I mean I'm not saying he makes good decisions a hundred percent of the time, but I'm not gonna assume he's not just because one of them sounds weird from here. He probably has a better idea what's going on here than I do.

You want to meet them when they come in?

Yeah. 

Does he know I'm here?

No. Travel's not that safe, no one in the escort party knows. We'll tell him once they're nearly here.

OK. Cool.

He'll probably be upset about it.

Why?

I think he's getting kind of stressed about the number of absurd dangerous situations I've gotten into over the past few weeks. But I guess he probably has bigger problems right now, so maybe he'll already be too stressed for any extra stress to matter.

This is really the safest place you could possibly have landed, if you were coming through at all.

I was really really not supposed to come through, but I guess it's good that the spell dumped me on the wrong Tyelcormo, then, if it was going to insist on dumping us here.

We can look into ways to send you all back, but my current instinct is that that wasn't a coincidence and efforts to get you back should not be expected to go any better.

Yeah. I guess.

It's a week of riding. 

"Hey. You all full of blood again?"

"You know, technically I'm royalty, I should be able to make someone else do this." He doesn't do that. He offers Spike his arm.

"Technically I'm a soulless demon who should be able to kill as he pleases. Ain't life weird."

He drinks. 

"It honestly just seems like it'd get old, killing people all the time. Maybe it'd take more than a couple centuries."

"S'one of the things that makes eternal life worth living, mate. S'like - sex, like poetry. Things get dull without it."

"There's a god of hunting, here. Hunting isn't really hard if you're a god but he loves it anyway, never gets tired of it."

Spike chuckles. "Well. If he knows what he likes."

"Growing up I thought I was like him but then we went to war and that was better, it was real, you could lose, and then we did lose and when we came back war had gotten worse, just stupid children all around, trying to do the right thing. And then I come back here, where war was good, and - it's still just stupid children all around."

This is really sort of an unnerving thing to say, given that Spike feels like he is probably the sort of person who really appreciates - not war, war is all uniforms and ranks and rules and reasons, but fighting, violence, the uncertainty of having your back against a wall and knowing that you didn't rig the odds in advance and that if you get out it'll have to be because you're actually just that good.

"Seems that way."

The new Quendi castles look much like the old Quendi castles. Maybe a little less pretty and a little more utilitarian, but only if you're looking very hard for a point of comparison. 

When they're nearly there someone tells Alex that there's a girl and a dog here claiming to know him.

Why didn't - never mind. I want to see her.

The version of Tyelcormo you know wants to see you.

She stops writing notes. (The floor has been absolutely covered in notes, about what's happening and about what she remembers Alex saying about this place and about a bunch of random science concepts she's been trying to draw back out of her brain, in addition to the prayers and the not-panicking and the things Wishbone has said and the doodles that she drew when she got bored.)

OK. Am I coming out or is he coming here?