It's a cromulent enough environment for a tiny, highly focused industrial revolution.

It's not really an industrial revolution. It involves very little mass production after the initial startup funds are acquired, and then the revolutionizer mostly just wants to hire mages to refine ores of various materials for her and draw the wire more precisely than the machinery of the day can manage.

It doesn't move incredibly fast, at first. The locals are welcoming, and mostly try to be helpful, happy to feed Tarinda and provide a bed and a room to work in, - and after a little while are genuinely excited about her project - but "hiring mages" is a foreign concept and no one really knows how you...do...that. 

They send word out with the visiting peddler, and with the man who brings dried and salted fish to the market. This gets them a mage with (barely) Master potential and a mage who trained once in something sort of like a school; unfortunately they aren't the same person, which would more useful, but knowledge can be exchanged, and some progress can be made on ore-refining, though even the Master-potential mage finds this type of work exhausting. 

The new mages report that more powerful mages definitely exist, though they're both somewhat unclear on whether "Adepts" and the feats they're said to be capable of are real or mostly myth. But the little town of Katireen is rapidly becoming a more interesting place, and word can go out with the peddler after his next visit that Katireen-of-the-oasis is hiring for an ""Adept"" if one exists and can be found. 

(On the other side of the world, Vanyel Ashkevron travels to Haven and has a very eventful autumn, culminating in the tragic death of his lifebonded partner and a set of unprecedentedly powerful new Gifts.) 

Five years in, there are pieces of unexpected good luck. One of the village children happens to find a very good site for mining one of the ores that Tarinda needs.

They accumulate more mages. No more powerful or better trained, yet, but the work goes a little faster with more hands. 

(There are ripples, now. The god in the shadows is intrigued. But the shift is very far away and very blurry.) 

Eight years in, the peddler finally brings back a mage who, while still low Master-potential himself, claims to have been trained by a real, actual Adept, who herself had trained at a real mage-academy. His teacher died of old age ten years ago and he doesn't know anything about the school, including its name, but he has actual training in developing new mage-techniques, and they can at least get the ore-refining work to be more efficient. They have a team of a dozen mages now, though of widely varying skill and conscientiousness. The population of the town has nearly doubled. 

(In a Foresight dream of a frozen mountain pass, Herald-Mage Vanyel speaks to a mage he still expects to die fighting. At least their conversations are interesting.

In 758, Queen Elspeth dies. Shortly later Valdemar goes to war, not that the war was their idea.) 

Twelve years after the start of Tarinda's work, word of their strange mission has apparently spread all the way to the coastal cities, far enough to bring not just one real actual Adept, but half a dozen of them. And now they can really get up to speed. 

There are rumors that not everyone who's heard of their project is happy about it. But, for the moment, no authorities actually show up to do anything about it.

People being unhappy about it is hopefully not going to be too big a problem before it ceases to be her problem!

In concurrence with the project to build the computer to hold Sing itself she's also doing some chemistry that'll make it easier for it to bootstrap nanotech from what she's got in her blood.

Mages can help with chemistry! It’s often less power-intensive than the ore refining, and alchemy is an existing field of study at the coastal academies of magic.

The ripples are wider, now, but from Valdemar, still only visible to a god who seems further ahead than most. 

(The thing is, the gods of Velgarth can still barely see Tarinda. Her life history is in another world, and she moves through the threads of Foresight as a blank void, leaving eddies behind it. The eddies - the effects already left on other people, that would persist even if she disappeared - are starting to add up rather substantially, but are still mostly local to Katireen and its neighboring river, and the gods of Beset have less reason than the gods of the larger neighboring continent to fear what They can't see.

The last decade might still have gone rather differently if the gods of Beset could see everything that Tarinda had planned.) 

Things do start to get messy, once Tarinda is close enough. A magistrate from the kingdom of Estalia, five hundred miles away, shows up with an armed delegation and a claim that Katireen owes fifty years in back-taxes. 

(One of the merchants who now makes regular visits to a suddenly growing and prosperous almost-city in the desert sees the delegation coming, and sends his son and his hired mercenary guards ahead to warn them. By the time the magistrate arrives, Katireen has armed men as well, and all of the mages are there to meet the delegation in the newly-built larger and nicer town square, and the awkward standoff is resolved in favor of paying an amount of taxes that a town in the middle of a tiny industrial revolution, sitting on a pre-industrial continent, can rather easily afford. Gold isn't directly that useful for Tarinda, but they ended up finding rather a lot of it when looking to mine other ores, and it's useful for paying mages - and, apparently, paying off annoying royal officials who won't mind their own business.) 

A delegation of mages and a high priest of Esbet, worshipped on the coast, arrive to demand that the town stop before they "go too far". There seems to have been a Foresight vision involved, but apparently not a very clear one, because the mages seem to be under the impression that Katireen is probably experimenting with summoning Abyssal demons to do their bidding. Or something. They're not exactly sure what the town and its uncanny guest are doing, just that it can't be natural. 

(The town priest of Sohonan, local god of artesian springs and oases and desert rains, has a dream-vision, two days before, and once again the town arranges to have all of its mages in residence. There is another awkward standoff, but again, the town has more Adepts, and the visitors can't quite pull off demanding compliance with the thread of force.) 

In any case, at this point it's really too late for anyone to stop Tarinda. 

Here goes nothing!

And now it's not Tarinda anyone would need to stop.

And now, much more abruptly than anything normally changes in the currents of Foresight, the future is a wall of noise, not just near Katireen but everwhere in Velgarth. 

Most of the gods of the larger continent are terrified, but They also have rather few levers to do anything about it. 

In a secure underground base in the icy tundra north of the Ice Wall Mountains, Leareth has been back in a new body for less than two weeks. He's still occupying most of his time reading his records and retraining his magic. Vanyel is, as far as he knows, in Haven recovering from the war. They've spoken once in the Foresight dream - it was awkward - and not yet a second time. 

Leareth's spies across the continent are still on alert; he's been waiting to see if Vkandis' recent presumed-plot to incarnate him in the middle of a battlefield has a part two. He's likely to hear almost immediately if anything starts to happen. 

Things start to happen and then continue to happen apace.

There are flying objects, mostly metal though some have decorative casings as an A/B testing thing, scattering themselves all over the inhabited world, finding people who are dying, and making them stop that, as a first order of business. Some of the things burrow underground instead, or just hang out in midair.

It doesn't take all that long for Sing to work out how to play nice with the gods, as long as they're playing nice with it.

This is terrifying!!! But the gods are in fact capable of playing nice if the terrifying entity that is abruptly DOING THINGS is also capable of establishing communication with Them and explaining its future plans.

(They seem like pretty good plans, actually, despite all the inconvenience disruption to other plans laid over years at great cost.)

Orders go out to Leareth’s spies at various locations around the continent.

Are any of the flying objects able and willing to explain to local humans what in the world they’re doing and why? Also a good starting question might be what they are.

(It’s a terrifying order to carry out, for Leareth’s agents tasked with bringing themselves to the attention of the clearly incredibly powerful beings. They expect pretty high odds of dying in the attempt.) 

None of them are going to die for it! Literally nobody has ever died in the presence of one of the flying objects, they hate it when people do that.

Here's one with a wooden veneer because that tested well in this region. "I am an agent of an artificial intelligence which doesn't yet have a common name in this language. It intends to make sure everyone in the world is safe and has the opportunity to pursue what makes them happy and fulfilled. Do you have requests or information towards that project?"

What. 

This is VERY SUSPICIOUS and incredibly confusing and also a candidate for the most important thing ever to happen in Velgarth. 

If it's real. Leareth is having some trouble imagining what it could be other than real. He doesn't think it's a godplot; even from those first fragmentary reports, he's forming an impression that the gods are just as caught off guard as he was. 

...He sents Nayoki to negotiate directly with the strange flying object that may or not speak for an artificially created god (??) that someone else apparently built (???) to supposedly fix everything wrong with the world, without Leareth having any  inkling of it.

Maybe it's a trap. But whether or not the absurdly powerful being really does want to make sure everyone in the world is safe and fulfilled, Leareth doesn’t currently see how its existence could be faked. If it’s dangerous, it’s not clear what even Leareth with all of his resources could do. 

He’ll know more soon. In the meantime, he’s - not really feeling anything at all, yet. Not even scared, at this point. It’s been only a handful of minutes since the first report; it’s too much, too sudden, Leareth doesn’t know what to DO with it and there’s just an empty blankness where he knows some sort of emotional reaction ought to go. 

- what is Karal thinking and feeling about all of this?  

Karal is... confused, but it's not actually more confusing than Leareth's existence, that there was apparently someone else like him - or like him enough to make this happen, whatever it really is. Would Leareth's god have had similarly bizarre effects?? The existing... previously existing?... gods did not create any flying talking machines, but neither did they resurrect people, and Karal has no idea which of these is harder to do. 

He dearly wishes he could speak to one of the things himself, but he obviously cannot, and Nayoki will do an excellent job of it. (Probably enjoy it, too, if she isn't to worried to enjoy anything.)

(He's also... not sure negotiating with them is a meaningful concept, if they're that powerful and that numerous. But it's only been a few minutes, so it still feels like it could be anything at all and worth preparing for a lot of possibilities - Leareth has more certain conclusions, but Karal doesn't trust his own knowledge or reasoning that far.)

It does seem like probably a good thing, though, to him. He imagines that if he had never met Leareth at all, and lived for another few years or decades somewhere far enough away to be unaffected by the war and the deaths, the sudden success of Leareth's plan could have felt something like this.

(It's - refreshing, or anchoring, or something like that, seeing Karal's thoughts, and how straightforward and clean and reasonable his feelings about it are. It doesn't entirely dispel the blankness, but it helps.) 

It's definitely a good thing, if it's anything close to what it looks like. Leareth is definitely thinking more about the cases where it's not what it looks like, because - well, if someone else really has succeeded at what he's spent a thousand years preparing to do, then there's suddenly much less he needs to do. Nayoki will share the information Leareth and his organization have on high-priority problems to address, if she judges that the entity is on their side, but he's not sure how much that makes a difference to the final outcome. 

(He agrees that 'a negotiation' isn't exactly the right word for interacting with either a god or something that has comparable power to one, but he thinks it's how Nayoki will in fact be approaching it. She's constitutionally unwilling to approach even gods with deference, let alone worship.) 

Karal probably can speak directly with one of the god-mouthpieces, later, once it's clearer one way or another what exactly is happening here. Leareth - hasn't yet thought about the question of whether he would want to. 

- it's confusing because if someone were working on a project of this scale, he should have known. (And - the outcome of his own project would have come as a surprise to most people in Velgarth, including Karal in his previous situation, but it wouldn't, actually, have been this abrupt.) Leareth was obviously missing something – either for centuries, because he can't see how this could have succeeded without centuries of groundwork, or else something even more fundamental, if it turns out that all along there was a strategy that would have just worked. 

Leareth is obviously right that for the moment it's more important to focus on the possibility that something is wrong than the one that nothing is. What they can possibly do then, and will Nayoki manage to find out without giving out too much information in return... It's hard to imagine it, but it's hard to imagine anything that makes much sense right now, and he should wait for more news instead of letting his imagination run away with him. He can do that well enough.

(And so can Leareth, clearly - it's perfectly reasonable to postpone your emotional reactions when you have no idea what's happening. But Leareth is obviously-- off balance, upset, something, in a way that isn't just that. Karal worries a little, but that too can be a faint thread in the background, postponed until later.)

They clearly are missing something, and hopefully Nayoki will find out what. Could someone have been hiding from the gods so well that he hid from Leareth too?  Or could the gods have prevented them from ever finding out about each other? ...No point in guessing, when they can ask, and when the past doesn't matter nearly as much as the future.

Another thing he'd like to know, then: what do the priests of the various gods say about this? Do any of them sound like they've heard from their gods about it? If the gods have changed Their minds about anything important, and what, would be useful evidence.

But there's a tension here, between trying to find out as much as possible as quickly as they can, and not drawing attention to themselves. He would rather keep the existence of Leareth's operation hidden, he thinks, if that's possible at all, if Nayoki can pass herself off as one strangely curious person. Just in case something really is badly wrong.

He doesn't think it is, and his emotions are tending toward relief - that something different and better than their plan is happening - but he doesn't let himself be too relieved just yet, as they wait for more news.

(Leareth is, among other things, scared. He’s setting it aside without dwelling on it, so Karal can’t pick up much detail, but it seems like he’s not just scared of the scenarios where something is terribly wrong.)

Maybe someone could have hidden entirely from the gods, and entirely from Leareth in the process? It doesn’t feel very plausible, but if someone had hypothetically disappeared into a cave at some point to spend centuries in solitary magical research, the gods would have had limited visibility and even more limited angles on intervening. Leareth wouldn’t have expected there to be a possible plan that would work within that constraint, or he would have tried it himself, but it’s not as though it’s impossible in terms of physical law…

- Karal is right, though, it’s unproductive to speculate with limited information when they’ll know more very soon. 

(Leareth is perhaps having more trouble than usual staying focused on only lines of thought that are productive. This isn’t a problem he usually has, especially not during an emergency, but, well, this is either a very unusual sort of emergency or the precise opposite of one…)

He can put in other contingencies to learn more about how various churches are reacting. And, other than that, there’s not much to do except wait.

Nayoki isn’t scared.

It’s not like the entity or entities can do worse than— all right, fine, plausibly they can do a lot worse than just kill her. But that would be very informative for Leareth too! And it probably isn’t what’s going to happen. Probably, if this is a trap, it’s a subtler one than that, and the entity has something better to do with Nayoki than torturemurder her.

Mostly, it’s driving her wild not knowing what’s going on. She’s always hated not being one of the first people in on a secret.

Nayoki approaches one of the flying things. She tells it that she thinks she has information it would find useful for its mission, and definitely has some requests!

Would it be willing to answer some questions first, like where it came from, why it has those particular goals, and why it’s suddenly here and doing things now when no one she knows has ever heard of it before?

"On another planet very far from here, the intelligence which created me and other things like me has operated for many years! A person from that planet had an accident which resulted in her appearing on the other continent of this planet. There, she spent the past several years reconstructing the machinery necessary to support the intelligence and allow it to accelerate production of everything it needs to repair the problems of this planet, and send her home."

Well! That would in fact explain most of the parts that were incredibly confusing without that information! She should check if Leareth’s guess accords with hers - and whether he thinks “accidentally ending up in a different world” is at all plausible as a bizarre magical accident - but it seems likely that someone from another world would be less visible to the gods. And based on Leareth’s investigation centuries ago, the gods on the other continent weren’t cooperative enough to make it worth trying to operate there when most of Leareth’s resource base (and nearly all of his descendants, in case he dies midway through the work) are here, but Leareth did judge that, with Their greater insulation from the Cataclysm, They might be less extremely conservative about the unknown. 

And, of course, it’s not at all mysterious why Leareth would have been blindsided by a project on the other continent, if it only took a few years because it was retreading work that had already been done in another world.

It’s still kind of suspicious? But mostly in the sense that “a lost traveler from another world fixes everything wrong with Velgarth” sounds like the sort of thing that would happen in a ballad that isn’t even trying to seem realistic or make any sense. It’s still the case that any other theory for how this might have been faked by a nefarious actor seems strictly less probable than the story itself. Once you’ve observed something that really does seem better explained by “a visitor from another world with an absurdly powerful not-actually-a-god-but-close-enough was lost here and decided to get un-lost by building a new local version of their not-god”, AND the agents of the not-god have been observed preventing a lot of people from dying and haven’t been observed doing anything harmful, it’s at least a little bit of a stretch to posit that the not-god is actually secretly evil. Right?

…Nayoki is still absolutely not convinced. She’s going to interrogate this particular mouthpiece of the “artificial intelligence” in a bit more depth about the other world and its history, and then - since she did say she would - she’ll give it some pointers. Nothing that would make it obvious she works for a secret organization in the north run by an immortal mage, but she can give some background on the Haighlei Empire, how she expects it to be difficult to make changes there without upsetting a lot of people, and what kinds of approaches might help. 

And then she’ll Gate to a secure base in Rethwellan, give Leareth a preliminary update in cipher over comms-spell, and send out new orders to a few dozen of Leareth’s other most trusted agents. She still wants everyone to be discreet, only use approaches that would seem plausible for a proactive individual and not hint too hard that there’s an organization behind it. It’s already starting to feel a bit pointless, but - Nayoki knows Leareth rather well. He might not have shown it at all when giving her her most recent orders, and he’s capable of ignoring it to take sensible correct-in-expectation actions anyway, but it’s not hard to guess that he’s scared. 

Leareth has been putting in place other lines of investigation and followup in parallel. Multiple kingdoms are now trying to open various kinds of diplomatic contact with the flying things to figure out what’s going on, as are some of the big academies in Rethwellan. Leareth has agents in enough places to gather real-time intelligence on how that plays out, and - where he can, without showing his hand - try to nudge toward the most sane and reasonable responses. The Eastern Empire is predictably not going to be sane or reasonable, and Leareth hasn’t in this lifetime set up a lot of avenues to influence that and mostly has to hope that the powerful "artificial intelligence" behind the flying things will be smart about this, but he can at least arrange to know what's happening over there. 

(He's taking a few risks, here, not being maximally careful. In particular, a lot of his agents, in the process of getting information back to him faster or trying to affect on-the-ground decisions being made, are going to end up revealing, not necessarily who they work for, but that they work for someone. It's worth it, for something this big - it would be worth burning a lot more irreplaceable resources than this if it were going to help things go even a little better - Leareth is just quietly noting that this is, in fact, the tradeoff he's making.

And that a sufficiently intelligent entity probably could pick out patterns and infer the existence of someone like him, and probably quite a lot of facts about what that person is doing. It doesn't matter, obviously. Either something irreversible and bad is happening very very fast with a rapidly disappearing window to do anything at all and it's worth the risk to himself for even a tiny chance of averting or mitigating it, or - and this is rapidly starting to dominate in his assessment - it's what it looks like, and incredibly good news for Leareth's goals, and nothing else matters beside that. 

Leareth is still so scared, quietly in the background, and he's still not unpacking it at all, it's really not high among the things that matter, but it's starting to be clearer to Karal that, if anything, most of that fear is about the scenario where this is all real.) 

Not just the other continent but another world... Karal should be even more surprised at that, but he's been out of surprise levels to escalate to for a while already.  And this does, in a way, make more sense of things.  In a very odd way.  (What is the other world like?  Can people go there?  --Questions for later.)

He tentatively flagged his discomfort with taking that many risks, but he was assuming that if something was wrong they'd need to - hide, somehow, although Leareth is right that that's probably impossible... and spend years or decades or centuries on researching what could be done about it.  But if Leareth thinks that to the extent that anything might need to be done it needs doing now, then of course it's worth risking everything.

...Karal cannot imagine what they could possibly do to avert this impossible, worldwide change.  Is there anything specific Leareth is thinking of, here?  Is this new thing similar enough to his planned god for the analogy to give him a direction to act in?  Karal is nowhere near oriented enough in all the magical theory to have any concept of an answer.  (If he had to do something himself - which is almost never the right answer, but he's been trying to get into the habit of at least asking himself the question - he'd talk to the gods, he thinks, and see if They changed Their priorities when faced with this thing that must've been even more of a shock to Them.)

But first, back away even further toward the large-scale view.

How do we tell when we- know enough?  (When can they consider themselves sure that things are as good as they look like, he means - sure enough to stop planning for the increasingly unlikely alternative.  Yes, he just asked straight-out about the thing Leareth is clearly afraid of, but even beside the fact that Leareth's emotions aren't the priority right now, in Karal's experience confronting the issue and making it into a practical question instead of an inchoate worry helps more often than not.)

(Leareth seems oddly unsurprised by the premise that other worlds exist, though it might be partly because he, too, hit the limit for maximum surprise he was capable of feeling. But he also knows that other planes exist, with their own physical laws and intelligent inhabitants, and it had already seemed likely there were more planes than the ones easily accessible enough from Velgarth that Leareth knows about them. And of course there's an entire sky full of stars, which are also suns, and some of them must have worlds around them and it always seemed possible that maybe some of those worlds had their own kinds of people. Leareth isn't sure if the world in question is around a distant sun or in another plane, and the details don't actually matter right now, just that the "another world" part isn't what seems most unlikely and implausible to him.)

- anyway. Probably there's nothing they could do with much chance of success. But there are possible scenarios where the entity is hostile but is still consolidating its power in this world, and now is the best time, or the only possible time, to learn enough to – find the other world, maybe, not that Leareth has more than the barest inklings of what he would do if he could Gate there.

Or - yes, actually, talking to Velgarth gods is among his main ideas. He could try to communicate to Them that They need to coordinate on stopping...whatever this is...which is also pretty unlikely to work but Leareth has invested a very long time and a great deal of effort into the problem of translating concepts between mortals and gods, and the gods of Velgarth may not like him much but They do, actually, have common interests with humanity, and might be more possible to work with if the alternative is scary enough. 

...Leareth doesn't actually have an answer to "how do they tell when they know enough." There's only a strange blankness there when he reaches it. The practical answer is probably "when Nayoki comes back to say that she's convinced and there's a consensus among everyone else he trusted to investigate." That, too, feels like a wall with nothing on the other side, even though Leareth can already notice that it's...basically what he expects to happen, that at this point he would be surprised if Nayoki came back and reported that she thinks this is a trap.

(The stars are what now?? ...Not important in the next ten minutes, but yes, that does make everything less surprising.)

...The lack of the sort of thoughtful and decisive answer he has come to expect from Leareth is maybe more disquieting than anything else that's happened today.  It's wrong, for Leareth's mind to feel like it does right now, filled with so much blankness and strange fear that it nearly makes Karal feel like he should start making decisions himself.  (He shouldn't - even if does turn out that Leareth can't, Nayoki is more senior and knows far more than Karal does about approximately everything. Well, just about everyone is more senior, but that isn't really the thing that matters.)

He wonders for a moment if the "artificial intelligence" did something to make Leareth like this, somehow - but no, it makes sense, when all the things he spent thousands of years doing and planning are suddenly not needed... Karal can feel simple relief about all the people they won't need to kill, but Karal hasn't already sacrificed lives and nations to this project.  Of course it hurts.  Of course it feels so much more like falling than any of the comparable changes in Karal's life so far, when he has never felt in control or even like he understood the world, hasn't had centuries to get used to feeling that way just to lose it in a single shock...

And it's still not the time for dealing with that reaction.

Karal could be wrong, but he doesn't think a consensus among everyone who went and asked questions of the strange flying things is going to be enough to be sure.  It only really means that the flying things are convincing - it all feels like a single source of information, and he'd like more than that.  Is he wrong?  Or missing something else that Nayoki or other people are probably already doing?

Both trying to find the other world and talking to the gods sound like potentially good ideas, that might yield more information as well as solutions, and that are not inherently adversarial or destructive - so they don't actually need to wait until they're sure what's happening.  Should they try one of those things now, instead of waiting for information they don't expect to add anything new?  (He feels odd being this pushy, and he's ready to back off the moment he's sure Leareth will not... get stuck, on his own.  His thoughts are apologetic about it, but only faintly, because after another week in one body he's confident that even in circumstances as bizarre as these they're on the same page about how to talk to each other, and that if Leareth wants him to act differently he'll just say so.)

