"I will have to work on some gifts, then." Leareth gets to his feet. Stretches. "I look forward to sleeping in an actual bed tonight." 

"Yeah. Amshalan's a good pillow but not a good bed."

Inadequate bed or not, Leareth finds it much easier to be productive that day. He's even a bit less clingy, more comfortable with just having Belrun in the same room but not necessarily touching him at all times. 

Since her research is awkwardly crammed into this room right now anyway this is not untenable. She does cranberry juice experiments.

And Leareth makes substantial notes on rereading his personal records, piecing his full identity back together. 

The next couple of weeks are substantially better. Leareth encourages Belrun to move her research back to the properly set up room; when he misses her during the day, he can always wander over there. He spends a lot of time in his library, interspersing reading his personal records with textbooks on various topics, occasionally Mindspeaks Belrun with interesting tidbits. 

The remaining ache is comparatively tolerable. She's interested in his past lives. Vaguely curious what he used to look like, but probably it wasn't a priority to sit for a portrait each time.

It really wasn't! Leareth has spent most of his lives not publicizing his immortality to anyone, and after the turbulent first few centuries, generally as a scholarly advisor rather than a ruler; why stand out more than he has to? It does mean there aren't a lot of roles in power where he would have had official portraits done. He digs up a few for her, though.

Also he can show her all the books he's written, with the disclaimer that he won't necessarily remember their contents, right now. There are hundreds. 

She can concentrate on reading without getting lost midsentence half the time, that's cool. She will read his books.

Leareth is happy to divide up his reading list! He wants to get up to speed as soon as he can, but Belrun being up to speed on some of it instead of him seems fine too; he'll get to all of it eventually.

A month in, he's starting to seem a lot more like himself. It's hard to tell if he's grown much, per se, but he's definitely back to a healthy, less malnourished weight for his age– well, the age of his current body. 

Puberty had better hit him like an avalanche and at least now it has the calories to do that whenever it gets around to it.

Puberty does not show up during the next month.

Leareth does read through enough of his records to start feeling a lot more...himself-shaped. It's felt like everything else is sort of on pause until he can sort that out. It's not totally sorted out, yet, there's still some level of background distress and he thinks he can compensate for it but he's not utterly sure and therefore feels dubious about his ability to make high-stakes decisions. 

It's also awkward having everything on pause, though, so at some point he seeks out Belrun and asks if she's available to talk about future plans. 

"- yes? What sort of plans do you mean?"

He's made notes. "I am not sure I have everything important here, yet, but - in the longer run we ought to think about researching different power sources, and about - ways to make you immortal. In the more immediate term, we need to decide what else to tell the diplomatic party they can share with the Heraldic Circle. And at some point I should perhaps consider whether it is safe to visit Haven again myself." 

"Nothing happened to you while you were there last time, so there's that... Uh, what are my options, immortality-wise?"

"Realistically there are not any options that allow you to keep your current body forever. There are two possibilities that I think are significantly better than the one I have set up, ethically speaking, but both are - somewhat less robust and riskier. The first involves transferring your spirit to a Changed body - not an ordinary Changecreature, but one would usually start with a less intelligent animal, modify them with magic to allow a fully human intelligence to be accommodated - this does not really result in the animal becoming more intelligent, since its spirit cannot make use of a larger brain - and also to make the body very long-lived. We would then transfer you at the death of your current body. This does involve killing some animals, and some of the modifications are painful for them, although pain can of course be treated and the death made as humane as possible. Also, it involves either keeping a host-animal on hand for decades, or predicting the time of your death." 

He pauses, referring to his notes. "The second is somewhat of a hybrid between Need's method - the immortal intelligent sword that I think we spoke of before? - and mine. Your soul would be partially anchored to an artifact while you are still alive, and would spring fully there on your death. A willing surrogate-mother could then have your soul attached to an early fetus, rather than waiting for this process to happen by itself at the usual time. At birth, your self and preserved memories would still be mostly contained in the artifact, since a baby's brain cannot hold an adult mind, but the burden would gradually shift as your new body grew up. The main downside of this method, in my opinion, is that you would have periods of being less functional during the transitions." 

"I don't object in principle to killing animals but that's sure giving me very strange ideas of what I'd wind up looking like... where would one find surrogate parents, seems like it might be hard."

"Nayoki might be willing? Or there are some women with the Healers. Or, honestly, I would think a lot of women would be willing to do it for money, they do not need to also be the one who raises you." 

"I guess that would work for having someone on standby in case I die violently but we'd need to keep updating it, people can't indefinitely bear children."

"That is a good point. Keeping an updated list seems not unreasonable, though - if any of them ended up changing their mind, I could arrange it, as long as we did not both die at the same time - which is perhaps an unwarranted assumption, so we would want further backups. The other difficulty with this method is the period of vulnerability where gods might decide to interfere, and of course the initial setup of the artifact is challenging and finicky." 

"Could a book or whatever support a lifebond while the body was growing up? Waiting till you grow up is bad enough."

"I am not sure. This is one of the areas that will require research. I suspect it would be better than if you were fully dead, but a very weird lifebond." 

"What would a Changecreature host body look like?"

"It could be a variety of ways! Depends on the initial body plan, and then on your preference. If you want to come to the library, I think there is a book somewhere from when I studied this some number of centuries ago?" 

"Sure."

They can head to the library and hunt for it, then! 

Leareth has a lot of books and only the haziest memory of a one-off-reference in something else he was reading to having done this research, but also his library is well indexed, so it doesn't take them too long to find. 

The research was mostly very theoretical, and not particularly aimed at producing reasonable, humanoid bodies to get reincarnated into. There are examples starting from deer, rabbits, hawks, and some large species of fish. They can get pretty far from the starting point in terms of superficial appearance, at least.