"I know. Nirvana's - all right, for that.

Carissa is also all right."

He had been shy about asking, for some reason, but he's glad that she said it without his needing to. "Thank you." 

It doesn't feel like there's anything else to be said, right now. He rests in her mostly-metaphorical arms, and feels a dozen emotions at once, tired and sad but also hopeful and proud, and right now, at least, none of the emotions are fear. 

"You're going to float way out to sea and have a hard time getting back in the air," she says, after a little while. "The tide's coming in."

"- Oh, right. Thank you. I - should go. ...If you talk to Carissa, at some point, could you tell her I am all right, too...?" 

"She has not prayed to me and I do not expect her to. - if she does, of course I'll tell her."

"Oh." He's not sure why he's surprised; had he assumed Carissa was working with Iomedae now because she ended up in Heaven? "...By the way, do you know who is alive who I could direct a Sending to, if I wanted to communicate with my people about obtaining better computers for Nirvana's trial records search engine?" 

"Your people sent a Visser One, to the negotiations in Axis, and a Visser Nine, and sub-Vissers 3, 7, 12, 14, and 18."

"Oh." He tries to remember which people the latter titles even correspond to; it feels like it's been such an incredibly long time. 

He has more questions, but he's not going to run out of questions for a while, and drifting too far out to sea would be annoying even if he would still be safe because Nirvana. "I should go back. I - thank you -" and he makes a deliberate effort to return to his body. 

He is floating; waves are crashing around him, but not in a way that interferes with his floating. He's not that far from shore, yet. 

It's sort of restful, in a weird way, letting the waves crash and not doing anything about it just yet, because it's not an emergency, because he doesn't need to react quickly in the face of possible danger. 

After a minute or two, though, he starts trying to take off and fly back to shore. 

Taking off from water turns out to have some kind of trick to it, and his first several attempts fail, but after a while he can ride a wave up and get just enough air to take off from there.

He makes it to shore, lands and rests and waits for the sun to dry his wings, and then takes off again; he finds that he doesn't want to be alone, right now, and since this is Nirvana it probably won't be long before he spots some people, and they're unlikely to shout at him and drive him away for wanting to hang out nearby. 

There is a herd of deer, walking slowly through a meadow full of flowers. There are other birds, flying in formation in the sky.

Mhalir joins the birds, though he's not sure he knows how to gracefully fit into their formation. 

It turns out birds seem to have instincts for this, at least tolerable ones. No one challenging his flying prowess. 

"- if you just double the size of the isle, sure -"

"No, you're being too generous. If you increase the size of the isle by a factor of ten that might do it. And might not! They're going to be violent!"

"That's kind of racist."

"I - understand what I think you're trying to gesture at but I feel like you're not leaving me with a lot of vocabulary to make the point I am trying to make here which is an obviously true one."

"I think that if you take people in and are starting from assumptions - adjacent to the popular one that they're fundamentally not capable of Goodness - you're going to wrong them."

"Are you talking about the people being evacuated from Hell?" he asks, eventually. 

"Yes."

"There's going to be a couple hundred million. We usually get about a million a year, on the Isle."

"That is - wow. You...might want to make more small Isles, instead of making the current one much bigger? I suspect if you concentrate them all in one place, their preexisting culture will have a stronger effect, and - it matters what the ratio is." 

"Yep."

"I don't know if we can make more isles - or more precisely, I don't know who can -"

"They might need a different space anyway because - they're not going to start out in an appropriate shape, I don't think, since they're not our petitioners -"

"Will they learn eventually?"

"Yeah, I know a guy who was Elysium to start with. But - took him the better part of a century -"

He's suddenly so curious! "How did someone start out in Elysium and then end up here later?" 

"It takes thousands of years but you can get, eventually, the ability to travel the Outer Planes, and he did, and he came here, and he liked it and decided to stick around, I guess. Does trials occasionally when the being Chaotic gives him a useful angle."

"Mmm." 

Mhalir falls silent, enjoying the feeling of the wind against his feathers, and how quietly satisfying it is to fit gracefully in with the other birds. It's an odd feeling; he wouldn't have expected it to be pleasant, but it is. 

They fly along the coastline for a while, and then land as the sun sets in a dense pine forest that's having a light snowstorm; beneath the branches of the pine trees it is warm and dry.

Mhalir finds a pinecone, pecks out some pine-nuts and eats them, offers another pinecone to the others. 

It's odd, Mhalir thinks, he both does and doesn't want to think about the future. He can think about now, and now stretching out indefinitely, forests and skies and seas and friendly people who want to help and want everyone to be okay - and he can sort of think about the someday when, instead, he's back in the material plane, dealing with Yeerk politics and whatever else happens, but it's an undetailed picture, an outline not yet filled in, and that makes it feel distant and unreal. 

Maybe that's fine. 

He's quiet, and eventually snuggles up in some pine needles and goes to sleep. 

In the morning the snow is heavier, and has blanketed the trees enough to mostly block the sun. It is cozy and warm beneath the blanket of snow. Some of the other birds are working diligently at coaxing a sweet sticky tree-sap out onto the snow, where it freezes into maple candy.