There are indeed always a huge number of things that might happen and wouldn't be okay (not to mention things happening that aren't okay), all the time, everywhere. Plenty of people go to absurd lengths to not think about the catastrophes that could befall them. Some people worry a lot. Seldan himself was accused by several instructors of being constitutionally incapable of ever taking anything seriously (...huh, he remembers that but not his Companion's name when he was a Herald...) Being constitutionally incapable of ever taking anything seriously didn't get in the way of making serious decisions, and going off Blai's decision record, neither does worrying.

 Thus, one can prove that worrying is (har har har) nothing to worry about

In Seldan's defense, the world is, in fact, incredibly silly. See the part where Seldasen is currently a Mindspeaking horse

:If you'd rather not have to tell me the thing, I can just look.: Companions: convenient. So far he's overall delighted with this being-a-Companion thing, even if he's gradually adding more complaints and questions to his mental list in case he ever somehow gets a chance to hand it to the god Vanyel went and yelled at. 

"Vicar, I'm not sure another weekend in the basement will actually help," says Blai, "I think I need more time with the commentaries, I - I don't feel ready -" It's an excuse. It's not that it's untrue, but if there were something untrue he could say, to not go down in the basement again - last time was their fifth, and then Imma got chosen, and now he has no allies down there at all. Last time he was down there Claudia was so disoriented she tried to drink a candle. She burned her mouth and had wax all over her lips and she was still so exhausted that she almost tried to do it again before her hands shook too badly and she dropped it and gave up. Blai hasn't attempted to drink a candle, so far, but by the third time he was acquainted enough with dehydration that he tried to accept Marti's offer to let somebody drink his piss and then Marti didn't even let him.

Vicar Rey rolls her eyes. "You may be glad to learn that your feelings do not matter at all," she says, and she pushes him down the stairs.

He falls about halfway before he catches himself, ribs throbbing, knee smarting, a spot on his upper arm promising to turn into a violent bruise, and - it doesn't matter?

Really?

It doesn't matter and he's allowed to be glad of it?

Now that she's said that it's almost obvious in retrospect. Asmodeus is in charge, and if you'd asked Blai, on one of the theology quizzes or something, "does Asmodeus care about Blai Artigas's feelings, literally at all", the answer would have come with no searching, but -

He sits in the basement, with the remainder of his dwindling cohort. He'll either get chosen, or he won't. If he gets chosen then in just, what will it be now, sixteen hours, he'll be able to create water, and if he doesn't then he'll stay in here till Moonday (he can't remember any of the basement Moondays, it's so hard to keep track of time, there's just the march of heartbeat after sluggish gluey heartbeat once you've been in there long enough, but, notionally, Moonday) and he will have all kinds of stupid freewilled pathetic human feelings about this and none of that matters. He can just write it entirely out of the calculus. It'll still happen because he's an idiot insect only speculatively usable for anything other than paving material but he could just concentrate on everything else. Like his prayers. He is commanded to pray. There's nothing else to do in the basement besides pray and politick, and with Imma gone he is disadvantaged at politicking. The thing to do is pray. The point of him being here at all is to carve him into a shape Asmodeus can take up as a tool.

O King of Hell, Prince of Devils, I wait to be Yours; I will serve, I will serve, I will serve -

It must go on for about sixteen hours. The dehydration headache has him in earnest by then. His eyes are swimming with exhaustion. He hasn't budged from his agonizing kneeling position. Asmodeus has not called him to a task that requires his joints unstiff, or his mind clear, or his throat capable of speech, and every other reason to move doesn't matter.

Dawn strikes him and he goes on praying for another full hour, the whole complement of spells he's meant to ask for the first time, rather than break early and interrupt his preparations with a drink of water. That's for after he has served his purposes. The full hour. Then the water. Then making his way up the stairs, to be let out into the world, and take shape more fully as his lord's possession, a fullfledged Chosen of Asmodeus.

That sure is impressively horrible. Creatively horrible. Like someone put a lot of effort into coming up with the most horrible thought experiment they could. And was better at it than Seldan, because he would not have come up with that! 

Those are his first thoughts, but he isn't exactly feeling horror. It doesn't seem like it would help, and Seldan may not have been capable of inventing that but he was, in his time, an acknowledged champion of horrible thought experiments. He can look through the memory with detachment. Mostly. Except for a brief moment of idly picturing kicking in Vicar Rey's head, the thought tagged with an acknowledgement that just because someone did awful things does not make it fine to do whatever you want to them and he wouldn't actually go enact a revenge fantasy about it, but also he absolutely won the argument once about whether having revenge fantasies you're never going to act on is fine actually.

