Bella does the last handful of pinches on her list, and then she counts down on her fingers to warn Savil without spending stamina on talking. Five.. four... three... two... one... and Vanyel's awake... and he is super chill right now.

”Where am I- oh.” Vanyel looks around, slightly disoriented but not at all upset about it. “Bella?”

(This is really weird, he remembers lying down and being terrified about...something he wasn’t even looking at head-on...and now he isn’t, at all. Which was part of the plan. So it’s all fine.)

Good morning. You should eat while we talk, you missed dinner. She pushes his tray at him. How do you feel?

“...Hungry.” He butters a piece of bread and chows down and tries to figure out an actual answer. To start there’s a sense of space in his head, but he can’t find a non-stupid way to describe that, and he’s already gravitating toward the reason why he’s waking up with a really interesting telepath from another world asking him how he’s feeling...

”Tylendel’s dead.” It might be the first time ever that he’s said it like that, out loud. “He’s dead and I miss him so much and - and he killed himself, even though I was...right there...” There are tears in his eyes but it doesn’t immediately escalate to sobbing, he can still talk, he can try to answer the question because Bella is there listening. “It hurts. I’m...angry? That he did that?” It comes out with a question mark because until now he hasn’t ever formed that sentence, out loud or to himself. 

I'd be angry too, that makes sense.

He chews another bite of food. It’s completely surreal that he’s sitting here eating breakfast and talking about Tylendel being dead like it’s a completely normal topic.

”I didn’t even want to be a Herald,” he hears himself say. “I was...I guess I still am sort of mad about that? I didn’t actually ask to have a moral obligation to not kill myself because I’m the most powerful mage in Valdemar and they need me around in twenty years.”

That's... yeah, a lot to have dropped on you at the worst possible time, yeah.

And now he’s remembering it. And still weirdly calm. “I tried to jump in the river. After the Gate, the part of the report I didn’t get to. Yfandes fished me out. She was...mad that I did it. And then I was in the Work Room because I couldn’t control my Gifts, and...I was in so much pain all the time and I didn’t understand what was happening, I just wanted it to stop? I tried to kill myself again - I barely remember it - and everyone was so angry. And scared, I guess. I...could feel everything that people were feeling nearby. And it was just - it was weeks like that, it felt like centuries, and I, I wish it hadn’t happened to me? It doesn’t feel fair.”

It's not! None of that is fair on any level.

It's...very important, somehow...that he find the right way to tell Bella what he's feeling. "I can feel where he used to be? There's, just, this void, and it's there all the time, and it's always going to be, and – and you asked me before to try to have goals, for working with you, and...I want Tylendel to not be dead. I know that isn't an actual reasonable goal I can have? That's not actually the kind of way you can help me? But I don't know if I can ever be okay, if he's dead. And I don't want to spend the next twenty years being miserable? There are things in the world that are good and I wish that was enough. I don't know if it can be." He shrugs. "I don't want to be an unfixable problem for you, for everyone, forever. I hate it. But I don't know." 

Not wanting to spend the next twenty years being miserable is a goal and a perfectly good one. ...Why is it twenty years?

Vanyel looks frozenly uncertain for a while. 

"Savil?" he says finally. "I'm, um, really glad that you stayed this whole time, but...can you actually go so I can talk to Bella alone?" 

(Savil, honestly, looks like she very badly needs a nap anyway.) 

"Of course that's fine, kechara." She reaches to stroke his hair and then rises, wincing as her back pops. "Just Mindspeak me if you decide you want me here after all." 

When the door is closed behind her, Vanyel turns back to Bella. "There's, um, there's a part of this Savil knows about, but there's another thing that I haven't told her or anyone else..." And then he stops. 

Bella waits.

"I'm scared you're going to not believe me and just think I'm crazy." Vanyel shrugs. "I guess I still want to tell you. I started having a recurring dream right after my Gifts happened. I figured out it was Foresight when – pleasedon'tthinkI'mcrazy – when I, um, almost died because I made stupid choices, and I...talked to our death god and he said I had a choice about whether to die or go back because it was important for Valdemar. And a big reason, I mean, it wasn't the only reason I went back but I'm not sure I would've otherwise, is because there's this dream about the future. Where I'm fighting an evil mage and his army in a mountain pass in the north and I'm the only one in the entire Kingdom powerful enough to stop him and I probably have to die to do it. We guessed it would probably happen in about ten or twenty years because my hair is mostly white in it and that happens from using node-magic but it should happen slowly. So I figured twenty years is the longest time I have to stay alive." 

I don't actually know enough about the world to rule out that this literally happened exactly as you describe, but it sounds like you expect me to, why is that?

He squirms. "...I don't know, I think a lot of people from this world wouldn't believe me? Not the part about the Foresight dream, people know Foresight is a thing and Queen Elspeth and Lancir know about the dream and are planning for it, but I've never heard of the Shadow-Lover sending anyone back and I almost don't believe it sometimes. Also it makes it sound like I think I'm really special and important." 

I don't know if this literally happened, but I also don't know that it didn't, and I don't think you're lying and the experience can be meaningful regardless.

He nods, looking not quite fully reassured but at least somewhat reassured. 

"...I haven't told Savil about the Shadow-Lover part," he says. "And I, um, there's another part I haven't told her or Lancir. Taver knows though." He screws up his face, and finally seems to make a decision. "I'm not going to tell you yet, because, er, it seems like something I should spend longer thinking about whether it's a good idea and I just met you and I don't know if the thing you're doing right now to help me stay calm is going to make me feel like I trust you more than I actually do. But I did want to tell you that there is something and it makes me think the whole thing is even more important." 

I don't think the calm has a direct effect on whether you trust me but it would probably make sense to have an instinct to trust people you feel calm around.

Is there anything else you want to tell me before we talk about how to use the rest of this time?

"I don't think so." This is apparently about the number of exchanges he can manage of thinking about anything other than the fact that Tylendel is still dead and he's really sad about that, whatever Bella's doing isn't actually preventing him from feeling incredibly sad and lonely and hurt and confused, it just means that he's all of those things and also calm about it. 

Let's go down the list and make sure all the association pinches are working right.

She reads off everything she pinched.

That one's fine, that one's also fine, thinking about his friends Mardic and Donni being lifebonded without immediately jumping to how he used to be lifebonded is kind of weird but it's not a bad weird. It's all really different from before but none of it in a way that he minds. 

Okay. My go-to here with traumatic memories is re-living the event with all the salience stripped out. So instead of all the actual events and people and places it'll be 'nothing in particular' and 'no one in particular' and 'nowhere in particular'. This doesn't actually make it hard to remember if you need to call a detail to mind, but when it works it makes the overall structure of the memory duller and less compelling. But not all of your problem is directly tied to the traumatic event, a lot of it is just the non-event of Tylendel continuing to be dead. This I don't have a standard fix for because I worked on Elves, who do soulbonds when they get married but have a different death god situation.