"There is," he says to the demon, "a way to travel between worlds without being summoned. I will trade you the knowledge of how to make it for three of them and some help identifying a habitable planet in our new dimension."
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."
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?"
"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?"
"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."
"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."
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?"
"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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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...)
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...
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.
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.
(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 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...
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?
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?
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.
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 -"
"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.)
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.
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.
...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.
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 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.
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 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...
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...
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."
"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."
"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."
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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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?
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.
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...?
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...
"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."
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."
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."
...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?"
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.
"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."
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."
Well, by the nature of soul contact, he'll have to let go to find out if they worked. The fork's soul doesn't visibly object, at least.
Also, his husband is over there giggling with his face in his hands, insulated from the songs by a touch of silver light. I should have expected this, why didn't I expect this, everything is going to work out exactly the way I planned but in the meantime he is going to fuck with us at every turn, there was no way that was ever not going to happen...
It's like -
He really really wants to be a part of this amazing relationship. He wants it so much. He envies them both - adores them both - and he's wryly aware that he's almost certainly going to take the other choice, but in the meantime he is so deeply fulfilled and delighted by being wrapped up between them like this - he was not expecting this outcome when he threw his soul at Maitimo, he just instinctively knew that if Maitimo was deliberately refraining from touching his soul the only way he was going to get him to do it would be to throw it at him instantly the moment the impulse crossed his mind - having his alt in the mix seems to pull him out of it a little, give him slightly more affordance for complex thoughts, although he hasn't exactly done this very often so he isn't sure - it's nice, it's lovely, the soul-contact intimacy feels like a warm hug, is this how good it gets, no it isn't, if it can be this good he bets it can be so much better -
...you actually can't leave him like this all day, says Taliar, there's a background risk that his soul will acknowledge you like mine did and then you will have two sun-bright god-killers and no nice helpless Taliars to give your alt and my alt will be making fun of us for months - it's not going to happen under most circumstances but the thing that'll do it is if he either decides to definitely stay with us, or gets so wrapped up in being in love with you that he forgets there's another one out there waiting for him.
He takes his hand off his alt's soul.
He only stays dazed for a few seconds, and the first thing he does when he recovers his senses is dissolve into helpless giggles. He actually won - he loves Maitimo so much, he loves them both so much - and he has independently figured out that he needs to make sure he doesn't let his soul get carried away on that, and it's kind of difficult because getting carried away is so tempting, but he's managing it.
"Were we always this adorable?" wonders Taliar. "I think we might always be this adorable, but wow, it's much more visible from the outside. My love, what if I'm tempted to keep him?"
He is totally tempted to keep him. The three of them, forever - it would be amazing. But his alt is going to go try his luck with the other Maitimo, that's pretty clear by now.
He is getting such a clear picture of what they're like together and he has no idea how they got there - well, he knows one of the prerequisites, but how the hell they managed it is a total mystery.
"I need a soul necklace," he says. "Sun-bright, use your godlike power and get me a soul necklace."
...that's amazingly appropriate.
He goes to the window and leans out it and uses his land-shaping power to summon up a chain and setting more or less like his, and then he comes back and attaches them to Sun-dark's soul and hands him the resulting necklace without touching the soul at any point.
He holds up his soul on its chain and looks contemplatively at it for a few seconds and then puts it on the bedside table.
"I know what I'm going to decide but I haven't actually decided it yet," he says, "and I'm sure I've thrown all your careful plans for how to shape me into the perfect gift completely off-course, and there's no way I'm passing up the opportunity here. Much as it will tempt me to make the sane and reasonable choice. You were planning to have us both at some point during this carefully planned campaign of manipulation, weren't you?" he asks, grinning up at Maitimo (and never mind the sudden sharp pain of remembering just last night - how long ago was it really, he wonders - when Maitimo wanted to indulge himself with both of his boyfriends...)
He laughs.
"I observe that you're happy. It could not possibly be clearer that you're happy. I have no fucking idea how you pulled it off, but," he gestures at Dawn-shining's soul, bright-blazing evidence of their happiness. "If I were sensible and prudent I'd wait to understand it before I accepted it as an option, but if I were sensible and prudent I would've climbed out the window and fled by now."
"His soul gave me powers, and then the marriage added new ones - I can make it feel like an arbitrary number of strangers are holding his soul, I can make it feel like I'm touching him, I can set off these cascades that way - I'll have to be more creative with you but I somehow think I'll rise to the occasion -" He lets go of Taliar's soul but leaves the imagined strangers in place.
Sun-dark watches his alt lie there on the bed utterly insensate, consumed by agony. He can tell that it hurts more than he can even conceive of, and it's terrifying, and - the way Dawn-shining looked at Maitimo when he gave him his soul - he knew this was coming and he wanted it, looked forward to it -
"I want to learn how to do that," he says. He's obviously capable of that same depth of - strength, of acceptance-of-pain - and he has no idea how to get there and he really badly wants to and he suspects that it involves getting tortured until you don't care anymore and there's something so enthralling about the way Dawn-shining looks right now...
He looks up at Maitimo and - he just wants, without even any clear idea of what it is he's wanting. It almost doesn't matter.
It's lovely, of course, Maitimo singing is always so lovely.
And it's soothing.
...kind of suspiciously soothing actually.
Songs can do that?
Okay admittedly this feels fucking amazing but - "hey," he says with half-joking indignation, "give that back, I was having fun with it."
That sounds like a great idea.
A substantial part of the reason why that sounds like a great idea is probably literal mind control, wow.
"You can't have sprung this on him like this," he muses, "he has to have agreed to it, how the fuck did you manage that, you can't possibly have known ahead of time that it'd get us this high - did you? I'd be very impressed... wow. Wow. This is amazing. And I will never be able to look my emperor in the eye again if I follow objectively terrifying suggestions made while I'm high on artificial trust."
...so that's what he meant by a cascade -
Fear and amazement and love and delight and confusion and back to fear, and the determination to win by not letting the fear take over, and all of these things going off like fireworks and feeding on each other and looping back around and chain-reacting and none of it ever goes away he can't handle this he's going to fall apart - he's a Taliar he's a miracle he will be okay -
He notices, sort of distantly, that he's shaking a little.
Oh come on, he thinks, with affectionate half-joking disappointment, that was your one opportunity to talk me into something while I was high on trust songs without having known they existed beforehand, I can't believe you didn't even try -
You still picked up my soul, he points out. I love you.
And he has to be careful about loving him - he could easily let himself get carried away on the wings of that revelation, it's not like he couldn't have guessed but it's very different to hear him say it - has to keep in mind that there's another Maitimo out there who presumably does not have this quirk and might not ever and Sun-dark is going to go seduce him anyway because he is stupidly, dangerously, gloriously in love with this absolute marvel of a person.
I actually think I could've thought around it to get a genuinely accurate idea of whether I would've agreed without the trust songs and then gone with that, which is much more impressive and also trickier to predict without trying it, he says, laughing softly. I love you.
Listening to the trust song and knowing what it means is its own kind of fascinating - he feels nervous and he feels the nervousness fade away and he is gloriously high on this, it's amazing, he wonders if it even is this good for Dawn-shining, who actually trusts Maitimo very deeply and entirely independently, whereas Sun-dark trusts him mostly by proxy, it's a much bigger jump from one state to the other...
Bet I will, he says dreamily. It's lovely, it's perfect, Maitimo is amazing, he actually can't imagine anything better than this... it's fascinating how he wants Maitimo right now, intensely but not urgently, his patience is infinite, he is content to just lie there and be kissed and touched, to move only when Maitimo tells him to move...
Watching you two is even better than I thought it would be, and my expectations were high, he says. Also my fork is adorable, and you can count me in on being disappointed, if I'd been awake I'd've suggested you try it, as long as you had him on trust songs without warning anyway. How many opportunities are we ever going to get for you to have a Taliar on trust songs without warning? As soon as we've heard of the concept while sober it gets much easier to think around.
Dawn-shining is contemplating trying to talk his soul into branching a power for reading his fork's memories just so he won't have to interrupt Maitimo to ask for a more complete summary. He needs it for strategic reasons, arranging his alt into the right shape is delicate work and he has to have as much information as possible, but Maitimo is busy right now and Taliar is extremely reluctant to substantially divide his attention. It's so beautiful, they're both so beautiful - the look on Sun-dark's face is amazing, is that what Taliar looks like on trust songs, he's so - he can't even think of a word for it, in any language - he looks like he's having the time of his life, but in a really calm dreamy way, and yet at the same time intensely focused -
Dawn-shining Taliar loves his husband sooooo much. His husband is the best.
And then it is time for cuddles again. The Taliars snuggle up happily.
Still a few things I need to tell him, muses Dawn-shining, trying to decide the best way... do you want to explain what you used to get out of not caring about consent, or would it be better if I sent the memory of what you said?
All right.
He reaches over and ruffles his alt's hair. Prepare to be enlightened, he says, and then sends the memory, with approximate context of when it was being said and what they'd been talking about beforehand. He stops short of including what he did after Maitimo finished speaking.
His breath catches.
"Oh," he says quietly.
It's - it makes perfect sense - and if the Maitimo of the past was in front of him right now, Sun-dark would want to kiss him - would want to put his soul in his hand and drown in loving him - and that Maitimo is not here, and the Maitimo that Sun-dark is going to seduce doesn't even want his undying devotion - but the war is over and there's another entire Taliar to go around being Dawn-shining at things, and Sun-dark can afford to go hand his soul to Maitimo's sad alt and love him undeterrably.
Well, yeah. If I didn't think I'd do him any good, I wouldn't even be considering it. He reflects on this assertion for a moment, and then adds, Well, not seriously, anyway. There's definitely a part of me that just wants to find out how badly he can fuck me up, but that is not the part that gets to call the shots.
So Taliar sends him just a flash of the moment he stopped feeling safe.
That's the night of the first time I encountered daffodils in Arda. And it went just about as badly as it could've gone, and I handled it.
It's surprisingly easy to extrapolate the parts of the context he isn't being directly told - there's enough substance in the brief memory to get across the concept of hypothetical consent, and it all falls into place neatly from there.
Sun-dark contemplates the feeling in the memory. Like being made of nothing but willpower and pain.
He observes that he is really extremely tempted to get competitive about it. Anything his alt can handle, he can handle just as well. Better, with an example to learn from.
I am crazy, he announces. You're crazy. We're both crazy.
"Sounds about right."
He gives Maitimo a kiss.
"It is really very tempting to stay," he says. "There's no way I'm going to do it. But it's tempting. It's... this," he gestures at the three of them snuggled up comfortably together, "this is what I want to have. But being a present for your alt is what I want to do."
"Mm. No, I don't think so," he says. "Going off to seduce your alt means giving up the option of staying with you two, and I'm genuinely losing something there, it really won't be the same even if we end up just as adorable. But that's okay. It's hardly the most significant thing I'm giving up."
Implicit in his choice to go be the other Maitimo's present is the possibility that he might never regain the full power of his soul, and the other Maitimo might never decide to start respecting his consent. That's why his chosen soulname embraces the loss of power. He is the Taliar whose soul is in eclipse, and he'd better be okay with that, because if he isn't okay with that he should definitely stay.
Yeah, he says. Between what I want to have and what I want to do, the second one always wins.
'Have', in this context, is about things that are rewarding on the level of personal enjoyment. 'Do' is about things that are rewarding on the level of challenge and accomplishment, difficult things that work toward valuable goals. And he's a Taliar. The outcome is inevitable.
Dawn-shining thinks back to all the things they wanted to say to his fork. They've hit most of them, but - the imaginary strangers thing is just so absurdly perfect and convenient - he wonders if it's worth trying the identity song on Sun-dark, to make sure his soul gets the picture.
"Sure I can. I can even show you. The trouble is - well, here."
He sends the memory.
"I have a perfect memory for everything related to Maitimo and I still can't remember it right because it fucks me up that much. And it's what prompted my soul to figure out how to do the imaginary strangers thing, and the imaginary strangers thing is amazingly convenient."
It's immediately obvious why Dawn-shining wants to do this to him. If his soul doesn't have the imaginary strangers thing, the other Maitimo will just go have his soul touched by actual strangers if he wants to produce that effect, and doing it with a soul power is obviously preferable on a multitude of levels, it's more convenient and does not require involving strangers in one's sex life - but wow, the way that memory felt -
- on the other hand, if there are kinds of torture he's too afraid to try, perhaps he should reconsider his decision -
- but no, there's a difference between what he's willing to sign himself up for and what he wants, and he does not want to get that fucked up right now. So he doesn't have to.
On yet another hand, there's something he wants to do before they send him off...
He looks at Dawn-shining.
Kissing himself is new and different and interesting! And very enjoyable! He's not sure exactly how far they're going to take it, but it's nice. They're not reading each other's minds but they almost don't have to, they can just guess, there's no deficiency in communication.
They have a delightful time together.
There is an unspoken question of who is going to take the role normally reserved for Maitimo. It stays unspoken, because the answer is perfectly obvious to both of them: if it turns out to be something they like enough to end up missing it the rest of the time, Dawn-shining is better placed to handle that. Sun-dark is going to be dealing with quite enough already in the genre of Things He Might Like His Sex Life To Include Which For The Forseeable Future It Won't, and there's no call to risk adding another one, however trivial.
He does turn out to like it, but not that much. It's new and different and interesting and fun, but in a way that's not substantially different from the rest of the being-with-one's-alt experience. He will be just fine if it never happens again, or only happens again the next time he needs a fork for something.
Afterward, they curl up together and snuggle, and Sun-dark finds himself running his fingers over the scars on Dawn-shining's back. They're really something, those scars. Exquisitely beautiful, and - evocative of a deep commitment. He kind of envies them. He suspects that if the other Maitimo ever does that to him, he is going to feel intensely validated and triumphant.
It did! Dawn-shining is proud of himself for handling his alt this well and proud of his alt for managing to be so extremely Taliar at them. Both in the sense where he messed with their plans and expectations, and in the sense where he ultimately cooperated anyway.
Sure.
If Maitimo's worried then Sun-dark is definitely worried but, well, he is deliberately doing a very worrying thing. Some worry is to be expected.
For hard-to-articulate reasons, he wants to hand his soul to the other Maitimo himself. He has no other delivery preferences he can think of.
I should stay far away from her because I really don't want to argue with her about my choices, and same with Grandfather, but I want to catch up on what's been going on since my point of departure and I want to talk to Kelora. Unless she's going to argue with me about my choices.
He kind of wants to snuggle his alt and his alt's husband for a while longer and maybe have sex with them again and generally luxuriate in there not being a war on. But he's done plenty of that already. If he lets himself get too comfortable it'll be that much harder to go through with his decision.
Should he take that as a reason to get comfortable? Should he spend a few weeks living his life and then revisit the question when he's more settled?
He thinks about it, and concludes: no. All the reasons for his choice will still be true in a few weeks, and they'll still outweigh the lure of effortless comfort, but the lure of effortless comfort will have a stronger pull. He'll have a harder time with it but he won't have any useful new insights that he should fairly be taking into consideration. Given that, it's better to go as soon as possible.
She nods slowly.
"Yes. After how his first encounter with Nuime went, I imagine it wouldn't. Well."
She goes over and hugs Sun-dark, and hugs Dawn-shining, and then looks at Sun-dark consideringly and hugs him a second time.
"Good luck," she says. "Though I have every expectation you'll make your own."
There follows a discussion of politics in both worlds, the war against Melkor, thirty hours under a rockslide, the Yeerk invasion, and so on. Occasionally Kelora sends Sun-dark a moment of Dawn-shining's sex life, always when he least expects it. He's so cute when he blushes.
Independence has been moved. He's not satisfied the peal won't look for him so with the help of the daeva Yeerks Independence has been moved a lot, six hops over and with some false trails spiraling off in different directions. He should notice if anyone's coming for them. He notices their arrival and sends someone to greet them.
Wow he is really nervous.
"Hi. Raika-seren Taliar," he says. "Nice to meet you."
And in his thoughts, the full context of the soulname:
In Atialemain when he manifested his soul and went to war with Seofar, the first soulname he thought of was Raika-linsi, 'Sun-bright'. He decided against it, because the context made it too aggressive; by itself, it could mean anything in the range between 'the light that brings life to the world' and 'the fire that scours my enemies from the earth', but his mother Linsi-kelen ('bright flame') Aeleva is well-known for the destructive power of her fiery soul, and he was at that very moment preparing to go kill a bunch of people, and destructive wrath is not an aspect of himself he wants to advertise or encourage in the slightest. So he went with Elaneth-imire, 'Dawn-shining'; softer, prettier, more hopeful, evoking the kind of strength that lifts people up rather than the kind that burns them down.
And then he won the war and went around healing people and solving problems for a while, and he was transported to Arda and met Maitimo and agreed to fight his Enemy and got to know him and fell in love with him and found out the soul-shattering truth about him—
—and woke up the next morning in the imperial palace in Nuime, where his alt told him that the war with Melkor was over and he'd won and married Maitimo and everything was going to be great forever and oh by the way the reason you exist is as a present for Maitimo's alt who hates me, which is why you come from the moment in our life when our soul was at its weakest.
The obvious way to differentiate was to pick different soulnames. The obvious person to pick a different soulname was him. His soul does not shine like the dawn, and it won't for a while, it might not ever; in choosing to be this Maitimo's present, he is choosing to take that risk. So he is Raika-seren, Sun-dark. Eclipsed. The exact opposite of aggressive or powerful.
He considers how best to explain. This Maitimo doesn't know him - that might be the weirdest part of the whole thing - and therefore he can't just say 'because I am very hopelessly myself' and be understood, he has to actually start from the beginning...
"It's relevant that there's another one of me," he says. "Elaneth-imire is all set for soul power, he can - fulfill all the functions of my existence that rely on it. I'm not abdicating any responsibilities. There are no evil gods nearby that I need to fight and if there were, my alt could handle them. And he and his husband are rather magnificently happy together, so - in a sense I have a share in that, he's fulfilling that function of my existence too. I don't need to be powerful or happy or safe because Elaneth-imire has those angles covered. But what he can't do is make you happy the way he makes his husband happy. That's my niche, I'm the only Taliar who's got a chance at it."
He pauses, trying to articulate the next part in a way that sounds remotely sane. There does not appear to be such a way. He shrugs and says it anyway.
"And they told me that I could either stay with them and be powerful and happy and safe forever, or come here and be your present and be probably ignored and maybe tortured if I'm lucky, and - when you put it like that, there's no way I could've done anything but this. Because staying with them would be nice but being your present is - hard work toward a meaningful goal that I care very much about and that almost nobody else could conceivably accomplish as well as I can. I have a thing about challenges. I find them almost impossible to pass up." He smiles wryly. "And I love you and I want to make you happy. You're not the Maitimo I know, but you're a lot like him, you're - you're all the things I fell in love with. So. Does that explain it?"
"That's one way to put it, I guess," he says. "If you touch it—" he remembers the feeling, the few times it's happened to him, and the ones he got secondhand from Elaneth-imire. It's torture by default, because the circumstances required to make it not torture are kind of particular, but what it really is is just - soul contact. An unbearably intense sense of intimacy, an overwhelmingly vast magnification of everything you feel about the person who is touching your soul.
"Somebody somewhere might have a soul power that can make you untraceable," is his first thought. "Or my alt might be able to do it. Our souls have a three-day turnaround on major powershifts, which in my case means very little because my soul can't do much and is using most of its space for things it would be reluctant to give up, but in his case it means that if you want something done and don't think it's otherwise possible, 'tell Elaneth-imire and wait three days' is always an option, alongside 'ask Esarkan if he can find a soulbearer who happens to have something relevant'."
Healing aura, about six feet in radius but very robust; lie detection, completely passive; osanwe, with a branch for manufacturing magic items very quickly and another branch for enforcing his mental privacy and a sub-branch from there that prevents him from ever hiding any thoughts from Maitimo; a little bit of space probably in reserve for protection from hostile mind control in case he ever needs that; a little bit of space probably in reserve for letting Maitimo make him feel like his soul is being touched by imaginary strangers in case Maitimo ever feels like doing that.
"They're still - capacities my soul has, so, soul powers. Anyway, I'd argue that the privacy exception is more beneficial than otherwise. There is nothing I want to accomplish that could be accomplished better by hiding thoughts from you than by not doing that."
"Okay," he says, "so - does that mean 'go home' or does it mean 'stick around and consult on tactical problems and maybe do some magical engineering', or?"
Also, this is a Maitimo. Elaneth-imire will resurrect him as many times as it takes, fight as many gods as it takes; if the interdimensional meddlers come for him, they're going to have to go through Elaneth-imire first, and they will find that prohibitively difficult. But Raika-seren appreciates that he doesn't have a good reason to believe that and there wouldn't be a whole lot of point in trying to convince him.
"I would be delighted to make you eidetic memory necklaces. If I'm remembering right, in the current state of my soul I can do a year's work in three or four hours," he says. (Secondhand memories of a past/future that never happened to him are weird but useful.)
He grins and leans forward and reads them. Probably he should wear the first necklace he makes, he has a really good memory but it's not literally perfect and if he's going to be making a lot of artifacts the lost time from occasional mistakes will add up eventually...
Huh, that's right, Shadow-cloaked Nezhefena was wearing an obviously-Elven necklace and the way she brought them here was... not very soul-flavoured. "Useful," he says. "I bet Esarkan will appreciate it."
He also bets Esarkan likes the Maitimos a lot. Although depending on exactly how much he likes them, that may be difficult to pick up on without assistance from someone who knows Esarkan really well.
Well, yes. Although I'm sure he could find the multiverse civilization without your help if he felt like it. Which flavour of easy to work with was he? If he starts every conversation from the perspective that you both want to help each other and should figure out the most efficient and mutually beneficial way to do that, he respects you. If he also makes a lot of sarcastic comments, he likes you and wants to be your friend.
I don't know - it won't necessarily matter that he's consenting, I'd sworn by then never to touch Findekáno without his consent and that didn't help, but if he's insistent enough about wanting to stay - Findekáno was terrified by there suddenly being a dozen more of me around and he wasn't about to start expressing preferences about how they treated him -
What a mess. Yeah, Elaneth-imire will insist. We Taliars can get very insistent. If there were a dozen more of you why did they kidnap your Findekáno - I'd think alts would tend to cooperate well - actually if there were a dozen more of you why are the interdimensional meddlers like that at all...
They're not like me. In their Ardas Elves are naturally - exactly how the Valar want them, really really peaceable and virtuous - so the Valar don't even bother meddling - and my alts didn't have to deal with a civil war and they're mostly happily married to their Findekános and they all consider me an embarrassment and want to execute me so they can - avoid reminders - that they turn out like me under less idyllic circumstances.
Doubt it. They are talkable into not killing me because they don't have anyone better to run the country - though now that I tried to leave their jurisdiction I don't know if they could be talked down again - but they're never going to get to 'the way I am is, once it's not hurting anyone, an okay way to react to the world I came from'.
"I am constantly loudly being what I think I should be," he says. His hand goes to his chest but of course his soul is in Maitimo's pocket. "If 'they' is the Valar, I don't exactly conform flawlessly to their standards and I am glad not to because their standards are insane and their enforcement is unconscionable."
He can't help himself; he starts laughing. He's not even sure what's funny. It's just - he loves Maitimo, and Maitimo thinks he's a pest but will be useful for making eidetic memory necklaces and consulting on tactical problems, and maybe this is going to be it forever and honestly it's not nearly as bad as he would've expected, and - it's so bizarre how this Maitimo doesn't know him...
If you want to know what your alt sees in his husband you'll have to ask him.
"I'd certainly like him to but if you're giving Elaneth-imire one I take it that'll have nearly the same effects. You need either me or him - or, I suppose, again his husband - to transmit the contents of the actual teleport - should I stay around for that, or will you ask them?"
Dawn-shining Taliar puts on an eidetic memory necklace, immediately branches a soul power for eidetic memory from his relevant marital sense, takes off the eidetic memory necklace, and passes it along to his father, who was next on the list to get the teleport. He gets the teleport from Nezhefena and distributes it to Esarkan and Corino. He asks his soul for a power to render the other Maitimo and his planet and his people and so forth all magically untraceable. It isn't immediately obvious whether he's going to get one; he'll just have to wait three days and see.
He's in love with Maitimo. Being ignored is kind of hard on him but he has useful important work to do so he's handling it fine; he's just sort of aware in the back of his mind that if he gets less busy he's going to start having emotional problems. He thinks about magical engineering a lot. He's really, really in love with Maitimo. He can see the shape of Maitimo's influence on everything in the kingdom - the architecture, the people, the city planning, the way things are organized - and it feels comfortingly familiar and sort of bittersweet. This state of being is not indefinitely sustainable, but right now he's fine to keep making necklaces and not doing much else, and he is serenely confident that when he starts having trouble he'll figure out how to deal.
"Interesting magic you have there," she says. "Is Yeerk the proper name of the brain slugs? They made a short-lived but very inconvenient attempt to conquer the planet. They weren't especially talkative about it and Dawn-shining Taliar didn't stop to chat before he killed them all."
"Yes, the Yeerks are the brain slugs. The interdimensional alliance I belong to recently conquered their empire and remanded the population to the custody of a friendly anti-slavery faction of Yeerks. The ones who came through here were the only escapees and we've been trying to find them; they can be very dangerous to unprepared worlds."
"One of the magic rocks finally turned up with a better teleport-tracking power and finessed the maze they left on their way out." Magic rocks, it magically transpires, are a class of people with powers that are wished into place according to a certain magic system.
"My power is telling the truth! It doesn't let me lie convincingly to anyone who's heard me ever say anything true and I'm not even that good at it to people who haven't. It is not harmless, if I tell the truth too hard it can be damaging, but I don't plan to damage anybody here."
"Not in known locations. There's one that ran away from the same Arda that disappeared with the Yeerks, but we don't know where he went and unlike Yeerks he's not safe to follow by tracking power. Especially since he may be in Materia or one of its accessory dimensions."
"I'm very convenient!"
And according to his soul, he is also clever, charismatic, wise, resilient, insightful, loyal, determined, competitive, and married. His soul is very forthcoming about these things. If his soul can be believed, it makes for a pretty excellent recommendation.
"There's one nonflat one, where Valinor was a spherical planet and Endorë a different spherical planet and instead of Trees it had actual suns and everything is higher-tech. And there's an evil one where the Ainur are worse than usual and this had cascade effects on the population; that's the one that ran off with the Yeerks. I should fix your Valar as long as I'm nearby, it turns out that if incarnates are explained to them really thoroughly they become much less terrible at everything."
"Oh, the Halls become less unpleasant to be in and easier to talk people out of and they become able to understand problems people are having in terms more complicated than 'people are sad' and respond more sensitively to those and they become easier to reason with even for people who aren't me and they develop some concept of incentives. I don't make them more homophobic or anything. I don't make them that much less either, since Eru did actually tell them things and that's one of them and we are pretty sure his deficit is not a matter of not understanding what he's doing in the first place, but they get less disproportionate about it and learn to distinguish between 'stay dead or do this thing' and 'actual consent'."
"Hmm. I'll ask my husband what he thinks," he says.
Da needs to come back from Independence with an answer about whether or not we can mention that we know them. It's getting to the point where it'll be really awkward to keep concealing our knowledge with true but misleading statements.
They aren't looking trigger-happy at all. But if I were them I wouldn't necessarily give Honesty Girl all relevant information. Hmm. My instinct is that she's representing their position accurately, but there's that power of hers potentially interfering...
"You're clear to talk to my Emperor, by the way, and it might be simpler to include him in the conversation," he says to Elspeth.
"Its nickname is Shadow to distinguish it from all the other Ardas," she says helpfully. "It's not actually worse than most planets, it's just much worse than most Ardas in terms of people being antisocial, which isn't really the inhabitants' fault as such but most of them were not directly mind-controlled, just made worse people than they would have been indirectly, so there's no obvious way to act on it not being their fault. At least we're pretty sure now they're not contagious. Shadow really upsets regular Maitimos, who are heavily represented in peal affairs and don't like their Shadow alt 'Midnight' or having to think about him. And there are enough other planets-full-of-mediocre-populations-we-can't-trust-with-heavy-duty-stuff-but-do-want-to-help that it hasn't come to a point where the obvious next priority if not for that would be doing anything much with Shadow. So the strategy lately has been lightly supervised neglect because all the palatable non-neglect options keep turning out to be terrible ideas. Except then it skipped off with a bunch of Imperial loyalist Yeerks and that's a really big deal and we need to find all of those Yeerks."
"All of those Yeerks are dead and their infrastructure destroyed; the Yeerk daeva children are in the care of the Arda in question, which is known to me as Independence," says Esarkan. "Apart from the Yeerk invasion, which I understand was not under their control, they have been impeccably good neighbours. And it would be relevant to tell Dawn-shining Taliar how your explanations affected their Valar in particular."
"They didn't bring their Valar," blinks Elspeth. "The Shadow Valar were left floating in vacuum and very confused." (Shadow shall henceforth refer to the world between Aurum and Edda and Materia while Independence shall refer to the planet, her magic helpfully footnotes.) "Uh, we'll want to unsummon the daeva Yeerk children and then have them resummoned by someone working with Tide and brought back there, or maybe to Luster, which is an Arda with a small Yeerk population for irrelevant reasons in a neighborhood that would be easier to set up safely-with-respect-to-daeva. The Shadow Valar had different questions from a standard set but my results were ultimately similar."
"A representative from the interdimensional meddlers showed up in Nuime asking to speak with the Emperor," he says. "Esarkan would like to know if we have your permission to admit we've met you. If it comes up unavoidably before I return with an answer he's planning to consult Tivarante Maitimo."
"They're being friendly to Nuime; how friendly they feel about you wasn't clear as of my departure, but I could go back and check. There's a day and a half left before my son either comes up with an untraceability power or doesn't. Besides waiting for that, and Esarkan making it clear that he considers you a neighbour and ally, what can we do to help you?"
"I acknowledge that my son might have a little trouble with that one," says Corino. "Esarkan can send soulbearers with protective powers if you'd like some." If all such methods of extremely aggressive murder would require Maitimo to be removed from this universe against his will, protective soulbearers can almost certainly prevent that; it's been tested.
They're a representative of Tide, a non-enslaving-people polity of Yeerks, and would like to be introduced to the daeva Yeerks' summoner or summoners and be told all the daeva Yeerks' names so that the children can be taken elsewhere. They would also like a list of the dead Yeerks if one is available.
If any of the computer systems are still intact it may be possible to extract a list. The daeva Yeerks are all children too small to have ever taken hosts and learned things that way, and while Yeerks can in fact fend for themselves without parenting it is really not a good idea to have them grow up without any adults in the pool with them, they may already have pulsecoding deficits and nobody knows how having been summoned and gotten a non-pulse language that way will affect it; they appreciate the sentiment of asking the children but there is a serious child welfare concern here.
They have living aunts and uncles and cousins. In Tide. Yeerks have very large extended families and scatter around. The Visser who ran off with all of these Yeerks was Sovereign Ristrell's sibling. This very Yeerk talking to them right now is second cousin once removed to the daeva babies.
(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."
"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."
"Yeerks are pretty harmlessly containable in pools as long as no one removes them and won't be able to perform the ritual to bind their spirit animals without a host - it's possible they'd have trouble even in a host; they might need to personally adopt humanoid forms for it."
"He's doing well. He correctly anticipates that he's going to get restless soon if he stays in this pattern of not doing much other than make magical artifacts, but he also correctly anticipates that he'll find a way around that before it gets to be too much of a problem. He is... very thoroughly aimed in the direction of emotional self-sufficiency. I don't think he realizes how thoroughly. But it's a necessary first step in his plan to avoid exalting his soul. The reason why Dawn-shining Taliar is so much more powerful than any other soulbearer is because he gains unprecedented amounts of power from having friends, knowing them well, caring about them, being invested in their happiness and personal growth. Raika-seren is going to isolate himself to avoid that."
"He'll find his balance with it. When Elaneth-imire was recovering from the same state Raika-seren is in now, he needed to befriend hundreds of people specifically selected to maximize compatibility before his soul started looking like its old self again, and it was still very weak compared to its former strength. Raika-seren doesn't need to categorically avoid making any friends."
"Huh."
It's certainly a fascinating environment. Taliar has not been around spaceships very much.
He still doesn't have any good guesses about what might be going on here, but he's not trying particularly hard. Too many unknowns for guessing to be very useful.
There is some mild discomfort associated with having a slug wriggle into his ear. Less than he was expecting, and he was expecting it to be pretty trivial.
Okay, Maitimo turned into a Yeerk to go in his brain. That's, uh, terrifying. He observes that he's terrified and he picks it apart in fascination: an abstract fear of loss-of-control, a more visceral fear prompted by being unable to move under his own power, uncertainty about what Maitimo wants from this, uncertainty about what is going to happen next... his alt would go crazy for this. His alt would be burning like a sun right about now. He can feel that reaction at one remove, it's not how he feels right now but it could be, he could go there. Being terrified is... weirdly comfortable, though, and it would feel sort of rude to deliberately ignite himself into a stellar furnace of lust when he has received no indication that Maitimo is interested in him in that way. He'll leave it.
And underneath those surface thoughts:
The entire architecture of Taliar's mind rests on an intricately interconnected set of foundational concepts. One is exaltation. His social skills are built around helping, encouraging, uplifting, giving people what they need to become more themselves, more the people they want to be, the people they aspire to be. And that flows into cooperation - he is highly gifted at analyzing situations from the right perspective to let everyone involved come out ahead, finding ways to bring different people's interests into genuine alignment. From there, integrity: he is able to make utterly unwavering commitments, he is the sort of person who would find it almost impossible to betray a trust. These things are a vital part of how his entire mind functions.
A lot of this information can be picked up by staring at his soul for long enough, but his soul only says what he is; this is a detailed look at how and why.
He is an extrovert. People, their personalities and interests, their loves and hopes and dreams, are a huge part of how he perceives and interacts with and understands the world. He wants to make people happy and safe and fulfilled, he wants to give them the things they want and need, he wants to help them achieve their dreams. He wants to be around them and interact with them and see them flourishing.
He is a problem-solver. He finds immense joy and fulfillment in fixing things that have gone wrong, in coming into a situation and leaving everyone in it better off than they were before he arrived. The very best thing is when he can leave people not just better off than they would've been without him, but better off than they could possibly have imagined being.
It's been said that a Taliar's favourite pastime is accomplishing the impossible. There is some truth to that. Challenges are intensely compelling, the more difficult the better, and Taliar has developed both the skill and the inclination to look at a problem, figure out what the best possible outcome is and what would be necessary in order to bring it about, and then do that. He is intensely ambitious but not quite in any of the ways people usually mean to evoke when they use that word: what drives him is the satisfaction of succeeding at difficult things and the fulfillment of achieving something meaningful, of making a positive difference in people's lives. There's some competitiveness in there too, but it's secondary to the rest.
He has an amazing ability to order his own mind around. It's built partly out of his integrity, the ability to make it absolutely psychologically inevitable that he will do this and he won't do that, to change which things he can even consider doing; partly out of his problem-solving skills, the ability to analyze a situation and figure out which levers to pull to make it go his way; and partly out of the machinery of exaltation, turned inward to act on himself instead of others, that instinctive understanding of what to do to help people be more of the things they value about themselves.
Right now he's in the middle of a major overhaul. He's pulling together the bits and pieces he's seen or heard from his alt's life into a model of how being his alt works, and he's expanding on that and tweaking it to better serve his own purposes. Corino was right that he's reaching for emotional self-sufficiency, and right that he's getting there even faster and more successfully than he thinks. He expects to spend an unknown amount of time getting absolutely no support, suppressing or redirecting several of his fundamental drives in order to avoid exalting his soul, being ignored or tortured by someone he really deeply loves and admires who dislikes him and finds him annoying; and with serene confidence and unwavering determination, he is figuring out how to turn himself into someone who can get through that, who can not just survive it for a little while but be genuinely okay that way indefinitely.
He speaks his native language with surpassing eloquence and Quenya almost as well. He's been riding and caring for horses since he was a tiny child. He's really really good at every strategy game he's ever played. He's good at learning; he picks up new skills easily and is quick to come to a deep understanding of new subjects and disciplines. On the strength of that talent he has learned enough magical engineering in months to keep up with people who've been doing it for centuries. There are all sorts of other tidbits of skill in here too, things he found it useful to do or interesting to try. He can knit, he can sew, he can play cards, he can pick locks.
All this information about the inner workings of his mind makes it overwhelmingly obvious why he decided to come here and be Maitimo's present. Everything he said and thought when he was trying to explain it was true, but there were details missing, things that he didn't think of or couldn't articulate. Inside his head it all fits together into a picture of perfect inevitability. He made this choice freely, but he was never going to do anything else. He loves Maitimo. He admires him and adores him and wants to make him happy, and as far as he knows, there is only one way to arrange for a Maitimo to have a chance at the kind of unbelievable idyllic happiness Elaneth-imire Taliar and Tivarante Maitimo have found together, and that is for a Taliar to make a gift of himself to that Maitimo, unreservedly, and just keep pouring himself into it for as long as it takes, even if that's forever. So if this Maitimo wants him to, Raika-seren is going to do exactly that.
It is going to be difficult and arduous and he is going to suffer and he is okay with that, he is looking forward to being tortured because he has had a taste of what it's like to be tortured by a Maitimo who is magnificently thrillingly fascinated by the things it does to his head, and it is fucking amazing and he knows exactly why his alt loves it so much. He has seen bits and pieces of Elaneth-imire's bad days and he feels the pull of wanting to prove himself like that; he's watched Elaneth-imire hand his soul to his husband in cheerful anticipation of being tortured with it, he's seen the look on Tivarante Maitimo's face, watching his Taliar lie on the bed drowning in unbearable agony. His alt showed him what it was like to be raped, and it made him feel competitive, he wants to go through something like that to prove that he can.
Speaking of which - he's got some trauma going on. Atialemain left its marks on his mind. Mostly not the part where he was actually fighting the war; mostly the part beforehand, where he was drifting uncertainly around Seofar's court, getting more horrified by the day. Most particularly that late-night conversation with Nahira. Being confronted with that much overt cruelty, so intense and so intensely personal, directed right at him from close range, with her soul radiating all the relevant parts of her nature right at him, and being completely trapped and helpless while she told him what she wanted to do to him, was terrifying and overwhelming and it really thoroughly fucked him up to the point where he has vivid immersive flashbacks if he smells the flower whose scent she wore that night. (It's daffodils. His alt told him so.) He really really does not like to think about Nahira. He hasn't had a nightmare about her in a while but he gets the impression from his alt that they're by no means gone for good.
Teleport. Beijing, it's the capital of this world, and in Taliar's body he won't stand out. He has two hours but Taliar doesn't know that, and watching Taliar rearrange his mind to be all right with the thought that it might be much longer will be fascinating, and - you can convincingly impersonate someone after half a second in their head, that's how they were able to do what they do, you pick up their whole self, all at once - I could think your thoughts for you now -
His first thought is bet you can't fool Da; his second thought is that his alt would be even more lit up by this than he initially predicted, he's kind of into it himself and not just by proxy anymore; his third thought is that he's mildly worried for Maitimo, and he hopes that suddenly being able to be Taliar won't make it any harder to be himself, that it isn't annoying or upsetting to be so deeply immersed in someone so - whatever Taliar is. And his fourth reaction is to be sort of shyly pleased that Maitimo decided to do this, glad that Maitimo now knows him.
...then the fear catches up with him again. He is going to spend an indefinite amount of time as a helpless passenger in his own head while Maitimo does whatever he likes with his body. Probably not weeks, Maitimo has a kingdom to run, but days is plausible if he arranged for some time off. Fuck.
Okay. He doesn't need to be okay. He can be terrified, he can feel trapped and helpless and almost-but-thankfully-not-quite reminded of being frozen in place by the power of Nahira's soul. He can feel these things, it is okay to feel them, he doesn't need to be calm right now, freaking out is a perfectly legitimate response to the situation.
And once he's settled into that perspective, it's easy to get back into the state where fear is comfortable, where it's something interesting that's happening in his head, it's not overwhelming him or making it hard to think. It hurts but it's okay that it hurts.
This is sustainable for now. He turns his attention back to what Maitimo is doing with his body. He's curious about what's going to happen. Terrified, sure, but curious.
Taliar grew up half in the imperial palace, half in the Kazaryne family home overlooking Lake Kalas, high in the mountains that separate the western edge of the continent from its center. His family's mountains are stunningly beautiful. He was an incorrigible little shit, but in an inexplicably charming sort of way. His childhood adventures were creative and intricate and occasionally property-damaging. He spent a lot of time in pain as a kid because he bruises really easily, legacy of an assassination attempt on his mother while she was pregnant with him.
He knew from very early on what sorts of things would exalt his soul if he had it in front of him to see, and what sorts of things would debase it. He knew from not long after that that he wanted to be the sort of person whose soul would shine brightly. He has been building the skill of self-creation ever since, learning through practice how to rearrange his head to make himself into the person he wants to be.
(And in the present: he's calming down gradually, enjoying the fascinating sights of this strange planet, listening to languages he doesn't understand and trying to see if he can pick up any words. But every time he absently tries to move and nothing happens, every time his head turns or his eyes shift without his input, he gets another little jolt of fear. He gives his mind a gentle push in the direction of enjoying that, recontextualizes it as a nicely exhilarating thrill, but doesn't send himself all the way into the intense incredible rush of delight and desire that Elaneth-imire would be feeling if Tivarante was doing this to him.)
It was an incredibly lovely and wonderful time, unquestionably the best thing that had ever happened to him, and then a moment of soul-shattering horror, and the rest, as they say, is history.
He's managing to get used to the experience of feeling himself move and not being the person making it happen. It's, yeah, it's kind of hot once he's less distracted by the fear. Although the fear is definitely a part of the draw. Okay, he can handle this. (So it's probably going to get worse. It's hopefully going to get worse. Torture means interest, torture means appreciation, torture means a chance to test himself.)
He can see the appeal, now, looking through it, the light on the horizon of a potential end to the war, its instrument totally open to him and in love with him and expecting nothing in return - it would have felt so delightfully effortless, taking a lover because why shouldn't he -
There's a florist.
...Raika-seren isn't familiar with the local context, but he manages to recognize the florist. It's not hard to guess what that's about, when his body turns in that direction.
He is abruptly, intensely terrified in a way that is not at all enjoyable.
In his panic, he tries to run, which of course doesn't work, which of course terrifies him more, and he fights and fights and it's no use at all and—
—then he stops. He can't close his eyes or take a deep breath or any of those other little calming rituals, he has to do it all in his head, and it's much harder that way, but he gets ahold of himself anyway, he makes himself stop struggling for control. He can't make himself calm, but he can put himself in a state where even if he could run away, he wouldn't be. And it is important to him to do that. It is important to him to cooperate, even when his cooperation or lack thereof has no practical effect on the outcome of a situation.
He feels a flash of warm affection, a glow of pride—I love you—and then he smells the flowers and he ceases to have any awareness of the present moment at all.
He is just turning the final corner on his way to his rooms in Seofar's castle, and there's a woman waiting for him there, at first anonymous in the low light—he sees her soul and recognizes it—Den-aminde Rysher Nahira, one of Seofar's crowd. She looks at him with an expression he can't quite decipher, and takes a step forward, a little farther into the light. The scent of her perfume begins to reach him, a lovely flower he's sure he's smelled before, but he can't put a name to it.
"Kazaryne," she says, and he flinches at being addressed in such overly familiar terms on such short acquaintance in that tone of voice, and she smiles, and smiles wider when he instinctively recoils. "I thought it was time we talked."
"Den-aminde Nahira," he says respectfully, trying to establish a little social distance without revealing enough discomfort to make her smile like that again. "About what?"
"Oh... let's start with family history," she murmurs, with an ambiguous glitter in her captivatingly beautiful eyes. "I knew your mother, once. Has she ever mentioned me?"
"Can't say that she has, no." Maybe she would have, if she'd had the chance. What's Esarkan's game, sending Taliar here so abruptly? He almost wishes he'd refused. He does not feel like his loyalty is being rewarded.
"No? Nothing? No stories of old times? No warnings?"
She smiles again, at that last part, but her eyes narrow slightly and Taliar reads a profound rage in that small movement. He is getting increasingly afraid. Whatever is going on here, it's on a different level from the awkward and upsetting conversations he has had with the other members of Tekhesin Seofar's court. Den-aminde Nahira means him harm, in a very real and immediate way, and he has no idea what she wants or how to talk her out of taking it - best to assume he can't possibly fight her, with her soul gleaming blood-red on its chain and Taliar seventeen and completely unarmed.
He hesitates too long. Nahira shakes her head and tsks. "Remiss of her. You'd think she'd have a word to spare for an old flame." His first thought is 'what a stupid pun' and his second is 'wait, my mother dated this woman?' and his incredulity must be visible, because she laughs and goes on, "Oh yes, once upon a time, we were in love. Well, I know I was in love. Aeleva was a little less free with her feelings."
"I've never known her to have trouble expressing herself," he says without thinking, and Nahira smiles at him and it's - almost physically painful, experiencing the intensity of how much she wants to hurt him. He flinches, then steadies himself. Maybe he'll be lucky and it'll be as easy as - "And I'm sorry, but it's been a long day and I am not interested in having this conversation right now."
It is not that easy.
He moves to step forward, and she holds up a finger as though rebuking a child for straying off the garden path, and he stops moving. There's no invisible force to strain against, nowhere to set his will and push, he just isn't going anywhere and can't make himself start.
"Let me explain how it's going to be," she says softly. "Tomorrow you join Seofar's household. You will live in our lovely castle, eat our lovely food, and bed our lovely princess. And you will be mine. Seofar promised me that, as soon as the marriage offer came in."
The way she says 'mine' is possibly the most deeply terrifying thing he has ever heard. He can feel her possessive cruelty, he can see it in her soul, hear it in her voice, read it in her eyes. It closes in around him like a suffocating cloud.
"I will hurt you in ways you've never dreamed of, and I will make you thank me prettily for it." She leans closer. The light of her soul glints from her cheek as she tilts her head and smiles, eyes alight with anticipation. "It won't always be awful, mind you. Your mother often came willingly to my bed; I'm sure you will too."
There's no escaping that implication. She has raped his mother and she is going to rape him too and he cannot stop her, he cannot get away, he cannot talk her out of it, she will take no bribe, yield to no charm, she is absolutely irrevocably intent on harming him for its own sake. He can't yell for help, and even if he could, no one would answer. Not in this place.
"I think I'll write her letters," Nahira continues in a dreamy, thoughtful tone. "Beloved Aeleva, today I tied your son to my bed and made him scream for hours until his voice gave out and he could only weep silently into my pillow. His tears are almost as beautiful as yours." Her eyes are mesmerizing. He doesn't know if it's her magic or his own sheer terror that prevents him from looking away. "What do you think? Will she come running to save you?"
Yes. Absolutely. She will petition Esarkan for an army, and he'll deny her, and she will come alone, burning with the fire of her soul, and at that point presumably Nahira has plans for what will happen next that Taliar would really rather not think about.
"I can't wait to see her face. But first, I want you all to myself for a while. I want to break you, Kazaryne Taliar. I want to make you my plaything. I can see in your eyes you don't think I can do it, and I am going to enjoy teaching you differently. You come from a strong-willed family, but you'll beg for mercy before I'm done, proud little Kazaryne."
He is utterly paralyzed in horror, not even trying to move anymore. Her soul shines red, and he can see her self in its light, the incontrovertible truth of her. This is what she lives for. Making people helpless and afraid, tearing them apart and laughing at the pieces. This is her deepest source of joy.
"Do you want to know what I'm going to do first?"
No he doesn't. There's a part of him that wishes he would just drop dead on the spot, it would be better than continuing to listen to her. Something of that reaction apparently shows, because she laughs, a beautiful sound that scares him more than he has ever been scared in his life.
"Seofar won't let me touch his daughter, so you'll have your wedding night undisturbed, if you're willing to use it. Kelora's such a shy little thing, though, I doubt you'll get anything from her you don't take by force."
What - what the fuck - is she really offering him a night's grace before she starts torturing him on the condition that he spend that night raping the princess—?
"No? Suit yourself. No wedding night for you. Tell me, Taliar, have you ever been with a woman?" He doesn't answer, wouldn't if he could. "A man, then?" Again no response. "Have you thought about it, or are you entirely innocent?" He doesn't feel very innocent right now. He feels like every sexual thought he has ever had is on display for her and she's going to take her time picking through them and defiling them one by one. Her laugh is musical, ethereal, terrifying. "Lucky me, having you all to myself. I'll take you to bed and show you every pleasure in the world. Before I ever hurt you, I'll claim you completely. And when there's nothing left of you that isn't mine, when there's no part of your body that doesn't remember my touch, then I will show you pain. I'll cut you and burn you and beat you and if I don't like how you scream the first time I'll heal you and do it over again until you get it right."
He wants to die. He wants to run away and climb the nearest tower and throw himself off of it. He can imagine her doing all these things, so vividly that his skin almost feels the touch of her imaginary hands.
"You'll beg for mercy, and I will not give it," she continues, staring into his eyes. "You'll promise me anything in the world."
Even now, even in this moment of utmost horror, he's pretty sure that isn't true. If it comes to it, he will endure. There's nothing to be gained from begging for mercy; it's clear she owns none. And it would satisfy her, and he finds himself strongly disinclined to satisfy her.
"You have that Kazaryne look," Nahira murmurs. "Oh, this will be lovely. The strong ones are my favorite, they're so much more surprised when I finally make them crack." She shifts, leaning forward slightly, and for a moment he thinks she's going to touch him and he tries with desperate urgency to scream, to run, to move at all, and he can't—and then she laughs her beautiful terrifying laugh, and shakes her head. "Don't worry, pet. The anticipation makes it all the sweeter."
If she's not going to touch him now then maybe he can kill himself before she gets the chance. He hates himself a little for being weak enough to consider it, but she is a walking nightmare, the most terrifying thing in the world, he is already suffering unbearably and she hasn't even started yet - surely there's no shame in escaping that the only way he can -
"Dream of me tonight," she whispers, watching him with devouring eyes. "As I will dream of you. And when we meet again, I'll show you what I dreamed of. I promise you, it will be worse than you can possibly imagine."
His mind immediately jumps to all the worst things he can possibly imagine, which is no doubt exactly what she meant to happen. She smiles, and leans down, and he tries to run again, but she only kisses the air just shy of his forehead. "Sleep well, my darling Kazaryne. I'll see you tomorrow."
Then she steps around him and walks away. The sound of her slippers on the stone floor is soft, and he strains his ears but he loses track of it almost immediately. He can't turn around to look. She could be standing right behind him, waiting. She could grab him at any moment and drag him into his bedroom and - it would be just like her, to half-promise not to touch him for a day, and then turn around and do it anyway the moment he let himself believe it -
Her soul's power releases him. He stumbles, shaking - bruises his hand catching himself on the wall - stands there for a moment, utterly unable to move, terrified that he's going to look up and she's going to be there, and standing around waiting won't help if that's the case but he still - can't - make - himself - move -
He clenches his fists until they ache, and he straightens and deliberately turns to look behind him. There is no one there. He turns back around and does not flinch at the sound of his own footsteps and does not turn back to look for her any of the dozen times it occurs to him as he walks the remaining five steps to his door, and he shuts himself in his room and bars the door from the inside and curls up on the bed and trembles silently for a long, long time.
He comes out of it gradually. He is outside, sitting in the sun. He can't move she has him she's going to— no. Nahira does not have him. Maitimo is the one who has him. So that's all right.
It doesn't feel all right.
It occurs to him in a distant sort of way that if Maitimo does anything sexual with him right now, he is going to very messily fall apart. He lets that awareness sit there in his mind, just a fact about the world, somehow not even a frightening one, or maybe it's just that he's so overwhelmingly terrified to begin with that he can't detect variations in response to specific frightening things. He feels sick and awful and shaky, exactly the way he did back then. It's got to be the eidetic memory necklace, making this flashback so much more prolonged and vivid and intense. He should've expected as much.
—he wonders if Maitimo is okay, if the intensity of the flashback might have affected him—he's operating Taliar's body with perfect calm, but Taliar could operate his body with perfect calm under these conditions too if he had to, probably—it's sort of not any of his business but he really hopes Maitimo didn't hurt himself doing this.
And from that genuine concern, he builds a shift in perspective. It is all right. He gave himself to Maitimo and now Maitimo has him and that is exactly as it should be, that is exactly what he wanted. He is here to be Maitimo's Taliar, and that means that whatever Maitimo does to him, however Maitimo hurts him, it's always all right; he will always cooperate, always forgive. He will accept no less from himself than that.
He doesn't even know if Maitimo still thinks he's annoying. He doesn't know if Maitimo finds his pain fascinating or just tedious. It's an awful, desolate feeling, not knowing that. And - he would take a deep breath if he owned his own lungs - it is all right.
I love you, he says, because it's true, he can still feel it, through the sick horror, through the echoing sound of Nahira's laughter. He loves Maitimo for true reasons, reasons that don't depend on being safe from him; it's a fact about their fundamental natures, that Taliar is the sort of person who loves the sort of person Maitimo is.
He hugs himself and shivers. The feeling of being respected for his strength is so intense it's almost terrifying in its own right. He can handle it. He knows he can. He doesn't doubt - not exactly. But he's never yet had to prove it, and he is very, very afraid.
"I don't want you to take me home to my alt," he says. "I want you to take me home to your palace."
And - if the history he remembers was one they shared, he'd walk right up and kiss him. But he hesitates. Not because he's afraid, although he certainly is. But because - he doesn't know if this is Maitimo wanting him or just Maitimo wanting to torture him, and if it's the second thing, he'll cooperate and he'll do what he's told but it would feel - wrong - to make spontaneous gestures of affection.
He makes a small sound, a half-stifled sob, and tears spill down his cheeks and he feels sick and awful and horrified and - he is going to be okay, they both know he is going to be okay, Maitimo said he wouldn't do this if Taliar couldn't handle it and Taliar trusts that. He closes his blurred and stinging eyes and says, I love you.
He smiles. He cries. He cries kind of a lot. He is perfectly cooperative and constantly terrified and he loves Maitimo so much and he doesn't regret this, he loses hold of that certainty a few times but it's always there when he goes looking for it, he would rather be doing this for Maitimo than be off with their alts partaking of uncomplicated adoration and happiness.
His present thinks:
Yeah he's really fucked up right now. He expected to be really fucked up and here he is, really fucked up. Good job predicting that one. Also, the sun is likely to rise tomorrow and Emperor Esarkan will live forever.
Being tortured by a Maitimo who visibly cares about him is amazing. Being tortured by a Maitimo who only occasionally lets slip an implication that he's interesting or worthwhile is... not amazing. It's pretty awful, in fact. He feels... only just barely appreciated enough, and he doesn't know to what extent that's intentional, but given what Maitimo said about how Yeerking works it probably wasn't as accidental as all that...
...which actually implies he might be more appreciated than Maitimo is letting on, but he's not going down that road. It would be - 'cheating' isn't quite the word, but it would feel unfair, uncooperative, to conclude that Maitimo feels differently about him than he seems to and then try to figure out what he really thinks. If Maitimo wants him to feel just-barely-appreciated-enough then Raika-seren will extend him the courtesy of not making him work any harder for it than he has to. He got all that sort of thing out of his system in his short time with their alts. He is not here to be difficult.
'Only just barely appreciated enough' might not even be the right way to describe it. There's definitely a threshold he is just barely clearing, but if he went below it he'd still make it through, it would just take him a lot more time and effort to recover.
...the thing is, he can't get out the way Elaneth-imire did. He can't go back over what just happened to him and make himself want it. Because he still doesn't know if Maitimo actually wants him, and until he knows that, it would feel - wrong, presumptuous, to deliberately cultivate desire. It would feel like he was making an imposition. He'll do it if Maitimo tells him to, or if Maitimo tells him that it would be interesting or pleasant or otherwise positive, but short of that, no.
Which leaves him curled up in bed shaking with horror and needing to find a new way through that.
And - in Maitimo's bed. He doesn't feel welcome here. He feels like he's intruding in Maitimo's space.
He takes a few deep breaths and then he gets up and gets dressed and makes himself stop crying and goes back to his own room. Then he hesitates, because it feels... weirdly self-indulgent to curl up and shake some more. Instead he sits on his bed and leans against the headboard and wraps his arms around his knees and closes his eyes and tries to keep still.
Okay. Okay. He feels awful. He has excellent reasons to feel awful. Maitimo just gave him the most intense Nahira flashback of his life and then fucked him just to watch him fall apart. Which is... flattering, in a way, and endearing in a way, and also rather intensely traumatic. Particularly given the parallels. He knows Maitimo is not like Nahira, but at the moment he's kind of undersupplied with evidence that Maitimo is not like Nahira, and there is definitely an uncomfortable resemblance between the two situations.
Well. That's an unfair comparison and he should dismantle it regardless of whether or not that'll help, but also, it will definitely help.
He knows better than to think Maitimo is in this to destroy him for personal amusement. Maitimo let him choose, and he chose this. He chose this because he loves Maitimo and wants him to be happy. He chose this because he wants to be Maitimo's present. Maitimo said he wouldn't do this if he didn't think Taliar could handle it, and Taliar trusts him completely about that. Maitimo said it would be fascinating, and the way Maitimo is fascinated by Taliar's pain is flattering and lovely and not at all about wanting to shred him beyond repair and then play with the scraps. So there's that association taken care of. Maitimo is not Nahira.
And now he's - actually now he's sobbing uncontrollably, why is he doing that, he's making progress - and he was half-numb before and now that he's doing better it hurts more, right, okay, that makes sense. Well. He's not going to make much more progress like this; might as well not fight himself over it. He curls up and huddles under a blanket and puts his face in his hands and cries.
He gives a couple capable people the teleport for famine relief; he composes a letter for Esarkan's attention saying that while the peal would not generally share their teleport, once the teleport is out they might be persuadable to share the healing; depending how easily Esarkan can get a hold of his miracle-worker it could be worth asking.
He cries for a while; eventually the tears slow, then stop.
He did choose this. He can get through it. If Maitimo is listening to this, Raika-seren sincerely hopes he's enjoying it. He is here to be a gift. That means that Maitimo can do whatever he wants with him, and Raika-seren will cooperate as fully as he can and then find a way to be okay afterward. It means that his entire purpose - the purpose of him being here, the purpose of him existing - is to bring joy and delight and fascination to Maitimo's life in whatever ways Maitimo wants, so he's going to do that, no matter the cost to himself, and then deal with those costs in his own time.
He loves Maitimo. It hurts a little, loving someone who does such awful things to him, but he does. And... he doesn't mind. He isn't angry, he doesn't feel betrayed. Maitimo wanted something from him and Raika-seren gave it to him willingly and now he is in a lot of pain but he accepts that, he's okay with that, he knew it was going to happen and he did it anyway. He prefers this pain to the pain of being completely ignored. And if Maitimo decides to go back to completely ignoring him, then he'll handle that too.
Elaneth-imire was right. This is something that no one in their right mind would willingly do. By any reasonable standard it's outrageously unfair. But Raika-seren doesn't have to care about anyone's standards but his own, and he thinks it's worth it. It's worth it even if Maitimo never likes him, even if Maitimo treats him like this for a hundred years and then sends him back to his alt; it's worth it just to give Maitimo the chance to have what Tivarante has with Elaneth-imire, even if he rejects that chance.
He sniffles; he rubs his face; he pokes his head out from under his blanket and resettles himself. He still feels very, very fucked up, but he's on top of it now, he could function normally if he had to.
Maitimo clearly has a very high opinion of his resilience. And his regard is clearly justified. That was incredibly awful, and here he is, already putting himself back together, already well on his way to recovering.
He can't tell himself that it won't happen again. He can't even tell himself that he'll get a choice every time; he might not. There's no easy way to make himself feel safe. But he did make a choice. He does think this was worth it. He is glad to have done this for Maitimo, and he hopes Maitimo enjoyed it. From an impartial perspective it's monstrously unfair to suffer so much for Maitimo's entertainment, monstrously unfair to have all his dedication be rewarded with a combination of torture and emotional neglect, monstrously unfair to do all this for someone who doesn't even like him - but it's his own perspective that matters in deciding which of the things that happen to him are okay, and he is okay with this. Really and truly okay with it.