It's quite clearly demarcated in his thoughts that the horror isn't toward Blai. He wants to understand Blai, and this is a step toward that. There's some admirable tenacity and self-control to show there.

He can guess it gets worse than this, in terms of things Blai has actually done that were horrifying (which "get kicked down the stairs and locked in a basement to coerce him into praying to an evil god" isn't); all he's sure of is that it didn't involve eating babies. But, well, if this was just a horrifying thought experiment, rather than Blai's real actual life, it would be something about exploring the question of when a person's actions in extreme circumstances start to come apart from their character, in the sense of what you could predict about their actions in normal circumstances, and how this relates to moral culpability. One can take a position at either end on that question, and Seldan has always thought of himself as somewhere in the middle. It's information about what sort of person Blai is, and he's glad to have that information; he wants to understand Blai. It's already pretty clear that it's not predictive of Blai's character, in the sense of how he behaves when offered magic by a god who isn't evil (who sounds pretty excellent, really) and then dropped in a new world and given an opening to save a kid and prevent a war. 

He is also no longer confused about why Blai doesn't really like being referred to as Seldan's Chosen! That makes sense! 

Oh. Also. If anyone else ever again tries to do that to Blai, he will kick in their head. He feels very strongly about that. NO ONE is allowed to try to mess with Blai anymore. 

(Thoughts he's not having where Blai can see them: any expression of sympathy on how unpleasant and awful that sounds, he doesn't think that will help. Getting competitive on horrible-thought-experiment-generation and trying to see if he can think of an even worse version. Ranking all the Heralds he's met so far by how likely it is they could end up being chosen by Asmodeus if plopped into the horrible thought experiment.) 

trying to drink a candle is a little funny though

like, in an awful tragic way, but still

Wait why are we fantasizing about kicking Vicar Rey in the head. All things considered Blai remembers her pretty fondly. The other vicar not so much but Rey was mostly possible to work with and - helpful, if, as Blai did at the time, you consider her goals to be the same ones you mean to work toward. He has no reason to expect to ever see no-longer-a-vicar Jana Rey ever again but if she's somewhere in Reclaimed Cheliax instead of in Hell he'd probably be inclined to just say hello and not make a huge fuss about the time she broke every joint in his body, it's not like he didn't know that would happen if he fell asleep in class.

Fiiiiiiiiine it's a good thing when people outperform their environment even if it's only slightly and the bar is incredibly low and Seldan couldn't pick it out in this one specific memory. "Possible to work with" is better than not that. Seldan is probably still going to hate her, the Companion-bond has VERY STRONG FEELINGS on how unacceptable it is to break every joint in Blai's body for falling asleep in class, but the Companion-bond is not objectively reasonable about all things and he can respect Blai's relatively positive memories of her, and if they somehow do ever run into the woman he can be polite. 

Well, she might easily be impolite first, since Blai is now going around with the symbol of Iomedae hanging from his neck, but, like, Blai wouldn't choose to start shit with Jana Rey, or with Imma, or with his high school teacher who recommended him for seminary, or... most people really. Actually if you phrase it that way he wouldn't even choose to start shit with Vicar Vilar who took advantage of the broken joints situation to do some rape even though Blai really did not like that at all.

Not choosing to start shit with people is often wise! Even if they were gratuitously unpleasant to you when they had the opportunity! It doesn't sound like picking a fight with Vicar Vilar now would accomplish anything, even if you include "being satisfying for Blai personally" in "anything" (which Seldan thinks is generally not a good policy to follow). And Seldan is still missing swaths of context here (though he'll pick it up ambiently as things come up in Blai's thoughts, they don't have to do the entire explanation at once now) but he has a sense this is not one of those situations where Vicar Vilar being aware that Blai would remember his bad behavior while in a position of power and retaliate if he ever had the chance with him if he had the opportunity would have had...any...meaningful deterrent effect.  

(Seldan is not nearly as calm about this as he's trying to convey, but he has observed some things about Blai and this time he's keeping his colorful and creative visualization of exactly how he could retaliate for that behind his shields where Blai doesn't have to interact with it.) 

