"...Abadar's the Lawful Neutral god of trade." He's not sure if Leareth was ever told that and certainly may not remember it now.

Leareth does not really understand what that means, he's sure it makes sense and judging by Select Artigas' tone it's supposed to be reassuring, he just...is very impaired at reasoning from it at all, let alone having the result of his reasoning have any impact at all on being terrified. He's absolutely certain that he's just forgotten something else that was important and he hates it and he can't do anything about it because he's dead and stuck here until and unless the Shadow-Lover's god decides to do something else with him and– panicking is not helping stop it. 

"Why is Abadar interested in my soul and what would– what do you think he would be likely to do with it?" he says, surprisingly coherently. 

"I don't know exactly. He might want to put you in the Lawful Neutral afterlife. I have heard that it is an enormous paradisical city and that the people there change relatively little from how they were in life compared to in any other afterlife. Or He might want to arrange your resurrection somewhere, which would explain why we are supposed to tell you about how the spell requires consent."

Those are probably positive and reassuring things and Leareth is just completely unable to interact with that on an instinctive level because there's a god involved. ...This is stupid. New information. It's new information and that means it calls for a new reaction and - just - it isn't working. There's a motion that he's reaching for and it isn't there. 

Leareth summons an enormous effort of will, which...slightly works, as a mental motion...and forces his screaming thoughts into some kind of order. 

"You– insofar as you are doing this - on my behalf - should do whatever you have the power to do that achieves your goals," he says. "I - trust you - that the things you want are - priorities I would agree with. If you think Abadar is an ally you are probably right, I just - I think I cannot do anything that requires trusting a god. I think that is not something where - trying - will work. So you should figure the best plan that does not require me to feel a specific way about it. You have my consent to do that, whatever you decide it is. Obviously if you are not doing this on my behalf you are going to do whatever you wanted to do anyway."

"...I do not know precisely what it feels like to be resurrected. It has never happened to me. That might be enough or it might not."

He knows less than Select Artigas does and is impaired at thinking by being dead, he doesn’t have any better idea. He won’t try to micromanage and put in his own opinion on how low the estimated odds of success should be before they would conclude it’s not worth the risk of wasting an expensive spell. It sounds like it’s not fully in their hands, anyway, it’s up to the Shadow-Lover’s god whether to let go of his soul and make it available for resurrection at all, and if that god trades him to Abadar then presumably it’s up to Abadar.

The Shadow-Lover was told unambiguously that this would go better if She gave them space, but it’s been quite a long conversation now and is adding up to a very substantial cost in substrate to let Leareth’s soul experience things.

She is not going to interrupt but She pulls for Seldan’s attention with a firm Companion-Foresight tug.

Ugh. 

The Shadow-Lover is getting impatient, he thinks where Blai can see it. And clearly still expects them to mediate a conversation between Her and Leareth, though if they say “no, not a good idea” it‘s not clear what She can do apart from cutting off their conversation privileges and pausing Leareth again.

Oh. Uh.

"Can you talk to the Shadow-Lover? I think She has something to say to you that She couldn't get across before."

It's not as though there's literally anything Leareth can do to prevent the Shadow-Lover from talking to him??? ...If the thing Select Artigas is asking for is to try to be cooperative and helpful because it's helpful for their plans in some kind of godnegotiation or something, he...will try. He's - not completely disoriented, he thinks, he knows who he is and, in some approximate sense, "where" and "when" he is, and he thinks he has a grasp on the key important elements of the situation, though he doesn't know how he died and he surely would have asked so it's plausible he forgot that at some point. 

"Of course," he says. 

Seldan continues to have gnarly-ethical-dilemma-for-a-thought-experiment-in-a-treatise feelings about this entire situation, which is still interesting but definitely a lot less fun when it's happening in real life, to a specific person you're kind of fond of, and before you've actually had a chance to write a treatise and pre-think through your endorsed viewpoints at all. 

But - he is, in fact, fairly sure that the Valdemargod is going to keep trying to wake Leareth up and stick him in with the Shadow-Lover to try to get more angles on Leareth-legibility, and it's deeply unclear that they have any leverage to say "please don't do that, actually", and probably the Valdemargod literally can't perceive that it's unpleasant for Leareth and wouldn't care anyway. 

(...It's sort of confusing how unpleasant it seems to be for Leareth? In all the songs and legends and thirdhand supposed-personal-reports he knows about, meeting the Shadow-Lover is supposed to be nice. Blai definitely seems to be...more relaxed than usual, here? Seldan himself might not have noticed, he mostly doesn't find things very unpleasant in general, and he's mostly been angry here, which he's been accused of enjoying outright before and that's not entirely false.) 

- anyway, it's not going to go better without their presence and it might actually accomplish something productive. 

He tries to figure out how to tug back in Foresight to convey that, sure, might as well try it now. 

It's unpleasant because it's from a god and Leareth has trauma about gods like how Blai has trauma about being thirsty and Leareth has prioritized avoiding his trauma object (reasonable, they were trying to kill him) instead of on coping with it. (Even Blai prepares Create Water every day, though he coped when he had his interregnum.) Maybe the relaxingness of the place works on anxiety and not on trauma and if Blai were managing to be thirsty here he would be upset about it?