It might happen again, and he might not get a choice next time... and he'll still think it was worth it, he'll still love Maitimo, he'll still - be okay with it, even when he is very much not okay. If Maitimo came into his room right now and handed him a bouquet of daffodils and then told him to take off his clothes, he'd do it. And he trusts that Maitimo wouldn't do that if Maitimo didn't expect him to recover. That's a kind of safety. Knowing that while awful things might happen to him, they will be things he ultimately chose to allow, and they will never be more than he can take.
The feeling of sick horror lingers, but it's lost its edge, it's just an experience he's having, it's not in control of him anymore. He gets up and washes his face and changes into clothes he hasn't spent two hours crying in, and he finds something to eat and then goes back to work.
He laughs. "No. I like being happy. It's just that being happy always always always takes second place to being - me. So, sure, I'd be happier if you were nicer to me, if you liked me, if you hurt me adoringly instead of indifferently. I'd prefer that to what I'm getting. But overcoming challenges is satisfying and giving nice things to the people I care about is rewarding and doing my level best to accomplish the impossible is fulfilling, and if I don't do this, who the fuck else is ever going to be crazy enough? No reasonable person would do what I'm doing, and I am deeply proud to be this unreasonable. I would like it if you were nicer to me, but I can handle the fact that you aren't, and it is worth it."
"Okay."
He can stop holding himself back, then. That'll make his life easier.
"Thank you. If you change your mind, I can go back to—" the phrase that comes to mind is 'stifling myself' and he chooses not to say it because the connotations are wrong, it sounds resentful and he isn't at all, but he can't think of a coherent alternative and Maitimo will have heard him think it so he just trails off with a shrug.
"It's not quite a power to make you permanently magically untraceable," he says. "But it's a power that prevents you from being traced through, or located within, the world Elaneth-imire's soul is in or any adjacent one. If you moved Independence to somewhere one hop past Tivarante's Arda, the peal would not be able to find it even if they randomly hopped into the correct world, as long as Elaneth-imire was at home with his husband at the time they were looking. And if you moved farther away than that but still kept Nuime and Tivarante's Arda between you and the peal, they still wouldn't be able to track you through those worlds or their neighbours unless you went out and were followed home all while Elaneth-imire was elsewhere."
"All right. By default, residents of Independence can find it, and so can I and Shadow-cloaked Nezhefena, but no one else can. I'm sure Elaneth-imire's soul could allow him to find you if it wanted to, but for now it isn't. Feel free to suggest a different set of permissions and I can pass it along to Elaneth-imire."
"Well, this Taliar can't tell her what the first one did—" he sends the memory: Mother, if you kill my boyfriend, I will resurrect him first, and you afterward "—but she regrets acting so hastily and will not do it again without circumstances even more extreme and more urgently so. Separately from that, she doesn't want to meet you just yet, except to offer an apology for killing you if you would like one."
"I expect that if I asked my son, he'd say he's doing perfectly fine. And Aeleva is content to stay out of it, and she bears you no ill will - but it nevertheless makes her angry to think about her children suffering, and she prefers to avoid situations that she knows will make her angry."
That's either straightforward and about the fact that he's not holding himself back from exaltation anymore, or subtly ironic and about the fact that Maitimo gave him a Nahira flashback and then fucked him - he's pretty sure his father can't guess the exact details but there's no question that he knows something happened with that approximate degree and kind of unpleasantness.
On second thought, he's sure it's both.
"Hello to you too, Da." He gives his father a hug. "What's the news?"
He's in the habit of wearing his eidetic memory necklace around. It's nice.
He has not given sufficient thought to possible failure modes.
He takes an afternoon off and goes on a long walk, because he's starting to feel the first stirrings of future restlessness and it seems like a reasonable experiment as far as changes in his routine go.
He does not give sufficient thought to possible failure modes there either.
He's distracted thinking over a tricky bit of math, and by the time he smells the flowers, it's too late. He's lost in memory. It replays over and over and over again, and he collapses into a bush and does not notice in the slightest.
He does not come back from his walk when he said he would. He does not come back from his walk one, two, three, five, twelve hours after he said he would. He does not come back from his walk at all.
He's taking full advantage of the teleportation to go all over his world, solve problems on the remote continents they are only now settling. He also doesn't listen to Taliar all the time.
When he does check in on him -
- wow.
He teleports him back home, in case that helps.
The loop is so burned into his mind by now that the next repetition is almost unchanged, but there's definitely a loss of clarity - a slight blurring of the details - it's not quite so immediate, quite so vivid - and the next one after that starts to fragment a little, overlap with itself, lose a few pieces - he might come out of it on his own, eventually.
His mind floods with - terror, definitely terror, but also profound adoration and profound relief. He has absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on but he knows Maitimo is holding his soul and that's one good thing in his experience of the world, which is more than he had a second ago. The sense of overwhelming unbearable intimacy is actively welcome, because it means right now nothing can touch him but Maitimo.
And he drops from the intensity of soul contact directly into a lovely calm state that is definitely the result of mind control - considers, calmly, whether he should therefore be panicking - concludes that this is Maitimo doing him a favour and there is no cause for alarm and he is very grateful and he loves Maitimo very much -
- wonders what even happened...
They last saw him yesterday when he went off for lunch and mentioned that he'd be going for a walk afterward and might not be back until the evening!
(Meanwhile, Raika-seren is trying to figure out how fucked up he's going to be when this song wears off. The answer is looking like 'very'. If he weren't being mind-controlled he'd be furious at himself for being careless enough to end up in this mess.)
He is really sorry about that! He shouldn't have needed supervision, he should've thought ahead and either not gone out or not worn his necklace - if this is a thing that can happen he should get in the habit of only putting on his necklace when he specifically needs it for something, he'll do that -
Oh. That does sound useful. On the other hand, Tivarante and Elaneth-imire seem to have been having tremendous fun with their 'rescuing', and Raika-seren doesn't have thirty hours under a rockslide to fall back on if his reaction to daffodils goes away, so the convenience of eliminating it would not be completely without costs... on the other other hand, it's not like thirty hours under a rockslide would be prohibitively difficult to arrange... he'll go ask the subtle artists for help if Maitimo wants him to, and not if he doesn't.
All right. I love you. Sorry I fucked myself up like this.
He feels like he's making kind of a terrible present so far, if Maitimo can't even leave him alone for a day without him immediately stumbling into a disaster that needs Maitimo's intervention to solve. But the effect of the calming song stops himself from being too actively upset with himself over it.
And, as predicted, he is tremendously fucked up.
It would probably be a lot worse if he hadn't had that interval of calm. He knows what's happening, he is aware of his surroundings, he can remember the soul contact and the conversation that followed it and have something in his head other than the lingering effect of almost a day of the worst moment of his life. But wow he is not okay.
He's not sure he'll be able to sort it out anytime soon, either. He'll manage eventually. He'd manage even if Maitimo decided now would be a good time to torture him. He is Sun-dark Taliar and there is nothing he can't manage. But he's pretty sure that, left to himself, he will not be ready to get out of bed and go interact with the world for at least another day.
Okay, he can do that.
...or try to. It's unexpectedly difficult to move, not even because he's particularly afraid of what will happen if he does, just because the fog of unrelenting misery makes everything difficult.
He'll figure out a way around it. Somehow. He is not letting the memory of Nahira win this one. He just has to - think of something, get a handle on the problem -
I love you, he says, smiling slightly. It feels so wonderfully safe. He starts to relax and only then notices how tense he's been since the calming song wore off. His hands hurt in the way that means he's clenched his fists to bruising. His emotions are still mostly a bottomless well of horror, but he can almost float on top of it, leaning on Maitimo, safe in his arms...
...and now he's disappointed in himself all over again because he shouldn't have needed this, he should've been stronger than that.
...okay.
Not being disappointed in himself is a difficult problem, but orders of magnitude smaller and more manageable than the other one. He sets to it. Maitimo is not angry with him, Maitimo doesn't mind that he needed him, he is doing fine, he does not have to be literally flawless—
(of course he does, who does he think he's kidding, he's a Taliar)
—yes, well, Maitimo told him to stop being disappointed in himself, so shut up—
(not even Maitimo's word can make a failure not a failure)
—and why not, he is here for Maitimo and it is Maitimo's standards that matter—
(no one ever holds Taliar to a high enough standard except himself, this is no different)
—yes it fucking is because he is Maitimo's present and if Maitimo says he's doing all right then by definition it is so.
Okay. Fine. Okay. He takes a deep breath, lets it out, tries to chase the distant echo of Nahira's laughter from his mind, fails, sighs, cuddles into Maitimo's lap and closes his eyes and wraps himself in the feeling of safety as much as he can.
Well. Then maybe Maitimo can do it, and won't that be new and interesting and different.
(He likes the thought of Maitimo demanding things of him and holding him to his own standards in the endeavour. He'd have more room to like it in if he wasn't still eighty percent trauma, but he likes it pretty well in the mental space he has available.)
"You're here for me. You're here to be exactly what I want, and I don't think much of guilt. You'll hold yourself to whatever standards you like but if you fail, you'll come to me and you will trust me to fix it and you will not feel guilty, because that's what I want."
Snuggles. Tears. Love. (A brief shudder when Maitimo touches him unexpectedly - he only thinks of the wrong person for the tiniest fractional instant, but it's enough to make his pulse jump. The lovely soothing feeling of Maitimo's hand in his hair more than makes up for it on balance.)
He cries. He cries a lot. It sort of oscillates between happy crying because Maitimo is glad to have him and wants to keep him, and utterly wrecked crying because he can't get Nahira out of his head, and happy crying because Maitimo is holding him and it feels so good and safe, and all the way back around again.
Too busy with the terrified weeping to respond at first, but after a few seconds -
Okay. I love you.
He is so glad Maitimo wants to keep him. It makes him feel so satisfied and accomplished, he succeeded, not completely but at least he's made a start, and it was difficult and so, so worthwhile.
And - he is free of Nahira, just like that. He's not even afraid at all. His whole mind and then some is filled with pride and joy and trust and comfort and endless soaring love. Nothing can touch him but Maitimo, and it's perfect, it's the best thing in the world. He loves Maitimo so much. He is so, so glad to be his. The soul-contact intimacy is as overwhelming as ever, but he likes it that way, it's so good and warm and safe.
"Um," he says, and then - right, his soul's right there, he's gotten used to being nowhere near it, he can just - golden light wraps around them both and he notices how lightheaded he's been feeling this whole time by contrast with its sudden absence.
...not that the notion of being cuddled in Maitimo's lap and spoon-fed doesn't have a certain appeal, it would be very comforting, but he's less hungry and more able to move now, he does not need to eat as urgently and could probably manage it on his own.
You mean this? and he sends the secondhand memory, with his reaction included.
I - I want people to be better off for knowing me, all of them, always, what hurt so much about the peal was that just by existing I made all their lives so much worse - I told myself I'd never crossed that line, I don't know if that was true, but now that the war's over I know I'll never have to again -
...yep. Look at Taliar, falling a little more in love.
I love you, he says, snuggling him. So much. I want - I don't know - I want to find a way to do something so magnificently good for them that it wipes out all the trouble they've ever had over you - my alt's probably going to be on standby to kill new Melkors for the forseeable future but that seems at too far a remove -
The trouble between the peal and Maitimo is exactly the kind of thing Taliar is built to solve, when he puts it that way. Here are some people whose interests are in conflict, now find a way to bring them into a position of mutual benefit so that everyone is better off than they would have been.
Elspeth made it a condition of helping win the war that I let Findekáno go and I - couldn't - so I asked myself under what conditions he might stay and - I knew he'd stay if I regretted it and wouldn't ever do it again and wanted his help making the country a good place - so I swore that and let him go and - when he could trust I'd never hurt him again - he came back and we were working things out. And then the peal showed up.
...if it helped then I'm glad you could do it but - I wish you'd had better options - and I'm glad you don't have to hurt like that anymore.
His alt literally couldn't win the war with Findekáno still a prisoner. Somehow he doesn't think Elspeth had that problem. And no, in whatever great cosmic accounting one might imagine keeps track of these things, Findekáno being a prisoner wasn't good, but... Taliar is Taliar and he does his best to always look for the solution that helps everyone. Coercing Maitimo into hurting himself terribly is not a solution that helps everyone.
Next time the peal finds one of you I hope they just tell Dawn-shining immediately.
Snuggle. Extremely snuggle.
And - Taliar being Taliar - he is of course determined to make it true that he's better off for knowing Maitimo, no matter what happens. It's not even that hard, really. He exists because of Maitimo. All he has to do is live a life that is on balance preferable to never having existed. And of course he is going to wildly surpass that bare minimum, because Maitimo is wonderful and Taliar is his and they are going to be so lovely together.
I hope so too.
If he comes back of his own accord and is okay about it and he and Maitimo can be happy together, that is exactly the sort of solution that Taliar likes to see. Although he's not sure how this Findekáno will feel about him. He's heard very little about Tivarante's Findekáno, which in retrospect suggests that he and Dawn-shining got along really really badly. Well. If and when it comes up, they will figure something out.
I was in love with him - for all of five seconds before I was distracted by my soul imploding, and it turned out he'd been mind-controlled the whole time I'd known him anyway, but. I don't know what happened between him and Dawn-shining after my point of departure but the lack of any information whatsoever tells me that it was pretty bad. I'm - not sure I follow the part about adequate supervision...
Oh.
Snuggle.
That seems - not to bode well for Findekáno coming back, if he'd only do it to prevent Maitimo from hurting people. Also seems to create impressively terrible incentives. Somehow Taliar doubts that the sort of thing his alt has with Tivarante qualifies as 'hurting anyone' in the relevant way, despite the copious torture.
So he'll only come back if coming back is necessary to stop Maitimo from really harming someone. What an awful incentive structure.
...he can't fully endorse this suggestion because it would be unfairly manipulative of Findekáno, but he wonders if it would count if Maitimo was torturing him in unsustainably awful ways - no, it's just a bad idea to engage with this whole setup, if Taliar ever sets out to solve this one he will find a different and less terrible angle where no one is incentivized to hurt people or to be likely to hurt people if not kept in check.
...well that's delightfully terrifying, in a way that actually cuts through the background horror for a moment and leaves Taliar afraid of Maitimo and nothing else.
I love you so much, he says, releasing a trapped breath and looking up at him with an adoring smile. The weight of memory settles down on him again, but for a moment it was gone and he cherishes that.
He sighs contentedly. That sounds lovely. You're being so nice to me and I love you so much. If I'd known all it'd take would be having Nahira flashbacks for a day straight I - well, wouldn't have done it because that would've been cheating in the worst way...
He is filled with love like sunlight, wrapped in it like a blanket. Maitimo is terrifying but it's all in the good way. He makes Taliar so happy. Being inescapably intimately surrounded by his presence is cozy and comforting, overwhelming but still so good. Something about it associates back to the time when Maitimo Yeerked him, and it's a very positive association, he inhabits it gladly. He loves Maitimo and loves being in his power.
He comes out of it slowly, a piece at a time - sight, sound, touch, memory, thought. And then he just kind of lies there feeling a weirdly comfortable mix of deeply traumatized and gloriously in love. The aftereffects of a straight day of flashbacks are still there, but more subdued, less intrusive, he can focus on nice things instead and it works.
He eats. He gets up and walks around a bit. He considers his mental state and concludes that it's livable, he could go to sleep and wake up in the morning and go straight back to work and nobody not reading his mind would even be able to tell anything was wrong.
He looks at his eidetic memory necklace.
He observes that he's terrified of putting it on.
Well, he wants to go back to work, and he works better with it on, so he'd better be ready to wear it.
He picks it up and puts it on and the whispers in the back of his mind gain an abrupt clarity, but he's still okay, he's still in control. He smiles with quiet satisfaction. He is going to be fine.
It's a way of connecting all the computers in the world so anyone can talk to anyone else instantly, and it results in people putting lots of information on computers so everyone can learn from it. I don't know how it works but I want to have it. Set it up. You might need to summon a demon, I think part of how it works is things in space bouncing all the information around. You can only summon a demon somewhere Hell-adjacent, do you know how to get there from here?
I will, he says, settling into the lovely solid feeling of facing a really meaningful challenge. You're perfect, you know that?
All right, time to find information on demons. And the Internet. He knows how to look things up on the local computers, he can start there, go bother his parents in Nuime if local resources are insufficient...
May I have my soul while I'm jaunting around the multiverse? he wonders. I don't know what happens if I'm multiple hops away from it for a long time.
He takes it. He puts it on. He grins at Maitimo with utmost delight and adoration. He's still pretty fucked up, and now he has a big complicated problem in front of him and only the faintest idea how he's going to get from here to solving it, and it's exactly what he needed and it's something most people wouldn't dare to lay on him like this and Maitimo knows him so well and cares about him so much and he's so happy.
I bet they will. I'm going to be so smug at my alt.
And he goes off and reads background information for a few hours and goes to sleep.
Predictably, he dreams of Nahira.
It's the worst it's ever been. She stalks him through the halls of Seofar's castle, pins him to a wall, kisses him deeply while he struggles and cries, and then his clothes are gone and her hands are all over him, and he is alone and powerless and no one will ever come to help him—
Ring for n—
—nope.
His soul flares with soft silver light. It tells him that, much as it would be useful to him to have this, and even though it can't spare the power to duplicate the effect itself, being under persistent externally imposed mind-altering magical effects is not a thing that should be able to happen to him. So now he has that protection from hostile mind control power he's been suspecting was waiting in reserve.
"...in hindsight I should've expected this," he says, "there must be some reason my alt doesn't have one of these and 'they think Nahira dreams are fun' is not quite a sufficient explanation."
"I can sort of see its point, I think. If it had the power to spare it would just start suppressing my nightmares for me, but it doesn't, and - souls aren't aware, they don't reason, it's not exactly thinking about what it's doing... I hesitate to wonder this in case I end up losing my eidetic memory necklace, but it let me have my eidetic memory necklace, so 'persistent externally imposed mind-altering magical effects' can't be the precise shape of the objection..."
He attempts to interrogate his soul on the matter. Does it just approve of him having trauma reactions for some reason, what's going on here?
"...huh."
Apparently dreamless sleep as imposed by this ring would be subtly harmful to him in a way that his soul could avoid if it arranged the same effect. Eidetic memory is just eidetic memory, and its pitfalls are permissible because they're avoidable isolated incidents rather than an integral part of its functionality. But messing with Taliar's dreams like this would in fact mess with his head.
"The fact that it'd mess with my head doesn't mean it'd mess with everyone's. And it doesn't necessarily have to mess with my head a lot for my soul to deny it - like, if having nightmares about Nahira makes me get over the flashbacks a tiny bit faster, I'd still probably make that trade so I could reliably sleep at night, but my soul wouldn't because it doesn't weigh priorities the same way I do. But yeah, I'll ask the subtle artists."
"Well, waking up from a Nahira dream with your hand on my soul is one of the best things I have ever experienced, so there's that," he says, smiling up at him with wry affection. "Definitely preferable to waking up from a Nahira dream into anything else. It'll be livable if you don't, though. And if I keep having them all night, which seems plausible, I genuinely don't know whether it'll be better for me in the long run to have a solid-ish night of awful dreams or a frequently interrupted night of awful dreams."
Nod.
...Taliar wants a hug. Taliar isn't thinking about wanting a hug, but Maitimo was inside his head, Maitimo understands him very thoroughly -
- Taliar is not consciously desiring a hug because that would be making demands.
That's interesting.
He hugs him.
He keeps hugging Maitimo for just a little longer, one long slow breath, immersing himself in the experience. It's wonderful. He feels so cozy and so safe.
And then he lets go and snuggles back under his blanket. The cozy safe feeling lingers, fading slowly.
Immense relief and gratitude and love. And then less immense but still all those things. He curls up and wraps himself in his blanket and wraps his mind in love of Maitimo, and goes back to sleep almost immediately.
He has four more nightmares before morning.
He is delighted, and happily kisses back, and—
—this time he catches it, and connects it to last night's hug, there's a similar feeling of not having known he wanted something but clearly having wanted it anyway. Well. That's a thing his mind is doing, apparently.
You know me frighteningly well, he says, with another adoring smile. Should I disentangle that restriction, or keep it?
I love you.
He'll poke at it a little bit but not make a concerted effort to get rid of it, then. Maitimo picking up on his invisible desires and then sometimes fulfilling them seems to be enjoyable for them both, but Taliar would generally prefer to know what he wants rather than not.
"Two things! One, Emperor Esarkan wants to know how long he will be waiting for the crystal ball Elspeth promised and if there's another means of communication he should be using in the meantime; two, Midnight wants an Internet. Do you know who I should talk to about either or both of those?"
"I do apologize for the lack of communication about that. One of my alts is working on something for it and expected it to be simpler than it has turned out to be, but in increments - it keeps appearing to be a day or two away. I did assign a hard deadline for tomorrow afternoon for sending someone to explain."
"The world known to you as Independence at one time had an ordinary crystal ball. Now that it seems prohibitively difficult to reliably keep track of the planet's whereabouts and activities, we'd prefer a version that would be likewise prohibitively difficult to reverse-engineer for that world and the apparently similar new Arda - has anyone selected a nickname for the new Arda?"
"Not yet but if you're desperate for something to write in the file I could unofficially suggest Dawn. Why do you want Nuime's crystal ball to be prohibitively difficult to reverse-engineer? Independence turned down the offer of a new one and last I heard Tivarante hasn't asked."
"We suspect it wouldn't be difficult for Dawn and Independence to access the Nuime crystal ball. Inconveniently, all of our actual diplomats are Maitimos and not equipped to navigate the question with their usual grace; the rest of us are trying to figure something out."
"I've heard that there are other Maitimos from nicer Ardas where Elves are naturally the sort of people the Valar are comfortable with so the Valar don't use nonconsensual mental alteration to make them that way," he says, "and that they're very upset about Midnight not being cast in the same mold."
"The problem, so far as we are aware, has nothing to do with the innate nature of the relevant Elves and instead has to do with worse Valar, most specifically a subtler Enemy," says T'Mir. "The divergence in the Maitimo template in particular we are inclined to trace through his father to a person named Rúmil, who in all Ardas is an ex-prisoner of Utumno and has considerable influence over Fëanáro's default-badly-parented upbringing. To Boots's subtle artistry, which can normally detect alts, the Independence Rúmil does not even register as a member of the template. Standard Arda Valar who Elspeth has not visited do perform dubiously consensual mental alteration on dead Elves but do not practice such thorough surveillance on the inclinations of the living. Complicating the matter is that in a typical Arda's trajectory Maitimos are captured early in the war and spend time in Angband and have some lingering difficulty with coping with the concept of Midnight's behavior towards his Findekáno for that reason. There are non-traumatized Maitimos - the Space Arda versions are forked from a time prior to that event; the human alt is not from an Arda at all - but they remain upset about having an alt who kept and raped a prisoner under variously mind-altering oaths for centuries."
"It's an upsetting thing," he says, "and I'm not saying it isn't, I just - "
He pauses for a moment to collect his thoughts.
"...When I look at this situation, what I want to do is find some way to help all the rest of you, improve your lives and the lives of your people to such an overwhelming extent that it becomes worth it that you met him. That's - I guess you'd say my template - that's my template's favoured approach to conflict. Just keep making everyone involved better off until it goes away."
"I think that would have been easier to accomplish before Midnight ran off with Imperial Loyalist Yeerks and his entire planet. Teleporting planets, even Flat Ardas, had not previously been tested; that could have killed everyone aboard and he didn't even bring the Valar as a safety. Yeerks are intensely dangerous to unprepared populations and according to our limited understanding of what happened after Nuime was found this fact was made manifest there, if mercifully briefly."
"'Even Flat Ardas' made it sound like you consider Flat Ardas strictly safer to teleport. But that's a little beside the point. I think everyone involved in this situation is incredibly lucky that Independence fetched up next to Nuime because now your major point of contact with the Ardas you dislike is going to be me and my alt. Please let us help you."
"Flat Ardas lack one known danger associated with teleporting spherical planets - their suns are closer by and manually piloted. However, it would be unlikely for a spherical planet to suddenly crumple in the absence of its magical physics, as spherical planets do not require such a thing. How is it you propose to help us?"
"Do you have any problems that could be solved with vast amounts of arbitrary magical power? You could start by telling Elaneth-imire about those. But what I was specifically talking about was trying to straighten out your approach to Independence. It's... I might have to tell you some of my world's history to explain why I'm coming at it from this perspective, but: when you make people desperate, they do desperate things. I think Midnight's situation might have made you all a little desperate, and then you reacted in a way that made him desperate in turn, and in Nuime we have learned that when powerful people get trapped in that cycle with each other, everyone suffers."
"We've been told that Elaneth-imire has a portable continent-preserving means of killing Melkors, which we should assume we'll need sooner or later. Certainly we are not under the impression that we ever handled Midnight well as a collective; the entire business has been governed by unproductive emotional reactions, which is why I am the instance of my template having this conversation with you now. I am entirely willing to hear the history of Nuime."
"More precisely, what Elaneth-imire has is a soul artifact a thousand times more powerful than anyone else's, which picks up new powers depending on his needs, with a lead time of three days," he says. "Soul artifacts are Nuime's local magic system. Anyone in Nuime can become a soulbearer, in theory. In practice it can be difficult, and it used to be much more so. A few thousand years ago, soulbearers were very rare because the process for becoming one wasn't common knowledge. Then someone decided that wasn't fair, and everyone should be able to have that kind of power, so he published an explanation. I actually think it might've turned out okay if he hadn't picked such a bad time and place, but as it happens, well..."
He shakes his head.
"His country was at war with its neighbour, had been for a long time. While the news of how to manifest your soul was still spreading, they put together an army of soulbearers and attacked. The neighbour was in danger of getting wiped out completely, so they got their hands on the secret and put together their own army of soulbearers. The thing about armies of soulbearers fighting each other is that both sides have enormous amounts of power but there's no way to predict anything about what that power is going to look like unless you personally know every single soulbearer involved. And even then, souls can change. It makes war very very messy and unpredictable. So what ended up happening is that both sides were terrified of being completely exterminated and thought the only way to save themselves was to exterminate the other side first. In the end, they both lost. That was the first Soul War."
A thoughtful, withdrawn look crosses his face for a moment; then he focuses on T'Mir again and continues.
"For a while, everyone agreed that armies of soulbearers just weren't worth the risk. But eventually someone decided they wanted to completely wipe out one of their neighbours; they put together an army of soulbearers and counted on everyone else's reluctance to start another Soul War to prevent them from doing the same and fighting back. They destroyed their neighbour so thoroughly that the only survivors were refugees in other nearby countries, then started conquering those places to get the refugees. Some of them fielded soulbearer armies of their own; others tried to kill or capture any refugees in their midst so the aggressors would leave them alone, and then ended up fighting the refugees, most of whom were soulbearers themselves by that point, and the whole mess just kept getting bigger until it swallowed up the world. The Soul Wars didn't so much end as gradually taper off once there wasn't enough of any individual side left to present a credible threat of total destruction to anyone else."
He considers for a moment whether it's relevant to add—
"My father was born during the Soul Wars. He saw it happen, some of it. Nuime is safe from that kind of thing now, especially since Elaneth-imire is irrevocably immortal, but it strikes me that open conflict between dimension-spanning polities would turn out similarly, and I cannot overstate how much I don't want that to happen. When I hear about how you handled him, I can't help thinking that it's sort of like that very first country in the very early days, secure in the knowledge that their neighbour didn't have a soulbearer army. It's - I don't blame you, I want to be clear about that. I know it's a hard problem and I can't say that the way I would've handled it in your place is unambiguously better. But I think the strategy of trying to restrict Independence's power is deeply counterproductive. If you'd been on good terms with them when the Yeerks showed up, if they'd had more resources and been able to trust you more, maybe they would've had better options than cooperating. I don't imagine that the Yeerks would have politely turned around and gone home if Midnight had refused to help them."
Sigh.
"So. I don't think anyone in this situation wants there to be conflict between you and Independence. I think everyone would be better off if both sides could trust each other and share resources freely. And I really, really want to make that happen, because you all sound like good people trying to do the best you can with a bad situation, and I want only good things for you, but I also care about Midnight and his country and want them to prosper. And Nuime is caught in the middle here and would really prefer if everyone got along. By the way, if you want to give things to Nuime that you don't want Dawn or Independence to have access to, I'm able to make commitments about that on Esarkan's behalf. But I am really hoping to secure your permission to give Dawn and Independence some things as well. I can't think how it could possibly hurt you if Independence had the Internet."
"No, the Internet is fine. What concerns us more are daeva especially demons, Materian wizardry especially in the presence of Maiar, the sorcery underlying the teleport especially in the presence of an untrusted instance of Fëanáro - Midnight's Fëanáro has been working with his Space alts and not interacting with Bells at all lest we irritate him; this is open to Dawn's too - worldleapers, and spellbinding."
"Demons can produce adjacency-unlimited surveillance on any unsecured or inadequately secured recorded information, which is most forms of recorded information not specifically produced with demons in mind; they can in a moment destroy stars and planets; they are themselves indestructible. While demons as a group have humanlike psychology, this includes a humanlike amount of variance and much of the peaceability of Hell has to do with the fact that everyone in it has the same powers. We're keeping an eye on the demon who made the worldleapers for Midnight and so far she hasn't made a move to distribute the information or leave Hell, but that's sheer luck. We have been trying for years to come up with a solution to the demonic information security problem which doesn't involve trying to bottleneck Hell's information, but so far do not have one. Materian wizardry is extremely powerful in its original dimension, which forbids systematic experimentation; outside of that the limit its eventual capabilities are unknown but presumably enormous. Maiar have unlimited fuel of the sort it uses and their cooperation removes a soft cap on development and casting. The sorcery underlying the teleport is slow to develop but has no known hard limits - additionally, the inventor of the teleport, my alt Loki, is very personally annoyed that it has been stolen - and may or may not be possible to reverse-engineer. Worldleapers provide dangerous but not prohibitively dangerous access to new worlds whose magic systems may be as or more potentially dangerous than the above. Spellbinding is not known to have any genuinely hard power caps when it is combined with Arda magic."
"I fully agree that demons require careful handling, and I wouldn't dream of treating them otherwise. The rest... what do you imagine will happen if Dawn and Independence gain access to powerfully general magic systems? Or is it as simple as - you don't trust them, therefore you don't want them to have significant power? Well, Dawn has Elaneth-imire. He's pretty significant all by himself."
"Yes, that's concerning too," T'Mir says. "We were not making a substantial priority of restricting Independence's independent work before - they had an ordinary crystal ball, although I don't think they ever did pick at it very much - we just weren't helping. Then Midnight risked an entire planet many of whose inhabitants are not even his own subjects in an unprecedented planetary teleport, stranded the subtle artists we'd loaned him on an undeveloped part of Vanda Nossëo, assisted Imperial loyalist Yeerks, and apparently secured the friendship of a world with yet another high-power magic system."
"...I think this situation would benefit from more guarantees of trust," he says. "Is there anyone you trust who is a Yeerk or could morph one, who could go in my head to verify that I'm - the person that I and my soul say I am? I want to have this conversation without worrying that you're going to think I'm wrong or lying or playing games with you when I'm not."
"My alt Butterfly can morph a Yeerk. So could I, I suppose, but she's the one who's done it before. There will remain the salient possibility that you're subject to some manner of deception or manipulation, and again as a group we do store most of our social skills which would make that clear in the Maitimos."
"I find it easy to understand people, and my soul has a lie detection power, and in extreme cases it's been known to just tell me what someone was trying to keep from me," he says. "And if I understand right, going in my head actually would let you pick up my social skills?"
"To an extent. Butterfly does not experience morph instincts the way most people do and it seems likely that others of us would have the same property. She would get your languages but has not mentioned retaining much else from people she's previously Yeerked. Social skills are also the sort of thing that is often heavily entwined with the personality attempting to deploy them. Lie detection alone does not necessarily guarantee anything; we do have that in magic song form. Depending on how extreme cases are defined the other power may or may not be any more reliable than Elspeth's occasional bursts of sourceless truth."
"There aren't very many subtle artists evacuated from Materia and a number of those now have particular Midnight-related irritation about being stranded without warning on Vanda Nossëo that might interact poorly with artist-patient rapport. There are some who practice and were not loaned to Shadow and you could inquire after their interest in taking on new patients."
"Thanks, I'll do that. Okay. I feel like the conversation between us about Dawn and Independence is going to be vastly more productive and efficient after you have someone Yeerk me, but if that's hard to arrange on short notice I can talk to you about Nuime in the meantime."
And Raika-seren picks up Finleran and holds him next to his ear.
He genuinely doesn't mind a bit. Finleran is welcome to look through his head as much as he likes. He wants Dawn and Independence to have a better relationship with the peal, and this is the best way he can see to make that easier, and it's barely even a cost, he has no problem with being known like this.
I mean, I know there's some stuff in here that's not going to make them very happy, but the thing I want to get across is - what it means to be a Taliar. The rest... I don't know. I don't mind in principle if people know about me and Midnight, but I mind if they, um, understand it incorrectly, d'you know what I mean?
It seems like not even Elaneth-Imire could stop the evil Maitimos if they decided to ally with the next enemy of the peal to come to their attention. I think that is the essential dilemma we will have to solve to feel comfortable with allowing them to accumulate power, but I should articulate all of this to everyone else so other concerns can be discussed. ...the thing that would really help would be ceasing to disseminate or use Loki's stolen spell.
...I can do my best, but I'm not sure even I can manage to get Dawn, Independence, and Nuime to all give up their only distributable means of interdimensional transport. We'd be down to Nezhefena and Tyela, and Tyela's too traumatized to go anywhere. Is there a substitute available?
Well. You're not a Taliar, he says, smiling. I can be optimistic enough for both of us.
His soul shines a soft and beautiful blue, the colour that represents his optimism as the force of nature it is.
(And in the back of his head, Nahira keeps whispering, as she's been doing all day. He barely thinks about it. He has a project, an even bigger one than he thought.)
And he pops out, and a short time later:
I will note firstly that I asked his leave to share this and received it; he would actively prefer any information be shared that might lead to a positive outcome. The positive outcome he envisions is that magic and advanced technology are shared with Dawn, Independence, Nuimë, and the neighbors they anticipate seeking out, and that the instances of Taliar are personally able to provide so much value to the peal that we consider this worthwhile. He is very competent, very resourceful, positioned with access to a lot of resources, and very very confident that he can achieve this outcome somehow, and he's willing to incur practically arbitrary personal costs to achieve it. I am less confident, in particular because both Maitimos have irrevocable continuous access to their consorts' thoughts (when in range) and the second evil Maitimo (chosen name Tivarante) irrevocably has the ability to incapacitate his husband at will. That seems like a likely trajectory of the dynamic between Midnight and Raika-seren, if Midnight decides that having a nearly-omnipotent consort is of use to him.
The original Taliar landed in his evil Arda in its year 400, fell in love with the local Maitimo, and was informed by his soul of the conditions under which the local Maitimo was keeping his consort only when the Maitimo attempted to arrange a threesome. Taliar's soul magic gets stronger off strengthening people around him and particularly people of significance to him; confronted with a problem whose obvious solution (removing the rapist from power) presented practical challenges and also meant doing grievous harm to a person of significance to him, his soul instead lost nearly all its power. That is the moment that Raika-seren was forked from, when his alt decided to give a fork of himself as a present to Midnight; how long it will take him to build up to the power levels that allowed the other one to trivially kill the Enemy is hard for him to estimate, but not longer than a few years.
(The relationship between Raika-seren and Midnight would certainly meet most standards of abuse but he's happy, his stance on it was not formed while being manipulated by Midnight, it would be counterproductive to attempt to extract him and he expects to be completely fine whatever happens. I think he is right to expect this; he has more-or-less modified himself to make it true. He categorically cannot be persuaded to leave Midnight, if prevented from returning to him he will either be rescued by his alt or manifest a power to do it himself, and if Midnight is executed - as, to be clear, I think is at this point entirely necessary - he will spend as long as it takes trying to figure out how to resurrect him and given the undirected nature of his magic system plausibly figure it out eventually. He is also pretty much categorically unable to consider betraying Midnight or working against him or aiding an effort to meaningfully contain him; because Midnight can read his thoughts he is in the habit of not having any that might damage Midnight's trust in him.) You might as well assume the Taliar template impossible to talk out of their commitments in full generality.
He is very confident in his ability to persuade Midnight to participate in some kind of plan to build enough trust that his world can get advanced technology and magic, but through a general conviction he can achieve results he wants rather than any specific basis for thinking Midnight inclined toward compromise. He is genuinely very gifted at this and I am inclined to assume him correct that he could achieve it.
My assessment of Midnight's aims, based on Raika-seren's memories, is that he wants to use his consort to acquire first modern technology and then probably wizardry and any other transmissible magic, win favor by sharing these with Nuimë, and then explore for adjacent dimensions. He is contained at least to some degree by the desire to use his consort for powerful magic - Taliars will not aid him in anything overtly evil or likely to endanger civilians - and Raika-seren believes him likely not to act badly to a greater degree than this because the degree of trust present in Tivarante and Elaneth-imire's relationship - and the state of their souls, which is very informative to people in Nuimë - is in his assessment incompatible with Tivarante still being a rapist or for that matter an irresponsible ruler. Raika-seren thinks that given more power Midnight would be less inclined to desperate acts, which is how he interprets helping the Yeerks and teleporting the planet and stranding the subtle artists and so on. Raika-seren is categorically opposed to efforts to contain Midnight and thinks they're almost certain to fail. His alt has had good results from never trying to make Tivarante do anything and he thinks that is the correct approach to evil Maitimos, at least beyond intervening for specific victims.
It should be possible to sustain good relationships with Nuimë independent of the other two and perhaps even while acting against the other two but that'd take finesse we've so far been underequipped with.
He might be right, but he does not have any special advantage that would make it more certain he is right - he has extraordinary social skills but so do Maitimos - and Midnight Yeerked him and is thus very well equipped with a picture of how to manipulate him. I do not think Midnight merits any benefit of the doubt at this point and the consequences of being wrong would be catastrophic. That is why I think the compromise he hopes for may not be achievable. In the spirit of attempting one anyway I suggested they give up the stolen teleport; he thought that would be impossible. If anyone wants to offer other gestures of good faith that might help salvage this, he is certainly open to hearing them.
So he makes some inquiries, and then he reads Finleran's summary.
"...The perspective gap actually managed to be even wider than I thought," he concludes. "Wow. I'd kind of like someone from a different template to do it and add their thoughts, just - to get more angles? I don't exactly feel like Finleran misrepresented me in any glaring ways, but I feel like he's... giving a more limited picture than I'd like."
"When you look at my soul, what do you see?"
(Integrity and compassion and optimism and wisdom and insight and charisma and contrariness and mischief and strength and resilience and determination and love and hope and the fundamental drive to give everyone what they need to be happy and safe and fulfilled—)
"Not necessarily a list, just - an impression. What sort of person you would think I was, with what capabilities, if you unconditionally believed everything my soul says about me. I hadn't actually considered that it might not work at all, although I should've."
"It might not work on, say, Golden, whose mental defense power has been known to be overprotective; I do get an impression from it. You come off as having very useful skills and admirable values and if that were all I knew about you I would be uncomplicatedly delighted to have you as an ally - if that were all I knew about you I would be having emotions, relevantly. The problem is that you are aiming your useful skills and admirable values at a project which may inherently balance poorly with ours however much skill you throw at it, and you are irrevocably committed to prioritizing that project to the point where there are apparently literally unthinkable thoughts."
"The unthinkable thoughts thing is one of the parts of that summary that was... technically not false but that I think suffered from an issue of perspective. I'm not tying my brain in knots to stop myself from thinking things that might make Midnight trust me less - I don't have to do that, because I am actually just trustworthy. And, yes, the amount of trustworthiness it takes to gain Midnight's trust is pretty extreme. But I'm a Taliar." He gestures at the summary that ensued from his casual offer to have someone on the peal's side Yeerk him. "When I want someone to trust me, I do not fuck around."
"I hope to eventually convince you to trust Midnight by giving you legitimately good reasons. I don't expect you to do it just because I showed up and said so. Although - can I ask, when you say you would be having emotions...? I'd been assuming you were just really good at locking them out of all the important stuff; are you saying you actually turned them off?"
"Yes. I can turn them back on at any time, but the reason you're talking to me in particular is because, as I mentioned earlier, historically our handling of Midnight has been governed by unproductive emotional reactions and so far our best idea for a new thing to try is 'definitely not that'."
"...It's kind of making it hard for me to get a good read on what you think of me," he says, "but from your perspective that might not necessarily be a bad thing. Anyway. At this point I think it's probably worth getting Dawn-shining to fork again from before he ever met Tivarante. Then we can send that Taliar to handle all this, and you won't have to worry about him being under the control of someone you don't trust."
"It's not remotely casual," he says. "It's... this, putting everything we've got into accomplishing the impossible, finding the best possible outcome of a situation and then making it happen no matter how hard it is, this is what Taliars are for. We cannot give this any less than our best. And the fork will have plenty to occupy him after he succeeds in clearing this up - there's a whole multiverse out there, I'm sure it contains several more problems worth throwing a Taliar at."
"Having a Taliar who was not devotedly attached to a - there will need to be some less loaded terminology for the subtemplate than 'evil Maitimo', presumably - would potentially be very useful in bridging the gap you observe and would certainly make it easier for the peal and Nuime to interface without complications. It will not make Midnight - or for that matter Tivarante, although he has less of a track record problem - any more trustworthy than they are willing to be, and it seems like nothing about that is liable to change in a positive direction."
"I am confident that we Taliars can bridge that gap," he says. "Regarding the teleport - I really don't want to keep using a stolen spell whose creator feels proprietary about it, but it's fundamentally not practical to have three separate dimension-spanning polities collectively relying for all of their interdimensional transport on two soulbearers one of whom no longer leaves her house. Is there some kind of compensation we can offer to the inventor, or official channels we can send some people through to acquire authorized copies of the spell, or any alternatives?"
"Materian wizardry is capable of interdimensional transit, though it has its own set of problems. I do not think it would be impossible to convince Loki to accept Midnight and Tivarante and various Nuime residents having it, but people she's never met who were not vetted by people she vetted at any degree of remove in control of its distribution is a harder sell and you would have to convince her that Midnight and Tivarante would not continue to hand it out however they pleased."
"I'll make the suggestion. Oh - unrelatedly, it just happened to cross my mind, there's a potential unfortunate interaction between eidetic memory necklaces and trauma flashbacks. Have you seen anyone get trapped in a memory loop for hours because something got them started while there was no one around to pull them out of it? I don't know how common it's likely to be, but it happened to me and I'd really rather it didn't happen to anyone else. Hopefully it was just some personal quirk of how my mind works and not something most people need to worry about."
"Yeah, I have some lingering trouble from before Nuime's first interdimensional contact, it's really inconvenient. Would still be pretty inconvenient even without the interaction - my soul says rings of dreamless sleep are subtly bad for me, I hope that's just another quirk - but with the interaction it's really inconvenient."
"If you know a lot of soulbearers, and know the person well, it's usually possible to guess some things, but not always, and not reliably. Whatever someone gets, it's always... appropriate for them, though. And powers can change when a person changes, or when their circumstances change. Taliars' souls are unusually flexible, but most people's souls change at least a little bit over time."
"It sort of... fills your entire mind with a sense of the person who is touching your soul and what you feel about them. Except that 'fills your entire mind' is an understatement, it takes up more than the amount of mind you normally have. And the fact that it's so terrifying and overwhelming to begin with means that usually most of that space is filled with pain and fear."
"Happy to help. Let's see, what else... how would you feel about providing Nuime with some Allspeak installations? Oh, and my alt and I have made some minor theoretical advances in magical engineering that you might not find redundant, who should I tell about those?"
"All right, I'll take care of it. Ideally I'd like to go home with the means to set up the Internet for Nuime, Independence, and Dawn if they want it. I think I can manage that mostly by myself, given a crystal ball and a while to read about it; but I probably shouldn't personally summon a demon to conjure the relevant materials because they might get curious about my soul, so I'd need some help with that part. And a few hours in front of a crystal ball. Are those things available?"
"I can divide the order up between multiple demons. And come up with plausible justifications for all of them, given another few hours in front of a crystal ball. But at that point it's more of an inconvenience for you to put it through for me; I welcome alternate suggestions."
"All right. Well, if Cam or Epic would find it worthwhile to send me home with three planets' worth of internet, I'll go for that, and if not, you can have some people whose time is less valuable summon a bunch of demons or I can suggest to Esarkan that he trade with Tide."
"Well, the term is derived from a pun on the name regularity of my template but has in the absence of comparable puns been expanded to include 'coming to the attention of the network while being a relevantly-similar-enough alt of a person already trusted thereby'."
"Elaneth-imire almost certainly knows more about the state of Dawn than you can get from even very clever conjuration. I suppose it's an open question whether you'll accept his standards of evidence, but the evidence available to him includes a soul power that lets him see everything happening on the entire surface of the planet at once whenever he likes."
He settles in and starts reading. Rather than waste time on food or sleep - particularly given how unpleasant sleep is likely to be - he wraps himself in his healing aura. Hopefully the soft golden glow isn't too distracting. He keeps an eye on the time; if it takes more than a day and a half for a subtle artist to have an appointment slot free, he'll go home.
Well, there are a couple with free spots in the next few days but they charge money.
The subtle artists who don't charge money were disproportionately tapped to not-charge-money in Shadow before Midnight left them stranded on an unhabited continent of Vanda Nossëo, so they are perhaps understandably inclined to turn him down.
Unfortunately, I don't have any money right now, and I would really like to get started on solving my problem quickly because an unforeseen magic interaction left me having looping trauma flashbacks for twenty-four hours straight and I would strongly prefer not to give that a chance to happen again. Can you recommend anyone else?
There's a different set of cultural assumptions surrounding healing in Nuime. And I arguably didn't exist at the time, but that's kind of a long story and I'll understand if you don't want me taking up any more of your time. Thanks anyway.
(Anyone else interested in talking to him or passing him along to someone who will...?)
A whole course of talk therapy probably isn't necessary; what are the available options for 'I sometimes have trauma flashbacks and I would like to not have them anymore'? He could do without the nightmares too, but it's the flashbacks that are significantly affecting quality of life.
Okay, cool. Can he just temporarily not dream about anything that happened in Atialemain, annnnd if blunting the flashbacks is going to take multiple sessions he might like to be temporarily unable to smell daffodils or something? And he is very grateful for the subtle artist's help.
He goes back to the public ballroom. He spends another several hours reading about how the Internet works until he's satisfied he can make it happen if someone hands him the materials.
He returns to Nuime, passes the relevant parts of the conversation on to Esarkan with very little commentary, hops into Dawn, and says to his alt, You busy?
No kidding. I am absolutely forking for this, though, Sun-dark is right, we can get it done but we need one of me who's - unattached. How do you feel about having me spy on you to win favour with the peal? It seems like a pretty reasonable trade considering they're apparently spying on you already.
Aww. Elaneth-imire cuddles his husband.
I mean, that would be satisfying, but Esarkan will prefer to be in contact with them, and they'd still be spying on us, and they have Midnight's father, and - Raika-seren got into this on behalf of Taliars-as-a-group and now we have to see it through.
And he can see the same lurking specter of an interdimensional Soul War that his fork can. He can hide them, but he doesn't want to rely on his hiding power against all possible methods of finding, and he feels like the peal would find their disappearance provocative, and in conclusion this situation desperately needs a Taliar thrown at it. Maybe his father, too. He bets his father would have something to contribute.
I'm going to tell all of my people that there are demons spying on them and how to avoid being spied on. Right now. I will not tolerate engagement with them taking the form of 'we're good enough to deserve not to be murdered or captured or conquered, look at us, look how deserving of continued freedom we are, we're so virtuous, there's nothing you'd even want to fix.' You tell them nothing. They are loathsome and disgusting and worse than the Valar.
Well, that'll make the new fork's life difficult, but he's a Taliar, he'll handle it.
—also, it's not just written records, he bets they can conjure scale models of planets and so forth, that seems within their described capacity, so eliminating written records won't even solve the entire problem. The new fork has his work cut out for him.
Yes, I know that, but the more time they waste doing that the fewer people they can harm. And there's only so much you can learn from models.
His soul flares and his osanwë range - is extended, good. He warns his people that they should stop writing anything down, as hostile aliens are reading them looking for evidence the planet needs conquering.
Sure.
(And again, this is escalatory, this is exactly the wrong direction - but he's not going to try to convince Tivarante not to go down this road, because they shouldn't have to placate the peal in order to maintain their independence.)
(—and Midnight's Findekano is out there somewhere too, he'll need a way home eventually - and what if the peal finds another Arda like Dawn and Independence, the Taliars will need to be there to offer its Maitimo sanctuary and a fork - no, they can't cut off contact. The Taliars will just have to fix it.)
They're making stupid assumptions about you. It's inconceivable to them that you could make the choices you've made in your personal life and not be - malevolent in a way that makes it frightening to not know what you're doing. And I will make a new fork and the new fork will fix it and you don't have to go out of your way in the slightest.
Kiss.
And he pops over to Nuime.
"Let's find out."
Elaneth-imire pops into the palace briefly to grab some clothes for the new fork. He makes an eidetic memory necklace. He uses his landshaping power to make a nice comfortable grassy hollow, in case the new fork needs to sit down suddenly.
He closes his eyes and casts his mind back to that moment, just before he opened his eyes and saw a new world. His soul shines brightly.
"...thanks." He gestures at Dawn-shining's soul as he moves to put his new necklace back on. "And, uh, congratulations? What'd you need three of us for? Is the world ending? If you need three of us because the world's ending why aren't you making three like you - is there some sort of collector who wants Taliars at all available levels of exaltation - and seriously, what the fuck did you do," he says to Raika-seren.
"Never better," Raika-seren assures him. "So, here's the deal. There are other worlds! Strange worlds full of strange people! A year or so ago, at exactly the moment you're forked from in fact, we were minding our own business using our healing aura and suddenly we were in a different world in the throne room of a foreign king. We fell in love with him. He's honestly amazing, you should see his kingdom, it's - it's so obvious that he cares? But don't fall in love with him, because we need you not to be, because there are complications."
He taps his soul.
"This is because I found out he was a rapist and didn't take it well. And that's the moment I'm forked from, out of Dawn-shining's past, because an entire other version of Dawn-shining's husband from an entire other version of his world showed up in our neighbourhood dragging his entire planet behind him, fleeing from some well-intentioned people who treated him very badly because of how he was handling his personal life, and he didn't have a Taliar and Dawn-shining wanted him to and - it wouldn't have worked, if the fork had been a sun-bright god-killer like Dawn-shining, it would've been too... intimidating. So he made me and he said 'this is my beautiful glorious husband, who has an alt in need of a me, and you can either stay with us and be uncomplicatedly happy forever, or go hand yourself over to the sad alt and probably suffer a lot but eventually you'll both be this happy'."
Elaneth-imire sends memories. Not everything, and in particular not anything he thinks will lead to the new fork falling in love, but enough to give him a solid picture.
He doesn't need to address the part about ever needing rescuing. That just sort of gets straightened out incidentally in the course of explaining the rest.
"...Well," he says. "This is going to be fun, isn't it."
His soul shines blue, deep and clear and beautiful, like a summer sky. And it doesn't stop, it doesn't fade like normal soul reactions, it just keeps right on shining. He looks down at it, touches it, looks up at his alts.
"Liran-alore," he says. 'Summer-blue'.
He pops home to Midnight's palace.
...it occurs to him to wonder - well. Midnight did Yeerk him, so presumably he won't be that surprised by how wildly out of control this simple task has gotten. And the Internet is definitely on its way, and more good things are coming after it.
I don't know about dramatic declarations, I don't actually know what got Elaneth-imire's soul to acknowledge Tivarante except in the vaguest possible terms, but if you want my soul stronger you can introduce me to lots of people I'll get along with, it's slow but it works - oh, and I think Elaneth-imire's soul took another significant jump when Tivarante married him, but that still required his soul to acknowledge Tivarante in the first place... I suppose you could find someone else as amazing as you for me to fall in love with, but I can't imagine where you'd get such a person...
I love you. I'm sorry my soul is so inconveniently conflicted about that. If I could argue it into godhood for you I would, but I'm sure Elaneth-imire tried that and given that it took him months instead of days for him to win the war after my point of departure, I'm going to assume it didn't work. You could go ask Tivarante for advice...?
And so does Sun-dark. He writes up those theoretical advances and pops into Nuime to hand them to his alts, who are still sitting on that cliff transmitting the teleport, and then he goes back to making magical artifacts, but with more of an intent to make friends as opportunities arise. The next step on the plan to acquire Internet is going to be talking to Summer-blue after he comes back from his first conversation with the peal. Shouldn't be long.
"...Hi," says - definitely not the Taliar he knows. This one has only recently heard of the public/private thought distinction and has been a little too busy to put it into practice. He's thinking about how he's going to approach the peal, and - oh of course if Findekano decided to help he'd be invaluable - and how badly must he and Elaneth-imire have gotten along, for Elaneth-imire to have said so little about him -
"Liran-alore Taliar," he says, touching his sky-blue soul. Hints of gold and silver remain, but blue is firmly ascendant. "Nice to meet you."
"Those people who chased the other Arda into our corner of the multiverse caught up with them recently. Esarkan wants to have a productive relationship with them, but they're inclined to look with suspicion on Ardas of the local type and anyone who's friendly with them, so there's been some tension. Taliar decided to... Taliar at it."
"They also have this thing about alts - they know a bunch more of you, and they trust them, so they'd trust you. You might actually be the only person available who that's true of; the Ardas they're used to produce nicer versions of everyone - the nice Maitimos are all horrified by Midnight and Tivarante - and as far as I know, you're the only one who's consistent across both versions of the world."
Looking at Findekano's soul, he's not surprised by that. If there is some base version of Ardas from which the local flavour is a departure in the direction of everyone being less nice, this is exactly the sort of person who wouldn't budge an inch to follow it.
"They're—" he sends a condensed impression of what T'Mir was like when Raika-seren met her. "A bunch of that person and a bunch of people from nice Ardas. They have enormous amounts of useful powerful magic and other miscellaneous useful things which they hand out freely to people they trust but which they don't want to give to Dawn or Independence because they don't trust them and don't want to give to Nuime because they don't trust Dawn or Independence not to steal it from us. They're spying on Dawn and Independence with some of their enormous amounts of powerful magic, and the degree to which no one in this situation seems interested in avoiding an interdimensional Soul War is painful to watch, and I am absolutely not capable of leaving it alone to continue limping along in a grudging tacit truce until one day they decide they've got some clever way to come in and force everyone to submit to their benevolent oversight and they try it and it explodes in their faces."
"Well, here."
He sends it. It's a pretty complete summary of relevant events since his point of departure, although it avoids going into the details of anyone's personal life except as necessary to explain other people's reactions. His alts were clearly very concerned with making sure he had no direct focused memories of why they are in love with their Maitimos or what it is like to occupy that state. Enough of that gets in around the edges that he can understand why they're being so careful. He's a bit bewildered by the strong implication that they both enjoy being tortured, he can't reconstruct what that's like from the information available, but he very much understands the part about falling in love with someone who runs a kingdom really really well.
"I'll pass that along. Elaneth-imire would be delighted. They're all dead at the moment, but he can resurrect them himself if it would be inconvenient for you. And I would be more than happy to heal orcs. Elaneth-imire didn't find out for sure, but we think the healing aura does work on them."
"...If you want it solved fast, give me three days to become immortal and then send me and Elaneth-imire, with Shadow-cloaked Nezhefena for tracking and transport. If you want it solved with certainty, wait for Raika-seren to get up to Elaneth-imire's level and then send both of them. Raika-seren will have the most personal investment, and that matters with souls. Sending two sun-bright Taliars is enormous overkill but at the point where you've got a loose Melkor roaming the multiverse, enormous overkill is warranted. There's no telling when Raika-seren will get that powerful, though, it could be a while."
"Yeah - my logic was that if certainty might not be certain, you definitely want it - but if killing gods is a qualifier, I think they'll do fine. Maybe let Raika-seren take out the next available Melkor first if the timing on his power level works out right."
"We'd also be very interested if you can directly affect adjacency, render things unconjurable by demons, resurrect people who in life had spirit animals or familiars, produce divinatory information about certain properties of some unusual worlds without us having to test them, duplicate certain spellbinder effects or make them more efficient to cast..."
"I can see what my soul comes up with - might help if I heard about specific applications for these various abilities, resurrection's obvious but what are the unusual worlds, what kind of spellbinder effects do you want duplicated or streamlined... soul artifacts can't traditionally maintain magical effects on anything without a constant investment of power, but I'm pretty sure that if anyone can sneak past that restriction it's me."
"Stork's native human population does not reproduce and instead babies appear in random wilderness locations; we don't know if the rate will change with the population or anything else. Materia's anticausality may be inherently unpredictable but so far it seems not to react to things occurring outside its sphere, and if observed from there it might be we could learn more. One of the most commonly used high-investment spellbinder results is duplicating daeva indestructibility."
"Dawn is a responsibly run polity with superpowers that they can loan you - it sounds like you still have people dying of old age on some worlds known to you, Dawn-shining's planet-spanning healing aura could probably cover several hundred worlds in a week, and it de-ages people -"
"And - I hesitate to speak of conditions - but the way to make that work is to tell Dawn 'sorry for spying on you, let's mutually swear not to aggress against each other' and probably propose mutual freedom of movement, which is the one sort of check on his powers that Tivarante will tolerate."
"Keep in mind I don't live there, I just - know him well. And I'm sure he'll agree not to do anything at all in your jurisdiction without your explicit agreement and guidance, on the condition that its citizens be permitted to leave if they want, and accept the reciprocal of that."
"Nuime would be glad to help move people around without the use of stolen magic if we had the teleporting soulbearers to spare, which admittedly at the moment we mostly don't," says Corino. "I know of a few people whose souls might shift in that direction, myself included, but even if the number of active teleporting soulbearers increased from one to five..."
"Requires Maiar or Materia adjacency to charge. Also the designer of the wizardry dimensional teleport we have is a yea high alt of your uncle Fëanáro." Gesture. "It hasn't been stolen, but I don't actually know what his opinion on giving it away under these circumstances might be."
Well, there is a certain logic to that. "Epic doesn't object to sharing the wizardry teleport. The system is also reverse-engineerable but it's clear we're going to need to come to some kind of comfort with evil Ardas or whatever we wind up calling the variety possessing escalating magical power."
"I assure you I'm not coming to this from a position of sympathy for him, but he's far, far more dangerous when cornered than when possessed with the resources to run a peaceful, prosperous empire. Since he acquired - ah - access to nearly arbitrary power in the form of his now-husband - he has not done anything I think you'd find objectionable."
"Yes. The reason I am taking point on this interaction for my template is that when Shadow was found the reaction to it took almost exclusively the form 'unproductive emotional wheel-spinning' and while I have no special expertise I do have the ability to turn my emotions off at will and therefore produce something that isn't that. An idea of what to do instead of one thing to have ruled out would be very much an improvement."
"It's not like leaving Maitimos in Angband while we get some politics sorted out - I much prefer on a personal level the trajectory of my kind of Arda to a standard one - and if you could notify me that stabilizing the place is in progress I'll prefer helping with that to getting whisked away from it."
"I'm looking forward to helping you however I can," says Liran-alore. "Are there any orcs in need of healing right now? All the ones in Dawn that were alive when Elaneth-imire killed Melkor were in his healing aura already, but I guess that leaves plenty of dead ones..."
"The orcs from all the other Ardas are fine on a population level; we took Shadow's before Independence was moved. If you want to go to an orc planet and visit a maternity ward and see if you can catch someone's baby before the attending healer does that would serve as a proof of concept - although someone will need to be reading the baby's mind to make sure it works; it's hard to tell on newborns."
"I could do that, but if there are any other places a city-sized healing aura could do some good, might be more efficient to start there unless orc maternity wards are, uh, more city-sized than I'm picturing. On the other hand, Findekano made a good point that the really efficient thing would be to bounce Elaneth-imire around at a few minutes per solar system. In which case I guess we should go convey the nonaggression pact idea to Dawn. Or you two should go and I should heal some cities, if there are any in need."
