Seldan does not think it makes sense for his oath to hold now that he's been reincarnated as a magic horse with only the vaguest memories of his actual life (as opposed to Valdemaran history and policy, which he remembers pretty well.) He had kind of want to clarify that with the Groveborn before leaving Haven but Rolan did...not seem to be coping incredibly well with the abrupt change in circumstances. Seldan is worried that - well, whatever thing Enara was worried about with him, the part where Companions can't think about disobeying gods unless they fight off mind control about it, he thinks maybe the Groveborn has that more intensely? He didn't seem about to repudiate Dara over it, thankfully, but he also didn't seem incredibly able to engage. 

...Seldan has a vague suspicion that most other Companions in fact have binding loyalty-to-Valdemar, as part of the same mechanism that makes it hard to question if Velgarth's gods are really on their side. It would make sense of some odd notes in the conversations he had with them. Seldan doesn't seem to have that part either, just the Companion-bond, which is in a sense probably also mind control but it doesn't bother him to be 100% dedicated to Blai. 

And - it might make sense of Vanyel as a person, if Yfandes had to shake off that mind control four years ago in order to stick by him, and they've had all the time since then to be much less directly and unavoidably bound to Valdemar. Though it's probably also relevant to his relationship with the King that he's a little older - very much someone Randi might have looked up to as a heroic mentor figure, back when he was a trainee and his father was alive so he wasn't expecting to inherit the throne for decades. And Vanyel spent nearly a year during the war with Karse being approximately the only Herald-Mage holding the Valdemaran border. He's had...more time than most...when he would have been making decisions almost entirely on his own. 

Vanyel is there five minutes later. 

He clearly just woke up but he...seems better, maybe? His expression is more visibly unhappy but he seems less cold and remote, more like a human being who's actually present in the room with them. 

Great! They can all go line up in the Gate-terminus room along with several dozen additional people, and prepare to head to Waymeet. 

Indelible loyalty to a specific country is, for personal Blai background reasons, kind of weird as a concept! Almost no one who was loyal to Cheliax a hundred years ago would have been or should have been any time in the intervening century! Maybe the gods would stop producing Companions if something like that happened?? Or maybe they wouldn't, because they suck??

He awaits the Gate.

Hmm. Seldan personally would feel that his loyalty is primarily to what Valdemar is trying to be, and secondarily to the particular King he swore his oath to (...he might have served more than one King over his life as a Herald and thus sworn it a few times? it's incredibly frustrating not remembering details like that!) Anyway, if Valdemar were hypothetically taken over by a cadre of people working for an evil god - or, you know, who were just mundane kind-of-terrible people - he would absolutely not consider himself bound to serve them.

But - as a Herald in his mortal life, now might be different - he thinks that if Valdemar had ended up horribly off-course like that, he would have considered himself bound to keep fighting for Valdemar, specifically, even if it seemed like a doomed effort, rather than going off to some other part of the world not ruled by an evil god? He's not sure, though, he doesn't think he's ever considered the hypothetical in depth now. 

(And should probably not do it now even though it's very interesting to think about, he needs to be focused on situational awareness.) 

They go through the Gate into Waymeet. 

Lissa is working on two candlemarks of sleep and has just spent a remarkably stressful and unpleasant candlemark wrangling thirteen badly injured kyree, eight injured and set-commanded gryphons (that's not all the injured gryphons but they ran out of space and prioritized the ones who the Healers thought might not recover otherwise), and twenty-one very sheepish and mostly-sobered-up soldiers into a circle marked out in the largest barn they could free up for it, exactly matching the figure she was given for Blai's channel radius, with a narrow aisle so Blai can actually get through to the middle.

She is in a BAD MOOD and could really use a hug from her brother but it feels too unprofessional in front of Leareth's mages, so she doesn't ask. 

Blai confirms that this is everybody they want to pile in, walks to the center, checks the radius, and channels.

The soldiers file out under General Lissa Ashkevron's stern glare and firm prior orders that they are NOT TO START ANYTHING ELSE IN THIS BARN. The gryphons are still set-commanded and don't do anything. 

The kyree are very grateful. Subdued - apart from four scouts who were far enough away to miss the explosion, this makes literally all the survivors of Hot Springs Clan, which previously numbered sixty-plus, and none of the pups survived. But grateful, both to Blai and to Leareth's people who helped dig them out of the wreckage and evacuate them here before they froze to death. They hadn't really been expecting that. 

...Seldan can relay an explanation of the resurrection magic from Golarion if Blai has one ready? 

- yes. :Golarion gods give out resurrection magic. It is expensive, partly because it requires a cleric of rare power, stronger than I am, but also because it requires sizeable diamonds. It requires the soul to be free to return, and the weaker and therefore less expensive spells also require remains, as intact as possible. The raised would be a little weaker, as though not quite recovered from a very bad illness - fixable with more magic and diamonds if that's important enough. My hope is that some of the participants in the hostilities here will view your losses as their responsibility and also that diamonds might be much cheaper here since they have no such local use, such that they could actually cover all the Raises your clan would want as reparations, but I cannot speak for any such entity. I'd recommend making a particular effort to find the bodies and sort them by intactness and how important it is to have them alive again. I can with some considerable opportunity cost make elapsed time count for less with respect to the difficulty of raising a longer-dead person, which might matter if it takes more than nine days since their deaths to reach Golarion and make purchases.:

Wow. That seems really important to know!!! Nayoki had not realized there was a timeline like that and it probably affects Leareth's prioritization on interplanar-Gate-research versus putting all his time toward defusing the geopolitical situation before he starts on that.

