He'll walk! He isn't so totally convinced of the across-the-board depravity of this evil archmage that he doesn't think it might be remotely possible that he's doing the best he can from here! Sometimes people are evil and/or lawless for a long time and then they stop even if this is objectively bizarre timing!

He's one to talk about objectively bizarre timing it's not the poor man's fault that he happened to arrive in Haven and walk headfirst into an incredibly escalatory godplot that included killing everyone in k'Treva Vale. It's plausibly not even his goddess' fault! 

This is fucking terrifying but Leareth's messenger does feel a little better about only meeting Vanyel, who Leareth clearly likes even if this is pretty baffling of him, and doing it far away from Haven.

She is now stuck hanging out with a priest who has miraculous powers from his god, which wasn't part of the original plan she was getting herself emotionally ready for, but - apparently Leareth confirmed that he's not actually a priest of any of the gods they know are terrible, he's from ANOTHER WORLD which is OBJECTIVELY REALLY WEIRD and doesn't really make this less stressful but maybe his god is fine? 

Leareth wouldn't be asking her to do this if he didn't think it was worth it. 

She goes through the Gate as well and waits for it to go down behind her. She can't disarm the wards herself, but she's wearing an artifact that Leareth said would identify their party as friendly and shut down the countermeasures against intruders, and she has written instructions for Vanyel to follow to take the wards down from the outside if he wants to go in and poke around in Leareth's stuff. 

She also has instructions to find the door so she can go out and be mindreadable, which is good because it's really not immediately obvious. Awkwardly, she doesn't actually have a way to talk to the priest from another world until Vanyel gets here, since she doesn't have Mindspeech. 

And he has no way to explain Comprehend Languages to her. Alas. He's just gonna tap himself with Guidance fucking constantly while they depart the records cache. Can he Mindspeak Vanyel yet?

Blai doesn't actually have Mindspeech and they're still almost a mile away, so even once they're out of the shields and standing in the snow, Vanyel will need to be actively looking for him.

It doesn't take Vanyel that long to narrow down where he thinks the confusing and blurry Web-alarm must have originated, and then look for minds in the area. 

- that doesn't make any sense - this has to be a trap - 

...If Leareth was telling the truth, he reminds himself, then he thought Blai had deliberately blown up k'Treva to start a war. Which is obviously absurd once you've spent more than three seconds reading Blai's mind, but Leareth wouldn't have until after he already decided to kidnap him... 

Also there's another person there who is completely unshielded, unlike Blai with his weird not-shields, and is really scared but thinking very loudly that she SURRENDERS and HAS A MESSAGE FOR VANYEL. FROM LEARETH IN CASE THAT WASN'T OBVIOUS. 

Oh, Blai's actually trying to fail his save at Vanyel right now if that helps.

It doesn't help Vanyel find him in the first place but it does mean his mind is just as easily readable as the ??messenger??'s mind and he doesn't have to push harder to get past the weird not-shields. 

...Vanyel is not going to give any indication that he's noticed them, yet, because most of his mind is still screaming that this is a trap, but he will totally try to read Blai's mind as well as the messenger's. 

Sitrep: he was kidnapped, and taken alive, obviously. He was very very enchanted and Vanyel should take all the precautions appropriate to someone having been very very enchanted but Blai doesn't know enough about what, on this planet, those might be. He does not currently feel enchanted, if that's diagnostic, which, again, it might not be. He resisted interrogation insofar as he could which wasn't a very impressive amount; the messenger is planning to surrender with her communiqué and it's going to be VERY awkward if she really means that and Vanyel can't accept her surrender. His Endure Elements will wear off at the same time he cast yesterday's and he's not currently sure exactly when that is, and he doesn't have his coat, but if they have any unexpected trouble meeting up, he knows how to dig a snow trench or a quinzee and will be able to summon a fire elemental to hang out for thirty seconds and get it warm to start out, and he expects this to allow him and the messenger if she's cooperative survive till dawn; cure spells work on frostbite if you catch it before anything falls off.

The messenger has no idea how long to expect it to take for Vanyel to notice them but is deliberately trying to keep cycling through the basics of the message in her thoughts, which are that Leareth did not blow up k'Treva (seriously, how would he even do that????) and also didn't send the Changecreature, though admittedly that one he could have done, but he wouldn't have sent her falsely claiming he didn't do it if he had done it and also it wouldn't have made any sense.

The other important part of the message is that Leareth had no idea that the priest was from ANOTHER WORLD, which for one seem much less likely that he was being steered as part of the godplot that included k'Treva and the Changecreature attack, and also the fact that ANOTHER WORLD EXISTS is REALLY IMPORTANT and Leareth didn't explicitly say he was going to call off the whole invasion plan solely on the information he already has but that's definitely the direction she expects him to go, even though it will be way harder to get this plan past the gods of Velgarth a second time if he spends fifty years investigating the other world and it turns out the gods there are also terrible and it doesn't have any better solutions for a power source.

It could absolutely still be a trap; Leareth could have told the messenger whatever he wanted and then separately put one of those sneaky compulsions that doesn't do anything until a certain trigger happens and then makes her try to stab Vanyel. Like that time with the family priest. Though that only worked because Vanyel was not at all expecting it, had never thought to read his family priest's mind or examine him close-up with mage-sight for compulsions, and was unshielded and already half-dead at the time, and it might have mattered for the compulsion working that the family priest had always inexplicably hated him anyway. 

