Well, it's going to be mildly irritating if he has to kick down that door. It would probably scare his Chosen and doors are expensive to fix. 

:I am fairly sure I outrank you.: 

Aaaaaaaaaaahhh!!!??

:I would suggest I could clear this with the Groveborn but I, in fact, just walked out of the Grove, so.: He paws at the ground a little. :Will it help if I say please?: 

.......Yeah okay he did not signing up for facing down angry...Groveborn???...and denying them access to prisoners even if those prisoners are apparently really important for some reason. 

He backs away. 

:I do still need you to unlock the door.: He lifts a hoof and examines it. :I think I would have difficulty.: 

"I really think I should clear this with my senior officer first!" 

....Aaaand he needs to decide whether he's kicking down the door or not.

He would generally prefer not, but he knows how long it can take for the chain of command to respond to confusing new inputs. The Call is less - yelly - now that he's the one guarding the door, and doesn't that have some interesting implications, but it still feels urgent. 

(What in the world is happening here?) 

He could clear it with the actual Groveborn, get orders dropped in from above in a hurry, but he doesn't seem to have landed here knowing who the actual Groveborn is. And this has got to be incredibly irregular, that might not be quick either. 

Sometimes it really does get things done fastest to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Or, you know, not bother, since he's a Groveborn now and really should outrank quite a lot of people, at least on matters of his specific Chosen. 

The door is shielded against magic but not against a Groveborn Companion kicking it as hard as they can. It splinters. He can't actually wedge himself through the door, but he sticks his head in to get his first look at his new Chosen. ...Who's probably pretty alarmed, he should apologize. 

:I'm sorry about that. The young man guarding you very reasonably wanted to clear it with his superior officer and I judged the situation too urgent to wait. I'll make sure to clear everything up after.: 

His Chosen appears to have been sitting alone in the dark, kneeling in prayer. He leaps to his feet. :Is there an emergency - who are you -:

:My name is Seldan and I'm here to Choose you.: 

:- I'm taken!:

Wow, is the Grove sending him to poach someone else's Herald? Rude! 

...He checks. 

:No, you aren't. Definitely no Companion-bond. If there's some other complication I'm afraid you'll have to fill me in, I just woke up in the Grove and inferred there's a war going on from all the troops everywhere.: He gives a clearly-telegraphed glance around the bare Work Room, at the mattress on the floor. :Clearly this situation is irregular in several ways.: 

:I mean, I'm a cleric, I'm a Select of Iomedae - I'm from another planet -:

:Is that supposed to be a disqualification? That sounds very intriguing! I've never met anyone from another planet before! And it does explain why you're important, though not why they're holding you prisoner.:

Squint. It turns out Companions - or at least mysterious extra Groveborn - have additional senses, and it's taken him to long to figure out what he's seeing. 

:Wait, did they put Mindhealing blocks on you?: His mindvoice is so offended. 

:To stop me from casting spells in the event that I'm compromised.:

Pause.

:I think I must be Called to you to fix something , but I'm fairly sure it's not that.: 

And - maybe a man from another world doesn't know - he's going to bounce over the feeling of the Call. The soaring sense that this is his person, that the entire core of him is wrapped around that, the bone-deep certainty that he's here for something and it's this and it's - perfect, glorious, the whole world falling into alignment - 

(On an emotional level. On an intellectual level, Seldan has questions.) 

- he hasn't looked into his Chosen's mind yet, it seemed like one really ought to at least introduce oneself first, and then his Chosen had concerns and - this moment should be right, not forced over objections - but the objections don't change anything, from Seldan's perspective. If anything it's actually very appropriate that Seldan's Chosen would be someone who feels a need to debate the whole thing with him first. 

:Are you... here to solve the problem where plausibly the Star-Eyed Goddess has been manipulating the Web through the Heartstone attached to it to cause a war between Valdemar and the archmage in the north? That seems like the pressing one at the moment but I don't know how having feelings at me could possibly affect it.:

So! Many! Questions! 

:I imagine the idea is to send a costly signal that you are not, in fact, compromised, because a serious downside of the Companion system is the tendency Heralds have to only trust people who also have Companions. ...All right, that comes out weirder now that I am one, but it's still true.:

Pause. Hard look at Blai.

:That may be a flaw in the system but the part where I love you isn't, actually, it makes people stronger to have at least one person who's unconditionally there for them. I don't think being from another world makes that any less true of you.: 

What does that have to do with ANYTHING. Why does this horse claim to love him. What is going ON. :Whose idea, exactly, is it.:

:Oh, there've been thousands of words of debate written on who or what sends the Companions' calls: he wrote quite a lot of them, :I'm not sure it's ever been settled. One of the gods, all of the gods, an emergent intelligence in the Web, the force of Foresight itself. Is the answer to that relevant to whether you want to be Chosen?: 

He won't, in fact, Choose this man if he isn't on board with it, and sends that wordlessly. It won't make the man any less Seldan's Chosen, that part isn't under his control, but he doesn't have to take the final leap and make himself this man's Companion. He could just be around and - offer ethics advice? Glare at people who try to block his magic with Mindhealing? Attend negotiations with - since when is there an archmage in the north, anyway? 

...He really really wants to actually Choose him, though. 

:Of course it is! A lot of gods are Evil! The ones on this planet do not disclose their allegiances or their motives and frequently operate as an anonymous mass! I just mentioned that one of the local ones may be manipulating Valdemar into a war! If this is one of those's idea of a charming intervention it is not remotely wise to allow it to go through!:

:Wow. That would be a bizarre choice. I–: Probably he's not really supposed to just say this outright but the man is from another world. :I hate war. When I was alive, in my old age I wrote several books about how wars are a terrible idea and you should avoid them if you can do literally anything else. ...I was very good at it. Fighting a war, I mean. Which means I have an even more exhaustive list of all the ways in which wars are a terrible idea. I don't know Whose intervention this is, but the fact that whatever it was sent me seems like some evidence of what it's for.: 

:When you were alive?! Are you an undead on top of everything else??:

:I'm...a...Companion? That's how Companions usually work? Possibly this still isn't common knowledge among the Heralds but it was always bloody obvious to me, I think it took a month before I confronted my Companion about it. She used to be a weather-mage and an expert on birds and all her analogies were from one or the other, and there was only one Herald-Mage in the records who'd written a treatise on birds. I imagine the system finds it efficient to reuse us, since we already know the ropes.: 

Pause. 

:...I'm getting the sense neither of us has nearly enough context to make good decisions here, though. May I offer you a ride to go find the Groveborn so I can find out what's going on, and you fill me in on your side of things on the way?: 

:I feel it is actually pretty important that you be definitely and explicitly alive before I go anywhere with you, creatures that are not definitely alive are a serious problem on my planet and I am far too confused to be confident that I can overlook this as a minor terminological difference.:

:Your planet sounds deeply concerning.: 

He steps outside - he can guard the door better and maybe alarm his Chosen less by sounding reminiscent of "undead", which indeed sound pretty horrifying - and loosens his shields for the first time since he stepped out of the Grove. 

There are a lot of Companions in Haven! When he last remembers, there were barely over fifty Heralds in the whole kingdom. He has a feeling there might be more Kingdom now, too. 

The Groveborn is Rolan, apparently. Seldan did not get an incredibly positive impression of Rolan from the histories immediately preceding his own era; in his time the Groveborn was Allora. 

:Rolan? Terribly sorry to disturb you, but I need someone to come confirm for my Chosen that I'm alive.: