn't tried to do anything with his head. Why should he? This'll end soon enough. But now he reluctantly starts trying to persuade it not to be in an advanced state of terror and panic. It'll get back to that soon enough.

The kobold hangs around for a little while, and then goes to start working on her new cooking area. She checks back in after a few hours.

What are you working on?

Putting together someplace I can cook where it won't bother you.

Thank you.

No problem.

I intend to work on that for the rest of the day, I'll probably have it done by bedtime; your blanket will be ready for me to finish it tomorrow morning, and then when that's done I'm planning to go start looking for that second safe spot you wanted. The blanket shouldn't really wait, but the rest is mostly flexible if you need anything.

I do not.

She nods, I'll keep checking in, anyway.

He sleeps.

She works, quietly checking on him every so often. When the sun starts to set, she enspells a good-sized rock with the new portal spell and takes it to him.

The sunset is pretty. He doesn't remember what delight feels like well enough to send it over osanwe, but he remembers enough to fake it. He smiles and makes his eyes glow with fascination and imbues his voice with wonder and delight and thanks her profusely.

Under normal circumstances it's pretty hard to lie to her; these aren't, she buys it, she's very pleased. She sits with him for twenty minutes or so and then goes back to work.

And it is nice. Delight may be too lost to feel but he doesn't stop looking at it and when it's over he reminds himself it'll happen again.

And then there are stars, too. She set the spell to show a scene overlooking the forest from a hilltop, for the clearest view, and it's trees for miles and miles below and starry, intermittently cloudy skies above.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

She comes back after a few hours, yawning and dragging her feet, but happy. See you in the morning.

He tries to read her to get more sense of what she's happy about.

She's happy that he's happy. She's glad that it was so easy to arrange; it's important after trauma, she knows from personal experience, and usually much, much harder; she was expecting it to be too hard for her to pull off.

Oh, good, that's easy, he can continue doing it.

She falls asleep quickly and is awake well before sunrise.

Sunrise is nice. He expresses joy, trying not to repeat too many phrases from last night.

She takes a break from working on his blanket to sit and watch it with him, beaming. (The east-facing view is from a different hill, and overlooks the lake she gets their water from.) When it starts getting bright, she mentions that she can deactivate the spell if he'd like her to.

Might be easier, thank you.

All right. And she does, by touching the stone at a particular spot and humming a tone.

Your blanket'll be done soon; I'd have to teleport you to get it under you but I bet you'd be more comfortable that way.

I wasn't planning to maintain a very high body temperature for the winter. Won't be conscious but that's all right.

She blinks. You hibernate? I guess that makes sense with what you've been saying. But I meant today; I should have it done in the next couple hours.

We don't usually. Should be possible in principle.

...you know people get sores if they lay in one position too long, right? Kind of nasty ones, too. Bears and things don't seem to have that problem but if you don't usually hibernate it seems like it'd be a risk.

I can consciously control everything my body does. 

When you're asleep?

Should still be able to. I heal while sleeping.

Huh. I'd feel better about it if we found a way to check that first, I don't want to find out the hard way if it works just well enough that I can't wake you up, but okay.

Don't see an alternative, can't make myself eat and you don't have enough food anyway.

She flinches, subtly, at that. Yeah, as options for dealing with a food shortage go it's not as bad as it could be.

Is it winter in the whole world?

Everywhere I've been, at least, but that's not much. I could check, I think.

Your world's too different from mine to say but in mine some places plants grow all year.

Nod. That seems possible, at least. I've never been out of this forest, but I know the world's not the same everywhere. The bigger question is whether I can get there.

You got to Angband.

Yeah, I'm not saying it's unlikely, just that I don't know yet.

Okay. I shall be fine either way.

Mmhmm. Do you want me to work on that today, or would you rather have that other spell as soon as possible?

Sorry, which other spell?

The backup teleportation location, in case it somehow becomes dangerous here. It's going to take me a while to find a suitable spot, I expect, but the sooner I start the sooner you'll have it.

Perhaps the backup location can be somewhere far from here and warm, if such places exist.

Hm.

I'm not sure someplace far away wouldn't be just as dangerous as here in ways I didn't know about. Going there to gather food when I can teleport right back if something startles me is one thing, planning to go there if there's a problem here doesn't sit so well.

All right. I suppose if you don't expect danger to take the form of anyone specifically looking for you distance won't help avoid it.