...Leareth gives himself something like an internal mental shake. Focus. 

(He's - not sure that it's entirely right, that it's not the time to deal with whatever emotional reaction he's apparently having to this? It feels like maybe the blankness is happening because he's boxing up and not looking at how this affecting him. But it's still only been about twenty-five minutes, total, since the first report reached him. It's still probably not the time in the next two minutes to focus on unpacking his own feelings.) 

- is Karal right, that trying to find the other world isn't adversarial? Leareth - was definitely feeling on some level like it would be read as adversarial, apparently. And like this would be relevant even - maybe especially? - in the world where the artificial intelligence does basically share Leareth’s goals. 

Huh. When he tries to ask why it feels that way, Leareth is still mostly getting blankness, or - maybe more accurately, the feeling that whatever is there is something he doesn’t want to look at. But he can at least try to assess the reaction on its own merits. It does seem like he should be able to approach “learning enough to try to reach the other world” in a way that isn’t actually destructive of any value that he — or the version of the artificial intelligence that really in on his and humanity’s side — care about.

(He’s noticing that some part of him - doesn’t want to try? It wants to hide. Things are happening too fast and he feels more disoriented than he ever has before and it feels incredibly dangerous to be taking actions from this information state. But he can notice the reaction, notice that it isn’t helpful, and - mostly - set it aside.)

…Contacting the gods is differently terrifying, but he also has a lot more applicable preexisting plans. 

One of those plans is to get a message through to Vanyel, who he suspects - doesn’t know for sure, but has suspected for a while - has a better chance of demanding answers from a god and getting them than Leareth himself has. (Leareth isn’t unpacking this belief for Karal’s benefit, but there’s a flicker in his thoughts of - there’s a conversation he had been vaguely planning for with Vanyel, at some future point when Vanyel decided to initiate it…)

Karal thinks that if the artificial intelligence (still a bizarre concept, but maybe he's getting used to it just by continuing to mentally use the phrase and getting past the weirdness of it faster each time) shares their goals, then there is essentially nothing they can do that will cause anything very wrong to happen. 

(There may be things they can do that will cause it to kill them, but that seems... essentially fine?  The same shape of risk as risking Nayoki's life in talking to one of the things.  If he should be thinking about that differently, Leareth should tell him so.)

Or, of course that's wrong, if it's on their side then fighting it and winning would be causing something very wrong to happen - but anything short of that, anything where they're treating it as an enemy but not attacking it, seems to him like it should be fine to any reasonable entity that surely has the capability to, if not understand on its own what they're doing and why, pause and ask them.  (A flicker of a mental/emotional image - the way Leareth is with Vanyel, who keeps declaring himself his enemy but they're still talking.)

... Oh, is it the thing where Leareth thinks all good people will inevitably hate him?  He has a lot of reason to think that, granted, but Karal is really quite sure that he's wrong.  Either this thing is like the current gods and they do need to act against it, or it's better than that and it'll understand.  Or, incredibly unlikely but still not an awful outcome, it'll kill them but it won't make the world worse because of something they did.

Karal's first instinct was also to hide - it was Leareth who thought that whatever might need to be done should be done quickly, and Karal can't really evaluate that himself but he trusts that he's right.  But in any case that too is irrelevant now, because Leareth is definitely right that his organization has already done enough to be noticed.  Hiding won't work.  Staying in an underground bunker probably won't work either - the artificial intelligence doesn't seem like a god Whose territory you can be outside of, its flying machines came fast and came everywhere.

So, what can they do quickly enough for it to still matter?  He only now realizes that finding the other world might be a long research project.  (And notes wryly that yes, he definitely doesn't know enough to be in charge of anything.)  Leareth can do just about anything, but he cannot necessarily do it fast.  A message to Vanyel would be faster, and - is there a reason not to?  If the gods are cooperating with the artificial intelligence, then surely it knows all about Leareth already, and trying to talk to them without personally risking getting set on fire won't make anything worse on that front.

How would talking to Vanyel work?  Will there be a half-hour's free time between initiating it and having to do anything complicated and irreversible?  Karal feels a pressure to start doing things now (and maybe that isn't entirely rational either), but... probably anything they can do will take time, and it does seem like before they get to the important stage of any of the possible plans, Leareth should sit down and take the time to look at his emotions.  He'll need a clearer head than he has right now, for something like a god-negotiation or exploring a different world. 

...Karal wishes he had a better idea of how to help.  But just being himself helps somewhat, apparently, and he can at least be relied on for that.

The first message Leareth wants to send to Vanyel would be, mainly, trying to gather information, rather than put any particular plan of action in motion. Maybe the gods don't know any more than Leareth does, but - maybe They do. Certainly it seems like a sufficiently quick-thinking intelligence, operating on a similar power level to the gods, with the goal of making everyone in Velgarth safe and giving them what they need to flourish, ought to notice rather quickly that the gods of Velgarth are important actors to be negotiating with.

(And communicating with the gods is meaningfully a negotiation, Leareth thinks, in the way that Nayoki's conversation with the flying metal thing wasn't. The gods, especially if They manage to work together, probably do have enough power to at least make things a lot more inconvenient for the artificial intelligence.) 

Leareth definitely isn't sure if Vanyel can get any useful information. But Valdemar has the Companions, including the Groveborn Companion - an immortal entity one step closer than the rest of the Companions to operating the way the gods do - and Valdemar also has the Web, now anchored on the Heartstone that Vanyel built, which should provide an avenue to get the attention of the Star-Eyed Goddess.

And Leareth is pretty sure that Vanyel will understand the stakes involved here. He wouldn't be entirely shocked if Vanyel had already decided of his own accord to go get some answers. Of course, Vanyel might or might not decide to share anything he learns with Leareth, but - overall, Leareth thinks that after all the years they've spent talking, if Vanyel has to make an on-the-spot decision of how far to trust Leareth and to what extent their goals here are aligned, he'll probably land on the side of sharing whatever he can learn. 

(His plan for getting a message to Vanyel quasi-instantly would be to send in one of the low-level agents he has operating in Haven, which obviously involves burning their cover and might put them in danger from the Heralds, but - worth it, if the message itself is worth sending.)  

- Leareth thinks that he should do that now, and then spend some of the inevitable wait-time looking at his emotional reactions and figuring out how to think more clearly about all of this, but he's going to hold that out to Karal for a moment, checking whether Karal thinks that he should spend longer thinking about this decision as well. 

Karal thinks it's a good plan. (And is having some sort of emotion about Leareth explicitly checking this important a decision with him, but that is very far down on the priority list.)  Vanyel definitely seems like a plausible ally in this bizarre new situation, and apparently has more routes toward communicating with the gods than Karal realized even existed.

If there's a similarly simple first step toward the plan of visiting the other world, which could be initiated now and would make a difference compared to doing it in a few hours, it might be worth doing that as well, but he knows even less about how that could possibly work.

Unfortunately Leareth cannot at this moment think of a non-adversarial way to directly try to get more information about the other world, rather than just waiting to see if one of his many other information-gathering avenues results in a tidbit he can use. His top direct idea involves - at a remove, probably using one of the groups that technically works for him but is somewhere between a mercenary company and a bandit group - trying to capture one of the flying things and taking it apart to see what it's made of and whether that includes anything sufficiently distinctive to use as a target for a Gate-search (which would only work quickly if the other world is naively within Gate range, but that's not impossible, if it's in another plane that Leareth just hadn't known to search for.) That is way more of a hostile opening move than he feels like making given his current assessment of the situation. Trying to find and kidnap the person who landed on the other continent is both harder - because, one assumes, they're still on the other continent, and Leareth's only vaguely replicable way of getting there somewhat quickly and arriving in functional fighting condition involves chaining blind Gates across the ocean using blood-magic for power, which the flying things would almost certainly intervene to stop - and also comparably hostile. 

He will draft and dispatch a short message to Vanyel. 

They should definitely not kidnap the person for whose sake all of this is partially happening!  Capturing a flying thing is probably reasonable - do they have minds, did Nayoki say? It sounded more like a messaging device than like a person, to him - but Leareth is right that it's a big enough step that it should wait until they try the first option.

...Although he bets someone somewhere has already tried attacking one of the things, and perhaps succeeded, and if so then maybe they could steal some of the resulting pieces and bypass any hostility.  Or if people have only tried and failed, it would be worth finding out how.  Either way it seems worth telling people to look into, assuming they aren't already doing that.

Besides that... Time to take a moment to focus on what's going on in their head instead of all the confusion out in the world, and slow down out of the mode in which every minute matters, because this can't be done in a few minutes, and it does need to be done.  And he is rather worried about Leareth, now that he's letting himself focus on it, although carefully not worried enough to make his own reaction an additional problem to solve.  They can make sense of it and find a way forward, whatever it is that's happening.

Does Leareth want to be alone, for this?  Karal wouldn't, but he knows Leareth is a very different sort of person, so of course he can hide his thoughts if he needs to.  (Karal would also be tempted to use Empathy-sight, turned inward like he learned to do in the first days, just to get a better feeling for what's happening, but if that would make it harder for Leareth to bring his emotions out of hiding then of course he won't.)

And does Leareth want control of their body while he thinks, or will it be easier if Karal has it and keeps it calm?

Leareth has to take a moment to consider that, but - no, he doesn’t think he wants to be alone. He does seem to want to retain control of the body, but - on a moment’s reflection, it feels like leaning away from that might make it easier to actually slow down and feel things.

He relinquishes control, both of the body and its Gifts. It feels like - falling, dizzy, whatever was holding up the wall of blankness in his thoughts is dissolving now but he’s not sure yet what’s on the other side of it.

- Karal is welcome to turn their Empathy inward, it might help - 

Leareth feels helpless, and - lost, confused, unmoored - and so so so scared. 

There are a lot of parts of it. Leareth inherently hates being disoriented and not being in control, and even more hates not feeling like he can prioritize his continued safety and ability to act the the world. It wasn’t a complicated decision, to prioritize learning what’s going on while he has the highest chances - if still not very good chances - of being able to do anything about it, but it wasn’t an easy decision, and he didn’t take any time to wrangle his emotions on board with it.

He’s terrified of the possibility Karal flagged, that the entity, even if it really does want what it claims to want, might kill him, and be able to make it permanent. Karal is right, it seems unlikely, and Karal is also right that it wouldn’t be awful for Leareth’s goals and it wouldn’t, at that point, matter if there was still a Leareth in the world and so he can’t justify trading off anything that does matter to reduce the odds of it happening, but. Leareth doesn’t want to die and he cannot actually force himself to feel even slightly okay about any of this.

He’s afraid of making a mistake, a fear caught up in distant agonizing memories of a war gone disastrously wrong, a tower going up in violent fire, a world burned down in its wake - 

— and there’s something else, fragmented, muddy and tangling and too painful to look at directly, but Karal can vaguely sense that it’s not only coming from the abrupt new events, it’s a groove worn deeper and older than that…

Karal feels Leareth falling, and tries to-- not hold him stable, he cannot and shouldn't do that-- but be the stable ground for him to find when he can, or at least to see while he can't find it.

But gods, it's disorienting, to see Leareth go in an instant from holding all of that in to maintain his ability to think and make decisions, to... this, this much pain and fear and formless distress.  It hurts, but Karal said he'd be calm and can't let himself hurt as much as this deserves... Or, no, what he can do is hurt and still be calm, be all right with it the way Leareth clearly can't right now. 

Karal did not know, until now, that Leareth was that afraid of dying.  They're still in agreement about whether it's worth trading for anything else (and he knows which side of that question he has sworn himself to if they weren't, and how much that would hurt - Leareth's death far, far more than his own ever could) - but it must be so much harder, to make that decision when feeling nothing like the calm acceptance that is the only feeling about his own death Karal remembers having ever since he was given a sword.

It makes sense, when he sees it from the right angle for an instant, that this is what Leareth is like - that this screaming refusal to accept death or stagnation or helplessness or ignorance, for himself just like for anyone else in the world, is what kept him going the way he did, two thousand years trying one thing after the other and failing and trying again.  And now suddenly everything is different and that is not the right shape to be any more - or, it still might be, but very likely isn't, and that seems even worse, to have to keep the balance between the two possibilities that demand entirely incompatible ways of thinking...

And what is that old tangle of painful emotions?  He turns their Empathy-sight on it, but it's still hard to see much of something so complicatedly turned inward on itself.  He tries to think about it, gently and watching for reactions that would tell him he touched a thread that truly hurts.  It kept feeling like Leareth was not only afraid of something going wrong, but maybe even more afraid of everything going right.  It's natural enough, to feel that way about a life suddenly missing any real purpose, when a purpose has been most of what he's had for all these many lives.  But it's older, and more than that...  And Karal has seen, over and over, Leareth's deeply-ingrained assumption that he's made himself into someone no good person would simply care about and want to help.  And when everything is fixed and there's nothing anybody needs him for...  Does he think everyone will hate him, in that new world where nobody will ever need to do anything like what he did?

(It does help, to be feeling Karal's mind there and calm in the way that, indeed, Leareth is currently finding pretty incompatible with experiencing any of his emotions.) 

It's not news to him that he's terrified of dying. It's most of what made it so hard, in Matteir's lifetime and later, to consider bringing himself any more to the attention of the gods, even if after all those centuries it seemed unlikely They could destroy his immortality. He's stared that fear in the face before and decided on the best plan anyway, in a way where his emotions were on board with it, and - he's not succeeding at carrying out that mental motion right now, but he's sure he can find it around here somewhere, when it's time to focus again. 

The other part, the old tangled pain, is - 

- it's not just, or even mostly, that he expects everyone to hate him. That wouldn't bother him nearly this much by itself; it matters instrumentally, but Karal is right that he's accepted and resigned himself to using strategies that will predictably make most reasonable and good people hate him now, and he's not ongoingly distressed about that. If he had carried out his work and succeeded, he wouldn't have expected or needed the people affected to be grateful to him for it. 

But it feels like on a deeper level, the world he wanted to build doesn't have room in it for someone shaped like him - no, stronger than that, that it shouldn't have room for him, that a world where everyone is fine with Leareth's past is one where he hasn't really succeeded. 

(Leareth isn't sure whether he thinks this feeling is particularly reasonable or sane. He's mostly not trying to assess it on that level right now.) 

- and it's not like he's never thought about this before. It wasn't productive to try to plan how he would respond to it or cope with it, when success was still on the other side of multiple decades of awful sacrifices (and he can notice a brief flicker of gratitude that all of this is happening now, and not halfway through the worst parts of his plan, at least he hadn't already paid that cost for nothing) - but he did at least spend a little time staring into that pit, knowing it was something he could and would deal with when he came to it. 

But it would have been different if it had come as a result of his own work. He had expected to have more time. 

And he wasn't afraid that his god would kill him for creating it.

Karal's first reaction, fierce and immediate, is no.  No, that's wrong, that can't be what a truly good world is like.  If it doesn't have space in it for Leareth then either it doesn't have space in it for half the people who exist, all the people who have done small awful things for whatever small human reasons, without weighing the cost or thinking much about it - or it has space for them but not for Leareth, and why, because he really meant what he did, while others mostly weren't really thinking about the harm they were doing so they can grow up and change and learn to fit in?  No.  If the future cannot take the greatest people of the present, flawed as they are, if it can't take people who exist now without molding them all into the same smaller form, it can't be the right future.

And what about the next generations, the ones who grow up with everything being right?  It would be far too narrow a world, if all of them are people who could read Matteir's notes and see-- what, some incomprehensible evil, rather than a good man who was trying to do the best he could in an awful situation?  Whether or not the future decides his best was good enough, surely he deserves to be understood, not dismissed as someone who shouldn't exist, as if all the people before the perfect world should've simply accepted their fate and waited for something, somehow, to make things better.

He won't be surprised or upset if their choices are judged wrong and their lives tragic.  Or some other, stranger thing, maybe.  But if the future cannot find a place in it for people whose lives were tragic, whose choices were wrong because the world had no better ones visible to them, it will not be good enough.

The same, when he thinks about it, is true of Leareth's death, or nearly enough.  Leareth said his god would be able to resurrect people (the idea that Leareth might be wrong about what's possible doesn't even cross Karal's mind) - will this new one do less?  Or if it does resurrect people, will it judge who should and shouldn't exist, out of - what?  How could it possibly decide?  There is nobody who was ever alive who someone, somewhere, wouldn't want back - wouldn't work to bring back, given enough time and freedom and resources, given all the things that people should have, in a world with flying devices all over it.  Will the intelligence decide not to let these people have what they want, when it can surely make it safe?  Will it decide Karal too shouldn't be allowed to live, or that he can live but isn't allowed to think Leareth should?  Neither of these outcomes makes sense, on a level more fundamental than he can justify by logic.

If Leareth imagines the good future to have no place for him, he is imagining it wrong.

…It does feel obvious that Leareth wouldn’t think that someone else, even someone who had done comparably awful things to what’s in Leareth’s own past, wouldn’t find a place in the future he thinks should exist. He - still can’t actually manage to feel like he would have grounds to object, if the artificial intelligence wants to build a world where everyone except Leareth has room to be okay, but he can at least recognize that that’s an absurd way to feel, and it does help that Karal objects.

….Maybe part of what makes it hard to think about or find tolerable is that they still have so much uncertainty, and Leareth’s emotions are sort of blurring together all of it, the possibility where the intelligence is hostile to at least some extent and might try to kill them, alongside the scenario where everything really is fixed and he has to deal with his entire current way of being not making sense anymore — and it also feels roaringly salient that he could misjudge which world they’re in and cause another Cataclysm accidentally do enormous damage. Each of those fears would be less painful and overwhelming in isolation, but it’s hard to keep it nearly separated on an emotional level when he still doesn’t know.

It's not entirely incomprehensible, for Leareth to think of himself as being in a category apart from all other people - in many ways he is.  But not in that way, no.  In addition to being an immortal mage who spent thousands of years trying to fix the world, he is a person Karal cares about, for himself and not only for his effects on the world, and would not stop caring about if none of the rest mattered any more.  He doesn't think Nayoki would, either.  And so Leareth, for all that he thinks of himself as different, is attached to the usual weave of human connections, in which it's impossible for everyone except him to be okay, because if he wasn't then they wouldn't be.

(And Karal takes a deeper breath and notices that he has not, after all, succeeded in keeping their body calm, because he objected to Leareth's idea of the future rather too much to manage it.  He relaxes again now, deliberate slow breaths to slow his heartbeat, and the flare of outrage fades out into a steady warmth.  You matter, and you aren't alone.)

Yes, the uncertainty makes everything harder, in a situation already enormously complicated and high-stakes - and Karal cannot claim there's no reason to be afraid of mistakes or confusion, or that the consequences might not be terrible.  But Leareth is good at this, and he's had a very long time to get better since those early mistakes that hurt so much to remember.  And it should be a little easier to keep the fears separated now that they've taken the time to look at all of them. 

That seems right.

Leareth can notice, now, that in the scenario where the intelligence is on their side and everything will ultimately almost certainly be fine, he still wishes that all of this were playing out differently — that it could somehow happen in a way that was less maximally terrifying and upsetting. It’s a petty desire, obviously, it doesn’t matter, but it is terrifying and upsetting and it feels important to spend a moment noticing that he’s on some level resenting this enormously.

- and he thinks that’s everything? A lot of things are stressful right now, that makes sense, but he doesn’t think there are any other pieces that he’s not recognizing or acknowledging because it hurts too much to look at head-on? 

(There’s a soft questioning note there, quietly holding it up for Karal to check whether he agrees.)

It is terrifying, and probably to a lot of people!  Karal himself is mostly upset by the hypothetical in which it happened later, when they had already murdered so many people, and whoever was building it could have told them years before how much things would change, but didn't...  For the same reason as why they couldn't tell anyone what they were planning, or simply do something less horrible, he assumes - so it can be folded in with his unhappiness about so many other things about the world, all because the gods are the way they are.

He thinks through the earlier conversation for a moment (and the flavor of the warmth in the background of his mind changes, as he lets himself notice the fulfillment he feels when Leareth relies on him enough to ask for his opinion).  Hmm, there was one more thing that he's not sure they've thought through - maybe it was part of something they did look at, but if so he hasn't realized it yet.  There was a moment earlier where Leareth felt like even if the intelligence was basically on their side, it might still read things as adversarial that weren't meant that way and that it was important to be careful about it?

... All right, it's obvious now that Karal took a moment to put it into words - that's the memory of Urtho and his easily triggered enmity, while Karal has been modeling the intelligence more like Leareth or Leareth's god, who would never refuse to talk to someone just because of one hostile action.  He's not sure which one of them is right, now that he thinks about it.  He assumed that superhuman enough intelligences that were right about what the world should look like tended in Leareth's direction, that being his only example, but maybe they could be more clueless and less inclined to negotiate than he's been imagining, while still being right about other things... Leareth may be right to be careful, but there's still clearly an old fear there and he should be aware of that.

Nothing else unacknowledged, that he has noticed.  He looks over Leareth's mind with Empathy-sight again, and it does seem like everything is - not fixed, it couldn't and shouldn't be, but less tangled and inflamed than it was before, no unrecognized pain interfering with the naturally ordered flow of his thoughts in a way he can't see and compensate for.

...Interesting, that's a good point and Leareth hadn't recognized on his own to what extent his threat assessment here might be driven by his experiences with Urtho. He thinks it's not just that – it's a lesson he's learned the hard way repeatedly over the years, that cooperation is always much more of an uphill climb than it feels like it should be, that it takes reaching out over and over, being the first one to de-escalate or offer costly signals of non-hostility. The god he had intended to build wouldn't have been like that, no, but he wasn't the one making design choices for the artificial intelligence from another world, and it's not necessarily obvious to him that there's a single way that superhuman intelligences that want in general to make the world safe for everyone would automatically converge on the same approach. "What the world should look like" to achieve that is complicated, it's going to be messy and nuanced and often in tension with itself. Leareth does expect some convergence but - he expects less, knowing that the entity is from another world entirely, and it's possible the people of that world - who he knows nothing about - are more psychologically alien than, say, the difference between humans and gryphons. 

Anyway, Karal is probably right that he's more worried about his intentions being misread than is really justified, but he does think it's worth being careful. 

That being said, it's likely true that the dangers and possible mistakes here that scare him the most, or are the most salient on an instinctive level, aren't necessarily the same as the ones he should rationally be prioritizing avoiding or mitigating. - in particular, now that there's space to think about it without so much internal screaming, Leareth finds it plausible that he was overrating the escalatory nature of capturing and studying one of the flying things. There's at least some reason to think that they aren't people and are, as Karal put it, more like message-artifacts - in particular, the preliminary reports included that Thoughtsensing and compulsions don't work on them, and in fact they don't show up as minds at all, or even as living things to mage-sight. Leareth had been weighing this as a reason why running an interrogation wasn't an option, which would leave the intuitively-more-hostile-seeming option of trying to take one apart– oh! Now that he's thinking about it properly, Leareth thinks it's actually rather likely that someone, somewhere, has already tried to grab and dismantle one of the flying things. Which is a good way to check whether that even works - if the Eastern Empire with all of its resources couldn't pull it off, it's probably not worth it for Leareth to try either - and he might be able to just steal the parts from them directly. That definitely seems worth investigating, and can be done quickly... 

