Mhalir stays for a while, helping them with this project and enjoying the results of it, and then bids the group goodbye and takes off again, flying high enough to get his bearings before aiming himself inland. 

The landscape is fairly distinctive from the air, probably so people can find their way around easily. He can find Caroline's forest without too much difficulty.

He feels stronger today, or maybe the wind is just more convenient, and he reaches the forest and Caroline's tree just before sundown, and descends toward the nest, looking around for her. 

She's at the nest. "Mhalir! Did you hear? The fighting's over, they think. It's going to be all right."

"I heard!" He recounts to her what he's picked up from the various people he talked to. 

Wing-flutter. "It sounds awful. I hope some good can come of it. How are you feeling?"

"...Good. Hopeful. - I prayed to Iomedae and She answered, this time. She said Carissa is all right and - that it is going to be a long time, they do not have anyone who can cast True Resurrection right now, but they are going to raise us eventually. Once they get everyone in a dangerous afterlife like Abaddon." He shrugs with one wing. "I told Her not to hurry." 

"Oh! I'm happy for you."

"I want to find someone who can do a Sending again, now that I know which of my people are in Axis for negotiations, I can ask if they are able to Plane Shift over a computer for the search engine to run on." 

"We can go ask around. It's a rare skill but I'm sure we can find someone."

Nod. "And - I might want to offer to help people adjust, when they start arriving here from Hell. I am not sure who I ought speak to about that?" 

"I can introduce you to the arrivals coordinator for this region, they might or might not be directly involved but they'll certainly know who is."

"All right. Tomorrow. Or maybe the day after, I might want longer to rest." 

And he finds that he wants snuggles, again, which are less satisfying when he's a grownup bird the same size as Caroline, so - maybe he'll see if he can focus on wanting that, wanting to be small but safe and cozy, and shift back to be a baby again. 

And Caroline can snuggle him under her wing.

They get a letter back from Alloran the next day. He says he's running the search engine and storing all the transcripts on his chip; it's not specced for this and they're very constrained for storage, which makes it hard to do anything clever to improve the search procedure even though in principle there are many easy improvements to be had.

Mhalir shapeshifts back to his adult bird form in the morning. 

"It is very generous of him to lend what is basically part of his brain to run this," he says to Caroline, thoughtful. He writes a reply saying that he intends to communicate with the Yeerk leadership in Axis and request computer equipment and a power source to run it; where should he have this sent, if he's able to obtain it? 

After sending that letter, he wants to fly around and ask people if they can do Sendings to Axis or know someone who can. 

It takes longer than it did the first day, but eventually he can find someone who can do it.

He has the message written out for them, and asks them to try to send it to Visser One, or Visser Nine if they can't reach her. 

They can reach her fine. She replies acknowledging the message and saying she'll see what they can do.

Mhalir can wait. 

He had been vaguely planning to go talk to the arrivals coordinator right away after this, but somehow it feels like he's done SO MANY THINGS, and now he wants the things to go away, and probably that means he needs a rest and instead of pushing himself, maybe he should go back to the nest and be a baby bird again for a little while. He has time for that, here, he doesn't need to hurry. 

He does not! He can, instead, get wing-snuggles and rest.

And eventually he does feel able to face the world and the prospect of having goals in it. 

Within a few weeks of hearing the news about the end of the war, it feel like he's settled back into a routine. One that feels more structured before, shaped by his expectations of the future, less formless with that uncertainty. But there's still a sort of timelessness in Nirvana. There aren't deadlines, or if there are, they're always the responsibility of people who've had much much longer to heal. Sometimes he wants to accomplish things and he does that; other times he wants to rest, and does that instead. 

Sometimes he feels very hopeful. Other times he just feels exhausted and sad. Most of the time he's some mix of both. Different blends are more or less conducive to different activities, and he's starting to learn how to recognize when he wants to be around people versus alone, and when he wants to build something versus just explore it without any particular endpoint in mind.

He likes working on the computer system for Nirvana, the technical aspect more than the logistical one, but both are satisfying in their own way. He doesn't, at any point, try to talk to Alloran face to face; for a long time it's mostly that he's afraid, and eventually he notices that he isn't, anymore, but it also doesn't feel like it would be productive on either side. Letters are fine. 

He spends more time away from the nest, exploring on his own, sometimes choosing to be a bigger bird like a hawk or eagle. At some point he thinks to tell Caroline that he'd be fine if she got another baby bird now, though he still expects to come back every once in a while. 

Welcoming new arrivals from Hell, when that eventually happens, is more exhausting, but also feels like it holds some sort of nutrient that he hadn't realized he was hungry for. He can do it as long as it doesn't have to be in a very goal-oriented way. 

Time passes. He wonders what Carissa is doing in Heaven, sometimes, but he doesn't send any more messages; it doesn't feel that there's any more information to be conveyed between them. They'll see each other again, someday, and by then both of them will be readier for it. 

It is about eight months later that he feels - a tug, and a sense of utter certainty about what it means, which is that the lawful neutral Khemet III, pharaoh of Osirion, is trying to resurrect him, and he can stay or he can go.

- it would be nice if there were time to say goodbye to the people he knows here, he thinks for an instant. But - it's fine. He can do a Sending, if he wants, later, and it's not like any of them are going to be offended. 

He goes. 

Being alive is - obscurely different from being dead in a thousand different ways that are overwhelming and unpleasant and hard to catalogue, and then someone is picking him up and holding him to an ear -

For a moment everything is aaaaaaaaah and somehow he had forgotten what it was like to be small and helpless and mostly-blind here, in a plane not made with soft edges and safety rails, a place where bad things can and do happen to people for no reason at all, and he's scared...

He remembers how to stop struggling, and instead just wait, focus on the quiet calm part of him cataloguing what he knows so far. Which is that he's probably in Osirion, and it seems very unlikely the pharaoh, Abadar's representative, would resurrect him at great cost in order to hurt him. 

He can't tell if the ear is Carissa's, yet, but he slips in anyway.