"...oh, gosh," says the demon. "How big are they? What kinda help?"

He gestures. They'll fit in this ship. "They take you to a completely arbitrary location in the new dimension, so you're almost guaranteed to land in vacuum. Then we'll need someone to conjure for Earthlike worlds and help us get coordinates for one so that we can lightleap to it."

"Okay, I like this whole being allowed to talk thing so I'm gonna help you out, technically you said help identifying planets not help getting there," the demon says. "If I'd gone uh-huh to that I wouldn't've had to make you a lightleaper too."

And they don't actually need a lightleaper but he's not going to tell her about the teleport. "Okay. I will trade you information about how to travel between dimensions for three of the devices used to do that and then help identifying and travelling to an inhabited planet in a new dimension, is that a deal?"

"You got it," the demon chirps, and she makes three worldleapers.

"Thank you!" And to Issiak, do you have someone in an escape pod to jump for us or should we have someone jump with her, ask her to make air when they land?

It seems less likely to reveal more than we mean to in the latter case.

Agreed. "All right, want to jump dimensions with me? I'll need air where we land."

"Sure," says the demon, "how do you do it?"

The worldleaper detaches; an anchor and a jump component that has a simple activation switch. The current models require you to enter an activation code, but the very first prototypes didn't and that's what they have. 

Jump.

Air is supplied.

Second worldleaper to take them one more dimension out.

Air is again supplied.

"Thanks so much! Okay, you probably know better than I do how to conjure for habitable planets."

"I've never actually done a search like that before... I'll figure something out."

A lot of fist-sized balls of rock later she's got one.

"Thank you so much!. The latest lightleapers have pretty cool targeting, if you can just make me one in the 22 series I can go find the planet myself."

"Sure thing." A model 22 appears around them.

"That's all we needed; you happy to go home?"

"You could maybe make it a little easier to find documentation on the leapy things?"

"For sure. They're called worldleapers, Fëanáro Curufinwë invented them in Year of the Peace 7, the blueprints are all chiplocked but prototypes you should be able to grab."

"Cool, thanks!"

"My pleasure." He sends her home. He teleports to the new planet and verifies that the air is breathable and the gravity tolerable. He parks the lightleaper in space somewhere in the intervening dimension so people can teleport through it without a ship. He bounces back to Issiak. "Got one, two-off from here, taking the ship there now, someone should check whether it's not by sheer bad luck neighbors to a discovered dimension. How long does Yeerk reproduction take?"

"New Yeerks are full size in under a year and can take hosts in half that time if there's a reason, though they won't have as consistent a hold on the host. Why?"

"We need demons, we can't infest them, people who are conceived adjacent to the daeva worlds will be daeva when they die."

"Conceived is not really the - but all right, we can get together a cluster in a world adjacent to the daeva worlds."

"It might not work, it seems worth trying. This ship's now in orbit over our new habitable planet. You want to go get spellbinders next. Not the Bell, they'll never stop chasing you if you take the Bell and she's indestructible anyway, but at least fifty others, you need thirty-six for indestructibility and I don't know if all of them can learn the charts. I am going to go move my kingdom somewhere out of their way while you do that."

"Could cluster a batch on the spellbinder planet as well," Issiak says.

"You should but you may run into timing problems there, I doubt it'll take more than a few hours for your hosts to be noticed missing and once they are they'll definitely conjure for Yeerks in known dimensions who aren't in your native universe. ...is it too late for you to impersonate your host, or is he spending too much time around people with flat Elf osanwë -"

"He's a fork and doesn't have much in the way of established behavior patterns that aren't just his original's," says Issiak, "but it would be a substantial risk. It's probably worth trying for a batch of spellbinder Yeerks; clustering doesn't take long. I'll take the daeva batch -" He gestures at Yomenië, who collects a separate set of would-be parents.

"All right. Now, as it stands, if they fork your hosts to try to use them to follow us to the new dimension I don't think they'll get anything, you didn't see the dimension we passed through. You should probably always use me or the Hork-Bajir hosts as your ride through that intermediate dimension, unless you've got a way of making sure the hosts can't see anything that'd let them identify the dimension for targeting."

"If you send us and not the hosts the mental images of the destinations literal blindfolds will suffice. We know what they know; it doesn't work the other way."

He sends a mental image of the lightleaper he parked in the intervening dimension to the Yeerks and not their hosts. "All right. I will meet you back here once I've moved my kingdom. I'll be identifying people who will make suitable hosts, do you have Yeerks who can be agreeable enough towards their hosts that an Elf I order to cooperate is likely to not die?"

"Agreeable here meaning?" (Yomenië and her tank skip off.)

"Willing to at least pretend to adopt a posture of 'I am impressed with you and it speaks well of you that your King chose you for this, we are allies working together', willing to let them sing occasionally. I think that'd be enough to keep someone alive indefinitely but it's probably the minimum."

"Many of them should be able to adapt to that arrangement."

"Great. I can also less complicatedly get you humans. Good skill." And off to Shadow.

When they reconvene they have a bunch of baby Yeerks in the shipboard tank, some future daeva and some future spellbinders.

And Shadow has been hopped minus its Valar - Edda - Space - Hell - Revelation - Buffer - to their new dimension. It survived the jump wholly intact and without its sun and moon at all inconvenienced, what with them being flying fruit. 

How convenient.

"Has anyone checked that we're not accidentally adjacent to any of the peal's known worlds?"

"Yes; we're clear."

"Great. Do you all want to come live in Shadow, which I'm renaming Independence, for the time being? Once you have daeva you can make planets more suited to your needs, but for now -"

"That would be much more convenient for the time being, yes."

Pop. "These are my people. I would be delighted to provide hosts in the spirit of this alliance, but if you take them without my leave that would damage the trust between us. Unrelatedly, your host's crying and shrieking is likely to be vaguely upsetting to everyone within ten miles."

"Even if you have difficulties producing hosts in a short time we'll have demon Yeerks who can leave us completely self-sustaining," says Issiak. "Is there a particular reason for me to be within ten miles of anyone?"

"None come to mind."

"I will want him replaced before he dies, does that seem feasible?"

"Yes, certainly, unless you think you have less than a day left."

"I think I have several."

"Do you have preferences for Elf or human?"

"Humans are lower-maintenance but if you have a particularly tractable Elf available the osanwë benefit may outweigh that."

"I expect to eventually have sufficiently tractable Elves available but am uncertain if I'll have them in a few days. I'll send you the best option available in forty-eight hours."

"Thank you. My lieutenant could also use a replacement in a similar time frame but is more likely to be convincing with the being impressed and tolerant of the occasional singing and such."

Nod. "If I find you an Elf who'll do it for a decade, are either of you likely to get attached and disinclined to move on in a decade?"

"We're neither of us the type; some of the lower ranks might be susceptible."

Nod. 

And he considers for a while and calls someone into his office and tells them that he's been hiding from his people for a long time the activities of the interdimensional collective which has been wavering on whether to oust and execute him, and that Independence is now safely out from under them by coalition with another people subjected to the same treatment, a people who innately have no senses and cannot see or sing or experience the beauty of the world without taking a host. And it is in the interests of this kingdom to help the Yeerks in this brief time before they are independent through the use of daeva, and to help them especially by lending eyes and hands and expertise, and is he willing to give the budding alliance a decade's service as a Yeerk's companion? 

It does not take forty-eight hours to find two convinced Elves. He teleports them over to Issiak.

And Ehtelion and Yomenië can be carefully exited and stunned while it's assessed if the new hosts are sufficient to allow the Space Elves to be put out of their misery.

Issiak's new host is nervous, but he served on the front lines of the war against Melkor, facing a fate infinitely worse than death, for King and country, and he keeps reminding himself of this, and he is certainly regarding himself as a volunteer for an onerous duty and not as a prisoner. He promised the King a decade's service and he can do that, assuming they go pretty places and sing occasionally.

Yes, yes, osanwë will save enough time to be worth it. (Issiak does not put it in these terms to his host.)

The Yeerks get to work building a Kandrona generator; they don't have an infinite supply of the vegetative substitute and it would be nice not to cut it too close waiting on the demons.

Independence throws a festival. Elves are actually more willing than humans to be hosts, both because they're more obedient to their King and because they can keep talking to their friends and working on their projects. Someone determines that you can even enchant metal while a host and at that point there's a great deal of demand for Yeerks, assuming said Yeerks are willing to keep to-be-enchanted rings on their fingers, so the inventors can focus on their enchanting and not worry about sustenance and maintenance of their house and home. Elves are mostly interested in decade-long contracts; the interested humans are mostly not willing to commit that much time. 

It does not inconvenience Yeerks at all to have rings on their hosts being enchanted and do the host maintenance they'd have to do anyway.

Midnight writes the peal. Letter to Cam: there's a recording of me swearing to the truth of the contents of this letter. We have no designs on you and yours. We would simply like to live independently of you. If you escalate our peaceful departure from your realm into a war, that war would harm many innocents; if you do not do that, we have no intention of disrupting your governance of people who want to live under you. 

And he finds a audio recorder in the lightleaper and swears to the contents of the letter. 

There's no response, but then, there wouldn't be.

There is a lack of an invading army, but that might mean the peal is trying as hard as they can and just hasn't found them yet. Once the daeva Yeerks are grown they'll be able to check. 

That's a ways off. (They could kill off the daeva Yeerks now, but Issiak prefers to have some opportunity to evaluate their personalities before granting them magic powers and indestructibility.)

What a reasonable preference. Issiak has osanwë and can get a great deal of insight into their personalities.

It's very handy, osanwë.

Independence would love some Yeerk help getting modern technology.

Yeerks can totally do that, although z-space transit won't work here.

That's okay, they're happy just to be getting computers and non-magic heavier-than-air flight.

Those are all totally doable. It'll be easier when the demon Yeerks are grown and dead and summoned.

To Elves that seems a short time away.

They move the lightleaper out of the buffer dimension in case Joy can target for a lightleaper. They can teleport with it when it's necessary to interact with the multiverse, which it isn't, desperately curious though Midnight is.

Two strangers appear in an empty field near a Yeerk pool. Humans, tall ones, a man and a woman, holding hands, both wearing obviously-magical glowing pendants. He's got a coily green thing like a very abstract snake, that tells onlookers about his warm heart and cynical, fatalistic sense of humour; she's got a ripply orange-pink rectangle that tells onlookers about her insatiable curiosity.

People are not supposed to suddenly appear near Yeerk pools, especially not with strange magical powers. They are promptly stunned. It's mildly surprising when that works. In go some Yeerks.

When the strangers wake up, they are confused and alarmed!

Their names are Sehana Irtezi Daeredh and Oravith-kelinre Aliharno Tyela. They are from a world called Nuime, which has never heard of the peal, although it's heard of an Arda. They are dimensional scouts. Sehana Daeredh - 'sehana' means refuge or sanctuary - was supposed to keep his wife safe from assorted strange hazards while she hopped them from world to world looking for interesting new places. He has no idea how the stun got past his defenses. He's pretty sure the world is doomed. Tyela, meanwhile, is too panicked to even think about that.

Well, that's interesting.

The Yeerks report to their superiors. They poke the souls to make sure that this won't be a telltale problem-of-some-kind, poking them through the host to whom they belong. They make sure they can use all the soul powers.

Sehana Daeredh's soul has a major passive shielding effect that protects him and anyone he touches against all sorts of things, not including the stun effect the Yeerks got him with but including most kinds of bodily harm and mind-affecting magic. He, or a Yeerk working through him, can extend the effect into a green-glowing aura with a radius of about six feet, but it takes serious concentration. His active soul powers are minor telekinesis and the ability to make sounds louder or quieter within about ten feet of him; both are Yeerk-accessible.

Tyela's soul has a teleportation power which only recently extended to work between dimensions. Her Yeerk can operate it as well as she can. Her soul also gives her a perfect memory and enhanced vision, which her Yeerk can access just as well as she does, although the Yeerk does not get a perfect memory of its own just from inhabiting her. She doesn't see quite as well as an Elf, but it's close.

Daeredh keeps himself entertained by imagining all the possible ways this unexpected development could lead to the world being doomed. It's not hard to think of a few. If the Yeerks took Emperor Esarkan, they'd have Nuime, and the Emperor's security arrangements take into account the fact that he considers assassination a form of peaceful protest. (Emperor Esarkan is very immortal.)

Tyela's chosen coping mechanism, once she gets past her initial panic, is to remember all the facts about rocks that she knows. She knows so, so many facts about rocks.

Well, this is promising. If the peal is chasing them then having magic powers the peal doesn't know to expect is pretty important.

The Yeerks send the King a courtesy notification and Issiak puts together a small strike force with which to collect Emperor Esarkan. The fact that the souls world knows of a Flat Arda complicates matters - osanwë does Yeerk detection - but should be possible to work around.

Some peaceful protestors with stunners and little sloshy containers make their way to Emperor Esarkan.

Emperor Esarkan does have security.

Emperor Esarkan's security is not prepared for stunners.

He is mildly surprised when the peaceful protestors break into his office. He is just as susceptible to stunning as everyone else they've encountered so far.

When he opens his eyes, he isn't the one opening them, or the one sitting up, and he definitely isn't the one making eye contact with the Elves lurking in his office. Presumably there's some conversation going on there but he is not party to it.

If he could operate his body, it would be laughing.

I suggest you surrender immediately, he thinks in the direction of whoever is trying to conquer his empire.

Oh? says someone.

If you start doing this sort of thing to my subjects, I'm going to be increasingly annoyed with you. I can afford to be forgiving, but my mercy is not infinite. I have no idea of your numbers or your capabilities besides what you have demonstrated to me, but I will be very, very surprised if anything you've got can hold up against Dawn-shining Taliar.

He can guess that they've got the scouts - he should've sent Nezhefena; Nezhefena would've been safe - and he's pretty sure they got this notion from Sehana Daeredh's tendency to catastrophize. Well, as a counterbalance, he can point out to them that Elaneth-imire Kazaryne Taliar swats gods like flies. If these people want to try capturing Taliar, they are welcome to do so. Esarkan expects to be highly entertained by Taliar's account of their defeat.

If his occupant is nervous, it doesn't display that to Esarkan in any way.

That's all right. Esarkan is very patient. He can wait for them to surrender or be destroyed, whichever comes first.

His soul's powers are almost universally passive; the immortality takes up most of it, and the rest is a sort of general sense of how his empire is doing, with an attentional boost that lets him keep track of it all. When his occupant doesn't respond further immediately, he turns his attention to contemplating the input from that sense. He is completely unworried.

The Yeerks want soulbearers. Soulbearers will make everything else easier.

Esarkan has pretty good wherewithal to collect them and the Yeerks can whisk them away to be stunned and infested.

This works for the first fourteen soulbearers they try.

And then the fifteenth one wakes up just like the rest, and screams internally much like the rest, and is promptly engulfed in white-hot flames, which is new and different. The Yeerk pool where this operation is being conducted is vaporized in the blast. Outlying buildings are scattered across the countryside in molten flaming pieces. For twenty miles in every direction, the heat cooks birds in the sky and fuses soil into glass.

The Kandrona generator range is not actually that big. That's all the pools and all the Yeerks in them at the moment boiled away. There's still the ship tank with the vegetation supply, and anyone who was in a host and farther away than that; that's all. They scramble to figure out what happened; they send someone to summon the baby daeva-Yeerk casualties; they send the King word -

He hops over to somewhere within Elf-sight of her but well outside the apparent radius. He's also outside osanwë-range, inconveniently. He watches her anxiously. There's that other habitable planet to teleport her to if she looks likely to blow up his kingdom.

There is presumably a soulbearer somewhere inside that enormous white fireball. It shrinks slowly; molten glass begins to cool at the edges, pingpingping.

And then, abruptly and without warning, a lightning-fast lance of flame darts out toward the King, obliterating everything in its path. It's a mere sixty feet in diameter, so there will at least be less collateral damage on this one.

They don't have Yeerk spellbinders to make people indestructible yet; this is fatal.

If there is anyone left with teleportation capabilities, they might want to do something about the giant fireball rolling across the landscape at a human's walking pace—

—oh, never mind, looks like someone already did.

"...Nezhefena?" asks the fireball.

"Please cool off so I can reunite you with your husband," says Nezhefena. "If you melt this island I don't have another one lined up."

The flames dissipate. Aeleva stands at the center of a crater. Nezhefena is next to her, untouched by the heat. "...I suppose I can trust you," she says. "Your soul wouldn't let - whatever that was - happen to you, would it."

"Corino sent me to figure out where all the disappearing soulbearers were going. Can you shed any light on that?"

"I didn't know soulbearers were disappearing until they disappeared me. They must've got Esarkan. They do something to make you fall unconscious, and then - I woke up and something was controlling my body - and that fucking—"

Her son chooses that moment to contact her.

Hey, is now a good time for a visit?

Your husband has been kidnapping soulbearers, she says, and sends him the memories - waking up a prisoner in her own body, blasting everything in range, inhabiting the fire of her soul and finally seeing him show up to watch. If you want to resurrect him and ask why, I won't stop you.

...I, um, I feel fairly certain he hasn't, says Taliar, blinking up at the entirely non-incinerated Maitimo in whose lap he is presently sitting.

...but someone has, presumably. We should go -

Yeah. He tells his mother, Something's very screwy here - I don't need to resurrect my husband, he's right here. Send Nezhefena, we need to be closer to this.

...congratulations, says Aeleva.

And aloud, "Please bring me to my husband and then bring us our son."

"Of course."

Shadows enfold them - Aeleva is with Corino, standing on an ice sheet in the middle of the open ocean - she doesn't even unwrap herself from the shadows, just vanishes right back into them to emerge in Arda in front of Taliar and Maitimo.

"I'm to bring you to your parents," she says to Taliar. "Emergency."

"I've heard. Both of us, please."

Shadows. Ice.

"Esarkan's been suborned somehow and he spent all morning summoning soulbearers into the imperial palace to be kidnapped," says Corino.

"They can control your body like it's someone else's," says Aeleva. "If there are any left after they tried to do it to me."

...Taliar reaches out his senses across the planet. He demands detail. What is wrong with Esarkan?

Well you see he's got this slug in his brain.

Now he doesn't.

Now no one in Nuime does.

He lets out a little delighted laugh and then says - "and the world they came from, or do we need to talk to Esarkan first -"

"Esarkan first, I think. Nezhefena, it should be safe to take us to the palace now. I eliminated the problem from this world at least."

Shadows.

Now they are all standing in Esarkan's office. Lucky for them that it's a pretty spacious one.

"I told them they should have surrendered," says Esarkan, smiling faintly. "Good to see you, troublemaker."

"Do you have anything to add to my picture of the situation, which is 'mysterious brain slugs were using you to kidnap soulbearers to another world to be given brain slugs of their very own'?"

He shakes his head.

"My love, do you want to come with me and Nezhefena to the world with the other you who was mysteriously in league with the brain slugs?"

"Or, more plausibly, brain-slugged himself" he says, "but yes, let's."

Taliar realizes that he was assuming the other Maitimo couldn't possibly have been brain-slugged because it seemed too awful to think about. He takes a moment to straighten himself out on that, then nods to Nezhefena.

Here they are, near Aeleva's crater while still being far enough away that the heat is merely uncomfortable.

Taliar supposes that if he were being maximally merciful he would make some attempt to communicate with the brain slugs before he kills them all -

- but he means to have general resurrection someday and their tactics do not advertise an ability to negotiate in good faith.

He reaches out his senses. He burns slugs.

That gets all of them except the daeva baby slugs, who are resistant to burning.

Well, none of those are in anyone's brain, so they can wait.

"Time to resurrect the other you?" he asks, looking up at Maitimo.

"Yes, let's."

He looks for the local Maitimo with his spirit-sense, and—

—those are mind-altering oaths that's even worse than a brain slug my love, what do I do—

Make them go away -

They go away.

He contacts the spirit.

Hi. I'm Dawn-shining Taliar. If you want me to resurrect you, come this way— and a path to follow.

(He is having serious trouble with the notion of a Maitimo under mind-altering oaths - his thoughts keep flinching away from it, it hurts to think about - he needs to get his head together, this is an emergency, but oh that poor Maitimo, no Taliar of his very own and brain-slugs all over his kingdom and mind-altering oaths...)

That Maitimo accepts resurrection.

A moment later when that Maitimo regains his senses, he is lying in an improbable patch of fresh soft grass amid the charred flaming wreckage that is the rest of this area. The whole area is bathed in a gentle golden light emanating from Taliar's soul, and the light carries the soul's sense-of-personality - his drive to bring freedom and happiness and fulfillment and exaltation to everyone, his cheerful love of accomplishing the impossible, his integrity and insight and compassion and cleverness, his inexhaustible will.

And there must be a Silmaril around here somewhere, or - no, that's the soul hanging around this other Maitimo's neck, the Maitimo against whom Taliar is fretfully huddled; and the sense-of-personality in his soul is faint and slow and subtle, a whisper under Taliar's shout, but still enough to distinguish him as one of Midnight's type.

Also they're married. They are very much married. It somehow shows in Taliar's entirely human eyes, and there's a hint of it in the light of his soul too, if that wasn't enough.

He's letting the new Maitimo see all his thoughts - it would just feel wrong to do otherwise - and mostly right now his thoughts are concern for the new Maitimo's well-being. He knows one shouldn't rush newly reembodied Elves, but he so desperately wants this impossible duplicate of his husband to be okay, how can he help him be okay...

You can explain what happened, you can get me another necklace -

He organizes his memories of relevant information: brain slugs captured his Emperor and kidnapped his mother, his mother exploded at them, his mother thought this Maitimo was the one she knows and in her rage concluded that he was in league with the brain slugs and killed him - she's still a little iffy on their relationship because of all the rape and torture, even though Taliar himself is fine with it - and then she got in contact with Taliar and he killed all the brain slugs in Nuime and came here and killed all the brain slugs in this Arda except for the inexplicably indestructible ones and then he erased this Maitimo's oaths and resurrected him. Sorry if he wanted to keep any of those, but some of them were mind-altering and Taliar kind of freaked out. He can re-swear any that he wants back.

...and what do you mean by another necklace?

I had an eidetic memory necklace that gave me an interdimensional teleport, I would like to have it back. The genocide in your dimension sounds like it was unavoidable but most of the Yeerks in my dimension were children and all of them were partnered with consenting hosts.

Everything else he is still processing and is not going to comment on.

I somewhat regret being so hasty about it, but given the information I had at the time, leaving any of them alive wasn't worth the risk.

(They can go on the internal list alongside all the baby orcs from when he cleaned out Angband, and someday when he has general resurrection and has built enough paradises to hold everyone he'll bring them all back...)

I can get you another necklace if you know where to find one that isn't in use, or if you can get me the instruction set I can make you one pretty trivially.

The risk being what, exactly? It does not sound like they can affect you. I'll have my people bring me a necklace.

