The useful thing is that some fraction of those are totally reasonable concerns to be tracking! Seldan is glad of the reminder to nag someone in Mindspeech about Blai's Gentle Repose spell and find out if they actually have access to any dug-up kyree corpses yet or if he should just use today's on Leareth's mage, whose body he's pretty sure is being stored in this facility already. 

...Seldan cannot speak to whether the Shadowgod is intentionally appearing as attractive to whoever They're talking to but this is not just Blai, Seldan isn't sure how many people in Valdemar's history have nearly-died enough to speak to the Shadow-Lover but apparently enough that a Bard wrote a song about it once which is halfway to being a romantic ballad. (This actually isn't a memory from his past life and he's not sure whether or not the song had been written then; it came up unrelatedly in Companion-gossip after all the recent Shadow-Lover conversations.) 

Vanyel mentally drilled the initial steps of the Heartstone-shutdown process with Savil a dozen times. He steps across the Gate and then into the shielded Heartstone sanctum and doesn't hesitate. 

He kind of appreciates having the time pressure. Otherwise he might be tempted to have feelings about it. He created the Heartstone. Birthed it, in a sense. It's not quite a living thing but it's not not a living thing, either, and - even if this is definitely necessary, there's still something deeply sad about it. Part of him feels like it's surely not the Heartstone's fault, that the Goddess who lent Her magic to it is hostile. 

But he's under time pressure - the hardest part of this might be just barely doable within five minutes - and so there isn't time for feelings. 

Savil is slightly less intensely busy than Vanyel for this part - she's holding some of the structure of the working and cuing him - which means she has slightly more time to be INCREDIBLY TENSE. 

It goes entirely as expected for the first few minutes. Vanyel goes through the sequence of steps required to authorize any modifications to the deepest layers of the Heartstone structure; this part requires a signoff from all the Herald-Mages currently in the Web (so, everyone but Jisa), but Savil figured out a way to have them do it in advance, so they don’t need to be crowded into the rather tiny sanctum room right now.

Vanyel starts bleeding power off the Heartstone into the surrounding network of ley-lines and nodes. It’s difficult in the sense that he’s moving a lot of energy, but the Heartstone isn’t fighting him per se. 

He eases the stored power down to only somewhat more than a node, which is the part he was mostly worried about; even if the Heartstone does explode at this point, it should be contained easily within the shields that Leareth’s people are holding on the inner Palace walls, from which all civilians have been waiting for evacuated.

Maybe they’re still going to die attempting this - himself and Savil and Sandra and the 43 mages from Leareth’s organization who volunteered to be here. But no one else is going to die. 

He should have a minute or two left on the Owl’s Wisdom.

The next stage is to start peeling apart the anchor-structure of the Heartstone, cutting it off from the inflow of ley-line energy before cutting the outlets and then dismantling the containment surface itself.

It doesn’t require Vanyel’s level of sheer power, especially; he’s the most familiar with this specific Heartstone, but Savil helped move a Heartstone for k’Treva, a decade before Vanyel was even Chosen. They drilled what to do if for some reason he has to hand it over to her.

With the Owl’s Wisdom, it’s pretty overdetermined that whenhe does feel something odd, he taps Savil’s shields without hesitation. 

:Might need you—:

:—to take over: but her mind isn’t there to reach anymore. 

A second ago Leareth was in the main coordination-meeting room with a scrying artifact, mid-Mindspeaking someone a question.

Now he’s…at the pass? Facing Vanyel. He can’t feel anyone’s mind at all; it’s somewhat unclear if his Gifts are even working, which - is exactly how the dream normally works. Except for the part where he definitely wasn't asleep. 

"...Well. That has never happened before." 

...Vanyel jogs over from the mouth of the pass. 

"I - think I handed off to Savil in time - was anything happening in the north -?" 

"Nothing that I was aware of! I assume everyone is very worried now." 

Leareth makes another attempt to Mindspeak Nayoki. It does not work. 

"...This is incredibly inconvenient." 

"I'm...going to see if I can wake up on purpose?" 

Vanyel pinches himself very hard. This does not result in waking up. 

If Savil hadn't been warned, it's possible she would have been alarmed enough to run to Vanyel when he abruptly collapsed, instead of first attending to the extremely complicated working they're trying to manage and which she's explicitly on-call to take over if anything happens. 

She doesn't panic. She manages to take over, ungracefully but before anything has a chance to explode. 

:- I think you should evacuate Vanyel: she manages in between steps. :Get out of range for the Gate.: 

And now she needs to focus. This part is doable for her but it's pushing the limits of her Gift-potential. She tries to block everything else out, and not think about Vanyel tumbling to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut - what could have happened - no time to think about it now - 

Seldan is (by his own insistence and Mindspeech range) in realtime communication with Leareth’s people at this location, and so he hears immediately when something unexpected does go wrong.

…Blai’s anxiety is apparently weirdly prescient, because “Leareth falls over” is NOT a threat model Seldan would have been tracking. 

- they don’t know what happened, there wasn’t a Gate anywhere near him, he wasn’t doing anything magically complicated at the time, he just abruptly collapsed for no obvious reason - 

WHY IS THAT A THING. Does he need healing, is the room he's in secure, is there an invisible attacker or a scrying sensor or a whatever the fuck there would be instead of those things here because magic is different,

Seldan will hopefully know more in the next ten seconds! The room he’s in really should be secure, it’s part of the same building, and Seldan is not aware of any magic that would let someone invisibly sneak into an underground shielded base without being detected. Everyone in the room with him is confirmed to be one of Leareth's actual staff though it sounds like they're pulling everyone who was present away to check if they were somehow compulsioned or something, even though there are a lot of precautions that should make this nearly impossible and, for example, no one from the Highjorune evacuation was brought into contact with anyone who's now in this building... 

- they've summoned a Healer who says it doesn't seem like anything is physically wrong with Leareth, he's just inexplicably unresponsive, which seems like something Blai's Healing magic probably wouldn't help with - 

Urgent update from one of the comms-mages: the Heartstone working is still in progress but Vanyel apparently also collapsed for no obvious reason. They're evacuating him north. ...To a different location just in case whatever is wrong with him is somehow contagious. 

This is baffling! Seldan doesn't even have a theory at this point, especially because the obvious goal of incapacitating Vanyel or Leareth would be making the working go wrong  and it sounds like it hasn't, in fact, gone irretrievably off track, Savil was able to take over - 

This might be a good time for Seldan to try out praying to the Shadowgod in case She is not fully apprised of the situation and can do something to make it work out okay!

That's a good idea. Seldan is not entirely sure it'll work outside of Valdemar - based on some gossip with Leareth's staff here, Leareth picked this region for his operations because it's outside the territory of any gods (or at least of any gods that tend to intervene in noticeable ways.) 

His idea for getting it to be more likely to work - and, hopefully, to get some form of feedback on whether it did work - involves focusing most of his attention in a sort of extraplanar space where the Companions access Foresight. So he'll be pretty distracted for a while. 

Understood. Blai's going to pray too for lack of any better ideas but Iomedae is way less likely to do anything.

Seldan finds the way Blai prays very charming, and has gotten enough of a sense of it by now to somewhat imitate it in his own blue-place prayers, not that he has any idea if it's actually as good a format for the Shadowgod to learn things from prayers. The Shadowgod does not seem very good at...understanding...things. 

Worth a try, though. He'll settle himself comfortably in his straw bed in their room, and - it's a weirdly intuitive motion, shifting his mind to the blue place of silver threads, given that he's never done it before. 

Presumably the Shadowgod knows that something is going on but this is what it looks like from their perspective, the sequence of events as they're strung together from a mortal viewpoint... 

Nayoki was inconveniently working from almost the opposite end of the facility, but she makes it to the room within three minutes of the urgent summons about something mysteriously wrong with Leareth. 

:What's going on?: 

He's still apparently unconscious! They haven't tried moving him yet, so he's on the floor with someone's jacket folded under his head.

As reported, he doesn't respond at all or make any attempt to pick up his end of a Mindspeech link when she tries for one, but his shields do still seem to be up. 

Which you wouldn't expect if he were unconscious from backlash or something, which normally brings down someone's shields. This looks more like he's just asleep, except for the part where they've already tried every reasonable way of waking him.

It's also inconvenient because he shields very well and just this once Nayoki would like it if she could actually read him and try to figure out what's going on. The little she can get off him with Mindhealing Sight accords with "asleep" more than "unconscious" but does not explain how or why; she can't see anything wrong that would explain why he's not waking up. 

They should get him somewhere more comfortable than the floor and she'll go look at Vanyel. 

Vanyel is in similar shape – well, except for the part about looking fine to Mindhealing Sight, he doesn't shield it out at all and he looks horrifying, but that's mostly the broken Companion-bond and shouldn't have any effect on whether they can wake him. He does show signs of moderate backlash but that's fully explained by the Heartstone working he was in the middle of when it happened and, again, shouldn't cause him to be unwakeably asleep. 

This is so weird! Nayoki is so confused and she doesn't like it at all! 

It occurs to her after a few minutes of staring frustratedly at Leareth's shields that she's never actually tried to wake him for an emergency and interrupted a Foresight dream. She would have expected him to wake up normally, but - usually it's timed for when he's asleep, and doesn't just happen in the middle of an important project. Some Foreseers do fall over like that they get a strong enough vision, though it's more common for someone to externally look like they're lost in a daydream, or see it without entirely losing track of the present, and also she's never heard of it lasting for nearly ten minutes. 

They know the shared dream is a godintervention, though. It hadn't occurred to her that it could be wielded as a hostile intervention like this and incapacitate both of them at an inconvenient moment, but maybe Someone is running low on options and getting creative. 

- she doesn't like it any better. It may not be directly dangerous, but it's making her wonder what else might be about to go wrong while neither of them is available to deal with it. 

They bring Leareth and Vanyel both to the infirmary, and she parks herself there and remembers to tell someone to update Seldan.