...how strange.  It seems he had begun to enjoy his time here more than in Cheliax, no doubt due to sheer laziness and lack of ambition on his own part.  Esta had not realized before, he had managed not to realize.  But it is obvious enough, once Asmodeus calls him home, and that feels like a punch in his stomach.  The blow is too great, felt too quickly, for Esta to suppress it or for him not to notice.

He has been spending too much time inside Cultural Adaptation to a dreamworld, and zero time inside the Palace at Egorian; his mind has grown undisciplined.

Esta will not dare the Homeward Bound, if they are somewhere that Planar Binding could not call a devil (this decision not being determined by how Mariona would be left behind, of course) and he has no tuning forks yet for a Plane Shift.

But he will send his Sending, before this day is done.  Not to Iker to whom he reports, nor yet to Aspexia Rugatonn.  There are procedures, when at least one of you has been touched and contaminated by an Outer God.

Merrin...has honestly been kind of vaguely worried about Estha, lately. 

Their survival status is, for the moment, fine. Stable indefinitely so long as they have two Endure Elements and one Create Food and Water per [day.] The days are still getting hotter, and Merrin has by now gotten a unit-mapping of the temperature range that Endure Elements covers and she suspects that even with that it won't be safe out in the open in the afternoons, come full summer. But there are caves. She's mapped out like six hypothetical possibilities for longer-term summer shelter.

And...for Merrin, that's already more than she had expected, right? She had experienced True Death. She hadn't thought there would be anything more for her at all. She had four months to...process, grieve her old life, come to some kind of sort of acceptance. She's not ""at peace"" with the possibility that they won't make it off the planet alive, or at the very least Laeirthe is not at peace with it, but, still - 

- her planet will be fine. Dath ilan was fine before she was born and will continue to be fine without her and she doesn't have to worry that her absence will cause any measurable harm whatsoever to the Civilization she left behind. She's sad, for her mother and her siblings and her friends and her boyfriends and - the real Kalorm, the one who isn't in her head, and his family, and there are probably other patients who stuck less in her mind but she stuck in theirs, and now she's gone, from their point of view irretrievably, and that will leave a hole in the world, just...not one that brings any buildings down with it, you know? No one was counting on her and her alone - okay, with the possible exception of the actual Kalorm, who did at one point insist he would only carry an emergency beacon to summon Merrin specifically, but...Kalorm is Kalorm. He's not even scared of True Death, and he's kind of spent his whole life trying to make it so that his loss wouldn't bring down any metaphorical buildings. 

Merrin does not know that the same is true for Estha. She suspects it isn't. 

The narrative tropes theory hints that one of them might be from a place with very bad problems, and it's certainly not her. And it...fits, with the differences she's seen in him. 

Her Estha wasn't always happy, she doesn't think. Most dath ilanis are happy less often than she is, because it's honestly bizarre that Merrin is just as delighted the hundredth time her patient comes off the ventilator and takes a breath on their own as she was the first time. But her Estha had fun, on purpose. He knows how to do self-care and Merrin is not sure she's seen alternate-Estha do something she would describe as "self-care" at any point so far. Merrin is doing a ton of deliberate self-care, because she's under a lot of pressure and now would be a really bad time to end up depressed and full of cognitive distortions about it!

And Estha is probably experiencing even more pressure, if Merrin's guess is right, that something is wrong back home and he can't, actually, be certain that all of the metaphorical buildings will stay up if he's not there to hold them. That's a really stressful situation to be in, knowing that something is incredibly important and not knowing if any of the actions available to him are ones that can even in principle move toward the important thing! Stress is bad for people, especially if they never do anything to try to relax! 

But most of Merrin's observations and interpretations of them are still - at the implicit level difficult to verbalize, let alone put numbers on, let alone link up into a coherent logical case for why he should listen to her and do something differently.

Laeirthe is surprisingly unhelpful on the matter, probably because he has fun but he doesn't need fun to be functioning at his best, he just needs there to be a problem left to solve, and that character trait came through a lot stronger in the version-in-Merrin's-head than the original canon. 

Anyway. Merrin hasn't, at this point, even gotten close to considering if she should, like, have a conversation about it? There is a point at which it would solidly feel like she was making a mistake, on an interpersonal-relationship-ethics level, by having her concerns silently and not telling him. But that point isn't now, mostly because it feels like if she tries the conversation will be full of culture-gap pits full of metaphorical spikes and she'll probably end up communicating some different concept that isn't actually what she meant, and that does not sound like a way to decrease Estha's stress levels at all. 

(Trusting him might? He did say something that hinted that he maybe wanted her to trust him more, but - one, "trust Estha" is not an atomic action Merrin can just decide to take, trust in someone is a belief-state and that's not how beliefs work, and two, if it somehow was then that probably wouldn't be the thing Estha wanted, because that's messed up. Anyway, Merrin really feels like the problem here is all the cognitohazard stuff that Estha can't - or won't - tell her about, and she can't unilaterally decide that they're going to be fully open with each other now, and one-sided complete openness with him is...not, really, something that appeals to her right now.) 

Merrin has concluded that the best thing she can do is to be okay, on her end. To be reliable and predictable and super on top of the logistics that are in her purview, and to be uncomplicated to coordinate with and handling her emotional support needs on her own rather than flailing at him across a culture gap and falling into metaphorical spike pits. 

(This is maybe slightly a self-serving conclusion, because doing that is easy and comfortable for Merrin, whereas having a fully open conversation about how Laeirthe is in her head and that might imply things about what the [Outer Gods] want here does not sound easy or comfortable at all. But Merrin has poked at it and concluded that that doesn't mean it's the wrong conclusion.)