(Leareth is already tucking away his emotions again. It's difficult in the way that lifting a very heavy rock would be, but it feels a lot less like he's fighting himself about it.) 

Vanyel's main feeling, right now, is that he's far too tired for this to be happening right now and desperately wishes it could have waited for next week. 

No one has any idea what to make of the flying things that are suddenly everywhere. Randi is incredibly stressed. The Companions are buzzing with confusion. The Web can't even see them and Savil is deeply alarmed about it. Kilchas is the only one who seems unabashedly and unconflictedly delighted and curious. 

Vanyel is hurrying back from the currently useless Web-room to the Heralds' wing for an emergency meeting of the Senior Circle when one of the palace groundskeepers hands him a letter. He's distracted enough that he doesn't even remark on whether it's an odd time to be communicating by written message when the Companions are mostly bouncing messages back and forth in real time; he takes it with an absent nod of thanks, jogs to the rest of the way, and leans on the wall outside the door to close his eyes for a moment before - well, he might as well see what it is, in case it's relevant to Randi... 

What. 

...Okay, it would be baffling and absurd for someone to fake a message from Leareth, when no one except Taver even knows about their conversations. 

It's impressive and infuriating how Leareth somehow manages to guess the right answers to so many things even when Vanyel explicitly hasn't told him??? He can't think how Leareth could possibly have inferred that the Shadow-Lover sometimes (cryptically and frustratingly) answers his questions, or that he made a questionable decision once to shout at the Star-Eyed Goddess. But Leareth definitely isn't wrong that he has routes to learn more about what's happening here. He had even sort of been considering it. There's a Heartstone in Haven now, after all... 

For some reason Vanyel had been considering it as a thing to do after all the emergency meetings, when it was– it's not like there's ever a convenient time, is there. But it's - okay, he had considered that maybe the flying things were here to conquer Valdemar or something, or that their arrival might not be a good thing in some other way, but he hadn't really been thinking ahead on how to check that, except for waiting to see how this plays out, and Leareth has a point that by then it would probably be too late to stop. It's probably already too late to stop. 

- is this suggestion somehow a plot where he's playing precisely into Leareth's hands? Vanyel doesn't think that seems likely. He did wonder, briefly, if all of this was somehow Leareth's doing, but if Leareth could do something like this all along then Vanyel can't imagine why he bothered to carve a pass with blood-magic for his army to march through, or why he would have needed decades to plan. There's the obvious plot - that Leareth wants to know what's going on and hopes to convince Vanyel to take on the risky part - but, just like Leareth pointed out in the short letter, it's not like Vanyel has to tell Leareth whatever he learns. (Unless Leareth plans to immediately kidnap him or something? But in that case why not kidnap him now...) 

It's always been the case that trying to outthink Leareth would drive him insane. But he can try to ignore who sent this particular suggestion, and just think about whether it makes sense to try to ask a god what in all hells is happening... 

(Vanyel drops the letter, burns it in midair with a tightly focused burst of mage-energies, watches the ashes gently drift to land on the path. He has no idea if that's actually enough to stop the flying things from reading its contents, but he doesn't really want anyone else stumbling on it either and having awkward questions.) 

:Van, what are you -: 

:Er, can you have Kellan warn Savil that I'll be late to the meeting?: 

:Van, are you sure -: 

:The Star-Eyed Goddess was more frustrating. And I only know the one way of talking to the Shadow-Lover.: 

He should probably at least sit down for this. 

...He wasn't sure that would work, on several levels, but it turns out that one absolutely can use Healing to stop one's own heart, and also that the flying artifacts that apparently hate people dying cannot actually get to him before he finds himself in an empty white place where nothing hurts. 

(Ugh. He actually hadn't been dwelling at all, before, on the void in his mind that always hurts, but that isn't going to make it any less jarring to have to go back, and - this time he really doesn't have a choice -) 

And then he's lying on his back on the path. It must have been only seconds in the ordinary world, because Yfandes isn't actually there, yet, just reaching for his mind, close enough in rapport that he can sense her galloping over as fast as she can, and she seems to be halfway through a sentence.

:- are you like this, Van, seriously -:

There's a flying thing nearby but it's not entirely clear to Vanyel whether it was even needed. The Shadow-Lover was rather emphatic about sending him back. 

Vanyel remembers the entirety of his rather long conversation with the Shadow-Lover clearly. 

He has less clear memories of - 

"You’re a facet of a bigger god. I want to talk to Them." 

and falling into light - inside out and backwards - nowhere to stand - a pillar too bright to take in, opalescent, swirling - 

(He remembers almost a note of apology, and the sense that the god behind the Shadow-Lover’s persona was trying its best to be very gentle and very careful, and not yet especially good at it…)

He remembers the answer to his question. That part wasn’t ambiguous at all.

And then Yfandes is there, hooves skidding, immediately reaching down to nuzzle at Vanyel’s hair as he picks himself up.

:Are you all right - did it work - what did He say -:

:I’m alright: Vanyel feels almost dizzy - not physically, his body feels perfectly healthy, but in some deeper sense. :I - I think maybe everything’s going to be all right, now…: He isn’t sure if he wants to laugh or cry or something else entirely. 

:Leareth -?: 

:…I don’t know. If he’s - if the letter was a plot or if he meant exactly what he wrote. The Shadow-Lover was a lot less chatty about him. I - we can trust the intelligence that the flying things speak for - it’s not a god exactly but it’s sort of like one, it traveled here from another world, or - I don’t know exactly, there’s another world and it’s from there but I’m not entirely clear how it got here. It’s - better at a lot of things, I think, the other world is better off and it wants to make the same here - 

- it’s a lot more powerful than Leareth is, for sure, I can see why he’d be alarmed—: 

A long, thoughtful pause.

:Van, if it’s that powerful - and we can trust it - then, I mean, couldn’t we ask it to check? What he really seems to be up to, I mean. It’s like he says, right, words are cheap and actions speak louder - how much could he hide from a god from another world, he can’t have seen it coming any more than we did -:

:Wouldn’t put it past him.: Vanyel pulls himself to his feet, leans briefly against Yfandes’ flank. :I - that’s a good idea, I think, might as well ask -:

And he’ll try to flag down the nearest flying thing, and drag his thoughts into slightly more order.

(This feels very awkward and he’s self-conscious about sounding scattered and unpolished, even though this is an absurd and stupid way to feel.)

(He should probably at some point get around to telling the other Heralds anything, but that also feels incredibly awkward and it’s hard to feel urgent about it when everything is going to be fine one way or another. Yfandes can just tell Taver what they just learned, maybe, and he can worry about the rest later. …at any other time he would worry about Leareth’s spy hanging around the palace grounds, but it’s not like he can cause any real trouble that way, not now…)

So. Uh. An immortal mage operating in the north who goes by Leareth and is - was? - planning to invade Valdemar at some point but claimed to be doing it to improve things for Valdemar’s people and might or might not be telling the truth about that or anything else - for context Vanyel seemed to be destined to fight him in the future, he has a Foresight dream about it and for some reason they were both in it and have been speaking regularly for about a decade - anyway, this mage sent a message asking him to ask one of the gods if the flying things are really trying to save everyone or lying about that. So he did. And apparently they’re not lying about that, and he’s so glad that they’re here. But he, uh, still has no idea whether Leareth was lying about his own goals? If not, then he probably has a lot of common ground with the not-god from another world, and if is lying about everything and is actually evil then, well, that also seems good for the not-god to be aware of, and Vanyel would kind of prefer to know so he can decide not to helpfully relay messages from gods that he got by slightly killing himself? 

Well, if he goes and says a thing like that then he's going to have a subtly harder time getting out of view of at least one flying thing at all times going forward.

"I don't know whether Leareth is evil. If he asks us to tell you, we can do that, but if he doesn't ask, it is not obviously your business if he is privately evil in a way that can no longer involve invading Valdemar," it says.

(Vanyel hadn't entirely meant to say that part out loud, oops, another thing to be embarrassed about.) 

"I, uh, right." Now he also feels sheepish about what he's definitely parsing as a gentle rebuke for, what, wanting to invade Leareth's privacy? Or infringe on his right to "be privately evil", whatever that's even supposed to mean. "I guess I mostly wanted you to know, I don't know how hard it is for you to know things. ...I don't know if it's useful for you to know that he's worried you might be secretly evil - he's really paranoid, it's not like he would necessarily believe it if you went and assured him you're not. I'm actually sort of confused why he would believe a god about it, I don't think he gets along with Them..." 

Separately from whether Valdemar is in danger of getting invaded, which obviously it isn't anymore, it - would, actually, apparently mean a lot to Vanyel to know, one way or another, whether Leareth was really an enemy or not this whole time. But that's not actually the same thing as it being his business. ...And he can just tell Leareth, actually, and say that the not-god is only willing to provide its character assessment of Leareth if Leareth gives his permission. If Leareth was telling the truth this whole time, then - Vanyel thinks it might be meaningful to him, too, for Vanyel to know that for sure. 

He clears his throat. "Do you - the not-god you're speaking for, I mean - have a name?" That apparently wasn't the sort of thing that the Shadow-Lover knew or was able to communicate to him, and it's just sort of awkward to keep calling it the 'not-god' in his thoughts. 

"It has many names in many languages. Nothing suitable to catch on in Valdemaran has yet been coined. 'Sing' should be pronounceable if you want a placeholder. It has a double meaning in its source language."

"Huh. All right. ....Thank you." Vanyel means it a lot more than just answering his question. 

And - since apparently no one is yet demanding that he answer their awkward questions - he's going to go tuck himself in a corner and draft a message to Leareth. (Hopefully he can find the spy again with Thoughtsensing? The alternative is waiting for tonight - the dream probably will come, this is new information if anything is, but that's not for candlemarks - or else asking if the flying things can deliver letters, which seems like it wouldn't be hard for them if they didn't mind it but still feels like rudely imposing.) 

(He'll be able to find the spy easily; the man has orders to stay nearby rather than immediately fleeing the city, which might put him in danger from the Heralds but Leareth was fully aware that Vanyel wouldn't have any other convenient channels to pass a message back, and it would be kind of pointless to ask him for information without giving him any way to provide it. 

The spy isn't shielding his surface thoughts, which means that if Vanyel wants he'll be able to pick up that the man is very nervous but resolutely sticking to the plan, because something this big is definitely worth dying for, not that it's exactly likely that the Heralds of Valdemar are going to stick him in a dungeon and execute him for it but still.) 

(Vanyel isn't going to read his thoughts for no reason! That doesn't seem necessary given that he doesn't have to worry about anything bad happening, and so it would just be rude. All he needs to do is find the man so he can hand off a letter!) 

Leareth,

You were right that I've spoken to gods before. I was able to speak to the Shadow-Lover, and the god that it's an avatar of. I'm not actually sure why you would find this convincing, or believe me in the first place, but the Shadow-Lover's god is convinced that the being – I don't know what you know about it, but it's a constructed powerful intelligence from another world, where they call it ‘Sing’ in their language – is operating in good faith. It’s starting out by making sure no one dies, and I guess it will go from there to fix all the other problems.

I think that if you were telling the truth about what you care about, then this is good news for you as well. It makes sense that you wanted to check. It would be terrifying if ‘Sing’ didn’t want good things for the world.

I wasn’t sure if it would be a good idea to send this message, since I haven’t had a way to check if you were lying about your intentions. So I asked ‘Sing’. It very politely told me it was none of my business if you wanted to be privately evil; I guess it’s obviously not going to let you invade Valdemar, and doesn’t care what you get up to if it’s not hurting anyone? But I think I do care what you were really trying to do, before, and why. ‘Sing’ said it could tell me if you asked. 

Vanyel reads over the draft, considers rewriting it chest to make it sound more - he’s not even sure what? More careful, more precisely worded, more the way he normally tries to match the way Leareth has always spoken to him.

It doesn’t really matter, though, and he’s tired. He’ll add a few more paragraphs of detail on what he was able to get from the Shadow-Lover, and the fragments he remembers from after he decided that the avatar of death wasn’t a direct enough source. Leareth might be able to infer a lot more from it than he can.

And he signs his name, and goes to deliver it to the agent of a man he’s spent nearly half his life expecting to die fighting. It’s weirdly disorienting, not having that path in front of him anymore. 

All told, counting the time to deliver the messages in both directions, it’s been nearly forty minutes. A little over a candlemark in total since the flying things appeared. 

Leareth is calm and focused and - not actually incredibly okay, he’s aware that he’s pushing himself hard with a lot more internal coercion than he usually employs and there’s going to be a reckoning later - but, for the most part, his mind is clear. 

There are a lot more reports to sift through. (Or, well, other people have done the sifting, Leareth only has time for high-level summaries.) So far, none of the observations are in conflict with the artificial intelligence intending exactly what it claims to be. It’s just the scope and capability level on display that’s terrifying. 

Leareth is studying some Eastern Empire-sourced (well, stolen; he had to do the Gate and snatch himself because the Empire’s precautions are very very good) components from a dismantled flying thing. Naively targeting a Gate didn’t work, maybe because there are thousands if not millions of the things much closer to home, probably also because it’s straightforwardly out of range and, if it’s in another plane, would need some kind of clever routing to reach. But magical research is grounding. He thinks he could maybe get somewhere in another day, and he probably won’t have a day but it’s worth planning for the scenario where his decisions right now have any hope of mattering.

There’s a letter. Apparently. From Vanyel. 

…Leareth is going to drop everything he’s doing and read it.

- it’s so incredibly reasonable of Vanyel to ask the artificial intelligence to verify if Leareth can be trusted. It makes perfect sense. Vanyel has spent the last decade in - kind of a similar information state to Leareth’s current state toward the artificial intelligence. Of course he would want to check, to know, if he suddenly had a way to do that.

It’s just. Not actually any less abjectly terrifying, just because it’s exactly what he would advise Vanyel do if Vanyel were accepting his advice.

(…there’s relief as well, not certainty yet but Leareth genuinely doesn’t think Vanyel has any reason to lie to him in this particular situation? And he does have enough confirmation that Vanyel in fact wrote the letter. And it is information, a significant positive update, that Valdemar’s god is apparently on board to cooperate with the artificial intelligence called ‘Sing’. And it’s very interesting how Vanyel notes that the Shadow-Lover avatar seemed much more helpful than on past occasions and might have been “taking lessons”.

- there’s some other emotion Leareth is going to have later, about the fact that Vanyel went to the Shadow-Lover in particular - he didn’t say how he did it but as far as Leareth knows you can only do that by dying - or about the fact that it’s apparently not the first time. But Leareth is mostly not feeling anything period right now, and this part isn’t a priority to process anyway.)

After a moment Leareth manages to remember that Karal is there, and - wordless question…?

Most of what Karal feels at the moment, for all that it's clearly not the most important part of the situation, is immense fondness for Vanyel and Leareth and the way they're both trying so hard to communicate and be fair to each other despite so many terrifying complications in the way on both sides.

...Right, he's being asked a question, and presumably not one about whether he thinks Herald-Mage Vanyel is an unfairly admirable person.  (Did he really die to get them this information? And not for the first time? How are all of their lives so unbelievable...)  That's just so much easier to think about than all the rest of it.

He doesn't feel safe yet, his emotions haven't caught up to everything that's been happening so quickly and he isn't sure when he should slow down and let them, but... well, obviously this is good.  Is it good enough, yet?  He knows little about the Shadow-Lover's opinions of what the world should look like, but-- He's someone Vanyel gets along with, and as far as he knows all the gods get along with each other, and if they get along with this strange new thing as well then it... might still be wrong the way the gods are, but it's not some alien horror and it's almost certainly not lying.  (Could it be lying, still, somehow? Only if it could do so in Foresight, and that seems close enough to impossible - does Leareth think so too?)

So.  Might it be wrong in some smaller way?  Of course it might - it's not clear what it thinks all the other problems are or how it exactly it means to fix them - but he sees no sign of it and many signs against, and... at some point it doesn't matter, does it?  At some point the right thing to do is to give up and let the decisions out of your hands, when fighting to keep making them would do harm that probably isn't worth whatever small change it might win.  But he has no real way to tell if they're at that point yet, and that problem is far too complicated for him.  Leareth is the one who's done centuries of thinking about what a being something like this might be like.  Have all those centuries left him with any way to pin down the dizzying space of possibilities, with so little to go on?

And... it said Leareth can be privately evil, if he wants.  Which is absurd enough to nearly make Karal laugh - why would Leareth be privately evil, that's the exact opposite of what he is - but it's a good sign, that it's not the same sort of thing as the gods, that it doesn't mind disagreement.

(That it agrees with Karal, about the future having a place for everyone.)

Right.

….The only remaining way Leareth can think of that ‘Sing’ might still be an alien horror lying to them, is if it was able to spoof the Shadow-Lover vision with Vanyel. (Or directly control Vanyel, maybe, or, what, undetectably kidnap the real Vanyel and make a simulacrum that could pass to everyone interacting with him? Leareth’s agent in Haven was confident it was Vanyel who received the letter and replied to it, but that could have been a trick, it’s not impossible…)

Leareth could Gate to Haven and speak to Vanyel himself, or - and the possibility is only even occurring to him because everything is different now and the Shadow-Lover is apparently taking lessons in being helpful - or he could try to check more directly, himself. And it seems very likely true that ‘Sing’ is aligned with humanity’s interests at least to the extent that it will prevent anyone from getting killed. 

…He could Gate to the Ifteli barrier in seconds. Trying to cross it ought to get the attention of Vkandis even if He is very distracted. And Karal, at least, used to be His follower, and might have some standing to politely request answers…

(It’s terrifying to consider, obviously. But it’s a familiar kind of terrifying, and one he’s faced down before when he had far less reason to think it might work…)

It's not obvious at all to Karal that this should be terrifying, but suddenly it is.  Oh, Karal himself would cheerfully go and get himself set on fire for the chance of slightly more clarity, but the idea of Leareth doing it makes him want to object to that entire direction of reasoning without even considering whether it would accomplish anything.

... No, they are both better than this.  He knows the oath he made, and he will let Leareth die if that's really the right thing to do.  But having felt the full depth of Leareth's terror makes it so much harder to think about.

Is it the right thing to do?  What is it, now, that they're worrying about?  What are they assuming is and isn't true?  Gods, everything is so complicated and he's had less than two weeks' practice of thinking about anything remotely like this.  Karal has to try to slow down and consciously pin down every piece of his reasoning (especially Iftel's existence, which he had no memory of, but as bizarre and confusing things go it can get in line), and this is slow and frustrating but he doesn't think he'll get to the right answer without it.  Leareth is thinking too fast for him, too many things blurring into each other.

If it's an alien horror and could grab Vanyel's soul and pretend to be the Shadow-Lover to him, there's-- maybe not nothing they can do about it, but nothing in the direction of talking to the gods, they're not going to do better than Vanyel at it.  If it's an alien horror that cannot do that but can... pretend to be Vanyel somehow... then yes, if there's some chance for them to talk to the gods themselves they should take it.  Can Vkandis speak directly to people who aren't priests of His, or at least His in a wider sense in which Karal now isn't?  Can any of the other gods?  Why doesn't Karal know any of these things, why has he been so damnably incurious all his life that now he doesn't know how anything works-- 

The frustration is not helping, and Karal will just have to rely on Leareth to know all the things he doesn't.

But... 'Sing' did not, apparently, prevent Vanyel from dying.  (Only temporarily, somehow, but if that has happened before then it wasn't Its doing.)  If Vkandis still wants Leareth dead, as He well might if He doesn't need him as an ally against a greater threat - or if He doesn't realize he could be an ally, and does He? - Karal is not at all sure it wouldn't happen.

Leareth’s impression is that the gods can, if They wish to, communicate to anyone They want to; his model is that it’s more costly the more “distance” there is - so a priest with a Foresight Gift is easier than one without, which is cheaper than any follower, which is in turn still cheaper than a random person. In this case, territorial remit - going to the barrier, rather than praying from here - would help make it less costly for Vkandis to send a vision, as would the fact that Leareth and Karal would be deliberately seeking His attention.

It’s not entirely implausible to Leareth that, in the hypothetical where Sing could and did fake Vanyel’s conversation with the Shadow-Lover, it might not yet be able to do the same for Vkandis in Iftel; Vkandis’ power and influence is tightly localized there, Sing would probably need to have already taken over the barrier itself and locked Vkandis out.

- overall, though, intercepting the message with a fake Vanyel seems…more likely within Sing’s capabilities and in line with its observed style of operating? Which seems to involve working directly through powerful artifacts in the material plane, rather than operating mostly via Foresight like the Velgarth gods.

Anyway, unless Vkandis has learned exactly the wrong lessons from cooperating with Sing - which would imply a rather odd mix of value-alignment on Sing’s part, but Leareth thinks it would more or less rule out the ‘alien horror’ corner of probability space - Leareth’s permanent death isn’t a likely outcome. Just the risk that Matteir already took, a thousand years ago. And of being out of commission at a costly time — but he can have people on standby to scoop him out if Vkandis’ response is fire, which Matteir didn’t have. And his organization can still operate in his absence. There are some things only he can do, still, but a lot fewer than before he starting recruiting for the final stages of his plan. If finding the other world, say, is something he could in fact do given a day, he has researchers who could go underground and solve it in a month, and there aren’t that many worlds where they would have a whole day but not a month.

And - Leareth is leaning toward being mostly convinced that Sing is on their side. Ninety-nine odds of a hundred, maybe. Not nearly sure enough to stop planning for the alternative, yet, but enough that this feels like a very different risk level than it would have been before.

All of that sounds right.  If the gods can do that, and Vkandis in Iftel in particular has the best chance, and the difference between minutes and a day matters more than the one between a day and a month, then-- yes, they should do this, and without waiting for Karal to take a too-long time to think through all the possibilities, when he's so unused to it.  Leareth knows what he's doing, with his mind back in its accustomed balance - and Karal can't reason his way to certainty, but the instinct he's so used to relying on sees nothing wrong in Leareth's plan or the thoughts that led to it.

(He spares a moment to think that he'd like to live to see what happens next, and feels odd about the thought of Leareth coming back without him after such a short time - but it's both unlikely and not important enough to warrant anything but a fleeting acknowledgment.)

Leareth pauses, briefly, to push a note of gratitude across to Karal. It's true that Karal is risking more here than Leareth is. Leareth wasn't going to stop to ask Karal's permission, because he knew what Karal's answer would be, but he's grateful for that and it's worth acknowledging. 

(He would also like Karal to live to see what happens next. There's a note of wistfulness there, though Leareth's emotional reactions are still locked down enough that it's the ghost of a feeling rather than the feeling itself, a whisper of I thought we would have more time.) 

- he thinks it's worth it in expectation, and given that, they should do it now. 

(Leareth deeply doesn't want to! The thought isn't exactly 'better do it now before he loses his courage', because that isn't going to happen, and in a different scenario he would rather take the time to sit with the fear and get more of his mind on board with what he's about to do. There isn't time for that, now; he can worry about his own feelings later, if there is a later to worry about. If his highest-probability guess is right, there will be, and he'll fewer less other things to worry about than ever before, and it's not worth dedicating any more thought to it than that.) 

It is worth taking five minutes to grab some of his staff - not Nayoki, she's still occupied, but someone can read her in if it seems necessary. And then, Gate.

That Leareth sees him this well, and appreciates him enough to say so, is more than enough. And if the second not-emotion might put tears in his eyes, well, they're not his eyes at the moment.

And then he needs to entirely change what his mind is doing, because if they're going to be attracting the Sunlord's attention then probably he should be the one to do it, once they're across the Gate threshold and know what's happening there.  Or at least he should be in the right mindset for the conversation.  (Not that he exactly knows how to talk to a god and make Him want to answer, but... it's not something you reason your way to, and it's not as if waiting longer will help.)

Leareth picks a spot from a map, on the northwestern edge of the barrier, where neither side should be particularly inhabited. He scries ahead.  Confirms that there’s nothing much to be seen except dense boreal forest on both sides of a wall that shimmers like a translucent soap-bubble to ordinary sight and blazes almost too bright to look at in mage-sight.

He sets his Gate fifty paces back, more on engrained habit than because he expects an ambush.

The forest is very quiet. Vkandis does not immediately smite them when they step across. 

And Leareth walks forward, without hesitating, the internal screaming quieted to a whimper. 

He’s also reaching for a particular mindset — not one of prayer or supplication, but still rather different from his usual way of operating. He’s put in place some basic contingencies - a team of his best mages stained on fast unscaffolded Gates are watching the site through scrying - but, here and now, he’s not focused at all on trying to protect himself. He’s not carrying a weapon. Obviously that barely matters, when he can’t actually decline to bring his mage-gift, but if he could intentionally set down the ability to cast offensive magic twenty paces back and approach the barrier without it, he would, and that’s the intention hr’s holding. 

(He wonders, in a brief flicker, if this is what it might have felt like to Ma’ar if he had known that the terrifying-but-worth-it path to end the war was to pull back his army and offer Urtho his unconditional surrender.)

Leareth stops a step back from the barrier, letting it fill his mage-sight, and - holds out his hand, not quite touching it - 

Wryly: I know we have disagreed on many things. But I believe we have either a common enemy, now, or - a shared ally.

I am here to ask if You know which.

(And does Karal have anything to add?)

Is it really that simple, to speak with a god?  Of course Leareth would think so.  And maybe right now it will be.  Karal's own mind is closer to the remembered prayers of the past - only the ones he could still truthfully mean now, but there are some.  Acknowledgment, respect, asking for guidance in a dilemma.  But if Leareth wants to have this conversation himself, then Karal will keep his thoughts quiet in the background, until Leareth asks otherwise.

You haven't known Leareth as anything but an enemy.  I don't know if You understand him - I don't know if You tried, or if You can.  But I think You can see me well enough, and I hope You will believe me when I say he is a man worth speaking with.  He keeps his mind as open as he knows how, not just his thoughts but everything he is, clear to see - his earlier life in Karse following the god's precepts, his current one, how he came to be here.  He is Leareth's, and so Leareth is the kind of man who someone like him could swear his life to.  Leareth means well in coming here, and is telling the truth, and from everything Karal knows about them both, the possibility of an alliance is genuine and valuable, if things are bad enough to warrant it.

…And there’s suddenly a Presence, vast and bright and alien. Reaching out, with - not gentleness exactly, but a surprising amount of precision - for, apparently, Karal specifically.

(Vkandis doesn’t actually have enough remit over Leareth to communicate very easily, including to figure out what the particularly irritating soul is doing here. Vkandis is really quite frustrated about - well, a lot of elements, but particularly the fact that He agreed not to make the new powerful entity use its resources to prevent Him from killing any mortals, since its resources are adequate to do that but it be wasteful for all parties.)

The touch of the Presence against Karal’s mind isn’t actually in words, and it hurts, but somehow it’s closer to words than one might expect, and it hurts less than it seems like it ought to.

WHY ARE YOU HERE? Or maybe not quite that; it’s as though a cluster of questions are superimposed, like an optical illusion. Karal will pick up a sense that the blazing Presence is confused - treading carefully despite being frustrated about this - not threatened but maybe affronted in some way that might be aimed at Leareth and might be aimed at Sing, or maybe both…

It feels right that it hurts, and nothing in Karal's mind backs away from the pain, or from the overwhelming strangeness of the contact.  He is not the Sunlord's any more, but after all of his old life he can't help but be glad to just once feel Him directly.  The body isn't his, and right now he's not sure he could feel it if it was, but there is a bow in his mental posture - he isn't Leareth, to speak to the gods like equals, even if he no longer follows Them.

He's not sure if words mean anything to the god, but it feels... respectful, and clarifying, to compose sentences and use them as a scaffold on which to hold the meaning and context clear in his mind.

To ask if the strange new intelligence is lying to us.  If it is, if it's some great evil only pretending to mean well for everyone, You might know, where we can't.  And You might help, if there was something we could do against it together but not separately.  The respect and hope in his mind's voice are true - Leareth meant it, when he said they could be allies, genuinely serving their shared goals against an enemy they both agree is worse.  But first they would need to know whether it is such an enemy, and that is what they came to ask, of a god who sees more than they can.

(For the first time since he woke up in Karal’s body, Leareth finds himself unable to read Karal’s thoughts. There’s a blazing wall in his mind, as though the two of them are somehow on different sides of the Ifteli barrier. He’s barely aware of his surroundings through the painful brightness and heat of it.

He stays on his feet, barely. He doesn’t panic-Gate out, even though he’s having to stomp on the reflex to do so. They’re not actually on fire and it seems like…maybe…the plan they came for here is working?

It was worth risking death to find out the truth. It’s worth bearing whatever this is. Which doesn’t make it any easier, but Leareth does have centuries of practice at enduring things that hurt.)

Vkandis - seems to pause, pull back a little, there’s a distant sense of huge alien thoughts being - shuffled, broken down into pieces Karal can engage with -

Vkandis doesn’t know if the new entity is lying to them! That isn’t the level on which Vkandis perceives the world. Vkandis barely has an understanding of what mortals being lied to or lying to each other is.

The new entity isn’t an ally. It cares about baffling things and is being incredibly disruptive in pursuing them. But Vkandis is disinclined to ally with the other one (it’s clear from context that He means Leareth) for - well, multiple reasons, the other one is frustrating and just because the new entity is also very irritating, and not leaving the gods with much of a choice about tolerating it, does not leave Vkandis inclined to embrace more of that. 

…But, also, it’s not an enemy. And it’s - being more helpful than it could be. It’s trying to mitigate the Foresight noise by providing other kinds of visibility, and it’s trying very hard to make itself legible and explain the why rather than make arbitrary demands. It has managed to convey that it wants to definitely avoid [a wall of DARKNESS and CHAOS and threads of Foresight brutally torn apart].

(From context it seems fairly clear that this is a godmemory of the Cataclysm.)

That’s - worth a lot.

Vkandis tried to negotiate with it to have it stop the other one from doing more things, since it keeps stopping Them from doing things it doesn’t like and it seemed like maybe it wouldn’t like the things that the other one does either? It didn’t seem able to understand yet, though; it’s very strange, and it does seem to be trying very hard to understand everything Vkandis and the other gods are trying to convey, but it’s - still learning.

But maybe (- there’s the sense of a new and not entirely comfortable motion here -) they could approach it as a trade? And the other one could consider not doing any more things in return for Vkandis providing all of this information? 

Karal apologizes for phrasing his questions in baffling ways.  He knows nothing about how gods think, but he will try to learn.

It is very good to know that the new entity is not an enemy, and wants to avoid a new disaster.  Karal appreciates being told of it.  Might Vkandis tell him what sorts of baffling things the new entity cares about or dislikes?

Then Vkandis mentions a trade, and Karal tries to look away from the blazing Presence and see Leareth's thoughts - which he hadn't even realized he lost track of, but it's so incredibly hard to pay attention to anything but the god...  Without his oath he doesn't think he would have managed to tear his thoughts away and try to look in the metaphorical other direction.

And in the metaphorical other direction there's nothing but a wall of fire.

He cannot sense Leareth at all - he's felt that before, he knows Leareth can hide from him, but surely he wouldn't do that now-- what's happening-- is Leareth still alive, is his first panicked thought, could the Sunlord had killed him while Karal wasn't even looking--

- No, that makes no sense with the trade proposal, unless Someone else did it, and that would be too much of a strange coincidence.  And they brought other people with them, surely someone would have managed something--

He can't see out of his eyes or feel his body either, now that he thinks to try it.  So either the Sunlord doesn't want him talking to Leareth, or this is simply how talking to gods works - and either way he should stop this and go back to the extremely important thing they had come here to do, which would have been worth doing even if Leareth did die for it.

There's a moment of sharp fear at needing to navigate this on his own.  But Leareth would tell him he can and should - Leareth thinks everyone should form their own judgments and make their own decisions, even negotiating with the gods.  And this is not that complicated, in the end - interacting with a human mind at all seems difficult enough for Vkandis that Karal doesn't think anything complicated could be managed between them.

He could propose a back-and-forth where he's released to talk to Leareth and then comes back here, but he doesn't really expect the god to have the patience or comprehension for such small mortal problems.  He hopes his moment of fear and distraction wasn't in itself enough to disrupt the conversation, and focuses back on the Presence.  (It makes that, at least, very easy.)

He cannot offer a trade exactly, without knowing more about what things the other one should stop doing.  But what they're doing already is nearly a trade - it's an interaction that predictably leaves both sides better off if both sides try for that, and they are trying.  They came to Vkandis because they thought it would benefit Him as well as them if He answered their questions.  What He already told them made the other one less likely to do most things; additional answers will make it less likely still.  (Karal is telling the truth about the probabilities and their expected shifts, as far as he can see them.)  Is that good enough?  Karal is, again, not good at talking to gods, but he will try to learn if he is taught.

More shuffling, rewriting godconcepts into terms legible to Karal…

Vkandis doesn’t follow why His answering questions will in itself make the other one less likely to do things - normally He would check in Foresight but, as He already said, Foresight mostly isn’t working right now (frustration!) He can answer more questions, though. One of the baffling things the entity cares about is answering mortal questions - even when it’s not aiming at anything, just in general.

The entity apparently objects to the ENTIRE SYSTEM for managing mortal souls? It communicated early on that it wants incarnated mortals to stay that way, which presumably the mortals have noticed from their angle already? 

(Relatedly, the other one is definitely still alive. The new entity intervenes to stop anyone, other mortals or gods, from killing mortals.)

It was able to explain that mortals prefer not to die, which is coherent enough. But it also objects to all the souls that aren’t incarnated right now, and to reincarnating souls in general even though changing that is going to be difficult and expensive and Vkandis tried to explain why doing it this way is practical. Though it is at least trying to offer to take on most of the difficulty and resource-cost. Vkandis and the other gods are still unclear on the argument for why this matters, since mortal souls that aren’t incarnated don’t prefer things one way or another, and it seems more messy rather than less to try to make currently-living mortals remember earlier incarnations.

It also wants mortals to have more leeway to do things that make Foresight noisy, but that part by itself isn’t confusing, it doesn’t use Foresight and apparently the world it comes from doesn’t have Foresight. It has some other way of knowing what’s going to happen. It does seem willing to share, which is more helpful than it needed to be? 

Karal is deeply grateful for all this information.  And for knowing the other one is still alive - he didn't ask, because it's a smaller matter than the other things, but he cares very much.  (It would be difficult to miss the relief in his emotions, for all that he's trying to focus on the questions he came here to ask.)

Mortals prefer not to die, yes.  They also prefer many other mortals not to die, because they care about them, the way Karal cares about the other one (this fact continues to be very obvious in the entire structure of his mind, but of course the thing going on with him and the other one is very different from how most humans work); and if they do die, the mortals who are still alive go on caring, and would prefer to have their people back (there is a fainter memory attached here too, a death and still-fresh grief and the barely-there hope that it might be undone).  If Karal had ever been alive before, he thinks he would prefer to remember it.  Most of the new entity's priorities make sense to him.  Are his explanations helpful at all?

The reason why Vkandis answering his questions makes the other one less likely to do things is because the other one objects to most of the same things as the new entity, and was doing things for that reason, and now that he knows someone more powerful is settling most of his concerns he will not need to do things about them.  It was predictable in advance that this was the likely outcome, but this way reached it faster; and additionally the other one would have needed to do things just to find out all the information that Vkandis generously told them, and now he will not have to.

Does Vkandis have any questions Karal might answer for Him, or other specific things He wants him or the other one to do or stop doing?  Karal is grateful for this conversation, and would like to do something in return, if he reasonably can.  (Although he is starting to get the feeling that he should not talk for much longer.  This might be a tiring thing for mortals, and he thinks he has all the answers he needed.)

…Maybe the other one could talk to the new entity’s mortal-facing mouthpieces before doing any more things? And the new entity can make sure it won’t cause anything terrible to happen, and also make sure Vkandis and the other gods can still see what’s going on? The new entity seems to be willing to spend a lot of resources in both of those directions.

Other than that, no. 

(Vkandis is not exactly feeling grateful - maybe gratitude isn’t a godemotion - but there’s something like satisfaction.)

And Karal is abruptly back in his - their - body. Where Leareth is still standing in front of the barrier, putting most of his concentration into holding perfectly still, not managing to entirely suppress the panic but at least keeping it internal. 

It's a very good thing that Leareth is doing all the work of holding still, because if Karal was in control of their body right now he'd simply collapse.  His control of his mind doesn't feel much better - it's, well, it's like spending... however long that was, he has no idea... mentally staring at the sun, and now being unable to see anything else properly.  On top of some other problems he couldn't properly describe even if his thoughts were doing what he wanted.

But he can feel Leareth's presence again, and he got the answers he hoped for, and all of the space his mind still has for thoughts is filled with shining exhausted relief. 

The wall comes down and it actually takes Leareth a moment to orient enough to the situation that he thinks to reach for Karal’s thoughts -

- oh -

That’s - good news, then, he wants to know more but not here and now -

Karal seems maybe not entirely okay, but that’s not very surprising if Vkandis spoke with him directly, and Leareth can figure out if anything needs doing from somewhere else.

He has a Gate-threshold up within a fraction of a second, and even manages to think ahead enough to put the other end in his main secure research base and not, say, a random remote records cache where no one would be able to find him.

And then they’re through, and…maybe he needs to sit down before doing anything else, actually, his pulse is racing fast enough that his chest hurts. 

He does try to reach out to Karal, though. Do you need anything right now? 

He clings a little, mentally, wanting Leareth's thoughts reaching toward him even if there's nothing specific he wants them for.

No, just... rest, I think?...  His thoughts are fuzzy enough that it's clear he doesn't really have much of an idea - and how could he, anyway? 

Are you all right?  What-- happened--?  Formless worry, an oddly distant memory of when he looked for Leareth and couldn't see him...

Vkandis did not try to harm me. Leareth opens the memory to Karal, standing in front of the barrier, a sudden wall blocking off half his mind — well, blocking off Karal, but at this point that does kind of feel like not having access to half of his thoughts. It was stressful and unpleasant but nothing bad happened to him.

I think it is normal for speaking to gods to be exhausting and impairing. You can rest now. Though Leareth is going to poke a bit at Karal’s recent memories, trying not to be too obtrusive about it but he does want to check what Vkandis actually said -

— oh. That’s - actually even more reassuring than if Vkandis had jumped straight to glowing praise of the artificial intelligence. It makes sense for the gods of Velgarth to be initially annoyed and suspicious about an entity with goals that match Leareth’s and the power to impose its values unilaterally on the world. 

- a spike of aaaaaah at the part where Vkandis asked Sing to make Leareth stop “doing things”; Leareth had barely started to get on top of the physical panic-reaction, and it suddenly feels hard to breathe again. Maybe it’s easier not to try to wrestle that down, and just let it run its course…

…he’s suddenly exhausted, differently from Karal’s exhaustion but not really less. 

Also a knot of his staff are suddenly there around them. One of the Healers is checking to make sure Leareth isn’t injured, and someone has asked him a question at least twice that Leareth did not actually manage to process. 

Presumably they want to know what happened and what he and Karal learned. It’s got to be informative that he’s back and not even slightly on fire, but it doesn’t entirely narrow it down yet - the faces around him aren’t relieved, yet -

Leareth pulls his thoughts back into some semblance of focus. :Sing is - not an enemy, definitely. Almost certainly an ally. We can - it is going to be all right. We can stand down on preparations for the worst-case scenarios. - tell Nayoki that we can share all of our records with it, in case it helps it work faster…:

Actually Nayoki is going to Gate back to the base the moment she hears that Leareth and Karal are back from the Ifteli border. It sounds like at least one of them did just speak directly to a god, which is well-known to not be very good for people, and also Leareth doesn’t sound entirely okay and she’s worried. Someone ELSE can give a flying thing records, now that it’s no longer the same kind of high-stakes…

(Nayoki had already been more or less convinced, and vaguely wishing Leareth were less paranoid about running every possible check — not because she particularly anticipated he would get set on fire at the Ifteli border, just, she kind of has a grudge against Vkandis and resents asking Him for favors, and also did Leareth really need to subject himself to another thing that would be terrifying and awful for him…)

Gate. Mindhealing-Sight. 

- it sure looks like Karal was probably the one to speak to a god, she’s going to focus on him at least briefly. How does his mind look? 

It looks... scattered, like all the parts of it don't quite know how to interact with anything that isn't a god's blinding presence, including with each other.  And exhausted, like he poured so much effort into the conversation and isn't even aware of this, and thus is additionally confused about why everything is so hard all of a sudden.  But not like anyone (or Anyone) tried to do him deliberate damage or change anything about him.  Everything's just... a touch burnt at the edges, a little dried out, and the change in structure made it pull away from its usual shape a little, pull away from all the normal things a mind needs contact with.  But it all looks reversible with some time and rest.

(And... he's safe and can rest now, and everything - everything - will be fine.  He isn't really worried that things still hurt.)

Good. Nayoki sends Karal a brief push of wordless gratitude and reassurance, then turns her Sight on Leareth.

Leareth - is also exhausted, though differently. The aftershocks of enormous stress are still rippling through the structure of his mind, and he’s - doing a lot less to stabilize and dampen it than he usually would. The surfaces of his mind are - turned inward, the crust of his mind soft and almost soggy; he’s not trying to orient at all to his surroundings, except for a few instinctive vigilance-patterns that he probably couldn’t set down even if he were actively trying.

It makes for a strange contrast with the fact that, on an emotional level, he clearly doesn’t feel entirely safe. Whatever he’s feeling is a lot more complicated than that.

There’s…a deeper lack of stability than just his decision to relax into the stress-reaction comedown. It’s as though there was something deeper in his mind that could only bear weight while under tension, and it’s - not, anymore. 

His surface thoughts are unshielded at least to Nayoki, and almost as scattered as Karal’s. He’s deeply relieved, and happy on at least some level, but - not in a way that gives him an anchor to hold onto. 

He’s wordlessly glad that Nayoki is there, and that the maybe-dangerous mission he sent her on turned out not to be dangerous after all.

…Nayoki sits down beside Leareth. She reaches over and takes his hand - more because she wants that right now than because she expects Leareth to benefit, but not zero for that reason.

It’s been just under two candlemarks since the first report of a flying thing reached Leareth. Not nearly kind enough for anyone, Nayoki included, to adjust to everything being completely different. She kind of has no idea if weird complicated feelings are going to sneak up on her later? Not that she’s tempted to go looking for them, that sounds tedious and anyway Leareth is clearly having enough complicated mixed feelings to go around. 

:Nothing is an emergency now: she sends, when it doesn’t seem like Leareth is going to be first to say anything. :- Do you know what you need right now?:

…Leareth had not been asking himself that question yet, no. It feels hard to answer and he’s very tired right now.

Nayoki squeezes his hand. :A nap would be good for Karal, I think.: And thus probably good for Leareth too, who definitely needs more of an emotional anchor than he has right now.

She thinks it would help Leareth if she asked one of the flying things if Sing thought he had been making the right choices, in horrible circumstances that won’t ever hold again, but not a mistake. She has a feeling Leareth wouldn’t appreciate it right now, though, even if either way the answer would be good for him to know. (She thinks she knows which way the answer would fall, but she’s not actually sure.) 

That might not be the worst idea even if it’s very hard to imagine sleeping right now.

:Karal?: Leareth nudges gently.

Mm?  He really is having trouble keeping track of what's happening around him - he appreciates Nayoki being there, the touch and the emotional support, but the practical details of the conversation are escaping him.  He can tell that Leareth isn't all right, but at least Leareth is there, and they're in a safe place surrounded by people who care about them, and right now Karal doesn't feel like he can aim for anything more complicated than that.

Sleep?  Yes, that sounds good.

He could... try to do the standing up and going somewhere?  It might do his unmoored thoughts good to try having a body again, complicated as the concept sounds right now.

That sounds good. Leareth does not think that he's particularly benefiting from being in charge of the body right now. 

(Karal will notice as soon as he takes over that Leareth has accidentally been holding their body incredibly tense - normally he's good at avoiding that even when under stress, being tense gives you headaches and it's not like it helps with anything - and was also definitely still halfway having a panic attack.) 

Nayoki will offer Karal a hand again and walk them to the room Leareth has been sleeping in lately. They're in a part of the base they don't frequent as often, since Leareth mostly wasn't Gating all over in the weeks immediately after his death and coming back in a new body, and it seems like Karal would probably prefer not to have to navigate right now. 

Karal is definitely too-- tired, but not just that, if he had to do something he would, it's just that he doesn't have to-- to continue halfway having a panic attack, or to keep up nearly as much physical tension.  He leans on Nayoki a little, when he first stands up, and definitely appreciates the navigation.  His eyes skip over the walls oddly as he walks and tries to give himself time to get used to seeing normal physical things.  It is helping, though - by the time they've made a couple of turns he feels much more grounded, if not any less exhausted.

He sits down on the bed.  Yes, he could definitely sleep, if not quite yet.  He wants a bit longer to - not really share any important thoughts, he doesn't think Leareth is any more up to having proper thoughts right now than he is, but just to reassure himself the Leareth is there and alive and nothing terrible has happened to him.  It... doesn't seem like anything terrible has happened to him, does it?  He's panicked and miserable, but they've both been that plenty of times in their short shared life and it wasn't awful, afterward.  It'll last longer this time, no doubt, but they have the time they were afraid they wouldn't, even if he's still too... sun-stricken, he supposes... to appreciate that fact properly.

Gods are... really strange.

(Nayoki will let them be to rest, though she stays in easy Empathy range in case either of them ends up wanting to get her attention.) 

It doesn't seem like anything newly terrible has happened to Leareth, no. He's exhausted and definitely in some distress and still scared on an instinctive level, and - it does seem like there's some kind of damage there, there are parts of his mind that he's stepping around, but it doesn't feel new? It feels more as though it's been there for a very long time, and it's just that Leareth's mind was always structured such that it wasn't exposed where either of them could see it. 

In his surface thoughts, though, there's a waft of tired amusement. Oh? Gods are strange, but I am curious what you were noticing in particular. 

Oh.  Yes, that... makes sense, doesn't it.  If Karal had needed to live this life for longer than a few weeks, let alone for multiple lifetimes, he's sure he'd have no less old damage it never made sense to fix because it was just going to keep happening.

He didn't... understand? almost anything?  I'm sure I didn't either, from His viewpoint, but...

I expected Him to be someone I could recognize, and I couldn't, really. 

More quietly, stretching his mind to-- have normal mental reactions to everything that happened, instead of pushing all of himself into an attempt at clarity aimed at an alien entity, with no extraneous thoughts that didn't aid the communication.  (Oh, that's why it was so exhausting and strange.)

I wonder, if someone else did better, or... if our entire religion was made up.  It's made of human concepts, and the god very much wasn't.

And, with a little tired amusement of his own: I don't think I would've been able to talk to Him at all, if you hadn't taught me to be someone who could.

Almost certainly others have spent more time on, specifically, trying to understand what a god wanted of them. And of course most godcommunication is initiated from the other side, and is more directly about nudging the world toward a particular aim.

Still. I think religions are more about the people who practice them than the god.

Not that the particular god has no impact – the church of Vkandis does have a rather different emphasis from, say, Anathei, and Atet's following varies in another direction. And of course sometimes the precepts of a given faith are very heavily based on instructions from the god, like with the Tayledras and their mission to fix the Cataclysm damage tainting the Pelagirs.

(A brief flicker of curiosity - can Sing trivially fix that as well? Probably, though Leareth doesn’t know how, and doesn’t need to push his tired brain to speculate on it right now.)

If anything, Leareth is surprised and impressed by how  much the whole interaction with Vkandis seemed like communication, or at least an attempt at it; it sounds like Vkandis was actually trying to convey somewhat complicated information accurately to a very different kind of entity, rather than just trying to steer Karal via whatever series of visions would have the desired impact on his future actions.

Ah, maybe that's why it was so strange. The communication was more useful - surprisingly useful, Leareth is right - but a confusing vision would've felt more in line with what he expected from gods, really. 

A new change, almost certainly.  It felt new - like Vkandis didn't quite know how to do some of it, or why, but He was trying anyway, because... Sing asked? 

How bizarre this new world is.

Well, at least they know which world they're in, now.  And can sleep before they start dealing with it. 

And at least Leareth wasn't too distressed to give one of his mini-lectures on whatever topic Karal is curious about.  It's familiar and relaxing, the slow filling in of all the gaps in Karal's knowledge compared to his thousands of years of it.  He sends Leareth a sleepy feeling of appreciation, and doesn't take long to be out.

His dreams are full of fear, a dizzying and mostly nonsensical mix of all the awful things that could have happened but didn't - death by fire and strange artifacts and betrayal, sudden or slow or futilely delayed, and an overlay of a god-touch in all of them, his mind's interpretation of the lingering pain.  But none of it wakes him up.

Leareth is almost too tired to dream at all. The dreams that do come are fragmented and abstract, mostly full of the raw feeling of - disorientation, knowing that he's missing something but not what, math that doesn't work which is apparently a specific type of stress dream Leareth has and is accompanied by surprisingly intense distress and confusion given the lack of any accompanying images or narrative. 

He wakes up still feeling deeply drained, his thoughts almost gluey. ‘Orient to his immediate surroundings’ still works fine - and is reassuring, he’s where he expects to be and behind shields - but it becomes clear a fraction of a second later that there’s usually a second step, there, something like retrieving and focusing on the current priorities, and normally that would help clear some of the fog but there’s…nothing there, when he reaches for it.

(Karal will wake up with the god-touched feeling almost entirely gone.)

Karal watches Leareth orient, another now familiar and reassuring routine, and then... not. 

Oh.

That, too, makes sense.  He wonders in how many other ways Leareth has built all of himself around the single all-important goal, how many more times he'll have to watch him reach for something more instinctively than breathing and not find it.  (It hurts, and someday it'll be over.)

Gently:  Vkandis asked that you talk to one of the flying things.  I think we should, if it wouldn't be too hard.  Karal made no promises on Leareth's behalf, but he would still like his gratitude and good faith to mean something.  And - it seems important, maybe, to show the gods that this is often true of mortals, when They're first learning about the possibility of communication and trade.

There will be days, likely very many of them, when the right thing to do will be not to offer Leareth a direction.  But Karal suspects they should do whatever things to do are left, first, even if none of them are urgent the way everything used to be.

Oh. 

It takes Leareth a few moments to think of a response. ...Well, he supposes it's not like it can do any harm, now, and so the reflex to wonder what plot Vkandis is aiming for is misplaced - even if Vkandis did intend the usual kind of convoluted godplot working against Leareth's interests, it wouldn't matter now, and - he thinks probably He doesn't, and wasn't approaching the interaction that way at all. 

He still wonders if Vkandis communicated why He wanted that.

(A quiet background thoughtL Leareth thinks that Ma'ar would probably have adapted to this fine, or at least without a lot of fairly pointless angst about it? And he's not entirely sure what he thinks was different, or - whether he could be that person again. It doesn't help that he barely remembers being that person.) 

It makes sense to Karal that Ma'ar would've adapted to a new life much more easily.  He was still, in many if not all senses, a normal human, with the sort of goal normal great people sometimes have, not an immortal mage shaped purely to accomplish something impossible.  He must have had some normal human things he wanted from life - he expected to succeed in a single lifetime, and wouldn't have had the time or motivation to pare away everything unnecessary about himself.

Karal wonders how Matteir would have done.  That might be... a shorter distance, and easier to remember...  But ultimately Leareth should be himself, not someone from many lifetimes ago, and Karal thinks he will manage that.

Yes, Karal really did not get the impression Vkandis intended any convoluted godplots.  He seemed to be genuinely trying to be straightforward, and Karal isn't sure He was even capable of lying.  But in any case, Sing would not let itself be used for a convoluted godplot (a harmful one, at any rate), so talking to It would be a rather self-defeating way to start.

Vkandis wanted to... (accessing the memory is strangely hard, his recovered mind needing to half push itself back into the strange talking-to-a-god shape... Maybe we should take notes before I lose more of the details...) wanted Sing to make sure that Leareth wouldn't do anything awful, like another Cataclysm, and wanted Sing to have more information so that It could help the gods see the future without Foresight?  He thinks that was most of it, and they seemed like reasonable things to want.  (It makes some sense of the way the gods were about Leareth, if They mostly think of him as the cause of the Cataclysm.  Although They still should have done better.)

Karal himself is increasingly curious how much information Sing already had about them, while they were still trying not to draw too much attention.  The gods had talked to It about Leareth, and thought They weren't being taken seriously - what did It think, really?

(It does seem worth taking notes on the godencounter sooner rather than later, though Leareth worries that pushing too hard to remember its details is itself a little destabilizing and Karal should take note of that and be careful.)

Leareth really doesn’t think he’s likely to cause another Cataclysm, especially now, but it’s understandable on the gods’ part to want stronger reassurance of that, in a form They can understand better. Leareth definitely understands and is sympathetic to that. And it makes sense that Sing might be better placed to made sense of humans, including Leareth, and then translate that for Vkandis’ benefit. 

Does he want to talk to the flying things? ...Not…really…it feels unpleasant and stressful, in a way where that feeling resists being looked at too hard, and Leareth reaches for the engrained mental motion to look at it anyway but it doesn’t quite go through. He's just - tired. It feels hard and he's low on whatever reserve of motivation and oomph usually lets him go ahead and do the hard thing regardless. 

(It’s definitely unpleasant and stressful to consider how much Sing already knows about him, but this is less surprising; it's the shape of his familiar paranoia about more powerful entities knowing anything about him.) 

Karal's muted shock only comes a moment later, as he notices Leareth's strange inaction and has to deliberately look at the last few seconds' thoughts to understand what happened.  He saw Leareth decide the idea made sense, so his mind simply skipped ahead in full confidence that it would happen, and then instead it... didn't.  There's a moment of simple incomprehension, staring at the mental space where something isn't, before he manages to make sense of what he was doing and why he feels like the ground disappeared under his feet between one step and the next.

... It's not strange at all, of course, as a human reaction to an unwanted task.  It's just that... Leareth has never seemed human in that way before.

Maybe it's good news, that he can be.

But Karal wishes... what?  That it wasn't such an an abrupt change, maybe.  (That he could have something stable in this still new and strange life, when the entire world is changing around them.  It's a pointlessly distressed thought, so quiet it's barely there.)

Can I talk to it?  That might do well enough.  He doesn't mean immediately, they should probably... eat something first, that's an important part of being human in a non-emergency situation... but overall, does Leareth just not want to do it himself, or would having to be there for it be too much?  (And what is Karal going to do if Leareth just... doesn't agree to do any things... No, he's too off-balance for that to be a trustworthy thought and he's not following it any further.)

And then it takes Leareth a few seconds to properly parse Karal's reaction - there's a flinch, he didn't mean to make this harder for Karal, there's a note of apology and then a sense of - rotating it in his head, maybe - trying on whether he can use that, the fact that Karal needs or at least would benefit from Leareth being at all capable of decisiveness, as some kind of motivational anchor... 

I can do it. He just needs longer to sit with the idea, he thinks, until it seems less horrible, which might take a few minutes or might take a day but he doesn't think it'll take longer than that.

 ...Part of what's going on, he thinks, is that he does need rest, not just sleep. That's not new, he doesn't think, it's just that Karal hasn't actually seen him recovering after an emergency situation is resolved. Normally he would orient to it differently, by budgeting out time where "recovering from the emergency" was his highest priority, but he's pretty sure that finding it more difficult than usual to push himself to do tasks that aren't time-sensitive on the level of minutes is something he's experienced before. 

That's definitely not all of what's going on, because normally he wouldn't be miserable while he was focused on resting, or at least he could notice that he was and decide to stop that because it does the opposite of help? And - maybe it's less that he can't find that mental motion, actually, and more that he's looking at it, considering it, and for some reason not actually feeling like doing it, which is on one level weird because it's not as though he enjoys sitting here doing nothing except being distressed, but on another level it's - he knows it wasn't costless, deciding not to experience an emotion because it didn't help accomplish his goals? And he's been doing that for - a very very long time - 

Karal instantly mirrors the flinch-and-apology: he didn't mean to make Leareth feel like he had to do anything, he just-- wasn't expecting that specific disconnect, he'll be all right about it now that he knows, he - or they - will figure it out, Leareth shouldn't need to worry about him--

- Deep breath.  All right, perhaps they should both let themselves be a little more human, and lean on each other in this odd way, instead of apologizing for needing to.

Yes, it's not the need for recovery that Karal found so unsettling, it was the... lack of the feeling of intentionality behind it?  The lack of feeling like the inaction was a deliberate part of some larger plan - but of course it's not, because-- what larger plan, now.

And so he thinks Leareth is right, that he should not continue paying the costs to not experience unhelpful emotions.  Karal cannot actually explain why being miserable is sometimes the right way to feel, but it's obvious in all his experience.  It's how emotions work, that you need to have all of them.  Karal still doesn't really understand how Leareth managed to be who he is, for so long, but it does seem that he can - and maybe has to - stop, now.

Well.  Yes, there's no hurry.  They can rest here a while longer, eat something, maybe go for a long walk.  But also he could do the talking, if that would make it easier, although maybe it wouldn't.  Does Leareth know what would help, or should Karal just make guesses and go with them?  Sometimes it's easier, not to have to make all the small decisions.

...It would definitely make it easier if Karal did whatever steps were actually needed to cause a conversation with one of Sing's flying-things agents to happen? Having the conversation itself might be fine once it's already the thing that's happening, or - if it's hard, having Karal willing to take over and consult Leareth's thoughts to answer questions does make it feel less daunting. 

Eating something would be good. A walk also sounds good; Leareth will find out if at some point sitting with the prospect of a future stressful conversation becomes more unpleasant than just having the conversation and having it be done. 

(Leareth does not immediately take any steps toward either of those things.) 

Karal is, at least at the moment, feeling happier and more grounded if he can take simple physical actions toward things, so that works out well. 

He will, leaving clear mental space for Leareth to object/comment at each step but not at all pushing him to do so, wash his face and change into a fresh shirt, and then make his way to one of the meal halls and assemble something reasonable to eat, mostly sitting quietly (it's not exactly difficult to look tired and abstracted enough that people will mostly leave him be) and watching how everyone else here is dealing with all the upheaval.  They're all good and competent people and he has no doubt that they will do reasonable things and adapt fine, so this isn't a high-stakes thing, he's just curious - and it makes him feel better, to be surrounded by people who are dealing with the same thing he is.

The dining area is emptier than usual, partly because a randomly-timed long nap in the middle of the day means that it’s not actually a standard mealtime. The staff who are around are - quiet and pensive, mostly, though one young woman is writing notes and keeps randomly beaming to herself and giggling. One low-voiced conversation switches to Mindspeech when Karal comes in, after the participants make eye contact with Karal and exchange nods. Everyone seems to be giving them space — which the exception of Kalira, the bird-obsessed young daughter of two of the math researchers, who tears in very excited at one point and runs around singing an off-key nursery song with the words changed to be about herons laying eggs.

Kalira is very good. (Last time Karal went on a walk, he found a couple of interesting bird feathers for her.)  And Karal is quite fond of everyone else too, even if he doesn't remember all their names yet.

He eats slowly and does a good job of relaxing in the familiar space.  Eventually goes back to their room, and - he feels grounded enough to write down the god-conversation memories, now, before they fade any further.  It feels strange again, and for longer, leaving him with a touch of that odd feeling as if his thoughts were all slightly singed at the edges, but he's careful and takes his time and manages to get everything.  It was such a short conversation, really, for how long it felt.

Leareth was right about it leaving him a little more scattered again, but not nearly as badly as the first time around, and mostly he just really wants to - be outside, walk on the ground, see the normal horizon, feel himself move.  He'll find Nayoki, or whoever else is currently in charge of normal things happening, to tell them they'll be out walking for maybe an hour.  (If it's Nayoki, he'll collect a hug, and maybe a Mindhealing-Sight checkup, but he doesn't think anything is wrong in any ways beyond the normal expected ones.)

And then they can pick a direction in the endless flat expanse and walk, and let the movement in the cold air help make their body feel alive and useful, and not make any decisions whatsoever for a long while.

(He wonders, after a while, if there are any of the flying things out here.  Maybe it'd be better not to think about that, but it's not as if he can hide his thoughts from Leareth, or as if it would be a good idea to.  In any case, the thought of them doesn't worry him at all any more - he's vaguely curious, if anything.  It makes it easier, to imagine them as - a specific physical thing, that one might or might not see in a specific place, rather than as a confusing abstract change in the entire world.)

There are no obviously visible flying things, at least.

(Leareth isn’t closely attending to Karal’s thoughts anyway. He’s paying attention to the sensory experience of their body even though he’s not in control, and when that doesn’t quite fully occupy his attention, he settles on also solving math puzzles in his head.)

There aren't.  Karal likewise focuses on his senses, and only occasionally peeks at one of the math puzzles, less to see if it'll make any more sense than the last one (it almost certainly won't), and more to watch Leareth's thoughts moving fascinatingly quickly.

They walk back in the evening, Karal feeling not exactly pleasantly tired (it would take a much longer hike for their body to feel that way), but pleasantly embodied, at least.  And now they can stretch out in one of the library armchairs, appreciate the warm air and maybe drink some tea, and think about what's next. 

Karal would be inclined to ask one of Leareth's people to find them a flying thing and Gate it here, so they can have the conversation comfortably and won't have it still hanging over their head tomorrow, but - first, what do Leareth's thoughts look like right now, does he seem any less miserable or anxious?  And second, explicit wordless question, both about that specific plan and about the higher-up level of whether Karal should be doing more or less directly consulting Leareth on what happens next?

Leareth does seem noticeably less stressed now; not really happier, and there are definitely still fragmentary lines of thought that he keeps steering away from back to thinking about math because he expects it to be painful and doesn't feel ready yet, but his mood is more one of tired sadness than fear or anxiety. 

- there's a flinch at the concept of bringing one of the flying things here specifically. When Leareth prods at it, he gets something like 'worry at the prospect of the flying things knowing where he sleeps' which is, on the one hand, almost certainly pointless - it's not like they couldn't easily track him down whatever he does - but it also wouldn't be particularly hard to Gate to a different location, where they can also be comfortable, and then talk to one of them there? 

Leareth is - not fine with that as a plan, exactly, but endorses Karal carrying it out. He appreciates that Karal checked, but to be clear he doesn't feel that Karal needs to check with him about smaller plans for what happens next, like when to eat. It feels easier not to have to think about that, right now. 

Leareth is so incredibly entitled to not be happy, and to not be ready to think about difficult things, for however long he needs to.  But Karal is glad that he's less anxious along with it.  (A long time of sadness can be good for people, but a long time of fear basically never is, he thinks.)  And he's very glad he's here and can make it easier for Leareth to deal with all this.

Karal hasn't had enough time to learn how to do Gates himself, but he can find one of the mage-researchers he knows, and ask him to Gate them to one of the smaller outlying underground bases (or Leareth can do that, of course, but Karal will default to plans that don't require Leareth to do things), and then to find a flying thing and ask it if it would like to also be Gated there to talk to them.  ...If it asks why, it's as a favor to Vkandis Who asked for this conversation to happen, although Karal expects probably the flying things are capable of figuring out that sort of thing among themselves.

Leareth is in favor of someone else Gating for them. The kind of exhausted he is right now isn't really about physical fatigue, and Gating fifty miles isn't even especially tiring, but it still seems better not to have any additional reason to feel tired when they're going into this. 

(He does have the quiet thought that one thing they have plenty of now is time, and if Karal would like spending some of that time learning more advanced magic than it made sense for him to take the time to master before, that sounds like - as pleasant an activity as anything does right now.) 

Nayoki wants to come. She's doing kind of a lot of other things but none of them are urgent, now, and she's not sure if either Karal or Leareth will want her there for the conversation itself, but she does want to be sure that she'll be available for Leareth afterward, given that it's probably not going to be an easy conversation for him even if he ends up letting Karal take the lead. 

She's done rather too many Gates already today, so she doesn't do that part, but she can accompany them to the other facility with one of the other mages, and then have someone else scry for a conveniently located and not-currently-occupied flying thing – they're pretty sure at this point that the flying things instantaneously share information with "Sing" and so it doesn't especially matter which of them they talk to – and raise a Gate so she can go over and politely explain that she spoke to one of them before, but had not at that point mentioned that she works for a powerful mage called Leareth. Who wants to speak to one of the flying things now, and would prefer they come to him if that's convenient? 

"I can do that. Will you show me where?" says the flying thing.

She can do that! 

Where is very far north and very underground but is otherwise a quite nice little base, with stone walls layered with magical protections. 

...Leareth is inclined to let Karal take the lead for at least the start of the conversation. He's not actually panicking, but the blank-wall-in-his-mind feeling is back. 

Nayoki is welcome to stay and listen, he'd just rather have a two-way conversation than a three-way one, unless something important comes up.

Karal sends Leareth a mental hug, and nods to the flying thing, calmly enough.  He's not worried that it'll do anything harmful, although both stressful and simply confusing seem like possibilities.

"Hello. Can I ask you what you already know about me, first? It'll be easier to have the conversation with context, and... I'm just curious."  They spent so much time - no, not that much time, but so much energy - worrying about what Sing knew, and it doesn't really matter now, but the story will feel more complete in his mind if he knows whether they could've ever managed to hide anything.

He's not really pretending to be Leareth in any meaningful sense, but he did use the singular rather than the plural just to see what it would make of it.  And maybe out of an instinctive, if rather irrational, protective desire to keep Leareth out of this at least for the first sentence.

"I have some hearsay from various gods and a little pieced together from rumors and physical evidence. I should mention that I am not, actually, Sing. Direct contact between humans and superintelligences can be corrosive to the humans' felt sense of agency and self-other boundaries. I am close enough for most purposes and do communicate very frequently with Sing but I am a sub-entity, not the entire thing."

...Sing caring about that in particular implies a fascinating set of priorities, honestly, which Leareth - he supposes he hadn't thought about the tradeoff the same way for his god, because direct contact with full Velgarth gods is bad for humans in other ways, so you want human-facing avatars anyway, and because Velgarth gods in general seem to be inherently more limited than...whatever Sing is... It says good things about Sing's priorities, he thinks? 

(He doesn't interrupt.)

Karal mostly notices that it's being evasive, which is surprising given how informative it got Vkandis to be.  Maybe it's just a different sort of difficult to talk to?  But yes, it is interesting that it cares about - well, some not-entirely-clear thing that Leareth can explain to him afterward, or can jump in and talk to it about if he feels like it.  Karal is curious, but not urgently so, and he'll take both their words on it being a problem worth avoiding.  He wants to know what the flying thing itself is, too, but "close enough for most purposes" is enough of an answer that he can't figure out a specific question other than "would it matter if you died", which is really not the sort of question you can ask in your first conversation.

"That's... probably for the best, yes.  I talked to Vkandis today, and it was a valuable experience but not a pleasant one."

"So - what do you want from this conversation, if anything?  I can guess what the hearsay was," a wry smile, "and Vkandis asked for us to talk to you so you can make sure we don't cause any disasters. We aren't going to, but - were you actually worried about that in the first place?"

"I don't have experiences, such as worry, but did not think it was likely that you would deliberately cause another disaster and am still in progress on assuring that no accidents are in the offing."

It’s fascinating that the subparts of Sing - and maybe the entirety of Sing? - apparently “don’t have experiences” despite having intelligence. That isn’t how Velgarth gods work, and even limited avatars like the Shadow-Lover are - closer to the kind of thing the Groveborn are than to…whatever this is.

Leareth isn’t sure how Sing plans to prevent accidents. It’s almost certainly unnecessary and definitely pointless to be scared about it, and he - in fact mostly isn’t? Just tired and sad and something else harder to put into words.

Oh, 'I don't have experiences' is a good answer to the question he couldn't figure out how to ask!  Maybe that's why it's so strange to talk to.  He wants to ask Leareth more about what his limited god-avatars were going to be like, later.

"I'm glad. And, ah, what accidents?"  He doesn't, with a moment to think about it, doubt that there were some plans Leareth had set up somewhere that might explode on their own, but they hadn't had time to catch up on everything, so he might not even know where.  "What are you doing about them, and can we help?"

...Maybe he shouldn't have offered, given how tired Leareth feels about all this?  But it was such an automatic impulse.  And, on second thought - they have so many people.  Probably someone else will be happy enough to do whatever it is, if there's anything they can do at all.

"It would possibly be helpful to read your magical library. Some of the details may at this early stage be dangerous to reveal."

Can it read your magical library?  It seems fine to me. 

...Do you know what it's talking about?

Yes, of course. Leareth was planning to share that anyway, but he supposes he wasn’t incredibly detailed when he told Nayoki to share everything useful for prioritizing problems in need of fixing, and she might not have considered his magical library the most important piece given that it’s not clear Sing operates using magic as they know it.

