First things first:Time Stop, Moment of Prescience, Greater Heroism, Magic Circles against evil and chaos – because anything that can land a  dominate on Naima can probably land one on him – 

Where are you? Do you have the body? 

Nex, south of Sarfa, where we were going to clean up undead. I think it fell. Can't look down at it. I'm confused about why I'm able to say this, actually -

Her invisibility is broken from the attack. She flies down into a crevice in the earth, watching herself.

Because it's a trap – not that he expects it to matter. He waves over his nearest assistant, tells him to get a sending to Catherine – Naima dominated, killed Shawil, south of Sarfa, come – and teleports in, invisible and mind-blanked. 

Heading down into some kind of crevice, she notes, not actually aware that he's here, and kind of trying not to think about it. 

Her feet touch the floor, and she looks up, eyes scanning for falling dirt that might indicate anyone else entering the cave behind her.

He can see it, now that it's been pointed out. He'll use his dimension steps to get to the bottom, where – yes, Naima is visible – so he'll cast Break Enchantment, with just a little twist of fate to make absolutely sure it lands. 

She feels something land, and then tries to move her arms to check whether this made things better or worse. Works.

- okay, I think that did it. Still have to find whoever it is.

He's not going to assume it worked just yet. Ordinarily they could just kill and resurrect her, to be sure, but that's out of the question, with the baby. 

Check later. Right now the most important thing is finding whoever did this. Is there anything unusual to his Arcane Sight? 

There's a hidden entrance in the crevice, illusioned to look like ordinary stone. Beyond it, a corridor into a larger complex.

He points it out with an illusion marker, since he's not about to reveal his location just yet. Through there. 

After me, I suppose, she says, and then realizes that she would rather be invisible again if she's going to head into the base of something that can land a dominate on her. Not that that stopped it the first time. She activates her invisibility ring again anyway, and flies through.

Entering. Are we waiting for the others?

"I'm here," she sends Élie, "Forty feet above and twenty north of your marker, meet there for a telepathic bond?"

Alfirin's here – to Naima.

And to Alfirin – Actually, you'd better meet us down here. 

She swoops down to join them and lets Élie put up the telepathic bond.

Naima's free? What's the situation?

She seems to be but we should confirm later. We don't know who's responsible but I suspect they're past that suspicious hole in the wall. 

It's not easy to land a dominate on Naima. It wasn't her. Dispater doesn't leave Hell. It could be Geb?

Understood. Summon first?

Good idea.

He tells Naima to hold back – he's sending in an invisible stalker to scout. 

All right, staying outside.

There are traps. There are not incredibly impressive traps, relative to what they've dealt with over the course of the last year. And there are other defenses, and illusion spells - but, again, underwhelming relative to what they've seen in the past. 

It's a lich. Apparently there are just random liches hiding under nondescript rocks sometimes.

Apparently. Either it's a lich who's been hiding under a rock for the last decade and got really unlucky with who it decided to pick a fight with on emerging... or it's not that. It's cramped in here, and there's too many unfamiliar magic constructions - she doesn't want to risk a disjunction. Greater Dispel Magic on the lich, and she'll follow up with a dominate in a moment -

And Naima pinpoints Alfirin's location. Evil eye, stormbolts, misfortune, wail of the banshee, slumber.

That's not good.

Stormbolts she can dodge, misfortune she can shake off, wail of the banshee she can redirect to the lich (who will be wholly unaffected but that's fine), and slumber she can resist. That is, however, decidedly not good.

Nope. He's going to go ahead and risk a Disjunction – the space isn't big, he can get both Naima and the lich at once. 

Yep, that hits both of them. And, unfortunately, also cuts through the middle of at least one volatile magical experiment. There's a crash, and a flash of something exploding -

Time Stop.

- okay, well, she's not entirely sure what's happening at this point, and is pretty concerned about several elements of it, but most immediately there is a frozen explosion behind her, Elie has presumably pulled her into a shared time stop, and she is going to spend the entire span of it running as far away from the explosion as possible.

This works, at least.

Ten subjective seconds later, the explosion fills the room. She's put enough space between herself and it that she gets singed, and not entirely destroyed. 

This is not what happens to the lich. The lich is gone.

"Well. There go all our best hopes for getting answers quickly."

His wife is alive, he's not apologizing. 

"We'll still find the phylactery. Eventually." 

"Yeah."

"...I realize that a dysjunction probably took care of it, but I would really like to go somewhere very far away and be checked over very thoroughly for any remaining enchantments now."

They can do that (and detect thoughts on the baby, just to make sure it's unharmed). 

It seems so. That, at least, is a relief.

Naima wakes up in complete darkness, in a chamber where the air smells stale. She tries a light cantrip, which fails, as if she hadn't prepared it. She's not wearing any of her gear - no headband, no robes, no belt, no haversack full of potions and items, no ring of sustenance and invisibility on her finger, no wedding bracelet to summon Elie to her side. She is, at least, wearing clothes this time, which is arguably an improvement over the first time she died and woke up in one of her clones. She doesn't remember dying. If she did, that means -

She puts a hand to her stomach. Flat, smooth, unmistakably empty.

Elie? she thinks, but no one answers. Because she died, and the permanent telepathic bond is on the dead body, probably. Obviously.

She can, when she thinks about it, faintly feel that Wishbone is reading something. Something calm, absorbing. There's no worry over the empathic link - at least not at first, not until she begins to feel feelings that mirror her own. Wishbone will know something's wrong, then. And for now... she has to get out of wherever her clone has been taken to. She tries a teleport to Sothis, which ought to be in range. Once again, nothing happens, as if the spell hasn't been prepared. Maybe she managed to lose all of them upon coming back to life, this time.