Yeah, this world's kind of generally dangerous - inter-species relations aren't great anywhere, from what I've heard, and everyplace has dangerous animals and the occasional monster. Knowing how to deal with the dangers where you live is the important bit. If you want to visit someplace warm, I have no problem with giving you a spell for that, but it's really not going to help with safety - my plan for that is to trek over to the far side of the forest from the elves' village and find a cave there that's as inaccessible as this one - maybe I can find one with an entrance halfway up a cliff or something, there's some good cliffs over there. Should throw them off pretty well if they don't know we can teleport, and even if they do it'll slow them down enough to give us time to decide what we want to do based on the situation at hand. Not, again, that I expect it to come up at all, I'm just not in the habit of doing half-jobs with safety plans.

I appreciate that. 

She grins.

That's several days' walk just to get to where I want to start looking, though. And figuring out whether I can cast a spell that'll put me someplace warm might be a couple days' work too, depending on how complicated it turns out to be.

I think in a month I should be able to walk, if I work at it. That would require eating, though. Once I can walk properly I should be faster than you.

You'd still need me along to show you where to go and get you out of any elven traps you happen to walk into without having to teleport back here, but I like the idea of you being in better shape just on general principles.

If the forest is still full of elven traps it doesn't sound like the elves have stopped being a danger.

Yeah, they're still dangerous, they're just not actively going after anybody, there's a pretty huge difference. And their traps aren't dangerous to kobolds; they use magical ones almost exclusively, and properly trained kobold mages have an anti-magic spell form that they cast on everybody that lets us ignore them.

What do they look like? Social organization? Do you speak their language?

She sends a memory of watching a group of five of them from a bush - they're similar to Men, but their faces are proportioned differently, especially the ears. In the memory, four of them are riding giant raccoons and the leader is riding a tiger, and all of them are carrying spears and shortbows.

I don't know much about them beyond what I need to know to stay safe, we lost a lot of lore during the war - they got more than half our Speakers, and all the ones who spoke their language.

I am very sorry.

It really isn't worth the risk of provoking them.

I promise that until I have the resources to do things that obviously improve things in this scenario I won't do anything at all. I hold innocent lives very dear. 

Thank you.

If you're the kind of person who needs problems to solve, the tigerfolk are a much safer one all around.

What's the problem with them?

They don't think kobolds are people. Most of the time they leave us alone anyway, but when it is a problem it's kind of an awful one. I was working on it, just going and talking to them works pretty well, but they live in small groups and are nomadic, so that was a long-term project.

Okay. I can try to help with that too.

Only if you want to, and I'm not sure I'll be up for it even then, we'll have to see. It's pretty emotionally exhausting for me.

I was fighting a war for the fate of the world. I think I'd get emotionally exhausted by not doing enough that matters on enough of a scale, eventually, but it should help in the short term while I can't do anything about that war anyway.

Nod. If the spell to find a warm place works I can probaby guarantee I don't land in Angband and go somewhere else in your world instead, too.

Yes but that's what the Enemy obviously wants me to do, if this is a false rescue.

I'm still pretty confused about what you think is going on with that, but anyway I didn't mean you should go back; I meant maybe if I go and find out what's going on there'll be some things we can do to help from here.

Sometimes the Enemy lets us 'escape' from him, or be rescued. It always turns out that either our rescuer works for him and we're just somewhere else in Angband - and any suicide triggers we've been given don't work - or that we were hallucinating all along. He can induce controlled hallucinations.

Yikes. That's kind of gratuitously awful. ...to deter people from rescuing people, I'd guess? Not that I regret getting you out of there, but.

And to make sure when he does release you, as a way of hurting your loved ones, you don't even believe it.

Sigh.

Yeah, forget the tigerfolk, let's work on burning that place to the ground. Are there any obvious problems with the idea of me going?

Going back to Angband? Yes, he might catch you and mind-control you into working for him.

I mean going elsewhere in your world. It might take me a little while to work out which parts of the location-pattern are for that world in particular, but once I do, and once I figure out the other aiming method, 'not Angband' will probably be trivial.

I suppose that can't hurt, they'll know you're real. You want to go to Lake Mithrim, where my family is, and offer to help them win the war using teleportation. If this is a hallucination that won't matter and if it's real they can help you. 

I doubt the name will help; let me see if I can work out what kind of information I do need.

Okay. Once I can write I can draw you a map and give you a letter for them.

Dunno what that is, but a map might be useful.

My people invented a correspondence between sounds and symbols, so you can put symbols on a page and then they can look at them and know the words as if you are there to say them.

She blinks. Clever!

