"If I didn't trust you to be okay I'd just fake it whatever you said. You wouldn't be able to tell."

"Maybe."

She closes her eyes. 

Then she opens them.

"On the bright side I'm feeling significantly more optimistic that Eru won't interfere with our kingdom building? I mean, the Valar are supposed to be indestructible, and she let two of them get very messily destroyed, and all that eclipsing wasn't planned and has been absurdly disruptive and the humans appearing right when the lights rose is more suggestive of 'there are triggers for various events' than direct continual intervention - I bet we're safe enough going ahead from here -"

"I take your point," mutters Isabella.

"Good," she murmurs.

"I'm not actually thrilled to observe that I would likely have no clue you were hurting if you decided to instead pretend to be a model of mental health, but whatever floats your boat."

"If you weren't going to be okay. I want you to eventually be okay. It might be a silly conversation because if you weren't the sort of person I could be honest with and who'd want me to be we might not have ever gotten involved -"

"I'll be okay," murmurs Isabella. "Just seems like the sort of state that's improved by company and I don't know how to help you -"

"...get something out of it? It'll be very frustrating to exist for all the time required for you to reconcile yourself to my not getting better and not even feel like my continued existence is helping you in any way -"

"Does it not count as helping if what I'm getting out of it is 'not having killed you', because I consider that a fairly significant benefit personally and feel like I wasn't enjoying it enough before."

"There have to be Earth psions who were researching it, it can be one of them -"

"I wouldn't actually stop you if you wanted to go find one. I don't - think I can - help -"

"I hear we're broke."

"Won't last long, Macalaurië just has to drop another album or something and I'll work the next eclipse and get my payout for that etcetera etcetera, but yeah I did run down the savings a bit finding you via psion when it turned out Maira didn't want to tell me where you were, yes. I could have tried harder on that but I really didn't have the stomach for it."

"Why would she tell you -"

"She might've given something away - I wasn't thinking it through particularly clearly, I got a teleporter to bring me to the portal as soon as the power came in and I gave it about four seconds of precogged try in case - at the time I didn't actually have an 'in case' in mind. Could make up things in retrospect, she might have thought I had Liz's range limit and tell me she was on a certain continent and tried to keep me talking while I traveled, say."

"Why didn't I die in the destruction of Angband -"

"It wasn't targeted destruction, it was an eclipse. Orcs. We did damage control on the rest of Endorë and - didn't, on Angband. Melkor died, Maira lived - maybe because she was watching Liz so closely and Liz had some precognition - and you lived and she dragged you through the portal because she was a fucking psychopath, and some orcs lived but they weren't in great shape by the time anybody checked on them and were then killed. ...Also there were two entire species that nobody warned me about. Although there were few enough Ents that only two eclipsed and one of them did something actually useful, and Dwarves only throw mages not psions."

"Aulë had like ninety percent of an excuse for not mentioning Dwarves but Yavanna is worse at species design and at cooperating with precogs."

"My mother's always spoken highly of Aulë."

"Apparently Dwarves have a rather adequate afterlife and are immune to mind-affecting magic. He thought they might not eclipse at all and if they did at worst they'd die and go to their rather adequate afterlife, which, fair enough, he was right about that much."

"What a good species design."

"Yeah. They were still a hazard to everyone else, since mages are the ones who can, oh, suddenly be two thousand miles away and still have enough juice to set things on fire! But ninety percent of an excuse. The humans were a way bigger problem."