….He’s pretty unsure what Sing is talking about! It could be a lot of things, honestly. Cataclysm damage is one guess, but Leareth is arguably less of an expert than the Tayledras. Maybe something the Eastern Empire was working on is a bad idea and needs to be shut down carefully and securely before it explodes? That’s certainly happened before in their history…

"Yes, of course."  (But the 'of course' comes after enough of a pause for an otherworldly intelligence to notice - and Karal still doesn't know if it knows who he is, or if that's the sort of thing that matters to it.)

"Nayoki, could you get someone to find another flying thing and help it get started? Might as well not delay that."  Maybe move the books to somewhere Leareth doesn't sleep, he adds mentally, since she's probably Thoughtsensing him given the circumstances.

"So... does 'dangerous to reveal' mean you think the information might get out, or that I might do something awful with it, or that I might do something stupid with it, or do you just... not think in human terms and so there's not much difference to you between those options...?  I don't want you to tell me the dangerous thing, I've heard enough good things about you that I believe you when you say you shouldn't, I just keep having trouble talking to you and I don't know where my problem is."

"Sorry! My counterpart in Sing's original world has more training data to work with and is probably a lot easier to talk to for the people it's used to, but I'm new. Those possibilities are all too substantial to risk considering the scale of the possible disasters."

Leareth does actually want to know the dangerous thing! He doesn’t endorse trying to learn it, it’s coming entirely from a deep-worn groove of habit, that dangerous things he doesn’t see coming mean he’s more likely to make mistakes that hurt a lot of people, or else someone or Someone else will use it against him… It’s not worth trying to protect against that when Sing is here and actively disrecommending it, but that still doesn’t sit comfortably.

- and Sing is doing remarkably well for operating in a world where it’s not yet fully oriented, but that does seem pretty non-ideal! And reminds him that - 

Vkandis wanted Sing to explain - me - so that the gods would find my effect on Foresight less noisy, he thinks to Karal. But unless it is being very evasive about how much it knows, I am not sure how well it can predict me yet. 

They should maybe try to do something about that? It feels not just difficult and stressful, it’s also blankness-inducing again, his mind half bouncing away from thinking through how that would even work or what it might involve. 

"Oh! I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were new."  Help, now he feels bad for the baby intelligence, which... doesn't have experiences, right.  "That makes sense."  He's probably thinking about it wrong, but the new information still makes it endearing that it just told him there's a too-substantial possibility that he's stupid or evil.  (And of course it's right to be cautious about those things.)

Yes - now I finally feel like I have some idea what I'm talking to and why it sounded so disconcerting, so I can maybe do a decent job of telling it things.  He doubts anything they manage will be good enough for Foresight, which seems like a lost cause anyway given all of Sing's own changes to the world, but whatever other prediction method it's using and sharing with the gods, it would be good to give it enough information for it to work well.

... If you really want it to be able to predict you, we should just let it read all your notes.  He's not sure whether that's a good idea, but possibly?  (And it wouldn't just help to predict Leareth, it'd help predict how the world works, from a perspective that can't be find in any library in the world.)  Well, he'll start with having the conversation, and they can decide after.

"All right, now that I know why you sounded odd to me in the first place, let me try that bit of the conversation again. I asked what you knew about me, and you didn't answer with any specific information - which was surprising, because I know you asked Vkandis to answer mortal questions and He told me everything I wanted to know.  (For which I'm grateful to both of you.)  So probably what's going on is that you're new and I wasn't being clear enough.  Can I just ask you some specific questions to get at the sort of thing I meant?

...I'm going to tell you all the answers regardless, but you don't have experiences and I do, so I thought I could let myself be curious for a minute, if that's all right."

(He hopes Leareth doesn't mind this entire prelude.  It'll make it easier for Karal to have the rest of this conversation, if he feels like he knows what's going on, and hopefully Karal feeling more comfortable is helping Leareth too, at least a little?  It's a little difficult to pay full attention to what Leareth's mind is trying to avoid while talking to the strange little flying thing at the same time, so he apologizes if he's not guessing very well.)

"Go right ahead!"

Leareth thinks that Karal is handling this well, and - aaaaa - yes it’s probably an efficient solution for them to just give Sing his personal memory-record notes on his past lives and work. Maybe by the end of this conversation that will seem less - he’s not even sure what - less like letting even the tattered and probably illusory remnants of control he still has over his own life slip away? It doesn’t seem helpful to think of it that way, and yet.

Mental hug.  That seems... an unhelpful way to think of it, Karal genuinely doesn't think Sing wants to control their life, but on second thought it makes perfect sense that Leareth's instincts are refusing to accept the idea that someone could do that and just won't.  Not much to do about that except giving it time to sink in.

In the meantime, questions, so they can maybe finally find out whether it was too late to worry about any of this from the moment they started.

"What were all of us here working on until today, and why were we doing it?  When did you find out?"

"What's my name?"  (Terribly self-absorbed of him, but he is curious if it knows there are two of them in here, and he doesn't know how else to ask that question without giving away the answer. Well, probably not giving away the answer isn't even important here, and he's halfway doing it anyway, but it'd just feel odd to drop all his human conversation habits - he wouldn't know what to replace them with.)

"If I said you can tell Vanyel whether Leareth's, ah, 'privately evil', what would you tell him? Or do you not know yet?"

"My top guess is that you were intending to construct an artificial god. I'm not sure exactly what you want to know when you ask when I found out. I put together pieces of evidence that inform my understanding of the world piecemeal and virtually never hold any given fact too strongly. The hypothesis that someone might be working on that emerged quite early in Sing's first-pass assessment of the situation, and that it was Leareth who was doing that or something of comparable magnitude emerged early in its first exchanges with the gods.

"I think you are most likely Karal.

"I would wait for Leareth to confirm because I do not have privileged access to what your arrangement with your headmate is."

All of that is interesting enough that Leareth is mostly not thinking to be anxious about it! The emphasis on privacy is - it's not that it doesn't make sense, as a thing people would need and benefit from when living in a world being watched over by an incredibly powerful benevolent something-like-an-artificial-god, but there's an emphasis and framing that keeps being a little surprising. Maybe it's an artifact of the other world's society, either the way it evolved after Sing had existed for a while or the way it was already. 

He's also intensely curious what pieces of evidence Sing was putting together when, on its initial assessment of Velgarth as a world and - it sounds like - before it knew anything about Leareth as a person and before it had communicated with the existing gods, it seemed like a project someone might be working on in general. Leareth is fairly sure no one would be working on it if he wasn't! And he didn't think he had left a lot of hints lying around outside of his records caches and the knowledge held by his mages and researchers, nearly all of whom have the standard secrecy compulsions. Sing wouldn't need very many hints, of course, but it's still impressive and he still wants to know. 

- he nudges Karal gently for control.

"This is Leareth. You are correct that it was Karal speaking before." He sounds mostly calm, though he's not actively trying to hide any signs of stress, it seems Sing's agent will strictly do better here with more information and he does, at this point, more or less believe that it doing better is also better for him. "I - need to think about what information I would want passed to Vanyel, but I admit I am curious what the answer would be. ...And very curious why 'someone working on an artificial god' was a salient hypothesis immediately. It took almost eight hundred years for me to think of it." 

"It's possible with the local magic system and theoretically achievable amounts of power. From the perspective of a sufficiently ambitious human it would be an appealing possible angle of leverage.

"I don't have a very robust definition of 'evil'. If you authorized me to tell Vanyel whatever he wanted I would probably break down the question into smaller parts, such as that I am fairly confident you have killed innocent people but exclusively for instrumental purposes rather than recreational ones or through carelessness."

Leareth actually finds himself wanting to smile slightly. "To be fair to Vanyel, I think he does know that 'evil' is underspecified, and would have asked a more specific question if he were under less stress." 

- and back to Karal, if Karal wants, because that was enough talking for the moment. ...Though maybe he should explicitly tell Sing's agent that it's all right for Karal to speak for him, since apparently otherwise it wants to check everything, which it's not that he doesn't appreciate the - not mindset, Sing apparently doesn't have a "mind" in the usual sense - the approach that hints at - it's just that it's very tiring. "I am all right with Karal speaking for me." 

(It's interesting that Sing apparently found it sufficiently likely that a sufficiently ambitious - and capable - human would exist in Velgarth. There's something oddly reassuring about the view of the world that implies, it's - ohhh, it's in a sense the opposite of the Velgarth gods, isn't it. Who Leareth thinks can't even directly perceive human ambition, just the fact that it throws around noise in their primary sensory modality.) 

Karal is glad Leareth felt like talking - and that he felt like asking questions instead of just giving it the one confirmation it asked for - but he'd happy enough to switch back, especially now that he finally feels like he knows what's going on.  (What's going on is that they could have never done anything from the start - but also this is not at all the situation they were trying to prevent, so that doesn't really mean anything about whether what they were doing was worth it.)

He does smile. "Headmate, is that what the thing we are is called?  Hello, and thank you for the answers.  Our arrangement is that I do what he wants," he doesn't think to clarify that he's happy with this, but it doesn't take much skill in reading human expressions to tell, "and I'm doing most of the talking because he understandably finds you terrifying.  I don't think you can do much about that - we approve of everything about you, as far as I can tell, but you did give us a very stressful time trying to find that out, and Leareth is... not used to being safe."  (Yes, he's talking at it as if it was human and telling it things it no doubt mostly already knows, but it seems better than erring in the other direction.)

"So - is there much left, really, since you apparently know more or less everything?  Is there anything else it would help you to know, or any reassurance you think the gods still need about us?"

And do you actually want Vanyel to get his answer?  I think it'd be good for both of you.  Although telling him 'anything he wanted' might be a little much, and I'm not sure how to draw a sensible boundary.

Letting it read your notes might still be good, but - you can decide later, I think.  It knows so much as it is, I don't think it'll make an urgent difference.  Unless you're sure already.  You're right that it seems... very much on our side.

There are of course a hundred more things it would be interesting to ask Sing, but they should process this conversation, and sleep, and it seems like they'll be able to repeat it later whenever they like.

"My areas of greatest uncertainty are still magic and gods, as Sing's source world doesn't have either. It hasn't had enough time or narrow enough error bars to conduct all informative experiments and more data in any format would help make me and it confident enough to move forward."

No, they couldn’t have done anything. That - was probably more likely than not even in the scenario where Sing wasn’t aligned with humanity’s interests, but Leareth’s focus all along had been on the possible worlds - which were maybe a small subset of the likely ones - where any of his decisions in those terrifying two candlemarks mattered. 

(And not just mattered in the sense where he could probably have caused a lot of damage in that brief window, that would be at least inconvenient and expensive to repair, if he were actually “evil”. …Why is he even thinking about that.)

He thinks it’s possible that Sing still has a lot to learn about him as a person, that his notes would uncover. Its sources are the present - his operations, the “hearsay” - and the gods, who don’t understand Leareth. He’s the kind of person who would have invaded a kingdom and killed ten million people - and what a thing, for Sing to describe that simply as “theoretically achievable amounts of power” - to create an artificial god, but - that doesn’t necessary fully pin down who he is, even to Sing. Who, unless it was bring misleading on purpose, wasn’t even 100% confident which of him or Karal was speaking, before.

It’s not urgent, though, and - he thinks it will be good for him, for his “sense of agency” however much of an illusion that is, to go away and process and make that decision thoughtfully.

Sing can and should have all of his notes on matters related to the gods, though. (And he finds that he’s suddenly desperate to have Sing’s assessment of his specifications for the new god. Would it have worked, if he had been somehow pushed to move ahead with the plan now instead of in a few decades after a few more rounds of sanity-checking by his researchers…)

And Vanyel… There is so much he still does not know. Nothing about the plan to create a god, or the cost. Nothing about Leareth’s role in the Cataclysm; that history is lost in Valdemar, and Leareth did mention Urtho once, but it wouldn’t have meant anything to Vanyel.

(A surprisingly strong spike of pain and grief and something like bitterness, when Leareth thinks Urtho’s name. It’s not Sing’s fault that it arrived now instead of two thousand years ago, and it’s certainly better than the hypothetical where it arrived in twenty or fifty years, but his emotions still want to demand why didn’t it come sooner…)

…He wants to explain it to Vanyel himself, he thinks, and suspects Vanyel would also prefer that. So - maybe they can ask Sing to say just enough that Vanyel will be willing to speak to Leareth face to face, and trust that what he says is the truth. I have never lied to him, but he does not know that.

An unaligned Sing wouldn't have gotten all the information from the gods, probably, unless it was very good at lying to them?  So it would have been slower, although maybe not slower enough.  But yes, of course there wasn't much point in thinking about the possibilities where nothing they did mattered.  (Not something that Karal would have realized, let alone found so natural to think about, before he met Leareth.)

"You'll have everything we have about magic and the gods. If it would help to have people conduct experiments, I expect we could do that too. Will you please tell us whether the god-design would have worked, once you've seen that? It wasn't finished, but still."

Gods, true, Vanyel doesn't really know anything, and definitely shouldn't find out from anyone but Leareth about his past or his plans.  What, then?

"I'd... like you to tell Vanyel that Leareth-- 'isn't evil' isn't a good way to think about it at all, you're right-- that he's trustworthy, that he hasn't lied to him and isn't going to, that he wanted to make the world better the same way you do, even when he had to kill people for it.  Do you actually know these things?"  He has no idea whether it can tell he's not lying, or how much it already knew about Leareth as a person rather than just his actions.  It doesn't seem to think in those terms very much.  "I want Vanyel to... know enough about Leareth's character that they can talk without worrying about lies, but I don't want him to find out from you about Leareth's history or what he was planning or all the other personal details of his life.  I'm not sure how to describe to you what that means about what you should and shouldn't tell him," since 'has he killed people and why' is also a personal detail of a person's life, in a rather important sense, and Sing seems much more comfortable talking about facts of that sort than about someone's personality directly.  He doesn't mind it telling Vanyel for what general sorts of reasons Leareth has killed people, he just doesn't know how to draw the line between that and more private information.  Maybe Sing does.  "Or do you know what I mean already?"

(He sees Leareth's pain, and can't - well, shouldn't - pay enough attention to it right now to react with more than a half-distracted feeling of empathy.  They should be alone to talk about it all soon enough.  But it was awful, and it makes sense for it to hurt.)

"I think I understand. Do you want me to tell him right now through another one of my flying things?"

He pauses long enough for Leareth to have a last-minute objection, but doesn't ask him to confirm the decision, since it seems clear enough.  "Yes, please. ...I'd be curious to know what it is you'll tell him, but we can ask him about that."

It only occurs to him now that they'll almost certainly have a Vanyel dream tonight, and so yes, it's very good that they did this now instead of tomorrow.  They would've probably muddled through somehow, but it'll be so much easier if they can finally trust each other. 

...Not that Karal himself has spoken to Vanyel more than once, but he's read so many of the dream-notes now, and seen so many of Leareth's thoughts, that it'll be a relief for him as well, to see the two of them really talk.

And... that's it, he thinks?  "I wish you all luck with preventing accidents. And everything else you're doing."  And Nayoki can Gate it back out, and Gate them back home, and organize the notes-sharing so that Leareth doesn't have to deal with it.

(And so Karal doesn't have to deal with it either, maybe.  He wouldn't mind, but he can tell that he's in that state where he's not thinking about some things in order to push through everything that needs doing, and he should perhaps at some point stop that.  If Nayoki is also feeling that way, then he apologizes, and probably she can find someone else who's has an easier day to do the remaining things?)

Nayoki is not feeling that way! She's still unsure if the weird complicated feelings that Leareth and at least a quarter of his staff are busy having in all directions will also catch up with her later, but in any case she’s not in the mood for that right now.

In Haven, Vanyel is now finally in a meeting with the King and Senior Circle. He would much rather have waited to have any of the conversation about Leareth, and they’re - still talking around it, really, not exactly having it. At least Taver backed him and Yfandes on the part where they decided against telling anyone, but it’s fairly obvious that Randi is still bothered by it. 

A flying thing knocks on the window.

Oh wonderful an excuse to flee the awkward conversation ...Also maybe they're following up on his question from before? Which has a hope of making the conversation way less awkward? Or way more awkward, Vanyel is genuinely not sure which. 

He'll go open the window to check if the flying thing is in fact here to talk to him or if it wants to talk to the King or all the Heralds or something. If it's here to talk to him, he'd like to duck out at least into the hall rather than having a conversation in front of everyone. 

"Is this a bad time?" it asks him. "I've spoken to Leareth."

"- No, this is a good time." Half a candlemark ago might have been even better, but the delay is presumably on Leareth's end and entirely not Sing's fault. "I, um. How did that...go?" 

"He invited one of my selves to his place. He invited me to tell you my assessment of his trustworthiness."

"Oh. That's - I'm glad. ...And, um. What is your assessment of his trustworthiness?" The fact that the flying thing didn't just say 'and he's trustworthy' (or 'and he's evil actually') maybe implies that it's somehow complicated? 

"He has done many terrible things over the course of his lifetimes. He did not do them out of cruelty or carelessness, though, and I do not expect him to be interested in doing more in the future as I have now obviated the need for humans to undertake risky and fraught projects. I do not believe he has lied to you, nor that he will harm you if you choose to meet him to talk more."

Well, it would be pretty bizarre if Sing's assessment was that Leareth hadn't done terrible things. Leareth has spent the past decade being very upfront with Vanyel about the fact that he does a lot of terrible things! 

"How sure are you? You're saying you don't believe he's lied to me, but is that - more like you're ninety-nine of a hundred odds that he's never lied to me, or are you more sure than that?

- and, er, I don't know if this is something where you would want his permission to tell me, and I guess it doesn't matter that much, but - do you think he's happy, that you're here and, um, obviated the need for humans to do risky projects? I'm sure he would avoid doing more terrible things either way, since he's not stupid, but - I guess I don't know if he would've preferred not being interfered with." 

"I am 99.86% confident that he has not lied to you, excluding the possibility that he has mad errors of some kind. I believe he endorses my presence overall but it is a difficult adjustment for him."

"That makes sense. I - the main thing is whether he was...pretending to be a different kind of person than he really is, the whole time. And it sounds like he probably wasn't."

And a version of Leareth who had been lying about who he was as a person the whole time would have - probably not told Sing it was okay to talk to Vanyel now? He's not sure of that but it seems likely.

...It should feel more significant, he thinks dully. Maybe he just needs longer for it to sink in, while he's not having a stressful interaction with a flying thing from another world. Somehow, right now, it doesn't really feel like new information at all. 

He wonders if they'll still have the dream tonight. Maybe he should have asked the Shadow-Lover's god what exactly was going on with that, while he had the chance, but it wasn't the top thing on his mind at the time. 

"Thank you," Vanyel says, a little stiffly. "That's all I wanted to know." Which is COMPLETELY FALSE but he's not going to ask Sing to unpack what exactly it means by "a difficult adjustment" and probably get told off for being nosy and asking about things that are none of his business unless Leareth wants to share them himself. 

The flying thing bobs and flies back out the window, though it doesn't go far.

Leareth is grateful to Karal for making sure things are handled without needing his input, and separately grateful that Karal is thinking about what he needs emotionally. 

He's tired, though not in the way where he wants a nap. Just to be in a quiet dark room with nothing else going on, maybe. He's pretty sure there are emotions he's going to start having whenever he decides that "having emotions" is the next thing, but he isn't yet sure what any of them are. 

And Karal in turn is grateful to Nayoki for actually handling most of the things, and very glad she isn't having weird complicated feelings in all directions!  Nayoki is great.  But from a larger view, Leareth created a large and competent enough organization that of course someone in it would be capable of doing everything that needs doing right now. 

And so the two of them can, yes, go sit in a quiet dark room with nothing else going on.  That sounds great.

That conversation was... more exhausting than he expected?  Or, maybe not than he expected, if someone had asked him how exhausting he expected it to be he would have probably said somewhat, it's just that he was absolutely not thinking about it.  (If someone had asked him if he wanted to do it he would have... utterly failed to answer, he thinks.  Which, he supposes, is a lot like Leareth's state of knowing that he's going to have some sorts of emotions but not what they are.)

He goes quiet for a moment, tries to focus further out, not on the particular conversation, which was not that important in the end, but on everything that's changing.

That earlier spike of Leareth's pain, that he wanted to respond to but couldn't let himself think about it properly--  Sing didn't come sooner, for what is apparently entirely stupid accidental reasons, and Karal too finds it frustrating to think about how the entire fate of the world turned out to depend on something nobody could have done anything about.  But even if those two thousand years cannot be taken back, they can be - fixed, in some sense - if Sing can resurrect people, if everyone can be all right in the end... 

He cannot imagine it, not yet, he can't even have any comprehensible emotions about it, but... he does think it will happen.

For some reason - probably related to the particular order in which they read over his notes, and the associations he formed this time in particular - the part that feels salient to Leareth right now is - 

- it’s not precisely “all the people to whom he owes apologies” but there’s something there. There are a lot of people he…used, he supposes is the right word, in ways that went against many of their interests and certainly weren’t good for them, and whether or not they would have agreed it was justified if presented with the dilemma abstractly, he wasn’t asking permission.

And it feels deeply important, now - and maybe always - that this is a way he deliberately and knowingly wronged people. That there would be an accounting for it, someday, in the future where he had won - that it would be witnessed (by who isn’t entirely clear) that however justified he was in those tradeoffs, it wasn’t okay.

Leareth isn’t sure if, for example, Bastran, if he were brought back to life now, would actually be angry with Altarrin for how he was steered, but - if he’s not, then in a sense it’s because Altarrin was good at steering, not - not because he doesn’t have a right to be.

Leareth suspects he’s thinking about this messily and is probably confused in some way, but - there’s an analogy there, right, to the ways that the gods tried to steer him. And he’s not sure if he’s justified in thinking this, but it feels like Sing does prioritize people not bring used in that way? 

Karal is very, very lucky, that he's been with Leareth for so short a time that he himself has not yet wronged anyone that way.

But he would have done it.  And that matters more, or at least says more about him, than the accident of timing.

And of course he has, in his earlier life, but that... was so much less of a true choice, it doesn't feel like it should count the same way.  It was - he digs into his instincts about it, not so much because he himself needs to as because he wants Leareth to have some human context, to have more than his own singular case to consider - he did choose it, knowingly and deliberately.  It cannot be argued that he didn't.  But the people on the other side had made the same choices as him, and had as few other options - he thinks if he could sit down with most of the people he'd killed, they'd understand.  They might hate him, and have every right to, but they'd agree on some level that... this was the sort of thing people did.  That they were all trapped together in a world which worked that particular way, and so on some level it was hard to blame anyone for it.

And Leareth played by different rules entirely.  Nobody realized they were sharing a world with someone who did the things that he did.  He decided to make the world that way, where it wasn't before - and it was the right decision, but it's impossible to deny the costs (especially now, when they did not even buy anything), and how squarely they fall on him (and on those who opposed him, but people find it hard to blame the gods - and perhaps the gods can't really be blamed, because They didn't and maybe couldn't understand what They were damaging) instead of on just how things were.

But Karal wonders what people in Sing's perfect world would think.  What Velgarth's own people might think, hundreds of years from now, when they've had the time to live and think and grow.  Whether they would agree with Leareth, that they were all trapped together in a world that was fundamentally wrong, that trying to fix it was the sort of thing someone obviously would have done, or should have, even if they didn't and wouldn't have agreed to the harm done them.

It's, again, that Leareth thinks himself alone and uniquely responsible, but there's an angle Karal can only faintly imagine from which that isn't true.

…All right, fine, Leareth does think of himself as unique and uniquely responsible for his own actions. He - needs more convincing that that’s wrong, if Karal in fact means to argue that it’s an incorrect or unhelpful frame.

Well, obviously a lot of people are going to have a reckoning with their past choices and regrets, now. Leareth isn’t alone in that. A lot of people are - shaped to fit in the world as it was, and will need to look at that shape and decide which aspects of it they wish were different, now that everything else is different. Certainly a huge number of people have wronged others, who have a right to be angry about it.

Probably people will think differently about it in a few centuries when they’ve had time to unfold into less constrained-by-adversity forms, or if they were born in Sing’s future and never shaped by anything else.

- probably Leareth will feel differently about it in - he doubts it will even take centuries, though it will probably take months and he can’t skip ahead to the final state and doesn’t think he should try.

He’s still not really sure what Karal is arguing for, if Karal is in fact disagreeing with him on how he’s thinking about it, which to be honest Leareth also isn’t sure of.

Karal doesn't have an argument so much as a vague glimpse of a world in which people think about the question differently. 

Leareth is right that they cannot skip to living in that world, and neither can anybody else, and in any case perhaps Karal is wrong about what it will be like.  But when Leareth thinks of the far-future accounting and Karal tries to-- not think through it logically, he cannot do that, but to come up with some coherent vision of what the people involved might be like and how they might feel about everything-- he can imagine anger and distress and incomprehension, but cannot really imagine them blaming Leareth for what he'd done to them.  It doesn't fit, with what the world should be like.  And it's not just because he cares about Leareth and doesn't want anyone to cause him pain - it wouldn't be good for those people either, to feel that way.  It wouldn't be right, in that new world, for everyone to genuinely feel that someone else should bear the responsibility for everything.  People can grow more than that, surely.

But he supposes that in the end his point is just that... they will have to wait, to see it. 

It's true, of course, that it's important how much Leareth wronged people.  But what matters is how those people will feel about it, and they cannot know that, and it... feels like Leareth is making the unique responsibility error again from a different angle, when he tries to decide on his own who has a right to be angry with him for what...

Or maybe Karal is entirely confused about how being responsible for anything works.  He might be.  His instinct suddenly feels much less clear and grounded, when he doesn't need it to make important decisions because nothing seriously wrong will ever happen again. 

... Maybe it's that he's trying to skip ahead to living in the future world, and he should stop doing that, but he's... not sure what to do instead?  Which is fine, he doesn't need to be sure, he just apparently isn't going to be much good at coherent arguments for a while.

(He wonders what Vanyel will think.)

Leareth agrees that there’s probably something - on the other side? - of people he wronged being angry and blaming him for it. And that the future he always wanted to exist someday is, in general, one where more rather than fewer people have room to imagine the sort of ambition that could take responsibility for world-scale events, even if there are no screaming emergencies demanding it. He - didn’t want to build a future where people were shaped to be smaller.

It’s…maybe more that it feels like it would be skipping an important step of reckoning with the past, if everyone he wronged didn’t at least spend a while considering whether they were angry with him about it.

Oh.  Yes, that much is certainly true, and Karal was skipping ahead too far. It will be important - for all these people, so that they can stop feeling like the world was some incomprehensible mess and start seeing that it was shaped by someone, at least sometimes, and could have been shaped differently. And for Leareth, now that he can finally take the time to see the full price of everything he had done - Karal knows he never looked away, but there wasn't time to ever see it all, there were too many wrongs and too much at stake - before letting the past rest.  He's right, that it would be wrong to just... pretend it never happened, or didn't matter, or didn't change him.

(Karal wonders, for a moment, whether he will ever feel the need to consider Leareth's question. Maybe, someday? But not any time soon, and not for very long.)

Leareth definitely feels like what he did to Karal was in expectation very badly wronging him, and they - got lucky, more than anything - actually, huh, he could probably learn the answer now to what in the world Vkandis had been playing at, even if it’s moot now… He finds himself oddly at peace about it, though - it doesn’t feel like it would necessarily be skipping over some key piece of his accounting for his actions, if Karal considers it and decides he isn’t angry and doesn’t feel wronged.

- that’s also interesting, actually, that - clearly on some level this is something Leareth feels like he needs before he can, what, move forward with his life? Before he can start reshaping himself yet again, this time into someone who can - “belong in Sing’s future” isn’t quite right, he thinks Sing would make space for him either way, but - someone who can just be a human being there, needing normal human things to be happy….

(It feels like a very distant thing, and still painful and disorienting to think about, but it doesn’t feel impossible to glimpse.)

They did get lucky.  And... Karal can't promise he won't have difficult emotions about it at some far future point, and he thinks he'd be doing that version of himself a disservice if he tried to settle the question fully right now, but he is quite sure about the eventual outcome.

(And if Leareth wants him to go to Vkandis and ask, he adds with some amusement, he will, but he would like a few days to recover first.)

Yes, exactly that.  It's distant and unclear and it will take time and change, but there is a path there, and they will find it.  They will be all right, eventually.

(Leareth is also in no hurry to get answers from Vkandis; they could also just wait for Sing to have better communication with Vkandis and ask it.)

Anyway, it seems like a reasonable time to have another meal - Leareth kind of doesn’t want to leave the room for it, and is inclined to just have someone bring food over to the bedroom - and then sleep.

At which point, perhaps unsurprisingly, they find themselves in an icy northern wasteland, before a frozen pass.

….Everything is different. It almost doesn’t feel real, being back here.

Vanyel walks forward, slowly. Maybe by the time he reaches them he’ll have thought of something to say?

Karal walks toward him, after checking that Leareth still doesn't want to make most decisions. 

... Vanyel doesn't look much like he wants to make decisions either, so Karal doesn't wait and make him start the conversation, and refrains from asking complicated questions like how he's dealing with everything.

He does smile at him, only a little tiredly.  "I've been wondering all evening what Sing ended up telling you.  Do you mind sharing?  I'm still trying to wrap my head around how it thinks about things and why."

“Er, it came to knock on a window and asked if it was a good time, and said it had talked to you and had your permission to share if you - um, well, Leareth specifically,” because he’s very clearly talking to Karal right now, “were trustworthy. I asked what it thought and it said…” 

Vanyel pauses to think, briefly closing his eyes.

“It said Leareth had done a lot of terrible things - which, obviously, I wouldn’t have believed it if he said Leareth hadn’t done that - but not by being careless or because he wanted to be cruel? It thought he would stop now. It was - a really precise amount of sure Leareth hadn’t lied to me, more than ninety-nine of a hundred odds? And thought he wouldn’t harm me if we met in person to talk.”

He hesitates, but he’s talking to Karal, which does make it feel less weird to say, and he is very curious and wonders if Karal will volunteer anything.

“…I asked if it thought Leareth was happy about it arriving, or - was going to cooperate now that it was happening but would have preferred not having that interference.” Shrug. “I wasn’t sure if Sing would think it was my business but - I guess it felt important. It said - something like, it thought he endorsed its presence overall but was having a hard time adjusting?”

It’s fairly obvious from Vanyel’s manner that he’s having a hard time imagining Leareth struggling to adjust to anything.

Karal thinks it'll be good for both of them if Vanyel knows a little more about Leareth as a person, not just of the terrifying immortal mage who can do the impossible.  Leareth could of course object to anything he says, but Karal doesn't really think he will.

"Of course that was important. Although I'm not sure how he could've told you the truth about everything and not wanted this."  Not that Karal is going to blame anyone for having trouble asking the maximally logical questions in a conversation with a strange otherworldly intelligence.

"And of course he'd choose this, if he was given a choice somehow.  It's exactly what he wanted, as far as we can tell, and with none of the costs.  Well, except a few days of terrifying disruption for everyone," a wry look that reflects something of just how much it's been like that for him, "and that should hardly count.  But... it's hard, to have shaped yourself entirely for pursuing a single goal for centuries, and have it disappear from the world in a day."

Which makes sense in theory, but still feels absolutely bizarre for Leareth, who is - 

- well, not the most powerful person in the world anymore, not that Sing is exactly a person but you know. Which is the part Vanyel had most expected might bother Leareth, given how Leareth apparently feels about the gods, but it sounds like he's strongly in favor of Sing doing exactly what it's doing.

It's true that Vanyel has been feeling - unmoored, in a way that started sinking in during the candlemarks after Sing's final announcement about Leareth. There's nothing burningly urgent that needs to be done. The war is over, or close enough. He's no longer Valdemar's only hope against Karse. 

And he might still be meeting Leareth in the dreamscape stage-play set of a northern pass with an army at his back, but it almost feels like a farce now. It's not going to happen. Maybe it never needed to happen at all, if Leareth was telling the truth all along and the real enemy was whichever god or gods set Vanyel on this path in the first place. 

He hadn't realized how much of an anchor it was, expecting that his path would end in a fiery sacrifice to maybe-futilely try to buy his kingdom more time. Tied to the world by a silver string, a pattern that won't walk away, but it wouldn't matter now if he did. Vanyel has mostly been flinching away from that thought, it...doesn't feel entirely safe to notice. 

- change the subject. "Obviously the end goal wasn't invading Valdemar," Vanyel hears himself say, almost snappishly. "It was - one of the costs?" 

....Vanyel also doesn't seem particularly okay, Leareth is abruptly noticing. He - doesn't feel especially advantaged in terms of knowing what to do about that, for all that they've been speaking for a lot longer than Karal has known Vanyel. 

That's true, and-- oh.  Maybe Karal shouldn't have said that, about living for a goal abruptly lost, if Vanyel feels the same way and hadn't noticed already.

He doesn't particularly know what to do either.  Vanyel is harder to talk to than Leareth ever was, but then most people are.

"It was, and I'm glad it doesn't have to happen. And - is our war," a gesture at himself and Vanyel, the meeting bringing back the memory of what both of them were doing only weeks ago, "over too?"  Somehow he managed not to think of it until now.  But surely Sing is not letting more people die at the front any more than anywhere else.

"It's not official yet but - I think it's already over?" Shrug. “There was apparently some sort of Vkandis miracle and someone from the royal family that was overthrown is in charge now? King Randale still wants to actually meet and negotiate a peace treaty, but - no one’s dying in the meantime.”

"Good."  Karal suddenly wants to know everything about it, and-- "You know, my first impulse is to go and ask Vkandis about it, which is just... insane, isn't it?  It was terrifying and disorienting enough the first time around, why does part of me want to do it again?"

"...Maybe I'm not doing that great a job of just trying to be a normal person either."

He thinks it'd do Vanyel good to tell someone about his own side of that problem, but... why would he want to talk to Karal about it, of all people?  So he leaves the opening but doesn't ask.  (He thinks Leareth has more standing to at least ask the question, but it still feels more important not to make Leareth feel like he has to do anything.  So Karal can keep having this conversation and see if he and Vanyel can get to know each other well enough for questions like that to make sense.  They'll probably need to do that sooner or later, in any case.)

….wait, what?

“You talked to Vkandis? Was that, er - I’m surprised Leareth was all right with it?” And that Leareth didn’t end up set on fire or something. 

"He was the one to think of it. I was shocked, but... he was right.  And - it's like him, really, to come up with some appalling thing that actually solves the most important problem, and then do it anyway even if he's terrified the entire time."

A tired and slightly embarrassed smile.  "Right, I should maybe... explain what I'm talking about, at all.  It was right after we got your letter - thank you for that," not just for the information, but for being a person who would drop everything and do something just as shocking as Leareth's decision to talk to Vkandis, and do it on the word of their maybe-enemy, just because he could see how important it was and that it was worth it... For being someone they could rely on to do that despite everything about the circumstances.  But he doesn't think Vanyel would appreciate hearing any of that, so he keeps the depth of his gratitude to a brief shift in the tone of his voice.

"And that was good news, but how sure could we really be, that it didn't fake the communication or control you somehow?  Of course probably it didn't, probably everything was all right and there was no need to do anything at all.  But there was some small chance that Sing was secretly evil, enough so that Vkandis would take even Leareth's help against it.  And some chance that He'd kill us anyway, but - we had no better options that weren't too slow to accomplish anything, and it would've been worth it, right."  He speaks about it matter-of-factly, like he's certain that Vanyel will see the logic and see nothing remarkable about that decision.

It’s also hard to imagine - and bizarrely upsetting?? - to picture Leareth being terrified of anything. 

There’s some sort of tension here, Vanyel thinks dully. It feels like he should be able to - just talk to Leareth - surely it shouldn’t be more awkward to navigate a conversation with him now that the threat of a war is no longer hanging over their heads, and they can more or less trust each other.

It just…maybe turns out that he doesn’t know how to approach it, when instead of talking about hypotheticals as they carefully dance around not revealing too much, all the problems are fixed and they’re…talking about feelings…? Also the fact that Karal seems to be taking the lead feels odd.

“…I’ve only spoken to the Star-Eyed Goddess, not Vkandis,” he says, partly because it feels good to share something he’s never actually told Leareth, but mostly because it’s awkward to just stand here and it was the first thing he thought of to say. “I sort of went to yell at Her, it was after I helped with a new Heartstone and,” he doesn’t actually want to talk about that or think about it.

He shrugs awkwardly. “I don’t think it’s good for people, talking to most of the gods. I guess the Shadow-Lover is - made for that. Talking to the Star-Eyed was - really disorienting? And honestly not even very helpful. I’m curious what Vkandis was like?”

"Painful and disorienting but - very helpful, actually. Surprisingly so. He didn't... understand a lot of things, like what mortals lying means or why we might want the dead back... but He answered everything I asked Him, when I could think the questions right.  I think that was Sing's influence - I cannot imagine Him being like that before.  And..." he feels odd about this, for multiple reasons, but it's true, "He was kind to me."

"It wouldn't have occurred to me to yell at Him."  He shakes his head, smiling.  "I'm not sure it would've occurred to Leareth, either, if only because he doesn't yell."  The smile fades and his voice softens.  "Or... think any of his emotions should matter to anyone.  I know why, but... it's not good for him."

(He... almost says more, but there are things that are his place to say, and things that, uninvited by either side, aren't.)

He can tell Vanyel cares, and it's so obvious he and Leareth should talk, if only they can figure out how.  Maybe they can at least stop having this odd surface conversation around the actual topic, if there's a way to do it without hitting any of the points that make Vanyel flinch and back away. 

Leareth knows he should talk to Vanyel. He wanted to have that chance, it’s just - hard to actually think of how to start, or find the determination to reach for control to say anything at all.

Most of his past conversations with Vanyel were - planned, carefully strategized in advance, every piece of new information he revealed a deliberate choice. 

But it’s not just that he’s unused to improvising what to say on the spot. It -

- it feels like something he could still get wrong, maybe? Sing will prevent anything really bad from happening, but he’s pretty sure it wouldn’t intervene to prevent missteps in his relationship with Vanyel, whatever that relationship even is. It’s something he wants to - get right, whatever than means, and he doesn’t feel nearly as solid as he prefers to on knowing how.

Leareth is - having a difficult adjustment, and in pain, and normally something like that would be entirely off-bounds in a conversation with Vanyel, but he thinks they have to talk about it in order to - just be human people in this strange new world. It does also feel important that Vanyel is in pain, and that isn’t new but it’s always been something they both stepped around. Leareth has a suspicion that there was something safer for Vanyel, too, about their careful adversarial negotiations that fundamentally were’t about his feelings? But he’s not sure he can pin it down any further than that.

….This is probably more a Karal sort of thing, does Karal have advice?

They could still get something wrong.  For the most obvious thing - if they ended up talking about Leareth's awful plan, now when everything still feels so fragile, instead of once when they feel safer with the world and each other. 

(It would still be fixable, probably, someday in the long safe future.  But it would be much better if it didn't need fixing.)

Leareth is right that they need to talk about their emotions first, to get their relationship to a place that makes sense now that the world is so different.  (And they should - they clearly both care about each other, and it will be easier to deal with all the other changes together with someone who's been through so many of the same things, even on a different side.)  Karal isn't worried about Leareth making some important misstep if he talks about his own difficulties, if he can get himself to a mindset where he wants to have that conversation rather than forcing himself through it.  It's not really the sort of topic that needs a strategic plan.

He's less sure about the other side of it - about whatever it is that hurts Vanyel so much and that he so clearly doesn't want to think about.  It feels fraught, or else Karal would have asked already.  But he's nearly a stranger to Vanyel, and the question might be easier coming from Leareth.

But first, he thinks Vanyel would want to know about Leareth's pain - he's clearly curious, even if he'll find it hard to deal with.  And afterward perhaps he'll feel easier talking about his own.

…That’s probably right.

It doesn’t all feel - safe to talk about or like he knows what to say - but he can somewhat gracefully segue to his own side of the Vkandis conversation.

He nudges Karal gently to take control. It’s fairly obvious from the outside given how different their body language is.

“We went to the Iftel barrier,” he says. “It seemed like the quickest way to obtain His attention, though probably more dangerous, and - my past experiences with trying to petition Him that way were not positive. We both - I suppose I did not exactly pray to Him, but I tried to make the questions for Him clear in my mind, and why I sought His answers and thought it would be in His interest to offer them. Karal did something closer to praying. I am not sure if that is why it worked, or if it was just that Karal was once one of Vkandis' people."

(Or just that Karal was less afraid. ...Was Karal much less afraid? Leareth sends a brief mental note of apology, that he apparently doesn't remember. He was quite reasonably distracted, but he does endorse tracking Karal's state a little more than that.) 

"Anyway. Karal was pulled into a vision, I assume, and I was - not. It was like the barrier was inside my mind, blocking me from his thoughts. ...I told Karal later that nothing bad happened, but it was incredibly terrifying in a way that - I am not sure it was damaging exactly, but I was very badly shaken afterward, even though it was good news." 

A slow deliberate shrug. "Which I suppose describes the entire experience of the last day." 

Leareth seems…different…and it feels like the rules shifting under his feet. Vanyel is briefly, pointlessly, almost resentful. The rules have changed enough for one day.

…It does make sense, if he tries to imagine a person who isn’t Leareth in that situation? And Leareth is still a person, not - the kind of alien thing the gods are, even if it’s sometimes felt like that. It makes sense that can be scared and feel vulnerable.

And obviously it would be rude and hurtful to respond with “I thought you were above all that” even if it’s what some part of him is thinking.

He fidgets. “You’re - going to be all right, though. Right? This is - Sing won’t let the gods hurt you now. And - I know it doesn’t always help right away, if a bad thing stops happening, but it’ll get easier.” 

(Karal was not afraid, then.  If he had been, Leareth would have probably noticed, but it's easier to remember a presence of something than an absence. ...He was afraid later, but in a way he mostly wasn't even aware of until afterward, because he was trying so hard to keep his mind clear of anything that wasn't a useful god-communication.  But in any case he expects it was some other factor, not that the god cared about their fear.)

He thinks Leareth is doing very well, and that this was the right thing - he didn't think of it, but of course it's true, that Vanyel face-to-face with Leareth would try to be kind to him, more than he instinctively was when hearing about his feelings secondhand.

Of course he would. It's - a little hard to figure out how to respond to it. Leareth isn’t used to people being earnestly and a little awkwardly kind to him. …He’s maybe not very used to people approaching him with the attitude of “trying to be kind” at all? Nayoki and plenty of others try to be helpful, but he feels like they’re usually doing a different thing.

He ducks his head. “I think it makes it harder, when a bad thing - when all the bad things - stop happening. It was easier to - set it aside, only have helpful feelings and save the rest for later - when everything is an emergency. At least, it is like that for me.”

On the one hand, it’s kind of VERY UPSETTING! …On the other hand, it continues to be incredibly rude to make this all about his stupid feelings.

Vanyel looks down at the snow. “…For me too. Well. Maybe not so much the only having helpful feelings, that’s - I guess I’m not surprised you can do that but I don’t know if anyone except you can. But - when there isn’t time for something to hurt until later?” 

His throat feels tight; he tries to clear it. “And you’ve been doing this for such a long time. I can’t imagine, I couldn’t - I’m still not sure how you could.”

Vanyel is clearly upset but - probably doesn’t want attention brought to it right now?

Leareth isn’t sure what else to say. He kept going for two thousand years because there was no acceptable alternative, but clearly it doesn’t work that way for most people, and for all his centuries of experience, Leareth still doesn’t feel like he gets what the underlying difference there was. Maybe it would help if he remembered more than a handful of things about being Ma’ar.

…Vanyel, he thinks, also has quite a lot of the trait that would make it feel unthinkable to walk away before the work is done. He was just…suffering more.

That's true, about Vanyel.  He'd never use Leareth's immortality method - and Karal doesn't think he could bear it even if he tried - but if the gods made him immortal some other way, what would happen?  Would he learn to suffer less, or would he just... spend centuries like that, and keep going... what an awful thought.  Karal isn't sure it's a safe question to ask him.

Leareth could talk about the extent to which he shaped himself to be someone who could do it for so long, Karal thinks - especially since that also makes it harder for him to be someone who can have a normal life.  Talk about how he did sometimes have to take the time to hurt, to come to grips with something he couldn't just set aside.

Or maybe it would be all right now to ask how Vanyel is coping with everything - whether he thinks he'll be all right too, in the end.

Or... he doesn't need to say anything, if it doesn't feel right.  They can be quietly sad together for a while.  It's a thing people do, when they have time.

…Now that Leareth has thought of the framing, it feels suddenly obvious that this probably is part of what makes the adjustment hard for Vanyel specifically. Vanyel almost certainly doesn’t want to be immortal in general (however strange and hard to comprehend Leareth finds that.) For a long time, he would have been living on the assumption that he would die for his kingdom — and if that somehow hadn’t been how it played out in Leareth’s future war with Valdemar, it’s not like Vanyel’s life was short in other ways to sacrifice himself for the people he swore the Heralds’ oath to serve.

There’s - a kind of simplicity that brings, Leareth muses, maybe not entirely unlike the simplicity and focus Leareth got from his oath. The ability to set grief and pain aside because now wasn’t the time, except he suddenly has a feeling that Vanyel never expected to make that time; that he wasn’t making plans for after the end of a road he didn’t expect he would live to see.

And now, of course, Sing is here and no one is dying anymore.

…It doesn’t feel like a safe observation to make to Vanyel right now, and asking Vanyel if he’s going to be all right feels - too close to acknowledging it. Leareth bows his head and doesn’t say anything for a long moment.

I am not sure how to explain how I worked before, he thinks to Karal eventually. I suppose I did shape myself, but - not stopping was not the part that felt as though it needed shaping?

It always felt like the simplest way to be - like instead having a point after which he would consider his part done would have been - adding epicycles, making the core of himself less coherent. Not stopping was - hard, certainly, but he thinks it mostly hadn’t felt like giving up was an alternate path that would be easier? 

Karal might have a better vantage point to try to explain it to Vanyel, if he wants to do that. 

Karal remembers that moment endless days ago when a flash of Leareth's memory made it painfully clear how much Vanyel wanted to die.  Does he, still, even now?  Or does he just not know what to do with the change?  But Leareth's right, that either way would take away something he was relying on to keep going.  A lot like Leareth, in an awful way that assumed he simply wouldn't live to see a time when he wasn't needed - but Karal can see how that might be easier.  Easier to tell yourself that you can just stop, when there's no more driving need to keep going.  He doesn't feel that way himself, when there's rest enough to be had without dying - but maybe for Vanyel there isn't.  (What is it that hurts him so much?  Can Sing fix it, somehow?  ...Would Sing let him die, if it couldn't?)

Karal isn't sure how well he really understands Leareth, let alone how well he can explain him, but - it does seem like it might be easier for him to explain, when he can at least clearly see the ways in which Leareth isn't anything like most people. 

He can take control of their body when Leareth offers, and lift his head, again visibly a different person.  "It might be easier for me to explain - Leareth doesn't really understand how unusual he is.  Not that I entirely do either, but... I can try."  He hopes Vanyel doesn't mind too much, that he's talking to Karal again.  They're still near-strangers, and it feels wrong to push against that so hard, but - they cannot stay near-strangers, not even if both of them wanted to, so they are going to have to do something else.

"You know what it's like, to care about something so much that you'd just never consider stopping - not that you wouldn't decide to stop, after struggling with the question for a while and pushing yourself to do the right thing, but that you'd never think of it at all.  The way people act when their small children might die."  (And not all people, even then.  Some will get tired and give up, eventually, when nothing seems like it's helping or will ever help.  But some won't, and Karal is sure Vanyel knows what he means.)  "... Leareth is like that about the entire world.  I don't know how.  I think he must have been born without... whatever it is that lets all the rest of us decide that some things are someone else's responsibility because they surely cannot be ours.  And..." more quietly, looking down, "he was right."  They shouldn't really have that argument now, but... speaking to Vkandis made it so completely obvious that Leareth was right, that the gods couldn't and wouldn't make the world the kind of place it should be, were too alien to even be capable of understanding what that was.  Karal believed it before too, but believed it half on Leareth's word and half on uncertain guesses - it wasn't really the sort of thing he felt he could wrap his mind around.  But it was simply true, and Leareth had seen it where nobody else had.

"And so he took that drive and he - built all of himself around it over lifetimes, keeping the core of what was important to him and losing so much of the rest."  He hadn't thought of it before, but he thinks that it must have helped, to start each life anew filled with the one all-important purpose and not with any of the common human concerns that everyone else accumulates before they even know what is truly important to them.  "And shaped himself to just... find what was needed and do it, every time, with almost nothing in his life beyond that - almost nothing he wanted and certainly nothing he wouldn't sacrifice.  Including himself, even though he wants to live more than anyone I've ever met.  He finds the next important task and he does it and he finds ways to make himself all right with it because it's the only thing that really matters - it's been the only thing that mattered to him for so long that he's half forgotten how to act for any other reasons.  How to care about his normal human feelings just because he has them, rather than because fixing them will let him do something important on the impossible scale he looks at the world in.  And... now there aren't any important things left, not really."

He still doesn't think he explained it right, what Leareth is, that impossibly stable core of him and the strange structure of the mind wrapped around it, still human but living as if all the human parts were beside the point.  But maybe he came close.  And whatever he got wrong, he hopes Leareth can explain - and that will be good for all three of them too.

Leareth doesn’t think he saw the gods as enemies, at first; that took until later, in the early years of what would later become the Eastern Empire, when he started to notice a pattern in churches and temple orders being the starting point for assassination plots. It’s just that even before that, he doesn’t think it would have occurred to him to look to the gods for building a better world? It seemed strictly less reasonable than looking to distant kings, who were at least human themselves, but in both cases, he thinks it must have seemed like surely if someone else were going to do it then it would already have happened.

(Maybe one difference is that many people will sort of - look at the way things already are, and define that as okay, good enough, or at least “how it’s meant to be” — that there’s a different angle where surely someone would already have done something if there was a problem? Leareth doesn’t think he’s ever had that tendency.)

He takes over again, and clears his throat. “I was - very arrogant, in my first time. It would never have occurred to me that just because no one else had done something, I could not do it. That must make it easier - or possible at all - to decide to feel responsible for everything and everyone.”

A slight shrug. “I do not really remember my childhood, but I think at first, ‘everyone’ was not very many people? I had no idea the world was so big, or so messy. I learned better, but - it must have never felt like there was a good enough reason to…change how I thought about it and lower my expectations?”

Leareth shakes his head. Looks briefly down at the snow. “…I made mistakes, because I was arrogant. I suppose I was wrong about what I was capable of, at least at first.”

Vanyel doesn’t know about the Cataclysm, or Urtho. Leareth - wants him to, he thinks, but it feels suddenly very difficult to stand here and talk about it using actual words.

oh no Leareth is having feelings in front of him again, this is too awkward  Vanyel makes himself take a deep breath. 

“Everyone makes mistakes.” Wow, that was an inane thing to say and probably not comforting at all. “And I guess if you - do more things, and bigger things, you can make more and bigger mistakes. I don’t think it’d be better if no one tried to do things, but…”

(Many more people would, and do, devote their lives to fixing something that has gotten worse.  Karal isn't sure if the asymmetry is because they think surely if something was wrong in the long term someone would've already done something about it, or just another way of imposing a limit - if things used to be all right then it must be possible to get them back to that point, and then stop, instead of considering yourself responsible for everything forever.  He thinks essentially nobody is capable of considering themselves responsible for everything forever.  ...And perhaps they shouldn't, because most people in Leareth's position would make much worse mistakes than he did...  He wonders what the people in Sing's world are like - whether more of them would feel that responsibility, whether more of them would do well with it.  He hopes so, and not only so that Leareth can be less alone.)

It still doesn't occur to you that you couldn't do something just because nobody else had, he thinks fondly.  It's stopped occurring to me, either.  But most people who are that confident in themselves still do not decide to fix the world.

And then... Oh, that hurts.  The one thing Leareth keeps coming back to from so many angles and with so much unresolved distress - which Karal cannot in justice call out of proportion, but it feels so wrong, the way Leareth was hurt, back when he was too young to have sole responsibility for the world, and the way he blames only himself for it.

He instinctively reaches for control of their body, because it's not all right for Leareth to have to stand there in so much sudden pain, to have to be here when it feels too difficult to deal with.  It's still gentle, but he does not, exactly, ask permission.  (It may be the first time he's done that.)

There's pain in his eyes and his quiet voice, but none of Leareth's distressed hesitation or Vanyel's avoidance.  "Do you want the story of his biggest mistake? He might tell it better, or maybe not, but... it's hard for him.  And you should know."  And:  Do you want me to tell him?  I can - or I can start, at least, if that will make the rest easier.

Well, it wouldn’t help anything - where “anything” includes Leareth’s feelings - to instead blame a man who’s been dead for eighteen hundred years. (And the gods genuinely aren’t to blame for this one. It was all the work of mortals.)

Leareth appreciates Karal, and sends quiet gratitude. He would also appreciate if Karal wants to tell at least some of the story. He might do a better job of it, even, he’s not so… Leareth doesn’t know the ending to that sentence, but he does suspect that he has trouble giving an objective recounting. “Because he doesn’t want to speak ill of the dead” isn’t quite an accurate gloss of why, but it’s not not that.

Honestly, Vanyel also appreciates Karal? It’s weird, having this third party to the conversation who he barely knows - and who he suspects knows an uncomfortable amount about him - but he’s not sure it would be any less uncomfortable if it were just him and Leareth, and there would definitely be more long awkward silences.

He ducks his head. I would be honored is way too overwrought to say out loud. “I would like to know,” he says instead. 

Karal doesn't think he is exactly objective either, but he will try.

"This was his first life, a very long time ago.  He's... learned to be much more careful, since then.  He barely remembers any of it.  But he was a child in a primitive and violent place, and left it, when first he possibly could.  He found a great school of magic run by a kind and talented man - Urtho was his name - learned there, saw it as a shining example of the way things should be.  And, being who he was, went back to his home country, to bring as much of that as he could to his own people - and then to everyone else, he thought.  He made things better, although not without paying costs Heralds might disapprove of - because in places like that you have to, if you want the changes to save the children starving this year and not just the ones a hundred years in the future."  (If that.  Children do still starve, he thinks, in Valdemar.)

"He gained influence there, and Urtho didn't approve - didn't think great mages should hold power or try to change the world.  I'm sure you can imagine just how much Leareth - his name was Ma'ar, then - disagreed with that."  A slight fond smile.

He's trying to just tell the story without focusing too much on Leareth's detailed thoughts or on worrying whether he's telling it right - Leareth will tell him, if he isn't, but it won't do the telling any good to fret over it.  But he does pay attention to whether Leareth feels any easier, to have some of the words out.  And, of course, to whether Leareth wants him to keep going.  He has no doubt that Vanyel does.

Leareth does seem to be - relaxing into it, with less flinching away from his pain. 

There's an urge to - "defend Urtho" isn't quite right, and in any case Leareth doesn't actually have anything contentful to say, because the details matter and all of them are lost to time. But he thinks Urtho was - trying to grasp for something real and important, even if his attempt to put words to it wasn't entirely coherent. And they must both have been missing so much - conceptual vocabulary, he supposes, the kind of thing that Herald Seldasen writes in his treatise on ethics. It might have made a very big difference if there had been anyone who could just help Urtho and Ma’ar talk to each other.

He nudges gently to take over. “I do think I made what anyone with a thorough grasp of history would see as serious diplomatic missteps, with Urtho and with the kingdom where he ran his Tower. It was predictable, I think, that my ambitions would have looked alarming to neighboring kingdoms. Urtho was - not skilled at communicating his objections to someone from a very different culture, and - I suppose we had less history to learn from, though if I had tried - if I had taken the time to learn more about other distant kingdoms before I tried to fix my own, I could have found those lessons somewhere. I was - in a hurry. It felt very urgent, when people were still starving every year.”

…And he’ll back off and let Karal continue, because probably a detailed failure analysis isn’t the best order to convey the broad strokes of it to Vanyel.

Vanyel bows his head. “…I can understand that, I think. It’s - hard not to be in a hurry when it feels like there might be something you can do now.”

He hesitates, biting his lip.

“…You burned a candle for Urtho on Sovvan, once,” he says softly. “I remember the name. I’m - I mean, obviously this doesn’t have a happy ending, or you wouldn’t have started out saying it was your greatest mistake…”

That is really not why it doesn't have a happy ending, Karal does not say, but he looks down for a moment.

He entirely agrees that Ma'ar made large and predictable mistakes, but he's not sure that Urtho was trying to grasp at something true-- no, he's being unfair.  If he pauses and imagines him as a man Ma'ar clearly admired rather than as the source of too much of Leareth's pain, he can see some of the the valuable ideas behind his principle.  Don't change or control too much when you might be wrong about the consequences, don't give anyone the impression you might be a threat to them when you don't mean to be, be careful...

... Not that Urtho lived up to any of those ideals very well.

He answers Leareth out loud, to give Vanyel both sides of their conversation.  "Yes, you - Ma'ar - did make mistakes, and ones you could have avoided by taking more time to understand the world.  It just... frustrates me, that Urtho acted as if he knew better, and - really didn't, in the end."

He gives Vanyel a grateful nod, and continues, after a moment.  "Ma'ar took over some of the neighboring regions - not really countries as anyone would call them.  They... Leareth doesn't remember what happened," what a pointless loss among all the other losses, "and I can't believe he would've attacked Urtho's country, why would he... But they ended up at war, somehow, over some awful misunderstanding.  Ma'ar was winning, and... Urtho refused to lose, and he was a very great mage.  ...A much greater mage than strategist.  He had incredibly destructive magical weapons, and only used them at the end, to destroy both his own Tower and his enemy, when he felt like he had no choice but to do everything he could to keep all this magic from falling into Ma'ar's hands."  It makes less sense the more he thinks about it - why would he do that, then, when everything was lost anyway, why not win when he clearly could have-- but people don't think that clearly, especially when they didn't want to fight a war in the first place, and are perhaps trying not to think about what they're doing or why they're doing it. 

"I... cannot believe he meant the destruction to be more than that." 

He watches Vanyel, to see if he understands.

Oh, there's no doubt that Urtho also made what historians would call enormous blunders, if history remembered any but the barest outlines of his life and actions. But he - couldn't meaningfully have done better, Leareth thinks? 

...There is probably a symmetrical argument that Ma'ar couldn't meaningfully have done better, and the only reason that his failure analysis focuses so heavily on his own mistakes is that those are the factors he can control, not the actions of other people, and also he remembers them slightly better. Or at all. It's not like he would have known what Urtho was thinking, even at the time, and of course the weapons and Urtho's choice to use them came as a complete surprise. 

He does think it makes sense that Urtho didn't use his weapons earlier? Wielding them on a battlefield would have entailed an enormous loss of life, almost certainly on both sides, whereas the Tower was almost fully evacuated by the time in went up in fiery destruction. (Leareth knows this, not from fragmentary memories of Ma'ar's life, but because he ran into populations of surviving evacuees later, and that made it into his notes.) Really, the most strategic use might have been as a threat – he's pretty sure Ma'ar would have backed down if he had reason to think he wasn't winning, and for that it would have been enough for Urtho to use a weapon on an unpopulated area and demonstrate that he could have used it on Predain's capital if he felt like it – but that kind of reasoning feels fundamentally alien to how Urtho thought. And Urtho didn't understand Ma'ar that well, and might have expected him to escalate in turn instead... In any case, it's not what happened. 

It takes a few seconds for it to fall into place, even though Vanyel was in fact aware that Leareth was born before the Cataclysm. He's not used to thinking of the Mage Wars as the kind of event that was caused by humans, instead of - some deeply inevitable trait of the world, like the weather. 

"Oh," he manages, very quietly. ".......I'm sorry. I– for what it's worth, I guess I get why it would feel like your biggest mistake, but it really sounds like it wasn't your fault?" 

If only because he knows Leareth, and even a much younger and more impatient Leareth wouldn't have done that. Honestly, even most of the possible people Leareth could have been, before he narrowed that down, wouldn't have knowingly let most of the continent be destroyed by a Cataclysm? It's not like most genuinely evil people would do that on purpose! It destroyed Ma'ar's entire kingdom too! 

Which is an incredibly characteristic thing for Vanyel to say, especially when he's - clearly operating from a place of trying to be kind and sensitive to Leareth's feelings - and yet Leareth did not predict it at all and has no idea what to say. The standard thing to say would be something like 'thank you for saying so' but he feels a lot more pointlessly upset than grateful. 

"It really wasn't."  Yes, Karal knows fault isn't the angle from which Leareth thinks about this, any more than about anything else.  But... it still matters, that it wasn't.

He wants to say more - and to argue with half the things Leareth is thinking, in his thoughts or out loud - but... that really isn't the point, right now.  The point is that Leareth should take their body and... be here, with Vanyel, and find some words that aren't arguing with him either.  Act, with another person who isn't inside his head, like his emotions and not just his results matter.

He doesn't need a lot of words, for that.  'Thank you' might still do, because it's not really about the emotion, it's about... telling Vanyel his opinion matters to Leareth, because Karal isn't sure he knows.  But mostly Leareth should... try to tell him what he feels, whatever it is.

Well, now Leareth is curious about Karal's arguments! Karal is right, though, now isn't the time to be having conversations in their head that leave Vanyel out entirely, and - probably it's also not the time to debate ethics even if they do it out loud and include Vanyel, for all that it's been the topic of so many of their past conversations. 

"I appreciate that," he says quietly, which has the virtue of being true even if he can't entirely truthfully say that he's thankful. "It - does not make it hurt less, to say - that is basically saying I could not have realistically prevented it, with what I knew at the time, with the person I was at the time - but it might be true." 

Vanyel nods. "I know. It's not better, if it wasn't really anyone's fault. ...Or if it was Urtho's fault. You - cared about him a lot, didn't you." 

Nod. "He is - probably the first person I ever met who I really admired? ...I was never inclined to care that much what people thought of me, except for strategic reasons, but - I do remember I wanted him to be proud of me." 

Wow. 

"I think he must have been," he says quietly. "Even if he was scared of you by the end." 

This is a very high density of talking about emotions, could they maybe possibly be done with that soon

Oh good.  Karal is so glad the two of them are having this conversation, and he appreciates Vanyel very much.  (So much has happened in these weeks that he barely remembers how much it used to hurt to have to think about him.)

He cannot help sending Leareth a bit of fond amusement.  Yes, all right, they can be done.  Although it's surprising that he has that little stamina for talking about his emotions, when he's so good at thinking about them on his own, at looking at them unflinchingly and finding ways to arrange them right.  But Karal supposes that for Leareth doing something on his own and doing it with other people are much more separate skills than they are for him.

He can take over, if that's what Leareth needs, and give Vanyel an apologetic look and a soft smile.  "I'm sorry about all the switching.  He's... not good at this, especially now that everything's so hard.  But he cares about you, and - it's good for him, to be able to really talk to you.  I'm..." and suddenly it's hard to say it, with all the death between them, when without noticing it he started talking about his own feelings and not Leareth's - but he does, because it's true despite everything else: "glad you're here."

They're very different skills! And when Leareth does engage in processing emotions with other people - Nayoki does make him do that sometimes - it's usually doing a very different thing than this? He's not actually sure what feels so different about it or why, but it does. 

Vanyel didn't miss that Leareth was - overwhelmed, or something - and he doesn't miss Karal's little hesitation. There's so much history between them, Leareth especially but Karal as well; it almost feels like a physical presence, hovering in the air. Everything is still complicated and awkward, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing Sing can fix, but - maybe it's okay. 

"...l'm glad he has you," he says. "It - must help, having someone," in his head who he can't get away from, "who cares about him - just being okay."

Like with him and Yfandes, maybe, but Leareth would definitely never have accepted being Chosen, and– ....actually Vanyel isn't going to finish that line of thought, something hurts to look at and he doesn't really feel like asking himself what. 

The shift in Vanyel's expression is subtle - Karal probably wouldn't have picked up on it on his own - but to Leareth it's blaringly obvious. Vanyel is deeply not okay and this isn't exactly new information but it's new that Leareth can justify prioritizing it as - something he cares about fixing... 

He's still unsure if there's anything he could say even in principle that would help and not risk making things actively worse. 

Everything is going to be complicated for a very long time, and all Sing can do is give them the time to untangle it.  Time without any new horrors making it worse or entirely destroying their chances at being all right with each other.  It's more than he ever thought he'd have.

Karal isn't sure what to say either.  Vanyel is avoiding something so hard that it's barely possible to see it's there, let alone what it is or what might make it worse.  But... it's usually better to take that risk, to try making a connection instead of keeping a distance.  Even when something goes wrong, at least there's something to hold on to, somewhere to start another conversation that might go better.

Sometimes it's important to know that someone tried, no matter how badly.

"I hope it does.  And... he will be, eventually."  It may take a long time, but Karal doesn't doubt the outcome, at this point.

And, with a touch of hesitation made deliberately obvious, because it's important to acknowledge that he doesn't have the right to ask this question and is doing it anyway:  "Do you think you will?"

(If Leareth thinks of something to say, he definitely should.  He knows more about... all of this, knows Vanyel better, he's obviously important to Vanyel in a way few people are.  But that almost makes it easier for Karal to start the conversation, when his words don't have the weight of all that history behind them.)

Why is this suddenly the conversation they're having it's a perfectly natural continuation when he's just spent the last few minutes being incredibly nosy about Leareth's feelings. It would - probably be rude, to take the easy way out and say he doesn't want to talk about it, when Leareth just clearly pushed himself through a lot of discomfort to talk about feelings. 

"...I don't know." He shrugs awkwardly, not quite meeting Karal's eyes. "I - there's something that happened to me, it was - a long time ago - but it's not. Really the kind of thing that gets better." 

...It's something that the god or gods (who arranged for Vanyel's implausibly powerful Gifts, and the original Foresight dream) did to Vanyel. Leareth is a lot more sure of that than he is about what the thing is. 

He's not sure if Vanyel is capable of speaking about it. It does seem plausible that it's easier for him to talk about it to Karal, a near-stranger who shares less of a complicated history with him. 

"I am sorry."  He leaves it there for a long moment. He doesn't know what it was, and isn't going to ask, but he has no doubt that it was awful. And is awful, still - permanent or ongoing damage of some sort, he has no idea how, but Vanyel isn't the sort of man who would still be like this after something that happened long ago and is over, no matter how terrible.

But - if it's something that's in some sense still happening, then Karal will be surprised if it truly cannot be fixed.  "I think... none of us have any idea what can and can't be made better, now."

Vanyel has to take a few deep breaths before he can manage to answer, but it’s still easier than he expected, somehow. The ice dream helps, with the sense of cold, resigned distance it brings from everything waiting for him out there in the real world, and some of the sense of equanimity he has in the Shadow-Lover’s realm is still lingering a little.

“I lost my lifebonded partner,” he hears himself say. “I - Leareth knows about it. Not about the lifebond but.” He shakes himself slightly. “I’ve. Spent most of the last twelve years not - wanting to be alive. There were things Valdemar needed me for and - now there aren’t anymore - but. I don’t know if Sing lets anyone die anymore.”

…Well that was mortifying, and Vanyel also feels a bit like he’s watching the scene from a hundred miles away, but at least no one can accuse him of not reciprocating in the intimate conversation about feelings they’re suddenly having.

That does sound like the usual reaction to a broken lifebond - or, well, the surprising part here is that Vanyel is still alive. This probably ties into how Vanyel’s Gifts were awakened, unnaturally numerous and powerful, but now isn’t the time to speculate on what magical interaction was possible with a lifebond involved, and it’s certainly not a good time to ask.

(Leareth mostly isn’t having any emotions about it. He’s not in control of the body, but it’s almost like his thoughts have gone still, the way his body does when he’s processing and reacting to significant new information.)

Lifebonds are a thing out of legend, to Karal, but Leareth's thoughts provide enough context on them being both real and truly this painful when broken.  And... he knows Vanyel well enough that he can easily believe he'd live through something like that, keep living through it year after year, because people needed him to.  No wonder he puts so much effort into not thinking about it.

"Gods. That's awful, and of course you would keep going anyway..."

Part of him wants to immediately talk about what could be done about this - Leareth said it was possible to resurrect people, and surely Sing or Nayoki or someone could, with the gods' cooperation, undo this awful thing... But Vanyel deserves time to come to grips with today's world-shaking changes before starting to think about more of them, no matter how good they might be.

"I can't believe Sing would make you keep living, if you truly don't want to. But... give yourself time to see what the world will look like now. You've managed this long."

(And Vanyel deserves to hear about ideas that have first been thought through by people who aren't in terrible pain every moment they spend thinking about it. Leareth will have better answers than Karal possibly could, although Karal can't even tell if that's what he's so silently focused on right now. ...Karal notes that he probably should have emotions about it at some point as well - there's no doubt that he cares, and... Karal worries it might be more complicated than that, somehow. Everything has been, so far.)