Brightstar sniffles and rubs at his eyes.

:Jisa said I should talk to you: he mumbles out in Mindspeech. :She said you - might understand.:

Well NOW they know whose fault that is!

:......did she elaborate about why?:

:No?: Brightstar says uncertainly. :...I can leave, if I should not have come and it was a bad time?: 

:...the time is not at issue. I have... only guesses about why Jisa said I would be helpful with this: and half of them are that Jisa's insane :but I am not actually practiced at giving advice:

Blai could point out that the Star-Eyed also had terrible judgement and got people killed horribly but is now trying to move past that and really Her “trusting” Brightstar is only making the claim that he’s not worse than her, which is a very low hurdle to clear? …Will that help to hear, Seldan has no idea. He doesn’t think it would help if he delivered himself because he cannot imagine getting it out in anything but the most sarcastic tone imaginable. He used to get told he sounded snarky even when he didn’t mean to be. 

…Seldan can bother Enara directly to find out why Jisa made the suggestion - he can’t find Jisa herself, she’s probably in a Work Room - but his thought, whether or not it was what Jisa had in mind, is that…Blai is in some sense the least personally involved and least personally betrayed of anyone in Haven? He didn’t know any of these people until a few weeks ago. He’s not close with any of them. He doesn’t have nearly as complicated relationship with the gods as Vanyel, and he was pragmatically harmed by Leareth’s death but he’s not grieving a friend. And - he can be matter-of-fact about all of it! He’s from the horrifying thought experiment planet, and the things the gods - and the people - get up to here are almost tame in comparison to Asmodeus or Zon-Kuthon.

They really are, that's true. All this emotional distance will only help if he thinks of something to say though. ......... :There is reason to believe that the Star-Eyed has begun talking to some gods known on my planet: he volunteers inanely in case that shakes loose some Brightstar reaction that serves as a prompt for him to come up with a remark.

Brightstar blinks at him. 

:- She did not say that to me. ...Which gods? What are they like?: 

:I don't have a complete list. Vanyel was recently empowered as a cleric of Shelyn, who communicated something to him on the Star-Eyed's behalf this morning. Shelyn is the Neutral Good goddess of love and art. She might also have gotten referrals to Abadar, who we know the Shadow-Lover's god has been communicating with, and possibly others too:

Brightstar nods uncertainly. He seems to spend a while considering this. 

:So - do you think that She knows that in your world they can - return the dead to life -?:

:...if She was interested in this information it's been made available to her, I would assume:

Brightstar doesn't seem like he knows what to do about that, entirely. He paces back and forth a little bit, looking about twelve different variants of 'upset'.

:...She said she did not know if Leareth needed to die or not: he segues to. :That...: He swipes at his eyes, frustratedly. :It is hard to remember exactly, I - think - She said that maybe it was very important but She wished She had chosen a plan that hurt Her people less, but - maybe it was not even important.: His eyes lift from the floor to Blai. :Do you think he needed to die?: 

....Wow. Okay. That is indeed a much better question for Brightstar to ask Blai than anyone who's more personally upset about Leareth's death.

(Seldan, it turns out, is actually kind of personally upset, now that he's given himself a moment to think about it. Apparently he and Leareth were friends, once. He's more pissed off at the Star-Eyed and Vkandis for contributing to it happening, and pissed off at the Shadow-Lover for being hopelessly dense and mean to Leareth without even realizing it, than he is sad, but that's - characteristic, for him, anger is a lot more comfortable than grief.) 

:I do not particularly think so. If I were mistaken in some respect that wouldn't astonish me. There was nothing stopping him from deceiving me about his characteristics. But as far as I know, no, so I defaulted to trying to keep him alive:

(Is that actually true? That nothing was stopping Leareth from deceiving Blai about his characteristics? Seldan feels like it would at least have been very hard and implausible for Leareth to have known he would need to fake the Lawful alignment and figured it out in the, what, several days in between Blai arriving in Haven at all and the point when they met? And...a lot of the rest feels like it flows from that. 

...And he feels like there's something significant they can read into how dead-Leareth acted with them. He was so upset about the casualties in Iftel, and Seldan doesn't think he was in any way in any state to think to fake that in order to come across better to them.) 

Brightstar nods jerkily. 

:- How can you tell?: he sends after another few seconds of pacing. :If you are– if you think you are doing the right thing but you are actually about to make a terrible mistake that hurts everybody you care about and makes everybody angry with you?: 

...Asking yourself that question for even five seconds before you run headfirst into doing something stupid is a good start, Seldan thinks. Though it's not obvious that that would have stopped Brightstar's most damaging actions here, which were very premeditated. 

