They cross from scorching heat into freezing flurries. 

...Blai doesn't have Endure Elements. Seldan does not let himself indulge in any fretting about his Herald being cold. He tries to produce some extra body heat, but not too much; he needs to conserve his strength too. 

He does immediately Mindspeak every Companion he can reach. Can they please get some Healers out here right now. 

Nayoki has too much dignity to collapse in a heap, but maybe she will just. Sit down. ...And then throw up, but at least she can console herself that she held it in longer than either Van or Stef. 

For about two seconds the shock of cold feels nice against Blai's previously overheated skin and then it's just cold. Alas. He's got one Lesser Restoration left after having cast one on Nayoki but he's not sure where it will be best applied. Blai himself, in case he's about to collapse and not be able to dispense more Cure healing - one of the Healers here so they have more resources to help with, except there are local healers probably on the way - Seldan just because it's really very unpleasant for Seldan to be in bad shape but that's not a good reason -

Seldan is fine! At least for the moment! All of this is astoundingly unpleasant, but the unpleasantness alone isn't going to kill him so it's not worth burning limited resources on fixing. (It's admittedly pretty tempting to convince Blai to use it on himself, but the same considerations apply and Seldan is not going to indulge that temptation.) 

Companions, or at least Groveborn, apparently come with some very cool magical senses, including what he thinks is a direct sense of his own life-force and his Herald's life-force, and he isn't dying or particularly close to collapsing. He's going to need a bit longer to gauge the rate at which the injury-or-poisoning-or-whatever-it-is is progressing, but he's pretty sure both of them are on track to stay functional for at least a candlemark. Plenty of time for local Healers to show up. They can get someone who's seen Blai's healing in use with Healing-Sight up and knows how it works, and use that information to plan how to use Blai's limited healing magic. 

...Also, Seldan thinks, they should consider saving the Lesser Restoration for Leareth. They don't know how bad his condition is, but if he was fine, he would surely have already contacted Nayoki on his comms spell for a situation report, so the fact that they haven't heard from him is ominous. Seldan can harass the Companions in Haven about quite a lot of things, but it's...taking him longer than it usually would...to track down any of Leareth's mages stationed in Haven and use their channels of communication to harass whoever is relevant to finding Leareth. 

...right. Leareth's the ticket to Golarion, which is the only way they're going to get anyone up again who's down. Whoever's on trying to find him, Blai can aim a Minor Prophecy at them and see if that eliminates any dead ends or speeds up any important insights.

Yes. Indeed. 

(In a back corner of his mind, Seldan is thinking ahead to the possibility that they won't find Leareth in time. It's a habit. When you're fighting a war, it has to be thinkable that any given battle might be lost, even ones that feel irrecoverable. But noticing this at all is just about all the attention Seldan is dedicating to that possibility.)

....It does seem like Leareth's highly competent and well-run organization has been somewhat thrown into disarray by whatever just happened. Seldan is collecting multiple fragmentary reports along six different channels and trying to pass them along, which ought to be easy but is giving him a headache. So far he's determined that most, maybe all, of the major installations in the north are damaged and being evacuated. Nayoki would be one of the people on finding Leareth but she...doesn't seem up for it...even after a channel and a Lesser Restoration, she was able to cast a fairly intensive Gate without passing out but the Lesser Restoration doesn't seem to have done anything about the nausea. Speaking for himself, Seldan is operating at maybe half his usual attentional capacity while the rest is eaten by feeling horrible, and Nayoki isn't a Groveborn. 

Save the Minor Prophecy, then, Nayoki is unlikely to be Gating off anywhere. Seldan will find out as fast as possible who will be - or better yet, who's in charge of sitting in a coordination room somewhere in front of a map of all the places Leareth might be and directing the actual rescuers, because a vision showing someone finding Leareth in a records cache might not even help if they all look the same inside and are located underground in anonymous forests. 

...Oh. Important update via the Companion grapevine: apparently Iftel is on fire??? As in, a significant fraction of the entire country???

And - the barrier is down. 

