Well, what did he see. He saw Savil. She looks like this. He can't remember what she was wearing besides that it was white, and he has to think about this in detail, and if nobody stops him he is going to spend the next five minutes solid trying to reconstruct the shape of her collar and the length of her sleeves.

Sooooooooooooo stubbornly unhelpful! Nayoki is actually really impressed. Too bad this poor man works for one of the gods instead of Leareth. 

She'll be a little patient, mostly because she's curious how long he can drag it out, but not for five minutes. 

They would have gone to the permanent Gate-terminus (she assumes) and Gated to k'Treva. What did he see then? 

It looked like the edge of a Wish crater but he's never seen one and could be completely wrong about what Wish craters look like. So probably the archmage did it, who else is going to be slinging Wishes. Unless there was an ancient scroll, or a pit fiend, or a djinni, or there's another spell that does that at eighth circle, or it was weird slotless sorcerer bullshit, or any combination of those things, such as a djinni with a scroll, or a pit fiend who is a weird slotless sorcerer, that would be awful, wow -

Nayoki's thoughts stumble to a halt as she notices two things. 

One: none of that makes sense??? What is a 'Wish' spell, what in the world is a pit fiend, what does it mean for something to be eight circles worth of magic, what does "slotless" mean, what kind of artifact is a "scroll"... 

Two: it doesn't even seem to be entering this man's mind that they're asking whether and how his goddess did it. 

She relates this to Leareth. :I think we are missing really quite a lot of context.: 

They absolutely seem to be missing a lot of context! This is far beyond the point of just "not what it looked like" – whatever the story here is, Leareth is increasingly sure that it's going to be something that hadn't even occurred to him as a hypothesis before. 

:...Tell him why you are asking about this. He may still try not to cooperate - understandably - but if he was not in fact involved, he may genuinely not realize why we kidnapped him.: 

Nayoki sighs. At this point she really doubts she's going to get anything helpful from this man without dragging it out of him one compulsion at a time. 

:Leareth did not destroy k'Treva, and would not even have had the capability to do so, which I think Vanyel would realize if he were thinking clearly about it. We have no idea what happened, except that it is probably a godplot with the aim of pushing both us and Valdemar to go to war. You appeared in Haven with very suspicious timing and we are trying to determine if your goddess was involved in arranging this.:

And she's just going to ask the question directly, he's still compulsioned to think through the answer. :Was your goddess responsible for destroying k'Treva Vale, either with your help or without?: 

Oh no what if there are Iomedaeans on this planet somewhere and he messed up their operation that would be mortifying.

On...this...planet...? 

Really that seems like the most important part here!!!!!!! 

:Where are you from: 

His childhood house looked like this. It had green shutters and the paint was flaking away the last time he saw the place. He will now think real hard about the exact places on the shutters that were missing paint.

Well that was predictable, wasn't it, she definitely had that coming. 

It would...make sense of a lot, though. The confusing notes from the first Thoughtsenser's report. The bizarre theories about what could have caused k'Treva to explode. The fact that his goddess gives him something-like-Gifts, which Nayoki wouldn't have said was possible - but maybe it's only impossible here. 

Of course, it also raises a lot more questions, but it's not like this situation made an incredible amount of sense before, either.

She relays this to Leareth. 

...It makes sense, Leareth thinks. It's not impossible in theory, for there to be other worlds, or for magic to travel between them. At this point the "other world" hypothesis feels like the cleaner one, making sense of a set of facts that would otherwise be incredibly confusing. 

The man seems unwilling to say anything definitive about whether his goddess was involved in destroying k'Treva. Probably mostly because he's stubbornly being unhelpful, and secondly because he did, in fact, just get kidnapped by someone who the Heralds described to him as an evil archmage and that description is not actually particularly unfair. Incomplete, Leareth thinks, but he can't say it's wrong. The priest could be thinking it would be very reasonable of his goddess to do whatever it took to stop Leareth. 

But Leareth is pretty sure they can read between the lines: the priest wasn't himself involved and has no particular reason to think his goddess was involved.

And if his goddess is from another planet, then - they also have a lot less reason to assume that the simplest explanation is a single godplot. 

