It's actually really satisfying, even fun, working to Heal someone who has this much underlying health to work with. Apparently some part of Shavri is able to notice that, even in the midst of...everything. 

(Does that make her a horrible person? ...Doesn't seem productive to feel guilty about enjoying the one kind of work she's always loved, when it's in fact the most important thing to be doing right now and not a distraction from her real priorities.) 

:All right. This - isn't actually an explanation, but could it have been an accident? In principle? Do they ever, I don't know, take down some of the safeguards in the process of doing other work with the Heartstone?: 

:...I guess it's not inconceivable. If multiple people were being reckless and they got spectacularly unlikely.: Pause. :That's what I would guess happened, though, if not for the timing.: 

:With the monster attack, which definitely wasn't an accident?: Vanyel shakes his head. :Gods. I would almost wonder if - if one caused the other, somehow - if Leareth found out about k'Treva and decided it was a good time to launch an attack he already had a contingency-plan for. But that only makes sense if k'Treva happened first, and, I don't know...: 

Glance at Blai. :It looked very recent, right? Most of the fallout is magical, you wouldn't have been able to see it, but the ground was still hot even a mile out? Er, if you had to guess the longest it could have possibly been and still looked like that...?: 

:I would have expected the snow to melt, or for the liquid water to cool, if it had been longer than - two or three hours, perhaps? It might depend on how cold it is there climate-wise, and how deep the snow was to begin with, but I didn't see signs of refreezing anywhere, no - splashed water that looked like it formed ice midair or on contact with a bit of wood or anything, so it can't have been that cold.:

Nod. :That seems likely. How it looked might depend some on how much of the total heat bleed-through was upfront - at the moment the blast happened - versus from the magical residue the blast left behind still radiating heat. But - it can't have happened more than a few minutes before the monster attack, and seems most likely it happened at around the same time or a little afterward. So it can't possibly be what prompted Leareth to send an attack...: 

Savil's eyes widen slightly. She leans forward, hands on her knees. 

:I have a ridiculous idea, hear me out. If Leareth has a strong Foreseer, they could have warned him this was coming in advance. He could have decided to set in motion his own attack for the same day and time. Maybe even with the goal that we would assume he did both, and be even more terrified of him.: 

Vanyel frowns. :...I think I still feel confused about that. Losing k'Treva does weaken Valdemar, but not that much, and - can you imagine how much goodwill he could have gotten with us if he warned us about it instead?: 

Come to think of it, if something like that was visible in Foresight at all, surely Moondance could have gotten a warning and averted it thinking about Moondance right now is a bad idea. Vanyel blinks away tears and tries to drag his concentration back together. 

:Right. This only makes sense if he was never really committed to the negotiations with you. But I think the attack already tells us that.: 

Vanyel...isn't sure of that. He doesn't feel like it's already determined, yet, which world they're in. But maybe that's only because he so desperately wants to be in the world where peace is still an option, however remote...

:Maybe his Foreseer didn't see any detail of what happened, just - saw that we were going to get spooked and declare war. And decided to move first, to ensure he could still win.: He shakes his head, helplessly. :Gods, that would be so stupidly tragic. Like the Mage Wars all over again.: 

Shavri is more confident now that what she's doing - mostly trying to convince Blai's body that several of the ways it's freaking out in response to the additional injury are unproductive - is helping a little. She puts more force into it. 

Blai will probably notice that he feels better - not like the damage is gone, the set of things it's helping with are very different from what a channel or a Lesser Restoration would handle, but less generically unwell about it. 

He's not sure any of this is necessary, he'd probably be fine after a night's sleep and a spell, but it's very kind of her. :Prophecy on Golarion doesn't work any more but there were spells about it, is that something it would be useful for me to spend a slot on tomorrow?:

 …See, this is exactly why Vanyel thought it might be a good idea to include Blai in this. He’s still getting used to the sheer variety of highly specific things that Blai’s magic can do.

:Quite possibly, if we’re still this confused in the morning. Er, what exactly would the spell do and what questions do you think you could help answer with it? Our Foresight isn’t - replicable, the way a spell is.:

:Well, I... don't know, since prophecy has been broken since well before I was born. I would be looking in the Acts of Iomedae for references to prophetic spells and asking till I found one low-circle enough for me to cast and then I'd have a loose sense of it but it'd take experience with the spell to give you a better rundown.:

Savil looks slightly disappointed. :So - kind of a long shot, and if there is a spell we won’t know how useful it is until after you cast it.: At the expense of some other spell he could have asked his god for instead, of course. 