That doesn't seem likely to be unrelated - they might just be collateral damage of Exploding Polity Syndrome's second victim -

Jisa, Enara, Brightstar, and a dozen of Leareth's staff who were close enough to grab with force-nets tumble through Jisa's unscaffolded Gate into a records cache. 

Unsurprising, it's not the one that Leareth is in. It was selected solely for being the one Jisa has been in before, with countermeasures that she's already familiar with and that should hopefully still be down. ...They aren't, it turns out. Leareth is inconveniently very on top of routine maintenance line that. But there are plenty of people with her to absorb the levinbolts with their own shields and snip the paralysis-spells even as they try to land. It seems to be instinctive for them.

Jisa takes a moment to catch her breath. Not from the magic use, it really wasn’t that far to Gate - much closer than Haven - and she’s a White Winds Adept and still has most of the power from her most recent casting of the Adept ritual. It’s just that emergencies are stressful, and it turns out she’s not nearly as professional as all these people.

“Okay. Does anyone here know where Leareth keeps his maps of the other— good.” Someone whose name she doesn’t know is already diving for the storage crates. Jisa takes another deep breath. “What do we know.” 

The reports are concise and professional and a lot more incomplete than anyone would like.

Nayoki’s base - where Leareth would have been - boosted over some confusing alarms to an adjacent facility (at which point this was obviously propagated to everyone via the usual comms-spell relays, over the next 60 seconds or so.) Nayoki herself got out a brief message confirming that their situation was critical. There was no response to the initial attempts to contact her. Nayoki did not herself make any reports about Leareth.

No one else has reported contact from Leareth. One other base - a closer one - bounced over an earthquake alarm and then a comms-spell message that they were evacuating. They had still been working on getting scry-coverage up of the interior of Nayoki's base, given that no one - including half a dozen backup contacts - was responding to communications, but the evacuation interrupted that. 

…Someone else reported fire close to the Iftel border? But it’s unconfirmed and the Iftel border is over a hundred miles from Leareth’s last known location.

Jisa had been hoping to use the report-listening time to pull herself together, which would be a lot easier if the contents were less aaaaaaaa. 

(She's mostly ignoring the bit about the fire. Leareth probably didn't Gate closer to the Iftel border on purpose, and so it's not relevant right now.) 

It does give her long enough to form the thought that she really shouldn't be in charge here! That's stupid! It makes no sense! Leareth probably has fifty people on hand for the exact situation "rescue Leareth from a horrible godplot!" 

But he contacted her, which means that it's her problem now. Hopefully someone else is handling it and it's just that updating a random quarter of the staff from an outlying base - one deliberately picked for its lack of importance when they sent Brightstar there - isn't anyone's top priority. Jisa can hope that they're about to get a message telling her to stop getting in their way like an incompetent child, but - she hasn't yet. 

She takes a deep breath. 

"We should try to find out more, obviously. But, um, I think we should look for him. Can anyone here scry from a map and knowing what shields to look for?" Jisa can Gate with that much to go on, she's pretty sure, but even as a White Winds Adept she can't do fifty Gates in a row, and she isn't particularly good at weird scrying spells. It was never nearly as much fun to practice. 

It's been more than ten minutes now, but not very much more.

Leareth is not, at this point, particularly conscious. He can't hold a comms-spell anymore even through an artifact; he's mostly lost track of the fact that the artifact exists or that verbal conversations do. 

He's not completely out, though, and he claws his way back toward semi-consciousness over and over and over, because he may not have any idea what's happening but he knows that he's in danger. And that someone needs to be able to find him. It's very important. 

It's not exactly a plan. Planning requires the capacity for complex thought, and Leareth can't even manage simple thoughts now. But he drags himself up from the darkness over and over, for a second or two at a time. 

...if they can't find him, he needs to make a noise...? so they hear him...? 

There's some kind of obstacle nearby. Leareth knocks it over. He isn't sure whether or not it makes a noise. 

No one comes. 