She finds her way out of the chamber by feel, and then along the hallways, out into the outer crevice, until at least she can see the sunlight peeking through the top. There isn't much of it. It'll be setting, soon. She can't prepare a fly spell - or any other spells - without access to her familiar, who is hundreds of miles away. She sets to work climbing, which is very difficult - for all her power, Naima is still not physically strong. By the time she reaches the surface, it's night. Shawil's body is gone.

The others should be here, by now, if they were going to come back for her. They can't have missed it, if she died, but she's admittedly very confused about what she's doing here, and not safe in the demiplane where the party keeps their clones. It... suggests that the lich was able to make a clone without her knowledge, which she knows is possible because Shawil had it done once, and it's not something that will immediately occur to anyone.




In the morning, she walks to the village. It's a few hours. She heals everyone in the village who is currently sick, charging hardly anything for it. She buys passage to Quantium, in a cart - they have no wizards to teleport her, and no sendings to contact the city. That takes a week, and by the end of it she is driving herself crazy by calculating how many resurrections and reincarnations and ordinary healings the world has gone without in that time. At night she cries, thinking of her baby. She reminds herself that Elie won't allow the child to grow up in the Boneyard, that they will think of something as soon as he's able to find her.

He should have found her by now. He should have discerned her location and found her. 

When she reaches Quantium, she goes to the church of Abadar and asks to make a withdrawal - which, of course, they grant her, because Naima Cottonnet's savings with the Church of Abadar are so large that major projects are funded by lending them out, so large that they've apologetically explained to her that it would be impossible for her to receive all of them back at once. Enough for a teleport, though - that's easy. She teleports in to Absalom, and from there it's easy to find a teleport to Diobel, where it's another forty-five minutes to Catherine's old estate and the recently rebuilt and expanded wizard tower. She can feel Wishbone getting more stressed out. Probably that's just because she's getting more stressed out the closer she gets to the house.

Something's wrong. Not with the house, or with the grounds, which are as she left them. But no one is rushing to see her. No one is concerned. Nothing is out of place, except for her.

She exits the carriage, walks up to her front door, takes a deep breath, and... knocks.

A minute later, the housekeeper informs Elie that his wife is at the door, and does not seem entirely well.

Which is odd, seeing as she's supposed to be in Katheer and hasn't told him otherwise. 

Naima? Is something wrong?

She is, indeed, in Katheer. 

Not particularly, why do you ask?

I've just been informed you're at the front door and don't look at all well. 

Well, I can't say that I can see the front door from here. Do you need help?

I hate to take you away from your work, but coming so soon after the incident with the lich, it might be safer not to take chances. Meet us outside? 

He tells someone to tell Rasima to take the children on some sort of excursion. Now, please. He goes downstairs to greet his "wife." 

Coming. Invisibly.

And here she is, looking stressed out and exhausted and without any of her magic items, and - otherwise very much like herself.

She waits a second to see if Elie is going to hug her, or otherwise demonstrate any abject relief that she has been found after a week of fruitless searching. Apparently he's not. She - tries not to look upset, but Elie knows her well enough that this isn't going to be terribly effective at actually hiding anything. That's not really why she's doing it, anyway. She would like to not immediately accuse him of anything when he probably has some sort of explanation.

"What happened?"

No visible illusion magic – no magic of any kind, in fact – but that can be disguised. It's obvious at this point that they're dealing with something much subtler and stranger than they'd supposed. The mannerisms, he notes abstractly, are very accurate. He hasn't seen Naima so distressed in quite some time. For a brief, mad moment, he wants to comfort her – but these days he doesn't have much patience for people who take their greivances with him to the house where his children live. 

"I think you'd know that better than I." 

She looks extremely frustrated for a moment, and then swallows it, at least partially. "All right, then. One week ago, I woke up in the complex where we fought the lich, absent baby, magical items, and spells. Unlike you, I cannot prepare or cast spells without access to my familiar, so I physically crawled out of the cave, hiked my way back to the village, healed everyone in it for pocket money, spent an entire six days riding in a maddeningly slow cart to get to Quantium on the off chance that it would take you longer than that to find me, which it did, at which point I made a withdrawal from my bank account and was able to hire a teleport to Absalom and then to Diobel, where I really hoped that you would be waiting with something resembling an explanation."

Okay, so maybe she's not very good at swallowing her frustration. She's trying.

It would be odd for anyone to attempt to gain his confidence by pretending to be his wife, when his wife – as all the world knows – is alive and perfectly well. Probably some failsafe set up by the lich before he died, then. Oddly sophisticated if so. Might even believe herself to be real. 

Are you reading her mind?

And then, to "Naima" – "Well, one of us must be mistaken. A week ago, you left the complex with me."

I haven't been. I can. Give me a moment.

Well, that explains some things. And is extremely concerning.

- it is odd that she woke up in the complex. If she woke up in a clone, it suggests that the lich had access to her. But - it shouldn't be possible to duplicate a person at all, and most ways of faking it shouldn't duplicate the abilities of an archmage - but someone must have, if no one has noticed yet -

"Has she been raising people?"

...the confusion is honest. She believes she's me. Or, well, she's trying to determine which of us she believes is me.

Oh no. 

Gently, then. "Yes. She's been on her usual healing circuit. She – she thinks you're telling the truth." And then he remembers, because his Naima would need to know – "the baby is safe."

- on the one hand that's a good thing and on the other hand it means that she really is - 

" - but that doesn't make sense! I can heal! I have an empathic link with Wishbone!"

– Wait, what?

She drops invisibility. 

"...he's been worried about me. It would explain some things if he's been sensing your emotions. I agree that I don't know how that could have happened."

"I should check in on Drosselmeyer. Immediately. If the lich – we should finish collecting his notes, we should find out his name – has a way to effect your link with Wishbone, he might have done something to Dross."

"Especially if she can imitate my hexes. I suppose we've seen more impossible things before."

She looks between them. Takes in the fact that the other Naima really is pregnant.



