Huh. Seldan can believe that Blai learned to play a strategy board-game in a threatening way, but it's pretty impressive that despite growing up in the horrifying thought experiment he managed to land on a style of punishment that also presents actual learning experiences and would raise only a few eyebrows in Valdemar.

...Does Blai also enjoy non-punishment chess and if so does he want to teach Seldan the rules? Seldan probably cannot manipulate pieces but being a Companion seems to have enormously improved his visualization ability and they could do it via Mindspeech. He's always liked strategy board-games and this sounds like it could be a particularly good one. 

Blai has much less experience with purely recreational chess but he likes it! Grec, his second in command at the fortress, learned to play, after Blai had to stop doing punishment chess because it was not in the Lastwall disciplinary handbook, and that was nice. Blai loses track of pieces if he tries to play in his head and also his very favorite variant requires four people but Seldan being able to play mental correspondence chess is very neat. Vanyel should have mentioned this upside of Companions.

He came up with it because as an Asmodean theological matter it is meant to be the case that the exercise of power is desirable and appealing to those who wield it and he just doesn't actually like torturing people.

Well, in normal places most people don't like torturing people, but in the horrifying thought experiment country, disprefering torturing people enough that you come up with punishment chess instead is quite admirable, really.

(Seldan is radiating warmth and smugness, but only a little bit. He's going to have to gradually push Blai's tolerance for other people experiencing emotions in his vicinity.) 

They're at the stable now and can maybe go inside where it's less dark and snowy? It's not uncommon for Heralds to just sleep out here, too, and Blai does technically have a guest room that Seldan would be happy to deliver him to later but is also welcome to stay here.

Though that's later. Right now Seldan wants to learn CHESS and confirm that his visual memory is in fact up for maintaining a board configuration, which he's pretty sure it should be; Companions have really good memories, it's some compensation for not having hands to write with. 

If Seldan can hold a board in his head the question is whether Blai can then consult that board, and for bonus points whether he can do it without leaking all his strategic plans across the telepathic bond. He'll prestidigitate up a board so there's an example Seldan can use to visualize going forward.

If it's normal to sleep in the stables on one's Companion then Blai does not have a compelling reason to do some other thing instead. He can't sleep in his armor and his Endure Elements won't be wearing off in the middle of the night.

Seldan can pretty easily memorize the example and then project a mental image of a board to Blai! He does have to back off from reading Blai's surface thoughts to avoid getting all his strategic plans, and only maintain the formal Mindspeech link so Blai can tell him how he wants his pieces moved and he can update the board-visualization; it takes a few fits and starts to get this right and then it's straightforward. (Seldan can still tell how Blai is feeling through the bond, which might or might not leak some information about his plans in the game.)

Chess is delightful! Partly because Blai likes it, but Seldan suspects he would find it delightful anyway. 

To an insightful and mindreading person who is paying attention it is pretty obvious that much of why Blai likes chess so much is that it sponges up stray anxiety very handily. A fast complicated game gives him an unlimited number of things to worry about - he can always try projecting one more move ahead any time he has too many free mental spots. But all of those things he then worries about are "chess" as opposed to "devastating social censure" or "disembowelment" or "succubi" or "doing things against his religion" or "damnation".