Blai could be under a compulsion without being aware of it too, obviously, and...probably still can't take Vanyel in a fight, most people can't, but Vanyel should probably be paranoid and expect the worst. He can check if he gets close enough, and undo any compulsions he does find, but "close enough" is closer than within thirty or forty feet and some of Blai's spells have that range. 

Also he can't directly check for Mindhealing and definitely can't undo it. 

It...would in some sense be smart to leave them there, go back to Haven, and get backup. 

Vanyel doesn't really want to do that. 

- why not - 

Because right now, it feels like he's the only person - with the exception of maybe Jisa - who is still putting any probability at all on Leareth telling the truth. He doesn't know how the Senior Circle would react to this, but he just more or less stormed out of the most intensely frustrating meeting of his entire life.

Leareth could be trying to de-escalate. Which would be a lot more believable if he hadn't kidnapped Blai in the first place, of course, but - it's not impossible. Maybe, despite being two thousand years old, Leareth is also capable of panicking and making a bad call. 

It feels like he's probably making a mistake. Acting unilaterally without telling any of the other Heralds because they would try to stop him has, he thinks, generally been a mistake. 

But going to war also feels like a mistake. Even with all their allies, he's not sure Valdemar can win it. 

...He should probably briefly explain to Stef what's going on before he tells him to stay put and gets himself closer. 

Stef is not delighted about this plan but he did agree to listen to Vanyel when they decided he would come north as well. He will stay put, behind a weather-barrier Vanyel leaves up for him. Grumpily. 

Can he and Yfandes get to within a hundred yards or so of the spot where he can sense Blai's mind without being noticed? 

The messenger definitely doesn't notice! Companions can move very quietly and there are lots of ambient noises in a snowy forest anyway. She's found herself a fallen tree to sit on and is blowing on her hands. 

Blai's getting underway on a quinzee since they haven't heard anything and the messenger isn't moving any more. He still has Endure Elements for some unknown period of time so he can comfortably haul snow around barehanded, though he has his sleeves rolled up so they won't get wet.

She's not worried about freezing, they can always go back inside the records cache if it gets to nightfall and no one's made contact. 

It turns out to be impossible to maintain the same level of terrified for twenty minutes of nothing happening. She ends up watching him work curiously, in between remembering to LOUDLY THINK ABOUT HER MESSAGE. 

Vanyel gets close enough that he can target them precisely.

(He could have cast at a distance from a mile off, they're still in the Web, but he would feel bad about leaving them incapacitated in the snow while he made his way over, and also his backup plan if Blai resists is to try to knock him out with Mindspeech, and he's not sure he can do that from a distance. ...He's not 100% sure he can do it at all, actually, Blai is weirdly tough, but there's plenty of node-energy nearby to boost his Gift with.) 

:Sorry: he sends a fraction of a second in advance, so that Blai will know it's him and not Leareth deciding to re-kidnap him or some unrelated bandits or something.

And then he throws a paralysis-spell at him. A really thorough one, so he won't be able to move his hands, which Vanyel thinks he needs for most of his magic. Blai does have magic to resist the paralysis-spell catching him in the first place, Vanyel is pretty sure, so it's going to be informative whether he does fight it. 

A "sorry" does not successfully warn him to try to fail his save - people resist spells by default if they don't know they're happening and often still don't know they happened afterwards - and he even instinctively blows his current Guidance on it, but it does get him to chill out about it pretty quick once it lands anyway, and he doesn't try his Liberating Command either even though that one doesn't have required gestures.

The messenger is already pretty keyed up and nearly jumps out of her skin when the priest unexpectedly falls over. Aaaaaaahhhwhaaat okay it's okay it's probably Vanyel and it doesn't even mean he's here to attack them, he might just be being cautious like Leareth said he would be, aaaaaaaaaah–

(She continues to be unarmed and un-Gifted and under orders to cooperate with whatever Vanyel or any of the other Heralds want to do to her. She holds very still.) 

Vanyel nearly whacks Blai as hard as he can with Mindspeech anyway when he senses his instinctive resistance, but manages to catch himself in time. Blai was startled, that's all, he's not fighting it now and if he does decide to - or is under a compulsion that forces him to - then he needs to use the spell that frees him first before he can use offensive magic, which should give Vanyel enough time to knock him out, and even if he gets something off, Vanyel is in fact really well shielded right now. 

...He apologetically paralysis-spells the messenger too, even though she almost certainly can't do anything to him. 

She flops in the snow and tries not to panic about this. This isn't even on the more hostile end of ways Vanyel could have reacted, she's still conscious and everything. 

:I need to get close enough to check if Leareth left any sneaky compulsions on you that would force you to attack me when you see me or something: Vanyel tells Blai. :You wouldn't necessarily know it was there. ...I can fix it, if he did, I can't fix everything he could've done but I can handle that. I'm not going to hurt you.: 

Yfandes should stay behind, he can go the rest of the way on foot and if something does go wrong then Yfandes can warn Stef and hopefully get him safely out of here. Vanyel starts trekking toward them.