If Blai had been some sort of clerical prodigy and looked likely to be Aspexia Rugatonn's right hand man inside ten years (or something) then Vicar Vilar, or possibly, like, a smarter version of Vicar Vilar, might well have backed off on that basis. It was not remotely unheard of within Asmodean church politics to get a promotion and then spend one's entire ecclesiastical capital on fucking over everyone who ever slighted you. But Blai was not any sort of clerical prodigy - those get picked before they go into the basement even once, for one thing - and did not really radiate spite. He learned how to be scary, ish, at the Wound, but he was very much below average at it for an Asmodean priest.

Yeah. Seldan is pretty sure he prefers Blai the way he is, as someone who has remarkably little spite given that he grew up in the real-life version of a horrifying philosophical thought experiment on what kind of environment maximizes the number of people who will do bad things regardless of their underlying character. Seldan has a suspicion that Blai outperformed his environment by rather more than Vicar Rey. 

(Which can't have made it easier for him at the time, but - he survived it, and "oh gods you are so traumatized" is also not a helpful thought to have where Blai can see it.) 

Being scary is a useful skill in many circumstances even in Valdemar, but probably "below average at it for an Asmodean priest" is already overkill for the right amount of scary literally anywhere else. 

Well he was compensating for the fact that his preferred disciplinary method was making people play chess with him and that's inherently unscary.

....Okay this Seldan has got to see. He'll go looking in Blai's memories again for exactly how one plays chess with people in a terrifying punishment-y way. 

(He's also steering them toward the Companions' stables; Blai has the Endure Elements spell and isn't bothered by the cold, but it's still dark and snowy out and if it's like he remembers, the stables are actually very cozy.) 

Mostly you be much better and faster at chess than them, insult them the whole time, theatrically disintegrate the Prestidigitation'd pieces you capture (he hasn't had a physical chess set since Imma threw his congratulations-on-getting-into-seminary present into the fireplace), and sometimes tie other incentives to the game's hourglass or material points or exact board state. One time he was really pissed off at a junior cleric who'd been interfering with the martial officers and made him play over and over until he won, with Blai taking a slightly larger handicap each time until the junior cleric finally managed to beat six pawns, a knight, and a bishop, because Blai was making a point about experience counting for more than circles.

Huh. Seldan can believe that Blai learned to play a strategy board-game in a threatening way, but it's pretty impressive that despite growing up in the horrifying thought experiment he managed to land on a style of punishment that also presents actual learning experiences and would raise only a few eyebrows in Valdemar.

...Does Blai also enjoy non-punishment chess and if so does he want to teach Seldan the rules? Seldan probably cannot manipulate pieces but being a Companion seems to have enormously improved his visualization ability and they could do it via Mindspeech. He's always liked strategy board-games and this sounds like it could be a particularly good one. 

Blai has much less experience with purely recreational chess but he likes it! Grec, his second in command at the fortress, learned to play, after Blai had to stop doing punishment chess because it was not in the Lastwall disciplinary handbook, and that was nice. Blai loses track of pieces if he tries to play in his head and also his very favorite variant requires four people but Seldan being able to play mental correspondence chess is very neat. Vanyel should have mentioned this upside of Companions.

He came up with it because as an Asmodean theological matter it is meant to be the case that the exercise of power is desirable and appealing to those who wield it and he just doesn't actually like torturing people.

Well, in normal places most people don't like torturing people, but in the horrifying thought experiment country, disprefering torturing people enough that you come up with punishment chess instead is quite admirable, really.

(Seldan is radiating warmth and smugness, but only a little bit. He's going to have to gradually push Blai's tolerance for other people experiencing emotions in his vicinity.) 

They're at the stable now and can maybe go inside where it's less dark and snowy? It's not uncommon for Heralds to just sleep out here, too, and Blai does technically have a guest room that Seldan would be happy to deliver him to later but is also welcome to stay here.

Though that's later. Right now Seldan wants to learn CHESS and confirm that his visual memory is in fact up for maintaining a board configuration, which he's pretty sure it should be; Companions have really good memories, it's some compensation for not having hands to write with. 

If Seldan can hold a board in his head the question is whether Blai can then consult that board, and for bonus points whether he can do it without leaking all his strategic plans across the telepathic bond. He'll prestidigitate up a board so there's an example Seldan can use to visualize going forward.

If it's normal to sleep in the stables on one's Companion then Blai does not have a compelling reason to do some other thing instead. He can't sleep in his armor and his Endure Elements won't be wearing off in the middle of the night.