Vanyel manages a smile at Blai, who probably could use encouragement given, well, everything about him as a person that Vanyel was able to pick up by reading his mind.

:It’s worth looking into, though. Thank you for bringing it up. - hmm, is there anything else in your holy text that might be - valuable for reasoning about this situation?:

(He’s not especially hopeful; he’s mostly trying to think of a way Blai could occupy the rest of today so he’s not just fretting about his situation while the Heralds have the rest of their emergency meetings without him. But, well, Blai’s goddess does seem potentially more helpful than any god Vanyel has encountered before.)

:Iomedae spent nearly the entirety of her mortal life at war and says in several places that it's among the most tragic of human endeavors. I expect that if she were here she'd try to negotiate a peace. But suspecting this doesn't give me the skills to do it in her stead nor the certainty that it's in fact possible. I could try to produce more constructive guesses if I knew more about the history of the hostilities and what you've already tried?:

Vanyel nods. There's a flash of something like longing in his eyes, before his expression smoothes back to neutral. 

:The whole thing is a very long story. ...I do think our fundamental problem is that Leareth is fine with going to war, it was his plan in the first place, and he expects to win and is probably right to. I'm sure he would prefer to save the resources - even if he's lying about having any humanitarian motives, wars are still expensive - but he's been explicitly unwilling to consider any concessions on his end that would compromise his chances of pulling off his plan. I think from his end, he was hoping to convince me to help him take over Valdemar, and on our end we're - mostly buying time, and I suppose the remote chance of convincing him that he'll do better if he conquers some other poor country.: 

They were talking about potential alternate power sources, too, but - what are the odds, right, if Leareth spent a thousand years looking. Also, Vanyel still feels vaguely uneasy about explaining Leareth's full plan to Blai. He hasn't pinned down what he thinks might go wrong with that, but you can't unshare a secret, and it's not like they know that much about Blai as a person, let alone about the goddess he serves. 

:Anyway. I...am surprised, actually, that he would have attacked without communicating that he was calling off the negotiations. He's - very consistently given the impression that he cares about keeping his word, once he's actually made a commitment. But that could just be an impression he wanted to give me, and - it's unclear that he would consider himself to have explicitly committed to no surprise attacks? He committed to waiting at least a year before making any mmoves, at one point, while I - investigated some questions - but I don't think it cost him much, I think he wasn't planning to invade that year anyway. Also that was multiple years ago now and we haven't renegotiated.: 

:He might be Lawful - I know you don't have that as an ontological concept here but some people are just temperamentally Lawful even without having it inculcated specifically. It wouldn't stop him from also being Evil and it certainly wouldn't protect anyone without a negotiated agreement if what he wants is a fight. There's alignment-detecting spells but I'd need to be near him and able to see him, to use them, but - sounds Lawful Evil to me. Do you have allied neighbors who'll come to your defense if he invades, is that what you were doing with the time you bought, or were you trying to lay groundwork to make mass evacuation viable - possibly not even very mass, if you expect civilians to come off all right, if I recall correctly that he isn't a legions-of-undead sort of person, though I guess the blood magic thing suggests another reason civilians will not come off all right... Does he have an ambassador here or vice versa or are you just sending letters or using communication spells?:

"Temperamentally Lawful even though he's Evil" is a fascinating lens on Leareth. Especially the way Blai seems to be thinking about it, like it's a known shape that a person can be, not a baffling exception. 

:I do have some routes to exchange letters if we need to communicate outside the dreams, but we've mainly just communicated in the dreams, they're very convenient. We had discussed one of us sending an ambassador but hadn't agreed on an arrangement yet.: 

Mostly because Randi wanted the Senior Circle in agreement on it and Tran was never going to be. In hindsight, it feels like...probably something about how those decisions were handled was a mistake. They've had years. All of those years made of up days and candlemarks and minutes that individually felt rushed, never enough time to try to untangle the complex disagreements within the Senior Circle, never time to step back and reconsider everything from the ground up – but every time Vanyel has caught himself in that pattern before, it was always a mistake...