Taliar isn't actually categorically immune to things. He'd be moderately inconvenienced if someone dropped another mountainside on him. But in any case the risk is more about the things he doesn't know: he doesn't know in detail how interdimensional transportation works between any set of worlds that isn't Nuime and his husband's Arda, he doesn't know any of the capabilities of the brain slugs except for taking over people's brains and those strange weapons they knocked people out with.

If they had access to an interdimensional teleport capable of taking passengers, and were willing to sacrifice someone to it or had a way to survive the trip, and were very quick-thinking, they could've put Taliar way out in the airless void between the stars, in this world or some other one, and then they could've grabbed all the dead souls from that crater over there and a couple of soulbearers with resurrection powers and run off to yet another world where Nezhefena wouldn't be able to easily follow them unless they happened to steal a soulbearer she had met. If they had other powers he hasn't even thought of, they could have done other things he can't predict.

They came into his world unannounced and started kidnapping and enslaving his people using terrifying otherworldly powers, and Esarkan suggested that they surrender before Taliar found them, and instead they kidnapped and attempted to enslave Taliar's mother. This implies both that their interests were very fundamentally hostile to his, and that they thought they could take him.

He does regret killing all those people. But he stands by his risk assessment.

Well. The threat to your world has been eliminated. Do you have additional business here?

(he doesn't have a Taliar - given the circumstances of their meeting he probably doesn't want one but Taliar is nonetheless strongly tempted to ask his soul for some kind of self-duplication power - it's painful to know you could make someone so happy, if things were just a little different - )

I guess I don't, he says. Where's Nezhefena - ah, she's over in the crater, picking up the souls of the soulbearers Aeleva incinerated and taking them back home to be resurrected. We can go as soon as Shadow-cloaked Nezhefena finishes collecting the dead. If you're interested in further contact with Nuime, and I don't blame you if you aren't, you can visit Esarkan's palace or send a representative - will your interdimensional teleport take you there without trouble? He's visited the palace with Maitimo, he has crystal-clear memories of it, it looks like so. Esarkan won't hold a grudge even if he thinks you condoned or supported the invasion, which he probably will because he tends to assume the worst of people until proven otherwise.

He glances at his alt.

You want one. If he does happen to manifest the power for it.

He murdered my people. If they hadn't been slugs, if you'd been invaded by a human civilization with scary powerful capabilities, would he have popped into their home dimension and turned them all to ash - because if so, I should put him in vacuum somewhere, that's how the Valar reacted when someone tried to invade Valinor -

(he sends this to Taliar, too, because why not -)

Maybe he should ask his soul for general resurrection first, then.

He doesn't know what he would've done if it had been humans. The nature of the brain slugs was relevant on multiple levels - they're really easy to tell apart from things that are not brain slugs; the population was small; he couldn't actually tell that their children were children, or he would've left those ones alone; given their displayed tactics, once Taliar got over his instinctive aversion to thinking about a Maitimo being enslaved by a brain slug, it seemed rather more plausible that they had invaded this Arda the same way they invaded Nuime than that they were here by the King's leave...

Don't put him anywhere.

I didn't say I was going to, I said I don't want one. The additional safety against interdimensional invasion doesn't seem worth the risk that any attempted interdimensional invaders will be instantly extinguished as a species. Unless their infants are conveniently distinguishable to human senses. I have a lot of work to do; we were in the middle of a lot of important work and most of it's now lost but some might be salvageable. Does his world have computers?

I haven't heard of them.

They were teaching us. Please just go away.

Nezhefena's almost done. Do you want me to come back when I have general resurrection?

There's another habitable planet in this dimension, I was going to take whoever had caused the giant horrible fireball there so she didn't hurt my people but then she murdered me - you can put them there - although they'll starve without a generator and no one alive knows how to make one -

Taliar remembers his mother's perspective on the event. Terrified and bewildered and utterly lost to rage, and there he was looking like a confirmation of all her worst fears... if he wants an apology from her, he won't have trouble getting one, once she's had some time to calm down.

If they'll starve without something that no one alive knows how to make, it sounds like mere general resurrection won't adequately solve the problem of them being dead and I'm going to need something more complicated. Should I go away and assume that if you want to talk about it you can send someone to Esarkan's palace and ask for me?

You can assume that. 

All right.

I'm sorry.

He is going to cry on his husband for a good long while at the next available opportunity - no amount of practical necessity is ever going to make killing children feel okay, and it's worse somehow that he didn't even know - at least with the baby orcs he knew he was doing it, and knew for sure that he could bring them back one day... well. Someday he will have general resurrection, and someday he will have a solution to the other practical issues, and that won't make it okay but it'll be a good start. (Are the ones he couldn't burn going to starve to death, that's horrible - well, if this Maitimo wants his help with it he knows how to ask - and he's not going to want his help with it because Taliar is just a Vala to him, and that hurts too, he's failed so badly at such a fundamental part of who he is - he could've made this Maitimo so happy...)

He catches Nezhefena's eye and nods to her.

Shadows.

Esarkan's office.

"Well? How did it go?"

...he clings to his husband and bursts into tears.

"That well, eh?"

He hugs him. "He killed them all instantly. Turns out that the alternate universe version of me's planet had an agreement where consenting people'd host the slug things and in exchange the slug things, which were from a much more technologically advanced civilization, would teach them their technology. It is unclear if my alt knew that on your planet they were kidnapping unconsenting people, I don't think he had any influence over what they did but he didn't consider himself out from under a threat either. And he can't stand Taliar, which I should have predicted - love, I'm sorry -"

he could have made him so happy and he fucked it up—

and he still doesn't know which ones were children—

Hug. "We don't even have two of you and if we did I bet it'd work out all right, he can't have the objection that you're too virtuous for his tastes."

They could have two of him in three days if Taliar thought the second one would be - accepted in good faith, would have the same chance with the new Maitimo that Taliar did with his husband.

"Two of you?" inquires Esarkan.

Sniffle.

"Is that 'one is more than enough' or 'why can't we have five', I can't tell from here..."

"I'm not entirely sure myself."

Hug. "I can - try to guess - it might depend if the fork would be as powerful as you -"

"Does my emperor need me for anything else or can I go cuddle my husband somewhere—"

(and he's not actually sure how powerful the copy would be - might depend how he went about it - if they'd met a new Maitimo under more congenial circumstances and he'd looked at Taliar and decided he definitely wanted one, Taliar thinks his preferred approach would've been to sit down with him and explain everything about himself and his relationship with his husband, and then create a copy of himself from exactly the moment before he arrived in Arda, and tell the copy 'hello, I'm you from a year in the future and I'm matchmaking you with this inexplicable duplicate of my husband, I swear on my soul it'll all work out'... that copy would have the same power level Taliar had when he arrived in Arda, he's sure.)

"No, go on. The crisis is over," says Esarkan, waving a hand. "Congratulations on your marriage."

"Thank you."

Awwww. I am - deeply flattered and delighted that you'd want to do that for an alt of me. I don't think that approach will work. I bet we can think of one that can, if you're very sure you want that.

And now Taliar would very much like to be picked up and carried off to his family's rooms in the palace where he is very sure they will be left alone to snuggle as long as they like.

He's - you, as far as I can tell, he's exactly you but a less lucky you - I want you to be happy and I want other people who are you to also be happy and I have the means to make people-who-are-you very very happy in a way I'm not sure anyone or anything else can. Of course I want to do that. But - I'm not just going to drop a copy of myself in his lap and walk away with no explanation - it'd be a disaster, they have no Melkor to fight, and without that I need him to be actively in favour of the project, the other me won't be able to look past the thing with Findekano if it's still going on - if it's not still going on and I swear on my soul that they're going to be happy together, the other me will stay with him even after finding out, but I can't think of many other ways around that, and I can't swear on my soul that they're going to be happy together unless I genuinely believe it's a sure thing. Which I would if I hadn't completely fucked everything up with the other you before ever meeting him.