Hold the pieces together. The Changecreature, k'Treva...those make sense as a godplot. The Star-Eyed could have done both. If there hadn't been a foreign priest with miraculous powers in Haven, then - well, probably the Changecreature incident would have killed more people, maybe including the Queen. People who Vanyel personally cared about; he would have been grieving. They would have tried to contact k'Treva for aid at some point anyway, and learned it had been destroyed. 

It's not clear that the presence or absence of a foreign priest with miraculous powers mattered at all, to the outcome being escalation and war. 

The gods of Velgarth...maybe wouldn't have seen it coming in Foresight at all. Or maybe They did, and worked the foreign priest into an existing plan. Either way, Leareth is growingly suspicious that there was some nudging involved in what exactly he learned from his spies. If he hadn't learned what happened to k'Treva, he would have been vastly less likely to decide he had grounds to kidnap the priest – and the Heralds managed to be sloppy enough about operational security to leak that, but no hints of the priest's origins? 

He knew that the entire point of all this was almost certainly to push the Heralds to escalate, and he still went ahead and made it worse. 

(There's no point in being angry with himself for something he couldn't possibly known at the time – he's still not sure of his decision, it's something he would want to review after the fact with all the information, but it would have been correct, he thinks, to act quickly in the world where it turned out the priest had willingly helped destroy k'Treva. The question is mostly whether he should have been unsure enough of his top theory to wait a day or a week to act, and of course now he wishes he had done that instead, but - would a decision procedure that always waited an extra week lead to better results on average...) 

And, of course, the new theory is still half guesswork. And it's going to be a lot of work to get more clarity, because the priest is (not even unreasonably, from his perspective) being as uncooperative as possible.

Nayoki could probably wring more answers out of him eventually, but...that's a hostile way to be operating, and he already has a lot less reason to think that it's justified. Would he have authorized the strike team and given the order to kidnap the man from Haven with the information he has right now? Almost certainly not; he would have tried to talk to Vanyel first, instead of giving Vanyel even more reason to believe that he was wrong to even consider trusting Leareth. 

No undoing it now, but he can at least stop making it worse. 

:Nayoki. Whatever his other involvement, it seems he was not willingly involved with destroying k'Treva, and - we have less reason than before to think his goddess was involved either. I - need to think about what we know, and what we can do with it from here, but it is probably counterproductive to force him to answer more questions.: 

Well then. That's awkward. Probably not as awkward as accidentally kidnapping Savil's boyfriend would have been, though. 

She undoes the compulsions, which - unlike with set-commands - is much faster than putting them on was. 

:It seems like Leareth is convinced you did not participate in destroying k'Treva to provoke a war after all, which is the reason he kidnapped you, and so he has decided we should not keep asking you questions you do not want to answer.: 

To Leareth, :- I think I can do a block that will only prevent him from drawing on his weird god-Gifts. He is not otherwise Gifted. ...He would probably try to fight us with his weapon but I can leave the room first and do it through the door, I am keyed to the shields.: 

It feels like a terrifying risk, what if it still lets the priest's god possess him or something, but - Leareth thinks that's mostly a feeling. 

:You can do that from outside the room, sure.: 

Then Nayoki will leave the room, explain in terse Mindspeech - and not especially apologetically - what she's going to do, and start mucking around in Blai's head again. She's still totally reading his mind. 

Why isn't he making any of his saves. Did they curse him and he didn't remember it. He may have forgotten Not Geb's name but not his gender or there being only one of him so this isn't even the archmage and you'd think Blai would eventually make one of the saves. The Valdemarans may want to know how powerful the guy's lieutenant is if he can ever tell them but if they're smart he'll be in quarantine and asked to expend all his spells and kept unconscious* at dawn even if for some reason the evil archmage releases him back to Valdemar. And if he can't expend his spells who knows what would be a reasonable security precaution! Can Iomedae recoup the intervention budget if he's enchanted not to use the spells. Probably not, if that were a thing people would be using Geases about it sometimes probably. What a waste of a clerichood he is. War is among the most tragic of human endeavors and also he SUCKS AT IT.

