Ettelië finds this distracting but not distracting enough to avoid worrying she's dying of blood loss.

She will honestly just kinda have to wait until that one becomes obvious, unless the Elf doctors know how to recognize death from blood loss, because she sure doesn't. Although -

"I think if I were going to die in the very near future there would be some symptoms of shock by now, and there aren't, so. I think it's probably going to be OK. I'm probably also at risk of infection for a while, I don't know if anyone here knows how to do anything about that, but that'll take a while longer if it's going to happen. Thanks for - being here."

"Don't die." He squeezes her hand. "What a beautiful baby - what a wonderful baby -"

She squeezes his hand back. Probably if she can still exert a good amount of pressure then she isn't dying of anything right now, dying seems like the sort of thing that would interfere with that. 

"Isn't she? I was gonna name her Kanael if she was a girl, but - if you have a lot of opinions about name aesthetics then we can pick something later. Maybe when I'm less tired and not kind of high on pain meds." And more sure that she isn't dying of anything, she doesn't say, because she really doesn't think she is and she really really doesn't want Ettelië to worry even if the worrying is also kind of tremendously reassuring.

"The way Elves do it is that you pick her mothername and I pick her fathername. Does that work?"

"That works. D'you want to hold her?"

"Yes." But he hesitates to reach for her.

Kanael seems to be done with her initial screaming fit. She'll need to nurse soon but not right right now. 

"Welcome to the world, Kanael! It still has some problems but we're fixing them as fast as we can. You did such a good job coming into it, I know that must've been really scary. I'm your mom, which means I'm the one who you've been stuck inside for nine months. And I'm gonna pass you to your dad for a bit now, OK?"

She offers him the tiny tiny human.

He takes the tiny tiny human. "Can she understand all that?"

"Not even a little bit. But she recognizes her mom's voice, so even though the world is cold and bright and different now she knows still with the same person she was with before. She'll pick up the words on her own, but only if she gets to keep hearing them. So you just have to keep talking to her until she sorts them all out. It'll take her several months. If you talk to her in other languages she'll learn those, too."

"Ah, so like Elves. I wasn't sure if humans were faster because of - because of hardly having any time."

"We don't have much time, no. Still takes us a little while to figure out what's going on, though. How long do Elves take to talk?"

"They'll talk by the time they're one or so but some can communicate sooner with osanwë. I mean, you can read a baby no matter what but some of them start to figure out how to do it communicatively much earlier than the age at which they talk."

" - oh wow, you can read Elf babies' minds? So you never have to guess about why they're crying?"

"Yes. - that must be hard, not having that."

"You are gonna be so confused so many times and I am so sorry for your future self," she says. She can't be very sorry, because she looks like she's struggling not to giggle. "M'really tired but I should probably feed her before I take a nap. Can I have her back for a bit?"

"Of course." Baby.

Baby! Kanael has never had to eat before and is a little confused about which part of her face she's supposed to latch with, but apparently this is a relatively simple puzzle, because it only stumps her for a while. Imrainai tells her that she is small and soft and good and very very new and a Liar and a resident of Endorë, and that she's sorry the world isn't everything it could be but that it's definitely still got a lot of good parts to it. And she has a mom and a dad who are going to make sure she gets to see all the best parts of it.

Eventually Kanael decides that she's done and that it is nap time. She's been through kind of a lot.

"M'gonna take a nap now. I'm not gonna die while I take it. If she wakes up and cries you can get me and we'll see if she's hungry again, OK?"

"Yeah. Okay. She's lovely. Congratulations. She's beautiful."

"I'm really really glad you think so."

Sleep. Sleep is good. 

Haneo's parents teach her about dessert! You should save some room for it at dinner. They read her stories. They show her all the gardens. They tell her that the other human here had a baby.

Oooh, there's another human here? Can she meet them? Is the baby VERY SMALL?

They'll ask! The baby is very very small, that's how babies start out. 

(Ettelië gets a message and asks Imrainai. "The child is one of the mindreaders -")

She has to think about it. It's kind of stressful having the psyons around. But she must be very young, and she's very far from home and doesn't have anyone else around here with the same background knowledge, and it's not as though the child has anyone to report her to, and Parael always seemed all right talking to her, so - 

"Yes, if she'd like to. They're - you just always wish you could help them somehow, but the incentives to report everything make it - hard. And there's no one for her to report to, here."

"There isn't. They're keeping the Alteri somewhere else."

Haneo's parents tell her she may visit the baby and the baby's parents.