"It's okay."

"That was Alqualonde. If you were curious."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"He got a nasty head wound protecting me and everyone said he'd live but he--it took him longer to wake up than it took me to get myself killed, and that was the last I ever saw of him, with his skull dented and there was so much blood--"

Nod, nod. "If you want we could go through the memory and attenuate the affect like with the ice, but there are reasons not to want to do that."

"Yeah, I--It's not--making me less able to do things, like the phobia was, and I don't--I don't want to not have a negative reaction to my husband with an injury that would have killed a human."

Nod. "There's more direct nightmare-related interventions but I don't have much practice with them and you probably shouldn't risk tampering too much with your dreams."

"Yeah. But feel free to wake me up if I'm leaking."

"Okay."

"That's how Daphne found out, did I not mention?"

"You may have done."

"First two times she assumed something had gone horribly wrong with the air conditioning and hauled me bodily out of the room."

"Well, it seems like a reasonable guess."

"Yeah. The way she worried over me was sweet."

"Aww."

"Daphne's reaction when I told her the truth was that she had better stick by me because I was clearly a fantasy novel protagonist and she'd rather have the role of 'sidekick' than 'chick who shows up in the first chapter and is never seen again.'"

Bella laughs. "Very genre savvy."

"She is that. If we ever have to deal with a zombie apocalypse I'll be very glad to have her on my side."

"I scrolled the disrupt undead spell but only because it's an introduction to the positive energy used in healing magic..."

"Zombies don't actually exist," Idaia clarifies. "They're a popular fictional thing to plan for having to deal with, though."

"Zombies are a thing in Materia!"

"Somehow I'm not surprised!"

"Near my campus we had more of a ghoul problem though."

"Oh?"

"The paths are warded, but if you wander off them and something eats you something is slightly more likely to be a ghoul than anything else and much more likely to be a ghoul than any other form of undead."