It's not exactly like hearing speech, or like Mindspeech, or like anything in particular, but - through whatever mechanism, there comes the perception that there are people who are trying to talk to him, and he can understand them. 

He failed to particularly parse what the first person said, because he was distracted by the confusing direct-perception that it's a person he remembers. Someone significant. It's - the sensory perception is weird, it's not exactly "seeing a face", and he flails at half-gripped memories trying to catch onto it. Urtho? No, there's some reason it can't - because Urtho is dead, that's why - but he's dead so maybe - 

...Oh. That was a name. Maybe that was his name?? It...feels like his name. 

Ma'ar in fact does not at all believe that they're going to hurt him because they said so. Why would that be related. But it's hard to think of how they could hurt him in any way that mattered, when he's already dead and a god has him. 

(His face coheres a little more. Still blurred, but - adult, now, a dark-haired man who also doesn't look incredibly like Leareth but does look like could perhaps be the grown-up version of the child.) 

Can he - answer? ...Apparently. It doesn't feel like speaking and it doesn't feel like Mindspeaking either, but something does seem to happen even if it's unclear how. 

"Yes," he says. "...I think." And then he seems to be trying to look at Blai. "...I know you. Are you Urtho?" 

Wow. The Shadow-Lover really isn't good at this!

(Urtho died in the Cataclysm almost two thousand years ago. He was the child-Leareth's - Ma'ar's - teacher, and panicked and started a war with Ma'ar's kingdom over Ma'ar's use of blood-magic for infrastructure projects, and then panicked even worse when Ma'ar was winning said war and deployed some horrible magical weapons that caused the Cataclysm. ...Seldan isn't sure if Blai knew that. It came up briefly in the Companion gossip.) 

That's good context to be reminded of; he thinks he heard the name but it was with a lot of other information. It's not unreasonable, if there were a normal afterlife setup they could catch up upon their respective deaths if they wound up in the same place.

"I'm not Urtho. I'm Select Artigas, I'm from another world. On my world spellcasters can resurrect the dead."

That seems incredibly important! 

Ma'ar tries to make sense of it and - it's so hard to think when you're dead and a god has you - there's not enough space and now he's...lost track of something else that was also important. What was it. Tower and stars and a promise, he's got that. Cataclysm. He had a plan, he was going to...build something... A god killed him and now he's dead and a god has him. He has all of that and he has - someone claiming to be from another world and to be able to resurrect the dead - what was in the middle, that was also important... Herald Vanyel. Was important. 

"I know you," he says again. "You - helped me."  

His face is flickering again - there's some of the Leareth-face that Blai knows in it, now - but for this one moment at least, he seems more puzzled than terrified. 

"...Are you dead? Did the god kill you too?" he says after a moment, because that might at least answer the question of why this is happening now. 

"No. My Companion here and I are both alive. We are - visiting, the Shadow-Lover, to see what She has to say, and She mentioned you."

None of that makes any sense. 

(It might be possible to make sense of it, but he's trying to hold onto a teetering tower of six different elements that all seem really important for even slightly maintaining situational awareness – tower/promise/stars, Cataclysm, building something, Herald Vanyel, he's dead and a god has him, the person he knows is from another world and knows how to resurrect the dead – and on top of that he doesn't have any of his normal senses and can't shield and the space he's in makes no physical sense and so it's taking some mental discipline to continue not-panicking-because-it-won't-help.) 

Before it did not seem like giving the soul more substrate to have thoughts and experienced helped and it might have made things worse! But Leareth's soul is interacting at all now, with the other mortals, just - doing it slowly - and maybe having more to work with will help. 

...Abruptly it's a lot easier to hold onto the existing context. 

He tries to dredge up more. (His form and face are still fragmented and blurry, but he much more clearly resembles Leareth as Blai knew him, and not random other people he used to look like.) It seems like the most confusing part is how he knows the man from the other world. 

"...Are you the one I kidnapped?" he says, and then is abruptly succeeding much less at the not-panicking-because-it-never-helps. 

Oh no he's really scared. Why is he scared, though, what– maybe he's not sure what order things happened in and thinks that maybe he kidnapped Blai after the part where they were allies and Blai helped him, and is making the natural inference that Blai might be mad about it? 

"Yes, that was me. You let me go, it's all right."

It's fairly easy to calm down. The man who he definitely remembers, who isn't dead and is just visiting, who apparently is Select Artigas from another world, and who knows - no, doesn't personally know but the world he's from has people who know how to resurrect the dead, hold onto that it's very nearly as important as the tower and the stars - anyway, he remembers Select Artigas as an ally. Someone who cooperated with him, who helped him, even when he didn't have to and it was very surprising that he did anyway.

He works on piecing the fragments of memory together. Herald Vanyel...was before that, long before, but also after it. They talked in a cave by a waterfall. Select Artigas was there, he...checked something...and Leareth can't remember what he checked but he does remember the relief, it was - a true thing about himself that he nonetheless had no expectation of being able to prove... 

New information, the most important thing– well, that makes sense now. It would be. 

And then something went wrong, but Select Artigas helped him - saved his life, not that it apparently mattered in the end - and then there was...reason to hope, he remembers the hope mostly because he remembers the surprise when it didn't last. 

"How did I die?" he says, sounding level and almost like himself. All he remembers is that he was alone and no one came to find him and he knew he had made a mistake but not what, there's absolutely no helpful context on what injury killed him. 