Even if the other you's in love with him, he'd leave if he found out -

It's not absolutely certain that he would, but it's pretty likely. And - some of the things that got us to where we are -

Soul-touching, bad days, rape and torture - those are not things Taliar would've agreed to if he'd arrived in a peaceful kingdom with his happily married future self offhandedly suggesting he date the king. If he swears on his soul that it'll work out, that's enough of an assurance for the other Taliar to decide to - put all of himself into the attempt. And Taliar is pretty sure that Taliars who are going to successfully date Maitimos need to do that. Theirs is not the kind of success that can be duplicated in half-measures; it's all or nothing.

The other option, though it's not very ethical, is to not give him the means to leave, would he put his whole self into making it work out that way?

...he might, but I could also see him, for example, killing himself out of spite... I'm pretty sure it's not feasible to prevent him from doing that, all he'd need to do is want it the right way, wait three days, and then ever be conscious and in his right mind again.

I suspect that if we tell my alt that could happen my alt'd be more careful than that - I was, with Findekáno - but I understand why you don't want to rely on my alt's ability to manage him into trying when my alt doesn't like you and might honestly just hurt him for fun -

- actually, that's exactly what he'd do, my alt'd resent being manipulated and decide to prove that he wouldn't like his you and he could get his you to hate him, just to hurt the real you -

...depends how hard he tries, I guess... if I was sending a copy of me into that I'd give him all my memories of you and explain the situation and let him decide whether he wanted to risk it, and if he went in, he would end up either killing himself or succeeding, I think.

I do not consider that an acceptable risk. I want yous to be happy, I don't want to torture a you even if it does help the me -

Snuggle. Aw. I love you. If he didn't kill himself, I'm pretty sure he'd come out of it with no regrets, same as me - but yeah, it would be... different. So. I think we need some degree of cooperation from your alt or we're not getting anywhere.

He doesn't have a Findekáno and he misses him desperately, that much was obvious.

...I did not pick up on that. Well. That complicates some things and simplifies others... I wonder what happened to his Findekáno. Dead...? Farther away than that?

Dead he'd have been more excited you can do reembodiments.

Yeah, figures.

They have arrived in his family's rooms and now he can curl up in his husband's lap. He does that.

Well. How do we get your alt to accept the gift of a me? I could give him all my memories of you, in the hope that he will come to understand the appeal... of course it'll also give him an in-depth guide to refer to if he wants to try to break his Taliar out of spite...

I - think what I'd do is say to him - you'll like him, how vulnerable do you need him to be in order to give yourself a chance to like him - and I'm pretty sure I'd know if he meant to break his out of spite.

And his Taliar can be made pretty arbitrarily vulnerable. I could make a copy from the night my soul fell apart, if I had to. I'd have some trouble convincing him to go hand his soul to your alt, but I bet I can come up with an angle.

That I'm pretty certain would work. If you could convince him. 

I have all these lovely memories of our relationship to convince him with, he says.

Show him the explanation of why Maitimo is not Nahira, show him both bad days, show him trust songs, show him soul contact from its best moments to its worst - if it works, if he's convinced enough to try it at all, he'll go in with his soul already willing to pretend it is being touched by strangers for Maitimo-alt's benefit. And he will go in competitive, wanting to prove that he can handle anything the first Taliar could.

Well. Then, we could do it. Should we?

...I want to. I'm... I guess I'm afraid that it won't work out. I should have more faith in myself. But I - don't feel very successful or brilliant or good at accomplishing the impossible right now.

...hug. You saved the world from invading aliens.

And then followed them home and murdered their children.

They did have an interdimensional teleport, your strategic assessment was entirely sound - they could have taken you and put you in a sun somewhere where you'd die and come back over and over -

He shudders. There's a part of him that feels like that would be preferable to having committed near-genocide. But then Nuime would've been vulnerable without him - Nezhefena could've pulled him out of a sun but they might've been able to use some sort of interdimensional trickery to make him harder to find, delay her until they could get away with a bunch of soulbearers to enslave... he was right. It's just that being right doesn't make it okay. If he was really the person he aspires to be, he would've figured out some clever way to guarantee everyone's safety long enough to negotiate a truce.

I love you and I love the ridiculous standards you hold yourself to and we'll figure out how to really truly win but for that we need my alt in a more cooperative mood and so we need to seduce him.

I love you too, says Taliar. He hugs his brilliant beautiful husband and manages a smile. So much. Forever. All right, let's plan out exactly how we are going to send my alt to seduce yours. Are you going to wait until he shows up to talk about something and then bring it up - is he going to show up to talk about something...

I bet he'll send someone.

Be a little awkward to send an 'are you sure you don't want a present' through a diplomatic representative...

...and on a mostly unrelated note, it occurs to him that in the time between creating his alt and sending his alt to go seduce Maitimo's, there will be two Taliars around here... he's pretty sure that being borrowed before he's sent away will if anything help convince the second Taliar to go, if Maitimo would like to indulge himself and if he thinks his alt won't mind...

...also he should come up with a distinguishing name for the second Taliar. A different soulname, maybe, it's the most obvious thing. But his runner-up was Raika-linsi and the connotations seem really unhelpful, not to mention painfully ironic if the copy is going to be created as of the moment when Taliar's soul was the dimmest it's ever been...

Maybe I should ask Nezhefena for a ride over there so I can make the offer and become more confident he won't just torture his present.

You could do that. Would he object?

I don't think so. He's lonely and nervous, once he calms down he'll regret not being more civil -

Well, luckily for him, I don't mind him being rude to me about me coming to his world and murdering his friends.

Yes, but most people'd mind and so it wasn't very strategic of him.

He had all my thoughts the whole time. Plenty of opportunity to notice how I felt about it.

Hug. I think I'll do that, but I think I'll give him a few weeks first. I think he was sincere about having a lot to do.

Snuggle.

Yeah, okay. Makes sense. And it gives me plenty of time to turn up a self-duplication power, I guess.

And if you can't convince your self to try it, then better I don't offer.

Taliar smiles slightly. Oh, I can convince him. Though I might want you to help.

I will enjoy that tremendously.

I love you so much.

I know. I'm so enormously lucky.

And they wait a few weeks. After two of them, an Elf shows up and asks for a meeting with Esarkan on behalf of the dimension of Independence.

Esarkan is happy to meet with this Elf.

The Elf introduces herself and says that the multiverse is big, hundreds of discovered planets, and most of it ruled by this well-intentioned but very overbearing collection of extremely powerful meddlers, and the collection had decided to deny Independence technologies like space travel and computers (computers are like this) and Independence had decided to skip a couple dimensions over and out of their influence, and they took a few hundred infants with them who would have grown up to have some of the powers that would make it possible to interact safely with the multiverse but, um.

The Elf understands why Taliar decided to just wipe out the whole species but anyway now they have no access to spellbinders and all the useful things they can do and no access to anyone who can explain advanced technology and they're trying to figure out how to reconstruct and would like to let their neighbors know what's going on.

"Well, your neighbours thank you for the courtesy," says Esarkan. "In your opinion, would it be worthwhile for me to send someone looking for these meddlers of yours and see if they'll be more generous to me than they were to you? I'll be happy to pass on the benefits if it works."

"Looking for them is straightforward; we can take them to you if you'd like. The path from your world to their collective runs through us, though, and the King tentatively expects they'll execute him on sight at this point, so we'd want a week's warning to move our world again to somewhere they can't find it. Our assessment is that if you don't mention us they will be happy to meet you and probably willing to share computers and almost certainly unwilling to share for example the interdimensional teleport, though that we can share with you ourselves."

"I'd like to do that, then. Take as long as you need to move your world, and let me know when you're settled."

"Certainly. They have mind-readers not limited by osanwë's, ah, politeness, but there are no instances known to us of them using it without consent save against known enemies and in the middle of a war. If in a week you have some scouts ready to 'stumble upon' the collective we can arrange for that."