*he is expecting this to involve beating him with clubs or something

Wow that was actually enormously more informative than most of the interrogation, even if it also leaves Nayoki with so many more questions, none of which she can ASK because Leareth said not to interrogate the guy and also he would probably go back to being maximally unhelpful. 

She's, uh, moderately more sure of the "other world" hypothesis now. What a baffling mix of thought-references to incredibly powerful or outright impossible magic and, like, apparently not having a better way of keeping someone unconscious than beating them with clubs??? 

She's vaguely curious about "making saves" – now that she's doing something more complicated, she can notice that the man is somewhat weirdly hard to do hostile Mindhealing to. Not to the extent that it's a problem, Nayoki can boost with mage-energy, but it's eventually going to give her a headache. 

Eventually she's done with the new blocks and sufficiently sure that he really definitely won't be able to do anything even close to accessing the god-touched parts of his mind. She moves to picking out the set-command.

Blai will find that he's able to get up and move, if he wants. He's still alone in a room with a locked door. 

Well, the thing he keeps reflexively trying to do is cast Guidance and his arm doesn't move when he tries it so he doesn't notice right away that he can move in any other ways. He goes back to trying to play chess against himself in his head.

That's actually kind of impressive and interesting to watch for a bit, but probably not...productive...and Nayoki should go report properly. 

Leareth thinks they have enough information to at the very least put significant weight on the priest coming from another world. 

...Which changes almost everything, actually, even if he would have preferred to have learned it in almost any other circumstances. Another world means different magic, different rules – different gods, maybe better ones, though he would want really quite a lot of proof before believing that. 

If he had learned this a few weeks ago, it would have been grounds to, at the very least, communicate to Vanyel that he was committing to a longer period of no operations against Valdemar while he investigated. Delaying for a year now is significantly more costly than it was three years ago, but - only as long as he assumes he still needs to maintain readiness for the main plan. It wouldn't take that much confirmation to conclude that, however much he's already invested in this route, it's worth dropping it and spending fifty years checking for a better way. 

It feels too late for that now. 

Leareth...should probably be suspicious of that feeling. It seems like a coalition of gods have decided to move now, and will probably escalate further if this isn't enough to get both Leareth and Valdemar to jump the way They want, but - They do still have to work through mortals, mostly. And what exactly is Valdemar going to do if Leareth chooses to keep his forces on the other side of the Ice Wall Mountains. 

He takes a candlemark to think about it. It seems like the at most points lately, he's felt after the fact that he should have spent more rather than less time thinking before acting. 

...He does send Nayoki back for more passive mindreading, once she's finished her report. He's not expecting or counting on getting any more information via that route, but - does Nayoki happen to pick up on anything other than mental chess during that time? 

Blai tries to scratch an itch on his head and discovers he can move. He's tried nicking the back of his hand with his holy symbol in case that breaks the enchantment, and he didn't really expect it to work and also it didn't. He keeps trying to cast Guidance and it's driving him NUTS that he can't. He's also tried the other orisons he has for the day (Create Water, Detect Magic, Stabilize but there's no one to stabilize) and they don't work. He is mostly focusing on mental chess except when he's having unpleasant flashbacks to being on the second day of a dry fast with no sleep or hiding in his quarters in a fortress expecting his own men to tear him apart.

By the end of this Nayoki is starting to feel really bad about not letting him cast that one spell he seems to really really really rely on! She has several new questions and concerns about his world or maybe just this particular man's life. 

:Leareth are we sending him back to Valdemar or not: she sends as soon as Leareth Mindtouches her and is presumably done thinking. :If we are going to I think it would be better not to wait a day to consider it further.: 

:There are multiple reasons it would be better not to wait a day for no reason.: 

Valdemar might have officially declared war by then, if they haven't already; his information loop for decisionmaking in Haven is on a delay, because the Heralds have actually good security for the Council meeting today. 

:- I want to speak with him. I - am not sure if he would be willing to cooperate with anything we ask for, and I think we should send him back anyway, but it would be useful if he had some way to confirm that we were not, in fact, responsible for k'Treva, and bring that back to the Heralds.: