Melody shoots Thellim an apologetic look, and then sits, crossing her legs, and looking mildly at Vanyel. 

:I believe you that you're 'fine' in the sense that you could keep going if you had to: she starts. :Heralds learn that skill early, and I expect you've had it drilled into you even harder than most. But, also - not even knowing anything about you, mind you, just knowing what the last six months would've been like for anyone in your position - I can guess that you're, well, not at your happiest or healthiest or most well-rested. Also, right now all three of the other people involved are pretty worried. So. Can we talk a bit?: 

Vanyel twitches, his eyes turning briefly to glare furiously at Thellim and then at Lissa; a moment later, though, he ducks his head, seeming embarrassed by this response. 

:I guess: 

:Thank you. I do appreciate that I'm asking a lot. Hmm. Can you tell me your own best guess for why you froze up like that, before?: 

Silence. 

Melody waits for about thirty seconds, working through the rest of her tea but otherwise resisting the urge to fidget. 

:- Er, right. I do understand if it's hard to talk about–: 

:I don't know what's wrong with me! It's - Thellim being here is good news, it means there...there might be something we can do about all this...: 

Vanyel turns his face away again, curling into himself. 

:I understand: Melody tugs at her collar again. :May I use my Sight? It may help me sort this out for you, without needing you to talk through everything: 

Eventually, Vanyel nods. 

:Thank you:

Melody's eyes slip a little out of focus, her expression flattening - 

- her face doesn't reveal much, but she stops moving entirely, hands loose around her tea-mug. 

:Vanyel?: she sends, a long moment later. 

:Hmm?: 

:Er, may I try to show my Sight to Thellim? Apparently her world - knows a lot of things about minds: 

Shrug. :I guess if you want: 

Melody reaches out to Thellim with private Mindspeech. :...Sorry, I haven't actually done this before, but - gods - I don't know what I'm looking at except that it's horrifying...: 

:I think the trick is to sort of lean in closer, with your mind?: Yfandes offers helpfully. :As though you were reaching out with your hand, before, but now you're stepping in to dance - sorry, I don't know if your world has dancing -: 

It does, but Thellim wasn't invested in it.  She can guess what Yfandes might mean, though; she isn't just trying to transmit or trying to receive, like reaching out a hand or taking a hand; she's trying to respond, like in dancing where you would pay attention to someone else's whole body and let your own body shift instinctively in response to maintain a balance.  The Gift of Mindspeech is, obviously, handling a very great deal that Thellim would not know how to handle consciously, in terms of sending a thought or receiving it.  If Thellim can succeed at this subproblem at an unreasonable speed by the standards of this world, it won't be due to her conscious knowledge about how cortical columns work - she didn't use that to Mindspeak in the first place - but because Thellim has a better idea of what her Gift would be trying to make her do, and better training in how to get out of the way of herself when her intuitions are trying to move her.

Thellim focuses on Melody, leans in closer, readies herself to pay attention to tiny cues from that 'direction' and respond to them, consciously gives herself permission for her sensory modalities to load strange information, and tries to flow along / get out of the way of whatever her Gift knows how to do.

She won't be too embarrassed if this doesn't work on the first try.

Melody may not be experienced with Mindspeech-based concert Sight in particular, but she has a strong Mindspeech Gift, in power if not in distance-range, and nearly thirty years' of experience of getting into close contact with other peoples' minds. She accepts Thellim's mental 'reach', opens herself to it as well, rebalances herself and pulls Thellim closer...

And the world folds opens and spreads out, an entirely new sensory modality shifting into focus... 

As seen through Melody's metaphorical Mindhealing-specific 'eyes', Vanyel's mind is...like a tapestry, sort of, though the analogy is incomplete. There are threads woven into patterns, layers and colors and more complex structures, beautiful, intricate - 

- and, in the center of it, there's - nothing. A void. Like a miniature, metaphorical black hole, a darkness that swallows anything touching it; the threads and weave of Vanyel's mind are drawn inexorably toward it, nearby parts of his pattern half-unraveled under that impossible strain. 

Despite that, the rest of his mind holds together shockingly well. Thellim can sort of see the part of him scaffolded against Yfandes, the structure of the bond that links them; it bears a lot of weight, which must once have been carried by whatever used to exist in that pit of darkness. And there are other threads, other structures; it's not immediately clear what they are but it's very obvious that Vanyel has spent a long, long time adapting to work around having a void in the center of his soul. 