:We do have allied neighbors. We're probably going to start calling in our alliances, after this.: Not the Tayledras, though, it's too late for that now. :The civilians - wouldn't be all right in the long run - but I don't think mass evacuation was ever going to be viable, mostly because I have no idea where you would put nearly a million people without invading somewhere else, which Valdemar categorically doesn't do.: 

Sigh. :For what it's worth, I think you could be right about Leareth being - generally inclined to act in the ways your world calls Lawful. We don't have that concept and it - mostly means that he's very baffling as a person, when he's explicitly willing to cross all sorts of lines but then claims to take some random subset of them very seriously.: 

:Do any of your neighbors have embassy relationships with him, or would they be interested in receiving evacuees in exchange for a step down in their military alliance committed -? It wouldn't be a random subset, though I can't guarantee exactly which subset it might be particularly well. It's not like every independently Lawful person is guaranteed to feel the same way about every thing Law is understood to touch on, and a lot of Law rests on the - underlying ability to make commitments rather than on any commitments having already been made.:

:He's - not really doing the sort of thing where countries would have embassies with him? I wouldn't say that he's leading a country, more that he - has a secret organization, kind of. It's possible that if not for the Foresight dream, we wouldn't have had any idea he existed until he invaded us.: 

He frowns absently. :The Queen of Karse, our southern neighbor, does know about him, because we warned her - er, I don't actually know if this came up yet, but the Queen of Karse and our King are in an alliance-marriage and Arven, the little girl you saved, is their daughter together.: Officially speaking, that is. :It's how we ended the war with Karse a few years ago and made it stick. We have a mutual defense treaty with our other southern neighbor, Rethwellan, and - I suppose it's not impossible they would be willing to discuss taking our refugees instead. ...I don't believe they're aware that Leareth exists.:  

Because Treven didn't tell Queen Lythiaren, because it would have weakened his position for renegotiating their treaty. Vanyel is suddenly obscurely embarrassed about that. It seems like Blai's world, or at least the teachings of Blai's goddess, might be unimpressed with that or something. 

:Hardorn, our eastern neighbor, probably can't help or accept evacuees. –ohhh, right, and our neighbor to the northeast, Iftel, also knows about Leareth and is likely to commit their military forces to help us in a war. But it's - somewhat complicated - they also follow Vkandis Sunlord, the god worshipped in Karse, and would be fighting because they believe Vkandis wants Leareth defeated. I'm...somewhat reluctant to call on their aid unless we're - more sure than I feel right now - that this was definitely the opening attack in a war and not - not something we're somehow misunderstanding.: 

:Is he planning, should he successfully conquer Valdemar, to operate it as a country? If he means to do that imminently and he's on top of his logistics he might have diplomats in preparation for it that he could be asked to deploy early. It sounds like you should be leveling with Rethwellan if they're your most potentially helpful neighbor, and a power-mad archmage is everyone's problem anyway. What should I know about Vkandis?:

:...He must have plans for diplomacy with Valdemar's neighbors if he conquers us, that's - a good idea.: That had never occurred to Vanyel before right now, probably because he's an idiot.

(And, maybe, because he didn't really want to think about it as though the possibility of losing this war was? Maybe it never quite felt relevant to him, since in that world he would almost certainly be dead, and - he's spent most of his life, definitely all the long years before Stef, on some level quietly waiting for that inevitable ending, when the world would no longer be his problem.) 

Focus. :We obviously need to tell Rethwellan, especially if we're urgently asking them for military aid.: The Comb will be impassible this time of year, which means the only feasible way is a Gate - Jisa has Gate-locations in Rethwellan - nevermind, think about the logistics later. 

:Vkandis. Hmm.: Vanyel has a feeling that Blai is going to have a lot of questions that seem incredibly reasonable except for how it had literally never occurred to him, or anyone else here, that they're the sorts of questions that could have answers. 

Savil has already tried to answer some of Blai's questions about gods and has a better idea of what he's looking for. 

:Vkandis is - overall harder to communicate with than the Star-Eyed Goddess, I think, but in some ways intervenes more? Definitely more cases I've heard of of obvious one-off miracles worked through one of His priests, though not your world's sort of standardized god-magic. Queen Karis has a Suncat, who's - sort of like a Companion in some ways, Suncats are intelligent magical beings that show up sometimes to advise monarchs or high priests in Vkandis' service.

...Iftel, right, they're protected by a magical shield-wall that we believe Vkandis powers directly. I think they claim it was a similar type of agreement to the one I mentioned with the Star-Eyed, in the aftermath of the Cataclysm, except the work they do in exchange is...more or less quietly maintaining an emergency army. Maybe because Vkandis wanted the ability to act in situations exactly like this one.: