The Star-Eyed Goddess is limited, right now, to operating in something much closer to linear time than the gods of Velgarth generally do.

The intensely baffling god from the other world is being quite helpful with this, actually! It eventually became clear to Her that the other god's world doesn't even have Foresight, because of their Cataclysm, which is an even more terrifying and awful consequence to be left with than anything She has faced with the unsteerable soul that won't stop popping up over and over again and doing things. And yet the friendly god isn't scared by it, because He has other ways to see. And is remarkably patient, but learning new ways to see and to communicate to mortals is not going to be instantaneous. It might take quite a long time.

In the meantime, the friendly god is less indignant about that part than about Her relations with Her own people, and from Her perspective it would be much simpler for everything if the noisy one can stay put until She has a plan - to set right some of the damage that the friendly god has, at this point, convinced Her that She really dealt, but importantly, a plan that DOES NOT RISK ANY CATACLYSMS even though NONE OF THEM CAN SEE WHAT THEY'RE DOING - and until She can figure out how to convey a message with more content.

The noisy soul is probably also very scared, just like She and the other gods are, which is...a new angle on some of the spectacularly obnoxious past ripples left by that soul on the world...and maybe She can do something about that but She doesn't, yet, know how. 

The other gods indeed mostly can't see what They're doing, not well enough to plan in ways that aren't wildly clumsy and correspondingly costly, but it is visible to other gods that the Star-Eyed Goddess is doing something unusual. 

Something almost entirely unlike a conversation is taking place. Hypothetically, if it was a conversation in a form recognizable to mortals, it might include the words WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

The plan didn't work. It's as simple as that. It should have worked, it was a well-constructed plan, none of Them could actually have predicted that it wouldn't, but then things that They couldn't possibly have predicted - because they originated in a different world that, get this, DOESN'T HAVE FORESIGHT - and the plan didn't work. The adjustments to the plan didn't work. The wildly costly, last-ditch, half-blind efforts didn't work. They're exhausting Their resources, cornering Themselves, running out of angles to act, and besides, at this point They can't see if the Foresight noise is hiding a possible Cataclysm. That would be very bad and it isn't worth it. 

Maybe She is all out of resources and angles to act and has gotten Herself cornered by letting Their enemy box in Her most useful mortal. That doesn't mean that Everyone is. 

....But it would be very bad to be so afraid of the noisy soul causing another Cataclysm that They cause one by accident because They can't see???

The noisy soul might be convinced to just go to the other world, which would solve all of Their problems, right. The gods in that world wouldn't even object because They somehow managed to break Foresight by having a Cataclysm. Which is a very important risk of Cataclysms to know about!!! They didn't try asking the noisy soul to do things before, because it was completely obvious it wouldn't work, but right now They can't see what will or won't work anyway, and the friendly god from the world with broken Foresight is being very helpful at showing Her how to translate to mortals. He used to be one! That was something that took Her quite a long time to actually grasp but He has been very diligently explaining!

They should absolutely not be following any godadvice from gods in the world that managed to have a Cataclysm and break Foresight!!!! Can the Star-Eyed not see why that would be a bad idea???? 

Actually the Star-Eyed thinks that it makes perfect sense to learn what went wrong so They can avoid it? If They had ended up in contact with another world where no Cataclysms had happened, wouldn't it be a good idea to explain to the gods there how to keep it that way? 

If this were actually a conversation, which it isn't, the response might be something like "ARGHHHHHHHHHH!" followed by storming off in frustration. 

...Vkandis does that sometimes. The Star-Eyed Goddess will go back to learning things about how mortals work from Cayden.

It's impossible to keep track of time very well in the dream, when nothing whatsoever changes in their surroundings and everything has a distant, timeless sort of feeling, but it can't have been that long since the mysterious food appeared. Leareth is definitely tired. It's starting to feel a lot like the experience of being on strong stimulants after a full day and night awake, the dream won't let him feel sleepy but he definitely feels stupid. It's not building very fast, though, and the nourishment of the dream meal, however bizarre the concept, does seem to have helped. Leareth feels less of a desperate need to conserve energy. 

Unfortunately, having more energy also means more of it is available to be stressed. Which helps with nothing. There are no other precautions or preparations Leareth can take from here; all he can do is remember, over and over, that he knows he was in a secure base in the north when he collapsed. Stef reported that Nayoki had the situation under control. They have at least some evidence to believe that Blai is still alive. 

