"Probably but I'm really tired and it's not coming to me right now, sorry." 

"Okay. I'll see you around. Thanks for everything."

"I'll see you in the morning. Sleep well." Shavri heads out. 

In the morning, General Lissa Ashkevron is the first person to knock on her door, after the servant bringing breakfast. "Belrun! Sleep all right?" 

"No but I'll cope."

Lissa bobs her head, apologetic and a little awkward. "You have a meeting time arranged with Savil and Shavri in two candlemarks," she says after a pause. "The King needs Shavri until then. However, if you wanted to meet Herald Vanyel, he's free right now." 

"It''d be nice to see him. Should I go to him or vice versa?"

"Probably better if you go to him. If that's all right, I mean." 

"Yes, that's fine." She gets up to follow General Ashkevron.

General Ashkevron must have heard the memo about walking slowly, because she keeps a very comfortable pace, all the way around some pretty gardens to another long building, it looks around as new as the guest wing. They go inside. 

She knocks on a door. "Van, may we?" 

Slow dragging footsteps, and the door opens. "Belrun," Vanyel says tonelessly. "You can come in if you want. I'm sorry it's messy." 

"It's all right." She comes in. "I suppose it's not going to be very additionally informative if I ask you how you are, nobody's really having a good day."

"Not really, no. I think today could be a better day than yesterday but I'm not too hopeful yet." Vanyel looks incredibly tired. There are bags under his eyes. 

"Well, I guess we'll see, I'm supposed to meet Shavri and Savil in a couple candlemarks. Shavri's nice, under other circumstances we'd have a lovely nerdy conversation."

That gets a weak smile from Vanyel. "Shavri is pretty incredible." 

"Apparently she reads Rethwellani and went through a bunch of my publications!"

"Oh, right, I forgot she reads Rethwellani. I didn't know she read your publications but it does sound like exactly what she would do." Vanyel rubs his eyes, seems unsure what to say or do next. 

It would be tactless to bitch about merely being hundreds of miles away from her lifebonded so she won't. "They still giving you a hard time or has the focus at least shifted to me now?"

"...They've shifted to mostly ignoring me, I guess." From his face, this is not clearly an improvement. 

"...well. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help."

"Seems like a pretty tall ask for you to - I don't even know what needs doing, honestly. Reassure everyone that the world isn't about to end and they have time to think carefully about this. Maybe they're starting to get there now." 

"I think I make the Heralds, or at least most of them, nervous. Shavri wound up doing most of the talking - I don't know if she's usually very talkative but everyone else was so conspicuously quiet. I think Herald Tantras hates me, possibly just for having a personality such that I could possibly get lifebonded to Leareth even though I didn't do that on purpose."

"Weird. Shavri hates that sort of meeting normally. And, er, sorry about Tran. He's - got some good reasons to be sensitive around some of these topics, and - it's been a hard few years for him in general. He hates me as well right now, and that dates from before knowing about Leareth, even." 

"'m sorry to hear that.

How's Yfandes -"

Vanyel winces. "Mad at me for mysterious reasons probably related to gods, and refusing to say so outright, because that would involve admitting we were having a conversation on the topic of gods. It's just - most of my thoughts are about that, right now, this is so stupid that I can't even talk to my own Companion about it."