"Mmmhmm. If I were them, I'd be mad at me too for getting the world almost destroyed. And - I'll be careful and not do things too fast and make sure I have everything figured out first." He squirms a little. "...Did the other me try to talk to them? It - seems like it might be smarter to do that first, before I try any of the things that they wouldn't like. But it might also scare them by itself, I don't know." 

"He tried really hard and didn't get anywhere and one time they lit him on fire for trying. It might be safer now when they don't hate you but I wouldn't want to take the chance, really."

He curls up smaller again. Being lit on fire sounds horrible, even if it's only once and not the thing Asmodeus does. 

"- Do you know how the other me got to be immortal. I can figure it out if he did, probably, but I have no idea where to start right now." 

"A bunch of things. Most of them were perfectly nice and didn't survive the cataclysm. One of them was a - setup to hijack people descended from him and put his soul in their bodies and take over from them. That one did."

Ma'ar sucks in his breath. "I really hope I can make one of the better ones work this time! I guess if we don't let the Cataclysm happen that'd help." He shudders a bit, and then goes silent again, calming himself down. "Okay, I can read the letter now." 

She bypasses her arcane lock for him.

He takes the letter, and then closes his eyes for thirty seconds before actually reading it. It's extremely unclear to him what the point is of being scared, here, but he is. 

Ma'ar,

I love you and I trust you to stay safe and do important things. There is something I never told you about the war. I am almost certain that it was fought between you and Urtho. I am almost certain that you are the mage I knew as Leareth, who told me two thousand years later ...

...I am sure you will be trying to figure out what mistakes you made. I think one is that you have to meet people well past halfway, to stand a chance of building something with them. In two thousand years you spend several decades trying to explain yourself to Vanyel, not even thinking it might work, just because the chance was there and you were the sort of person who would take every chance you could, to cooperate with people, even when it almost never worked. I think the thing with Abadar is sort of similar, actually. ...

...I don't think I am a pattern that will make a splash every time, even if they reincarnate me. I'm not going to tell you whether or not to spend time looking but I won't feel betrayed if you don't, I am not expecting you to, and I would be surprised if it worked. 

Please be careful, and don't give up, and if you ever figure out Gates between worlds warn Aroden that the chaotic good gods will betray him for the chance to break Foresight forever.

- Carissa

Ma'ar reads it through twice and then, somewhat to his surprise, finds that he cannot read it a third time because he appears to be crying and the letters on the page are too blurred to make out. 

Hug.

The other Ma'ar wouldn't have had anyone to hug him. It must've been so much harder. 

It's kind of baffling, how long he cries for. He almost never cries, and he's not even sure what the emotion he's feeling to cause it is. The best he can name it is as the opposite of a lot of things, the opposite of loneliness, the opposite of despair, even the opposite of fear, and for some inexplicable reason all of those are apparently the crying sort of feeling. 

Eventually it doesn't hurt as much and he's mostly very very tired, and drifting toward actually falling asleep right there. 

She will nudge them towards the bed but not actually dispute this as a next activity. 

She locks the letter again, even though no one here speaks the language.

In the morning it's not really less overwhelming, but Ma'ar is at least able to decide not to cry about it. He eats a very subdued breakfast, and hugs Carissa, and goes to class. 

It feels incredibly surreal, to be walking around the Tower, sitting with other children, and all the time knowing what none of them know. None of them have any inkling that the universe is wider and stranger and more terrifying than even he had realized before now. 

For the next few days he comes home at lunch rather than eating in the dining hall, and hugs Carissa and sometimes cries.

The slight swell of her pregnant belly was already very salient to him but it holds a different meaning, now. 

It's very hard to focus in class, and for the first time he brings home a test with a poor grade - and can't even care, at all, the scope of it is so much smaller and pettier than the world he knows about now. He - is probably not less concerning or frightening to his teachers, right now, and he knows he needs to fix that but he keeps feeling like his mind is a thousand miles away from the classroom - or a thousand years in its future - and that makes it hard to get his face to do things on purpose. 

Within a week, though, somehow, impossibly, he's - kind of used to it? It doesn't seem like the sort of thing a person should be able to just get used to, but he remembers feeling that way too when Father and Mother died, and - it didn't get any less awful but the sharp edges of it in his mind got worn down, so it was less startling. This is the same.

He asks Carissa a lot of questions about Leareth. Often she doesn't know the answers, and he's not even sure it's helpful, to - focus on the surface, when Leareth had presumably been all sorts of different people in the intervening years. With the same core, which Carissa thinks he already has. 

He starts making up his own pretend language, or cipher, to take notes in that no one else can read. (Maybe Carissa can with translation magic, but that's fine). He will write down what happened, and also how he felt about it, less because he thinks he would forget and more because it helps to make sense of. 