I know, right? It was my father's idea. If you'd like I can teach it to you.

Once we've got time for it, yeah, sounds like fun. Assuming I'm not too out of practice at talking, anyway.

...I don't think one gets out of practice at talking. It's been thirty years for me.

Wow.

Anyway, kobolds do, it's kind of a problem - most of us can't learn at all, usually there's supposed to be at least two Speakers to a tribe so we can stay in practice, with only one to a tribe we only get to practice at the summer meetups and it's pretty clearly not enough. Going and talking to the tigerfolk was helping, for me, but it's been a year since I've talked to anyone and I'm sure I've forgotten some words.

Want to teach me your language?

I'm not sure I'd be any good at teaching it - I never did get the hang of the grammar - but if you want to try sometime, sure. Might make more sense for me to learn yours, though.

Can do that too. 

Nod. I don't have a good idea of when I'll be ready to go to your world at all, but if I'm here all winter there'll probably be time for both.

Okay.

He starts singing softly in Quenya. His voice is in pretty bad shape; to his own ears he sounds awful.

Yes but singing though.

As soon as she has an idea of the tune, she starts singing along in harmony.

They can do that until he gets too hoarse to continue, which isn't too long.

Then - sugar water, please?

Sure.

Just a tiny bit doesn't take long at all.

I should probably push myself to try soup or something. I don't want to, but I bet I'd be able to walk faster.

I don't mind you taking it at your own pace. Physical health isn't the only important thing here, probably not even the most important one.

Psychological health's a lost cause and 'functional' might happen by the time physical health does, I'm not really sure.

She makes a face - 'yeah, but'. There's gradations between 'completely back to normal' and 'just functional'. It's worth aiming for the better ones, if you can. Speaking from experience.

Functional is all I really even want.

Her nod is only slightly dubious. It's at least a good idea to avoid doing more damage, though, if you can help it, which I'm trying to make sure is the case.

She makes no move to hug him, sends nothing about the actual sensation of being hugged, but sends just the comfort and companionship and sense of being-in-it-together that she'd get from one.

Thanks. I'll be okay.

All right. I should get back to work.

He falls asleep again.

She finishes the blanket, and then goes out to work on the new spell. She comes back in after a few hours.

He's awake again. He doesn't acknowledge her. He's trying to get some badly broken and rehealed bones to fix themselves without him having to rebreak them.

She sits and waits for a little while. If he's still busy after twenty minutes, she heads down to the pantry and comes back after an hour.

He's not going to be able to fix them all this way. It's frustrating. 

Anything I can help with?

I think I'm going to need to rebreak most of the bones in my fingers.

She winces, then considers. Mind if I have a look with my magic?

Go ahead.

And so she does. She's not trying to interpret his emotional state, but it's automatic enough to be pretty unavoidable regardless.

Exhaustion, resignation, constant background terror, intense desire to stop existing.

Sigh.

She drops the trance to respond - I can see where they're healed badly and I should be able to teleport those bits out - it's not going to be painless, but it should be a lot better than re-breaking them, and heal better, too - then picks it back up to watch his reaction.

Resignation, vague amusement, confusion as he tries to figure out how that'd work. And background screaming terror and a desire to stop existing.

She drops the trance entirely. Only if you want me to; it's reasonable not to.

I think it's preferable unless it somehow leaves me with not enough to reconstruct from.

I don't think it will. I'll start with just one bone so you can check, though - I shouldn't do them all in one sitting anyway, it's going to be fiddly and I'll need my focus.

All right. Go ahead.

She drops back into the trance. She starts with the fingertip bone of his left pinky; it takes her a few minutes to arrange the spell to remove exactly what she wants it to, but then the removal is instantaneous.

He exhales sharply, spends a minute trying to get a feel for it. I think that's easier to fix than rebreaking it, yes.

She grins, not very happily. Good. What kind of pace do you want, for the rest?

It's going to take all of my concentration and also possibly most of the calcium I have access to to fix this one; why don't I let you know when it's done and then you can do another.

Sure.

And he gets to work trying to imagine how he wants his bone to work. He is desperately drained; it's hard.

She heads back up to work on her spell a little more; after another half-hour she's confident enough in it to give it a try. She lands in a jungle and spends the rest of the morning carefully observing the local wildlife from various hiding places; she ends up reasonably sure of the safety of a few new kinds of fruits and berries, and brings some of the latter back with her when she returns for lunch.

She looks like she could use congratulating. He congratulates her and asks how the area was.