He is a baby bird, in a nest, on a tree. The sky is blue. There is a gentle breeze. There is a mother bird, perched on the edge of the nest, looking out at the forest.

"Oh, hello," she says. "I'm Caroline. Nice to meet you - do you need anything -"

Why is he a baby bird. Why is any of this happening. Mhalir would desperately like it if, at some point, things started making any kind of sense. 

At least this doesn't look like Abaddon, he thinks vaguely, not that he knows what Abaddon looks like.

"I am very confused," he says to Caroline. 

"This is Nirvana. You are here because you died. Usually people can remember how they died, but not always; if you can't remember you shouldn't be too worried that anything is wrong with you. Your mind should work the right way here but the getting-here can be a little sketchy. After you died, there would have been a trial, but people typically remember fairly little of their trial. My understanding is that when you don't have a body they have to do magic just to be able to interact with you, and they don't have a good way to help you form long-term memories or retain the structure to interpret the memories you do have."

"That makes sense. I - do remember how I died."

(A Dimension Door into hard vacuum, and in Carissa's final conscious moments he said - something - to her, he doesn't remember what and maybe he'll never know, and slipped out of her head, on the general principle that the devil might try to pull her back into the ship, or retrieve her body to raise her, and it was strategically preferable for him not to get Mhalir too in that case, even though more than anything in the world he hadn't wanted to die alone...) 

He remembers a few fragments, he thinks. He remembers something that made him feel pleased and proud, if only for an instant. 

"...I was Neutral Evil," he says, finally. "I would not have thought I should end up here?" 

"Everyone has lots of different instincts in them, some Good and some Evil and some Law and some Chaos, and Nirvana goes to trial for all of them, on the principle that the Good is the part of them they'd choose, if they really got a chance to."

"Oh." 

It's sinking in, now, that he's dead - must have been dead a while, for the trial to be over - and no one has raised him.

Also he's in Nirvana, which means that theoretically he could run into Alloran by accident. That sounds like the most awkward thing in the world and he really hopes Nirvana is very big - it must be - or has some sort of special magic to conveniently prevent things like that. 

"Did - are you allowed - can you tell me if Aroden lost the war?" 

"We don't know exactly what's going on in the other planes. Some people went off to fight and they're mostly not back yet. That probably means it's not over but it could mean it's over and none of them will be coming back, or that it's over but there's lots of humanitarian work to do in the Material Plane which they stayed for."

"How long has it been." 

"About a month."

"Oh." That's even longer than he had expected, and - not a good sign, though he's not sure what he had been expecting, there wasn't time to form predictions. 

"Can I - is it possible to talk to people in other afterlives? I - my friend..." 'Friend' doesn't seem like the right word for what Carissa is to him, but 'host' will just be confusing to this person, probably, and besides it doesn't feel right either, or at least not complete, it puts Carissa in the same category as Alloran with no distinguishing markers. 

"You can learn to do magic, and then magic can be used for interplanar communications, though it's tiring and hard. Or you can try to find someone who knows how to do that and ask them to send a message for you."

"Oh." 

"Is there - any way I can get to the material plane, to - see if they need help there..."

It takes a great deal of effort to ask because Mhalir finds that he very, very badly doesn't want to do that. He has to, of course, the stakes are high enough, but he's so tired, and some part of him is frantically hoping that this is impossible or not allowed. 

"Eventually that too can be learned with magic. I think - it might be a good idea for you to take a few years before you worry about any of that."

That should be a relief and it is one and so Mhalir isn't sure why it also hurts so much. Maybe because it feels like otherwise they expect him to just keep breaking things in his attempts to help? 

- except there's something he was happy about, and it's very frustrating how hard it is to remember anything from the trial. It wasn't the verdict that he would go to Nirvana, he didn't know that was where he was until Caroline said something. It was...something had helped - something he did, not with precise aims, with remembered confusion and pain and falling through the pieces of a worldview that no longer fit together...

He thinks maybe it had to do with Alloran, but he can't retrieve anything else. 

"What am I supposed to do for a few years except worry about that," he half-snaps at Caroline. 

"...you're supposed to heal. That is what Nirvana is for. Healing."

...He knew that, it's what the cleric of Sarenrae said to him, but it was just words and it's still just words and he doesn't know what it means, in practice. 

He remembers a fragment of conversation with the cleric. 

What would your god's philosophy advise me to do, in this situation.

     Ask for help. If your people are in danger the Good gods will help you willingly.

If there is help to be had then I want it but I do not understand why your goddess would offer it to us.

     Well, we have one word on the subject so far, and it is 'Nirvana is for everyone', which seems promising."

I do not understand how that is a goal or motivation. 
 
     ...I don't think it's hard to understand at all! She saw this unholy wasteful tragic mess and she said 'hey, all of you ought to be safe forever and rest and have time to stop hurting each other!'

He remembers the cleric talking to Alloran. Finding out facts about his life that Mhalir had never known despite spending fifteen years in Alloran's head, because he never looked. 

He left Alloran in Nirvana even though it was tactically stupid - and in fact got him found out and Carissa captured, which ended up being fine because it was by Aroden but they couldn't have known that at the time so it was still stupid - but he did it anyway because he wanted Alloran to be all right. Because however little he understood about Good at the time, it feels like so long ago, he expected they would take good care of Alloran. That they would try to explain to him what Good was. 

He remembers thinking that maybe the Good gods couldn't answer Alloran's prayers, at the start, because he didn't understand Good well enough, and that if he ever did come to understand that, he wouldn't want there to be a war, anymore, he would want the Andalites and Yeerks to be able to coexist peacefully - that he too would see it as an unholy wasteful tragic mess, and just want it to be over...

All of that is a digression from Caroline's words to him, because apparently those were very uncomfortable. 

"I do not think I understand what that means," he says, flatly. "I want to go back and fix things, I made a promise, and I cannot do that from here, and so I am not sure what is the point of anything that happens." 

"Part of fixing things is understanding what they look like when they are whole. I think it will make you better at fixing things, if you know what it is like when things are all right and the background conditions of the world are not causing great harm to everyone around on an ongoing basis."

All right, fine, that's a not-unreasonable point. 

Mhalir is still for a while, absorbing it. 

"I want to try to find someone who can send a message to Carissa," he says finally.

(He wants Carissa to be here, he misses her very badly, but that is probably not achievable– he's suddenly scared that she might have somehow gone to Hell, despite her Atonement, and also somehow before it was fully melted, and then what if she got slagged to ash and nothing along with the rest of the souls they murdered horribly... Probably that hasn't happened but he's not sure.) 

"That makes sense. Can you spread your wings?"

He tries this. 

"Hmm, okay. I think you can't fly very far right now but if you practice, maybe by the end of the day, and then you can try to find someone who has a communications-spell."

He's morphed birds so many times in Alloran's body, surely he can figure out how to fly. It's very irritating that he's specifically a baby bird, though, and it doesn't seem like he can change this by thinking about it very hard, even though presumably his having a body at all is magic. 

Mhalir inches out to the edge of the nest, spreads his wings again, and peers over the edge. 

It is a lush forest of some kind. "We call it Summerfall," Caroline says. "All of the fruits and seeds are good to eat. You shouldn't try to eat the animals, they're people - it won't work but it'd be startling and rude."

"I will not try to eat the animals," Mhalir tells her, and he launches himself off the lip of the nest and tries to fly. 

His baby bird wings are weak and his feathers are limp but he manages to glide to the ground reasonably gracefully. It's soft.