That...sounds kind of weird and silly, but 'Valdemargod' admittedly sounds even sillier. Possibly the main way that god-names end up not sounding silly is once they've been established for a few hundred years and everyone is used to it. And now Seldan is vaguely wondering if Leareth had picked out a name for the god he was planning to make... 

Do the Golarion god names sound silly to Seldan...? Some of Leareth's surviving org members might know, it seems like the kind of thing you'd name the project after.

The Golarion gods seem to have names much more like the names people have, which for Iomedae and Cayden Cailean is presumably the literal etymology, unless Iomedae was named something else as a mortal and picked out a new godname? He wouldn't even blink if it turned out someone had a sister named Shelyn, that's just a normal name.

He'll make a vague mental note to check if Leareth's staff knew of a planned name, but it doesn't seem very priority. 

Anyway, maybe for now he'll think of the god as Valdemargod. 

Chess now? 

As far as he knows Iomedae was in fact her name in life and isn't just retconned that way in the book.

Chess now. Blai feels about a queen and one rook and two pawns of miserable, how's that for a handicap.

(What an intriguing method to quantify how badly his Herald is doing! Seldan will definitely be trying to track trends in Blai's chess handicaps, assuming they manage to do this again tomorrow.) 

Blai is pretty calibrated about the degree of handicap! Seldan wins a match, with very nontrivial effort while he's dedicating all of his attention to it, and then loses the next one because he got bored for three seconds while Blai was picking a move and started harassing one of the trainees to relay a message about potentially doing a Nap Stack for the Healers tomorrow and then had part of his attention on that for the rest of the game. 

...The last Remove Sickness wears off midway through a match and oh that is not nice at all but Seldan will gamely try to finish it anyway. 

Would he like to place one of the handicapped-away pieces midgame Bughouse-style to compensate?

...That is very kind of Blai to offer but then Seldan will have to keep track of more total pieces on the shared mental-chessboard and really he just wants Blai to let him lose as efficiently as possible, he just doesn't want to concede the game in the middle because you don't do that.

Okay. Blai checkmates him in six. And then they can just flop and be unhappy.

It is very miserable but, if Seldan is going to be trapped in a room full of miserable sick people while himself also miserable and sick, at least it's with his favorite person in the world. 

...oh right he was going to go try to talk to the Shadowgod. He should...do that. Ugh. He will of course try to be careful and not end up with a godheadache, though Groveborn might be resistant to that anyway, if it's - well, it can't be all about the Foresight-as-sensory-input thing, if it still happens in Golarion without prophecy, but it's known that Companions in general and Groveborn in particular have some kind of adaptation to existing in direct contact with Foresight. 

Formerly mortal gods are reported to leave less of a headache behind when contacting people. That's really not going to help here. Is this something Blai can... accompany... Seldan to... or is that not so much a thing, or it is but it wouldn't help.

...It would not at all have occurred to Seldan to ask Blai to come with him! He does, actually, think he ought to be able to pull Blai along with him? And it's - his general assumption is that this would be harder on Blai, not necessarily in specifically causing him a horrible headache but the coming back sort of disoriented and out of it in a way that makes the unpleasant symptoms harder to tolerate. 

But honestly, it would be helpful, on specifically the dimension where Seldan is absolutely stalling on this because he hates the concept of being out of contact with Blai. Maybe helpful for getting useful information, too, Blai asks good questions because Seldan has the best Herald!!!!

And there's the upside that Blai also won't be aware of his body while he's there. And Seldan does think he would notice right away if it was in any way actually dangerous for Blai, and be able to pull them both out right away. 

Well? Is Blai...in fact volunteering to come? 

Yes, of course.

(Awwwwww. It's very good how he has the best Herald.) 

All right, he should - probably Mindspeak someone so the Healers don't freak out if they try to ask him or Blai a question and fail to get a response. Healers get really upset when that happens. 

And then Seldan does something like wrapping himself around Blai, and - steps in a direction that isn't anywhere, and - 

They're in a bottomless blue expanse, strung with a web of silver threads. It's abstract and overwhelming, though Seldan seems to be able to read some meaning from it. 

They aren't there for very long at all, though. Seldan barely has time to start to reach out - it's not very prayerful, mostly a mental shout of HEY YOU WE WANT TO TALK - and they're both, instead, in a place of soothing glowing featureless white. 

The Shadowgod is there. Looking the same to Blai as She did before, and appearing to Seldan as a rather plump older woman with a frizz of carroty-orange hair. 

"You aren't dead or dying," She says, conversationally. "I can use this place in other situations now. It is a much better way to talk." 

He's not dying? That's news "Congratulations." The double vision is weird, though at least they both see women.

Seldan is only half listening to that, because he's currently distracted by the fact that he's abruptly human-shaped!

And also, apparently, remembers his own name??? And his Companion, her name was Liora. And the year he was born, which was 188 by the Valdemaran character and it's bizarre to think that was more than six centuries ago. His father was a shoemaker. He had a sister. He...oh, that's disappointing, for a moment he had thought he remembered everything but it's still just - fragments, and not even that many of them. A few scenes, crystal-clear, and some autobiographical facts, and the rest is still blank. Which honestly makes it even more confusing in some ways! Why does it work like that! Did the Valdemargod deliberately erase some of those bits because it's not helpful for Companions to be, what, comparing backstories, wow that's so irritating. 

Blai hasn't spoken to any of his family members in two decades and doesn't miss them at all but it seems to be distressing for Seldan - Seldasen? - why are the names so similar but not identical, what is the point of that? - that's not worth god-bothering about though -

It's not exactly that Seldasen– that Seldan, he's just going to have to be in the consistent habit of thinking of that as his name - it's not exactly that he misses his family, it's just that - his memories are his, his life history is part of what makes him himself, and it feels like he has a right to that, or something. 

Well, at least now he can probably just ask the Palace librarian for all the treatises he wrote back then. 

(He's also not sure what the point of the slight name-garbling is, assuming it was even deliberate and not just the Valdemargod trying and failing to remember his name correctly or something, but it was enough to be a stumbling block before for tracking down his past work, and maybe the Valdemargod doesn't want Companions bringing along too much baggage about their pasts? And it's a little bit more obfuscation of the fact that Companions are reincarnated Heralds in the first place, which seems not to be common knowledge even though it seems bloody obvious to him.) 

- anyway, there were here to get some questions answered. 

"So what was the plan with Leareth?" Seldan leaves out the tempting curse-words. It seems worth trying to be civil even if the Valdemargod probably won't take rudeness personally. "I thought you didn't want him dead." 

The Shadow-Lover looks at both of them for a moment, and one has the sense of - something behind that human-shaped facade, shuffling concepts, calculating, sorting through a few different branches of a conversational tree.

“No, I do not wish Leareth dead,” the Shadow-Lover says agreeably.

“…But he is dead,” Seldasen Seldan points out. “So - how exactly would doing something to save his life been worse? Why in the world was it the best path to let Vkandis succeed at murdering him?”

Again, there’s a pause, as though the Shadow-Lover avatar is puzzling it out, translating something, and translating an answer back.

”The best path is the one that achieves the desired outcome at the lowest cost,” She says. “There are two elements there.”

“…So the thing you’re saying is that all else equal you - or the god,” because it seems important to remember, here, that they aren’t exactly talking to the Valdemargod, not directly, “- that the Valdemargod didn’t want Leareth dead, exactly, just - wasn’t willing to do anything to save him that would be expensive?”

It kind of pisses Seldan off! He’s not unsympathetic to the reasoning, in general - he wouldn’t be mad at Iomedae for it, who is after all the goddess of triage - but it matters a lot that Iomedae is trying to allocate Her limited resources to Good priorities, and…it’s not at all obvious to him that the Valdemargod is.

"...or thinks Archmage Cottonet will come looking for me? Though that should be impossible to see - he's on Golarion -"

The Shadow-Lover indeed seems to be drawing a blank at that.

“If it had not been going to work, then Vkandis would have done something else instead,” She says, slowly, after another long pause. “If We had intervened as you asked, it would have been expensive, and so it would have been Foresight that We would act. Vkandis would have seen it and tried to counter it, and from there We could not see any further ahead to whether any of those paths would have a better outcome than this one. This was the only path that We could see through until the end, and now We can see better because Vkandis has no further power to steer."