Leareth settles on thinking out loud about where he left off in Golarion-finding research, using an illusion as a writing-surface. The circumstances aren't ideal for making progress on magic research, but it's in principle something that he could make productive headway on even stuck here. 

Stef spends a while spectating this in fascinated bemusement. 

"...Van, do you understand any of the words he's saying?" 

Yfandes would understand it

Vanyel shakes his head, helplessly. Everything hurts and his thoughts keep wandering off cliffs and it's only getting worse as the exhaustion builds. Leareth isn't acting like everything is doomed forever and ever, so that probably isn't a trustworthy thought, but even after a meal, Vanyel is having trouble dragging his mind onto any other thoughts. 

Stef is SO BORED. 

"So you're fixing your immortality thing, right?" he says conversationally to Leareth, once Leareth seems to have reached a stopping point, or at least gotten stuck, and stopped rambling out loud in math words. "Maybe while you're at it you could make one for Van too?" 

STEF

Leareth doesn't tense up very visibly at all. To someone who doesn't know him - and Stef doesn't, really, know him - it wouldn't show at all. 

(Leareth is trying to fix it, obviously, but - it might be too late. Even with Brightstar secured, the Star-Eyed Goddess has to know more now than She did before. He can't count on it, anymore, even once it's repaired. Golarion could offer alternatives, of course, or at least a place to work outside the reach of the gods here, but - he knows so little about the other world, and he's still days or weeks of research away from reaching it. More, if things keep happening to drag his attention away, and so of course the gods will be trying everything They can to distract him...) 

Leareth is scared. It's been getting more noticeable, over the uncountable candlemarks they've been trapped here. Probably just like Vanyel's own stupid morass of despair; it's harder to stay on top of it the longer this goes on. And, of course, the longer this goes on, the more reason they have to think that Leareth's organization can't solve it for them from the outside. 

For maybe the third or fourth time, he considers whether there's any way to talk to the Shadow-Lover from here. Inconveniently, the dream setting was more or less designed as a place where he and Leareth couldn't do anything to really harm each other. He can't reach his real Gifts at all; no way to stop his own heart with Healing. Injuries in a dream won't affect his real body. No way of getting a message out that they need to kill him (just a little bit, temporarily), and that's assuming that anyone would be willing to act on that request, which - no. 

It's still tempting to think about it, though. It takes Vanyel a while to drag himself away. 

Vkandis is unhappy with the situation. 

Unhappy is an understatement. The Star-Eyed Goddess is off making baffling and dangerous unilateral decisions, and Vkandis is, in fact, just about completely out of any useful leverage with Her. 

It should have worked. The backup plan should have worked. As a consolation, the Star-Eyed should have at least been able to take the noisy other-world soul out of the picture. But everything keeps not working - even when They could make out enough in Foresight to lay down hasty, clumsy walls to steer the mortals, abruptly everything would shift again for no reason. That isn't supposed to happen. 

The other world is obviously to blame for the new problems. Their Cataclysm broke Foresight, and clearly it's spreading, and the Star-Eyed Goddess is blind to it, probably because She sees some temporary advantage to imitate the Shadowgod and win a temporary advantage for Herself out of it. 

But Vkandis is not, in fact, out of all leverage. Just out of subtle options. 

Some plans are brutally simple. The kind of thing that the Star-Eyed Goddess, let alone the Shadowgod, would never think of because it's too...inelegant. It is inelegant, not to mention enormously wasteful. 

But it literally should not matter that He can't, actually, see in Foresight how it plays out. There's only one way it can play out. 

The immortal soul is not, currently, immortal – that much, Vkandis is certain He would see shift in Foresight, however blurred it is. But the window to act on that opportunity is narrowing. 

Vkandis has been maintaining a barrier over Iftel for almost two thousand years. If there's just one thing He understands that doesn't rely on Foresight in the slightest, it's the forces and energy contained in that barrier.

It will be a Cataclysm of sorts. But one that He can aim almost entirely at territory that literally nobody cares about, because the only one doing anything with it is the (not currently immortal) soul. 

The Star-Eyed should have been able to see it coming. Would have, if She had been attending to Her Foresight senses rather than mostly trying to ignore the chaos to talk to the friendly god from the other world, who of course cannot see anything over here. 