"I'll have an appropriate scout ready to go. Should we keep quiet about the slug invasion too? Pretend none of it ever happened?"

"Would you care to meet with the King and get the full context, and thereby decide what cover story best serves our interests?"

"Yes, that sounds like a great idea."

So shortly thereafter he teleports in. "Emperor Esarkan."

"King Maitimo. Delighted to meet you," he says dryly. "Again. I haven't actually heard an explanation for why there are two of you."

"Oh, it's much worse than that, there's ten of us. The multiverse has recurring patterns, and Arda is one such pattern. About one in every fifty worlds you land on if you go world-hopping is an Arda, and they have all the same people in them. I've never heard of a parallel for Nuimë or any other versions of you, but my access to information about the multiverse was extremely restricted."

"Ten of you. Oh my," says Esarkan. "Well, what can you tell me?"

Quite a lot. Here are the worlds in the multiverse; here is their magic, which they won't give out to prevent acquiring unwanted competitors for power, here is how they met, scared the evil god Maitimo had a ceasefire with into running off to a torture dimension, asked Maitimo to dismantle his kingdom so they could execute him without disrupting anything, backtracked on that after a couple years and said they'd only do that if they had a superior solution for running his country. And then an anxious decade while they tried to learn anything at all about the technology and magic their world was being denied.

"Then they encountered the world to which the Yeerks were native and decided to go to war with them. I know almost nothing of the war, and knew nothing at all of it until a Yeerk controlling an Elf with the teleport spell arrived, asked to see me, and asked if I would ally with him in escaping the peal. I agreed, teleported my world over here, helped them give birth to a few hundred spellbinder-potential Yeerks and a few hundred daeva-potential Yeerks, and resettled us in Independence. The Yeerks had agreements with consenting hosts in my kingdom. I was notified that scouts from your dimension had landed on top of them and that they were sending people after them, and then a giant fireball swallowed most of them and Taliar killed the rest, which I would say would teach them a valuable lesson but they are not around to learn it.

So the peal knows that I aided the Yeerks in departing their jurisdiction and might suspect, if they hear about the Yeerks, that I'm somewhere to be found, but I don't think that'd color their impression of you too badly if you did decide you preferred to share it."

"I find that it's generally simplest to tell as few lies as possible," he says. "So, the brain slugs showed up and tried to conquer my world, and Dawn-shining Taliar dealt with them. This made me curious and cautious, which is why I'm sending Shadow-cloaked Nezhefena scouting to find out where they might have come from and whether there might be any more on the way. Does that sound to you like it'll hold up?"

"They'll be excited to have someone with tracking abilities that work across adjacency and they may want her to demonstrate them to track down other people who've escaped their jurisdiction."

"Nezhefena can only track people she has personally met," says Esarkan, smiling slightly. "As far as they know, you don't qualify."

"How are you claiming she's tracking the Yeerks, then?"

"She spoke with me while they had me. Briefly, but it doesn't take much."

"Should work. I apologize if your experience was an unpleasant one, by the way."

"Thank you," he says. "It was no more than mildly frustrating, but my subjects suffered much worse."

He sighs slightly.

"I really wish they'd surrendered when I suggested it. It would've turned out better for everyone involved."

"I am mildly surprised they didn't. They hadn't independently been doing any conquering, they must have realized they had more to lose than to gain - I think they had a very unhealthy incentive structure back in their original universe, the commander-executes-you-for-failure sort, and perhaps they never shook themselves out of it."

"It's unfortunate. I prefer when people don't need to die, generally."

"Your, uh, subject Taliar seemed to think he could bring them back - he can't, because of the spellbinding, but he was under that impression."

"What does the spellbinding have to do with it?"

"Spellbinders when they're born have a sort of - phantom spirit animal, who only they can interact with, and who they can instantiate in the real world once they're older. No magic resurrection method known to me gets a dead familiar back or restores someone with their familiar."

"I don't see what difference that's supposed to make to Dawn-shining Taliar," says Esarkan. "Accomplishing the impossible is his favourite pastime."

Well. Second favourite, these days, but never mind that.

"...yes, I - noticed that. Is the story public, there?"

"What story are you referring to?"

"How he met his husband. How they have a marriage considered metaphysically impossible in my home world."

"There are details of the first part that aren't common knowledge, because they would tend to alarm people. The second thing, I'm told, has to do with them both being soulbearers. The metaphysics of Elven marriage don't interest me especially, so I declined to ask for details."

"Would tend to alarm people -"

"I'm not the best source on this; you might do better to ask your alt, or Taliar, or Taliar's father, or apparently my granddaughter for some reason. But I can tell you what I know if you're curious."

"I think I caused Taliar some injury when speaking to him and would hesitate to talk to him again without a little more context, but if you'd advise me to speak to one of those other people I can certainly do that."

"You'd know better than I would whether you want to talk to your alt. I can promise you won't injure anyone by speaking to Corino, and I'm sure he'd be happy to talk to you."

"Excellent. Where do I meet him - also, in the case interdimensional contact goes poorly, do you want or is there someone you would designate to have the teleport? It can pick up a whole planet or anything less than that, fairly good specificity, and it has a range of anywhere in this or adjacent dimensions."

"If the supply is limited, I want Nezhefena to have it. If the supply is slightly less limited than that, Nezhefena and myself. If I get three, the third will be Taliar. Corino spends most of his time at the Elven settlement these days, but I expect he'd prefer to meet you here."

"I have a total of three, the rest were destroyed in the blast. I'll get Nezhefena one; the process takes about three hours. When would it be convenient for me to meet Corino?"

"I can have him here by tomorrow, if that's convenient for you."

"That works fine. It's been a pleasure. Thank you."

"Likewise," he says, smiling. "You're just as much of a joy to talk to as the other you."

He smiles and pops home.

Esarkan contacts Corino. Corino is at the palace the next day.

He meets him. "Hello. I was discussing with your emperor how to share our resources, and it became apparent I'll be running into your son a fair bit, and last time we met I think I hurt him. I'd - like to have enough context to avoid doing that."

"I'm happy to help," says Corino. "What happened between you?"

"The Yeerks in my world had an agreement with me that they'd take only consenting hosts, for fixed durations of time, and they'd teach us the technology of their lost homeworld. That works better in our world than yours because everyone has osanwë and a non-consenting host could easily make themself known. There were also a lot of Yeerk children. The, ah, explosion killed many of them, and Taliar on arriving killed all the rest. He then resurrected me, and was - concerned for me - and I told him that however strategically defensible the genocide I had friends to grieve and hoped he'd go away."

"He was upset," says Corino. "But he doesn't blame you, if you were worried about that. What kind of context are you looking for?"

"I don't think I know what I'm looking for. My approval was important to him; why? Why was he upset?"

"I don't think it's your approval he was looking for, exactly," says Corino. "You're more or less the same person as his husband. He wants you to be happy. He regrets bringing you grief. Separately, he also regrets killing the Yeerks and especially their children. He grieves any time he finds himself in a situation where not everyone can come out alive and happy and safe; he grieves more when he has to harm someone to protect someone else. And then he does his best to make sure that next time he'll do better and no one will need to get hurt at all."

"And how did the two of them end up married?"

"They met when Taliar was inexplicably transported from Nuime to my son-in-law's Arda. They were having a problem with an evil god. Taliar offered to help. Then he fell in love. I'm missing some of the details, but they had been together for some time when Taliar found out that Maitimo's other boyfriend was being kept against his will. He didn't take it well. And... Do you know what happens when someone touches a soulbearer's soul?"

"No."

"It's considered the worst imaginable form of torture. People who have had it happen to them usually can't even describe the experience afterward, but they all tend to agree that they'd rather die than experience it again. While it's happening it's completely incapacitating; the soulbearer can't move or think or use their magic at all."

He smiles slightly.

