Father will be looking for them, probably; Luzai and Villibor constitute one of the more successful of his experiments with dhampirism. But they are able to steal quite a bit of money before they go, and between bribery and desperation they manage to make it to Osirion, where a priest of Pharasma puts down the zombie that Villibor had to make of Mama before someone else did, someone who wouldn't be doing it to get her out. She is buried in the village's small cemetary, and Luzai finally allows herself to weep. 

She weeps for what feels like a very long time. 

But their voyage isn't done. Osirion isn't the best place to get stronger.

Areelu Vorlesh doesn’t often leave the worldwound. She might be the strongest person in Avistan, at least if you didn’t count Gallowspire, but with that strength came a whole host of other powerful people who want very badly for her to die. Powerful or not, if she was known to be outside her sanctum and away from easy reinforcement or retreat they would keep trying until they succeeded. Even Arazni only avoids such a fate whenever she leaves Mechitar due to Geb’s backing, and Areelu doesn’t kid herself about being as strong as either of them yet. The risk of an occasional foray in utmost secrecy is almost negligible, yes, but being killed would mean failing and any risk of that is unacceptable.

Nevertheless, there is one task important enough for her to risk her life on, and her best candidate voluntarily leaving Geb's protective umbrella certainly qualifies. She waits long enough to be confident it isn't a trap, then acts; four plane shifts, a teleport, and a sleep spell later, her research demiplane has a third inhabitant once more.

When she sees the young girl with her own eyes for the first time, she doesn't feel anything. She continues to not feel anything when she performs the initial surgeries to splice their soul, and certainly doesn't feel anything while she watches her and waits for the connection to stabilize. If she takes more care with her work than usual, well, it's just important enough she wants to be sure she gets it right.

Logically Luzai should not wake up at any point in this process. 

But Dhampirs have unusual metabolisms, and whatever it was exactly that Father did while Luzai and Villibor were en utero makes them unusual even for dhampirs. 

It would be an exaggeration to call the thing she does waking up; she isn't exactly lucid. But she is aware that she is in pain, and she has some control of her body--

"Mom...Mom!"

It's not her. The fragments of her soul haven't finished integrating yet, and even if they had Areelu's best efforts only managed a partial restoration - it's the reason she needed to go this far in the first place to find as compatible a host as possible. She knows this in exhaustive detail, all the ways this couldn't possibly be what she wants it to be. She just needs to-

Oh. She's already squeezing the girl's hand, whispering that everything will be okay.

"Mom...I should have been stronger, I'm sorry..."

It hurts to hope. It hurts even knowing enough about Luzai to know who the woman she's actually calling out for is, hurts in a way that makes it obvious she's been hurting this whole time and lying to herself, and Areelu Vorlesh is thankful that her mind blank and isolation mean that nobody will see her tears. She sings softly a lullaby from a hundred years past, whose words she only half remembers even with her prodigious memory, and keeps singing until Luzia falls into a slumber again.

Before the next bit of surgery she makes sure to cast delay pain, even knowing it merely puts off the inevitable, because if Luzai screamed she doesn't know if she could bear to continue and she still needs to finish. Areelu Vorlesh is an excellent liar, but with this much evidence even she has a hard time lying to herself. If she went with her old plan now and something happened to Luzai, she would not be able to handle it at all.

When Luzia wakes up, it's to a soft bed looking upon an unfamiliar ceiling. Nothing hurts, but there's a strange absence of any sensation from her chest.

It isn't anything like her old room in Mechitar, but it still feels like home. 

She can sort of remember being half-conscious and in pain, and part of her wants to apologize to that woman for crying on her and calling her Mom, but a small voice in her heart really emphatically does not want to do that. 

She pushes herself up, swinging her legs off the bed and looking around. 

The room is not especially large, with most of the space taken up by a brand new bed, but theres’s a small bedside table and the walls have a pair of glowing crystals that on examination turn out to have a pair of voice controlled permenant dancing lights. The walls and floor are some kind of dark hardwood, and there is a set of dark curtains covering a window with a bare hint of sunlight showing through.

If there’s anyone nearby, they aren’t audible through the door.

...Luzai is having SEVERAL EMOTIONS and is not entirely sure what they are. 

She finishes examining the glowing crystals and pads tentatively out of the room. 

The hallways are equally empty, but at the end it opens up to a sitting room where a horned woman is writing something. A tiefling, maybe, by the looks of her.

!

That's...that's the woman from...last night? When did--that--happen? 

She is very uncertain about the temporal relationship of that event both to now and to her most recent memories of before-that-happened, but she is pretty certain that this is the same woman. 

"...Hi." 

She should! Say more than that!!!

"I'm. Confused?" 

The woman looks up at her and smiles.

”I probably have answers. Is there a question you want to start with, or should I start?”

"--Why is it that I feel like I know you, but I can't, actually, name any--facts--about you?"

“It’s a side effect of the magic I used to empower you. I wasn’t expecting that much memory bleedover, but it’s not out of model.”

In fact, it’s very encouraging news. What she could measure from Luzai was already enough to indicate a high degree of compatibility, but the fact that her soul was able to reconstruct and integrate that much from the fragments by now was a sign that the compatibility went even further than expected.

"--Memory bleedover? Not that I'm not in favor of being empowered, but--did you sacrifice someone to do it?" If she sacrificed someone who felt the way about her that Luzai is instinctively feeling about her then that is REALLY BAD ACTUALLY. 

“Not in the way you’re thinking; the person whose memories you’re feeling died a long time ago, in the way that outsiders die. The proximal cause was demons, but I personally hold more of a grudge against the humans who handed them over.” 

"Oh no." 

She bites her lip. 

"I have--so many questions, but--" her hand comes up to curl over her heart. "--is there any sense in which they're going to be okay?" 

"Only insofar as you might be okay. By the time I got to them it was too late for any mortal magics, and if the gods could do such a miracle nothing I offered to pay was enough for them to do it. About the only thing I didn't try was asking Geb, and even if he had agreed it wouldn't have been worth it."

"When I'm a legendary archmage, I'm going to Dominate him, crack his skull open, and peel out his secrets." 

"You wouldn't be the first legendary archmage to try; he's rather famous for that not working, even."

She shrugs.

"Perhaps whatever he uses is still possible to bypass if you're good enough, though. I can dominate someone through shield of law or holy aura, and Nocticula can even dominate constructs."

"Well, I'm not going to do it right away; I'm going to wait until I've been a legendary archmage for at least a century first. Then reassess what I think the situation looks like. I'm hubristic, not stupid." 

"A sensible plan. Did you have any other questions you wanted to ask?"

"Lots and lots! Who are you? Did you kidnap me? Can I look at your notes on how you did this? Am I going to remember more stuff, I'd rather be--both of us--than, uh, the alternative, at this point--can I have a hug?"