"Iftel exploded. There was some kind of penetrating progressive damage. You Gated away and were hard to find so you did not get the benefit of my magic and Healers for the earliest part of the exposure."

What. 

How - why - no, that part is obvious - except why never before and then now - what changed, it doesn't, surely even Vkandis wouldn't, but, just, why - 

"How - many - other deaths?" he manages to say, and then "Herald Vanyel...?" and then -

- there's a reflexive reaction that runs into a wall, a new different one, it's not trying to orient or trying to protect himself, it's a reaction to understanding something and to the reality being bad, it's a reaction for when an ally has a problem, except he...can't...because he's dead, and a god has him, and he had been planning to invent a Gate to the other world to - fix it, all of the other people dead at that point - but he can't do that, now, can he, even though he made a vow on the stars, he can't do anything to help right now because he died like an idiot - 

Wow. Leareth is really...what was that excellent turn of phrase Blai had about Brightstar, before...Leareth is so 90% operational constraint by volume right now.

(Seldan is going to continue letting Blai do the talking, because Leareth apparently actually recognizes Blai and seems to trust him a meaningful amount, and the last time they met Seldan was a horse.) 

"Herald Vanyel is alive. Bard Stefen is alive. Nayoki is alive. Some of your people died, I only have so many spells, but some Golarion gods," which is really not the right word, as it apparently misleads people into thinking they're Golarion-specific, but it's the best short disambiguating phrase right now, "have empowered more clerics and they're helping too."

No, that wasn't actually the– well, it's good to know that Herald Vanyel alive, and Nayoki is - can he put a face to - yes, actually, and she's important and it's good that she survived, but. 

"In Iftel," he says. 

...The actual answer, Seldan thinks, is that they have no idea yet. Thousands for sure. The rest depends on unanswered questions about whether Vkandis tried even a little bit to reduce the collateral damage, and if Karis as a first-circle cleric of a non-Vkandis sun god can do anything to help on a large scale. In the worst case he can imagine, it could be hundreds of thousands. 

"We don't know exactly. Many."

It would have to. 

And - his own people are one thing. He's upset, obviously, that it happened and that he can't do anything about it, but - all of them signed up for a war. A significant fraction, though not all of them, knew that their real enemy was the gods. And there were contingency-plans. Even caught completely unawares, as long as there were mages whose injuries weren't immediately fatal, plenty of people should have been able to get out. 

Random civilians in Iftel had no reason to expect their country would suddenly explode because their god wanted Leareth dead so badly. 

- it's almost certainly not why Select Artigas and...whoever the Herald is...are here. They know he can't fix it. It would be absurdly out of character for them to come talk to him literally just to shout at him for not preventing it, when that accomplishes nothing. 

He...can't remember if they said why they were here. Maybe they did, he just can't seem to remember things unless he puts them on the list of six things he's holding onto as hard as he can, and six things is already a stretch. And - there's still a loop that won't close, some kind of reflexive reaction to being in pain that he doesn't have access to, which is making it hard to - anything. He would at least try to avoid distracting them pointlessly by looking upset, but he doesn't have the faintest idea whether he looks upset right now, he isn't getting any kind of sensory feedback that would tell him.

"What do you want from this conversation?" he says. 

(He in fact looks incredibly distressed.) 

...Seldan is really quite sure that his gnarly ethical dilemma to write a future treatise about does not resolve onto "stop having the conversation because Leareth is miserable", because that is absolutely not how Leareth in full possession of his faculties would want them to handle it, but he's, uh, noting this consideration. 

"Bringing you back to life will require your consent. The spell won't work without it. The Shadow-Lover told us that you were too - disoriented? - for that to be likely and asked for our help to explain it to you."

Oh. He thought they didn't actually have a way to do that without him figuring out a Gate but they must have found another way to do that. That's - good - it's actually mostly too big to think about properly - they must have already explained and he forgot. He doesn't seem to be very good at remembering anything for very long right now – in fact, he's pretty sure he just lost hold of some other important fact they told him because the question was so startling. 

"Being dead is very disorienting but I am not confused enough to not want to be alive," he says. "Obviously I consent!"

...Is that all? Now what happens? 

"I don't know exactly how the Shadow-Lover's god means to have you resurrected. I still can't do it. The new clerics can't either. But apparently Abadar expressed interest in your soul, maybe there is some arrangement with Him."

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

(This is abjectly terrifying partly because now Leareth's attention is fully back onto the fact that his soul is already in the possession of a god and it does not sound like Select Artigas and his allies in Haven actually have any ability whatsoever to change that, it sounds like his fate is entirely up to a Velgarth god and Select Artigas and the Herald can only talk to him at all on that god's allowance and he's trappedtrappedtrapped. But it's also terrifying that - he's not entirely making sense of the claim but a different god wants him and he can't remember any traits about that god other than 'presumably from the other world' – and 'not specifically the god that empowered Select Artigas as a cleric' now that he's been reminded by the term and dredged up more than literally zero context on it. He - thinks - he has evidence for believing that the god that empowered Select Artigas is - potentially an ally. Not that this would necessarily make it all that much less terrifying, the fear isn't happening on a reasoned level.) 

....There has to be some way to convey to Leareth that this would not be the worst thing that could possibly happen to him, but Seldan is admittedly not sure how to do that, it would...benefit a lot from being checkable against things that Leareth can remember himself, but it's still deeply unclear to him how much Leareth actually remembers of the last couple of weeks specifically.