"Unless Mrs. Adams wants to volunteer to get a daemon so I can check ahead of time, it could potentially take a while to get a critter-compatible spell version, maybe turn up glitchy somehow the way your first resurrection did - and even if she does want to let the alethiometer have a look at her, it might be that critters just aren't resurrectable at all," says Ice. "But I'll certainly try." At the look on Phix's face: "The first version of the spell doesn't work properly on mages. They come back, just not - magey. I have actually had to resurrect Cypress twice, and the second one was - planned."

"I got better," assures Cypress.

Path fluffs up, still disgruntled.

"It would also be very nice to know if it worked on spellbinders. I don't have any immediate experimental candidates."

"Why wouldn't it?"

"It's possible that it would work, but bring us back without our familiars attached, in which case we wouldn't be spellbinders anymore - or that it would work, but bring us back attached to familiars that aren't there, and therefore leave us unmade - or that something more complicated would happen. I think what I'd want to do first is resurrect a non-spellbinder likely to be amenable to the experiment and of an age where they can reliably see their spirit animal and gather information from that, at least outside of an emergency like what we'd have had on our hands if Edarial had died in the building collapse or something."

"Unmaking?"

"Becoming a vegetable. If your familiar dies, that's what happens."

"I am very glad I didn't die in the building collapse."

"If the spellbinder dies, the familiar does too - so resurrecting the familiar first would have similar problems, and even if two witches synchronously worked on a binder/familiar pair I'd be worried they wouldn't appear connected correctly in some way."

"That's - um. I'm glad you didn't die in the building collapse, too. Why was there a building collapse?"

"We were putting magic fountains in a couple of cities, and were therefore both out of spells for the day when someone who objected to monarchy decided to express this by bringing a building down on our heads. I broke a leg, Edarial broke - more things. The magic fountains heal familiars, but not humans. Our guards all died and I had to keep Edarial awake until midnight came and we got spells again to heal ourselves and walk out of the wreck. And yell at the anti-monarchists."

"We didn't even do anything to deserve assassination," mutters Edarial. "I agreed to writing a constitution, and we're working on that - not right now, but as a project."

"... Okay then. Um. Wow."

"I'm sort of concerned that I should be expecting harrowing adventures to hunt me down any minute now."

"Unless the criterion is literally along the lines of 'long term emotional damage sustained' you probably count on the sole basis of the slavery."

"I do have to wonder why the - constant harrowing experiences occur. I wish there were a way to easily study it, figure out if there's a way of making it - stop it."

"I am," says Edarial, "completely on board with making it stop it."

"We have complete causal explanations for why all the things that have happened, happened," says Iobel. "But we don't have explanations for why we so resemble each other at all, so it's possible that hiding with the rest of that explanation is one saying why we're all so thoroughly adventured. Whatever the hell kind of explanation that might be."

"Do tell. In fact, all of you, stories of your lives, go."

Darren makes a face.