<I think Aroden would have feared that. But - also he saw the upside, immediately, that he could instead have our resources on his side. And I think even if that had not been the case, he would have cared even though we were aliens from other planets. Because he wants to save everyone, everywhere. It just - seems very tiring, being that shape. I know because it is the shape I am, and before this I was tired always. I...suppose that maybe he is too, but if so he bears it more easily than I do.> 

It seems like an inevitable consequence of caring about everyone everywhere. Carissa tried just caring about people in Hell and that was exhausting all by itself.

Maybe it is an inevitable consequence. He's not sure he has a choice about that way, but he understands Carissa's hesitations. 

They don't have any urgent commitments right now so maybe they can just play with her new spells for a while. 

Carissa's new spells are really cool!! She already had every spell you could buy anywhere in the world so they're mostly ones he developed privately, or learned from someone who didn't publish it widely, and she's sure this isn't all he has but it's enough she feels like she could spend a century just trying to wrap her head around all of it.

It's much less confusing that everything else, so she might just - do that, at least until Mhalir has objections.

Eventually he's going to want her body so he can go to a meeting and handle some annoying Yeerk-Golarion relations work, but he doesn't need Carissa's attention on that, she's welcome to keep thinking about magic. It seems good for Carissa, right now, to get to think about the things that are cool and exciting and don't hurt to think about.

He can manage fine on his own, for the things that would hurt her right now, and sometimes it still hurts for him but he can bear it. 

She gets less not-thinking about half of what's going on, over time. They make progress on figuring out how to use low-level magic to morph and demorph; they send their notes to Aroden, who is negotiating lots of tech-sharing with the Andalites and can probably use it to get more. She eventually manages to look up whether her parents and brother and sister are dead. They are. That's fine; they'll probably spend a lot of time bored in Hell and then eventually fetched off to Nirvana, or some people were saying maybe Sarenrae would outright set up a secondary domain in Hell since it's less resource use than moving everybody, whatever. She eventually also manages to look up what happened to Her Majesty's Seventh, which was overwhelmed by the surge of demons through the Worldwound that happened when its defenders abruptly started attacking each other. They're also probably all in Hell which is fine. She doesn't look up her ex specifically. Her cousins were clerics of Asmodeus. 

Sometimes she thinks about the thing Nefreti said, where there are other worlds, where stories go differently.

Mhalir sometimes thinks about that too. Wondering if there are other Golarions where the war didn't end in such heaps of rubble. Or where Aroden never died, even. If there are any versions of him out there whose lives went better than his, who managed not to pay quite such awful costs, who were never broken to the point that just existing hurt... Or versions of his story that went worse, where the total war with the Andalites did end only when one side was entirely destroyed. 

He exchanges messages with Firayar about morph, and with Morfirin about proposals for Yeerks to pay for hosts on Golarion, once they've sorted out the diplomatic barriers there. He visits Cheliax and talks to Aroden every few months.

They rebuilt. Nothing is on fire, but there's so much still to be done, even if they can afford to do it methodically and carefully and at a sustainable pace it's still a lot. 

He does remember, sometimes, that he has a ship with an experimental hyperspace drive, and some ideas for further changes from his conversations with the Andalites right before the attack on Hell. He doesn't even know how to start on the problem of navigating toward 'worlds that contain copies of himself' rather than particular coordinates, and they don't have time now, but maybe someday...