...Seldan doesn't think it's unrelated, no. Though he's turning himself in mental circles a bit trying to make sense of "they might just be collateral damage of Exploding Polity Syndrome's second victim", possibly just because it's hard to think when he feels awful. (Even though feeling awful still doesn't mean he's dying or about to collapse or anything! He continues to be pretty sure neither of them is dying or about to collapse! It's just distracting and making him stupider and that's frustrating.) 

The first 'exploding polity' Blai is referring to was k'Treva Vale, he assumes, and...Leareth was the victim and everyone who lived in k'Treva was the collateral damage? Is he parsing that right? Seldan did walk into this whole situation in the middle and missed the beginning so maybe he's missing context. 

...He's pretty sure that whatever happened, Leareth was the intended victim (and the entire population of Iftel was the collateral damage, maybe?). There was a godplot to murder Leareth just days ago, right, and the murder part didn't work but the part to temporarily disable his immortality contingency did work, and - that's a window of opportunity, for Leareth's enemies...

Something about all of it still isn't making any sense. He assumes that's a Seldan problem, more than a fact about the situation, but it's still frustrating. 

He was actually thinking of the polities themselves, k'Treva and Iftel, as the victims of the syndrome, but he is perhaps not at his most inspired right now in his thought constructions - ah, it is time to throw up again, he will aim away from Seldan. Leareth's enemies are... gods, yes? Does Iftel have a specific one?

...Oh, right, that does make sense.

It seems like Leareth's relevant enemies are gods? As in, he's almost certainly made a lot of other enemies, given his past actions, but he's an archmage (incidentally, what a helpful concept from Blai's world and Blai's memories, when it comes to making sense of Leareth!) so it's difficult for other humans, or even other countries, to really be a threat. Leareth definitely sees his enemies as the gods– 

- oh, that was a digression, wasn't it. Iftel belongs to Vkandis, who was responsible for the miraculous barrier-shield that has protected the country since, as far as anyone knows, shortly after the Cataclysm. ...Which does, on consideration, seem like it has a lot in common with the Star-Eyed Goddess and Heartstones. From what Seldan can recall, those were also a miraculous god-magic thing that turned up shortly after the Cataclysm. 

The part that still doesn't make sense, even assuming that this was Vkandis' doing, is....why now? Why in full generality, actually? The Star-Eyed Goddess had a few hundred Vales with a few hundred Heartstones, and from what Seldan can recall they're not even hard to make, the Tayledras who work for Her do most of the work. Destroying k'Treva was...a lot less costly. Vkandis only has the one barrier, and if He went almost two thousand years without– ...fine, the situation did change once Leareth was no longer immortal, but that happened days ago? Why would Vkandis think it was worth...that...at all, and why today? 

(Seldan politely ignores the vomiting - it's not dangerous, just unpleasant - and tries not to dwell on the fact that he's jealous because he feels just as sick and can't do anything about it.)

- oh, finally, here come some people. Some of them in green robes, even, that means Healers. Seldan isn't sure how long they've been waiting here for anyone to turn up - it's probably closer to two minutes than thirty, it just felt long, there's no need to be snarky to the Healers about what kept them... 

Tomorrow Blai is going to prepare Remove Sickness in all of SEVERAL of his slots.

Didn't Seldan figure out just a moment ago why today, today Leareth's immortality wasn't working.

But that wasn't today! That was days ago! At least one day ago, because Blai prepared new spells, it might just feel like it has to be multiple days ago because so many things happened, like shutting down the Heartstone, which took most of a day. 

...No, Seldan does think it was days ago, multiple - didn't Blai need to wait and sleep after the whole earthquake gryphon attack so he could prepare Endure Elements to fix Leareth's heatstroke. And the whole business with the river and the Shadow-Lover in Haven happened after that, and then didn't they fix Sandra's blindness, which again called for preparing a specific spell, the morning after that? And this morning Blai had to ask for the Dream Feast spell, because in the interim the whole Heartstone thing happened and Vanyel and Leareth ended up stuck in the Foresight dream? That's three days! 

(Seldan is deeply frustrated that it's this hard to remember which things happened at what times. Companions aren't supposed to have this problem!) 

...Possibly the whole line of thought is stupid because gods don't work on the same timescale, and a couple of days to react might as well be instantaneous, and so this isn't surprising at all and it's only bothering Seldan because a human military commander really ought to be capable of more decisiveness? At least, you know, assuming they were deciding whether to EXPLODE THEIR ENTIRE KINGDOM to murder a single specific enemy, which is insane, but - a human commander ought to do it right away, if they were doing it at all, because Leareth could have fixed his immortality in a few days, even if in practice he didn't? But that's also probably irrelevant to gods with Foresight, and Seldan is overthinking it, and the part where he still feels confused and mad about it is mostly that he's impaired. 

Okay, yes, Vkandis could have struck Iftel with exploding polity syndrome a bit earlier but it still explains why not last week or last year. Maybe Vkandis could see that the immortality was not fixed and not being worked on? Was it not being worked on? It's hard to think around the urgent sensation that he needs to stop containing whatever the fuck he contains that's making him so sick.

Shavri reaches them at a run, ahead of the cluster of other Healers and Guards and also Tantras inserting himself for some reason. No mages, because there just aren't that many in Haven - all the "allied" mages they couldn't trust are now elsewhere - and Leareth did have some mages stationed here but they are apparently extremely busy and trusting the Heralds to handle this.

(She would have been here sooner, but it was an unexpected Gate and apparently someone thought they needed to check for traps even with Seldan right there making himself incredibly obnoxious, who could possibly thought it was a good idea to make him a Groveborn who could Mindspeak a dozen people at once.) 

She's gotten the report. Blai, Seldan, Van and Stef, and four of Leareth's staff, but not Leareth himself, all suffering from injuries-or-maybe-poisoning, which Blai's injury-healing magic helped at all with but didn't fully fix, so it might be like k'Treva but worse. 

...It's definitely worse. There's no way that Shavri is making them walk anywhere. Why didn't anyone tell her that none of them were dressed for the weather. 

:Get us someone who can Gate to the House of Healing: she snaps at Tran. In the meantime, it's not like any of them can do a weather-barrier, but at least she can bark at all the Healers accompanying her to lend their cloaks. 

Shavri wasn't explicitly shielding her Mindspeech from nearby Thoughtsensers, though she wasn't broadcasting it. 

:I can Gate: Nayoki says. :If you have authorization to take us somewhere.: She would also really, really like to be out of the snow. 

...She's currently slumped on the ground in front of a puddle of vomit, so Shavri is dubious of this claim. 

This is a deeply frustrating argument to need to have, but Nayoki struggles to her feet to prove that she's capable of standing. :Blai did one of the healing spells: she explains. :I think it did not fix everything wrong but I can use magic.:

...Fine, that would definitely be faster and Shavri is cold too. And it makes no sense for this to be a trap, so she doesn't care that Tran is frowning at her, even he knows that it's only habit. She pushes over an image of the hallway in the House of Healing. 

Gate. 

...That was perhaps the last of Nayoki's strength and collapsing onto the floor once she's through is going to be less voluntary this time, but she can at least keep it together until she, and everyone else, are through. 

It's warm on the other side. 

Blai drags himself through. Lists his spells available to Shavri - :I have one channel left, another Lesser Restoration beyond the one Nayoki got, Stabilize but it might not work on this, a prophecy I can use for anyone doing something important that needs the insight - and a few probably irrelevant things that can be converted into healing -:

They have an Air Bubble and the two unnecessary Dream Feasts and a Summon Monster and a Remove Curse. Which, indeed, don't seem relevant, unless it's possible that the thing wrong with them is at all like a curse for the purposes of Blai's magic? Which it probably isn't, and that's the strongest spell and can presumably be converted into the strongest healing? 

Seldan doesn't think he's missing some a brilliant plan whereby an Air Bubble solves all of their problems, but he really wishes more of his capacity for brilliant plans was working.