In the immediate term, every single aspect of him is under INCREDIBLE STRAIN. 

Her first theory was very very wrong, this is so much worse than she expected, how is what's left of him still alive.

Thellim has ripped herself out of concert before she's even realized it, and completely forgives herself for that.  She takes a moment to calm herself instead of screaming at the top of her lungs for Yfandes to explain this, for somebody, anybody to explain this.  She DOES NOT even consider asking Vanyel, Vanyel has had a Mindhealer before this, if he doesn't already know about this it's because his Mindhealer did not tell him.  Yfandes is also in this - whatever it is - it may not be safe to ask her either.

She could ask Lissa, but maybe first she ought to try looking again, try to understand for herself before she asks, just in case other people's mistaken interpretations are part of some larger disaster.

A tendril of thought, colored in cold horror and wound up tightly in cloth calm, goes out from her to Melody.  :Let's try that again.  I want to try looking at some of the threads immediately around the disaster zone, figure out where that is inside his mind and what it means.:

Melody, too, seems shaken but also keeping it under tight control. :Of course. ...You've really never done concert-Sight before? Most Mindhealing trainees find their own Sight really overwhelming, let alone someone else's:

She offers an imaginary mental hand again, and gently twirls Thellim back into the dance, focusing in on the pit of darkness. :All right. Where were you thinking to look...?: 

Vanyel is still hugging himself, hunched on his stool, apparently oblivious to how disturbing his mind looks to them. 

The obvious place to look is at the center of the darkness, and Thellim may try that, but there's a better place to look first, if her first guesses happen to be correct.

:Melody, I know something about brains and nothing about Mindhealing, so correct me if I say anything stupid, it's very likely that I'll say something stupid - I had theories about Vanyel before this, they looked nothing like this, I was very wrong then and may be very wrong now - but my first thought about the difference between Mindspeech and Mindhealing would be that Mindspeech transfers bits of ongoing activity between brains, cognitions in the process of being thought, and Mindhealing looks at and potentially modifies the underlying state of the brain that determines which thoughts lead into which other thoughts.  Vanyel's actual thoughts would be reflected in changes to the tapestry, the parts of it that we can see mutating, and only insofar as Vanyel's ongoing thoughts were changing any of his long-term state.  Does any of this sound like it's at all on the right track?  It's okay to tell me if all of it is wrong.:

If that guess is correct, they should look for a thread visibly in the process of changing, in the process of reaching toward the void and unraveling, so she can understand where the margins of damage are being pushed outward or back.  The horrifying void at the center may be more of a fact about how Vanyel's brain works than an ongoing activity it's performing right now.

:That's - hmm - I'm not sure I totally understand the distinction you're pointing out, there, but it sounds mostly right? Er, an analogy in books about Mindhealing, is that Mindspeech looks at the content of thoughts and Mindhealing looks at the structure of the mind, though I think that doesn't describe it perfectly either. The tapestries I see do change over time, for a particular person, but not quickly, and there's a lot more permanence than with surface thoughts. And - look -: a rapid sort of mental gesture at some of the workarounds in his tapestry, :- I think his mind's been like this for a long time. So...probably not the immediate problem, though it must be related: 

:In which case - again, I'm still guessing - you wouldn't be able to get a lot of information about that huge void at the center without prodding it somehow, you'd have to set it into motion to do whatever it does, which we probably should not do.  Again, correct me if I'm wrong.:

Thellim is still thinking about that caution that Mindhealing is one of the easiest ways to do damage if you don't know what you're doing; if that's an example of a plausible novice error, that could be part of it.

:- Huh! You've got - surprisingly good instincts for this: 

A pause. 

:...Oh. Hmm. I suspect you may have potential - er, the unawakened version of a Gift. But let's talk about that later. Anyway. I'm...honestly not sure it could hurt him any worse, trying to get a closer look there, I don't see any structures or...anything alive at all... But I've never seen anything like this at all, so I'm inclined to be cautious. Usually I would ask him for some context - in particular, Lissa said he saw a Mindhealer before, and I'm sure they knew or had a theory on what was wrong with him...: 

She shifts her weight on the stool, tugging at several different corners of her robes. :Gods. I need more tea: