:I'm not sure he needs my help beyond knowing I exist? And he's doing all the work. It's probably worth asking an Abadaran at some point just in case, but I wouldn't count on it, there's not really much one hopes to incentivize in "be transported to another planet involuntarily and happen to find an archmage there".:

:I'm not myself an archmage and have no idea what his research strategy is, maybe all he needs is to know you exist, but it really seems like it ought to save him a lot of effort and false starts if you help answer questions.:

Mental equivalent of a shrug. :I'm sure we can think of something. If it were elsewhere in Velgarth, I would sell Mindspeech relaying, my range seems to be about three hundred miles in any direction – only the strongest human Mindspeakers can match it, and most places have a lot fewer strong Mindspeakers than Valdemar. I'm not sure if your world has communication at a distance solved already, though.: 

:...well, there's a spell for it, but only at fourth circle and very limited bandwidth with a long casting time, you could probably fetch a lot that way actually. I'm not sure if that crosses the Inner Sea or not... it would probably be enough to cover the entire Worldwound, but I just left the Worldwound...

- are you quite certain you don't need to know more things about me than you currently do -:

:I'm quite certain. I don't mind if you want to wait longer or tell me more things, but I've never heard of a Companion having a Call that went away because of something they learned about the person they were Called to, that isn't how it works.: 

:I mean, the circumstances are fairly - exceptional -:

:There have been Heralds who grew up as thieves in street gangs. At least one Herald who murdered their parents before they were Chosen.:

How does he remember THAT and not what YEAR it was when he was last as Herald. Seriously. Did he quote it in treatise– ...how does he remember some of the treatises he wrote and nothing, absolutely nothing at all, about who his own parents were. 

:I don't know if you think it's more exceptional than that and I am still fairly sure it wouldn't change anything. If you used to regularly eat babies or something, well, I'm not going to let you do it again, but it doesn't change anything for me.:

:I don't mind if you tell me anyway, if it - helps for you.: 

:I'm not sure if I'd say it helps, it just seems - an omission - I did not specifically eat babies and now I work for Iomedae.:

:Well, that addresses that, then, so far I have nothing but approval for Iomedae. I think the general advice is that conversations with your Companion about things in your past you have regrets about are much easier once the bond is established. I'm not going to regret picking you because of anything you did before I was around, that's really not how Companions work.:

(He's still trying to avoid saying 'Choose' or 'Chosen' because this bothers Blai, and is definitely looking forward to understanding why.) 

:Okay.:

He's not really sure how to conceptualize this as anything other than failing his Will save, but he knows how to fail a Will save -

Seldan looks at him, and - doesn't think "I Choose you" because for some reason that word is upsetting, but the mental motion doesn't need words - 

- it's like falling into blue, and for a moment a glimpse of interwoven threads that might be the structure of Foresight itself as perceived directly by Seldan...

Seldan loves him, though right now it's mostly still in an abstract way that Seldan himself is faintly puzzled by and poking at curiously, exploring what the Companion-bond is like from this end — what a fascinating implementation, and what an odd world they live in, where the cheapest friendly intervention a god could provide was to reincarnate a dead man as a magic Mindspeaking horse and glue his soul to someone important, what does that imply about the gods and how They work... 

Seldan has absolutely no doubt that Blai is important. He may not know what Blai has been thinking, or the intricate details of what motivates him (though he's eager to know, for Blai to make sense to him, for the intriguing glimpses he's caught to fit together) but he wasn't shy about getting the run-down from some of the other Companions about what Blai has been doing since he arrived in Velgarth a few days ago.

Which is behaving exactly like a Herald. He landed in a strange world and immediately fought a monster and saved a little girl's life. He was kidnapped by an archmage everyone had been telling him was evil, and still tried everything he could to head off a war. It almost doesn't matter what he was thinking - it matters to Seldan, of course, because Seldan loves to know the complex machinery behind anyone's decisions and the bond has taken that and run with it - but, ultimately, the thing it most makes sense to judge someone on is their actions. 

(Flickers of a remembered debate over whether it changes the moral valence of someone's heroic act if they did it for selfish reasons, though he hasn't the faintest idea who he once debated that with and one assumes they died centuries ago.) 

Blai was heroic but, more to the point, he was careful, and Seldan respects that a lot more. There's an incredibly difficult balancing act, when acting under uncertainty, of living in the various possible worlds at once, rather than collapsing confusion into one interpretation, and his sense from Enara that Blai did this rather better than most of the Heralds in Haven. There's an even more difficult balancing act of - he thinks of it as living in all the possible worlds, and considering not just how your decisions affect the concrete physical details in front of you, but how the rules behind your decisions affect what the possible worlds are, and he sees flickers of that in Blai, too. 

Maybe most importantly, Blai is not an overawed teenager waiting for their Companion to mold them into a virtuous adult. That's not a bad way for someone to be and it makes sense that it's how most Heralds start out, but - Seldan is not sure he would be good at it. Which is presumably related to why he's been pointed here instead. Blai was already doing all of that, without anyone guiding him (except maybe the concept of his goddess but it's not like she was there giving orders). Seldan wants to know everything about Blai's life and Blai's world and Blai's goddess, and then - well, they're kind of still in the middle of a crisis here, aren't they, and he wants to help. 

It would not be quite accurate to say that Blai Artigas has never loved anyone before in his entire life.  He was a baby once.  His mother and his sisters kept him alive, and the actions you have to take to achieve that are almost all the exact same ones you need to take to make the baby also love you.  It's not that you can't do one without the other but it's kind of niche and they weren't aiming at it.

When Blai was six he went to school and it became abundantly clear in that environment that, at this advanced age, it was not the done thing to cry about missing your mommy or to hug your youngest sister (the one who still tolerates you despite your inveterate inability to let the slightest misbehavior go unreported).  Chelish people aren't born Chelish.  They have to be taught.  Blai learned.  So, since then, nada.

And he doesn't have very clear memories of being six, now that he is instead thirty-eight.

Like most things that go on in Blai's head, "love" immediately attempts to render into "anxiety".  He doesn't have the Breath of Life scroll yet.  Even if he did, clearly Someone was holding on to Seldan's soul before and they might just not give it back!  Also he didn't wind up confessing in advance about having been an Asmodean and that's not going to let him get out of mentioning it at all, it's just going to make it even more agonizing to sit with the judgment, he's already told two people on this planet and he could have just told a third, but he didn't, and now Seldan can't even back out, can he!  And furthermore what if it turns out being off of this planet is bad for Companions.  It's not like anyone checked first.  Conversely what if Leareth can't get anywhere with transit to Golarion and gives up on it and goes back to what he was doing, and Blai can never get the scroll, and he and Seldan wind up dodging hostile gods indefinitely, which won't last very long because of how the operative word is "god".  Or what if they do go to Golarion and then it turns out that actually as an obscure matter of Iomedaean catechism one is not allowed to have a magic horse from a third party.  What if it's strictly a one source horse situation and he's not allowed to have Seldan and also be a member of the Church in good standing.  What if Iomedae Herself doesn't like it!  What if he wakes up in the morning with no spells, and he's no good to anyone for anything ever again, and Seldan just has to drag him around being useless forever!  This would be a very weird thing for Iomedae to have a problem with because Seldan is very good, but it would also be weird if She hated chess and that hasn't stopped Blai from worrying about it thirty times a day for the last few months!  What if Seldan just gets fed up with all the fucking worrying??

Really, the only thing rescuing this situation from being anything other than just an oddly appealing disaster is this, that most gladdening guidestar of a fact: at least, at least Blai's feelings don't matter at all.

Seldan is entirely unperturbed by any of this. Which is a slight relief, it could have been the case that the thing where the bond-mechanism makes him go all mother-hen about Blai being cold would also make him experience Blai's emotions as contagious, which would be deeply out of character for him but, you know, weird soulbond thing.

Fortunately it doesn't do that! He is fond and maybe faintly amused.

After a moment, he concentrates and then sends Blai a little slapstick-theatre-troup-style mental image of the two of them dodging lightning bolts and trees on fire while - what does Leareth look like? - he grabs that memory from Blai's mind and adds a little Leareth figure off to the side, sighing dramatically at a pile of crumpled discarded research notes before setting them on fire in disgust. 

Sure yes it's silly if you imagine it like it's felt puppets accompanied by a bouzouki player but it would not actually be okay!

There are indeed always a huge number of things that might happen and wouldn't be okay (not to mention things happening that aren't okay), all the time, everywhere. Plenty of people go to absurd lengths to not think about the catastrophes that could befall them. Some people worry a lot. Seldan himself was accused by several instructors of being constitutionally incapable of ever taking anything seriously (...huh, he remembers that but not his Companion's name when he was a Herald...) Being constitutionally incapable of ever taking anything seriously didn't get in the way of making serious decisions, and going off Blai's decision record, neither does worrying.

 Thus, one can prove that worrying is (har har har) nothing to worry about

In Seldan's defense, the world is, in fact, incredibly silly. See the part where Seldasen is currently a Mindspeaking horse

:If you'd rather not have to tell me the thing, I can just look.: Companions: convenient. So far he's overall delighted with this being-a-Companion thing, even if he's gradually adding more complaints and questions to his mental list in case he ever somehow gets a chance to hand it to the god Vanyel went and yelled at. 

"Vicar, I'm not sure another weekend in the basement will actually help," says Blai, "I think I need more time with the commentaries, I - I don't feel ready -" It's an excuse. It's not that it's untrue, but if there were something untrue he could say, to not go down in the basement again - last time was their fifth, and then Imma got chosen, and now he has no allies down there at all. Last time he was down there Claudia was so disoriented she tried to drink a candle. She burned her mouth and had wax all over her lips and she was still so exhausted that she almost tried to do it again before her hands shook too badly and she dropped it and gave up. Blai hasn't attempted to drink a candle, so far, but by the third time he was acquainted enough with dehydration that he tried to accept Marti's offer to let somebody drink his piss and then Marti didn't even let him.

Vicar Rey rolls her eyes. "You may be glad to learn that your feelings do not matter at all," she says, and she pushes him down the stairs.

He falls about halfway before he catches himself, ribs throbbing, knee smarting, a spot on his upper arm promising to turn into a violent bruise, and - it doesn't matter?

Really?

It doesn't matter and he's allowed to be glad of it?

Now that she's said that it's almost obvious in retrospect. Asmodeus is in charge, and if you'd asked Blai, on one of the theology quizzes or something, "does Asmodeus care about Blai Artigas's feelings, literally at all", the answer would have come with no searching, but -

He sits in the basement, with the remainder of his dwindling cohort. He'll either get chosen, or he won't. If he gets chosen then in just, what will it be now, sixteen hours, he'll be able to create water, and if he doesn't then he'll stay in here till Moonday (he can't remember any of the basement Moondays, it's so hard to keep track of time, there's just the march of heartbeat after sluggish gluey heartbeat once you've been in there long enough, but, notionally, Moonday) and he will have all kinds of stupid freewilled pathetic human feelings about this and none of that matters. He can just write it entirely out of the calculus. It'll still happen because he's an idiot insect only speculatively usable for anything other than paving material but he could just concentrate on everything else. Like his prayers. He is commanded to pray. There's nothing else to do in the basement besides pray and politick, and with Imma gone he is disadvantaged at politicking. The thing to do is pray. The point of him being here at all is to carve him into a shape Asmodeus can take up as a tool.

O King of Hell, Prince of Devils, I wait to be Yours; I will serve, I will serve, I will serve -

It must go on for about sixteen hours. The dehydration headache has him in earnest by then. His eyes are swimming with exhaustion. He hasn't budged from his agonizing kneeling position. Asmodeus has not called him to a task that requires his joints unstiff, or his mind clear, or his throat capable of speech, and every other reason to move doesn't matter.

Dawn strikes him and he goes on praying for another full hour, the whole complement of spells he's meant to ask for the first time, rather than break early and interrupt his preparations with a drink of water. That's for after he has served his purposes. The full hour. Then the water. Then making his way up the stairs, to be let out into the world, and take shape more fully as his lord's possession, a fullfledged Chosen of Asmodeus.

That sure is impressively horrible. Creatively horrible. Like someone put a lot of effort into coming up with the most horrible thought experiment they could. And was better at it than Seldan, because he would not have come up with that! 

Those are his first thoughts, but he isn't exactly feeling horror. It doesn't seem like it would help, and Seldan may not have been capable of inventing that but he was, in his time, an acknowledged champion of horrible thought experiments. He can look through the memory with detachment. Mostly. Except for a brief moment of idly picturing kicking in Vicar Rey's head, the thought tagged with an acknowledgement that just because someone did awful things does not make it fine to do whatever you want to them and he wouldn't actually go enact a revenge fantasy about it, but also he absolutely won the argument once about whether having revenge fantasies you're never going to act on is fine actually.

It's quite clearly demarcated in his thoughts that the horror isn't toward Blai. He wants to understand Blai, and this is a step toward that. There's some admirable tenacity and self-control to show there.

He can guess it gets worse than this, in terms of things Blai has actually done that were horrifying (which "get kicked down the stairs and locked in a basement to coerce him into praying to an evil god" isn't); all he's sure of is that it didn't involve eating babies. But, well, if this was just a horrifying thought experiment, rather than Blai's real actual life, it would be something about exploring the question of when a person's actions in extreme circumstances start to come apart from their character, in the sense of what you could predict about their actions in normal circumstances, and how this relates to moral culpability. One can take a position at either end on that question, and Seldan has always thought of himself as somewhere in the middle. It's information about what sort of person Blai is, and he's glad to have that information; he wants to understand Blai. It's already pretty clear that it's not predictive of Blai's character, in the sense of how he behaves when offered magic by a god who isn't evil (who sounds pretty excellent, really) and then dropped in a new world and given an opening to save a kid and prevent a war. 

He is also no longer confused about why Blai doesn't really like being referred to as Seldan's Chosen! That makes sense! 

Oh. Also. If anyone else ever again tries to do that to Blai, he will kick in their head. He feels very strongly about that. NO ONE is allowed to try to mess with Blai anymore. 

(Thoughts he's not having where Blai can see them: any expression of sympathy on how unpleasant and awful that sounds, he doesn't think that will help. Getting competitive on horrible-thought-experiment-generation and trying to see if he can think of an even worse version. Ranking all the Heralds he's met so far by how likely it is they could end up being chosen by Asmodeus if plopped into the horrible thought experiment.) 

trying to drink a candle is a little funny though

like, in an awful tragic way, but still

Wait why are we fantasizing about kicking Vicar Rey in the head. All things considered Blai remembers her pretty fondly. The other vicar not so much but Rey was mostly possible to work with and - helpful, if, as Blai did at the time, you consider her goals to be the same ones you mean to work toward. He has no reason to expect to ever see no-longer-a-vicar Jana Rey ever again but if she's somewhere in Reclaimed Cheliax instead of in Hell he'd probably be inclined to just say hello and not make a huge fuss about the time she broke every joint in his body, it's not like he didn't know that would happen if he fell asleep in class.