Seldan can pretty easily memorize the example and then project a mental image of a board to Blai! He does have to back off from reading Blai's surface thoughts to avoid getting all his strategic plans, and only maintain the formal Mindspeech link so Blai can tell him how he wants his pieces moved and he can update the board-visualization; it takes a few fits and starts to get this right and then it's straightforward. (Seldan can still tell how Blai is feeling through the bond, which might or might not leak some information about his plans in the game.)

Chess is delightful! Partly because Blai likes it, but Seldan suspects he would find it delightful anyway. 

To an insightful and mindreading person who is paying attention it is pretty obvious that much of why Blai likes chess so much is that it sponges up stray anxiety very handily. A fast complicated game gives him an unlimited number of things to worry about - he can always try projecting one more move ahead any time he has too many free mental spots. But all of those things he then worries about are "chess" as opposed to "devastating social censure" or "disembowelment" or "succubi" or "doing things against his religion" or "damnation".

(Seldan is so pleased with himself. Blai is excellent. He got the beeeeeest Herald. Everyone thinks that about their Herald, of course, the Companion-bond is probably designed to ensure it and also there's clearly some actual selection for the normal kind of personality-compatibility. It's still true though. 

...He's keeping those thoughts to himself and not letting much of the associated feelings across the bond, since Blai is - well, somewhat emotionally stunted in some ways after surviving growing up in in the horrifying thought experiment country. He'll brainstorm ways to gently work on that later; for the moment, it genuinely doesn't bother him especially. Maybe other Companions would find the incessant worrying distressing or frustrating, but Seldan is inclined to see that partly as a skill they're lacking and partly as an incorrect framing on Blai as a person. Blai is really impressively well-adjusted given, well, all of the everything, and it feels like all the elements of him, incessant worrying included, are relevant inputs into why he outperformed his environment even when it was horrible. In short, this changes nothing about whether Blai is great.) 

Chess is also great! The fact that Blai enjoys it (and that it's an anxiety-reducing coping mechanism for him) is just a bonus, really. It's going to take Seldan a few days to learn it well enough that he can fully keep up with Blai, but he's always liked strategy games and been good at them. 

In his ideal world, they would spend the next several candlemarks playing chess and then sleep snuggled up in the stall, letting the physical contact finish solidifying the bond, and worry about the bigger picture in the morning like sensible people. 

This is not Seldan - or anyone's - ideal world in as many as several ways. 

One of them is that after almost two candlemarks of chasing down every possible lead on Brightstar's current location, Vanyel is forced to admit that, one, Brightstar does not seem to be in Haven anymore, and, two, nobody actually seems to know when he left or where he was headed. 

Vanyel would like nothing more than for all of that to GO AWAY but he has a bad feeling. 

He grits his teeth and since Yfandes is NOT HERE starts tracking down and Mindspeaking relevant people or their Companions one at a time, the hard way. 

They're about a candlemark into the process of Seldan learning chess when he interrupts. 

:Herald Vanyel just contacted me. There's a problem and apparently it shouldn't wait until morning. Apparently they've managed to misplace the young Tayledras man who know how to destroy the archmage's immortality. And everything else is chaotic enough that he could easily have quite a lot of accomplices, wherever he is.: 

:I... don't have a spell suitable for that.  I don't think a lantern archon or an arbiter inevitable would have any special power to find him.  But if you need to go join a search pattern I can go see what became of my possessions since I was kidnapped?:

:Vanyel thinks it's unlikely he's in Haven at all, searching nearby isn't a good use of anyone's time. He mainly wanted your advice on - orienting to this in general, what questions we should ask and what to be paranoid about. And he's considering whether we can get anything useful out of your prophecy spell – obviously we missed the opening to cast it on Brightstar, but it sounds like it was very useful every other time.: 

Pause to glance back at some of Blai's memories. :...Though we should get your possessions back either way. I'll work on that.: 

:I have a prophecy and an Owl's both available if they'll help.:

Seldan mulls on this. :It's probably still the case that you don't have the context to reason usefully about this, and I certainly don't.:

After a pause,

:Vanyel thinks Savil ought to get the wisdom spell. She's been guarding the Heartstone, but Vanyel considers this evidence that the Star-Eyed Goddess already abandoned the explode-things plan as unworkable and is trying something else. She'll head over here.: 

Another short pause. :...And bring your armor and weapon, picking it up is on her way.: