"Mmm, sounds good." 

And he holds Mhalir up to his ear. 

He wriggles in. Spreads out, gets comfy. Orients... 

<...You still remember it> he thinks to Leareth a moment later, awed. <The moment you - first saw what was possible - and you were looking at stars as well... Urtho's Tower?>

Yes. 

<For me it was the first time I saw my home planet from space. With Seerow.> 

It's a lot more recent, for him, but not really any clearer than Leareth's memory; he's been through a number of different hosts in the interim. 

I am sorry about your war. You - lost so much. Echoes of a planet with millions of innocents dead - when the Andalites thought surely anyone would prefer death to slavery...

<Not as much as you did.> 

Leareth doesn't even remember the Cataclysm - the horror they now would have happened to Ma'ar if he and Carissa hadn't arrived at exactly the right time... 

Focus. He's here to learn, not just commiserate. 

The most notable thing about Leareth's mind, relative to both his and Aroden's, is how organized it is. Deliberate. 

He switches bodies - a far more thorough and final transition each time than Mhalir changing hosts - and has only faint native memory-traces of most of his lives; the rest is re-learned each time, arduously but, at this point, clearly very efficiently. Dozens of neat mental boxes, names, dates, events. Colourless and impersonal, most of them, words and numbers. 

The memories of this lifetime in this body are more normal human ones, but even those are far more tidily categorized than in most humans. He has practice at this. 

Reflexes honed over centuries and centuries; patterns baked into the very core of him. The implicit procedural memory seems to transfer better; wisdom not intelligence, in Golarion's categorization, and Leareth's wisdom must be outside the range that ever occurs naturally in humans with standard lifespans. 

For a long, long time he was so alone. Not lonely, exactly, or at least if he was, he didn't name it as that until much later; he has his emotions set up in a very nonstandard way. 

Memories, vivid and crisp: 

(A man dressed in ragged white, dark hair thickly streaked silver, standing at the mouth of a passageway carved through the heart of a mountain. Haggard and worn and sad, speaking to Leareth.)  

“They are still worth protecting,” Leareth says to him. “I know it can feel like there is nothing but ugliness, like there is nothing worth salvaging from a world that is so desperately broken. But there is, Herald Vanyel.” 

     “How do you still believe that?” Vanyel says, bitterly, angrily. "With all the people you’ve killed?” 

“I remember what I am fighting for. If I am willing to make sacrifices in the short term, it is only because that is the way I see forwards, and I do not weigh it lightly. It is hard, sometimes, when it feels as though I am the only one trying. I look at the stars, and I remember that there are so many lights in the world, who are worth saving, and we cannot save all of them – from the very beginning, it was too late to save all of them – but we can still save some. It is never too late for that.” 

     “Why are you doing this? Why do you care how I feel about it? I’m your enemy. We’re going to try to kill each other someday.”

“I hope that is not what will come to pass, in the end. I cannot allow you to stop me, and yet. You are trying to do what is right. Even when it is hard, and when the answers are not simple. You do not flinch from the truth, and you do not walk away.”

A long silence; a decade of history hanging in the air between two figures, destined enemies, almost friends. 

“It is rarer than you think," Leareth says. "In a world of lights, you burn brighter than most. I cannot wish to see that extinguished.” 

<You cared about him so much> Mhalir notes, amazed. <Even when you thought you would inevitably have to kill him.>

I recognized him for what he was, Leareth thinks back. You would have felt the same, I think, in my place.

He is - a shape that is rare and precious. Even more so because he never asked or wanted to be that way, and only - grew into what he saw was needed. 

<...He had to learn not to be small.> 

In such a different way from Carissa's path, Mhalir thinks; the Heralds seem to be very very very not-Chelish. But there's an echo of resemblance, there. Maybe. Possibly he's just imagining it, seeing resonance because of the way he feels. 

