"You and me both."

"We're going to fix everything."

Nod, nod.

"This is the best day of my life." Pause. "This one, anyway, so far, I've had days I liked better back in Valinor and I'm sure I'm going to have better."

"Similar," agrees Bella.

"Well, you have less of an excuse to call it a different life, but the principle still applies, yes."

"Exactly. Sometimes it feels like one, though, when I got sent back nearly twenty years had passed but I looked the same age, I went back to school, I didn't talk about where I'd been because no one expected me to have been somewhere, it could have all been a dream..."

"Going back to Kilaiuossa would have been worse," she agrees.

"What happened...?"

"In Kilaiuossa?"

"If you want to say."

"My dad screwed something up, and someone else reacted badly, and things escalated, and a lot of people including both my parents ended up dead, and it was decided to place all the blame on them, and Imliss and I could renounce them, stay and have everyone be super chilly to us, or leave. We left. We were in transit when the snake-thing got us."

Nod.

"If I'd told that story to most people in Kilaiuossa, they'd have assumed I was downplaying my parents' responsibility because I loved them. When I told it to Tyelcormo, when we'd just met, he hugged me and let me cry on him."

"We'll figure it out. We'll get him back for you."

"I know. Thanks."

"You're welcome."

"I just--I thought I was going to die failing to save them."

"I expect to be able to buy you time even if I can't just yank them out of the Halls myself."

"Yeah. I was more worried about dying of old age before I could manage anything than getting myself killed making the attempt."

"Not that I was looking forward to dying even besides that."

"Yeah."

"I wonder if old age is more or less pleasant than freezing to death. Probably more."

"I don't know."

"Sorry about the whole. Being depressing thing."

"It's all right."