Two weeks pass before Urtho summons Carissa again, but eventually he does. 

She's scared, and tired, and wishes she'd reliably be told the night before, but if Ma'ar, who is a tiny child, can pull himself together, she can do it. She meets him with several weeks worth of distractions, and if there's not as much progress as there should be, well, he probably won't notice. And she can blame it on the baby, who kicks, sometimes, at night.

Urtho again seems more preoccupied than usual, but grateful for the distractions, and definitely not paying enough attention to the passage of time to notice that this is less progress than ought to fit into a fortnight. 

At some point there's a knock on the door, and Urtho very apologetically answers. It's Lady Cinnabar, the young noblewoman teacher who worked with Ma'ar when he didn't know the language yet. She tugs Urtho out into the hall for a whispered conversation. Glances at Carissa, with an odd expression, before slipping out with him. 

Urtho's back a minute later, shutting and locking the door. "I am so sorry about that." He stops where he is, frowning and tapping his foot. "...I, er, this is rather awkward to bring up, but - Lady Cinnabar is an Empath. She - told me that you're very frightened right now, and I -" Fidget. "I cannot understand why - am I, did I say something wrong...?" 

- stupid Gift. The most unfair one of all of them. "You...haven't done anything," she says, "but you're very powerful, and I'm Chelish."

Sigh. He sits down again, folds his hands over his knee. "I think I do not understand Cheliax very well, and - perhaps it is important that I understand better. Since..." he stares past her at the bookshelf, "since it seems relevant to - why you understand Ma'ar better than I do." 

"Yeah. Maybe. 

I'm scared to talk about it, because - because you see Ma'ar as broken, because he isn't innocent, and I am much much less innocent than him, and I am not the kind of person who starts wars, I am small and obedient and do what I'm told, but if the thing that scares you about Ma'ar is that he is friendless and doesn't trust people -"

Urtho blinks. Rubs a hand over his face. "I - is that the impression I have given you? I...do not wish, I did not mean, to make either of you feel less safe here in the Tower than you would otherwise, because you - come from places that are much worse... I am so sorry. I have been thinking, since we last spoke, and -" Another heavy sigh. "Ma'ar has been greatly wronged already, and it would be horrifically ironic if I go on to wrong him more because I see the effects it had on him. I - am trying to find a better way to think about it." 

Nod. "I - appreciate that." And don't really believe it, but, she believes he believes it, and maybe that's a way to make it true.

"Cheliax was ruled for the last ninety years by Asmodeus, with the intent to make it somewhere where everyone would be ruled Evil and sentenced to Hell where they could be his servants forever. Children learned in school that this was their duty and eventual fate, and that the thing that really mattered about them - the core of them that would be useful to Asmodeus - was endangered by the activity of dissidents and rebels who wanted to teach defiance and undermine the rule of law and make Cheliax weak and the souls of its people worthless. There were public executions, of such dissidents, after church every week, it wasn't exactly illegal to not go but it would certainly get you investigated, if you seemed to be doing something else at the time, or not looking, or not applauding. They read our minds, every month or so, asked us questions about our devotion to Asmodeus and to Cheliax, dragged people off if they thought something wrong.

I didn't know anyone powerful or important, because it'd be stupid to know anyone powerful and important, because you might learn something you weren't supposed to know and get killed, or they might want something you couldn't do and interpret your failure as disobedience, or they might - think you were pretty - in Cheliax if you tried to wield power and you didn't know exactly who your enemies were and have plans to crush them if you needed to you'd get killed, right away, by someone who was better at the game, so someone in power who acts like they don't know the game is making fun of you, they're telling a lie that you can't possibly be expected to believe, and someone who won't tell you when they'd get fed up and kill you is very dangerous because either they don't know or they want you to be scared all the time, and you won't be able to see it coming or steer yourself to safety. 

I know it's not like that here. I know that Leareth thought very highly of you and he's careful and he's not stupid and - and I know no one else here is careful, at all, and they're fine. But - but I can't trust that it'll work out all right, either, because last time there was a war. And I don't believe you mean me harm, but I have no real idea when you'd start, or what you'd consider it appropriate to do, if you did - I said I don't know anything about Mindhealers but I've met one, I know they can take you apart and put you back together in a more convenient shape -"

Urtho is making various shades of horrified face, and keeps looking like he wants to say something but is holding back, listening, being patient. 

He interrupts at the final bit, though. "I - what - I suppose I should not be surprised, Cheliax sounds like - that sort of place - but to do that would be a horrific and terribly unethical abuse of Mindhealing! Here it is not considered acceptable at all to do anything with Mindhealing without the patient's agreement - you did not know that, how could you have - I am sorry..." 

"You don't write the rules down anywhere where people can consult them without anyone knowing they had to consult them, I have no idea what they are."