"Thanks!" he says cheerfully, and he bounces off to Stork and Hex to give those cities a few minutes at a time of healing aura. (His healing aura is still primarily golden, but the hint of blue is emphasized compared to his alts', not that any of these people are in a position to make that comparison.)
"I'm sure if I ever find an alt, he and I will cooperate very readily, but I do not at all feel moved to base the entire structure of a budding interdimensional organization on that. And the same goes for Esarkan, on both counts."
He takes a moment to update Elaneth-imire on the situation. (Interdimensional osanwe: so useful!)
So he kisses his husband and gets the intermediary hops from his father and bounces off into the multiverse.
It's weird going out of range of home, but maybe he'll be lucky and his soul will overcome the limitations of adjacency - it is definitely correct for them to be able to reach one another's minds no matter how far apart they are -
- guess not. Well that's disappointing. (Unless Maitimo's just playing with him - would Maitimo do that - yes he probably would - presumably one day he'll find out which it is and in the meantime he loves his husband very much. Even if it turns out that Maitimo is deliberately leaving Taliar to miss him.)
Taliar is not especially mopey. He does miss his husband, but he's not sure that Maitimo can't hear him, so it's not as bad as it could be. He'll be very glad to get back to him when he's flung his healing aura over all relevant planets, though.
He finishes flickering through all the stops between Nuime and Warp.
Well then, I suppose a powerful ally has just given you some stuff. And I think that's the last thing I can accomplish for you with just the powers I've got, so I guess I'll go home now, unless you've come up with another thing in the last fifteen minutes—?
I got to use my healing aura on like fifty planets in an hour, you practically did me a favour. See you later, maybe! Send word through Liran-alore if you need me for anything!
And he bounces all the way back home and informs his husband, Wow I missed you a ridiculous amount considering I was only gone for an hour and a half.
Progress on the Internet: the peal hasn't come through with any demons yet, but Raika-seren borrowed a minute of Esarkan's time to find a soulbearer who can make things. The scale isn't that great but he can at least figure out all the hidden technical problems and get some practice before doing it for real on Independence.
And then Liran-alore comes back and shares his memories of the conversation and Raika-seren bounces home with them.
What he wants?
If he just drops all the intervening practicalities and reaches straight for the optimal outcome in true Taliar fashion, what he wants is what he saw between Tivarante and Elaneth-imire. He wants that kind of love, that kind of trust, that kind of joy. He wants Maitimo to look at him with that expression of utter fascination, while he is much too busy being tortured to notice - he wants to know what it's like to have imaginary strangers touching his soul, and he wants to know what it's like to hand his soul to Maitimo expecting that and laughing about it. He wants to get high on trust songs and give himself up completely. He wants Maitimo to have him and keep him and love him and treasure him and delight in him - he wants to make a gift of himself and he wants to be the kind of gift that brings exquisite unimaginable happiness.
And maybe he can't have all that, but even if he can't, there are other things he wants in the meantime. He wants to see what it's like to be held to his own standards. He wants to see just how far he can be taken apart and still put himself back together afterward. He wants to help Maitimo, solve problems for him, love him and be appreciated for loving him, give him nice things, see him smile, make him happy.
Is that the sort of answer you were looking for...?
It's lovely. He's lovely. And Raika-seren thinks he recognizes that song, which makes it even more lovely.
He can feel the change in the shape of his thoughts, and it's - it's beautiful, it's enthralling - trust songs get at something really fundamental in Taliar's mind - and he knows that the reason he trusts Maitimo so perfectly right now is because Maitimo is mind-controlling him, and he decides to let that feeling go unchecked, because it will be more fun that way, because he genuinely and wholeheartedly believes he won't be made to regret it.
Most people don't get this high on it, right - I wonder what it's like to be that kind of person, I can't imagine - I love you so much, I'm so happy.
I can't even think of a coherent comparison, I've never felt anything else like it. But it's amazing and I love it and I love you.
The closest he can get is - what Kelora said about the colours of his soul, while he was catching up, the difference between silver and blue - trust songs feel like the absolute pinnacle of blue. It is so very deeply rewarding, to feel like this. Particularly since he's been having a rather silver time of it overall.
I would be doing a better job of this if I wasn't so high, but—
It actually hasn't all been because of Maitimo; he's been very silver about handling the aftermath of the twenty-four-hour flashback incident, which was entirely his own fault and which Maitimo helped him with tremendously. But it was silver when Maitimo took him to that florist, and afterward - silver because that's what he needs to deal with memories of Nahira, and silver because that's what he needed to get through being tortured with only just barely enough appreciation.
There's blue in there too. It's blue to come here and give himself to Maitimo and trust that he doesn't need to do anything more than that, doesn't need to play any games or pursue any strategies, that all he has to do is be the person he is and make the choices he makes and it will all be okay in the end. But silver is how he gets through the consequences of those choices. Silver is how he can tell himself that it's okay if Maitimo does hurt him that badly, does hurt him without permission, and make that true. Silver is deciding that he wants Maitimo to have that option and then doing his best to give it to him, and succeeding. Silver is strength; silver is that infinite well of willpower that he glimpsed in Elaneth-imire's memory and immediately envied.
Silver isn't really bad, exactly. It's not what he wants the foundation of their relationship to be forever, but it's a part of him and he isn't ultimately harmed by relying on it for a while.
Kiss. Snuggly adoring kiss.
...wow, he didn't realize how deep that internal wall ran - being this high on trust, loving Maitimo the way he does, he should be wanting Maitimo rather desperately right now, and he's not, because he doesn't know if Maitimo wants him, and that matters, it matters even when he has permission to want things in general.
Should I undo that - I can if you tell me to, even if I'm still not sure -
Okay.
It's not quite inconvenience that's the problem, but close enough. He closes his eyes for a moment and un-forbids the relevant thoughts. (He doesn't check first if he'd still want to do that without the trust songs, and he sort of half-notices that fucking with his head while on trust songs could be considered inadvisable, but he decided to let himself trust Maitimo exactly as much as he feels like, and he's not about to reconsider that decision.)
...and, yep, now he really really wants Maitimo to fuck him. Wow. Trust songs are amazing. He still feels a little fucked up from the aftermath of the flashback incident, and it just doesn't even matter at all, it's barely noticeable and certainly not getting in his way. He loves Maitimo so so much, and he wants to be his.
I trust you, he says, with only a little irony. I love you. I want you. And I can be very very patient if that's what you need from me, and I can be okay when you hurt me, if that's what you need from me. I want to be whatever you need. I want to be your gift and I want to be a better one than either of us can imagine.
Snuggle. Kiss.
...he remembers soul contact on trust songs - he remembers what you get if you let the trust song fade partway through the soul contact - and it's fascinating to watch his own thoughts on that, because he wants Maitimo to touch his soul and he doesn't want the cascade and yet he isn't afraid of it at all, he trusts Maitimo - and he can recognize that it's blatantly not true that Maitimo would never hurt him, but that's still what he feels - and under that, he feels that even if Maitimo did hurt him, it would be okay, he'd be fine, he wouldn't really be hurt, because it's Maitimo. Trust songs are kind of fucked up. In the best way possible. He loves this feeling so much, and he loves Maitimo for giving it to him.
Kiss. My one complaint about trust songs, he sighs, is that I can't be afraid of you when you say things like that. Ruins the thrill.
But no, actually, he's pretty sure his soul would intervene if someone tried to do this to him whom he did not genuinely trust. And he's perfectly capable of messing with his head until he disregards the feeling, he just doesn't want to because it feels great, and he doesn't have to because he has legitimate reasons to believe that Maitimo isn't going to take advantage of it except perhaps in the good way if he's lucky.
I really want you to touch my soul, he says. And I really want you to fuck me. Maybe both at once, that'd be fun, even though I couldn't feel it, I'd still be able to tell afterward, and you could show me what I was like... I love you, you're so beautiful, I love that you can do this to me, if we had the time I'd want you to keep me like this for a week straight... I want you to carve your name in me, I want to be yours forever... love you, love you so much, I'm so glad they made me for you, there's nothing I could be doing with my life that would be better than this.
What, wanting all those things? I want all those things anyway. But - there's something to that, yeah, being on trust songs makes me want - I don't quite know how to put it -
But he suspects Maitimo is likely to be curious, so he tries to figure out how to articulate the underlying drive.
...I trust you so much, and - I want you to use that, I want it to matter - I don't want you to hurt me, but I want the reason I'm not hurt to be because I love you and trust you and want you and feel safe with you - I want you to do things that would hurt me, if it was anyone else doing them - I love you and I want that to mean something. Otherwise you're just getting me high. Which, well, you won't catch me complaining, getting high on trust songs is one of the best feelings in the world, but - it's less than it could be.
I love you so much, Maitimo. You're amazing. I want you to have all the fun with me you want.
It's weird and sort of disappointing not to be afraid of the thought of Maitimo doing things to him that he'll need to be immortal to survive, but it's still enjoyable in its own way. He loves trusting Maitimo this much. It's the most beautiful thing he can imagine. And he wants Maitimo to make good use of that trust.
He doesn't recognize that song, but he can guess that it's magic and he looks forward to finding out what it does -
- and then -
- at first he doesn't even understand what's happening to him. He can't wrap his head around it at all. Something is definitely horribly wrong with the world but he can't tell what it is, he just knows that his mind is missing some deeply fundamental piece - and he starts laughing, fondly, because in what way does this qualify as not hurting him, come on - it's okay though, he still loves Maitimo, still trusts him, still wants him to have all the fun he likes -
...oh that's the thing that's missing. People. He's missing people. There's someone here and he doesn't know who they are and he can't figure it out and when he tries his mind just flails helplessly, he can't pay any attention to anything that might be a person because if he does he's immediately sucked into an endless spiral of aching confusion.
Okay. That's fine. He's not afraid. He's still gloriously high on trust. If this is what Maitimo wants from him, he's happy to give it.
His mind floods with trust and comfort and love, and the identity song can't stop him from recognizing Maitimo's touch on his soul, and it's the best thing in the world, he loves Maitimo so much, it feels so perfect, it's glorious, it's everything he's ever wanted, intense and intimate and utterly euphoric...
...and on the flip side, the trust song can't stop him from feeling the intense unbearable mind-shattering agony of - not just soul contact with strangers, he hasn't felt that but he can tell it wouldn't be like this, this is much too big, too alien, it's - the essence of strangers, it's something too vast and awful to fully comprehend -
- it feels like he's being pulled apart, torn in half between this joy and this pain, comfort and terror, trust and violation -
- he loves Maitimo so much, and he is deeply, fiercely, painfully happy to be having this experience because it's Maitimo doing it to him and Maitimo must be enjoying it immensely.
The trust song cuts out first. The half of him that can feel Maitimo's touch on his soul goes into cascade. Pain, and terror, and happiness, and pain, and love, and trust, and pain, and pain, and pain...
...and then the identity song cuts out too, and the cascade shatters into a thousand thousand pieces, every one of them separately occupying the same incomprehensible scale as the essence-of-strangers feeling that is now thankfully absent.
His mind is barely recognizable. Every part of this vast and shattered thing is him, but the way it's put together is nothing like anything he's ever felt, anything he's ever been. It's incredible. It's terrifying. It's wonderful. It's amazing. He loves Maitimo for doing this to him, and that love is filling his soul a thousand times over in a thousand variations, alongside pain and fear and joy and trust and comfort and the determination to endure, and all the shades in between.
For a while afterward he's totally blank, totally empty, his mind just isn't doing anything at all -
- and the first thing that comes back - before his senses, before his thoughts - before he remembers what laughter is, he's laughing. The rest follows after.
I love you, Maitimo. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me.
Afterward, when he can move again, he curls up cozily and his mind drifts a little and he contemplates immortality and—
—he can't figure out how Elaneth-imire did it?
He's got to be missing something. That kind of fundamental change in the soul should shine like a beacon as soon as he so much as glances down the right mental path - it should be obvious, and it's not. He has no idea what the trick was. He can guess that it involved committing to stay with Tivarante forever, but none of the ways he can think of to do that are the right way. Bizarre.
Maybe he should consult Elaneth-imire - then again, maybe he shouldn't, because he's going to feel like it's terribly unfair if it turns out that the answer is something about Tivarante and Elaneth-imire's circumstances that they can't duplicate - maybe he had to be facing the threat of death by evil god to get desperate enough... well. Raika-seren will just have to come up with a different way to argue his soul into immortality. And then he can find out what kind of fun Maitimo wants to have with him that requires him to be unable to die.
And if you ever find yourself irresistibly tempted to murder me, you can always bring my soul to Dawn-shining to be resurrected afterward.
Or not, he supposes. Wow, that was a depressing thought. He giggles at himself and cuddles up to Maitimo. He does not actually think that Maitimo is going to kill him and then leave him that way. (Although there's a part of him that kind of wants to play with the possibility, now - it's scary in the good way because he really does trust Maitimo not to do that...)
Between Taliars it's just - I don't have immortality yet so he's my immortality. It wouldn't read to him like you'd gone too far or messed up or anything, he'd just hand me right back to you and maybe ask what you did in case it sounded like fun, but he'd think of it as entirely your business.
He feels so good and cozy and appreciated and - small and helpless and safe. It's nice.
I'm so glad you decided to sing me trust songs. That was amazing. And, you know, when I said 'make my trust matter' I didn't exactly mean 'take my mind to pieces', but I ended up appreciating it anyway, so that works out. I like that you can do these things to me. That identity song was amazingly fucked up. If I hadn't been high on trust at the time I bet I would've been terrified you were going to fuck me like that.
For some reason it's really endearing when Maitimo says that. Maybe because - he definitely knows - it's lovely that he knows Raika-seren this well, that he can see into his head all the time, that he Yeerked him and understands him deeply enough to do things like set him on a stupidly difficult task to help him recover from a straight day of trauma flashbacks.
If they ever get around to exploring the concept of bad days, Maitimo isn't going to undershoot the first one at all, is he.
Guess it depends on when we try it and how I'm feeling at the time. I think I'd kind of rather wait until it's best for me to get as fucked up as possible, honestly, it's - I really get something out of you knowing me as well as you do, and part of that is that you can go farther with me than would be safe if you didn't?
We planned him out pretty carefully so he wouldn't end up getting jealous! Although I think we didn't think hard enough about the power disparity between him and Elaneth-imire - it's just more efficient to get Elaneth-imire to do nearly anything you need a Taliar's soul for, and Liran-alore is going to have trouble with that until he finds himself a niche. Or achieves godhood, either one.
I'm glad of that too.
Snuggle.
I love you and I want you to be happy and not have to deal with people who hate you.
And someday he'll give them all enough wonderful things to make Maitimo's presence on the periphery of their lives unquestionably worthwhile - on top of everything his alts are already doing for the peal - because he is a Taliar and achieving the gloriously unachievable is what he is for.
It gives me great joy to be so interesting to you.
Which is part of how much fun it is, but only part. There's also the ironic part where it involves terrible suffering, and the extra layer on that where the terrible suffering is worthwhile and in its own way enjoyable, and the part where sometimes Maitimo does something like get him high on trust songs and it is legitimately entirely fucking amazing, and the part where just being in love with Maitimo and being around him and getting to snuggle him and kiss him and work on interesting projects for him is very deeply rewarding in its own right.
Taliar very happily drowns in love. He feels so safe with Maitimo, and it's a very silver kind of safety a lot of the time but that's not necessarily a bad thing. He is glad to belong to him, glad to be with him, glad to be in his power. Glad to be so fascinating to him and glad to be the kind of person who can handle the kinds of things he finds fascinating. He is Raika-seren Taliar and he was made for this.
This time around, the overwhelming intimacy of soul contact feels satisfying and fulfilling and comforting. To be completely inescapably wrapped up in Maitimo is exactly the thing he wants most. It's perfect. Not a soft cozy painless blanket like soul contact on trust songs, but delightfully intense, unbearable in a good way.
It's a while before he's able to think again, but he is still definitely not lonely. He feels completely content.
Love you so much. It's so good when you do that.
Maybe they should find out what happens if you take someone's soul more than one world-hop away from their body - yes, it'll be embarrassing if the answer is 'instant death', but on the other hand if the answer is 'they're fine' then Maitimo won't have to return Raika-seren's soul before visiting other worlds and that can only be a good thing, particularly if soul contact still works. Esarkan will prefer that Maitimo not go around openly carrying someone else's soul in public in Nuime, but he won't otherwise care at all.
I suppose there are in theory. But especially for Liran-alore - he wasn't made for a person, he was made for a purpose, if Elaneth-imire has to make a new fork from the same point and catch him up on everything Liran-alore was up to it won't be the kind of loss it would be if something that irrecoverable happened to me.
I will. Love you.
If Maitimo doesn't want Raika-seren casually risking his life, then he won't. He can leave that to the Taliar who is trivially resurrectable by re-forking.
I have absolutely no idea what time it is, should I be going to sleep or getting back to work?
I'm tired but it's soul-contact tired, makes it hard to tell whether there is actual-tired lined up behind it. I'll pick up my soul and go work on that prototype Internet some more, then.
And he gets up and gets dressed, and by the end of that he's wide awake again. Which he could've done nearly as easily if it had been the middle of the night, and while that is a useful talent to have, it makes it kind of difficult to use his energy level to tell the time. If he only slept when he was tired, he'd be in a constant cycle of staying up for two or three days straight and then collapsing, until he wore himself out and didn't get out of bed for a week.
Liran-alore pops into Dawn and says to Elaneth-imire, I'm about to do something stupid, if I'm not back in five minutes my soul's in your lovely road, then sends all his memories that Elaneth-imire doesn't already have and bounces away.
Five minutes later: So I think it's safe to say soulbearers can survive with their souls in distant universes. I'm sure Sun-dark will be thrilled. You people. And he pops back to Nuime and delivers the news.
You don't get to risk some totally unknown horrible death two seconds after I suggest it and then say 'you people' about the fact that I like it when Midnight holds my soul, he says fondly. Thanks for checking.
And a few more hours working on the Internet and then back home to Independence. The spark at the heart of his soul is bright and steady, a brilliant pale gold.
Raika-seren wakes up in the morning and has breakfast and goes to work. He mentions to Elaneth-imire that it would be nice if he acquired the power to conjure arbitrary objects, and then he spends all day digging into technical problems, and sends Liran-alore to look a few things up in the public ballroom in Warp, and generally has a great time, and comes back to Independence in the evening to report his progress to Maitimo, and then follows the same pattern the next day.
Midmorning of that second day, Elaneth-imire turns up a conjuration power, branched as predicted from his landshaping. He creates an enormous amount of relevant supplies, and Raika-seren gleefully bounces home and starts distributing and installing them. There are a bunch more technical problems, which he solves. The spark at the heart of his soul spends the whole day brightening visibly as he bounces from place to place and explains things to people and configures software and tucks signal equipment into pre-launched satellites. Afternoon shades into evening and he's pretty sure he isn't going to sleep that night, he's having far too much fun. One all-nighter won't hurt him.
He does in fact stay up all night installing and tweaking and troubleshooting, and all the next day making final checks and hopping away briefly to get Elaneth-imire to make a few more things, and then it's late evening and he's finished and he eats dinner and flops into bed and his last thought as he falls asleep is maybe I'll take the day off tomorrow...
He wakes up; he eats breakfast; he considers the relative merits of taking the day off versus going off to do Nuime's internet immediately. On the one hand, doing Nuime's internet will be lots of fun. On the other hand, the extra day isn't going to hurt anyone and he just pulled an all-nighter and shouldn't put himself in a position to end up pulling another one. And he'd so pull another one.
But doing Nuime's internet will be so much fun...
"Oh."
He contemplates the question of whether he was worried about that. Well, no. And 'contorting around it' isn't quite right either - it's -
"...I'm - actually pretty sure you couldn't keep me as a prisoner against my will? I'm here because I want to be, and I'm not going to stop wanting to be here, that's how having a Taliar works."
When a Taliar decides to love someone undeterrably, he really, really means it. And therefore the question of whether he is being held captive against his will just isn't going to come up, regardless of whether it's also impossible for other reasons.
Well, Taliar doesn't have lots to do, because he was told to take the day off, which up until five seconds ago it seemed like Maitimo was also doing.
And he can't for the life of him figure out what he did wrong, or even whether he should be trying to figure that out or just - going and doing something else - something such as what, he's too off-balance to think of anything -
I haven't taken one since I got here, the closest thing was that disastrous afternoon walk - I wasn't much for them before that either - I'm sure I could figure something out but, uh, I'm not sure that would be a good idea right now—
—because despite his mind's attempts to dodge the subject for the sake of self-preservation, it's seeming more and more like the thing he did wrong was be too in love and if that annoys Maitimo, now, after Maitimo decided to keep him, then what the fuck is he even for - it would mean he's a failure on a level too deep to fix, because trying to be less in love would destroy him and it's clear that's not what Maitimo wants either - and with that going on in the back of his head, anything he tries to do with his day off will end in one of two places: either pouring all his energy into some project approximately as demanding as bringing Nuime the Internet, or lying in bed for the next week consumed by self-loathing.
The first thought that flashes through his head on hearing that is that if he's too high-maintenance for Maitimo's tastes he can just go - take his soul and bounce out to one of the nameless worlds in the surrounding cluster and drop himself in a randomly selected star, after which he will require no maintenance at all -
But of course he can't do that. He made a commitment. He is not leaving until Maitimo explicitly wants him gone.
He takes hold of the crisis building in the back of his head and he drags it to a screeching halt and locks it away by force of will. His soul flares brilliantly silver. In the sudden calm, his mind feels... quiet. It's a somewhat unfamiliar feeling.
"If you don't want anything further with me right now I think I'll go find a book to read," he says softly.
"I love you very much for that," he says, although the feeling is also caught in the unaccustomed quiet, muted compared to its usual depth and colour. This is a weird way for his head to be but - it's sustainable in the short term, it's not doing him any harm.
Then he will miss out on a few hours of Sun-dark Taliar quietly and comfortably enjoying a book about linguistics.
And then he finishes the book and conscientiously puts it away and goes back to his room and - what matters is whether things harm him, right, okay - he pokes gently around the edges of his locked-away emotional crisis until he's sure that it's safe to let out, and then he curls up in bed and cries very intensely for an hour, and then he gets up and washes his face and has a late lunch and goes back to his room again.
He needs to not be harmed by his doubts, and he needs to do it without any help. Okay. You've got a clear goal, Taliar, now solve the problem.
It would be very painful if Maitimo made a habit of dropping him and walking away every time he felt love too deeply, but so far it hasn't been a habit, so far it's just been a single instance. It would absolutely wreck his head if he tried to hold back from being so in love, but that just means that he shouldn't do that—
—he looks up when Maitimo comes in. "Hi."
"It occurs to me that you know nearly nothing about me and that might be part of the problem. I am for all the rest of time in love with someone who I hurt very badly, and he is very resilient so he is okay, and he asked for promises I wouldn't hurt him and I gave them and then we were happy, and he obeyed me as - an indulgence, almost, and it hurt so badly but I knew I could fix it someday. And now he's gone. And now you're here, and I can have everything with you, uncomplicatedly, except if I just evaluate you as worthy of happiness and then give it to you it'll all be a play, because I still have no idea what I want and I didn't win it, and so it feels like a cruel game and knowing it isn't one doesn't lessen that it feels like one, and feels like one so overwhelmingly it can't feel anything else. It's not about not knowing you well enough. It's about knowing how to get exactly what-I-want-from-you and being terrified of wanting anything from you because the last time I was in love it would have been unequivocally better for everyone if I hadn't been."
...Taliar hugs him.
It - makes it make so much more sense, and makes all the turmoil in his head so much smaller, to know that Maitimo hurt him by accident - there's a sort of reflection, a thread, a signature, that traces the shape of what Maitimo wants from hurting him in how he feels when it happens, and the signature this time was muddled and incoherent, like someone knocked over the inkwell.
"...does this mean I should be more difficult?" he wonders. If 'didn't win it' means 'didn't expend effort', then, well... it would seem like too simple a solution for such a complicated problem, but sometimes those work.
"Stop interpreting my leaving or not reacting as evidence of some failure on your part? I - am going to be ambivalent. For a lot of reasons. Your appeal isn't one of them. It'd be nice to have a way to convey 'I like you and want you to remain here' that isn't sleeping with you because if that's the only one I have I'll use it and then feel vaguely coerced."
He definitely does not want Maitimo to ever have to feel coerced about anything.
"Telling me to solve difficult problems and then observably noticing how brilliant I am at it," he suggests. "This Internet thing was amazing for that. And - I don't know if holding my soul is sufficiently unlike sex for your purposes - but it definitely leaves me feeling like I belong here."
(Is there a good way to tell the difference between kinds of being difficult that will help and kinds that fall on the wrong side of that trailing 'but', he wonders...)
"...more than just 'in principle', I think, but - if there's lines you don't want to cross because you're not comfortable going there, I can arrange not to be disappointed..."
And that's not a commitment a Taliar makes lightly, with something that he feels challenged over the way he feels challenged over enduring torture. But it's important to Maitimo, so it's important to him.
...he does kind of need a better idea of what to avoid being disappointed by, though.
...his soul shines blue, with a hint of silver. It seems, on the face of it, really unlikely for torture to succeed in achieving that goal.
But it also seems really counterproductive to start arguing over whether it'd work, so he just says, "I think I can manage to avoid being disappointed by you not doing that."
(And falls a little more in love, that too.)
Taliar hugs him. "I love you," he says.
"I - I think it would probably help if I stopped being so extreme about trying not to second-guess you - because as this morning demonstrates, you are capable of hurting me by accident, and I think I would've had an easier time of it if I'd let myself notice how... misaimed that comment about me being high-maintenance was."
"Yes you are, and yes I am." Snuggle. "But - the space between 'torture is redundant next to asking nicely' and 'asking nicely can't do it, so torture probably can't either' is really narrow? I suppose torture is also more fun than asking nicely, and there's always combining the two... anyway. You're not going to do it, so there's not a whole lot of point in speculating."
...and he's still left without a clear picture of what to do to avoid tempting Maitimo to really hurt him.
"Okay," he says, leaning comfortably on him. "Love you."
It's sort of fun watching the little shifts in the background of his thoughts as the changes settle in. He's a little hesitant about pushing some of them, and there's some he's not sure how to implement at all - 'refusing me occasionally when you don't expect me to back down', okay, but how does he decide when to do that because if he waits until he doesn't want to give Maitimo something Maitimo wants he is going to be waiting a while... and at first glance it sounds sort of - well. In the genre of things that Taliar suspects he should be arranging not to be disappointed by the lack of.
"...It seems pretty straightforward that if you don't want to really hurt me I should stop - being prepared for you to really hurt me," he says. "Especially since it costs something to stay this way. If it was something you wanted, I'd be fine with giving it to you, but if it's not..."
Snuggle. "Okay."
...it's surprisingly hard to take it apart. He tries to figure out why that is. It's not about not trusting Maitimo, exactly, but... okay, what exactly is the trouble here?
Well, when he looks at it up close... say what you mean, Taliar: the thing he's trying to do is stop being prepared for Maitimo to rape him, and another way of putting that is 'start expecting that he can say no to sex', and - he feels like he has not been given sufficiently explicit permission for that. Which is maybe silly of him, but it's what he has to work with.
"I'm not seeing it coming up either unless you were specifically trying for that outcome, which seems unlikely to say the least, but - it's sort of the principle of the thing - the fact that I have a teleport is wholly irrelevant, if it did come up I wouldn't leave unless I thought me leaving was what you wanted."
"It means, well, the difference between—"
His own memory: Maitimo having him after the song experiments, when he couldn't move, helpless in such a delightful way -
Dawn-shining's memory: nothing in his head but pain, exerting enormous willpower to make himself comply, because he did not own the right to say no but he would have if he could and he knew that and it hurt him so very badly but no amount of pain is enough to make a Taliar back out of a commitment.
"I'm - sorry, I guess?" he says. "It's... it's part of what goes into making it true that I will never be hostile to you no matter what, and I feel like that's important. I don't know. I don't think I could've come here without it, but - if it's not something you want..."
"No, it just means I need to think. The way - I was thinking about it - you had a teleport, you could safely rule out any outcome you considered worse than 'you decide to teleport away'. The other one - in that memory - it didn't actually matter except to him that he was being compliant, that's a difference - and if it isn't -"
"Oh."
He smiles.
"Yeah, I think I see what you mean. But it isn't a relevant distinction for us. It's... I'm not even sure how to articulate it, but... when I came here I was deliberately putting myself in your power, and I meant for that to hold even if someday I become as godlike as Elaneth-imire? The fact that you have control of my life should not depend on you being able to keep it by force. So it - doesn't. Because I am very very very serious about never coming into tangible conflict with you."
It's not even that he'd be unaffected, it's -
- actually there seems to be a latent implication here that Maitimo prefers him to be affected by being raped, which - well, if that's what he wants, he can have it, of course, but even though Taliar does genuinely trust that Maitimo means what he says about not wanting to really hurt him, it still makes the prospect of becoming vulnerable in that way kind of intimidating -
He has an impulse to just rip the protective acceptance out of his head and have done with it, but that's not the way to go, here, he doesn't urgently need to get rid of it and there's no point in hurting himself just to get it over with quicker. So.
What is the shape of this problem, why is he having such trouble with this... that technically wasn't explicit permission to say no and have that respected but it's nevertheless clear what Maitimo wants him to do... he's afraid but he knows he doesn't need to be, it shouldn't be getting in his way like this...
I was going with the best information I had at the time, never having actually met you, he says. I don't blame you at all; you never asked for me in the first place and you certainly had no obligation to correct my assumptions. But now here we are and I'm having trouble. It's fine; I'll get it figured out somehow. Do you want to help or would you rather leave me to it? Or are you not sure?
I'm not totally sure either.
He shouldn't need to be reassured that doing this will not lead to him being harmed - he knows it won't - and even if it were going to, he is still in principle willing to do it - but it still feels irrationally frightening. That might be another piece of the puzzle, actually - he's approaching this like he's trying to change his expectations in assurance of safety, because that's the reality, but his emotions disagree. So maybe he should take the other approach.
Doing this will give Maitimo the capacity to hurt him very very badly in a way he couldn't have done before. That's frightening, even though he trusts Maitimo not to use it. But he is okay with Maitimo having the capacity to hurt him very very badly. He's Sun-dark. He's not about to deny Maitimo power over him.
