Less than ten minutes after Blai asked if he could sleep, Shavri interrupts him and Seldan with a mental yell. :Hallway! Now! Hurry!:

They're not moving Leareth from right here. She needs all of her bloody attention to find his life-force so she can aim her Healing at all, at this point she'll settle for 'throwing Healing-energy in his general direction' because there's no way she's getting a proper link up, he's - well, going through a Gate while this badly injured probably wasn't good for him at all - 

- his heart isn't beating. That would explain the difficulty she's having, Shavri thinks, very calmly and distantly. Jisa is insisting he's still showing up to Mindhealing Sight but that's not helpful for Shavri - 

- Blai might need help to get out of bed, Shavri really hopes someone else is on that because she's busy - 

He is doing his very best to do it himself! Up! Left foot right foot trying not to throw up all his ginger tea! Hallway??

Seldan can help, though he's none too steady himself. (A couple of the Healers stationed in the room will also help.) 

He reaches ahead with Thoughtsensing. :Jisa's out there. They found Leareth. ...Brightstar's with them, I have no idea - what were they thinking -: 

And then they're at the door. 

That sure does look like Leareth on the floor, with Shavri beside him. They're within thirty feet, with no intervening obstacles, but it's kind of an egregious waste of a channel if it ends up not getting everyone in the room they just left because there are walls in the way - on the other hand, everyone else they can get back as long as Leareth survives - though even at a slow walk it's not that many seconds to get to touch range - 

Brightstar stands very still, with his back against the wall, looking...haunted. 

Blai burns a Dream Feast on a Cure. He has begun to get the picture that even archmages around here are not as tough as, say, second-circle squishy wizards, under all their abjurations.

Then he throws up, not on Leareth. :I don't think that worked.:

:I wasn't sure if it would or not. Hoped it might.: Shavri's mindvoice is very neutral. :I can't get anywhere with Healing. I'll - keep trying - but you shouldn't. Can't afford to waste your spells.: 

No. No, that can't be right. That's not fair. 

:I can still see him: Jisa insists. :Maybe if I get in rapport with you, you can -: 

Well. She can still see something. It's no longer particularly recognizable as Leareth's mind. 

It might not have been too late until they took him through a Gate. Brightstar did try, actually, for a Healing-link, and he couldn't then either, but he's not very good at healing humans. 

He still offers Jisa and Shavri a wordless mental hand, opening his shields for rapport if they want it. Maybe Earthsense is somehow useful? It does still feel like there’s something there, maybe, the way he can feel something in plants and soil. Just - not something he knows how to point Healing-energy at.

Is there anything Seldan can do— oh. He can go to the blue place right now and yell at Shadowgod to put Leareth back. It wouldn’t have to be for long! Just back enough for Blai’s magic to be able to target him, for the few seconds Blai needs to cast, surely there’s a limit to how expensive that can be. 

Blai is going to... sit here in case that works... and continue throwing up all of his ginger tea.

Blue place. It does have the delightful advantage of making Seldan temporarily unaware of his body, which can only be a blessing right now. 

...The blue place, right now, is somehow managing to be disorienting and nauseating all by itself. Maybe Seldan is just too out of it right now to cope with Groveborn Foresight, but also he...thinks...it didn't look quite this messy before...? Maybe the gods have some genuine reason for concern. Not that this justifies ANY OF THE RECENT EVENTS, obviously.

HELLO SHADOWGOD. SELDAN WOULD LIKE TO SUBMIT A COMPLAINT FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION. They've just gone to TRULY HEROIC LENGTHS to grab Leareth and now he's ambiguously half-dead and SELDAN IS PRETTY SURE HE KNOWS WHO TO BLAME FOR THAT. Seldan is pretty sure that the Shadowgod isn't served by Leareth being dead and, so far as he can tell, the Shadowgod has provided zero help with the most recent disaster. Seldan is not asking for miracles, here, he's asking for something really quite centrally in the Shadow-Lover's remit, They put Vanyel back half a dozen times. Seldan isn't asking Them to fix what's wrong with Leareth, even, they've got that handled! They just need him to be very slightly less ambiguously dead for about six seconds! This would be a clever and efficient way to stop Vkandis from having achieved anything He wanted with His stupid and spectacularly wasteful "blow up a country" plan! Isn't the Shadowgod into that kind of thing? 

Nothing answers. 

...Well, they do know that this is a communication method where the Shadowgod can hear him but not answer nearly as easily. The absence of an answer isn't necessarily a no. 

Seldan is going to keep yelling at (that seems like a more accurate description than "praying to") the Shadowgod, just to make really absolutely sure that the message is loud and clear. 

...Wow. Okay. This is the weirdest fucking way of using Healing-Sight that Shavri has ever experienced. She has her Sight focused on something, but she can't pull back her mental viewpoint or shift the scale. She can see this structure, and if she effortfully refocuses she can end up on that structure instead, and her Sight seems to be under the impression that none of the structures in Leareth's body are in any way related to each other. 

Blasting his shoulder joint with Healing-energy is not going to do anything useful, even if she could technically aim at it right now. If this is going to work at all, she needs to get herself focused on his heart and see if she can smack it around hard enough to get it beating, it doesn't even need to be an effective heartbeat that successfully moves blood, she just needs the energy-loop to exist at all so she can hook her Gift into it... 

Brightstar might be getting the hang of this? He thinks she should move her Sight this way. 

...Okay. That sure is a heart that is not doing anything. Seen up close, there's still a little bit of life-force there - it's not completely dark, and Shavri can make out structure, which she's pretty sure doesn't work on dead flesh. (It's historically been inconvenient for research, actually, that Healers can't train Sight on dead bodies, and can't cut up their living patients to look at how things are put together, so it takes a lot of drawings and practice to correlate them.) 

Shavri throws a focused dart of Healing-energy, and - 

- it lands, and it drains away and it's gone. Some of these cells are technically in some sense still alive, but they're - in living patients there's something like a cup, something Healing-energy can land in and propagate on from. The others are cracked cups, with both Healing-energy and their own natural life-force slowly but constantly leaking away.

This is a cup with no bottom. She can throw Healing-energy at it, sure, and at a hyper-local level there's something still there that can use it as fuel, but - there's nothing that can hold it even for a moment, let alone distribute it, and so most is pointlessly wasted. Shavri can't get a Healing-link to every cell in Leareth's body independently. 

If she had something to replace the critical vital functions, routing around the damaged pathways entirely, so she could slow down and figure out what can still be repaired– ...but Healing-Gift doesn't work like that. 

She tries again anyway, but she doesn't think it's going to work. She's pretty sure that all she's figured out, here, is an extremely creepy way to make Healing-Sight work on a recently-dead corpse.

:...And there it goes.: Jisa’s mindvoice is barely a whisper.

Some part of the “ground” underlying the garden - most of what’s left, by now, all the plants are burned away to ash - seems to lose its structural integrity, and the whole thing buckles and collapses and folds in on itself, and then abruptly there’s nothing there for her Sight to interact with. The body on the floor might as well be a piece of furniture. 

Shavri would really like to have the luxury to be upset about it, but she doesn’t, and so mostly she’s frustrated about the waste of a healing spell.

:We should get you back to bed, I guess: she sends to Blai. 

"Mmhm," he says, wiping his mouth off a little with the back of his hand and lurching to his feet again. :Ginger tea?: Since his is. Gone.

:Mm. And we shouldn’t need to haul you out of bed again. I’m sure that makes it worse.:

Shavri isn't apologizing, exactly. It was a pretty good reason. It didn't work but it was worth trying and it would have been even less likely to work if they'd prioritized Blai staying in bed and hauled Leareth over into the room instead. And now she's - not going to think about it, apparently, because she still has seven - no, eight, counting Seldan - patients to get through until tomorrow morning and that's going to need all of her attention. 

Even in the blue place and not directly able to reach his Herald, Seldan...knows, somehow. Maybe he saw it in Foresight directly. 

SHADOWGOD WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT

He wasn't expecting an answer, but he gets one. Sort of. 

It feels...carefully constructed. Not quite in words, but possible to make sense of even in his impaired state. 

Seldan should come back later. Later will be better. It will be easier to explain. 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

...No. No? No! No, the Shadowgod does NOT get to just tell Seldan to come back later! What the fuck! Seldan DEMANDS AN EXPLANATION! 

It seems to take a while to construct an answer to that. 

...They asked for something that would not have been the best path. The Shadowgod would have intervened if that was the best path, but it wasn't. 

THAT IS THE WORST MOST USELESS EXPLANATION SELDAN HAS EVER HEARD IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE

...It's apparently all he's getting, for now, and it's...probably not a good idea to spend any longer hanging out in the blue place trying to yell at a god. 

Seldan extracts himself, fuming, and bounces the cleaned-up and less overwhelming-Foresight-tangle version of all that to Blai, and then - having a body is really very bad right now and Seldan doesn't think he's closer to dying, he's pretty sure that pushing that harder than he really should have is mostly making the unpleasantness worse, but having a body is really quite bad right now and Seldan...might need some help...to get back to the room. And to avoid Mindspeaking anyone except Blai.