"I don't know exactly what the shape of the dilemma was, although I could guess. I do know that Taliar's solution was to take off his soul-necklace and throw it at him."

His guesses are hard to put into words, so he sends them as thoughts. He's got it about right; he knows his son very well.

"After that, well, Taliar hasn't told me how they got to where they were when I first saw them together—" he sends the memory "—but I know that it involved a lot of that same willingness to make himself overwhelmingly vulnerable, and I know that Taliar doesn't regret any of it in the slightest. He's made that very clear."

"And so he was hoping I was - what, on the market -"

"Hmm?"

"He was thinking about how he could make me happy if I wanted one which I wouldn't - he was upset -"

"Ah. My son and his husband are... very, very good for each other. I don't think it would be a stretch to say they are each the best thing in the other's life. And I expect that when Taliar saw you, he wanted to give you a chance at that same happiness, and he regretted making such an awful first impression because it meant that you'd have every reason to reject the gift."

"All right. Thank you. I'm - glad that they're happy."

"So am I," he says. "And I'm glad I could help you understand my son a little better. It's funny how you can have someone's whole mind to look at and still not be able to get a clear picture, isn't it?"

"I'm also not used to people letting me read their minds. Is that conventional here?"

"No, it's just Taliar being Taliar."

"I see. Thank you. That's all I wanted to ask about."

He nods. "You're welcome. Anytime."

"What did your son end up doing about Maitimo's boyfriend?"

"After the war, Maitimo had Taliar erase Findekano's oaths, resurrect his family and a hundred or so of their friends and associates, and send them all to live in Nuime. They're settling in nicely; I'm working as their liaison because I'm two thousand years old and therefore just about patient enough to avoid rushing them."

"I see."

"It's enjoyable work."

Nod. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Anything I can help you with while I'm here?"

"Not that I can think of, but thank you for offering."

"You are very welcome." Pop.

He relates this conversation to his son near-verbatim.

...huh.

Hmm?

I honestly can't tell what he thinks of me at this point.

He doesn't like you but you can do resurrection and he doesn't otherwise have a way to do that and he's mildly curious about the soul-touching thing.

...it's weird that there's a you who doesn't like me. I mean. I get why. But it's weird.

I know. I'm sorry. I bet we can figure out how to fix it.

I'm not even really upset about it for its own sake, Da called that one right - what upsets me is that I could make him so happy, and - he doesn't want me to - and I don't want to disregard that just because I think I know better, but, well, we definitely know better...

I don't know that he's unhappy. He seems - tired, more than unhappy.

I could make him happier.

Yes you could.

He grins.

Well. Think it's time for you to go talk to him yet?

Probably.

Snuggle.

Let me know how it goes, I guess...

His self-duplication power has come in by now. It fits in his marriage-expanded soul with plenty of room to spare.

And he goes off to meet his alt. Hello, he says once he's secured a meeting. 

Hello.

I ended up deciding to have him because he'd spent weeks wandering around my castle bubbling with how much he was in love with me, and Findekáno'd been out for a year and a half, and I thought, well, why not, he's easy to please and so obedient and he adores me - and he was, he was a delight, uncomplicated - his world doesn't have any taboos on it - and new to everything and convinced he was the luckiest boy in the world - and then he found out about Findekáno and his soul magic collapsed on him - it runs off how virtuous he thinks he's being. He was completely helpless. He's willing to give you one at that point, if you won't give him a try unless he's helpless. 

I'm not actually on the market.

Doesn't need to be serious. Truth be told I think you'll get attached but it's not - I'm not offering you a replacement for your loved ones, I'm just saying you'll really enjoy him.

If you want to give me a powerless version of your boyfriend and the artifact to torture him with then I'll listen to him think for a while and decide if I think he's worth fucking. I'm not promising anything other than that.

All he wants is for you to give him a chance to make you happy.

I see. Sure.

Thank you.

If I do want him I'm not going to cater to his every whim just so I can have someone around who loves me.

He's not expecting to be catered to, he's expected to be tortured.

Might do that. 

Okay. I just want you to be happy and I think having someone around who adores you like that will make you happy. And he's a useful resource.

That did not escape me.

And he goes home and reports this to his husband.

...I genuinely can't imagine where he got the idea that I might want to be catered to, says Taliar.

Might've just picked up that I was nervous about how he'd treat you.

Aww. Taliar snuggles him. Love you. Okay. So how do you think he's going to treat me - I think I need a pretty clear idea of the possibilities before I can start figuring out how I'm going to sell it to my alt...

I'm guessing he's going to be a bit cold, and pointedly opposed to you regaining divine powers, but probably less inclined to torture you than I was because you don't fascinate him yet -

That's actually not very promising; I handle torture a lot better than I handle rejection... my alt won't necessarily need yours to love him or even like him at first, but he's going to have a really hard time if he's not appreciated on some level.

Squeeze. I am absolutely certain he'll be listening to him constantly and spending most of his time trying to figure him out, he just may not give any outward signs of that -

Then he'll have a really hard time unless he knows that, but it might not be worth telling him if it'd annoy your alt. It's not like mine will be expecting a walk in the park.

Maybe we can - I don't know - I can be attentive enough that he infers that my alt will be, you can at least tell him that I listen to you every waking minute -

Maybe, yeah... I'm definitely concerned with making sure not to tell my alt anything that'll end up making it harder for him when yours inevitably reads it in his head. Like, I have the feeling that if I show my alt the night my soul acknowledged you, I might as well not send him at all. I don't know how right I am about that, though, your alt is really hard for me to predict.

You're probably right about that. If my alt feels that we're doing this to redeem him, or because he's unacceptable to us and you can change that -

If my alt thought we were trying something along those lines, he'd get enormously offended and refuse to go. Or he'd go but he'd be trying to prove he could make your alt happy without changing him at all. I actually don't think I can stand to let my alt think that about me, though, even if that turned out to be the right attitude to send him with.

I love you. Okay, so - with reasons to stick with someone who's going to at best torture him and at worst pretend to ignore him, without telling him the actual reasons in more detail than 'both of us are happier than we imagined possible'?

The way to get him there is to tell him that we are both happier than we imagined possible, and we think he has a chance to find that same happiness with your alt, so we want to give him to your alt as a present. And we have to warn him that the possibilities range from torture to being apparently-ignored-occasionally-analyzed. He'll tell me he should tell us both to go fuck ourselves, and then... I send him some memories of our relationship, to make the point about how happy we are and to give him a foundation for being able to love your alt the way he is, and I tell him that no matter what he thinks he's strong enough to handle whatever your alt does to him, and I maybe challenge him to prove it, and -

- he starts giggling.

If he does turn us down, how would you feel about keeping two of me? Because I am absolutely the sort of person where if I can honestly offer him that option, he'll look at the choice between being happy with us forever and going off to suffer enormously for a chance at maybe having the same sort of thing with your alt, and he'll want the second one more. I am so hopelessly myself, Maitimo.

I am happy to commit to keeping two of you if you make another one and he doesn't want to go to my alt.

Taliar kisses him. I love you. Okay. So we tell him that, and I bet he'll want to try being yours to see what it's like, and then I bet he'll be dissatisfied because there's another you out there who doesn't have one of him and all he has to do to fix that is go hand your alt his soul.

You are a delight. Okay, sounds like a plan. From when are we forking him?

Taliar considers his memories.

...Has to be from between the moment my soul failed and the moment you told me you loved me. Anytime after that would make it much harder for him, and if there's anything after that point that we need him to know I can send him the memory and it won't be the same as having actually experienced it. Maybe I'll take him from right before he woke up that morning, and have him wake up in Nuime somewhere with me right there to explain things and you a short distance away to come in and meet him when he's ready for that...

That sounds good.

...if we tell him what Nahira's flower was, is your alt going to want to use it...

I'm honestly not sure. Probably better to tell him, unless you think that'll hurt your alt too much for him to want to keep going with this -

If we tell him what Nahira's flower was and your alt decides to torture him with them, he'll get very me about it and it'll actually be easier for him to handle overall than if your alt just ignores him for weeks. It'll be awful but - it'll give him something to push against. Have I mentioned I am very hopelessly myself?

You have. All right, let's tell him.

Although that does bring up a question of... how your alt is going to react to various levels of knowledge my alt could have about the ways you've tortured me. If I tell him nearly everything and my alt goes in convinced he's emotionally invincible, is yours going to try to prove him wrong - if I tell him hardly anything and he goes in knowing I've been through some shit but not what it was, is your alt going to end up giving him a nasty surprise - I think it was ultimately good for me that you undershot my first bad day, and if your alt isn't going to undershoot, I want mine to be prepared for that, but I don't want him to go in neatly wrapped up and labeled 'bet you can't break him', you know?

I don't think my alt has the investment to make a particular attempt to break him at this point.

Not right now, but I'm assuming there's going to be torture at some point or why are we even bothering...

He pauses. He reviews what he just said.

...I mean - not that the torture is the point, but the degree of investment that leads to it - if he never cares that much, the gift will have failed.

Agreed. And by the time he cares that much he'll prefer not to break him. 

Well, all right then. Okay. So I can tell him what Nahira's flower was and, hmm, I could see him going either way on how much he wants to know about all the torture, I can ask him about that...

He tries to build a mental list of all the things he's going to need to tell his alt. He should tell his alt about the identity song so his alt's soul will let Maitimo's alt inflict imaginary strangers on it and they won't ever have to use actual strangers. He should tell his alt that trust songs get him high because the context that got Taliar willing to try that at all was really specific and they might not stumble on it by themselves particularly not if Maitimo's alt is being really distant with him at first. He should tell his alt what Maitimo said about what he wanted, that first day, because it'll help put his alt in the right mental place to decide to hand the other Maitimo his soul.

Can you think of anything I could tell him that seems like it'd particularly help your alt figure out what the appeal of having a Taliar is...?

Maybe that - there's nothing as healing as being trusted and loved by someone who knows the absolute worst about you? 

...awwwwwwww.

Taliar hugs him.

You can tell my alt that, then, I think it'll be better coming from you. Also, I love you so much.

I love you too. Let's make another you.

Let's!

They should definitely do this in Nuime, for immediate and tangible proof that Taliar's fork is not waking up in the same situation he went to sleep in. Taliar internally debates whether to use his childhood home or his family's rooms at the palace, and finally decides that the house in the mountains runs too high a risk of encountering his grandfather. The palace suite will do. He can tell his father they shouldn't be disturbed and his father will arrange for them not to be.

So he sits on the edge of his bed in the palace, and closes his eyes, and remembers...

...and the light of his soul collects and solidifies into another Taliar, curled up sleeping right next to him. He is close enough to hug and he looks like he could use one.

As tends to happen with people embodied by the power of Taliar's soul, he isn't wearing any clothes. He was created with nothing but his body and his... soul...

...which is surely around here somewhere...

Taliar opens his eyes and blinks and - it occurs to him that as of this moment in the past, his soul was hanging around Maitimo's neck -

And still is. Or, briefly; it doesn't have a necklace, and it falls to the floor. He's careful not to touch it. Well.

...I should've thought of that, says Taliar.

He looks at his sleeping alt. He fills the room with his healing aura.

"Hey. Me," he says. "Wake up."

He wakes up.

And - this is his bed in his room in the imperial palace in Nuime.

And that's - him? That's his healing aura, that's his soul, blazing like a tiny sun -

"What the fuck is going on?"

"The war is over, everything is fine, I killed Melkor and married Maitimo and it all turned out better than you can possibly imagine," he says. "But don't get excited just yet, because I'm about to convince you to do something nobody in their right mind would willingly do."

"Okay so you're definitely me," says the fork.

(He loves his husband. He sends his husband this.)

(His husband loves him too. So much.)

"I definitely am," he says. And he's about to go on, but -

- his fork takes one look at the smile on his face and says, "Where's Maitimo?"

And hardly a moment after that, "Relatedly, where's my soul? That one's clearly yours."

"He's in the sitting room and your soul showed up with him because I wasn't paying attention and it - went where it would've been."

He has... complicated feelings about this. That's definitely a version of him who is deeply, happily in love - and Maitimo must be a soulbearer because that affectionate hint of Silmaril-light in the married Taliar's soul couldn't possibly have come from anywhere else - but his last memory of Maitimo is -

"Why me in particular, why this moment in particular? What do you need a maximally powerless Taliar for?"

Ah, fuck it.

"We encountered another Arda and it has its own Maitimo and I want to give him a present because I think we're the best thing that can possibly happen to them but he hates me because he had some allies who invaded Nuime and I killed them all."

"All right, let's hear your pitch," says the fork.

He should've expected something like this. Convincing his fork to do things was never going to be like rearranging his own head - his own head tends to more or less hold still for him while he messes with it; his fork is definitely not doing that - but he's keeping on top of it, it's just surprising.

"I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Maitimo and I are happier than either of us could've imagined being. And I want to give that to the other one, but he won't take a me who's a sun-bright god-killer, he's a Maitimo, and he doesn't like me. So if you're lucky he'll torture you, if you're not he'll ignore you, listen in on your head once in a while to try to figure out how you're put together, decide in his own time whether he wants anything to do with you. And I can't even tell you for sure it'll work, he might decide he doesn't - we don't think so, but it's not a sure thing. And if he does want you, it'll be better than you're refraining from imagining, but not necessarily by much."

"I'm thrilled," the fork says dryly. "I'm ecstatic. Sign me up."

"Well," says the original, "if you don't feel up to it, you can always stay with us. My husband would be delighted to have two of me. He's amazing, we're amazing, you'll be inconceivably happy forever."

...He thinks about it.

He should obviously just say 'fuck you both', get dressed, pick up his soul, find his mother, and tell her to keep both these lunatics away from him by any means necessary. If they're in as good a place as they say, they won't stop him, and if they do stop him, he'll know what to expect from their lovely vision of eternity.

But.

But fuck it all, he loves Maitimo, deeply and truly, for very good reasons. No matter how much that hurts, it's still true.

He nestles into the blankets and looks up at his - creator - and says, "Anybody ever tell you you don't play fair?"

"Probably not as frequently as I deserve."

He closes his eyes.

A thought half-occurs to him and it's insane it makes no sense he's not supposed to be this self-destructive but he can't get it out of his head - what the fuck does he think he's doing -

- he says to Maitimo, I would like you to bring me my soul, please.

He grabs a pillowcase and picks it up and carries it in. "It appeared without the chain." His own soul says that he loves people and loves making them happy and should not be pushed around. 

"Thank you," he says, sitting up and taking it from the pillowcase.

He honesly expected Maitimo to just pick it up with his bare hands, but this works too, in a way - he turns and offers it to the other Taliar, saying, "We'll never live with ourselves if we don't find out what happens. And I assume yours is self-protecting already."

"You are me," he says.

He touches the misty silver soul.

It's not like having his soul touched by an entirely different person, but it's - definitely not nothing - he's half out of his senses, but only half - his suspicion and admiration and envy and affection and annoyance and trust for his other self are all filling up his soul but he can still see and think and breathe - "wow," he says hazily, "wow."

He lets go.

"I should show you a few things before you hurt yourself," he says. "If you wanted to know more about what soul-touching is like, you could've just asked me."

"Where's the fun in that?"

"There is a quite astonishing lot of fun in soul-touching even when he knows exactly how it'll go."

The fork looks at the original.

"...Okay, I'm not quite Da, but if you're accusing me of asking my husband to be unusually nice to you for strategic reasons, I absolutely did not do that," he says.