Maybe the Shadow-Lover has less - finesse - when it's a dead soul that needs a lot of complicated god-resource setup to experience anything, and it's just that this is easier with dead Heralds because there is all of that lovely existing mythology about how the Shadow-Lover will welcome your soul when you die and hug you and say you did a good job. There’s an an entire song about it and it’s, like, a romantic song. It also seems possible that the no-negative-emotions thing didn’t result in Leareth engaging and so the Shadow-Lover…experimented.

The circumstances of Leareth's death can't possibly have helped either, that's a thing. He was willing to meet Blai despite the cleric-of-a-god thing, he was willing to have a cleric prophecy spell cast on him, apart from freaking out about k'Treva and kidnapping Blai it seems like he's not actually so paranoid about gods that it interferes with his projects. But right now his most recent memory is of dying horribly to a godplot and not even knowing which god was responsible, a very recent trauma that he hasn't had time to do any coping about, and he can't form new memories and seems to forget things earlier in the same conversation if something distracting happens so he's certainly not going to figure out any coping now and have it stick. 

...Anyway, they can't change that, so there's nothing to be done except see how this goes. 

The Shadow-Lover steps in, not from anywhere in particular, just there. 

To Leareth, it...doesn't look like any specific person at all. Select Artigas and the Herald barely manage to look like specific people, but they're at least obviously meant to be, and there's - some of the quality that dreams have, where it feels like it makes sense until none of the details hold up. 

The Shadow-Lover as he sees Them is just - something like a pillar of light in the vague size and width of a human form. 

....He knows who he is. He’s holding onto the tower and the stars and there’s another world with magic that can resurrect the dead and gods— with at least one god actually worth allying with. And he’s dead and a (Velgarth) god has him, but the god in question may not be completely unwilling to cooperate with his living allies and so having this conversation might be the only thing he can do, from here, that still matters.

So he needs to try. 

“Leareth,” the Shadow-Lover says. “There is information you should have.”

maybe he can't do this maybe it's hard and he's too dead

- no, focus, trying to - anything - on purpose doesn't work very well but it's. possible. 

"I am listening," he says. He hopes he succeeded at saying that. It's hard to tell, there's no sensory feedback. 

(He's not entirely sure what the...point...is, he can't remember anything unless he's holding it in his mind continuously on purpose and with enormous effort and even then not for long, but - maybe it's not really about him. Maybe it's something that the Shadow-Lover's god needs to...test, while They have him in Their power? ...Doesn't matter. His allies have more context and they came here specifically to talk to the Shadow-Lover and so it's important even if right-in-this-moment he can't at all remember why.) 

"You believed you would find no allies among the gods of this world," the Shadow-Lover says. "That was not unreasonable with the information you had. There are constraints on Us, and communication was limited, and it would have cost Us an advantage to make Ourselves legible, to you or to anyone, and so that was not the best path. We do not share all of the values you would share with Abadar, and there are things that matter greatly to you that We cannot see to interact with. You were not wrong, about that, or that it stood in the way of your goals." 

....That was startlingly coherent and not-completely-missing-the-point for a Shadow-Lover explanation! Did the Valdemargod workshop this with every single Golarion god willing to speak to Them or something? 

Leareth in full possession of his faculties would be able to engage with that, Seldan thinks. It remains to be seen whether Leareth in this condition can, or - whether it will satisfy the Shadow-Lover of whatever She wants here. "There is information you should have" is kind of baffling when Leareth won't retain any of it for more than the next two minutes. 

It has the sound of a stock phrase. She said the same thing to Blai.

It sort of makes sense that there might be a script, as an alternative to very dense gods having to come up with lines on the spot, and Leareth is getting the script for "Herald souls that the Shadow-Lover catches temporarily and intends to send back" rather than the one for souls the Valdemargod is going to...store, or whatever...and put back later as Companions, because the Valdemargod does seem on board with sending Leareth back. Just not in a hurry. 

Leareth is trying to make sense of it and put it in context and...can't, and knows that he can't...and one of the few things even worse than being trapped in a conversation with a god and having no way to leave and no way for his allies to get him out, is being trapped in said interaction and knowing he's failing at what the god wants from him. 

Break it down. It...would have compromised the god's plans to try to communicate to Leareth about them. Because - because they required routing around other gods, maybe, and any gesture of alliance toward Leareth would have been blindingly obvious? And - implicitly, that must not be true, anymore, since this conversation. 

...He should say it out loud, he won't remember this but Select Artigas and the Herald might. 

"If You had done anything to communicate to me that You were - not my enemy - then other gods that You wanted to...trick...would have seen it coming?" he said. "Is that what You meant to say?" 

Pause. 

"...I had intended to break what You just said down to think about in pieces but I cannot remember any of the rest now," he admits. There's a very loud screaming instinct that it's not safe to reveal weakness when he's trapped and not in control and he tries very, very hard to ignore it, it's enough of a struggle to finish any thoughts without wasting some of his thought-capacity on useless panic. 

That was - impressive, actually, Leareth is clearly finding every moment of this awful but he's listening and making sense of it. 

Companions have eidetic memory. Seldan can repeat all of that back with no effort at all.