Hug.

"It is now. The peal showed up, and Esarkan sent me to warn the King, but it looks like they're not interested in further intervention here."

"Oh good." Hug. "Anybody try to rescue Dawn-shining?"

"Not that he saw fit to mention."

He laughs.

"Are you doing all right?"

He raises his eyebrows. "What would you do if I said no?"

(That means: you should know better than to think I'd interfere in your life without your approval, and I know better than to think I'd have your approval to interfere, however badly you were doing.)

"Love you," he says, hugging his father again. "I'm doing fine. Lots of magical engineering. A little less theory work than I'd like, and it's going to get lonely sooner or later, but I'm all right for now."

"Good. Enjoy your engineering," he says. "I'd better be going."

And another hug and off he pops.

Elspeth appears at the palace again a few hours later.

"Hello! You must be Elspeth. How did the fixing of the Valar go?"

"As usual. They'll run Valinor better now, it seems they were already pretty irrelevant to the rest of the world."

"Yes, they were. So will you now set up your preferred means of interdimensional communication here?"

"I'm not the person who installs those, but someone will be by to do that if you don't object."

"We don't object at all. We're very interested in further contact with the multiverse at large."

"Do you happen to know if Independence will want its hookup fixed too?"

"I don't happen to know that, but I can pass on the question if you like."

"I could also ask myself, my most recent information being that Midnight likes me for some reason, but he still might not appreciate it."

"'For some reason'?"

"It's pretty unclear to me how somebody who can read minds and who I don't like at all can like me, but he does anyway."

"And he dislikes my son, who's very fond of him. Although that's much more understandable, considering the circumstances of their meeting."

"Oh?"

"My son is Dawn-shining Taliar," he explains. "When the Yeerks invaded, they took the Emperor, then used him to collect soulbearers for kidnapping. One of them was my wife, Linsi-kelen Aeleva. When she awoke with a Yeerk in her head, she lashed out with her soul's fire and destroyed everything within twenty miles, killing most of the Yeerks. Midnight showed up to investigate the enormous fireball, and she saw him and mistook him for Tivarante Maitimo, since we didn't know about alts at the time. She assumed he was collaborating with the Yeerks and killed him. Then I noticed that soulbearers had been disappearing into the palace all morning, and summoned Taliar to investigate, and he discovered the Yeerks and killed all the ones in Nuime and went to Independence and killed all the remaining Yeerks there, except for the daeva children. And then he resurrected Midnight, because Midnight is an alt of his husband. 'Disoriented and grieving and immediately confronted with the killer of many of the people you're grieving for' is not a set of circumstances conducive to forming a good first impression."

"I see. We'll be able to resurrect most of the Yeerks but don't yet have a solution that extends to people from Hex."

"If there's somewhere for them to go where they will be well taken care of and will not have the opportunity to launch more invasions, my son would be happy to try resurrecting the ones that you have trouble with."