Receiving Mindspeech in the blue place is really weird. Seldan is now on his third repetition of trying to loudly think through the situation in the Shadowgod's direction, and has no particular reason to think that more iterations will be more successful. He extracts himself so he can concentrate properly on the message and then alert Blai. 

:Nayoki - the Mindhealer - thinks that Someone yanked them into the shared Foresight dream and is somehow trapping them there. She doesn't think it's dangerous for them directly - though it would be rough if it lasted for days - but she's not sure if there's a second step to the plot. ...Still waiting to hear word from Haven, but no news does at least mean it hasn't exploded.: 

Well, that doesn't sound that bad unless they're out so long that they have to be forcefed in their sleep.

It's not nearly as bad as most things that could cause someone to abruptly collapse! (Though it leaves unexplained what happened to Blai in that one prophecy, he doesn't have an existing recurring Foresight dream to be yoinked into.)

It seems like it would mostly be bad if, you know, something is going to come up that only one of them could have stopped, or if a god is going to try to assassinate Leareth again while he can't defend himself. But they're pretty locked down here, he can't see how any assassination attempt could get through – if it's an earthquake, there are literally dozens of people here capable of Gating them elsewhere, it doesn't have to be Leareth personally. 

Maybe the Star-Eyed Goddess just wants to block Leareth from researching how to get to Golarion? But the Shadowgod is already known to be in favor of contact with Golarion and probably wouldn't let it go on indefinitely? 

The Shadowgod might if nothing else not be in as much of a hurry as Blai, She doesn't have much reason to care if he makes it to the convention on time.

Indeed, the Shadowgod seems fine with nudging along plans that take twenty years to play out and until the very last moment look like letting another god have Their way. 

...Actually, that thought is making him wonder if this might be mostly aimed at making Foresight less noisy? It's probably incredibly hard for to the Star-Eyed to even figure out what's going on, what with Blai wandering in with his otherworldly god-magic, and especially Minor Prophecy letting them repeatedly see what's going to go wrong and changing plans based on it. Maybe taking Vanyel and Leareth off the gameboard is less to allow a specific plot to play out and more so that She can see well enough to plot anything at all?In which case the Shadowgod might not be too bothered, though probably (hopefully) would still intervene to disrupt any plots that end in Blai being murdered. 

Huh. Well, it seems like kind of bad incentives to let that work for sort of the same reason one shouldn't cooperate with kidnappers. Blai is now contemplating what the loudest most annoying things he could do to make this future retroactively a stupid one for the Star-Eyed to steer for might be.

This is not obviously a wise way to relate to gods but Seldan is kind of delighted by it anyway. He got the best Herald!

Hmmm. Blai could prepare as many prophecy spells as he can fit tomorrow and cast them on a whole list of important decisionmakers? Are there other spells he has that are even more weird and impossible by Velgarth standards? Creating food is pretty impossible with Velgarth magic but it’s not hugely impactful on their situation…

He's not sure. He could... cast Tears to Wine and let tons of people drink the wine, that might look confusing if they were people who then went on to do substantially different things than they would without the enhancement. He could... Speak With Dead, if there's anybody who might have valuable information a god might have been trying to lock up, though with Shadowgod being a death god and presumably on-side that doesn't seem that likely to work.

Yeah. The Shadow-Lover doesn’t have remit over all the relevant dead people, but - poke at Blai’s concept of the spell - aww, it seems like it wouldn’t work to try casting it on someone who died in k’Treva, since they don’t have the bodies. Also even if it did work, it might not change that much, most people are already convinced it wasn’t Leareth’s doing and Brighstar probably wouldn’t be convinced by a spell he knows nothing about.

Tears to Wine does seem interesting. Seldan can bring it up with Nayoki.

It might be worth doing it even without the justification that it will annoy a hostile god but he might not have thought of it without, so it can pull double duty.

Indeed. He wonders if it works on Companions, and now he's musing on how he would even drink wine, like, logistically - it seems deeply unaesthetic to put it in a water-trough though you technically could...

...he wonders if they could actually learn anything that would have any disruptive effects by Speaking to Dead with Yfandes, it's not like they can't already figure out more or less what happened, and Vanyel would probably not actually find it emotionally reassuring... 

He's going to attempt to do some more praying in the blue place. He's not sure it will help but it's as good a place to think as any. And maybe he'll think of something else.

Today is a bad day. 

It's been WAY too long that she's been hundreds of miles away from Treven. Jisa feels like the least she could ask for is for them to have the shared dream, but it hasn't happened once. (She's not sure if Vanyel...knows...about the dream, so it doesn't make sense to be annoyed with him about not asking the Shadow-Lover about it, assuming the Shadowgod is even involved in it in the first place.) 

On top of all that, she's now spent days at what might be literally the most remote and least important underground base in Leareth's whole organization. It turns out that being underground at all times is depressing even when there are really bright mage-lights, not that aboveground is going to be less depressing this far north at this time of year but still.

Being around Brightstar is also depressing! She's not sure what's going on with him, exactly, it feels like it's not just grief over the deaths of almost everyone he's ever known - though that would be enough to deal with - or even just misery over his "failure" at his Goddess' mission. She had to put a Mindhealing block on him to shut down his ability to shield against Thoughtsensing - for him, like for her, it's instinctive and doesn't go down even in his sleep - and she still feels awful about it, but he wouldn't answer her questions and even a coercive Truth Spell was barely getting anything useful from him. 