Okay, that's... much better for him than just forcing himself to make the change, but still going to be more painful and frightening and - leave him more fragile, for a little while afterward - than doing it from a place of properly-felt trust.
So.
You could say reassuring things about how you really aren't going to take advantage of this to harm me, he says, which I seem to be having trouble feeling even though I know perfectly well it's true. Or you could sing me trust songs, that would also work. Or you could leave me to it and I'll do it the other way and be a little off-balance for a bit afterward but still ultimately better off than if I left myself like this indefinitely.
I love you, he says, closing his eyes and listening contentedly to the song. Maitimo's voice is so beautiful.
As the effect fades in, he keeps checking - does it feel right yet? no? how about now? no? how about -
And then it does, it feels perfect, he trusts Maitimo completely, more than enough for the feeling to match the knowledge. And he just - makes the change, it's as simple as that. There is a distant feeling of releasing a burden, blurred by the high of more-than-perfect trust.
Thanks for helping, he says, snuggling up. I love you. I trust you.
And while he's here he might as well - fix the underlying problem - he has the knowledge of trust but not the feeling of it, well, there's plenty of that feeling available at the moment, it shouldn't be that hard to make it stick. It is technically objectively stupid to be doing something like this but he did specifically ask Maitimo to use mind control to help him fuck with his head so under the circumstances he thinks he will give himself a pass.
I wasn't totally untouchable. It wouldn't make it hurt less - not by much, anyway - the difference is mostly in the recovery. And... from a certain perspective it gives you more options, not having to worry about doing permanent damage. And it's, hmm...
He's a little too high to complete that train of thought; it trails off half-finished, something about it not being entirely a deliberate strategic self-modification, more a component of the process of deciding to do this in the first place.
I know I won't, he says contentedly. For reasons unrelated to being high on trust songs, even.
And he's pretty sure he has successfully installed that feeling of trust where it belongs. He feels very successful. And cozy and comfortable and utterly trusting - without the excited desire to see that trust put to use, this time; he's in this mental state for different reasons.
Taliar waits too, snuggling Maitimo happily.
As the effect fades, his soul begins to glow faintly blue, which is very reasonable of it; choosing to trust Maitimo like this was a very blue thing to do. The glow strengthens. Taliar, with his eyes closed, distracted by the fading high, doesn't notice for a few seconds; but then he feels it, a slow tide rising in his soul, a wave of deep and glorious love...
He opens his eyes and blinks in the blue-gold light. This seems - vaguely not the time, somehow - but okay, his godhood is apparently imminent. In retrospect it's not surprising that the key component was that particular flavour of trust.
He hugs Maitimo and then nestles comfortably against him. Congratulations, you have your very own god now, he says wryly. I love you. Wow, do I ever...
The sensation of his love for Maitimo lighting up his soul is one of the most amazing things he's ever felt. It's a little weird that it's coming on so slowly, but he likes it, it gives him a chance to really appreciate the feeling - and there goes his mental privacy exception for Maitimo, becoming irrevocable; and there goes his protection against soul contact, with its irrevocable exception for Maitimo; and there goes Maitimo's ability to make his soul feel like imaginary strangers are touching it... and as his soul brightens further, the mental privacy exception becomes a mental link with world-spanning range, and then the range to reach from a world to its neighbour... it feels nice, having these powers fall into place. It feels right. He agrees with his soul that these are correct things for it to do.
Because it's - more conditional, a solution to a specific problem rather than something that I was definitely going to need no matter what? It was already holding space in reserve for the imaginary strangers thing, and protecting itself against being touched was probably something it was always going to do when it got powerful enough, and the privacy-exception stuff was all changes to an existing power and that's faster than growing a new one.
Yeah.
His soul is still growing, but he can feel the approximate size of his healing aura in it and it's comfortably planet-spanning already.
I should get that sensory power that Dawn-shining has, it's kind of important to be able to see what you're doing when you can work at this kind of scale, even if all I can do right now is heal...
Yeah.
Oh well.
It's - it looks different from Dawn-shining's blazing sun of a soul, when he looks at it. The gold is paler; the heart of it glows brightest, and the brightness fades softly outward until at the outermost edges it almost doesn't glow at all. It's not damage or debasement, not anything of the kind - it's just an aesthetic distinction, a nod to his chosen soulname. He likes it. It's beautiful this way.
Raika-seren has a quiet day off, reading and walking around the city. He goes to Nuime the next day and installs its internet. His father congratulates him, even though he left his soul with Maitimo and it's not there to shine deifically. He pulls another all-nighter, returns home midafternoon of the following day, reports his success, and contemplates taking another day off before he goes to install Dawn's. It seems prudent.
Meanwhile in Independence:
Raika-seren's day off is going well. He reads a little, he walks around the palace and admires how much of Maitimo he can see in it, he curls up in bed and delightedly contemplates how much he loves Maitimo. He's so glad his soul acknowledged him, it's so good.
And now his entire soul is filled with how much he loves Maitimo, and he feels good and cozy and happy and safe, wrapped up in the overwhelming sense of Maitimo's presence. If Maitimo wanted to condition him out of contemplating his love, this was perhaps not the best method.
It's shatteringly awful, all the more so because he had no idea it was coming, he was completely unprepared - the other thing, with the identity song, was so vast and alien he almost couldn't process it at all, it hurt more but it touched him less; this kind of torture does not have that problem - he clings to the sense of Maitimo's presence, because it's a genuine comfort in the face of this agony, because he loves him, because he knows he'll forgive him, but - he feels a little betrayed, to be hurt like this with no warning at all, and 'a little' at soul-touching scales is enormous - if this is how his trust is rewarded, maybe he was right not to feel it -
He is frozen in that moment of betrayal, barely able to notice time passing, terrified and violated and helpless, for longer and longer - in the scattered fragments of his thoughts he wonders if Maitimo can even hear him -
And then he - isn't. His mind is not there anymore. His soul is lifeless in Maitimo's hands. It shines bright and pale and tells him what kind of a person its bearer was.
"Yes, of course - what happened from your perspective...?"
He can make guesses. Midnight has Raika-seren's soul and doesn't know what killed him, and Raika-seren is insensate in a way that suggests his soul was just being touched and had been for a while, so Midnight was holding his soul - probably from Dawn or Nuime - and saw it die, cause unknown, and came straight here. Could be anything from 'a bookcase fell on him' to 'someone destroyed the planet'. Best to be prepared for the latter. He wraps the three of them in his healing aura.
He nods. Yeah, that's what he thought. Midnight'll have to be the one to teleport them there, Elaneth-imire still can't find Independence, but he's ready to leave anytime. Under the circumstances it might be best not to wait for Raika-seren to recover. Just in case it's closer to planetary destruction than a fallen bookcase.
They land in what's left of Himring.
It's unrecognizable, a mass of rubble, no wall still standing as far as the Elven eye can see. Other nearby settlements have been treated similarly. The section they're standing on is melted, stone become lava, and still being actively bombarded - a blast of force from above smashes the three of them into the liquid ground. The healing aura leaves them all ultimately unharmed, but the heat and pressure are agonizingly painful. Elaneth-imire reaches out his senses and teleports them to the first bit of untouched landscape he can find, then collapses - but he doesn't have time for rockslide flashbacks right now - he reaches farther, expanding his healing aura at the same time, until he can see the whole planet and the fleet of alien starships bombarding it from space.
They're using some kind of energy weapons, blasts of heat and force and both. They have hit every civilization-resembling thing on the planet's surface, leaving very few survivors, and are currently concentrating most of their firepower on Doriath.
Now there is no longer a fleet of alien starships there.
And Elaneth-imire holds the whole planet in his mind, and at the intersection of landshaping and conjuration there's a way to just—restore—
Now all the destroyed places are back, good as new, every building, every book, every flower.
Resurrections next or what? he asks - he should go for general resurrection as soon as possible, Midnight had human citizens - where the fuck did these aliens even fucking come from and what is their problem and when is the next wave going to arrive, those are also important questions -
Being smashed against a pool of lava wakes Raika-seren up a little. By the time Elaneth-imire asks about resurrections, he's coherent enough to sit up and look around and sort through his memories. Now is clearly not the time to react to what Maitimo just did to him - Elaneth-imire's thoughts fill in enough of the context that he can tell Maitimo's entire kingdom was just bombed to ash and that definitely takes priority over his feelings on being unexpectedly tortured -
Raika-seren goes to Nuime to fetch Nezhefena. Aliens attacked Independence, please come track them, and he comes back without waiting for a response because she is going to drop everything for this unless there's an emergency of equal scale going on in Nuime.
She floats comfortably in vacuum, wrapped in shadows, and studies the fleet.
As soon as they notice her, they all target her with their city-destroying energy weapons. It gets annoyingly bright for a moment before she pops back to Independence.
Friendly, aren't they, she remarks, sharing the visual memory. I can find where they came from, but I can't guarantee they won't notice me and they might be provoked to escalate.
The wrong thing can talk?! Speak in ordinary understandable language? Even if this one is somehow okay - no it's not it's using mind control - that's terrifying, that means there are wrong things out there that could spy on people and understand their conversations, maybe even attack their planets. The wrong things of this new planet have already demonstrated several terrifying powers. The fleet won't be able to calculate a light-jump from their current position for several hours at least, and by the same token they're cut off from communicating with the rest of the galaxy, they won't be able to call for reinforcements. No one is going to come rescue this one from the perfectly trustworthy terrifying teleporting wrong things with terrifying mind control and terrifying immobilization powers.
...the alien is too busy being confused and thinking through the implications of the situation to actually answer his question or even think their own name.
"No...?"
Filth creatures aren't properly people, but they do think, that's what makes them an abomination. Things that can think but aren't people (meaning: members of this alien's own species) are wrong and need to be destroyed. Surely even a filth creature would know that - don't they see people the same way? How can any thinking creature not react this way to alien beings? This is so confusing.
Bounce - "no, actually, most species get along fine with other species. You guys are probably capable of it too, though I'm curious if the disgust-reaction thing is responsive to magic, that'd definitely make it a lot easier - anyway, you made a mistake. Things that can think but aren't your species are perfectly fine and if you dislike interacting with any of them we could find you an empty dimension."
"Oh, I think we should try a couple hundred variants on getting them into a more pliable state of mind, different songs for it - Cáno can improvise, and can put more into it than he is right now - you should see if you can manifest a power for turning off the disgust thing - I just won't especially mind if the end result is that they all want to die, because what the fuck."
"...I'm all right with trying to manifest a power for turning off the disgust thing but I can't help feeling that mind control songs are a badly targeted solution to this problem," he says. "Like, okay, we mind-control whole planetsful of aliens so they stop wanting to murder us for no reason, then they start wanting to murder us because we mind-controlled them. If I get a power for turning off the disgust thing it'll tend to be nicer and have fewer side effects."
"This seems like it might be a Taliar kind of problem," says Raika-seren. He definitely feels like if Maitimo delegated this to him he could get it solved with a minimum of mind control and psychological torture. Quite possibly not none, because holy fuck, these aliens, but a minimum.
"Not sure. I could try finding an alien planet and attempting diplomacy - possibly send Elaneth-imire for that because he'll be less inconvenienced if they shoot at him - I could have Nezhefena bring me another alien from the fleet and see if I can get anywhere with them if I don't use lots of mind control..."
"Sure, but I get the impression that if finding them and talking to them would be a disaster, leaving them to gradually become increasingly panicked about the disappearance of their attack fleet is approximately the same disaster only slower. And we don't know how fast they're going to panic about the disappearance of their attack fleet."
"Seems like going to talk might be substantially worse. If the attack fleet's lost they worry that we'll come find them; if we do come find them, that's probably much worse than worrying. Agree that we need to act quickly, I just think seeking out a planet of them is really dangerous if you don't want them all dead."
"Could isolate the planet, at least, find a similar star in a different dimension and teleport it there, which would definitely promote disappearance-related panic elsewhere and definitely freak them right out about how powerful we are, but I don't think we're getting away without freaking them out about how powerful we are and at least it'd limit the spread of information. I want to know how many planets are in this interstellar clusterfuck and I want their locations and capabilities. I'm thinking we should grab another alien from the fleet and try interrogating it in a way that doesn't make it obvious we can read their minds. Not sure whether or not to put this one out of its misery first, but I'd definitely at least put it somewhere else."
"So I'm happy to kill you but I want to make sure you're making the decision with accurate information. The world's not ending. We're going to take your whole species and put them somewhere where they never have to interact with any filth, probably. Can you confirm that you are aware that almost no one is going to die who doesn't prefer to, that no one is going to have to share a universe with species which they can't stand, and that you still prefer to die?"
They're filth!! Why is this insane filth creature having so much trouble grasping this simple concept?! Filth creatures are wrong, filth creatures are an abomination, they must be destroyed as quickly as possible! No one is safe as long as filth still exists! What if the filth followed them into this other universe and attacked, what then - and even if they didn't, they'd still be out there, being filth - and this filth has mind control, nothing it says can be trusted anyway - it is definitely the end of the world.
"In order to die you have to confirm that, if it were the case that we were going to leave you alone in an empty dimension and not attack you, you would still prefer to die. You don't have to trust me, just say that if, hypothetically, you trusted me, you'd want to die."
The insane filth creature still makes no sense. It's completely outside the realm of possibility to suggest that in universes and universes full of strange all-powerful filth creatures, none of them would find and attack civilization, even if these ones left everyone alone for insane filth creature reasons. If they really were just going to leave them alone in an empty universe, then there might still be hope for civilization as a whole - although it's inconceivable that they wouldn't eventually try to find and destroy all the filth, so the filth would have to be completely insane to do that - but this person in particular has still been extensively mind-controlled by filth creatures and should definitely be killed for the good of society, they can never trust their own thoughts again, it's horrible and they will be terrified for the rest of their life unless the all-powerful filth creatures force them not to be and that's worse.
(The Taliars glance at each other, sharing a thought. The plight of the suicidal genocide alien is horrifying, but Midnight is being very Maitimo about it, and they can each guess the other's reaction even before they share it. Elaneth-imire feels a wry fondness, an appreciation for the ways Midnight is similar to Tivarante, the shared foundations of their minds that form a substantial part of what he loves about his husband; Raika-seren feels a sharp ache of very personal love.)
(Just from the way that moment of love felt, he can tell things haven't been going well for Raika-seren lately, but Raika-seren is a Taliar and won't want that dealt with or even acknowledged beyond the level of a passing thought until this crisis has been thoroughly handled.)
Raika-seren nods. He coordinates silently with Elaneth-imire and gets Nezhefena to fetch and immobilize two more aliens, out of sight of this one and each other. They'd like a recording of a fairly low-key calming song if possible, seems less intrusive than the trust song, less likely to lead to perverse paranoia - can Midnight and Macalaurë provide?
All right. To work.
The Taliars' own osanwë is a little too privacy-respecting to make a good interrogation tool - they could probably push it in that direction but it might take time - but they can conduct their interviews within Maitimo's range, and it actually helps for their purposes if they can't hear their prisoners' thoughts because it means they can't inadvertently reveal that capability and put them on their guard. They can step away for a moment and come back and claim to have heard such-and-such information from another prisoner who was more willing to talk, although they use that tactic sparingly because these people seem really dedicated and it would be suspicious to have gotten one of them to crack that hard that fast.
Once calmed out of their panic, the prisoners still refuse to tell their captors anything, but they can be steered into thinking about lots of things. An extensive, though possibly incomplete, list of inhabited planets. Their civilization's FTL communication and transportation capabilities - pretty good except for the part where you need to aim everything very very precisely, hence the stranded fleet's inability to call home. The nature and origin of their weapons - apparently in this universe certain metals have magically resonant properties that make them usable as magic weapons if properly shaped. They also have plenty of non-magical weapons, but they prefer to use the magical ones because they're more efficient to operate, no ammunition or fuel required.
Raika-seren manages to indirectly lead his alien to think about what the trouble is with Tseiza-3 and its 'filth contagion'. Apparently there used to be filth creatures living there, some of whom had wings, and the people who fought them sometimes also sprouted wings, which obviously meant that those filth creatures were contagious somehow, and this was absolutely terrifying and they instituted strict quarantine protocols and killed all the filth they could find, and then they found out that there was a bizarre space-warping maze hidden behind a handful of portals scattered across the planet's surface, and you could catch the filth contagion by entering it.
They left a military outpost there, and sent expeditions into the maze, all volunteers who understood that they could never rejoin society again and would have to commit suicide once their purpose was fulfilled; the support structure for the military outpost eventually grew into an entire civilian colony on Tseiza-3; and just recently, they finally found the remaining filth creatures hidden deep inside the maze, and now they're trying to finish exterminating them, but it's really hard to bring ships and weapons into the maze through its doorway-sized portals, and there aren't that many people brave enough to volunteer for the job, and last this soldier heard, it sounded like it might be decades before they finish it.
It's hard to say from just the three soldiers, but - the way they go into that spiral of terror when they start thinking about the implications of teleporting aliens with immobilization powers, even when they don't know we can read and affect minds...
Another fleet appears overhead - he catches their arrival in Elaneth-imire's thoughts - the obvious thing to do is put them in a nearby dimension, maybe even the same one as the other fleet, but a few hundred light-years away so they don't get a chance to coordinate - he waits a moment to see if Maitimo has a better idea.
On it.
He sends Nezhefena, gets the new prisoner set up in yet another location mutually out of sight of the rest but within ten miles of Maitimo, and skillfully pretends to be frustrated by his inability to procure any answers while in fact getting the prisoner to think about everything they need to know.
When the first fleet disappeared, the people in charge were worried. They couldn't tell the difference between 'communications equipment failure' and 'ran into superior firepower and died' without going and checking, but in case it was the second thing they sent a bigger, better-armed fleet to investigate. They were not prepared for teleporting aliens. Whatever the commanders come up with next, they definitely won't be prepared for teleporting aliens.
They're going to freak out about the fact that the second fleet didn't have time to send a single message before vanishing, but the freaking out is likely to be confined to purity-keepers and the military for the time being. It's hard to say what the outcome of the freaking-out might be. One thing they might try to do is hack together some kind of weapon that can be launched on an FTL trajectory and detonate on arrival with sufficient force to destroy a solar system - the prisoner doesn't know if that's actually possible, but it's the sort of thing they themselves would try in that situation.
Yes, moving Independence a hop sounds like a fine idea.
The Taliars prod their prisoners about the concept of purity-keepers. They seem like some sort of combination religious caste and secret police. Their job is to make sure that everything is right according to the same set of standards that declares filth creatures to be wrong. They are respected but not generally feared, even though they will certainly kill anyone who does a sufficiently wrong thing - reading between the lines a little, it seems like these aliens' innate drive to follow their bizarre moral code is strong enough that most people just wouldn't do anything worth being killed over, and can't conceive of themselves as being the sort of person who would, and if they did end up on the wrong side of a purity-keeper somehow they'd agree that this meant they should die.
...even if these prisoners are unusually zealous aliens, which they probably are... wow.
It is also the purity-keepers' job - as an organization, rather than as individuals - to make decisions about what is right when confronted with new situations. It was the purity-keepers who decided, thousands of years ago when it first came up, that filth creatures are abominations that need to die. The prisoners assume they knew what they were doing when they made that decision; they're purity-keepers.
(That first alien, with nothing else to do, has finally managed to think their way through the puzzle of under what conditions they'd be willing to be resurrected. It goes something like: if it was generally agreed that having them alive again would be safe, and if there was some trustworthy and widely accepted means of making sure that none of the filth creatures' mind control lingered in their thoughts, then it would be okay for them to not be dead. But 'generally agreed' and 'widely accepted' both refer to the aliens' own civilization and definitely not to any other ones, so it still seems absolutely insane to think that might ever happen.)
Yeah.
Resurrection paths for everyone. His conjuration isn't good enough yet to trivially give them all clothes, he'd have to spend enough individual attention on each case that it would add up to being not worth it, but the reembodiment power has figured out how to appear them with braided hair.
Raika-seren's osanwe shifts to allow use as an interrogation tool - and his range is world-spanning. He hops into the world where he left the alien fleets and listens to them panic for a couple of minutes, then hops into the world where the genocide aliens come from and starts eavesdropping on their civilization as a whole. He can't listen to that many people at once but he can still get a picture of—
—He can't hear anyone inside the maze on Tseiza-3. Since his osanwe doesn't reach to neighbouring universes, this is... suggestive. (Also, without particularly thinking about it, he is operating on the assumption that Maitimo can reach his mind regardless of the number of intervening worldhops. Maybe not to talk to him, but definitely to read him.)
Yes, he can hear him. So that answers that.
Awfully tiny worlds, it sounds like, from the people who've been there but aren't in right now... unless the portal-maze is one really weird world that happens to have internal connections that look exactly like its external connections to Tseiza-3... I'm going to listen for a clear picture of the place where the survivors are hiding out, see if I can teleport there, it'll give me more information about what's going on in there adjacency-wise and if it works I'll have the option of talking to the survivors, who might have a useful perspective or useful magic.
And Elaneth-imire joins Raika-seren in interstellar space, and waits until he bounces a clear image of the survivors' bizarre planet, and tries to hop to it. Nope.
The next obvious thing to try is seeing if his sensory power can reach through the portals. He hops to the Tseiza-3 star system.
...this is a familiar star system.
Tseiza-3 is an Earth, he says to Raika-seren.
Portal mazes, magic weapons, and contagious wing-sprouting is a bizarre set of things for a magic system to do, but we're not getting a great angle on it, hearing about it from the aliens who are terrified of most of those things. Maybe the survivors could shed some light on the underlying principles, if we could get to them.
It's not clear where the magic weapons originated but they do at least seem to come from this world if not from its Earth in particular. I guess they could be an unrelated separate magic system that this world has. The maze and the wings have to be related, though, if just setting foot in there is enough for some people to catch the wing plague...
He is hiding inside of Earth's moon and extending his sensory power toward the planet; it seemed like a sensible way to lurk undetected nearby. But using his sensory power this way is a little disorienting and he hasn't quite—ah, there it goes. Yes, if he tries, he can get his sensory range to extend at least into the first layer of the portal maze. He starts working on the deeper portals thereby revealed. It's slow going, but if he managed to hold his perception on a complete route from out here all the way to the humans' bizarre maze-dwelling planet, he could wait until no one was looking and then bounce all the way through unnoticed.
Raika-seren is exploring this alien society via mental eavesdropping.
Turns out there's a secret cult on Ityen-6 that's heard about the successive fleet disappearances and is wondering whether this is the prophesied end of the world and, if so, when exactly they should launch their revolution. He focuses his eavesdropping. Their revolution honestly sounds pretty great, apart from the ritual murder of all the purity-keepers, but ritual murder would at least get the purity-keepers out of the picture and make way for the cultists' new, non-genocidal social order.
Plausible angle: kidnap this planet traumatically enough to set off the revolution, wait for them to establish themselves, get in contact with the resulting government, ask them to help deal with the rest of their species. The rest of the species would probably be worried about the disappearing planet, and might panic unproductively, that's the major flaw he can see in this approach.
He listens for people who are engaged in interstellar communication. Seems like every planet is exchanging at least one or two messages per second with the rest of the galaxy, although many of them are automated; a vanished one would be noticed in pretty short order, although it might take the rest of the planets a little time to confirm that no, none of them could reach it, it wasn't just a problem with one or two communicators getting misaligned. It'd have to be one hell of a natural calamity...
...some of the weapons research people, unfortunately not on Ityen-6 in particular, are working on a weapon of the kind that one soldier predicted, something that can be launched via FTL and detonate on arrival, and when detonated it's supposed to create a black hole... hard to figure out how to arrange for them to have a testing accident that takes out a totally different planet in a different star system, though. Also, wow, these people are terrifyingly dedicated to the extermination of other sapient species. Raika-seren is glad about the cultists. The cultists give him hope.
With Raika-seren spying on the aliens, they can afford to wait on the cultist-kidnapping for a little while; he'll be able to keep an eye on the likelihood of imminent mass panic. Maybe Elaneth-imire will branch the stabilization power fast enough. Alternately, there's probably a way to fix an orbitally destabilized planet, and Elaneth-imire could babysit it with teleportation and landshaping for the interim if necessary.
As far as he can tell the answer is literally just 'the ancient purity-keepers made a call', with maybe a latent implication that the ancient purity-keepers expected that all the other sapient species would probably consider them abominations so they might as well be sure to strike first? It's honestly really depressing. But there are the cultists to eavesdrop on whenever he starts feeling down. The cultists are so sensible.
There are a few of them who are visiting other planets right now, but they haven't branched out substantially - they don't have the numbers to accomplish a second planetary takeover, so they're concentrating themselves on just the one planet in order to be ready for the end of the world to arrive at any moment.
"There's one species they've made contact with that survived their genocide sprees, humans, have some kind of dimensional maze ability, Elaneth-imire's chasing them down. There's a planet of them with some potential for being dissuaded from the genocide spree, we're thinking of kidnapping it and trying to complete the conditions of their apocalyptic prophecy, I wrote Esarkan a letter -"
He explains about the eavesdropping and the genocidal aliens and the sensible cultists and Tseiza-3 and what Elaneth-imire is currently uninterruptably up to, half out loud and half via shared memories.
"So obviously we're hoping Dawn-shining branches a power to stabilize the orbits of teleported planets before the mass panic arrives. There's definitely going to be a mass panic."
He does that. Corino suggests some things to focus on to get a broader sociocultural analysis. They work very well together and it's a big help in refining his picture of the aliens' society.
Like, if you trace out these patterns of thought, it sounds like the underlying reason for a lot of their cultural trends is that their species is heavily shaped by having started out on a world overrun by absolutely terrifying diseases. Their public health programs are amazing, and their paradigmatic taboo is breaking quarantine, it's an idiom for an unthinkably wrong action. That in turn ties into their drive to follow their bizarre moral code - which, with the cultists to compare against, turns out to actually be a drive to follow societal consensus, and the cult stays stable by having its own consensus separate from the wider context of civilization as a whole.
This is also how they manage to run their tidy little galactic civilization with thirty-four inhabited planets and no formal central governing authority: these people just don't make war on each other. They used to, in the very distant past, but once a single overarching civilization emerged, it immediately became unassailably stable. Well. Until they went and set themselves up to fall apart as soon as they met aliens too powerful for them to exterminate.
He hugs his father goodbye.
(There's something about that last remark—oh, of course, he noticed that Raika-seren is having relationship problems, and also noticed that he's putting his personal feelings on hold to deal with higher priorities, and so is not actually openly commenting on any of it but is just sort of aware of it in the background as he comments on the somewhat related subject of Raika-seren hanging out in interstellar space with no air continually healing from vacuum-related damage because he can't be bothered to care about his physical comfort when it isn't impeding his effectiveness and there's a crisis to handle. Well, fair enough.)
He's not sure what kind of relationship problem 'his soul manifested the ability to let Maitimo affect it in various ways, Maitimo did that' is, and he doesn't have a place with air to recommend him, so he gets back to making sure everyone everywhere knows what's going on and has assignments for reconstruction and is assured that the humans will all be restored to life as soon as possible.
Elaneth-imire sees a clear path into the maze.
He takes it.
He arrives in the middle of the strangely shaped planet, in midair between two distant floating jungles. There's no gravity here; he floats freely. 'Above' and 'below' him, the two halves of the planet float separately, flat discs curving in at the edges to not-quite-meet around their jagged rims. Through that gap, the arcs of the celestial circles shine, bringing a dim light to the planet's inner surface. Although he can't see them directly from here, his sensory power shows him the planet's sun and moon, vast beads of light sliding along their shining cosmic strings.
The view is kind of amazing. He pauses, floating there for a few minutes, to give it the appreciation it deserves.
...alt of Grandfather.
This is good. This is very good.
"My name's Taliar," he says. "And it's kind of a long story but let's start with this part—" and he conjures a globe of rock bigger than he is, twists it with landshaping into the form of a snake and has it fly in a circle around them, then burns it away with his god-killing power.
"So, there are multiple worlds," he says. "The genocidal aliens come from a different one, linked to this one by a maze of tiny worlds with portals between them. I come from yet another one that's farther away. Someone I know had occasion to move his planet into a different world, and it happened to be the one the genocidal aliens come from, and they found it and attacked it. So he brought me in to help because I'm a very useful person. We got away from the genocidal aliens and now we're trying to figure out how to get them to stop being so genocidal without wiping out their entire civilization, because we can afford to do that because we are just that stupidly powerful."
Pause. Does he - yeah, he should.
"Also, there are sometimes versions of the same person in different worlds, and I'm pretty sure you're an alt of my grandfather."
He teleports periodically to keep up.
"Mother as a man and Father as a woman, that's going to be interesting. And you didn't recognize me, so something odd is going on in this family tree, unless - are your grandchildren girls, it's ambiguous and I don't know how to read local names for that...?"
"I can see a little Kevarsin in you if I look hard, but I might be fooling myself, and you're too Ceirene anyway. If you recognized me as your grandfather, though... I'm going to guess that you take after your father and he looks nothing like Kyralaine. And perhaps that all of you live on your planet's exterior."
"Is that what these little worlds are called? Yeah. Worlds don't customarily have edges, or portals between them. They do have an adjacency thing going on but you could roam the whole place and not know there was another one next to it unless you happened to have the right magic-or-whatever."
"You might have noticed I have wings," says Faidre. "Anyone can get them but not everyone does. Winged people don't age past adulthood, are harder to kill, and have Spheres. We can make portals to our Spheres from anywhere we happen to be, and close or reopen those portals at will. A portal between the Spheres of two living people requires both their permission to open and can be closed by either side, but a portal between two dead Spheres that's open when the second person dies stays open forever. Between a dead Sphere and a live one - or a live one and the outer world, but I suppose you're implying that what I think of as the outer world is also a dead Sphere - the portal is entirely under the control of the living Sphere owner."
...And he can't even tell Raika-seren because world-spanning osanwe doesn't reach through the maze. Well, it might not be the insanely useful breakthrough it appears to be.
"I'd love to experiment with how that holds up outside this, uh, cluster of worlds," he says. "I had to sneak past the genocidal aliens to get in here, but I might want to take a winged person with me on my way out."
He pops onto the balcony beside Faidre.
"I can't wait to..."
A column of white light wraps around him, extending upward into the for-lack-of-a-better-word sky. When it clears after a few seconds, he has acquired a pair of wings, massive and elaborately feathered, glowing in the colours of his soul.
"...meet... him...? What—?" He stretches the wings, folds them around in front of him to study them, runs a hand along the edge of one.
"I have wings now," he says, following Faidre into the palace. "This is weird."
But then - there's sort of a - he does something, takes an unfamiliar but somehow entirely natural action, and the wings vanish. Reverses it, and they reappear. "Okay, that's convenient."
"So! The world I'm from is called Nuime. Its emperor is a version of you - it's called being 'alts'. I know for sure Faidre's an alt of my grandfather, and I have no reason to doubt him when he says I'm an alt of Ashras, although I'm an only child so that bit's weird - anyway. The teleportation thing can move planets around. Someone I know had occasion to pick up their planet and move it around, and accidentally landed within reach of the genocidal aliens. They attacked. We teleported their attack fleet away, and then the followup attack fleet they sent in a little while afterward, and used our various absurdly powerful magic to capture and interrogate some of the aliens, and I ended up coming here after we found out that this place existed. I would like to rescue you all from the genocidal aliens. Ideally I would like to do that without causing the genocidal aliens' entire civilization to collapse, because the majority of them have never actually killed anyone and don't really deserve to die, and there's something like a hundred billion of them."
"Sure. Okay, I'm a soulbearer. That's a thing that happens in Nuime. Getting wings can only happen in this world—what's it called?—and becoming a soulbearer can only happen in Nuime. This is my soul." He points at it. "Pretty, right? It has a bunch of powers, including land-shaping, object conjuration, a planet-sized healing aura, a planet-sized sensory power to go with all the other things I can do at a planet-sized scale... and when I need another power, my soul can usually come up with one, but if it's new and can't be branched off an existing power, it takes three days. I already have a resurrection power that only works on some people - soulbearers can be resurrected from their souls, and there are other people who uh, leave behind ghosts, sort of, and I can do those too. But since that planet got wrecked by the genocidal aliens, now I urgently need to resurrect a whole bunch of people who didn't leave behind ghosts or souls or anything else, and as such I'm pretty sure I'm finally going to turn up general resurrection."
"There's no, uh, entry requirements like I heard there are for getting wings, but it's definitely something you do, not something that happens to you - you have to sit there for a few hours, looking for it and then pulling it out into the world, sort of by thinking about who you are and imagining what your soul is going to be like. And then you're a soulbearer. Oh, don't ever touch a soulbearer's soul, it's nearly always unbearable torture for them."
"Enormous. My soul is also self-resurrecting - your alt's is too - I don't know of anyone else who has that. It makes us really, really immortal, though. I don't actually know if Esarkan has any powers other than the immortality, but there's soulbearers who can do... well, just about anything, in theory, except that we can't sustain ongoing magical effects without an ongoing investiture of power. Although I'm pretty sure we Taliars are going to break that barrier at some point. ...Uh, I have a self-duplication power for largely irrelevant reasons and there's now three of me. I go by Dawn-shining, the other two are Sun-dark and Summer-blue, they're our soulnames, it's customary for soulbearers to pick one of those and then go around being addressed as 'Dawn-shining Taliar' in formal contexts."
"My parents and grandfather are all soulbearers - your alt's granddaughter isn't, actually - people can't become soulbearers unless they genuinely want to on their own behalf, but I bet that won't tend to be a problem with the sort of people you'd pick," he says.
So he sets to explaining the multiverse.
He's really starting to see what the peal gets out of their working-with-alts strategy. An alt of Esarkan or his grandfather is just... so familiar, so comfortable to interact with. It could easily get to be a habit.
"There's drawbacks - you know what, I'll just - " and he sends Ashras a summary of how soulbearers work. He includes the part where you can fuck yourself up a little if you try to manifest your soul before you're twenty, but, for fairness's sake, also the part where he totally did it at seventeen and was fine.
"In that case, I think perhaps you want to get out there again quickly, with the means to return via portal. Azair, take him out to put a portal nearby. Then go with him if possible, in case his wings are cut-rate somehow and you can create portals to your Sphere in places he can't do the same."
"It won't be a comfortable trip," he warns, "there are stops on the way that have no air. But my healing aura will make sure you don't die of it. And taking two people out won't be significantly harder than one." He glances at Dalvor. "I think I'll go all the way to Nuime first thing. If portals from there don't work, I'll come back and try one from closer by."
It's... beautiful.
He pulls in his healing aura just to make sure - yes: this place has its own version of the healing aura, filling it with soothing golden light. There's a... castle, sort of, something in that genre, and it's built like his road through the Helcaraxe, graceful and sweeping and gorgeous. The edges of the Sphere, its 'sky', are an enchanting swirl of blue and silver and gold.
"Wow."
"Yeah, as soon as I have a clear path out. This is going to be disorienting and uncomfortable," he warns, and casts his attention out along the path, and—a dizzying series of abrupt transitions later, they're floating in vacuum wrapped in golden light, just long enough for Dawn-shining to drop an update on Sun-dark—and after a somewhat more sedate series of hops along a somewhat more comfortable route, they're standing in the imperial palace in Nuime.
And when he fetches his mother:
"Sun-dark and Summer-blue are going to envy you deeply. Well, until Sun-dark gets this genocidal aliens problem sorted out and joins you in the ranks of the winged. Or do you suppose Atialemain will do it? Are your standards too high for that? Whose standards are applicable?"
This is true. It turned out that Corino didn't need to go all the way to Suranse to get his wings; Dawn-shining's Sphere was close enough.
The wings are cloud-white with sky-blue accents, huge and feathered like Dawn-shining's. They're absolutely beautiful.
"...So," says Elaneth-imire, "I want to make some kind of sane portal hub structure in this world, so people who want a portal between their Sphere and Nuime can have them organized. I'm thinking near the capital. I'm also thinking on the moon, for people who want their portals only accessible via teleportation."
He puts a portal hub on the moon. He installs appropriate air recycling systems and so forth. He comes back.
"Who wants a moon portal?"
They all want moon portals. Pop, now they're on the moon. The view is stunning; he made the ceiling transparent.
As each person puts up their portal in one of the provided archways, he reshapes the stone of the arch to write their name on it.
He pops to the other side, expecting all of his eavesdropping to suddenly go dead...
...and that does not happen.
Okay that's convenient but first: he thinks of Atialemain, and feels accomplished, and the feeling fills him up and shines out in a column of bright white light—and he has his wings. They're built in the Taliar style, big and feathered and fluffy. But the feathers are predominantly black, edged in blue and silver and gold. The colours shift and shimmer as he moves.
Sure.
He brings Nezhefena into it, since otherwise the experiments might be tainted by Elaneth-imire's ability to consistently reach his father's mind from an adjacent world. They string all their Spheres together and open and close various portals and have Dawn-shining and Nezhefena stand in various locations.
The conclusion seems to be: if a living Sphere has an open portal to another world, it can count as 'part of' that world for osanwe purposes if the Sphere's owner wants it to. This effect can extend all the way across at least the three available Spheres if all the owners are cooperative.
They experiment with teleportation. The conclusions are similar: link two worlds with a chain of cooperative living Spheres, and you can hop straight from one to the other. Close any of the intervening portals, or have one of the intervening Spheres stop cooperating, and it stops working. You can still teleport into an uncooperative Sphere from any Sphere or world that has an open portal to it, but the portals behave like adjacencies at that point, you can't pass through it like it's all part of the same contiguous space.
This is going to be very useful.
Who has the prettiest wings? Raika-seren Taliar has the prettiest wings. It's him. He does. They are so gorgeous.
He kind of wants to see what his Sphere looks like, but he's busy right now, he doesn't want to spare the attention away from eavesdropping to fuck around with making portals. That stuff about how living Spheres interact with adjacency is amazing, though. Also, his wings are the prettiest. Although Elaneth-imire's are admittedly a close second.
Yeah.
...he envisions the consequences to Suranse if Tseiza-3 had been teleported into its sun with the portals still attached. Ouch.
Happier thoughts: here's what the weapons development people are up to (not getting anywhere), here's what the military hierarchy is up to (arguing about the weapons development progress), here's what the galactic media is up to (no word whatsoever about any vanished fleets), here's what the cultists are up to (collecting the information they're getting from their spies in the military and debating what to do if this turns out to be the beginning of various possible end-of-the-world scenarios).
Yeah, let's.
He delegates the search to Dawn-shining, whose Sphere still connects this world to Nuime for world-spanning osanwe purposes. Find me a compatible star in a nearby world - or a non-nearby world you can teleport-link with your Sphere, he says. In case we can do the planet but not the star, I feel like including the star would be much easier to fuck up.
Also he wraps himself in his wings. They're so soft. His wings are the best.
All right.
He continues eavesdropping. The military decides to send another expedition to somewhere near the site of the previous two disappearances. They're hesitant to risk another fleet the size of the first two, so they make it a covert scouting mission, one small stealthy ship with good sensors and fast engines.
Should I vanish the scout or let it report back? he asks, focusing his attention on it.
He listens closely to see if there's any evidence that changes that prediction.
The scout prepares to jump. Nobody's thinking about what they'll do if they find no evidence of either fleet or the planet they were attacking. The crew of the scout ship are mostly terrified, but determined to do their duty. They're definitely going to put their absolute best effort into communicating as much information back home as possible. Not much time left to make a final decision—
—although if they manage to enact some kind of subtle sabotage on the scout's communication equipment, he'll have more time to see them react to the situation without any information getting back to their commanders. He transmits this idea to Elaneth-imire; the sensory power makes him the obvious person for the job.
So Elaneth-imire hides himself near where the scout is going to emerge, and extends his sensory power, and ever so carefully uses precisely applied landshaping to introduce a small flaw in the communicator's alignment apparatus that will have it directing its messages uselessly into interstellar space. With how finicky these communicators are, it won't be any more than circumstantially suspicious; this could absolutely have happened by accident.
The scout sends back continuous reports, unaware that none of them are reaching home base. They cautiously examine the area where the planet is supposed to be.
...the planet isn't there.
They run an alignment check on their jump system. It comes out clean; they're in the right place. They run another one, incredulously. There are no fleets and no planets in evidence. Not even any debris. Just. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Someone thinks to run an alignment check on their communicator, and that fails. They start tinkering with it, urgently trying to get it working again.
Raika-seren judges that Maitimo's guess was right; vanishing the scout will help more than letting it report in - it'll keep them on the distant ominous fear of the unknown they've got going on now, rather than the more urgently bewildered and alarmed fear of the unknown that the scouts are feeling. He tells Elaneth-imire to get it done.
Back at headquarters, everyone's getting increasingly nervous as there continues to be no word from the scout. He predicted their reaction correctly.
Elaneth-imire finds a bunch of uninhabited planets.
It takes really good timing and placement to move a planet between one star and another in a way that sensibly preserves its orbit and rotation. He uses his sensory power to check his work, and then conjures computers to run analyses, and then does not allow himself to get distracted trying to figure out how the analysis software works, and finally after all ten uninhabited test planets have been flawlessly-as-far-as-he-can-tell restored to their original placements, he declares that he could definitely kidnap a planet without fucking anything up. He can even include moons, which is good because Ityen-6 has two, and artifical satellites, because of course he conjured and launched a bunch of those to test that, it would've been silly to go to all this trouble and then find out at the last second that his precision wasn't quite good enough and oops sorry about that hail of debris.
Okay. Let's not do it until they seem on the verge of something worse than paralysis - actually, let's do the 'accidental' tamper with communications equipment somewhere and let them get it back up and running, so their first hypothesis when the planet goes dark is just that we're causing communications glitches -
Raika-seren listens for reactions.
Some people are mildly alarmed. (A cultist hears about it and gets excited.) The planet has one of its communicators back online in five minutes, and they start notifying everyone that they're fine and it was just bad luck. (The cultist is disappointed, but glad they didn't pass on the exciting news immediately, they would've looked silly.) News of the incident makes its way into the military, where a few people hypothesize that it might have to do with the vanishing fleets, but after the followup reports come in, consensus is that it was just a coincidence.
He has a Taliar. You couldn't ask for a better advantage than that.
After the second planetary sabotage, people are starting to wonder if the problem is with specific models of communicator, or maybe radiation damage, or, or, or... He listens to the technicians' investigations and advises Elaneth-imire on how to conduct the next sabotage to make all three of the top theories more plausible.
The question of whether this is related to the fleet disappearances comes up again among people who know about the fleet disappearances. They argue about it. No definitive conclusions are reached.
Raika-seren decides they should wait an hour or so before the third false alarm. He suggests to Elaneth-imire and Midnight that Elaneth-imire could go fix Independence's internet in the meantime - his restoration of the planet's surface didn't put their satellites back, but he could easily do that now, and with landshaping and conjuration he could trivially lay fiber optic cable under the whole continent without having to so much as pry up a cobblestone, so they could have even better internet than the satellites alone were giving them.
So he sends Elaneth-imire everything he needs to know to get the job done, and Elaneth-imire goes off and does it, and it takes about an hour and ten minutes to get all the infrastructure in place and up and running, and then Raika-seren tells him which alien planet should have its communications sabotaged next, and he does that.
Having an entire extra self to delegate to - with different powers, at that! - makes everything so much easier. It's an interesting change of pace, but he doesn't think he'll miss it much when this is all over with. Two sun-bright Taliars would be enormous overkill for the vast majority of problems, and he would be happy not to see another problem of this size for at least a century.
I'm not even twenty yet, a century still sounds like a while to me. But if you want a thousand stress-free years then you should have them. Feel free to make me deal with all of your problems, I knew I thrived on stress but I had no idea just how true that was until today.
I imagine it wouldn't be what Elaneth-imire said to me right after he forked me, but besides that I really have no idea.
As he recalls, what Elaneth-imire said to him was 'I'm about to convince you to do something nobody in their right mind would willingly do.'
Yeah. Love you.
He's definitely still on top of the situation. Now it's just a matter of picking the exact right moment to kidnap the planet, and planning out the theatrics...
It would be interesting to include the healing aura. But it would interfere with them ritually sacrificing the purity-keepers - but if he just had Elaneth-imire burn all the purity-keepers on the spot, that would undermine the cult's self-determination - perhaps if Elaneth-imire burned all the purity-keepers individually as each ritual sacrifice was about to begin... yes, that feels right. And, hmm... light and darkness. Have the planet arrive in total darkness - use conjured obstacles to block light from reaching the destination, maybe - and then take away the obstacles and flood the place with healing aura and announce the end of the world. Yeah. They can do this.
The prophecies they're trying to match are kind of astonishingly pragmatic. The cult's criteria for the prophesied end of the world are very very close to just being exactly the criteria for a situation in which their revolution would be likely to succeed if they tried it. There is a prophesied figure called the Destroyer, but they seem like more of a metaphor than a person and could easily be interpreted that way. Fortunately, they could just as easily be interpreted as referring to Raika-seren, at least once he claims credit for the world ending.
He passes the plan to Elaneth-imire, confers with him about it for a few minutes while watching for the right moment, and then gives him the go-ahead.
Raika-seren focuses most of his eavesdropping on them, keeping track of their panic. And oh boy are they panicking. Except for the cultists, who are getting increasingly excited and then finally springing into action once they reach consensus that it's really definitely the end of the world this time.
The revolution is beautifully organized. Raika-seren is impressed. They hit hard and win fast, while everyone else is still panicking over the sudden darkness and total cutoff of communications with the outside world. A few of the cultists wonder whether the world might be ending a little too thoroughly for their efforts to matter, but they don't let those doubts slow them down: they have a job to do and they're going to do it.
Two hours in, he has Elaneth-imire burn the planetary blackout curtains, and he floods the planet with his healing aura and broadcasts to everyone on it: The world has ended. A new world begins.
Some of the cultists are kind of alarmed to discover that the Destroyer is a real person who can talk and everything. But they adapt.
As soon as enough reports have confirmed that everyone really did hear that and the whole world really is covered in highly restorative golden light, they call for volunteers to try talking back directly. Of the volunteers, they select the one with the highest rank. It takes them about five minutes from the moment the healing aura appears to the moment their chosen representative says,
Um, hello. Are you the Destroyer?
Assistant Coordinator Sikyal Tegati has an almost Taliar-ish combination of sociability, optimism, and willingness to dig into hard problems. They're delighted to be the liaison between the cult and the unexpectedly helpful Destroyer.
The ritual sacrifices of the purity-keepers go forward on an accelerated schedule, with Elaneth-imire dramatically incinerating them on cue. The cult handles almost everything by itself, but here and there the Taliars lend a hand. It's astonishingly tidy for a revolution. Whoever founded this cult understood their own society on a very deep level.
Meanwhile, at around the fourth hour, someone finally dares to send a ship to the Ityen system actually looking for the vanished planet.
The cult isn't quite ready to take on the rest of the galaxy yet. Raika-seren vanishes the exploratory vessel.
The military concludes that it's definitely all part of the same problem. They tighten their information security so as not to cause a mass panic. Sure, everyone knows something happened to Ityen-6, but everyone does not yet know that what happened to Ityen-6 might have been planet-eating filth creatures, and they'd like to keep it that way. Raika-seren is happy to let them do his work for him. He goes back to coordinating with Sikyal.
I dream of letting them have a whole day, but I don't expect to be that lucky. I'd give them maybe another four hours before I'd expect it not to be a disaster? The condition the other planet is in when it arrives also matters. I'm hoping to be able to just kidnap planets one by one and bring them here to be dealt with by the cult, until enough of them have accepted the cult's consensus that I can put them all back and let them convert the rest. Have to leave Tseiza-3 where it is because we have no way to test teleporting a planet with dead Sphere portals attached, but any of the others are theoretically kidnappable, it's all down to which ones look most promising when the time comes.
Does Dawn still have their set of Silmarils? In principle you can do crazy time dilation with those, give the cult as long as it needs, but I don't know if they'd have developed it yet, we were admittedly handicapped by my father being dead but it took us years...
Raika-seren has to vanish three more ships from the Ityen system before the cult has their planet stabilized well enough to think about outreach. They're really starting to pile up, and some of them aren't supplied to last indefinitely floating in space, so he does the obvious thing and lets them find the planet they're looking for.
As a test case, it's very promising. The crews of the exploratory vessels observe that an alien force with no discernible physical form has been moving them around like someone playing a cosmic board game, and they see the cult planet covered in golden light and efficiently adapting to the new situation, and they join the consensus in front of them after only a few minutes of dithering each.
It's going to be harder than this when it's a whole planet at a time. Society versus society, instead of society versus individual.
He's thinking about it. There are a few candidates. It's easier to think of planets that he wants to do early-but-not-first than planets that would work well for the very first try. It would be nice to use the planet with the smallest population first, but that's Tseiza-3 by a wide margin, and keeping Tseiza-3 cut off from the rest of the galaxy long enough without moving it anywhere would be difficult to the point where they might actually slip up and let a message get through, and that would be bad. The planet with the next smallest population is one of the candidates he's considering; the two that he wants to do early-but-not-first are the aliens' first-ever colony world (their homeworld is abandoned) and the galaxy's most renowed center of culture and learning.
And then a rumour escapes the military about two fleets and a scout vanishing exactly the way Ityen-6 vanished, from the location of a newly discovered planetful of filth creatures.
He tracks it. Skimming the surface thoughts of thousands of people at a time is starting to be second nature, it's kind of amazing, but no time to think about that now - it's not quite to the point of mass panic but people are definitely getting worried - they're not going to make it another hour before the first riot. Okay. He tells Sikyal to get ready, and he watches all his candidate planets, and when one of them hits just the right point - widespread unease, but not yet to the point of disrupting social order - he has Elaneth-imire kidnap it.
Ityen-6 welcomes their new neighbour.
There's some violence, but not much, and mostly disorganized. He timed it right. The biggest problem is the purity-keepers, and Elaneth-imire incinerates those whenever one tries to hurt someone. They get the picture. They switch allegiance to the cult of the Destroyer, most of them sincerely. Elaneth-imire floods the planet in his healing aura for a few minutes when the conversion is complete.
Next planet. This one is already rioting. This is going to be the least fun part of the whole process, when people are dying and the best thing Raika-seren can do for them is not to intervene but to watch—
The rest of the galaxy freaks the fuck out. But the cult of the Destroyer establishes their hold on the second planet even faster than the first. Raika-seren picks out a third and has Elaneth-imire bring it over. Four. Five. Both vanished fleets and the vanished scout. Six. Seven. Eight. And all of the ships sent to look for all of these planets, they're coming pretty fast now, it's getting difficult for the two of them to keep up; they pull in Liran-alore to help with miscellaneous teleportation. There's mass rioting in the galaxy at large, but they're going as fast as they can, the best he can do for them is watch, the best he can do for them is watch...
The tenth planet they kidnap is the home of the military headquarters. This is going to be the hardest one. He drops all his eavesdropping on the original galaxy - very few things that could happen there would affect what he's going to do in the next couple of hours - and focuses on the situation at hand.
Elaneth-imire uses his sensory power to spy extensively on the planet while the emissaries from Ityen-6 approach. It looks like the rioting has been surprisingly minimal on this one. He's not sure if that's a good sign.
The weapons development people don't have their long-range black hole generator fully worked out yet, but they have enough of a prototype to set it off on the surface of their own fucking planet, which they manage to do because the Taliars were watching the launch infrastructure, not the payloads themselves, because who fucking does that—he catches it in time to mitigate the damage with landshaping, and then he decides that enough is enough and systematically destroys every large-scale weapon on and around the planet.
They find this very intimidating!
Raika-seren - can't be horrified he's too busy to be horrified he has to keep on top of this, it sucked down half a city before Elaneth-imire stopped it but he did stop it and it's not going to happen again - he listens as hard as he can, listens to everything, he is the flow of information -
The tenth planet is stubborn, but they're outnumbered, local consensus is against them, and also they have no weapons, and most of them disagree with the decision of the technicians who set off the black hole device. They accept the cult of the Destroyer as the new foundation of society.
Which is good, because it was getting a little crowded in this star system.
Raika-seren has Elaneth-imire put all the planets back where they came from. They send emissaries and reassuring messages to their neighbours. The neighbours' reactions are mixed. The Taliars keep one planet-sized healing aura active on Ityen-6 at all times, for the symbolism, and they have the converted planets send their emissaries to the planets that are having the worst trouble with rioting, and they deploy the second available planet-sized healing aura to reward conversion. It goes... more smoothly than they had any right to expect. So of course Raika-seren is disappointed in himself for not doing an even better job. People, probably millions of people, have died today who wouldn't have died if he'd made better decisions.
But if he'd known what the better decisions were, he'd have made them. He's not going to waste time hating himself while he has shit to do.
He coordinates with Sikyal and eavesdrops on the galaxy and directs his alts for hours. When the last planet converts, it's been about a day in total. What a day. He feels like going home and sleeping for twelve hours, but there's something he needs to do first...
Assistant Coordinator Sikyal Tegati consents to be teleported to the Destroyer's home to meet them.
When they see Raika-seren standing inside the anonymous conjured space station, they need a moment to collect their thoughts.
"You're - really an outsider," they murmur wonderingly. "I - I wasn't sure - "
"Yeah," he says. "You really need to push the point of view that lets you say 'outsider' instead of, uh, a certain other phrase. First of all because your people attacked my planet and killed almost everyone on it, and second of all because I'm not totally sure that every single member of your species hasn't caught the wing contagion from my healing aura."
And now -
He is only still awake because of his healing aura, and while in theory he could continue being awake because of his healing aura indefinitely, he's pretty sure he shouldn't. He could keep eavesdropping on the aliens for the next twenty-four hours straight, and mostly this would just work out to listening to a lot of things that he wanted to intervene in and then not intervening in them because he needs to stick to his resolution to let the aliens keep as much independence as possible. The new society is... not perfectly stable, but hovering over it and fucking with it constantly isn't actually going to help, the cult of the Destroyer has their shit together and they need to experience that for themselves.
He teleports home. He flops exhaustedly into bed.
How'd I do? he asks wryly.
When he wakes up, he snuggles into his blankets for a few seconds, and then his thoughts turn back to the takeover and he starts going over how he could've reacted better and prevented more deaths, and a few seconds into that he decides that no fuck this he is going to be nice to himself for the next twelve hours minimum unless an actual legitimate emergency presents itself and he has to go back into crisis mode.
It's a really good feeling, he agrees, and he falls a little more in love again, and feels it in his soul, and it's so utterly lovely, he still isn't used to it being so tangible... he closes his eyes and makes his wings appear and hugs himself with them, basking in the sensation.
The wings? They're - I don't know, you're reading my mind, you tell me.
When they're not there he doesn't miss them, but when they are, they feel exactly like a perfectly natural part of his body, as familiar as his arms or legs. And his feathers are so unbelievably beautiful, and so soft to the touch, he is so cozy right now... it's a little bizarre, suddenly having wings, but he doesn't regret it for a second, he loves them, they're amazing. The prettiest wings of any Taliar, with their soft black feathers edged in shimmering blue-silver-gold. He's terribly smug about them.
I technically still haven't met him, I only know him from Elaneth-imire's memories. I think I remember catching half a thought from Liran-alore indicating that the Suranse alts had all manifested their souls and gone home to tell everyone the good news, but I don't even know if they've picked soulnames yet. I really want to meet his siblings, actually, that's so weird - and the thing Inlaith did where he just put on Ashras's entire personality for a second, what's with that - and he grew up in a world with no soul artifacts, I bet he's not nearly as good at steering his head around as I am, he'll pick it up fast though, he's still essentially a Taliar...
Yeah that must be really fucking unsettling. No, I do not. And I genuinely can't imagine what it would take to get it to go the other way - if I met an alt of myself who'd done things so horrifying I wished he didn't exist, I wouldn't kill him, I'd, I'd Taliar him. And if he was in any sense actually an alt of me, he'd be delighted about it.
He snuggles contentedly into Maitimo's arms, and feels his love for him shining in his soul, and - he doesn't ever want to die on him again...
...oh so that's how Dawn-shining became immortal—the thing that was missing was being loved, being loved and knowing it—
"I swear on my soul I will never let anything take me away from you," he says, and it clicks and it's right there, a golden glow rising from his skin, the light lingering for only a moment but the power staying rooted in his soul, as irrevocable as Maitimo's access to his thoughts.
He smiles and cuddles him some more.
—and then he remembers—oh, right, he was upset about being tortured unexpectedly—he isn't upset anymore, he managed to work through it in the back of his head while he wasn't looking, but it's probably still worth having a conversation about at some point.
His thoughts drift lazily; he remembers the feeling of an imaginary stranger touching his soul, and - it was awful but he can definitely see the appeal; it would've been so satisfying to come back from that, if he hadn't been knocked straight out of it by an incoming emergency...
...hm.
He's thought before about how there's a signature to it, when Maitimo hurts him. He doesn't have a lot of practice at reading them yet, but he can tell they're there, he has a sense of them. And the signature of that incident, when he looks at it—to be hurt in that way, in that moment, after what he'd been doing beforehand, after what had happened the previous day—it reads as a pretty clear stop that.
Maitimo said he was trying to stop leaning on torturing people into more convenient configurations. Apparently he hasn't been completely successful.
Taliar isn't sure what to do with this realization. It doesn't make him angry or afraid, just... thoughtful.
All right.
He gets dressed and pops over to the relevant world to eavesdrop on the aliens.
The aliens... are doing really well. He made the right call in leaving them alone. They've pulled out of the Suranse portal-maze, they're working on reintegrating the ritually-dead soldiers into society, plenty of people are very very nervous about the idea of the wing contagion spreading throughout society but the cult of the Destroyer keeps emphasizing that the time of outsiders being filth is over.
Of course—can you show me where to put them—
He shows Maitimo the way it works. It's pretty clearly targeted very specifically at this exact problem - it branches from his existing resurrection but also ties into the sensory power, he can look at a place and see who has died there and pull them back into the world - but there is probably a better way to do this than just simultaneously restoring everyone to the exact spot where they died, and Maitimo would know -
Yes, he would, he has it all organized so everyone can be pulled together in a place with someone who can explain what happened and that yes, death is over forever now and their dead relatives can also come back but that'll take some time, and here are resources while everyone's recovering.
There's just something so satisfying about it. And the sesnory experience is kind of amazing - feeling the air under his wings, every feather contributing its own individual understanding to the picture as a whole - like a miniature version of eavesdropping on a thousand minds to get a sense of the thoughts of a society. Yeah, he likes it a lot.
Everyone is settled back in. The Internet is back up; he can make public statements over broadcast. The people responsible will never do anything like this again; a couple hundred million of them died in the retaliation but it was restrained, and in any event they're now clear of where the aliens could harm them. The procedures for lost pets, lost data, and lost magic items are as follows. The procedure for eventual reembodiment of people less recently dead is as follows.
It's nice to be able to talk directly to all his people, all at once. He never did ask the Space set how they ran a modern nation.
Oh, and now that it has the room, Raika-seren's soul has taken over the functions of protecting him from nightmares and daffodils. Although it will let him turn off the protection at will, in either case. Useful.
He can do magic items near-instantaneously now - are any of those urgently needed, should he quit goofing off and come do some work?
All right.
He can teleport, so it doesn't have to be convenient to get to; he goes looking for somewhere pretty.
...his sensory power comes in.
It's differently focused from Elaneth-imire's. Instead of a blanket of perception that he can extend outward from himself and reshape or refocus at will, it's countless separate points of view that he can move around freely. He examines the surface of Arda from a thousand angles, giggling delightedly as he circles the sky over Himring.
The spot he finds is an anonymous rocky hillside, no civilization visible for miles around. He teleports there. He makes a portal.
He steps inside.
It's a fountain of light. The golden glow of his healing aura fills the space, and the crystalline castle floating at its centre reflects and refracts that glow until it almost seems to be transparent through and through, a vast crenellated chandelier—but no, when he takes a second look, there's real stone in there somewhere - he takes off and flies up to it.
It is, if possible, even more beautiful up close. He wanted to explore, but he finds himself just sitting down in front of the palace's beautiful front doors, too overwhelmed to continue. The glass platform encircling the base of the castle has faint, intricate patterns engraved in it, a graceful twisting swirl of thin lines glittering in the light, mesmerizing in their complexity. The stone of the castle's inner walls is a soft silvery colour like the mist at the edges of his soul. Why is it so pretty. How is it so pretty. He's not even smug, he's just floored.