Flickers of more recent memories: 

Snatched from his bed, falling, weightless, in a magic-blocked demiplane full of stars. Vanyel speaking to him. And - Nefreti Clepati...?

"I haven't seen him in a long time," she is saying. "- Oh, not this one. Our own, I loved, when I was a child. This one does not know love. He would love your brother," she adds to a stranger standing by Vanyel, who stiffens. "But for the burdens they both have taken up and cannot put down."

"It will be all right," she says to Leareth. "I would not have brought you here to be destroyed. I think that could you see what the future might hold, you would have agreed to come..." 

A disapproving finger-wag. "I know, I know, you have set yourself against the gods, and why not, when they have set themselves against you? But Abadar loved you, and you will be safe here even if he recognizes you, and I think he may not."

<- Oh, I see she is just as baffling with you as she was when we met her.> 

Yes, she is like that. 

More memories: 

Guessing the truth about Rahadoum, travelling there. Kidnapped by Aroden (...weird, that that happened to both of them, Mhalir thinks...). A rapid-fire conversation that Mhalir can't keep up with even reading it directly from Leareth's memories. 

Accepting Abadar's offer of clerichood. Talking to the god - and this memory kind of hurts to absorb, the same way Aroden's godmemories did, though not as badly. But - feeling recognized, feeling seen and loved for, not all that he is, but a wide chunk of shared values... 

The war, kicked off on short notice but still taking the offensive themselves, catching Asmodeus by surprise; still awful, of course, but it hurts, how much less - pointless and wasteful and chaotic it was in their version. 

Studying magic in a Work Room with two white-haired men - a second or two, recognizing the betrayal, and then dying - 

- a discontinuity and Leareth remembers waking up on a floor in the palace of the pharaoh of Osirion, naked under a sheet, overwhelmed and terrified by the destruction of his immortality method - by people he let down his guard with, who he thought were allies now...

Seeing Axis for the first time. 

Khemet holding him, stroking his hair. 

Standing in Aroden's demiplane after they caught Carissa. Leareth is impressed, and irritated with Iomedae because did She really have to scare the poor woman so badly... 

Meeting Urtho again, almost two thousand years later, and how much it still touched him, to hear the man's apology. 

The wedding.

The terror when Carissa vanished. The frantic search, finding nothing; settling into a slower grind of mostly delegating the searching, but not giving up, he would have tried for at least a decade before he even considered that. He loves her and he needs her. 

Holding his newborn child for the first time, in a different Urtho's Tower. 

...And eventually Mhalir surfaces. Kind of overwhelmed, but much less so than he was with Aroden. 

<Thank you. That - was educational. And helpful, I think.> 

You are so young. Pride in Leareth's thoughts. I - cannot say that it ever really gets easier. To be us. But you will get stronger, in time. You will learn more tools to bear it. 

And they can wait for Carissa to return with Ayodele, quietly companionable.

Leareth likes having Mhalir in his head, he decides. It's probably not worth doing all the time, but - they would be a really very excellent team in a fight, able to coordinate on such a deep level and do two things at once. 

Carissa finds Ayodele and swears her to secrecy and gives the pitch on Yeerks. "Just in case you want an ancestor-spirit in your head too."

Ayodele is delighted to be included on such a big state secret! 

"I mean, he's not actually my ancestor, right. Just - another of the same person, like Aroden?" 

"Yes, that's right. He is a version of Tadesse and Ma'ar but not from your world at all. I don't know if he has any children."

"Right. ...Is he sad? Like Tadesse? Or is he more like Ma'ar." 

"Maybe somewhere in between? I think he wasn't very sad but then his last host tried to kill him and herself so now he's kind of sad about that."

Wince. "That sounds pretty upsetting!" Ayodele takes a deep breath. "...But he needs someone. All right. I'll take him." 

"Thanks. The King has him now, but we can go see whether we're interrupting..."

"All right." And Ayodele squares her shoulders, and goes with the Queen.