Fiiiiiiiiine it's a good thing when people outperform their environment even if it's only slightly and the bar is incredibly low and Seldan couldn't pick it out in this one specific memory. "Possible to work with" is better than not that. Seldan is probably still going to hate her, the Companion-bond has VERY STRONG FEELINGS on how unacceptable it is to break every joint in Blai's body for falling asleep in class, but the Companion-bond is not objectively reasonable about all things and he can respect Blai's relatively positive memories of her, and if they somehow do ever run into the woman he can be polite. 

Well, she might easily be impolite first, since Blai is now going around with the symbol of Iomedae hanging from his neck, but, like, Blai wouldn't choose to start shit with Jana Rey, or with Imma, or with his high school teacher who recommended him for seminary, or... most people really. Actually if you phrase it that way he wouldn't even choose to start shit with Vicar Vilar who took advantage of the broken joints situation to do some rape even though Blai really did not like that at all.

Not choosing to start shit with people is often wise! Even if they were gratuitously unpleasant to you when they had the opportunity! It doesn't sound like picking a fight with Vicar Vilar now would accomplish anything, even if you include "being satisfying for Blai personally" in "anything" (which Seldan thinks is generally not a good policy to follow). And Seldan is still missing swaths of context here (though he'll pick it up ambiently as things come up in Blai's thoughts, they don't have to do the entire explanation at once now) but he has a sense this is not one of those situations where Vicar Vilar being aware that Blai would remember his bad behavior while in a position of power and retaliate if he ever had the chance with him if he had the opportunity would have had...any...meaningful deterrent effect.  

(Seldan is not nearly as calm about this as he's trying to convey, but he has observed some things about Blai and this time he's keeping his colorful and creative visualization of exactly how he could retaliate for that behind his shields where Blai doesn't have to interact with it.) 

If Blai had been some sort of clerical prodigy and looked likely to be Aspexia Rugatonn's right hand man inside ten years (or something) then Vicar Vilar, or possibly, like, a smarter version of Vicar Vilar, might well have backed off on that basis. It was not remotely unheard of within Asmodean church politics to get a promotion and then spend one's entire ecclesiastical capital on fucking over everyone who ever slighted you. But Blai was not any sort of clerical prodigy - those get picked before they go into the basement even once, for one thing - and did not really radiate spite. He learned how to be scary, ish, at the Wound, but he was very much below average at it for an Asmodean priest.

Yeah. Seldan is pretty sure he prefers Blai the way he is, as someone who has remarkably little spite given that he grew up in the real-life version of a horrifying philosophical thought experiment on what kind of environment maximizes the number of people who will do bad things regardless of their underlying character. Seldan has a suspicion that Blai outperformed his environment by rather more than Vicar Rey. 

(Which can't have made it easier for him at the time, but - he survived it, and "oh gods you are so traumatized" is also not a helpful thought to have where Blai can see it.) 

Being scary is a useful skill in many circumstances even in Valdemar, but probably "below average at it for an Asmodean priest" is already overkill for the right amount of scary literally anywhere else. 

Well he was compensating for the fact that his preferred disciplinary method was making people play chess with him and that's inherently unscary.

....Okay this Seldan has got to see. He'll go looking in Blai's memories again for exactly how one plays chess with people in a terrifying punishment-y way. 

(He's also steering them toward the Companions' stables; Blai has the Endure Elements spell and isn't bothered by the cold, but it's still dark and snowy out and if it's like he remembers, the stables are actually very cozy.) 

Mostly you be much better and faster at chess than them, insult them the whole time, theatrically disintegrate the Prestidigitation'd pieces you capture (he hasn't had a physical chess set since Imma threw his congratulations-on-getting-into-seminary present into the fireplace), and sometimes tie other incentives to the game's hourglass or material points or exact board state. One time he was really pissed off at a junior cleric who'd been interfering with the martial officers and made him play over and over until he won, with Blai taking a slightly larger handicap each time until the junior cleric finally managed to beat six pawns, a knight, and a bishop, because Blai was making a point about experience counting for more than circles.