"Look, how expensive would it be, to send me back, so Boston can just be entirely pointed at this instead of being confused and suspicious, we have a lot of healing on hand and we can throw it at Leareth and whoever else needs it and if the other gods go to war with you we can, you know, cook something up that kills gods."

Leareth goes very, very still. 

"- Can you?" he says, after a long few beats of silence. "Create a spell that kills gods?" 

"Sounds like a weapon! I'm good at weapons! We learned there were gods literally an hour ago, but if they need killing, we'll kill them. And if they're keeping you from modern medicine then they need killing... unless that inevitably causes mals, which we should check."

- Wow. Leareth is pretty sure he's going to get along with this kid. 

....or would get along with her, rather, if she were alive. 

Maybe they can fix it. He's not sure, yet. None of his plans had taken into account...well, most of the bizarre specifics of this situation. And Leareth is so very tired, and even here, in the imaginary space that a baby god is holding for him, his head distantly hurts and his thoughts are gluey. 

Vanyel sighs. "I...agree, it would be a smart strategic move to just send you back, even if I need to do it the stupid way. It's...mostly not physical or magical resources that it costs me, it's attention? And right now I'm needing to pay a lot of attention to Haven, because there are multiple hostile Powers that would really like to murder Leareth, and - I think there's a good argument that allying firmly with Boston will reduce all the Foresight noise and actually make that cheaper, but it's a gamble, right? And I - don't feel great about gambling so much when I've been a god for...er, I don't know how long it's been in human time? Leareth?" 

"Somewhere between twelve and eighteen candlemarks, I think. It depends on how long I have been asleep." 

"Okay. Have Leareth tell Boston that I have arranged an alliance with a god who wants to bring modern medicine to Velgarth and might need to fight some other worse gods about this, like the ones who tied Prometheus to a rock, where Leareth is Prometheus, and they should heal up his liver metaphorically speaking and keep him safe and I'll be back as soon as I can, possibly in the form of a horse because this magic system is incredibly bizarre, and they should start thinking about how one would fight an evil god. There will not be any doubt about whether that message is really from me."

.....Leareth is going to assume that she is (metaphorically) cryptographically signing off this message via the use of bizarre inscrutable metaphors that are probably inside references she shares with her particular team of allies and no one else? 

He's so confused, but he has to assume at least half of that is because whatever pain-drug the Healers gave him - which, to be fair, was in fact strong enough to take the edge off enough that he could sleep - is making him feel incredibly foggy, and Vanyel's work to hold open this metaphorical space for the conversation can only go so far. 

He repeats the message back to Annisa. 

Annisa seems to be under the impression that Vanyel is the one giving Leareth orders? Or something? 

Vanyel (or, well, the small room in the larger house of what-used-to-be-Vanyel which is closest to his former human self) has no idea how to respond to this so he's just going to ignore it. 

"Yep, you've got it."

"Right. Leareth, er, I don't want to go much longer, I'm worried about hurting you, so I should figure out what else we need to cover and then send you back. I, er, have you...explained to anyone what happened? I mean, with - our plan, and me being like this now -?" 

"....No. I - was very tired - and every time someone came to speak to me, there was a more urgent emergency, and I was not sure how to explain it..." 

"- Leareth, hey. It's all right. You've - already done more today than anyone could've asked. But, er - can you please relay that? To...Jisa, I think, and Melody - I trust the two of them together to figure out where to go from there. I think. If words are hard you can just say 'Vanyel is a baby god now, it's a long story' and promise them that I'll explain later once I figure out how to actually talk to people?" 

"...All right. I can do that. And relay Annisa's message to her allies from Boston, and - hopefully once these drugs wear off I will be able to have a conversation with Boston and exchange information." 

"All right."

And the beautiful boy with raven-black hair and silver eyes - who is, somehow, at the same time, a lean weary man in his late thirties, hair entirely silver, dressed in ragged clothing that was once white - glances around, and then after a moment's hesitation, crosses the remaining five paces between him and Leareth, and hugs the man. 

(He never hugged Leareth when they were both alive. But, right now, it kind of feels like that was a mistake on his part.) 

And then the snowy pass dissolves, and for a moment there's white nothingness again - 

- and then Annisa is back in the simulacrum of her Scholomance dorm room. Alone. But time feels less dreamlike than it did before, and she can think. 

She wants to be alive. 


That's such a pointless thing to want, here, now.

She curls up in not-her-bed and cries.

Vanyel is dedicating a corner of his attention to giving her soul the necessary support-and-infrastructure that it needs to continue having any experiences while disembodied. Because Annisa helped him, and also she's a person and so he cares about her anyway, and the thing Annisa wants most in the world is to exist, and he can at least try to give her a vague terrible approximation of existence while he figures out something better. 

(He...hopes he got the forming-new-memories part right? It intuitively felt like the sort of thing that's incredibly unintuitive from the usual god-angle on the world, and much easier for him to triangulate, as an entity stretched between two widely divergent ways of existing and perceiving reality. And it seemed like there was an obvious tweak to make that ought to work and cost him only minimal extra resources? But he's not sure.) 

...Apparently, giving her space to exist and experience means automatically reading her mind and experiencing all of her emotions? Because the metaphorical 'space' he's holding for her is, metaphorically speaking, inside him. 

It hurts, to look. But not-looking isn't a choice that the pattern-that-is-Vanyel would make, ever.