Elaneth-imire's Sphere has a palace in it, which is also beautiful but not quite this outrageously beautiful, and the design sense is way different - I think they often start out with somewhere to live, and the exact details depend on the person, and apparently what suits me best is... this...
Even the ground below the castle is lovely, when he looks over the edge. Soft grass rippling in a gentle sourceless breeze, streams of water flowing over beds of white pebbles. It's too much, it's perfect, it's wonderful, he might actually cry.
He sits. He smiles. He wraps himself up in his gloriously pretty wings. He does actually cry a little. It's so beautiful, and so perfect, and entirely, perfectly his, his very own place made of his very own magic - he is the source of this beauty... and it's only going to get better, a Sphere grows for as long as its owner is alive...
He stands up and folds his wings to his back and walks through the doors. The doors are beautiful. Everything is beautiful. Soaring arches, white stone aglow in the golden light, perfect in every detail. He loves this place so much.
...I think I'm not going to want anyone in this castle except for you, he says. It would feel too intimate. Thinking back to a few things Elaneth-imire noticed, subtle tells about Sphere-related customs in Suranse, he suspects that's a common way to feel about one's Sphere. He doesn't think he'd mind so much about people being in his Sphere at ground level, but this floating castle is... in a weird way it feels like being inside his own soul.
Not by default, I think, only by controlling access to the portals, which is much less effective when so many people can teleport. With how strongly I feel about it, my soul might come up with something, but I think it'd only bother manifesting the power if asking people nicely to stay out looked like it wasn't going to work.
He walks around the inside of his castle. It's still outrageously beautiful, but he's getting used to it. He could pretty clearly live in here forever; there's food, places to sleep... he'd have to go outside eventually to avoid being consumed by boredom and loneliness, but besides that, it's perfect.
Purely out of self-indulgence, he flops into one of the enormous cozy beds and has a nap. With his wings put away he'd practically drown in this thing, but as it is, his feathers trail on the floor.
It's very psychologically healthy for him! He gets a lot out of having a place that's so completely his own, and he gets a lot out of having it be so beautiful and perfect, and after the week he's had, he gets a lot out of having the time to just take a nap for no reason other than because he feels like it. And then he wakes up and he feels like exploring the rest of his castle and going flying, so he does that.
He meant what he said about not wanting anyone in here except Maitimo. He doesn't want anyone else in here, but he would genuinely welcome Maitimo. It would be lovely to see Maitimo enjoying the beauty of the castle, and lovely to be the place where Maitimo gets his wings. And it makes him feel vulnerable, and - there's probably something objectively crazy about finding it intrinsically rewarding to make himself feel vulnerable to someone who keeps hurting him when he does that, but nevertheless, he does find it rewarding and he's going to keep doing it.
"Soulbearers are a little bit the same way but not nearly as much, it's true. I do think this is unusually pretty for a Sphere - the ones in the Suranse maze are generally not this amazing - but every pair of wings I've seen so far has been gorgeous. Although none as gorgeous as mine."
He has no idea why he has the prettiest everything, but he's hardly about to complain.
Kiss!
The sheer peace and happiness of the moment makes him half expect that something is going to go disastrously wrong any second. But that is not actually how things work, and they're going to be fine, and constantly fearing another emergency will not make him any better prepared to handle one if it appears. As demonstrated, he is pretty good at handling emergencies even with absolutely no warning at all.
"Yeah. I hope not. But I'm glad I have it."
It's both satisfying and reassuring to know the depth of his ability to come into focus quickly and completely when he has to. Solving the actual problem - well, he's a Taliar, of course he's confident in his ability to engineer galactic takeovers if a galactic takeover is required. What he didn't know until it came up is just how bad a state he can be in and still be ready to handle invading alien fleets at a moment's notice. He's proud of himself for not wasting time being upset when there was work to be done. It's... again probably objectively crazy, but it's the kind of crazy a Taliar should be.
Taliar laughs and hugs him.
"I am happy. I'm incredibly happy. I wasn't - I didn't need to take any time there, I wasn't depriving myself. The crazy thing about it isn't that I bounced back instantly from being tortured because someone needed me for something important. That's just the state of being a Taliar. The crazy thing about it is - you hurt me in a way I trusted you not to, and I didn't take the time to figure out if I was okay with that, because I knew no matter how it came out, at the end of it I'd still want to be right where I was, helping you save your planet from genocidal aliens. And it turns out I am okay with it, but I didn't need to know that to know I still loved you and wanted to help you."
"...I guess that depends what exactly you're asking..."
It's hard to build a coherent hypothetical because it's almost inconceivable, there's really no circumstance Raika-seren can imagine in which he'd feel like he couldn't work with Maitimo anymore if there was an emergency and Maitimo wanted his help and didn't seem inclined to get in the way of him giving it.
And the feeling of accomplishment grows into something almost solid, almost tangible, and wraps him up in a column of white light - Raika-seren giggles and hugs him - and now he has wings, huge sweeping feathered wings like a hawk's or an eagle's, the feathers a deep warm grey only a few shades up from black, patterned with a red that exactly matches his hair.
"They're gorgeous," says his Taliar, gazing adoringly at him. "You're gorgeous."
He beams.
(Being made for someone the way he was leaves him very aware of how he could just as easily have been aimed at someone else if things were a little different - but he'd be a different person, a different Taliar with a different soulname and different wings. He, Raika-seren Taliar with his glorious dawn-edged feathers, belongs to this Maitimo in particular, and he wouldn't have it any other way.)
"Yeah. I'm wondering if it's possible to throw a me at someone without him noticing he's a present - almost certainly not, honestly, we're a very perceptive bunch - what would your advice be, if we found another you? Or would it depend too much on what else was going on with him?"
"Oh, yeah, regardless of what else happens, the very moment anyone finds another Melkor, Elaneth-imire is smashing him flat... and I guess that depends, but I know we're not handing out any Taliars who would have to coexist with the sort of thing that was going on with you during the war, that would just be a disaster. Other people getting hurt is sort of the one thing we can't handle. Well - on second thought, I'm not saying we definitely wouldn't do that, but we'd need a really, really good reason because it would really, really fuck him up. And I'm having a hard time seeing what could make that worth it."
"I can imagine, yeah. We'd all be quietly miserable about it but - I don't think we'd go for kidnapping because that would fuck up the optimal solution - on the other hand, we wouldn't be able to stop any Findekáno who wanted to go rescue their alt, and there's a bunch of them and many are capable of doing that..."
"It really would."
Taliars fundamentally do not operate on an Elven timescale. A transition that would be slow enough for a Maitimo seems like it would almost certainly be a very long time of being very miserable for every Taliar in reach of the news. And they really deeply believe in not fucking up the optimal solution, so they'd do their best, but - it would hurt them a lot.
"If they'd agree to it that... works really well, I think..."
Of course, Taliars being Taliars, it's not completely satisfactory to him because it doesn't involve everything instantly being okay for everyone. But everything instantly being okay for everyone is probably not actually achievable.
"Okay."
He has no reason to think Maitimo is wrong about that, he believes him, but - it's not without costs, and that bothers him a little, the same way it bothers him that some of the aliens died in riots before the conversion was complete even though by any sane standards that was probably the most amazingly bloodless galactic conquest ever accomplished and much better than they could reasonably have hoped for. In the long run, the outcome matters more than the process, but the process still matters some.
"We'd be a lot less miserable about it with the oaths erased, and even less miserable than that if the Findekáno also had a teleport. Not completely unmiserable, but it'd help. Not that I'd actually want to make these decisions based entirely on what would make me more or less miserable, what I actually want is 'everyone is instantly okay', and everyone being okay in the long run is more important than everyone being okay immediately but I still prefer more immediate-okayness to less..."
"I did take about a day to become okay all the way down instead of just functionally okay and suspending all not-okayness until I was less busy. But yes. It's good that he'll be okay eventually - although 'the level of fine he prefers' is kind of an unpromising phrasing, what does that mean..."
Liran-alore's preferred way to make this happen is by getting those agreements established between the peal and Independence (and Dawn) regarding mutual noninterference and freedom of movement. Also, he can combine this visit with Elaneth-imire's first hey-I-have-resurrection trip into peal territory.
How general would they like it to be? Now that he has it, it can be branched pretty readily to handle assorted edge cases. He hasn't yet tested resurrecting someone from a world nonadjacent to the world they died in, but besides that, he's confident in his ability to tackle fairly arbitrary challenges.
Bound spirit animals belonging to dead people come back unproblematically with the person, he's got that one right off. Dead bound spirit animals belonging to living people are also doable if there's any of those around, he's heard that's a problem. Unbound spirit animals... he can feel the power starting to branch, it shouldn't be long, maybe he can do the rounds and come back when he's got something?
He's happy to try.
—he thinks he's maybe got something, but he's not quite sufficiently adjacent—if he pulled the kid from Materia while standing in Warp, it would be a fork, leaving the original in what is presumably some Materia-adjacent afterlife beyond Warp's direct reach. This seems... unsatisfactory.
Bouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebounce—
"Nothing. Sorry," he says. "But Raika-seren's got his godhood now, so we could potentially gear up to go Melkor-hunting anytime, we'd just need three days' notice to be sure our souls were aimed in the right direction powerset-wise. And after we kill Shadow's Melkor we can pick up the kid on the way back out. It might be prudent to wait and see if we get more and better resources to throw at the problem, but we could do it now."
"I don't think I'd get him if he was already alive, and even if I might, it seems like my power warns me when I'm heading in a direction that'll end up forking somebody, so I could avoid that. I can clear space debris and put the planet back. If you can get me really precise information about its orbit and rotation that would be good, but I can make adjustments afterward if it comes in wrong."
"I can work with that."
He goes to the former location of Vulcan. He clears space debris.
He puts the planet back, people and buildings and books and all, as of the moment of its destruction minus the black hole about to devour it. And wrapped up in his healing aura. He keeps an eye on it with his sensory power to make sure it's moving right. Looks good.
Conspicuously radiating delight about resurrections is an extremely charming quality!!
He can embody spirit animals and they will be all physical and able to interact with the world but they won't have that unfortunate interaction where if they die their person becomes a vegetable - won't be able to be bound afterward either, by default, but if a lot of cases pile up where he embodied a spirit animal who now mutually desires to become their person's familiar, he's pretty sure he can branch a fix if they can't get anything put together themselves.
And Liran-alore asks if they wouldn't mind making him indestructible, because he thinks his soul might be able to put together a power to hand that out like candy if he got a close enough look, but having it actually done to him might be the only way to get a close enough look.
"Yes, that's true. So daeva would be harder to trap this way. Mind you, I don't think it's likely that anyone would want to sacrifice their Sphere to eternally imprison someone. But it's possible to do it, and short of finding that person and forcing them to open a portal, it's hard to see how to rescue their victim."
"If you die with all your Sphere portals closed, no one can ever find it again, at least not while you're still dead. ...if you die in your Sphere with all the portals closed, I'm not even sure you can be resurrected, at least not with the current state of the art. Now that would be a nasty way for a highly motivated individual to permanently cut someone off from the multiverse."
He shrugs.
"No one's ever trapped someone that way in Suranse that I know of, but then again in Suranse murder has historically always been a significantly more convenient option, and you've got all that indestructibility and so forth going around. And if the victim is themselves winged, they can escape via their own Sphere, but only if they had the chance to set up a portal somewhere first."
So he steps out of the meeting room and goes just down the hall and opens a portal.
His Sphere is... impressive. A misty plain of dew-silvered grass stretches away into the distance under a soft grey sky; presumably there are edges, maybe even some buildings, other portals perhaps, but none of that is visible from here. It's just a seemingly endless expanse of unused land.
"There's another magic system attached to the Suranse cluster, and we haven't bothered to extensively test exactly how portable it is yet, because the weapons that make it worth using at scale don't work outside the cluster and it seems to be mostly useless compared to interdimensional niceties anyway. But if you have anyone you want to send to Suranse to try to pick up combat magic despite its uselessness, I can make arrangements."
Off they go to peal territory! Three identical boys with claws and fangs and tails, distinguishable mainly by the souls around their necks - Ashras's bright silvery sphere, Inlaith's black glittering four-pointed star, Elarron's flat coin-like circle with its subtly shifting colours.
"And - well, they probably still would've managed to save my planet without it, but things might not have turned out so well for the hundred billion genocidal aliens who are now happily non-genocidal. I hear they had to juggle a lot of planets around to pull that off."
"That's what Sigyn said. It's slightly distancing - in comparison to 'rapist' - shorthand for 'psychologically distinct thataway'. We'd have to get creative if we found more Maitimos who were psychologically distinct in some different unpleasant direction."
"I'm not lining up for the Taliar solution, but 'kill on sight' does seem kind of extreme," says Ashras. "They do a good job with their kingdoms and that matters a lot. The Zaranyes don't discernibly have consciences, but they make really good kings, and I'd stand between Dalvor and an interdimensional execution any day. Granted, the Zaranyes have no personal lives to speak of, let alone horrifying ones."
"Oh, yeah, we don't have problems with their governance on an absolute scale. It compares badly with other Elf populations but that's not the Maitimos' fault, we're pretty sure that traces back to the Ainur sucking extra much and the Melkors in particular being subtler." She glances at their souls; she's been looking at Ashras's, since it's loud, but when she peers at the others her gaze stops on Inlaith's.
Ashras's soul says much the same things as Taliars, although he seems to be less - extreme, refined, developed. Elarron's soul says nothing discernible at all.
Inlaith's soul...
...says he is clever and insightful and good with puzzles, but very troubled in the area of social skills, and his sense of humour is like so...
"Yes?"
"He is indeed not a rapist! He is however incommunicado at the moment; Shadow Findekáno needed to be away from all the everything so Sigyn toted him a couple hops away. We could with the abilities we had to acquire to track down the Yeerks find them now, but I don't think they'd appreciate that."
"I am simultaneously tempted to ask you for a hug and inclined to not do that because I would inevitably wind up wanting to pick you up and fling you into the air and since this is not something I'm normally inclined towards with Sigyn - who is taller than me - I have no guesses about how you'd appreciate it."
He is very scoopable and very huggable and very flingable, and lands in an easy crouch as though he does this every day. For a seventeen-year-old baseline human his grace, balance, and reflexes are amazing, but maybe for a seventeen-year-old Aluvai they're normal, like the claws and the fangs and the ears and the tail.
"That was fun!"
Loki materializes her wings, long pointed swift ones, and folds them smugly before dismissing them again. "My personal energies are spent on being a princess of two planets, one of which kidnapped me from the other, and on spell development and on things best handled by deployment of magic items it's not safe for anyone to try touching; I'm not sure I'm the person to go to for things that respond particularly well to outside help..."
He shrugs. "For wing-getting purposes it works just as well if you pass us along to somebody else. Although I hear the Taliars can replace you as free will distributors, so it's not all hopeless - Ashras is going to be just about equally general-purpose, we're pretty sure."
"Anything else I'd need the Aether to do, pretty much. Handling the Tesseract isn't uncomfortable and the time stone isn't - well, it's uncomfortable but not painful, it's weird. And none of these work more than a hop from Edda so outright copying me is potentially useful too."
"It sounds it! I'm very impressed." Thoughtful pause. "And we didn't tell anyone where we were going, so we should probably go home before someone starts thinking we were eaten by a giant snake. Do you still intend to find me sword-wielding lessons? We can stay in touch via Suranse's crystal ball, right?"
"We can. If you want actual computers, Cam can hand out the state of the art and they'll hook up fine to the latest crystal ball model and you won't have to check the ball all the time to know when I've found you a teacher. Are giant snakes endemic to Suranse? Do they have mirrors for faces?"
...so Liran-alore can hand out indestructibility now. Huh.
Raika-seren is pretty sure Midnight is going to want it; he isn't sure whether Midnight is going to want him to have it. On the whole, he thinks he would personally prefer to be the sort of thing that can be injured even when he doesn't wholeheartedly want to be. And he's already plenty immortal.
Probably. On the other hand, I'm honestly not sure it is, for him... maybe in a few years, but if he tried it now... he didn't grow up in Nuime, he isn't built around an understanding of his own soul the way the rest of us are, he can't steer himself the way we can, I'm not sure he could pull off the infinite willpower trick, and yet if anything I suspect he's more competitive... he'd be 'the Taliar who is very obviously the worst at being in love with a Maitimo' and almost no matter how he chose to respond to that it would really fuck him up.
He smiles slightly.
Why, did you want an extra? he jokes.
I love you, he says.
He might do all right with Dawn-shining and Tivarante. I wouldn't dare suggest that he go for a new Maitimo if we found one. I don't think he'd do well with us, we're kind of still working things out in a way that wouldn't be good for him.
He contemplates, slightly wistfully, the idea of having another Taliar in this relationship...
...maybe I should be setting him up with Liran-alore. Now that would be some fantastic cosmic power. If it worked. And wouldn't hurt either of them particularly much if it didn't.
It's kind of odd not to be! I wouldn't want to date a me and no one else, but I bet Ashras and Liran-alore would work out well like that. And I'm pretty sure two Taliar forks couldn't achieve fantastic cosmic power that way, they'd be too similar, but I think maybe Ashras and Liran-alore could.
And Raika-seren feels...
Having and declining the opportunity to become indestructible makes him very aware of how human and fragile he is. It's a nice feeling, scary in the good way, and oddly compelling. In a way similar to how being on trust songs makes him want Maitimo to do things that make use of his trust, this awareness makes him want Maitimo to do things that make use of his fragility.
I know. I love you.
He's not sure if that is quite what he wants, though. He wants... he wants to be hurt and scared as a celebration of his ability to be hurt and scared. He wants it to be nice. He still looks forward to someday having a really bad day and getting as fucked up as possible, but he doesn't think he's ready for that right now. Right now he's still getting settled in his new expectations.
Feel like indulging my desire for friendly torture? he asks wryly.
I would appreciate that very much.
Raika-seren happily contemplates ways to make use of how easily injured he is. He suspects that if he gets the chance, he might end up with a thing for pain the way he's already starting to have a thing for fear. Which will be new and different and interesting.
...he starts giggling. He can't help it. It's just so - perfect, he never thought of taking away his teleport necklace but in retrospect it's such an obvious thing to do, and he loves Maitimo so much, it's scary but only and exactly in the good way - he wouldn't have tried to escape anyway, even if he'd needed to, he wasn't getting anything out of having the option - it could have been awful if he were a different person but he is himself and it's perfect and Maitimo knew that because Maitimo pays attention and this is going to be so good.
It hurts and it makes him feel so small and fragile and vulnerable and scared and—it's a good feeling, incredibly good, it's like trust songs, like everything in the world is perfect, he's so happy—also kind of dizzy, but that's okay, Maitimo has him, everything is going to be okay...
As Maitimo takes hold of the feather, Taliar wonders that too. He bets it'll hurt, but he has no point of reference for how much, he's never had feathers before—and then a bright flare of agony erases his train of thought.
He blinks, coming down from it - wow that was bad, 'worse than he expected' doesn't begin to cover it - but it's a rush, it's kind of amazing, the really bad part was over in about a second and now it's just a sharp lingering ache, no worse than a bad bruise although differently flavoured - he wonders what happens if something puts pressure on the place the feather was pulled from, and then immediately wishes he hadn't because the answer is almost certainly 'it hurts a whole fuck of a lot' and now he's terrified of finding out - but it's the good kind of terrified, all shivery and nice. He likes it. He likes it a lot. This was such a good idea and he is so happy.
It hurts a whole fuck of a lot!
Not quite as bad as having the feather pulled in the first place, but it's more sustained, which is worse—on the other hand, having it drawn out for longer means he has more time to notice that he's definitely starting to get a thing for pain... it still hurts, it's still aversive, but now there's this lovely little spark of pleasure to go with it.
He grins. He shivers a little, because Maitimo is so wonderfully terrifying, but this is one thing he's not afraid of at all—he hands Maitimo his soul, and drowns in love and joy and trust and exactly the right kind of fear. This time around, the overwhelming intimacy of soul contact feels good and warm and safe, familiar, as close to comfortable as something so intense can really get.
It hurts, it hurts really intensely, and there's nothing getting in the way of him paying attention to how much it hurts, there's just his body and his senses, no need to spend the slightest fraction of a thought on what to do because he can't do anything... oh yes, he likes his song. He likes this song a lot. He is so fragile, so helpless, so utterly at Maitimo's mercy, and there is absolutely nowhere he'd rather be.
It is lovely. It's incredibly lovely. It's awful and terrifying and agonizing and wonderful and peaceful and safe, and he is crying with pain and joy.
I love you so much, he says, you're so good at this, it's everything I wanted, it's better than I could've imagined, I'm so glad I'm yours.
His thoughts are dreamy, scattered, wrapped in a haze of pain. He's so happy. Maitimo makes him so, so happy, he really wants Maitimo to know that, if he could move he'd hand Maitimo his soul again to communicate it as clearly as possible.
An entirely reasonable set of priorities.
His eyes sting with tears and his breath comes in quiet sobs and he can't move, can't do anything - he doesn't actually know if he could put away his wings, he's certainly not going to try it, not when Maitimo is doing such wonderful things with them - Maitimo could do anything to him right now, anything at all, but he feels so safe, terrified and delighted and completely, perfectly safe.
And lit up like a bonfire, that too. Being Maitimo's helpless toy is incredibly hot. He kind of really hopes Maitimo is going to fuck him at some point during all this, preferably while he is still a helpless crying terrified mess with half his feathers torn out, that would be amazing.
Raika-seren loves his favourite Maitimo so much.
Also, as much as he enjoys being tortured, all crying and terrified and loving it anyway, he also really appreciates the kinds of pain that are just thoroughly nice. Like when Maitimo was choking him, or any other time Maitimo's hands are on him with enough pressure to leave a bruise - it's pure bliss, it's like trust songs, it's like he's going to melt. He is delighted beyond measure that this is a reaction he can have now.
Love. Endless oceans of love. And trust and joy and contentment and - the feeling of being welcome, the feeling of being home. Maitimo makes him so very happy, and he is so very glad that Maitimo finds that a worthwhile pursuit. There is nowhere he'd rather be, no one he'd rather be with.
Technically yes.
The healing aura always starts from his soul, though, so healing himself from here would involve expanding his healing aura until it reaches him. And he could avoid that by popping into his Sphere, which has a permanent healing aura in it, but someone took away his eidetic memory necklace and he's not making a portal to his Sphere from Maitimo's bedroom without being explicitly invited to do so.
Okay then.
He makes a portal directly into his castle, and steps through, and shivers as the golden glow wraps him up and soothes away all his pain. His feathers are good as new after a few seconds.
I love you.
And he definitely does not remember where that necklace got to.
Yeah, I think you're right.
What's that saying, 'time flies when you're having fun'...
He giggles to himself, and sends a few hundred fragments of his sensory power out to check on the planet's computing infrastructure. Everything looks good. He gets dressed and puts on his necklace and pops over to a network hub to fix a minor problem. The obvious complement to this sensory power would be ranged telekinesis, maybe a different angle on the same set of abilities that Elaneth-imire branched from his landshaping... conjuring things, moving them, altering them. And maybe the ability to fragment his healing aura the same way, send it directly where it's needed instead of being bound to a single location. That seems like a good all-purpose direction for his power to start heading in.
He pops over to find out.
The genocide aliens are still adjusting. The first shock has passed, and the new consensus is taking hold; they haven't had any cases of the wing contagion yet, but they're phasing out the quarantine procedures on Tseiza-3 and dismantling all the infrastructure in the portal maze, and the level of unease in the population about these things is low.
I think the resurrections are going to go well, but I also definitely think I want to wait until they've had to actually deal with somebody growing wings at least a few times, and probably also wait for Dalvor to make diplomatic overtures and see how they handle that, he says. Seems very much the kind of thing better done right than fast.
I'm going to wait on that a little too, because I think Sikyal would appreciate more time to get everything settled before being faced with the decision of when and how to bring back the rioters.
On the one hand they died recently and in a way that is fresh in everyone's minds and a lot of people are going to prefer to get them back; on the other hand, they're likely to be a disruptive influence at a fragile time.
I'll see what I can do.
He pops back to Independence's current location and tries to figure out if he can use his spying-inclined infinite-range osanwe to just directly locate all of the other minds in the galaxy.
Yes! He can do that! There they are.
...and they're really weird...
After some investigation with his sensory power, he figures out that it's the stars that are doing the thinking. And they're really, really, really, really slow about it. He can't even tell what scale they're thinking on, except that it doesn't involve any discernible changes to anyone's mental state over the few minutes he's been observing them.
...I think we are safe from the locals, he says. At least for the forseeable future.
This is a good project to have. Raika-seren likes having a project, and this one is particularly difficult and enormous and interesting and useful.
Love you, he says happily, and - let's see - now would be a good time for him to have a conjuration power of his very own but in the meantime he can chase down Elaneth-imire... on the other hand he should probably wait for those other powers to come in before he starts making a lot of random jumps... he can start by practicing world-spying on all the found-but-unexplored worlds in this corner of the map. All right.
It doesn't occur to him to go back for his soul until he's already several hops away in one of the worlds not bridged by anybody's Sphere, and... yet all his powers still work? He'd been under the impression that being worlds away from your soul made it impossible to use its active powers. Maybe it's the godlike power that's doing it, or maybe it's having a Sphere - you can open a portal into your Sphere from anywhere, so in a sense it's always adjacent to you, and if your soul counts as 'you' in a similar way then the Sphere could bridge the two. On consideration, that's really really useful. If his soul stays with Maitimo while he goes around poking new worlds, then if he finds anything dangerous he'll end up self-resurrecting safe at home with Maitimo instead of right in front of whatever killed him.
Well, I definitely trust my resurrection power to work, and I'm pretty sure I'd resurrect where my soul is instead of where my body was. I guess it's always possible I'd hit some kind of really weird edge case. I'm not planning to be careless, but if I didn't trust my immortality I'd pass the project to Liran-alore or something. He doesn't care if he gets killed because Elaneth-imire can just make another one.
He could, but if I was already not trusting my immortality - I'm pretty sure there's no way to completely prevent Elaneth-imire from resurrecting me, but anything that could prevent my own soul from resurrecting me might be able to prevent him from retrieving my last several days of memories, or something like that, and I care more about losing several days of memories than Liran-alore does.
I will.
Okay, so where are all the minds in these previously-found universes and what can his sensory power tell about their locations? (It's not urgent, so he doesn't spy on anyone's mind directly; that would seem unnecessarily hostile.)
A bunch on the 'single inhabited planet, preindustrial, nothing obviously useful or threatening going on at a glance' theme, it turns out. Plus a handful with multiple inhabited planets, same pattern. And one world where the single inhabited planet is actually a huge cloud of gas looped around its star, full of floating plants and flying animals. It's really pretty. He pauses to admire it.
Yeah. I wonder if the Zaranyes will start forking - they're going to want to accept interdimensional immigrants, but they're also going to feel personally responsible for the well-being of all their subjects, and Nuime is already close to having too high a population for Esarkan to be as closely involved in running it as he prefers - he has solutions to that but I bet they're going to prefer forking as soon as one of them thinks of it. Fork, give the fork their own planet to run their own empire on, repeat as necessary.
It's particularly appealing to Zaranyes because they have pretty much nothing going on in their lives other than governance. They like their granddaughters and acquaintances and so forth, but they wouldn't miss them if they ended up having to share with a few hundred forks.
Although now that he thinks of it, he suspects that the Zaranyes' vision of a perfect future involves every forked Zaranye having his own complete set of forked Kevarsins or Kazarynes as appropriate, and the relevant granddaughter, and maybe miscellaneous other useful and socially tolerable people. This is unlikely to happen, and they'll get by perfectly well without it, but if they could have everything they wanted he's pretty sure they'd want that.
Aww, he says sympathetically. Yeah, I wouldn't like to live like that either. Esarkan and Dalvor are just - very narrowly focused people.
They must have had something resembling a close personal attachment once, given that they both have granddaughters. But Esarkan didn't ask Elaneth-imire to make an exception in the resurrection schedule for his wife, so it can't have been all that close.
Yeah, he's offering exceptions for dearly-missed loved ones to particularly useful and valuable people, and he certainly fulfills both those criteria. I don't think he's the type to deny himself something he actually wants if getting it wouldn't make his empire worse off, it's just that he wants very few things.
Maybe. I have no idea what she was like, he never talks about her, the only reason I know she must have existed is that Esarkan's son had a legitimate imperial inheritance title. Kuleakala Rekhanthel Tekhesin Zierni Seofar. Therefore at some point Esarkan was in a spring marriage. For all I know they divorced immediately after Seofar was born.
No, he really isn't, is he. I have no idea what made Seofar into Seofar but I'm pretty sure it wasn't bad parenting.
He reviews some fragments of memory that have been passed around between the Taliars.
...huh, Dalvor might actually have raised his granddaughter by himself? And from the couple of times we've seen her she seems, well, like a Kelora with a better childhood, not that Kelora's childhood was at all difficult to improve on...
Okay.
He returns to Independence and finds Maitimo.
Love you.
If he's going to wait three days for new powers before he starts in on actually checking new neighbours - which seems like a reasonable precaution - then maybe he could visit Kelora. Maybe he could introduce her to Maitimo. He feels like they'd probably get along...
He laughs. Yeah, she does. She's the first person I'd ask if I wanted an opinion on politics, for one thing.
That's not the central trouble, anyway, it's - he knows that Kelora agrees Maitimo will eventually be good for him; he doesn't know if she'll agree that Maitimo is currently good for him. He thinks she will, but he's not sure. And if she doesn't, then, well, she'll be perfectly polite about it, she's very patient, but she won't be friendly and welcoming and affectionate. You have to clear a pretty high bar to get 'friendly and welcoming and affectionate' out of Zierni Kelora.
Yes.
He is not remotely conflicted in that judgment. He has so much to do - and all the more traditionally relationship-like parts of their relationship are going reasonably nicely too, of course - there's just really something to be said for a boyfriend who will casually hand you huge difficult important world-spanning projects. He is flourishing.
But he recognizes that there's an argument to be made that some of the things that have happened between them are really bad signs, and he doesn't know where Kelora draws that line. Most people would see it as - well, non-trivial - that Maitimo implied an intention not to torture people into more convenient configurations and then tried to torture his Taliar into a more convenient configuration. Raika-seren is genuinely not bothered over it, but he has noticed that it is the sort of thing it would be reasonable to be bothered over.