She's going to immediately Mindspeak one of the comms-spell mages to get word to Leareth, but also she should probably say something now. 

:The attack on your people happened entirely because you had offered to shelter Leareth, so I do think he would consider it our responsibility to do everything we can to help recoup your losses. I am fairly certain we can arrange to provide diamonds. ...Leareth will likely have an estimated timeline for his research on finding Golarion in a few days, but I think it is more likely than not it would take longer than nine days, it has never been attempted before.: 

Seldan appreciates Nayoki. He feels like Valdemar also bears a lot of responsibility for what happened, since they were the ones to recruit Iftel into this in the first place, but Leareth's organization is almost certainly better placed to fund providing diamonds. 

...The kyree are kind of in awe. They also have a lot of questions but Blai seems busy. 

Nayoki will stay here and question - well, mindread - immobilized gryphons, in hopes that they know something about Iftel's other plans or at least Iftel's other resources. The others can head onward to Haven now? 

Seldan is going to check briefly with some of the other Companions in Waymeet if General Lissa Ashkevron - incidentally, apparently Vanyel's sister - can be spared for half a day to swing by Haven with them. She looks like she could really benefit from joining in on the Nap Stack arrangement. Possibly so could some other people here but she's the one he noticed. 

...Sure. Lissa can be temporarily spared in order to benefit from bizarre otherworldly magic and catch up on rest after staying up most of the night trying to prevent various stupid tensions in Waymeet from exploding into pointless violence. Things seem much less likely to explode into pointless drunken violence now that the sun is up. 

Onward to Haven, then! 

Where he should inspect the pillow in case it needs last minute frippery so that can be added in parallel with gathering everybody.

(The underlying spellcraft situation about what qualifies a pillow as sufficiently "expensive" is of course not how much somebody paid somebody else for it, or you could do it with a wad of corn silk and burlap. Instead it's something about how many manufacturing subtasks have to be executed and what degree of precision this execution indicates, so the ideal Nap Stack pillow has a lot of embroidery and is made of the most finicky fibers available. Blai has a vague memory of them being imported from some corner of Vudra in silk with a lot of dye painted on and intricate stitching on top of that, in batches. But you can compensate for a lackluster pillow by sewing things onto it that themselves represent precise execution of manufacturing tasks, like beads or a slipcover.)

This pillow is ridiculous. It is an absolutely absurd pillow. It's made out of imported patterned silk, woven with already-dyed thread via some special secret method known only by the weavers' guild in Seejay, and a person with taste would have left it otherwise unadorned so it could shine, but Lady Treesa does not have any taste and so it additionally has intricate embroidery - she likes needlepoint and had a lot of candlemarks to kill when they were still back at Forst Reach and her children were grown - and it has crystal beads and tassels. Is that enough frippery? 

Yes, that will do. Taste is not required, only technical finesse. She understands the pillow is going to vanish, right?

She was so informed and asked curiously what would happen to it and why it works that way - and would probably appreciate an answer if Blai happens to know - but didn't object, probably because she was clearly so touched by being able to provide a vital asset out of her collection of random ornaments. 

If she wants to watch it disappear she can be present when he casts the spell!

It's harder to estimate distances in the stables where everything's broken up with walls and Blai's going to want to stand up on a stall divider to do the casting to make sure he's got line of effect into every stall he wants to hit.

Everyone should be aware that if they're interrupted during their nap they can't go back to being under the spell - they can sleep in the area but it won't affect them any more. Also you can't get any use out of a second Nap Stack in the same week. So they need to be really clear with everyone who could possibly imagine it was a good idea to interrupt them to only do that if it is actually, genuinely, with a really good understanding of the importance of sleep, more urgent than the person they want to interrupt getting to sleep four times as efficiently. The spell will last for eight hours, and they should probably choose who's in it at any given portion of that time with that in mind, so that if (say) gryphons attack during any given period of the duration the people who are designated awake then can handle it without waking anyone up. Without being tempted to wake anyone up even if a god thinks it would be so great to wake them up. Blai has gotten the sense that Valdemarans might be really bad at this and is prepared to back this advice up with threats of not casting anything like this for them again if they do not take obvious basic precautions to efficiently use his spells.

Seldan is also ready to back this up by harassing every Companion in Haven about it! 

It sounds like they should plan on having Heralds and Companions alternate their naps - if anyone has an urgent question for, say, Katha, her Companion should almost always know the answer. The downside is that people will probably be sharing stalls with someone else's Companion, which is a little weird, but he thinks that minimizing the cost of people being uninterruptible is worth it. Heralds should also pair up and take ten minutes to hand off any ongoing responsibilities to their buddy. They can fit everyone on the Senior Circle plus their Companions into the first two blocks, and then the rest of the time can be dedicated to more junior Heralds and other key personnel in Haven. 

...Blai should probably not go in the first wave, in case Seldan needs him to threaten anyone with not casting spells for them again. They've both had some sleep recently, at least. 

Heralds file into the stables! Treven is going in the first wave; Dara will go in the second wave. Tran is buddied with Joshel and sleeping first, Katha is buddied with Keiran and same, Savil is buddied with Katri, et cetera et cetera.