(Well, see, if Stef dies then Vanyel dies. Shavri is fully aware that this might be what's going to happen anyway but...whatever comes next, Vanyel is a useful person in almost all situations. Even if he stays too disabled to do magic, he's probably pretty important for keeping the Heralds' relationship with Leareth's organization on even vaguely friendly terms.

Also, it may or may not be a good reason that Shavri herself feels like her sanity is holding together by a thread and she's not sure she can keep going through the rest of today and tonight if they lose Stef and then inevitably Van. But it's thought in the back of her mind.) 

There is plenty of tea. 

(Nobody has actually told Blai about lifebonds, let alone this specific one, yet.) He empties a mug of tea and curls back up with Seldan to sleep.

Seldan is pretty bleary but his time-sense is working at all. It's early afternoon. Maybe three candlemarks since Iftel exploded. They've got a very long time to wait until dawn. 

...The channel fixed his headache and some of the dizziness, which is pretty nice. He still feels sick, though. Sleep is good. They should do that. 

Wow, Lesser Restoration is really effective on this. Inconvenient how Shavri suspects it's temporary, but Stef looks better than Vanyel now. Well, temporary improvement isn't nothing. She'll need to ask Blai what the maximum number of them is that he can get tomorrow morning. It's not worth waking him for that question alone, though. 

She thinks Van is a little bit better off than he would be otherwise thanks to his weak Healing-Gift, and Leareth's Healers are benefiting more than that, but...not enough. 

Seldan, she thinks, might last until morning even with no other intervention. His baseline life-force isn't as bright as Blai's, but he has a lot of - stamina, the thing Blai was calling 'Endurance' - and he can take a lot of Healing-energy, so he's not losing ground as fast. Blai ought to be able to make it until dawn too at his current rate of deterioration, his life-force got a big boost from the channel, but - barely, it would be cutting it close, so she's not sure of that. He might start fading faster once his remaining life-force is weak enough. Under normal circumstances Seldan could bolster him, Companions are very useful that way, but less so when neither of them is in good shape. 

Stef and Van can more or less freely draw on each other's life-force. Which, again, is of limited use when both of them are dying, but any spell Blai uses on Van will help Stef a little as well, that's a consideration to keep in mind. 

If she hasn't lost count, Blai has five remaining spells that could be converted to single-target healing. Some are stronger and some are weaker? Shavri doesn't have a very good sense of that part. She does have a guess that for most of the people in the room it doesn't even matter; even the weaker spell brings them up to their maximum life-force-brightness. It's possible a strong Healer could get a bit more oomph out of it, maybe they can interact with it like Healing-energy and throw a bunch of it at other people, but - that's a big guess, and it would probably help if the Healer in question wasn't operating on vastly reduced stamina, something that the Cure spells don't touch. 

The question, then, is who gets what. Eight patients, counting Seldan and Blai. Five spells. That's assuming they don't turn up anyone else who is absolutely critical to the...to the next few days, whatever happens...and needs Golarion healing to be functional. 

In the end, it doesn't seem like any of her clever ideas about pairs of people with entangled life-forces, or Gifted Healers catching and redirecting some of the energy, are going to matter enough to stretch five spells over more people than that. 

Given that, it's pretty obvious what needs to be done. Blai should get the strongest spell – even if he's not the worst off, he's also the only one who can properly benefit from it. Seldan can probably benefit from the second-strongest. Then Van and Stef, critical to Valdemar, and Nayoki, also a critical point of contact with the rest of Leareth's people. That's it, that's all they can cover. Obviously they'll do their very, very best to keep the other three, Leareth's Healers, alive until dawn, but - Shavri isn't hopeful. 

(Again, in a way it simplifies her problems if they don't make it. They're probably going to be tightly limited on Lesser Restorations.) 

She doesn't even bother to try to find out if anyone important from Iftel was rescued with serious injuries. Let Vkandis handle it, this is all His fault anyway, Shavri cannot take responsibility for anything else beyond the people in this room and not even all of them. 

Blai is still leaking life-force. Shavri might as well wake him in the early evening, after he's had a solid block of sleep but before he's desperately low, and confirm her theory that he's the only one who will get the full benefit of the strongest healing spell. 

:That seems likely,: he agrees when he is again awakened at some Not Dawn Time. :Confirming I understand, convert my third circle to cure myself, one of the second circles for Seldan, and the other second circle and two remaining first circles for -? I'm planning to prepare four Lesser Restorations and four Remove Sickness. Remove Sickness will give someone nearly an hour free of the nausea so they can drink water or eat or something but it's only masking the underlying symptoms. Third circle - could do another Lesser Restoration in the slot or could try - Accept Affliction, which might cure any one person outright but might make me twice as badly off, I've never tried it when I have the same problem as the target already - if we think this is energy damage I could try Protection from Energy or Communal Resist Energy - first one is single target, second one I can divide up between people, neither will last all that long but the Protection is longer - if we think more positive energy will help a lot I could do a Symbol of Healing, if I can get mercury, phosphorous, and yea much powdered opal - that would be about as good as one more channel -:

 Blai’s last three Cure spells should go to Van, Stef, and Nayoki. There’s a faint possibility that Vanyel’s weak Healing-Gift can catch positive energy directly and stretch it further than the direct impact of the spell so in the absence of other considerations, might as well give Van the second-circle spell.

:…I think it’s too much of a gamble to try Accept Affliction, being twice as sick might kill you outright and then we don’t get any more channels.: And they would lose Seldan, who…is honestly a really useful person in his own right for staying coordinated in an emergency, even if everyone else Shavri has been in Mindspeech contact with today is clearly utterly sick of his meddling. 

Sigh. :I wouldn’t really expect Protection from Energy to help now even if it would’ve helped to have it up at time, it’s not like the energy is still around. Though I could be wrong, I don’t always understand how yoir world’s magic works. Does preparing a Lesser Reatoration at third circle make it stronger? Or just mean that you get five?:

Five would be good, because that’s how many people Shavri expects to still be alive an hour after dawn when Blai has his spells. Though the equivalent of an extra channel would be pretty good too.

:Just means I get five. I don't know if I would bet on the energy spells if I were thinking more clearly:

Okay. An extra channel equivalent would be awfully nice to have too, but it it’s a choice between that and five Lesser Restorations, she’ll take the latter. She doesn’t really want to gamble on Seldan being able to wait until the next dawn before getting one.

Remove Sickness sounds good. Shavri’s patients are mostly managing to get enough fluids - even if someone is throwing up every few hours, that’s long enough for their body to absorb some of what they drank - but nobody has been able to eat anything at all substantial, and by tomorrow morning that’s going to be seriously hampering the Healing work.

(Shavri does not in any way explicitly acknowledge that there are more people in the room right now than spells tonight or Lesser Restorations tomorrow. Blai can presumably notice that for himself and she doesn’t want to talk about it.)

Cure Serious Wounds. Cure Moderate Wounds. Cure Moderate Wounds. Cure Light Wounds. Cure Light Wounds.

Good. It’s actually a significant relief, to Shavri, that it worked. There was no rational reason to doubt it, just because it didn’t work on Leareth, but until now she hadn’t actually *seen* it for-sure work on anyone even if channels were helping.

Blai’s life-force is very close to its normal brightness now, though — nope, it hasn’t done anything to slow the rate at which he’s leaking it, so that won’t stay true for long. He’s got enough to last him for a nice long while, though. Seldan, too, and Seldan isn’t leaking as fast. Van and Stef seem to be stabilizing each other a bit, now that neither of them is in dire straits. It’ll be hard work, getting them through until morning, but doable. 

Nayoki is worst-off. Her Lesser Restoration was a long time ago now, and she probably burned through some of the benefit by immediately Gating twice. Shavri…is definitely going to have to figure out some tricks to more efficiently get Healing-energy into her, in order to get through the night. But - she thinks it’s doable.

She thanks Blai and brings him more ginger tea.

Seldan feels so much more alive now! …More alive but only marginally less distractingly miserable, which seems very unfair. 

…Lesser Restoration in the morning, he tells himself. And an hour of not feeling sick. That’s going to be their best opportunity to…think about the strategic situation and where to go from here. No point pushing through now, given that as far as he can tell there’s no new information to go over either. 

Tea is good. Does it have honey in it or anything, he can take a fair amount of fasting under normal conditions but these aren't.

They can definitely do honey. Salt, too, if Blai thinks he can tolerate salty tea without just finding the taste nauseating, his body lost a lot of salt. 

(Shavri is a bit distracted. She's trying to figure out how in the world she can slow down Nayoki's life-force leak enough to keep her alive until morning.) 

He can try Stabilizing her. (He puts salt in his tea and it's not in the top ten worst experiences of his life and doesn't seem to make him any more prone to throwing up than he was already so he will continue to put salt in his tea until a healer tells him he can stop.)

(Shavri can't tell if Stabilize did anything. It found a valid target, at least, she 'saw' it land, but it's not patching the leak. It might or might not do anything later on, if it's an hour or two before dawn and Nayoki is dangerously low on life force, but she's actually not dangerously low yet. Just...not on a good trend...and they've got more than eight candlemarks to go.) 

---

The Heralds meet. 

Dara remembers thinking last week that they were in the worst situation she could imagine. Well. Clearly her imagination sucked. Now they've managed to get Leareth killed, and Iftel is a giant humanitarian disaster and there's not even that much Valdemar can do to help. Blai (and Seldan) are still alive, and Vanyel (and Stef) are still alive, but Shavri made it pretty clear in her last update that they're hard-pressed just keeping things that way, Blai's magic is 100% spoken for, and there's absolutely nothing they can do for the broader situation, unless it involves Blai doing a channel he was going to do anyway with some extra people in the room. Which...Dara isn't sure is a good idea, if those people are Ifteli. Given, uh, the reason why Blai and Van and the others are slowly dying. 

They're going to keep going, because there's literally no choice, and - because Valdemar is still standing.

(Dara did, belatedly, realize that if Vkandis could burn down the shield and turn it into some kind of horrible targeted attack, He could just as easily have targeted Haven. They're not any further from the border. Closer, actually, and much less underground. If Leareth had been here instead of there...) 

It would be really enormously valuable to have someone who could do the healing-magic channel and was in any shape to step through a Gate, so they could show up there and Heal a bunch of people in the makeshift field hospitals without needing to risk accidentally bringing a priest still loyal to Vkandis into the House of Healing in Haven. Unfortunately, their prospects of getting a Gate up to Blai's world have just hit a very serious setback. Maybe an irreversible setback. Maybe that's just...not on the table, anymore. 

At this point it seems like there can't possibly be any harm in praying to as many of the gods of Blai's world as they can. 

The god of the shadows is frustrated. 

Everything is fine! The formerly-immortal one's soul is secure - not to mention quiet and no longer making any of its own noise in Foresight - and Vkandis is now actually genuinely completely out of leverage and...'injured' isn't exactly the concept, for a Velgarth god, but - even more thoroughly off the gameboard than would be indicated just from the lack of any more resources to act with. That simplifies the Foresight picture even more. Keeping the formerly-immortal one alive with Vkandis still able to act was really disproportionately expensive.

(Vkandis would have hesitated, if it had been visible in Foresight that this wouldn't work. Which would have been bad! Because the threat would still have been there, and could have landed at a point where it would cost the Shadowgod substantially more.) 

As it is, the Shadowgod now has more ability-to-steer than almost any other god in Velgarth, and it hasn't cost Them very many of their actually-important resources at all. 

The unfair part is that Cayden the formerly-human god from the other world is mad at them about it. The Shadowgod isn't interested in that. Also it seems like Cayden is a fairly new, fairly weak god, and not necessarily that able to act anyway.

He apparently isn't as mad at the Star-Eyed Goddess, even though She actively tried to kill the soul in question, rather than just choosing not to intervene at high cost and substantial future risk. Cayden is useful for figuring out how to communicate with the mortals more clearly and less expensively, so the Shadowgod will let Him do that with the Star-Eyed Goddess and go looking for other gods who might be more helpful. 

There are other gods, though! Older and more powerful ones, too. Gods who were never human, which makes them worse at talking to mortals but could make them easier for other gods to understand. Cayden even said that some of them might be interested in the existence of another world and have advice. 

The Shadowgod will go looking. 

Hello, stranger. Abadar has wares if you have intervention budget, or whatever other currency, He's flexible.

Hello!

They have information about another world! Which this god They just talked to communicated is something that might be of interest! They have more influence over the future of that world than any other god in that world right now and are holding onto resources that several of those other gods would like to have instead but do not. One of those resources is a very interesting mortal soul, if this other god would like to look? 

(The Shadowgod does not communicate at all in the expected format that the Lawful gods use to communicate with each other in Golarion. They have only the vaguest understanding of the concept of 'currency' and are translating 'intervention budget' into a concept that doesn't quite seem to match.) 

Weird. Well, currency exchanges are part of His remit too and they can figure something out. He will have a look at the soul and - oh, that's a nice soul. Abadar will buy it for... this much, or, for calibration, this much in this other format or this much in a third format, though the Shadowgod is welcome to suggest another form of liquidity. These figures include an insurance surcharge for the Shadowgod's illegibility and may decrease if They work out how to be clearer and more verifiable, and will also go down a bit if They hand over the soul first and take payment after. That's assuming it keeps it current that-property, if it loses that then Abadar probably fumbles it before it gets somewhere He can put it to use. But it looks like it will keep it, how nifty.

.......What??????? 

The Shadowgod had not been considering...trading?? this soul?? for other resources to solve Their problems...? It's not out of the question, given that that's apparently a thing that can happen, but They had been - (some muddled effort at communicating what they had been aiming at, 'look at this Foresight here' isn't going to work very well with a god from a world without Foresight that is instead communicating in all of those other baffling concepts) -

- They had been...holding onto the soul, out of the reach of other local gods that would destroy it if They could, until some other mortals (and not-quite-mortals including one who in some ambiguous and debatable sense is Theirs) in the other world, who are also interested in it, could act to retrieve it? Did that communicate it successfully? 

However, it's a fascinating offer to receive, given that most of the gods over in this world really hate the soul under discussion? And the Shadowgod is not inherently opposed to the soul existing and being incarnated in the world, but it certainly has some inconvenient properties, even if those properties inconvenience other gods more and so leave Them at a relative advantage. 

Can the other god perhaps try to communicate why in the world the soul would be worth that much to Them?

Oh, Abadar operates on many planets and most of them have Foresight, that's not a problem for Him. If the Shadowgod would like the soul resurrected on another planet, Abadar can do that but it will be yea much plus expenses and the expenses are pretty sizeable. It's a valuable soul because - okay, look at it like this, see there? That means that it's a Lawful soul. That's not even a thing there, it's not trying to do that to get status among other humans (though this is a valid thing for a soul to want), it's just like that! Isn't that nice? And if you look from this angle, you can see it's - build-y. It wants there to be Stuff, and for lots of people to be able to Get the Stuff and Have the Stuff. That makes it easier for Abadar to see, when there is lots of wealth and people can shuffle it around amongst themselves like so, that's His thing. It reminds Abadar of an old friend of His, the particular way this soul is build-y. If Abadar sticks it in Axis, or near any established Abadaran church, the place where He sticks it will probably be Enriched! Both because of the Law (the soul will appreciate being stuck in a place where it can do and build, and will be moved to repay this) and also because of the buildyness itself. Have... have the weird gods of this planet not been letting the soul build stuff? Do They not like that kind of thing, are They nature gods or something?

It's...complicated...although (shuffling, attempting to translate concepts) ...it may not be entirely wrong that the Star-Eyed Goddess is a nature-y goddess and that was part of the objection? The soul did try to build things, very very persistently, it's really quite a stubborn and un-steerable soul as mortals go - oh, right, the soul had also figured out how to wriggle around the usual mortality thing and has been doing this for [attempt to communicate a span of time, the Shadowgod is not especially good at units like "years"] ...Anyway, it did try to build things, and when it succeeded the world was less the sort of thing the Star-Eyed Goddess valued. The Shadowgod did not inherently disvalue that sort of thing but it did have some very inconvenient effects on Foresight visibility, which was - 

- oh, right, that would also be important background. The Shadowgod will attempt to translate and push across a description of the Cataclysm. This particular soul was only part of the cause, it's - not inevitable that putting this soul somewhere will cause Cataclysms there, it was in a particular context with particular other souls - but most mortals don't cause Cataclysms ever so that's still alarming. And of course most of the souls that were involved could simply be kept out of the world afterward, to play it safe, but this soul kept coming back and being alarming. 

ALSO also, look at what it wanted to build!!! ...Admittedly, the Shadowgod does not inherently object necessarily to a new god existing, crafted-by-mortals and steering for the...build-y...things, but it's also not hard to understand why this would be very alarming to everyone! And the Shadowgod was not happy about the cost, which would have been - shuffling - this many mortal souls, a very high fraction of them souls under the Shadowgod's remit... 

Oh it turns out it's not a big problem if you let mortals make gods particularly, any more than it's a problem for other gods who do not want the same things as You to exist in any other fashion (that is to say, sometimes inconvenient but a valuable source of gains from trade). Though that is a sizeable number of deaths and it would be pretty hard to compensate them all for their trouble especially if nobody was letting the build-y soul take remunerative actions and while it is in this state Abadar can't really ask what its plan was there and how it was planning to get title to all those folks so as to be able to reprocess them in this fashion. Still, He likes the look of the soul and He'd take His chances with it if permitted to purchase it.

Are the Velgods bad at seeing? The normal thing is that you can see, both now and where applicable in the future, a) your guys, b) your Thing. Abadar's visibility goes way UP if enough stuff is built and traded even if He doesn't have a guy on the ground there. What is the Shadowgod's Thing? Is Their Thing not working correctly to let Them see?

...That sounds somewhat different from how things work here, though yes, under normal circumstances the Shadowgod can see Their people reasonably well and especially these - (shuffling) - see, the Shadowgod has a whole system to scoop out some of the souls that were particularly legible and useful when incarnated, and put them back but not just the normal way, put them back in this special form, one that has a very tiny little piece of the god-nature that lives in Foresight directly, and they're set up to stick themselves to a second soul, which wraps their unusually-legible and unusually-steerable Foresight thread around a second soul, making them both legible and providing a particularly effective way to assess the new soul for its future usefulness - admittedly this wasn't entirely the Shadowgod's work, when it was set up, it would have been too expensive singlehanded and other gods contributed their...intervention budget? resources?...but it's the most Their thing. Prior to it you could also sort of shape two mortal souls incarnated in the usual way so they would glue themselves together when they crossed paths in the material plane, and that's also very visible to the Shadowgod. 

The Shadowgod actually had a whole lovely plan, taking advantage of factors They can see a bit better than the other gods can, to subvert all these other gods who wanted to destroy the inconvenient build-y soul, and instead nab all the local visibility and steering-power like this, see, by aiming a mortal They already have good visibility of juuust right, to get a (very small and weak) god shaped out of that mortal, which is really quite a lovely soul, steerable in some ways and not at all in others, the Shadowgod rather wishes They could show off that soul but of course it's not currently in Their possession, being still incarnated, unlike this one. 

...Anyway, the lovely plan fell apart when some mortal from this world turned up for no reason. Not that the Shadowgod intrinsically has any complaints about said mortal! There was a brief opportunity to attempt communication and the mortal was unusually helpful. But everything downstream of them is hard to see in Foresight and thus difficult to steer around, and a lot of plans went awry, and all of the gods started panicking and all of these very messy things happened and eventually the simplest solution was to let one of them burn all of His influence trying to destroy the soul and just do a tiny little nudge to ensure that the soul was somewhere They could get to first. 

All that to say, yes, right now everyone is really bad at seeing and incredibly frustrated about it. But it's not normally quite this bad, normally it's just this one soul that none of Them can see because the soul isn't any of Theirs and has a thing that isn't especially legible to any of Them.