"That definitely seems like the right spirit but for a lot of people it takes a lot of discipline to get from there to -" wing-gesture. "Maybe your history morphing helped. Are you going to go explore?"

"I think so. I will come back. I still want to see if Alloran answers the letter. But I might want to fly far enough that I will be gone overnight." 

"All right. Take care. Many people around here know where I nested, if you get lost and want to ask for directions."

"All right. Thank you. For everything." 

He snuggles against her for one final moment, and then takes off - he doesn't need to find a hillock for it, this time - and wings his way up and up and up, into the blue sky. 

He doesn't stop to look down until he's very high. What can he see from here. 

There's the mountain valley, and a big lake, and the redwood grove where the nearest lawyer-training is, and far in the distance past a stretch of meadows and some villages there's the sea.

The sea might be too far for him to fly in a day and come back, but - well, what's actually going to go wrong, if it takes him longer and he needs to sleep somewhere strange. Caroline will wait, and hold onto any letters for him. 

And he wants to see it. 

He flies in that direction, gaining altitude as well as forward distance; he's curious how high he can go. 

He can go up into the clouds if he wants! They are cold and foggy and somewhat hard to fly through but he can keep going up through that too if he likes.

Cold and foggy and challenging is fine; there's something nice about it, even. 

He will fly up through the clouds and find out what's above them. 

The tops of the clouds are fluffy and in some places manycolored like someone spilled oil atop them. Above the clouds there are floating mountains. Well, floating islands, craggy and rocky and in some places crystalline, with plants growing out of wedges and cracks on the underside, and forests on the top, and a silver dragon off in the distance flying from one to another. 

There are so many interesting details things to look at!

He doesn't want to land on any of the islands, right now, or go talk to the dragon, but he does test what happens if he skims along the surface of one of the manycoloured clouds. 

This tugs off his balance slightly, at first - those clouds are denser than other clouds - but then he can adjust for it. His wing gets heavy with water, eventually.

Once he's tired of that he lifts off higher and tries to shake his wings free of water, and then flies onward, wondering how long it'll take this time before he's tired. 

It takes a couple of hours of flying before he starts to get tired, and an hour after that before it's really slowing him down.

He's in a stubborn mood, and keeps going until he's almost too tired to move his wings, then lets himself glide into a descent mostly at the whim of gravity, toward whatever random place happens to be below him right then. 

It's a little village of log houses - not sized for humans - with gardens beside them. He lands in a pumpkin patch, gently.

Maybe he will just sit here in this pumpkin patch for a while. He's very tired, and no one is likely to threaten him about it - he can finally believe that on a deep level, now. 

A rabbit hops by, eats a pumpkin. Some cats return to the log houses. No one bothers him.

He doesn't really feel like talking to anyone, right now, but eventually he hops around looking for a cozier place to sleep. 

The log cabins have eaves he could tuck himself under.

He does that, and is tired enough to fall asleep without any effort at all. 

In the morning there are some groundhogs out tending the pumpkin patch and gossiping about the Godwar. "- backlog through the end of the year, but probably not much past that," one is saying. 

"Pharasma must be furious."

"Rumor has it that she told Aroden he'd better not try coming back, right now."

"I bet she's still holding a grudge over the last time!"

"But who else is there going to be to take over Hell? It's not a sustainable situation."

"We can handle it."

"Can we."

"For, you know, a couple centuries, until Pharasma cools off."

He listens drowsily until the content sinks in, and then startles fully awake and hops over to them. "You have news about the Godwar - Aroden is still alive...?" 

" - oh, hey. Yes, it's over, in Hell and on Golarion. Aroden died a couple of times but had contingencies up, as I understand it. Unlike everyone else." He tugs a weed up from under a pumpkin. "26 million dead on Golarion so not, actually, quite as bad as a hundred years ago. Though that was more spread out."

"...Twenty-six million." He takes a minute to absorb that, poking restlessly at the grass with his beak. "...What happened to Hell. To Asmodeus. Does... does the 26 million count the souls who were in Hell." 

"No. I think it must've been - much, much worse than that, in Hell, though we don't have a count. - Asmodeus surrendered. Eventually. They keep the bottom three layers of Hell, we get the rest, including the one where petitioners arrive, which is really the important one. And they're sending over everyone who wants to leave, which is - itself going to be at least a hundred million, Garadee was saying..."