"I can go in the anti magic cell for a minute."

He regrets having been cruel to the poor woman. This isn't her fault – unless she's a willing accomplice who agreed to have her memories suppressed for the duration, which is still entirely possible but looking increasingly unlikely and anyway doesn't make much difference in the moment. 

"I think that might be for the best. But – do you need anything first? You've had a long journey." 

" - okay, yes, technically, I am exhausted and want to eat something and would really really like to see Wishbone at his earliest possible convenience, but what I most want is for you to agree that we can continue this conversation as soon as you've determined that Drosselmeyer is safe."

"Of course."

"Okay. Then I'll go. Do you want me to show myself there, or do you not want me alone in your house."

"Naima, you could – " oh, no, that's the worst thing he could have said – 

" - sure, it'll only take a minute. Do you know where it is?"

"Yes." 

She'll just let the other Naima follow her and lock her in a box. Fine. Whatever.

Drosselmeyer is fine. 

That is to say, he's Mother-Ginger-and-her-Polichinelles, Nutcracker-transforms-into-Prince, coffee dance, chocolate dance, Nutcracker transforms into prince again, Nutcracker transforms into prince , which Élie reads as "excited about his new construct body." There aren't any signs of magical tampering, either on Dross himself or any of the protections they set up since Volnagur's attack.

He updates Dross on the construct progress. He resets the alarms, just in case. He goes home. 

Naima stares at the walls of the cell, while the other Naima goes back to work. 

She remembers so many things that nobody else is supposed to know. She remembers the deal with Mephistopheles. She remembers booking Alfirin, and traveling through Nexland. Of course, if her memories have been fabricated, it's possible that none of that ever happened. They would be very inventive things to fabricate, though.

She waits for her hus- for Elie to come back.

He contacts Naima as soon as he's back on the material plane. Dross is fine. At least as far as I can tell. 

That's good. The - whoever she is - didn't make any trouble. I figured she didn't need to be watched constantly in the anti magic field, so I went back to work?

I promised her we would keep having this conversation when I returned. She might be able to help us figure out what she is, or who's behind all this.

I agree. I - kind of got the sense that she wanted to talk to you more than to me. But I can come back if you think it's important.

I'd prefer to have you there, but – she thinks she's you. I think she'd be more comfortable knowing that someone was out there, doing your work. 

Yeah. That's what I would want.

So he stops in to visit the other Naima. 

"Are you comfortable? Can I bring you anything?"

He keeps obviously treating her like a stranger that he's trying to be polite to, which hurts much worse than the hunger or the tiredness, frankly.

"Did all of the stuff with Mephistopheles really happen?"

That's the second time in as many conversations he's had with this woman where she's managed to come up with the most destabilizing possible response in the first round.

"I can't speak about that," he says, before he can get into any real legal trouble. He wants to reassure her that of course it did, but she's not Naima and he can't. But then, she's not Naima, and she knows, which narrows things down to a very small list of conspirators – Volnagur, reformed and scheming already? Arazni knew enough about their plans to take advantage of them, but did she know enough about the contract to set something like this in motion? Mephistopheles himself? He needs to tell the others as soon as he's out of the anti-magic field, and maybe more urgently contact their Axis lawyers. 

" - Sorry. Bad opener," she says, belatedly remembering that he doesn't think she's Naima and she doesn't know if she's Naima and that could have been really bad. "I didn't - did all of the stuff with Nexland happen."

"Yes," automatically, before he remembers that he's not supposed to be leaking information. "– or, you might want to specificy which stuff." 

"No, I'm trying to determine whether my memories of secret information are at all accurate without needlessly leaking all of that information to anyone who might be watching. - listen. I think that you should Scribe's Binding me, and read the book. If you're not willing to pay for the labor I can pay for it myself, if you let me out of here, but I expect you to prefer the monetary cost to the security risk and to not be willing to refuse the request outright, unless there's some reason I'm not thinking of why this is a bad idea."

He doesn't say, it's worked before. 

"We could also try moving this to a private sanctum, but – if you think it's best. It might be the only way to find out where you come from, if you have suppressed memories. We'll pay for it, of course, I can make it in" – does she know about the fast demiplane, that one's not much of a secret at this point – "I mean, it won't take too long." 

"All right. And - Elie?"

She's - not actually entirely sure he'll grant her this. He would grant it to Naima. But he doesn't think she's Naima. She's... probably not Naima but if she is then she doesn't want whatever the other Naima is to be paging through her.

"I don't want the other Naima to read it. Just you. Will you do that? You can summarize what's in it, after, if you decide that's indicated, just - I don't want her to read it."

Right. 

It's not much to ask. He was the only one to read the Alfirin book, and the stakes were higher then. There's no question about trust. He doesn't like keeping secrets from his wife, but then, he's not exactly being asked to. 

And it makes sense. If she thinks she's real, that means the other one isn't. Naima wouldn't want some clone, or construct, or who knows exactly what, really, reading every thought she's ever had in her life. She thinks she's real, and nothing she can say or do will convince him, short of this. Gods. The whole thing reminds him of those terrible last six months in Isarn, meetings former friends at cafés or clubs or this-or-that person's apartment, swearing blindly that he's innocent, begging them to believe that he's the same person he's always been. Eventually he managed to scrape together some dignity about it. By then, nobody was inviting him anywhere at all. 

"Of course I can. And – 

– Naima. You understand why I can't trust you right now. I wish I could, and when this is over, I very much hope I will."

"Yeah. I understand. Thank you."

It takes him ten days to make a book capable of holding an archmage, if he drops absolutely everything else. That's a day sidereal, if he works in the fast demiplane. He drops absolutely everything else. 

The next day, Naima is a book.




Naima spent the first nineteen years of her life living in her parents' house. She played on the banks of the river Junira, learned to spin and weave cloth, and spent an enormous number of hours carrying water from the temple to the rest of her family. She couldn't read, of course, but in some respects her childhood was idyllic, at least relative to Elie's. As a child, her closest friend was her next-youngest sister. When she was nine years old, both of them caught a serious illness. Naima recovered; the sister did not.

The child who emerged on the other side of the illness was quieter, except when she was yelling; she got into trouble more frequently with her parents and siblings, and spent more and more time on household chores and textile creation. When she wanted to be alone, she looked for trash that had washed up along the side of the river. She eventually withdrew from almost everyone, besides her oldest sister, the only person who could ever get an honest report on what she wanted. It was her sister who helped convince their mother to convince their father to let Naima marry Tariq, who was considered a terrible option financially. She wanted him because she thought he would be kind.

For about a year, she lived with her new husband. She was still remarkably reserved while she lived with him, but she was happy. She worked tirelessly to make things easier for his mother and sisters, who in turn grew to accept her. She created new clothes for her husband. She bore him a son. He was proud of her, and told her so. He trusted her judgement, and didn't make many demands of her. For the first time, she felt like as long as she followed all of the social rules she knew, her life would be mostly comfortable.

Then, of course, her husband died. She felt shattered, unsure how to bear going on without him. She felt terrified that her son would die. Some power sent Wishbone to her, and she accepted its offer, fully aware that whatever price it demanded would be something she would probably regret. She went back to live with her parents for six more months. She knew she would have to remarry, and she really, really didn't want to. She felt like nobody else could ever compare.

Shawil showed up and commandeered her dog. He'll remember the adventures from this point forward, of course, since he was there, but will see them through her perspective. They were stunningly incompetent at some points, but somehow, they muddled through again and again. Naima started saving money to raise her husband, realizing that she had the ability to save enough money. And, at the same time, she gained friends. She didn't mean to, exactly, but it happened, over time. She became less withdrawn, and more angry. Then less angry, and more... hopeful.

She didn't mean to become interested in Elie, either. It just happened - very suddenly, actually, while he was playing with her baby in Merab. She told herself that it almost certainly wasn't a good idea to consider - but every day, he was there, growing beside her, and she was there, growing beside him. And when she finally had enough money to resurrect her husband, she realized that she had grown into something else while she wasn't looking - something brave, ambitious, and willing if not always able to try to convince others of her perspective. Something with plans. Plans that were compatible with marrying Elie Cotonnet - who was, really, her best friend in the world - and not very compatible with remarrying her husband at all.

She proposed twice, of course. Both of the proposals are about as terrible as he remembers them being, but the second one, of course, actually worked. There was a relatively long engagement, by Osirian standards, during which they stymied the plans of the Urgathoa cultists who were poking around the ruins of the four pharaohs of the ascension. It was worth the wait, though - she thought the wedding jewelry and the sentiment that went with them were perfect. She was so, so happy with her husband. And for the first time in years - maybe ever - she felt really, entirely safe with someone. She knew that whatever happened, she could count on Elie to be there with her.




And then, immediately following the remarkably dangerous honeymoon in Isarn, during which they saved the entire city from being physically sucked into hell, Naima Cotonnet was kidnapped by a lich. It suppressed her memories of the encounter and psychically linked her to a copy of his own creation, who then took over Naima's old place. No one noticed the difference. It was a perfect copy, one with all of her memories and abilities. She doesn't know how it was done.

Because of the link, the later memories are here, too. Naima remembers being there for them, all the memories of adventure and of marriage and of family - for Bachuan, for Ines's birth, for the months they spent hiding in the temple of Abadar, for the house of oblivion and Drezen crusade, for the growth of her hospital, for Nex, for Razmir, for the war to take Cheliax, for the deal with Mephistopheles, for the fight over Rovagug containment, for the realization afterwards that she was pregnant again -

But she wasn't. The copy was.

He doesn't remember what he expected when Naima asked to speak with him alone, that first time, but he knows it wasn't a proposal of marriage. It wasn't the sort of thing well brought up young Osirian women did for themselves – in the first place – and back then it still seemed as though that's what Naima was. Well brought up Osirian women – if they did somehow get in the habit of arranging their own marriages – certainly didn't pursue disreputable foreigners. And Naima herself wanted stability, a home, and a father for her son. He hadn't expected he'd ever have a home again. But Naima proposed anyway, and if that Naima was quieter, smaller, less confident, she was every bit as relentlessly practical. She needed a husband. Rahim needed a father. Of all the men she'd ever met, Élie seemed the least likely to beat her and steal her money. 

He told her to wait six months. He was sure that if she allowed herself to start looking, she'd find a man she really cared for. Instead, she came back in four months with a list. Item one: Naima's ambiguous-possibly-malevolent patron is likely to be a danger to herself and her children, Élie is likely to become powerful enough to protect them. Item two: Élie understands the significant of medical research, and thus, item three, Élie wouldn't forbid her from working outside the home. Item four: Rahim loves him. Item five: she thinks he'd be a good father. 

He'd asked her – somewhere between items seven and fifteen – if she actually liked him as a person. Yes, she said. It's on the list. She just hadn't gotten to it yet. 

They'd had a short engagement, by Galtan standards. Just long enough for him to make the wedding jewelry. And he did make all of it himself, even the things which weren't magic – only he needed to go to a cleric for help with the bracelets, for the spell that would let Naima summon him to her in an instant no matter where in all the worlds he was. He'd wanted to do that himself, too. He could now. It was his promise, in stone and wire, that while he might be a disreputable foreigner with strange ideas about freedom and duty and relationships between men and women, he would do everything in his power to be a good Osirian husband. That is to say: he'd protect her. 

And he'd believed he had. 