It would have been inconvenient for Leareth to deceive Blai about his characteristics, but a Lawful alignment alone doesn't necessarily mean somebody doesn't need to die. Obviously Blai was comfortable putting a lot of weight on his conclusions there! But nothing strictly stopped Leareth from omitting some kind of crucial contextual information, say, which he also would not have remembered while dead and only able to remember four things at a time.

Blai considers and rejects the response "if you figure that out, let me know". As phrased that's not even an accurate response, Blai has only recently had anyone he cared about and does not actually think whether everybody is angry with him is a useful benchmark.

He thinks, sipping his tea, then goes with, :There should be a strategic path to a specific objective that has a known good outcome. Leareth being dead might conceivably have been a step on a path like that. But it would have helped to know why that was desirable, so that if conditions on the ground seemed to change, you could respond to that:

:Van thought that Leareth probably needed to die: Brightstar says. It's more thoughtful and less...wailing...than anything else so far. :For a very long time. It was what he told me. That he wanted to try to talk to him as long as possible, because a war would be very bad and at the very least talking would delay it. And that - he admired Leareth in many ways. But that - even if Leareth was not lying to him about everything, he could be admirable and still wrong, and if he would not back down from invading Valdemar to kill ten million people then Van could not back down from trying to kill him.:

Brightstar shivers abruptly. :...And then all of a sudden everyone was backing down and I - I was not trying to understand, at the time, I thought all of it was a horrible trick. I am scared that - that the vision from Her is a horrible trick too, somehow, and I should not believe it... I know Van was never really dead, so Leareth did not kill him, and he did not destroy k'Treva, those are - bad things I thought he had done and was wrong - but there were so many other bad things we know he did and I, I do not understand why everyone - changed their mind - and said of course we want him to help go to Golarion. Even if he would pay to raise the dead - it would be selfish and horrible to help someone just because of that if they were actually bad and needed to die -: 

AHA at last Brightstar has said something for which Blai has a relevant response!

:It is not selfish to cooperate with even the most dreadful entities imaginable if you can do that and the thing you are cooperating on matters enough: he says. :Both of those parts matter - verifying what dreadful entities mean to do based on what they say or what agreements they sign, and under what conditions they can and will accomplish it, is something of an entire field of study, on Golarion, and it would not be fundamentally unreasonable to decide never to try to do this at all and to never attempt anything so ambitious that Evil allies were necessary to achieve it. But I spent my career posted at a border fortress keeping in an unlimited supply of demons bent on ravaging my planet, and people of all philosophies and commitments abided by a treaty that pointed us all toward the same end, whatever else we did with ourselves. We lent each other our assistance as needed and exchanged relevant information to keep the ward up and the breaches limited, and the world didn't end, for a hundred years, for long enough that a party of archmages was able to close the portal. Perhaps what Velgarth contacting Golarion could mean is less important than that. Perhaps Leareth is harder to be sure of than the other signatories to an expert-drafted ream of legal language. But those are questions that would want asking, here:

WOW that was a solid response, good work Blai, Seldan...would not have come up with it nearly as quickly and wouldn't have any personal examples nearly as relevant (Velgarth having both less in the way of evil-thought-experiment countries to cooperate with normal countries despite deep philosophical differences, and also a severe dearth of Law for even their much less starkly opposed countries to cooperate on literally anything ever) and he would have been incapable of delivering it sincerely and without snark.

Brightstar seems to find this kind of befuddling, and spends a while blinking and half turning in circles on the spot and rubbing his arms with his hands as though he's cold. But...it does seem like something landed. 

:I need to tell you something: he sends abruptly.

....Well that's really ominous. 

IT REALLY IS, WOW.

:What is it?:

:...I helped Jisa find Leareth: Brightstar sends. :I– just before the Iftel...thing...happened, minutes before, my Goddess had sent a vision. A shorter one, but - She said then that what She had asked of me might have been a mistake - and She tried to warn us, I think, about the attack, but it was only a second before it happened, we could not have told anyone to get out in time even if I had been - trying. ...And then Jisa asked me to find him. The way I found him before, with his immortality backup. She argued that my Goddess had clearly not been responsible for the attack and had - tried to help - even if it came too late. And that we could still fix everything and bring everyone back if we could reach Golarion, but we needed Leareth to do that. She said he would pay for it, she seemed very sure of it, that he would - feel responsible - because he did not kill my parents but they died because my Goddess was afraid of him and so it is - his responsibility even more than the rest of the world.: 

Brightstar shivers. :...So I did. And - we were too late - I panicked, I think, it felt like I had - made a choice I could not turn back from, with no time to think, and then it had not even mattered. ...I projected my mind to the Void and I tried to - catch him, his soul. Jisa thought that was a stupid plan, she asked what I would have done if I had succeeded and - I have no idea. I could not have put him back even if we could fix his spell, it kills people. I told Jisa that maybe I could have let him have my body so he could find Golarion and bring back my parents and she thought that plan was very stupid too.: