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".

(Seldan is so pleased with himself. Blai is excellent. He got the beeeeeest Herald. Everyone thinks that about their Herald, of course, the Companion-bond is probably designed to ensure it and also there's clearly some actual selection for the normal kind of personality-compatibility. It's still true though. 

...He's keeping those thoughts to himself and not letting much of the associated feelings across the bond, since Blai is - well, somewhat emotionally stunted in some ways after surviving growing up in in the horrifying thought experiment country. He'll brainstorm ways to gently work on that later; for the moment, it genuinely doesn't bother him especially. Maybe other Companions would find the incessant worrying distressing or frustrating, but Seldan is inclined to see that partly as a skill they're lacking and partly as an incorrect framing on Blai as a person. Blai is really impressively well-adjusted given, well, all of the everything, and it feels like all the elements of him, incessant worrying included, are relevant inputs into why he outperformed his environment even when it was horrible. In short, this changes nothing about whether Blai is great.) 

Chess is also great! The fact that Blai enjoys it (and that it's an anxiety-reducing coping mechanism for him) is just a bonus, really. It's going to take Seldan a few days to learn it well enough that he can fully keep up with Blai, but he's always liked strategy games and been good at them. 

In his ideal world, they would spend the next several candlemarks playing chess and then sleep snuggled up in the stall, letting the physical contact finish solidifying the bond, and worry about the bigger picture in the morning like sensible people. 

This is not Seldan - or anyone's - ideal world in as many as several ways. 

One of them is that after almost two candlemarks of chasing down every possible lead on Brightstar's current location, Vanyel is forced to admit that, one, Brightstar does not seem to be in Haven anymore, and, two, nobody actually seems to know when he left or where he was headed. 

Vanyel would like nothing more than for all of that to GO AWAY but he has a bad feeling. 

He grits his teeth and since Yfandes is NOT HERE starts tracking down and Mindspeaking relevant people or their Companions one at a time, the hard way. 

They're about a candlemark into the process of Seldan learning chess when he interrupts. 

:Herald Vanyel just contacted me. There's a problem and apparently it shouldn't wait until morning. Apparently they've managed to misplace the young Tayledras man who know how to destroy the archmage's immortality. And everything else is chaotic enough that he could easily have quite a lot of accomplices, wherever he is.: 

:I... don't have a spell suitable for that.  I don't think a lantern archon or an arbiter inevitable would have any special power to find him.  But if you need to go join a search pattern I can go see what became of my possessions since I was kidnapped?:

:Vanyel thinks it's unlikely he's in Haven at all, searching nearby isn't a good use of anyone's time. He mainly wanted your advice on - orienting to this in general, what questions we should ask and what to be paranoid about. And he's considering whether we can get anything useful out of your prophecy spell – obviously we missed the opening to cast it on Brightstar, but it sounds like it was very useful every other time.: 

Pause to glance back at some of Blai's memories. :...Though we should get your possessions back either way. I'll work on that.: 

:I have a prophecy and an Owl's both available if they'll help.:

Seldan mulls on this. :It's probably still the case that you don't have the context to reason usefully about this, and I certainly don't.:

After a pause,

:Vanyel thinks Savil ought to get the wisdom spell. She's been guarding the Heartstone, but Vanyel considers this evidence that the Star-Eyed Goddess already abandoned the explode-things plan as unworkable and is trying something else. She'll head over here.: 

Another short pause. :...And bring your armor and weapon, picking it up is on her way.: 

:Is that likely to be necessary?:

:I have no specific reason to think so, but there's also no good reason for them to be gathering dust in Herald Katha's office, which is apparently where they ended up for some deeply unclear reason.: 

:That doesn't sound like a good place for them, no.: He disappears the Prestidigitated chess pieces and gets up and brushes straw off himself.

Seldan unfolds himself from the straw as well. 

It's going to be a little bit of a wait, though. :Tell me about the archmage?: He got a basic rundown of some of the history from Savil's Kellan - since Yfandes won't be available until they solve transport to Golarion - and he could go digging in Blai's memories, but sometimes it's nice to, instead, have a conversation. 

:The one on this planet? His name is Leareth. I checked him for Law and he's Lawful. He kidnapped me and I was not very good at making that inconvenient for him but he let me go anyway. He has a Mindhealer minion and is based up north, but I've never seen a map of the continent we're on so I couldn't point it out.:

:...What does it mean for someone to be Lawful? I mean, other than 'it's a way they can show up to a spell you have'.: Though having a kind of Sight for that must have fascinating ramifications on a society. 

For this, Seldan can and will also reach deeper in Blai's thoughts for the concepts associated there. 

For seminary they just used obedience as a proxy. The kids who showed up on time, did all their homework, reported on their classmates, weren't under suspicion for anything like smuggling or primary worship or vandalism or heresy. But that's not what Law is. It hardly has to be, Asmodeus can take a Neutral Evil cleric. A lot of kids are true neutral and it's not hard to just make them worse. What Law is, is -

- showing up at a fort full of your worst enemies, and sleeping there without fear, and them letting you cast Remove Disease on their people without squinting at your gestures every time to make sure, because the treaty has held and it will not break here and will not break today -

- harboring a party of adventurers who were caught in a blizzard nearer your fort than any other, and there's a paladin in the party, and the paladin fucking hates you and radiates it in that disconcerting way foreigners have of screaming at everybody around them with their faces all the time, and the paladin doesn't attack you or your men and you provision them without being paid for it and send them on their way, because the insurance adjuster gives your budget a break for being ready for this kind of thing, so you are, and your CO believes your report and the reason he believes that is because it's true, except not in a way where he checked -

- gigantic edifices made of promises that could fall apart like a house of cards, and don't, because everybody decided they shouldn't. And the edifices withstand a century of demons, withstand sabotage and rumor, withstand suicide missions and privation and doubt and sometimes even enchantment. Just because everyone decided they should.

....Seldan is thirsty for it, and that emotion he doesn't try to hide at all. 

It's something Valdemar is built on. Well, in a sense it's something every state structure more sophisticated than a warlord's personal demesne is built on, but - it's a very significant fact about Valdemar's history and founding that Valdemar was trying to do better. The main place they were trying to do better than was the Eastern Empire, which - Seldan doesn't know if Blai has any context on them yet - the thing about the Empire is that he thinks, once, they were aiming to be Lawful, and it didn't work, and they ended up running the entire thing on compulsions instead and could not really manage any better than "everyone will follow their incentives" – which to be clear isn't nothing to build on, avowed enemies will in fact cooperated in limited ways off that, but it doesn't go very far. Valdemar needed magic talking horses to make it work, and the opportunity for them to pick a lot of overawed teenagers and mold them into understanding and caring about - that thing. The thing that, in hindsight, he poured out thousands of words into trying to gesture at, not having it nearly so cleanly in his head. 

Velgarth, on the broader stage of international diplomacy, mostly doesn't get to have gigantic edifices built on promises. Sooner or later it all falls back to the degenerate form of "everyone follows their incentives", if not worse than that; he's gotten a very basic report on a recent war with Karse and it was not in anybody's interests and just set a lot of resources on fire. It's probably related to the fact that they don't have a spell for seeing it. Maybe a lot of the difference is just in how it changes the incentives, and thus the ways that avowed enemies who hate each other can nonetheless build something together. 

...He's rotating it in his head and trying to hold it up alongside Kellan's report of Leareth as someone who has absolutely no lines he won't cross. 

Oh Seldan is very good. Blai is developing an increasing respect for whatever mechanism sent this magic talking horse out of all possible magic talking horses.

It's, you know, better not to have a Worldwound, you could probably do cooler stuff than hold a Worldwound if you had the same amount of Law and no demon portal, that's just where he's spent most of his life. He wouldn't actually have guessed the spells to see it and the gods to signal affiliation with were that important, he'd have guessed you could do a lot with reputation alone if you really tried, but maybe not.

Blai has no idea what lines Leareth won't cross except that he can't think of a legitimate conception of Law, developed in isolation with no feedback from Pharasma at any point, which would manifest in a man who wouldn't keep his solemn promises, and Leareth's attitude while swearing such promises - looked right. He was careful and he didn't make every promise that would have sounded good, and he was - obviously reaching for the thing you get if your promises are trusted and cannot have if they're wind in the trees.