He was was right the first time: no sane woman would ever want to marry him. He shouldn't have agreed. He should have known that he couldn't be relied on, that people who trusted him tended to die for it. He should have warned her. It wouldn't have changed anything, he knows that – Naima, once her mind is set upon a course of action, is nothing if not stubborn. She'd have married him anyway. She's probably not even going to leave him when he tells her, even though he deserves it. 

He realizes he's thinking about the copy. The one who isn't his wife – 

Except she is, of course. For almost four years, she's shared his home, his battles, his thoughts. She's the mother of his children. He loves her. And right now he needs her very, very badly. 

Naima?

Yes?

I need you to come here now. 

She plane shifts to him without hesitation. A moment later she's in the demiplane with him.

What is it?

"I know what happened." 

And, finding himself suddenly unable to speak – It might be easier to just share memories. 

Is it bad, she wants to ask, but it's obviously bad. She nods.

All right. We can do that.

He doesn't share the text of the book itself. He made a promise to his wife, and he is still trying to hold to those. Just his moment of realization – checking again to confirm the memories had been been altered – piecing the timeline together after. They'd only have been married a month, when it happened. 

She stills.

She spent a year or two believing, once, that the price of her witch powers was going to be the consumption of her soul. She had tried to face it bravely, making every day count as much as it possibly could, and to prepare Elie and herself for what might happen if she was replaced by something else, something that didn't share her values and goals - her patron, possibly, or maybe an older version of herself, one jaded and beaten down by trying to accomplish things. She'd thought she might be Alfirin, although she hadn't known the name, back then.

This is not the same thing. But - there is some carryover, she thinks. She will make there be carryover. 

"How certain are you?"

"We should go back through everything in the lich's lair, all of his notes – see if we can get copies from the First Vault of anything that was destroyed, if we can. But short of that, I'm as certain as I can be." 

"All right. We should do those things. I'm not sure if I should be part of the group that does."

"I want to tell Catherine and Shawil and Ione. I want all of you to have a plan for what to do if I attack you again. I want you to update whatever plan you have for me turning evil, if you haven't done that since it stopped looking likely to happen. I don't want to know anything about them."

"I think our first step should be finding and destroying the lich's phylactery before he reforms so he can never control you again. I'll do those things, but – 

I love you. I'm not going to leave you to deal with this alone." 

" - all right, yeah, that's a better plan. I like that plan. I think it plausibly also involves going back to get more of the lich's stuff so that we can hopefully discern his location. And - thank you."

"What about her?"

"We need to tell her. After that – she'll want to run her healing route. We can have it put about that you've solved bilocation. I don't want to lie to the children." 

"Yeah. I don't either. ...Rahim is hers, then, isn't he."

"He is, and Inès is yours, but we can't very well just split them." 

"No, not now. And can't very well - " No, she doesn't even know what to say about the new baby.

"We couldn't split them anyway, it's not like it would be fair to any of them to take them away from you."

"We'll have to decide together. All three of us."

"Yeah, it'll have to be."

"I suppose she's probably going to feel even worse."

"You would know, I suppose. 

Do you think she'll want to speak to you? Do you want to speak to her?"

"I can't imagine resolving this without talking to her. I admittedly don't know what I can say to her right now. Sorry for accidentally stealing your entire life and everything you care about? - of course, maybe it all really belongs to her anyway."

"I don't think that's a helpful way to look at it. The fact of the matter is, you're both here now." 

"I suppose we are."

She takes a deep breath and then hugs him, burying her face in his shoulder. This still okay?

Hug. 

You're still the same person you were yesterday. And this isn't your fault. 

No, but the situation isn't the same as it was yesterday, either. Or - I guess it is, but our understanding of it is now very different.

Of course it is. But – I don't owe you any less because of what I owe her. 

Well, that definitely makes me feel an embarrassing amount better, even if I am not entirely sure that it's - possible, for you to successfully be the thing you are for me for two people at once.

Maybe once we find the lich's notes I'll be able to duplicate myself.

That would certainly make a lot of things easier. It probably involves lots of horrible blood sacrifice, though.

The way he did it, I'm sure. But people are always resorting to horrible blood sacrifices just because they can't be bothered to think of something clever.

I suppose you are probably the world's leading expert in how to achieve great things that others have only achieved via horrible blood sacrifice.

Thank you. For - I don't know. It's scary to think about not having enough of you. I keep wondering if I should be falling back into - thinking about what I want from this situation first, and only communicating about things once I've determined what that is and how best to get it. It's not a way I've been tempted to interact with you for a very long time. And I don't want to now, either, but - well, before there was only one of me.

He understands. It's much the same reason he doesn't want two wives: already, he has to watch what he tells the one Naima, so that he doesn't betray the confidence of the other. It's not that he can't imagine wondering all the time what she might be keeping from him – he can, and with very little mental exercise. He doesn't want to. 

Please don't do that. 

He likes problems he can solve with magic. 

It did strike me as something you wouldn't like at all. I'll do my best to keep being open. It's just - nerve-wracking.

And it's not that I don't think it's possible for someone to be a good spouse to two women. Or even that I think it isn't possible for you. It's just - you remember the conversation we had about it, before we got married?

I remember. I believe you asked me to consult you before deciding to marry anyone else. 

It seemed like a very reasonable thing to ask, at the time. I was trying very hard to be reasonable, then. - you know, I also had an item on the list about not wanting you to hit me, and then I never got around to saying it. It just seemed like there was no possible way of saying it that wasn't either insulting or risking sounding unreasonable.

And then, do you remember, when we went to talk to Saira about the vows? That poor woman, I don't think I understood – 

She was so confused. And so concerned, about whether you were going to attempt to declare yourself legally incompetent in some misguided attempt to legally protect me from your future self - I probably could have helped more, but I was enjoying every ridiculous and perfect thing you said too much to end it -

- not her, actually, it dimly occurs to her, but she doesn't really feel like noting that -

We really didn't know what we were doing, did we? No more than we do now. 

