"It happened when Leareth talked about his plan being to make a new god. So - something about changes to...god things, I think. Figured it was because Companions were made by a god. Or gods." 

"We thought Leareth's plan was bad, we weren't going to let him do it. But it was enough that Van wanted to keep talking about it."

Melody nods. She sits back in her chair. 

"Hmm. Leareth's bad plan probably isn't going to come up the same way, for the other Heralds, if he's dropped it to go fight Hell in another world. Which is very reasonable of him really. And it sounds like having it come up in passing in the meeting, mostly overshadowed by the even weirder parts of this, didn't cause any other Companions to have a meltdown, and neither did the parts about Aroden. Maybe fighting a different world's gods is fine. And Vanyel's sense is that it's only if you're - thinking about it in a certain way, like you said, actually wanting to take a moment to consider if it's worth it. Which he did because he's known Leareth for a decade, but he thinks most of the other Heralds won't." 

Sigh. "However, whatever Yfandes had, all the other Companions do too. Possibly we should not be hiding the existence of this Companion-tripwire from everyone." 

"It seems like the kind of thing that might blow up at a bad moment."

"That's exactly what I'm worried about." 

Vanyel is gritting his teeth; he looks like someone in the throes of trying to find an argument why the unpleasant thing doesn't need to happen. "I...guess..."

"I think we have to tell Randi the beginning, and the end result, maybe mention how long it took. I don't think we need to tell him everything in between. However, I think some of that may be relevant for me to know." 

"Um, for reference, Melody is a Mindhealer and she's treated me for - a long time, years. Melody, I don't remember half of what happened. Just a lot of - being really upset and I think one time I might've tried to jump out a window. I think I'm all right now. Er, you're welcome to ask Fazil more about that, I would kind of prefer not to talk about it." 

"You seemed pretty out of it. Uh, Van could participate in conversation in short bursts but that was about it, and he was sleeping terribly, and he did try to jump out of a window on one occasion, and -" And in Vanyel's world everyone gets bizarrely worked up about whether men are sleeping together so maybe he should not mention Leareth snuggles? He hates trying to figure out what not to mention. "Hugs seemed to help," he settles on, vaguely. "That Ring of his is supposed to mean he only needs a couple hours of sleep every night to be fully rested and doesn't need to eat very much to be fully nourished but it didn't get a very good week of training data so we don't know how well to expect it to work."

"I was noticing I'm waking up rested after - five or six hours, maybe. Is it going to get stuck this way, not working well forever because I  gave it one unlucky week? That would be very irritating." 

"No, no, by the end of the next week it should work fine."

"That's good." 

"How has Van seemed to you since Yfandes got back?" Melody asks Fazil. "Was he more with it right away or did it take a while, and would you say he's back to his usual self again now?" 

"He seemed better right away, before she even got back, as soon as she stopped blocking him. We wanted to give him a couple more days, before we came back here, in case this ended up being - grueling - but the archon said you'd asked for him right away - and then we got lit on fire - I'm not actually sure he has had any real downtime, honestly."

"It would've been nice to have more of a break. But - I think I'm all right now? It was really bad during, when she was actually gone, but - mostly not in a way where I'm still upset now."

"Really? If I were you I'd be quite irritated with her for walking off like that." 

Vanyel's shoulder twitches. "We talked it out. I - I'm not mad at her, what'd be the point? It wasn't her fault she had some sort of rule the gods baked into her mind and I ran into it by accident." 

"Mmm." 

Crooked smile. "Leareth was - surprisingly comforting and helpful. I was barely tracking what was going on, I think they left him in the magic room for a while and then he was just around. He turned up in the middle of the night when I'd, er, the window incident..." 

"Oh. Huh." Melody makes a face. "That makes a really weird mental image." 

"He really seemed to care about you a lot. And be fairly out of his depths, but." 

"He tried to comfort me last Sovvan, too. Kind of ineffectually, especially since I was very mad at him for, er, reasons which I think are now less relevant. I'm really hoping that this whole 'people can read your soul and tell if you're Evil' thing gives him an incentive to stop solving his problems by murdering people." 

"It is kind of meant to do that!"

"It's more interesting to me that he's Lawful. He - really doesn't care about following any country's laws or any conventional moral standards, he's always told me that virtue and rules are fake, only results are real. So if there's any Law he's following, it's - his own internal code? Which seems hard to pull off." 

"It's supposed to be very hard to pull off. People are - not very good at being rigorous in their own thinking when there are lots of reasons to hope to get one particular answer, and it's very easy to get in the habit of compromising or reinterpreting, when the thing your rules ask of you is costly - and if it's not costly I don't think it counts."