Ironic that as far as Seldan can tell from Kellan, the Heralds' attitude (everyone except Vanyel) for the past twenty years has been that the man's promises cannot be trusted at all and obviously he's saying whatever he thinks will get Vanyel to - what? - he's not even sure what they thought the goal would have been...

Running it off reputation does work quite well at local scales, in a particular place or time, among people who more or less like each other and agree on basic assumptions. He expects that quite a lot of Valdemar's noble landholders would read as Lawful, and are thought of that way, and everyone benefits from it. A king's promises to his kingdom do, usually, mean something. But it starts to break down across cultural divides, with people who don't share the same basic assumptions, and - 

- oh, it's because in Velgarth, there mostly just aren't separate concepts for Law and for, you know, being a decent person who cares about doing right by other people. Valdemar's edifice of promises is built on both, and most people would boggle at the concept that you could separate it even in principle. 

It makes sense that this is different in Golarion, where you can See if someone is Lawful and if they're Good as separate things, and "Lawful, but Evil" is an entirely cromulent way for a person to be. Also if you can see that someone is Lawful even when their culture's sense of what the important rules are is completely different and they keep offending you. The general tendency of people to write their enemies off as monsters who want bad things leads to writing them off as lawless, too.

You can do better for a little while. You can have treaties that hold for a generation or two. But it's rather common for diplomatic relationships between neighboring countries to completely break down when a well-regarded monarch dies, largely because everyone thinks of this as a normal thing to happen; it seems to be approximately what happened between Valdemar and Karse. You can't put nearly as much weight on an edifice of promises if you can only expect it to hold for a few decades. And then you end up in an equilibrium where it's common knowledge that of course diplomats lie all the time, and it's rather unclear how to move from that to anything else. 

Anyway, Leareth can't possibly have been getting much out of the reputational benefits, since to most people it's absurd that someone wouldn't stoop at killing millions of people but draws a line at lying. 

Iomedae thought of Law and Good as being facets of some third thing that doesn't have a name, but - that is not how most people relate to it so it's not what reading those alignments off somebody in a normal situation means. If they're conflated totally here that must be confusing not just with respect to Lawful Evil people but also Chaotic Good ones, and they have those, Jisa was one! He's not sure how this confusion may have manifested around her and people like her, it doesn't look like they're having a hard time accepting her as a Herald?

If Blai were advising monarchs who were expecting to have this problem he'd advise them to loudly and perhaps repeatedly bring their successors to diplomatic meetings to reaffirm that they intend to go on abiding by the treaties in place years or decades before the change of leadership - they use Gates like Teleports but it seems logistically comparable, a nationstate should be able to spare a round trip for things like this. He's not sure how that would fail, it could easily fail in some way he wouldn't anticipate since he's not experienced in this area.

Well, it fails because eventually at some step of the process people don't get around to doing that because something else is taking up all their resources, or because a monarch dies unexpectedly early and a twenty-year-old ends up on the throne, or because a lot of people become much less trustworthy once they have the power to do whatever they want and you can't tell in advance who will be like that. (Valdemar doesn't have that problem; the monarch has to be a Herald and their Companion wouldn't stand for it.) 

Seldan has already caught up enough on the Companion gossip network to have a very good idea of why Jisa might be anti-Lawful. Her heart is in the right place but she has a lot of growing up to do. She's accepted as Herald because she has a Companion and that's how it works, she's already not about to repeat some of her past mischief because her Companion wouldn't stand for it, and - well, probably in ten years she'll have learned to think more about long-term consequences before she acts and she probably won't read Chaotic anymore. She's fourteen. 

People can also make sense of someone Lawful and not especially Good, a cliche example being the wealthy merchant who might be cold to his wife and strict with his children and a miser with his friends but at least won't cheat you. But that's - still something people would frame as a character flaw, he's not the worst person you know but he's a a less decent person than a different merchant who doesn't cheat anyone and is also generous and kind and a loving father - and people would expect that merchant to be less trustworthy, more likely to take advantage of you in ways that weren't exactly outright cheating. 

In Valdemar, most people wouldn't trust a merchant who was known to sell slaves. It's different in other places but, generally, because selling slaves is seen as at most a minor vice, more on par with being cold to one's wife than with something seriously evil like murder.