We really didn't. I don't think I could have imagined how well things were going to go beforehand.

Maybe I'm being insane. Maybe there's more than enough space in my life for two of me, given how little time I typically have for my life anyway. Or maybe this really is terrible, but it's because I'm actually a lich-created monstrosity who's a danger to my friends and my husband and my children, which I thought we were done with, and not because sharing you with a version of me who isn't a lich-created monstrosity will leave me with half of the relationship I currently have with you and mean I am no longer the partner who you face everything with or prioritize above everyone else.

I am admittedly still scared about all of those things. Even though I understand that it's - we can't leave her.

He wants more than anything to promise her that nothing will change, but the other Naima – the first Naima – will want just the same thing, and he can't give the first place in his heart to both of them. He knows what Félix would say, if he were here: don't be so full of yourself. The first Naima might not want anything to do with you. You haven't been much of a husband to her. 

We can't. Do you want me to change her back now, or wait until you're done with your route for the day? 

Oh, right, my route. 

...I selfishly want to spend more time with you here, talking, before the other Naima is a part of our lives and is never not a part of our lives ever again, and my snap guess is that given how you treated her before she will want you to have unbooked her and apologized and assured her that everything will be fine as soon as possible after you knew, and of course I suppose that it is better for the people waiting if I get back to tapping them and not having marital drama.

...what do you want, you being the other involved party here?

He wants the two Naimas to get along like perfect extensions of a single self, and failing that he wishes they'd show some sign of comfort at being in the same room together, and failing that he wants her to stay here for moral support. No point in dwelling: he's not getting any of it. 

Oh, I'm a simple man. Just as long as you're still speaking to me and we have the lich's phylactery by the end of the week, I'm satisfied. 

Is there some reason I'd want to talk to you less rather than more right now?

Because he made a promise he can't keep. 

Not now, but I don't like to underestimate my own ability to make things worse. 

...I want to say that you should probably be more prepared for both of us wanting more of you rather than less, but actually given how I was feeling at the beginning of this conversation I guess I am not actually entirely sure that's true? But it's not - 

- if either of us ends up talking to you noticeably less, and we haven't been clear about being upset about something, uh, I think I would assume that we're trying to avoid taking up space rather than being angry with you. I'm going to try very hard to be open and honest and clear about how I'm feeling, but - this is sort of one of the more challenging situations in which I have had to do that with you.

....Yeah, ironic detachment was never going to work. 

I'm afraid that if I try to do the same it'll end in pitting the two of us against her.

Well, you can be open and honest and clear about how you're feeling with her, too, right?

About how I'm feeling about you? You wouldn't mind that? 

I don't know exactly how to feel about that, but I am more scared of you not talking to me than about you talking to her about me.

I devoutly hope she feels the same way. 

Obviously if we disagree a lot about a lot of things that is going to cause some problems. It seems - unlikely, except insofar as we have asymmetrical preferences about one another.

You can tell her anything you want about me and not consider it a breach of my privacy, for now. I want you to keep talking to me. The thing I am most scared of is that you will stop talking to me. Or - that I will be less important to you than I once was. And that's probably what she's the most scared of, too, so you should feel free to talk to her about me if it makes it at all easier to continue being honest with me in return.

- actually the thing I am most scared of is that I am a horrible lich-created monstrosity probably grown for malicious purposes and this might have bad effects of some kind even if we do destroy his phylactery, but, you know, relationship-wise.

If this actually makes things harder or is terrible then we can revisit it.

I'm not worried about your being a horrible lich-created monstrosity grown for malicious purposes. That is, it looks quite likely that you were created by a lich and I'm sure his purposes were malicious – oh, that can't be very comforting – but it doesn't much signify, does it? The thing he made is you. 

And I know you. I've lived with you, shared my mind with you, upset the natural order of creation with you. I'm sure that lich was very frightening when we were small. But now – whatever he intended, I can't imagine it matters. We'll fix it. Very few people have succeeeded as thoroughly as we two at surpassing our creators.

I suppose you're right. It's certainly no worse than what we expected to happen to me when we got married in the first place.

I should probably heal people. I don't want to, but she'll want to talk to you without me there, and I really should try to be reliable. Just - can we talk more when I get home?

Of course. Ideally the three of them, but he can wait to raise that notion until he's spoken to all parties concerned. 

All right. I love you.

And she can plane shift out and return to work. She supposes she's lucky that her primary work requires almost no ability to think about anything complicated.

He's not ready to have this conversation, but then, he doesn't expect he's going to be. 

Freedom. 

It's a weird experience, being turned into a book and coming back. It's a bit like being killed and waking up in your clone. There's nothing in between the spaces, as if one didn't exist at all for a while.

"Did you determine what I am?"

"You're exactly what you think you are. The lich did create a clone – a perfect copy, all your memories, all your abilites, you link to Wishbone, and no, I can't explain how – but that's not you. You're the original Naima.

I think it happened about a month after our wedding. I think you've been in that cave ever since." 

It's monumentally inadequate, of course, but – 

"I'm sorry."

"Oh."

She wants to ask if he knows what the other one is, but he just said he didn't. It's hard to think; she's not sure if that's her missing headband, or the week without seeing anyone, or a side effect of being booked, or the enormity of the situation.

"The other one, she's - you don't know anything else about her?"

"I'm going to go back for the lich's notes and try to figure out what happened. It's been four years, and I didn't know anything was wrong until two hours ago."

Well, they didn't know each other as well back then - but that's not fair, if she has all of the other one's memories, it's not as though she doesn't recognize herself in them. Or, well, thinking back to who she was right after they saved Isarn - that's so long ago, so hard to remember all the specifics of how her attitude has changed since then - there was a sense in which she was a different person, a person she likes much less well than the person she is today. Or, at least, the person she thought she was today. But it's not a person whose transformation was sudden, or implausible. It felt natural.