...Even once it's too late and She can see that it - that something - is already happening, She can't really see what. Some kind of insane Vkandis thing? It doesn't not look like another Cataclysm, stumbling around a corner in Foresight and metaphorical-face-first into a wall. 

She would warn her Healing-Adept, for all the good it might do, but - warn the human of what? 

She flings out a pretty-much-contentless warning anyway - not conveying any real information should make it less disruptive, Cayden has been explaining to Her some details of why it's often not good for humans to talk to gods who were never human Themselves - and She kicks the various humans out of the Foresight dream construct, because at this point that really seems unlikely to make anything worse, and Cayden has just been making the very good point that the mortals are better at having senses that aren't Foresight and might, actually, know what's happening, and She abruptly wants the immortal one to pull out one of those horribly inconvenient twisty route-arounds, which would serve Vkandis right. 

And then She can do the metaphorical equivalent of yelling at Vkandis, and also at the Shadowgod for not doing anything, because She might have been busy but She does not think for a moment that They would have entirely missed it. 

(From Cayden Cailean's perspective, the other god has with no warning started blocking His godcommunications, despite the fact that the conversation seemed to have been going fine.) 

The barrier is primarily formed of mage-energy, of course, but that isn't the main form it decays into. Pure mage-energy is less useful, in this case. The immortal one shields against it, for one, and also it's not actually that good at penetrating thick stone. 

Vkandis can also work with light. Perfectly ordinary, non-magical light, that Leareth has no reason to specifically shield against. 

There is inevitably some overflow in low-energy, long-wavelength light, also known as "heat", along the current surface of the barrier. It's a minuscule fraction of the total energies in the barrier, for obvious reasons – it's not very damaging miles underground or miles in the air, where it either pointlessly half-melts some rock or dissipates quickly in the air - but it does, of course, set off a mile-wide ring of burning forest around the entire perimeter of Iftel's border. 

The vast majority of the energy exits mostly as extremely short-wavelength light, aimed west and originating from the upper component of the barrier's surface, at a shallow angle. It leaves a bar of brightly-glowing ionized air in its path, and then a substantial component of intersects with the surface of the conveniently very flat tundra a hundred or so miles away. (This is relevant because there isn't, actually, enough energy in the barrier to completely vaporize all of the stone in a straight line for over a hundred miles in a fraction of a second.) A smaller but still substantial fraction exits as slower-moving mage-energy, already in the process of decaying into more high-energy light. 

A lot of it "misses", of course, the beam having spread out a little while it traveled; the brunt of it lands on about a square mile of surface rock, and only some of that contains Leareth's base. The stone attenuates the remainder – a lot more than the magical shielding does, actually. Even gamma rays can't trivially penetrate ten feet of solid rock - though the beam, even at this distance, is intense enough to vaporize the first few feet and partially melt the next few. On the surface, things are about to get very exciting. 

The thorough earthquake shielding isn't damaged by high energy radiation, though, which passes more or less straight through it. The shielding is designed to handle the stone around it suddenly becoming unstable, and it holds, and the ceiling doesn't collapse, and the strength of the radiation blast makes it through several orders of magnitude weaker. It no longer makes the air glow. 

More than half of the energy hits in a fraction of a second, but the rest, that exited more slowly as mage-energy and then decayed, makes it through over the next two or three seconds. By five seconds in, it's pretty much over. The secondary radioactive isotopes from photonuclear reactions are trivial in comparison. 

It should, Vkandis thinks, still be a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the minimum high-energy light it takes to guarantee the squishy mortals will die. 

(There aren't that many interesting non-magical-radiation phenomena in Velgarth, not in places where mortals frequent, but Vkandis finds light very interesting, like the Star-Eyed finds Heartstone stability magic interesting, and has paid attention.) 

Something that may never have been obvious to Vkandis, given how Foresight works, is that the mortals don't necessarily die instantly. A guaranteed-fatal exposure can take weeks to play out. Even a hundred times that still takes minutes. 

Nayoki senses the attack - it shows up to mage-sight, though not very well - and on pure instinct flings additional shielding over the beds of the helpless sleeping people she's been guarding, for all the good it will do when the much more powerful building shields apparently did nothing. Whatever it is barely seems to interact with mage-shielding, and she has no idea what it is - it's not immediately apparent that it even did anything, the walls are standing, nothing is on fire - but the peripheral alarms are keyed to her and triggering now, much too late to serve as any kind of warning - what - 

- she bounces the alarm to the backup facility with scry-coverage, which takes another couple of seconds through the artifact keyed to her - it should have been automatic but the set-spell might be down, with that much damage to the outer shielding - and she broadcasts a Mindspeech alarm at the whole facility rather than take the time to look for specific minds, and then she tries to stand, which is the point at which she realizes she must be injured, or something, because standing feels unaccountably wrongbad. She opens her eyes, which she must have instinctively squeezed shut when it hit, and realizes something is wrong with them too, she can't properly see across the room... 

Nayoki does manage to get one more comms-spell through, for a second or two, enough to convey INJURED SITUATION CRITICAL, and then she loses hold of it, and by then it's far too late to attempt a Gate out. 

Leareth has faster reflexes. 

He jolts awake, thoroughly disoriented and under attack, and he doesn't try to orient further than the "under attack", because he has a firmly engrained instinct to Gate out to a secure location and then figure it out. In just under a second, he's gone, tumbling through a horizontal unscaffolded Gate onto the floor of a records cache that should be safely outside the attack radius. 

His shield-talisman is halfway drained but otherwise completely intact, which makes no sense. Maybe he managed to get out before whatever-it-was hit? Except that Leareth is fairly sure something did hit him. 

The Gate-backlash is bad. Leareth heads for the stored supplies to retrieve a scrying artifact, and realizes halfway there that something is wrong, and by the time he reaches the crates he's given up on walking. He goes for a comms-spell artifact, instead, because abruptly telling someone where he is is seeming like the highest priority. He tries for Nayoki and gets no answer and, with dull alarm, pieces together that she might well have been in the same place he was just in, hit by the same whatever-that-was - blearily, he dredges up the priority contact list and tries for the commander of the base to the northeast and gets nothing, which is even more alarming, that was fifteen miles away, and the gluey pain in his head is worse, the next name is no longer coming to mind and he's not, in fact, sure how many more times he can hold a comms-spell even with the artifact doing nearly all the work... 

It hits Blai and Seldan at the same time, with about the same intensity, about two seconds before Nayoki yells "UNDER ATTACK" in both of their heads and without actually offering any kind of Mindspeech link to pick up an answer. Seldan is a Groveborn Companion and Blai is third circle, though, and it's not going to be quite as immediately incapacitating for either of them. 

It does feel remarkably bad, like a Stinking Cloud that inflicts energy drain or something, but Blai's on his feet because his feelings don't matter - can Seldan follow him, can they get into a whole room of people and see if a channel does anything in such a room -

Seldan is mobile. For the moment, at least. The...attack? It must have been, even if Seldan can't imagine where it could have come from or how it got through the shields...is trailing off, but he's certain that it did something nasty to both of them, even if Blai has no obviously visible injuries. 

This way. They're not far from the room where Nayoki was guarding the people trapped in the dream – there were some Healers there as well, it's the closest place they can reach that definitely has at least six or seven people in one place. Get there first, Seldan thinks, and then assess if they have time to find anyone else to drag into the line of effect. He doesn't think either of them is imminently dying, but he's a Groveborn Companion and Blai is third circle. It could be a lot worse for the others. 

Hallway. Whatever the attack itself was - and he's still trying to guess that and still failing, it wasn't magic or at least wasn't normal mage-energy - Seldan thinks it might already be over? But the injury isn't, somehow, something is still getting worse, and it feels like more than just the phenomenon where someone can take a serious wound in a fight and only notice when the adrenaline wears off. (Seldan is not trying to conceal any of his own symptoms from Blai, because this is important information.) He can still move, he's not going to collapse on the spot, but his legs feel weak and his balance is off and there's a burning pain that seems to be everywhere at once, even though nothing is on fire and neither of them is visibly burned. 

(Ten seconds in, the actual air temperature is rapidly rising, as the massive quantities of heat dumped into the stone above their heads start to reach them, and even heat shielding built to protect against unexpected magma from an underground volcanic eruption can't redirect all of it.) 

Blai feels kind of like he would be sweating profusely even if it were objectively cold but there are heat shimmers in the air that mean it's probably actually hot.

He staggers into the room, trying not to lean on Seldan too hard because Seldan's not steady either and a horse will take a fall worse than a man - does he need to throw up - maybe? - he pauses to heave into a corner and then scrabbles for his holy symbol. He's dizzy, it's hard to count, are there the expected number of people in the room -