"Okay. I don't know if he'll answer. This looked like a suicide attempt, he might - not."

Vanyel is still focused on trying to fly - he’s made a little progress, he can jump off a bench and slightly glide - when he feels…something.

He doesn’t know what it is, but it feels like there’s some kind of action he could take - simple, it wouldn’t be hard…

His plan here is to go with the flow and see what happens, so he does it.

"- and there he is.

Hi, Van. Sorry I didn't warn you this might happen."

Vanyel stumbles a little. Catches his balance. 

…Looks down at his own very wet and muddy, extremely concerning-looking, technically alive but brain-dead former body. 

“Um. I - sorry? About - that -?”

Shavri looks up and freezes. 

After a moment she grabs the closest piece of unattached conjured medical equipment, and throws it at Vanyel as hard as she can. 

“What were you thinking?” she screams at him, and then burst into tears and flops in the mud next to dead Vanyel.

"I hope you did not want very badly to be dead because that's now definitely not happening."

“I said I was sorry about that! It was really stupid! I guess sometimes I do stupid things when I’m upset!”

Savil swipes a hand across her face and struggles to her feet. She’s soaking wet and shivering hard. “Van, I - I feel like this goes well past stupid - Melody was right there, you could have - I was right there - why didn’t you talk to someone?” 

“Look, I don’t know, why didn’t I? Maybe because literally everyone I know in Haven had decided I’d betrayed them and wasn’t speaking to me?”

Cam decides this situation will not be helped by saying "you could have texted me". Instead he sets his computer to attempting a machine translation of an introduction to angel magic.

Vanyel looks around for a moment. 

"Andy?" No answer. "Andrel. Andrel. ...Sorry, just, can you - stop trying to keep my corpse alive, it's - weird and distracting." 

Andy finally shakes himself half out of Healing-trance and looks up. 

"...What? What. Cam - Cam what just happened - how–" 

"In my world, there are afterlives. People who have performed summonses become one of the three kinds of daeva themselves and people who haven't go to a fourth option. Since you people don't show up in the fourth option I didn't particularly expect this to happen, but it occurred to me to check. Van's an angel, they can change stuff." The book is done; he hands it to Vanyel.

"...Um." 

Andrel looks down at Vanyel's body, which is currently not breathing because he got distracted and stopping nudging it to. The heart is still beating, that happens mostly automatically. 

"Cam, are you sure Van - that Van - isn't going to, er, fall over and die if I stop - this...?" 

"I really don't think so! ...How are you even doing that in the first place? I told the Shadow-Lover I didn't want to go back! Trying to save me shouldn't have worked!" He's so confused, and looks hopefully at Cam in case an explanation is forthcoming. 

"This has never happened to anyone from this universe before so my predictions are not a hundred percent but it would be unprecedented for ceasing to keep the body breathing to have any effect on someone who's already a daeva. Uh, I don't know what the Shadow-Lover's deal is precisely but I am a fully qualified medical demon and was doing lots of heroic interventions since I did not know you were going to pop up in Heaven and immediately get somebody to make you a set of wings."

Vanyel looks slightly self-conscious about the wings comment. "Everyone else had them! I was really confused and didn't know what to do and I couldn't understand any of their language, but it - seemed like the done thing, and someone offered?" 

"It is the done thing! And they're very nice."

"Thank you! I, er, don't really know how to use them yet, I was practicing when you interrupted me– er, I'm glad you did, it's fine, I didn't want people to worry–" 

He stops. 

"Where's Yfandes." 

Savil is aware that she should be answering, but apparently she is, instead, incapable of saying words. 

After a few beats of awkward silence, Taver answers. 

:Yfandes is approximately a mile out of Haven. Trying to reach us very quickly, but she has to detour to the road and city gates. ...I have informed her that you are back: 

"What. Do you mean that until right now no one had told her that?" 

Shavri, who's just starting to pick herself up from the mud, looks away. She should have. The fact that talking to a Herald's Companion directly isn't done, or that it would be awkward and uncomfortable, aren't good excuses at all. 

Taver says nothing.