She wants a hug. She wants to cry. She doesn't really have any idea how Elie is thinking of her now and isn't confident what will happen if she acts like she would have a week ago. Or - like the copy would have, a week ago.

"Are the memories I have from since then accurate?" 

"Yes. Which suggests some limitations on how the psychic link between you could have worked, because Naima – the other Naima – was mind-blanked or in other planes for much of that time –" 

He cuts himself off. Magical theory is a particularly cowardly way of avoiding the subject at hand, and he doesn't know what she wants. He should be able to tell, but he's gotten lazy, relying on their psychic rappaport. She might be furious. She might want to pack up her children and never speak to him again. She might want him to tell her that of course they'll be disposing of the copy now – but no, she's Naima. He knows her better than that. 

"We can figure that out later. What do you need right now?"

- she stops in the middle of trying to think of the next mature, responsible question to have about the situation, the next thing she ought to think about before letting herself feel anything. It sounds like a real question, a question meant for Naima, not for a stranger who thinks she's Naima and who he's trying to be polite to on account of her being very confused and having traveled for six days to get to him.

"A hug?" she says, trying not to hate the tremor in her voice.

Yeah. He can do that. 

She hugs him tight. She sobs, but only once. It turns out she needs to know that he'll let her cry on him more than she needs to cry on him right now.

"I need my magic items," she blurts. The words come out like vomit, like they always do at times like this, when she isn't insistently preventing them and being reasonable. "Not all of them, necessarily, maybe, I realize this is a horrifically inconvenient thing to need when many of them can't easily be duplicated, but I don't even have a ring of sustenance or a basic headband right now and it's awful, not having anything at all while you and she have all of your normal things. I need to see Wishbone, to talk to him and prepare my spells and stop feeling unnervingly helpless. I need to see the children, I know I've gone longer without them before but I need to see them this time. I need to talk to Catherine, or maybe Ione, so you aren't the only person I can talk to about this - actual Catherine, I mean, she'll have better advice - and I need to know who we're keeping this secret from. I need to know what we are, to one another, soon but not immediately if you need time to think about it. I need to know what's going to happen to the copy. I need to know more about the copy, what she is, what all of the implications of this are. I - might need you to apologize for how you treated me when you thought I was a random person, not because I think you did anything wrong whatsoever, it's just that it hurt and it still hurts and I need to hear that it was based on false information and doesn't apply anymore - I might need the telepathic bond back but I assume you still have one with her and I'm not really sure whether it'll be the same, but I hate not having one -"

It is too much, she knows, too many things to need at once - but Elie has asked, and the twenty seconds she spent trying to be strong and responsible hurt, and she's terrified that if she doesn't get all of the need-vomit out now, while the offer is open, then there might not be another offer that successfully convinces her that she's allowed to ask for whatever she needs, and then she will have to keep all of the needs inside her forever, budgeting enough of herself to be strong about them. The need-vomit feels safer than risking that, right now. At least if Elie actually cannot handle this many requests, he will fail to address them, or tell her that he can't, and she will be able to know which ones are too much, and afterwards she can direct her strength at bearing whichever hardships are actually necessary for her to bear.

It's probably bad form to feel a great wash of relief when one's wife is sobbing into one's shoulder, but thank gods, those are some concrete things he can do. It's not quite vanishing into his workshop for three days and making the whole problem vanish in a fit of concentrated magical brilliance, but he'll take it. 

"I can get you the basic items right away. I have my old headband of vast intelligence, you can use that until I have time to make another one. Everything except the earrings and the robes of the cerulean pharaoh I can probably duplicate – and if you tell me what you want in a set of robes, I can do something there too. Wishbone is with the other Naima right now; she's out on her healing circuit. And I had Rasima take them out when we still weren't sure what was happening. When we go back to the material I'll tell everyone to come back home, and we can tell Alfirin you need to speak to Catherine tomorrow. We probably should tell Alfirin all of what's going on, because I want her help trying to understand it, but beyond that it's up to – well, it's up to the two of you. I wish I could tell you more about what she was, but I don't know, we both thought you'd want to be turned back into a person as soon as possible so that's what we did. I don't have the things for a permanency here but we can put the telepathic bond back, I can have two – " 

Or ideally one with the three of them but he doesn't think either Naima would go for that – 

"And I feel awful about what I said before, and I'd never have done it had I known. I feel awful for having let any of this happen in the first place, but that doesn't change the fact that you are my wife. It's just – it's just that she is, too."

She's not sure she's ever felt so many emotions at once in her life. She feels - relief, that he's holding her and agrees that he's married to her and is not afraid to tackle any of the dozen problems she's experiencing right now. She feels scared, that neither of them knows what's going on with the copy, or whether the copy has some hidden goal that might trigger before any of them are capable of taking the lich out of the picture. She feels a little stab of pain at the idea that he's decided that he's also married to the copy, but - 

"I understand." They both thought - " - you've spoken to her?"

It isn't until she hears the accusatory edge in her voice that she realizes that of course he spoke to her, they have a telepathic bond, and now she can add embarrassment and shame and jealousy to the list. The other Naima probably wasn't such a hag about the situation.

"You have to understand – oh, that's not fair. This is all very new and you don't have to do anything. But if you can, I'd very much like for you to try to understand that this is someone I've shared my life with for four years. You know that. They're your memories too."

She is going to bury herself further in this hug until she stops feeling sick, how about that. 

" - I know. Sorry. I'm - overwhelmed, not angry." She is also a bunch of other things, but she doesn't think angry is one of them, apart from maybe at herself, and she really feels like that shouldn't count. 

"When you're feeling ready, I badly want all three of us to talk. But that can wait." 

"That makes sense." She takes a deep breath. She feels - scared, and wants to talk to Elie about it so that he can come up with ideas for how to respond to the problem, except that part of her is totally convinced that if Elie's first instinct was to talk to the copy and not to unbook her and talk to her it's because he's implicitly thinking of the copy as one that he has an actual emotional connection with, as the person who is really his wife, and not the person who is also his wife out of dogged desire to stand by his promises. It does not feel very safe or very comfortable to think about talking to Elie as she would have a week ago, not if it's possible that his heart is mostly with the other one.

- but if she pulls away from him unnecessarily, and the other one doesn't, then he will belong to the copy even more, and that thought hurts even more than talking about her feelings while feeling like the second favorite, even though talking about her feelings still feels like it might hurt really quite a lot in this situation. All of her feelings are incredibly ugly right now, and if he hadn't been so forgiving of every embarrassing thing she's ever said for four years, she would be pretty sure that he was going to be disgusted with her. But he's never been disgusted with her before - even if it was technically someone else that he wasn't disgusted with - so -

"I understand that this is probably necessary. I admit that it feels kind of scary right now."

He's scared too. He's scared of the hitch in Naima's breath when she asked if he'd spoken – dear gods, they're going to need nicknames – and he's scared of heavy little pauses and thinking about who he goes to first. But Naima has enough to worry about without concerning herself with him. 

"You don't have to do anything before you're ready."

"Okay. I - think that I probably need some time - more than two minutes, anyway - but I am not sure if that's the only thing I need. I'm honestly having trouble thinking about exactly what those things are, here - "

She should take a moment to think about that. She's - well, she's scared of what the outcome is going to be, but really even more scared that seeing them having a conversation with her will make it obvious that they know how to talk to one another and she doesn't - not that this wasn't already obvious from the last conversation the three of them had together, even if that one probably shouldn't count -

" - maybe I could use a list of things we're going to need to talk about."

"The children. Who we're going to tell what's really happening, and what we're going to tell everyone else. The hospitals and the healing circuit – actually, before that, you should try to prepare spells and see what abilities you have. 

...That said, taking a few minutes before we try to put our lives back in order might not be the worst idea."

"...yeah." Deep breath.

"We shouldn't figure out everyone we're going to tell and everything we're going to tell them until we know more. Plausibly until we've - how many days has it been?"

"Day and a half, outside"

At least he didn't keep her booked for any significant time longer than he needed to, then; part of her unclenches a little at that. "Plausibly until we've handled the lich and whatever his plan was, assuming you haven't had a chance to yet. I don't want any large group of people knowing about this until it's no longer a vulnerability. But I should talk with the party and with her before that."

"We haven't dealt with the lich – it didn't seem like a priority until you showed up. 

Do you think you're ready to talk to her?"

It has always been the right decision to talk to Elie about her feelings before. It has taken a while to stop hurting, sometimes, but it has always worked out in the end. Although, technically, she does think she made the right decision in avoiding talking to him about her feelings until she was sure that she wanted to marry him and not resurrect her late husband, but that was only because she didn't know what she actually wanted, then -

- and she doesn't know exactly what she wants now. But whatever it is certainly involves Elie liking her, and the main reason talking to him wasn't a good idea the one time it ever wasn't was because she didn't know whether she wanted him to see her as someone who might be a wife to him at all. She's pretty sure that consideration no longer applies.

"I am noticing myself feeling enormously tempted to stop talking to you about how I feel until I've figured out what I want to happen, but intellectually I expect that that would almost certainly be counterproductive for getting any of what I expect that is.

I'm - scared of her."

"I'm very glad you told me instead of doing that. – She said the same thing." 

She makes a ridiculous sound that cannot quite decide whether it's a laugh or a sob. "See, on the one hand that makes me feel better, because if we come up with the same ideas and responses to things then maybe I can trust her to reliably behave in ways I think are reasonable - and maybe I don't have to worry about actually being worse than her, given that she's the one who actually did almost every tremendously good thing that I've done and it's occurred to me in the last minute to wonder whether I would have handled everything as well as she did if I were the one here and not her -

"- and on the other hand it makes me feel worse, because, if she's thinking the same things that I'm thinking then she's scared of me, too, and I do not have an enormously good track record of being kind and reasonable to people I'm scared of, it's just been... four years... since this has especially come up."

"You've grown a lot in the last four years, and not only in power. I know what you're going to say: she has. But I've read the book, Naima – every thought, every memory she has, it's there. In some ways this would be easier if you were more different, but you're not." 

Nod.

"I can probably manage to be civil. I should prepare spells and get some basic items and.... wear something that wasn't selected by a lich, probably, if I want to give myself every advantage at being reasonable."

"Do you want to wait here while I fetch some items and some clothes and Wishbone?"

"Wishbone should stay on the healing circuit until the end of the day, I think. I don't want to tip people off that something has happened. But I can wait for items and clothes, yeah."

That's a relief. He wasn't looking forward to telling Naima – other Naima – argh – that he needed to take her dog. 

"Done." 

It'll take him about ten sidereal minutes to gather everything and come back. 

She'll wait, and change into something that makes her feel somewhat more like herself, and then come right back to him for another hug.

"Thank you. Do you need anything, right now?"

"No." 

Wants, yes, but that's a different story. 

"You're sure? This must be - destabilizing." And she's realizing now that she doesn't actually know what to do with herself until the other gets back. She's not used to having large stretches of unscheduled time. Normally she would spend any she did come across with her husband or her children or the pile of de-prioritized papers at her desk, but every action she can think of seems fraught, right now.

"I think you're dealing with enough yourself just now." 

"All right." She's not really sure that there's much she can do to deal with it at the moment, but - "I suppose we should head home and give time a chance to pass, then."

"Diobel or – I thought Isarn. I'd like to avoid having to explain anything to the children until we've all gotten our story straight." 

"...right. That's - sensible." It's not very productive to let it sting, is it. "Isarn is fine."