"Well, you know, we'd talked about education systems a bit before... So that's been on my mind. Less depressing than only thinking about killing people." 

Vanyel is pretty sure that this is an incredibly unconvincing answer, but it'll have to do. 

"We could talk about that more," he adds. "If you want." 

"If you wish, Herald Vanyel." Leareth takes another step forward. Looks Vanyel over again, his expression unreadable, and then - at least, this is Vanyel's best interpretation of it - makes a decision to stop pressing for answers and let it slide. "I am not sure if I have told you of my treatise, A Lesson on Lessons..." 

It's a really unusually stressful instance of the dream. Vanyel is incredibly distracted and now also very very self-conscious about whatever Leareth is noticing about him, he's trying to correct for it and act 'normal' but that's hard to judge when he doesn't know what aspect of it is noticeable in the first place...

But they have a neutral, even sort of friendly, conversation about Leareth's past thoughts on schooling - which of course he's researched and thought about and written up in depth - and then eventually the sky starts to come apart. 

"Until we meet again, Herald Vanyel." 

A long way north, Leareth opens his eyes. He sits up, casts a mage-light, instinctively checks all the shields on the room - it's a well-practiced routine scan that takes him about five seconds - and then rubs his face for a moment before reaching for the notebook that lives next to his bed. 

It didn't seem wise to push the matter any harder, in the dream. He is, nonetheless, intensely curious about the change in Vanyel. 

It wasn't really his expression or body language - well, it was some of that, but Leareth wouldn't have found that nearly so obvious on its own.

It's the fact that, in every previous Foresight dream, Vanyel has appeared almost painfully thin, his Whites ragged, his hair unkempt. (By all accounts, this matches the real-world present.) Until now. The most recent dream showed him - healthy-looking, clean, warmly dressed... 

Leareth has no idea who is responsible for this change, big enough to echo through in Foresight an unknown number of years ahead. Or what it means. 

Vanyel wakes up with a start, and manages to stomp on the desire to scream into his pillow - he didn't put a sound-barrier on his newly-assigned tent and someone might hear him. 

There are about ten different things he doesn't want to think about right now. Starting with the fact that he feels incredibly stupid for not having thought about the fact that he might get the dream tonight and maybe ought to prepare for it. It's always had a tendency to show up when he's just gotten new information, and this is the biggest revelation of his entire life - bigger than the Foresight dream itself, which he hadn't really imagined was possible... 

It's the middle of the night, and he definitely hasn't slept enough, but if he tries to sleep then he's just going to end up ruminating for candlemarks. He could wake Yfandes - but he doesn't really want her company right now, the thought feels suffocating, and besides she might want to talk about some of the things he's desperately avoiding. 

He rolls out of bed. His clothes and saddlebags still aren't here, and the Whites crumpled up on the stool are dirty, but he throws his cloak on over the robe and shoves his feet into boots. Maybe he can distract himself by walking around for a bit, and then be able to sleep. 

The night is chilly and cloudy and dark, no stars or moon visible; the only light comes from torches held by sentries around the perimeter of the camp. Nobody stops Vanyel, though the nearest sentry nods to him. 

Vanyel paces. 

...Strange, really, how for so many years Tylendel has been the unthinkable nightmare lurking in the back of his mind, the agony that he constantly tried to distract himself from, and now thinking about 'Lendel is - well, painful, but still one of the least stressful topics to ruminate on. He would much rather picture Tylendel's face, than fret about how bad it might be if Leareth learns about Thellim's presence and her origins, and worry that he's already given too much away. 

Maybe it's because what's done is done. Over. It's been over for a long time. There's something almost restful about staring into that grief, cupping it, remembering those golden summer days in a room with a glazed door... 

- remembering a blaze of blue white-fire on the other side of a faltering Gate - 

Vanyel flinches, expecting the usual unbearable void. And the pain is there for a moment, but bouncing him away rather than drawing him it. The emotion that fills in its place is - not quite anger, not quite disappointment, not quite regret, but a muddy tangle of all three and half a dozen other feelings he can't even name. 

They came so close to surviving together. Damn it, ashke, all you had to do was walk through the Gate. 

...Is that true, though? He remembers the Shadow-Lover speaking to him in a white place outside time. The dream. The whispers about his unnaturally strong Gifts, and what it means, when it's known that Heralds tend to be Chosen with Gifts that the Kingdom will need, in five years or ten or thirty. 

He's always been a pawn. Meaning that Tylendel was one as well - however brief and tragic his role on the gameboard - 

Why. 

- it's actually hard to stay caught up in that misery and loss for long, though, when the void isn't pulling at him, and is in fact gently knocking his thoughts back to their source, and at some point he can't help turning that cry of pain into an actual question. 

Why? 

He - could have had Gifts, even in the world where Tylendel lived; it would only have needed Mardic, or someone else, to take down the Gate wrong. And they could have been Heralds together– well, maybe, Vanyel actually isn't clear on the implications of a Herald losing their Companion. It's never come up before. Only the reverse, and Taver always Chooses again.

Presumably, some Power didn't want things to go that way. 

What would have been different, in that world...

The starless sky has no answer for him. 

He wonders, vaguely, if Leareth's sky, wherever he is, is equally clouded-over. And whether he, too, gets up and paces and thinks after their dreams.

And, still musing on the hypothetical where Tylendel survived, he finds himself imagining them sharing the dream together. 

What would Leareth think of Tylendel? 

...what would Tylendel think of Leareth? 

- he doesn't especially want to be finishing that line of thought, but his mind can't help it. He's pretty sure the dream would be way worse. Tylendel was perfect, golden, everything Vanyel had ever needed or wanted or dreamed of Tylendel was his lifebonded. Who did his best to be good to Vanyel, and made some understandable mistakes. Because he was seventeen years old, gods, they had both been so young... 

Tylendel always wanted so fervently to help people. To serve Valdemar - and to stand by his family, be loyal to his own people, Vanyel hasn't been able to really look at this in so long but now he can remember how conflicted his 'Lendel was. How black-and-white his thoughts and feelings were, on the matter of the Leshara family. 

Tylendel would hate Leareth for being a monster. Fair enough, on one level, but - he wouldn't be curious, and so he wouldn't even understand so much of what Vanyel thinks about now.

A cloud drifts aside, showing a single bright patch of stars. 

Everything hurts.

It's not even the pain of the broken lifebond, which he can now see wasn't ever really about Tylendel-the-person. This feels...realer, somehow, than that. 

It's incredibly stupid to feel betrayed by Tylendel for being, what, a normal seventeen-year-old? For his youthful idealism, for his loyalty to the people he loved, traits that were good until he landed in the worst possible situation...

Maybe he would have grown out of all that, if they'd had the chance to grow together. 

Vanyel won't ever know, now. 

Given that the emotions he's having are clearly stupid, and Vanyel is fully aware of this fact and kind of embarrassed about it, it's impossible to feel betrayed and hurt and angry for long.

Vanyel's pacing footsteps bring him to his tent. He stands outside, looking up at the widening patch of stars. 

:I miss you, ashke: he Mindspeaks, to nothing and nowhere, to the emptiness where a bond - and so much more than that - used to be. 

:I forgive you: 

:I...felt like it would be betraying you, to move on. But you would want me to live:

:You would want me to be happy. If I can: 

:You're gone. I'm still here. I'll - do my best - I promise...: 

Somehow it doesn't feel final enough. He wants - is this what Lancir meant by 'closure'? It always seemed so meaningless to Vanyel as a concept. 

He's a decade too late to attend Tylendel's funeral. And his empty grave in Haven doesn't feel especially meaningful or real.

- he could go back. To the place where it happened. Which would have felt utterly impossible until now, and somehow that makes it feel especially appropriate. The right amount of significance, for finally, properly, saying goodbye. 

He wonders if the trees are growing back yet. He hopes they are. It - would have felt disrespectful to the magnitude of the horror, before, that the world kept moving, but it doesn't feel that way now. 

Vanyel stands looking at the stars for a little while longer. To his own surprise, he isn't crying. 

He is, however, starting to yawn and sway on his feet. 

After a few minutes, he slips back into his tent, pulls off his boots, raises a hasty sound-barrier in case he has nightmares tonight, and then lies down again to sleep. 

Thellim wakes up as the sky is just barely beginning to lighten.  Her body is accustomed to a world in which rooms stay dark when you're supposed to be asleep and only start to light when it's time to wake up; she doesn't particularly have any tolerance yet for staying asleep through small amounts of light.

She's rarely, but not never, had the experience before of working on a difficult problem and seeing the answer even as she's waking up in a muzzy state.

In this case, Thellim finally realizes which utterly-straight textbook-xeroxed standard-human-fallacy reasoning-error she committed while doing Manic Science to Vanyel.

That query she tried directing through Melody's Mindhealing - the one about multiple representation inside all minimal sets of mutually recursive functions with execution pathways through the void at the center of Vanyel's mindscape.  It wasn't just badly formatted, it wasn't just a syntax error, it was badly thought up in the first place.

But Vanyel is not in a coma so it seems like she... got away with it?  Somehow?

...No.  Melody's Mindhealing Gift in the merge just interpreted what Thellim meant, what Thellim was trying to say, not what Thellim actually said.  It's not actually an IDE with an expression-based search module.  It was just following Thellim's intent the whole time.

Because if you ask "what neural pathways participate in lots of these loops here", what you would actually, literally get is, say, the main thread of cerebellar control of prefrontal cortical attention, or the brain's equivalent of the primary pathway for memory retrieval like a computer's main channel to RAM, or other things that Thellim doesn't have computer-science metaphors for and that maybe dath ilan doesn't know about at all.

She was so busy thinking about whether the result she wanted, would match the query she used, that she didn't think about what other results would match that query.

But, since Melody seemed to identify the search result as being primarily about the broken lifebond rather than lots and lots of other things in Vanyel's mind, even though nothing in Thellim's actual search term required that in any way, clearly Melody's Gift took its cues from the part where Thellim wanted to find a pathway highly specific to the broken lifebond, and not the part where she literally searched mostly for Vanyel's equivalent of his main RAM channel.

Which also means that the Sight behaving like a neat literal IDE, the part where it started to drop all the search results out of vision, at the moment Melody's block meant those results no longer matched the search query - the part that happened right after Thellim realized it was coming - probably happened only because Thellim picked that exact moment to decide to expect the Gift to work like that.

She's silly.

It is particularly embarrassing that this happened to her after explicitly thinking about Science Maniac Verrez because this is exactly the sort of thing that happens to Verrez in every. single. book.

No.  Wait.  This literally actually does happen to Verrez.  That time Verrez has managed to get into an alien spacecraft, and Verrez tries to use a poorly phrased search query in the elaborate command language he thinks he's discovering, which should have teleported him into the largest black hole in the universe, but the spacecraft was actually just reading his intent the whole time so it takes him to the alien homeworld instead.  As Verrez only realizes afterwards, of course.

...Does the pseudonymous author of Science Maniac Verrez have a surprising amount of actual experience in trying to do Manic Science and shooting theirself in the foot during their early days, or is Thellim just that bad at this?

She really hopes nobody else from dath ilan follows her here or she's just... never going to live this down.  Ever.

Well, time to get up and start her day, she guesses.

The camp is quiet and peaceful; there's smoke rising from the cooking-tent, and tired-looking night sentries in huddles, maybe doing handoff to the day shift or something.