She had to be the one to explain to Featherfire everything that's happened in the last week. Featherfire took it...better than she could have, honestly, and unlike Brightstar seems willing to interact with the concept that maybe the Star-Eyed was involved...but it was still one of the more painful conversations of Jisa's life. 

And now Savil is stuck trying to finish shutting down the Heartstone - latest word is that nothing bad has happened yet but it's taking her a lot longer without Vanyel's help - and the reason she doesn't have Vanyel's help is that he and Leareth are both TRAPPED IN THE FORESIGHT DREAM OR SOMETHING, and Jisa is still in this stupid underground base. And having to harass Leareth's staff to get any kind of update, probably because Nayoki is understandably overwhelmed with Leareth out of commission and is not thinking to keep her in the loop. 

At least Enara is with her, which feels like the only remaining reason she isn't losing her mind right now. 

Featherfire is trying to talk to Brightstar. 

...Something is wrong. She doesn't understand what, but - they've always been on the same page, before. They're twins. She should be able to talk to her brother, no matter what else is happening, and - she can't. Even when he answers her in actual words, which took half a candlemark of coaxing, it - feels like there must be words between them that are falling into some kind of crack in the world. She's not sure what she means by that but that's what it feels like. 

Eventually she hugs him for a long time, not bothering to say anything at all, and then leaves and goes to find Jisa. 

"Something is wrong." 

Literally everything is wrong, that's not new information at all

Jisa takes a deep breath. "With Brightstar? I - he wouldn't talk to me but I was hoping he would talk to you, you weren't - involved -" Brightstar has no reason at all to feel like Featherfire betrayed him. 

"He...did speak to me a little, but -" Helpless shrug. "I cannot think of how to describe it, he - I would have thought you had done something to his mind..." 

"...I mean. I did." And she feels like the worst person in the world about it. "But nothing that's still on him should be, um, affecting his thinking. I figured it was kind of understandable of him not to want anything to do with me, given...what happened, but..." 

"I think it is not that." 

A very long pause. 

"...I think the Goddess did something to him? - he said that he spoke to Her, on the Moonpaths. When he thought Father was dead." 

"...Huh." Jisa hadn't thought of that. Maybe she should have, given everything that's happened, but it hadn't felt obvious to her that there was anything left unexplained once you took into account that she was - from Brightstar's perspective - either fully mind-controlled to be Leareth's slave or willingly working for him, and was the one who had blocked his Gifts. 

(You will open a door to find only betrayal and pain, a god said to them once through a prophecy. You will stand at a crossroads, and find one another on opposite sides. Jisa isn't sure it's accurate to say she hadn't thought it could hurt this much; she hadn't really thought that part through at all.) 

Featherfire looks down at the floor. 

“…He has always felt that he belonged to Her. Even when we were small." She frowns, thoughtfully. "The pact lies more heavily on him. I think it is because he is a Healing-Adept."

That sounds very ominous and Jisa doesn't like it. 

And somewhere else - insofar as where” is an applicable concept - the greater god behind the Shadow-Lover is looking backward in Foresight for the point when the visitor from another world arrived - mostly unnoticed at the time by the gods, They were busy and a slowly growing blind spot in Foresight wasn't evident at first - and then following that, in a different direction, to search for where the visitor came from before that. 

The gods I would be inclined to recommend to You to speak with would be Iomedae if She is available, Cayden Cailean, who I already mentioned, Desna, of travel and dreams and the stars, Sarenrae, of redemption and the sun, Shelyn, of love and art, and Abadar, of trade. Not necessarily in that order. Maybe also Erastil, farming and hunting. 

is what the visitor said to the Shadow-Lover avatar, and the god behind the avatar cannot precisely understand that in words, but They can look for a world with afterlife planes, and its gods, and a god that used to be human and will communicate with Them.

...It turns out this is quite difficult to do. 

There are possible threads in Foresight leading to places They would rather not go. The Star-Eyed Goddess would probably be steering differently, if She knew what the god of the shadows learned from the visitor.

But communicating information of that format, learned from mortals via the Shadow-Lover avatar, is also not the kind of thing that the gods of Velgarth are particularly good at, and - it would be an enormous simplification and a misleading translation into human concepts to say the Star-Eyed Goddess "doesn't trust Them", but not entirely incorrect. 

Easier to wait and watch and nudge anything that would be really catastrophic, and keep trying to reach the other world. 

It turns out that ascended gods look real weird. 

This person has godsenses and godmemories and communicates like a god. But there is still something of the flavor of a human in them. His godsenses are shaped, on some level, like they used to be sight and hearing and taste. His communication is compressed in particular ways that let you know it once was speech. And his desires are, on some basic level, human desires that got bigger.

(Iomedae scrapped more of her humanity before she ascended; she thought like a god far before she became one. Perhaps that is why the Shadowgod found Cayden Cailean first.)

That is very strange. 

There is the additional complication that the Velgarth gods communicate with each other - to the extent that "communication" is even the right term for it - primarily in Foresight, and this is another world that entirely lacks Foresight as a functioning mechanism. 

The god of the shadows will try to communicate something like "We are a god from another world and were directed to speak to you about the destination of souls" but it's debatable how much of this will translate at all. 

uhhhhhhh Pharasma???? I think there's an Outer God bothering me