Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!! It's going to be okay but Seldan hates this so much!!!! 

He will allow himself some amount of fantasizing about violently trampling the Star-Eyed Goddess under his hooves. (He assumes is responsible for this, causing a bridge to implausibly pick that moment to fail is the kind of nudge a god could do with a Heartstone nearby and not a problem caused by gryphons.) Most of his attention is on the bond with Blai, though, focusing intently enough to bounce Blai's location to Leareth's mages even though Blai is no longer capable of holding his end of a Mindspeech link. 

It's been 116 seconds since Blai ended up in the water, and Leareth's people are about to send in someone on a rope through the hole in the ice, when Vanyel - riding Randi's Sondra, she happened to be nearest to where he was - reaches the side of the river, flings himself down from the saddle, sprints over to the hole in the ice, and reaches out. 

Blai isn't a small person, this is going to push his Fetching to the limits, but he thinks he can do it at this range, it's less than five meters - 

- there.

Vanyel's head is abruptly hurting a great deal, and also Blai, in sodden armor, is abruptly more or less on top of him and pinning him flat to the ice. 

Leareth's people will scoop Blai up and carry him to the shore of the river as quickly as possible, before they can get unlucky with the ice cracking under them or something - there's a Healer coming, right - 

Shavri is almost there! They're sending other people too but she's going to get there first, because she borrowed Tran's Companion Delian. 

WHERE IS HIS HERALD. 

Seldan is not enjoying trying to move through the snow with a bruised-or-maybe-broken leg and this would probably be a terrible idea and causing himself much worse injury if he were a normal horse, but he is so not worried about that, Blai can fix both of them as soon as they can get him conscious to channel - 

He meets Leareth's people at the riverbank just as Shavri bounces down from Delian's back. 

:He was underwater for almost two minutes but conscious until maybe twenty seconds ago - is he -?: 

Possibly Seldan could let her FOCUS so she can try to get a Healing-link up to Blai and then have a look, how about that? 

INCREDIBLY WORRIED COMPANION who will metaphorically sit on the hands he doesn't have and not interrupt the Healer!!!! 

Blai is not trying quite as hard to die as a normal person without any circles would be but the difference is smaller, under these conditions.

Well, he's super unconscious and he's not breathing and his lungs are full of water and he's really cold which is not helping anything, his life-force is moving very sluggishly and is about as faint as you would expect for someone in his condition rather than being weirdly bright, but his heart is still beating and Shavri can, with some concentration, get a link the normal way and start pushing energy through to him.

She rolls him onto his side and smacks him between the shoulder blades and poke, poke, pokes with her Gift. He should cough up some of the water and try breathing. Breathing is pretty great.

cough cough gasp

Oh good. Shavri calmly holds the link and pushes Healing-energy at him and keeps prodding until he’s breathing in a more regular pattern. He’s not breathing very well, after inhaling a lot of gritty disgusting river water, but he’s at least getting any air.

She doesn’t especially want to try to move him yet but he’s lying directly on the snow right now and soaking wet and still too deeply unconscious to shiver, which isn’t great. She’s commanding Vanyel’s cloak to roll him onto, and they’ve got all these mages here, though, can someone cast a weather-barrier and use magic to get him dry? 

They can do that.

Seldan will curl his body around Blai and radiate body heat at him and WORRY.

:How long until he wakes up? If he’s conscious he can do his Healing magic -:

Shavri has no idea! She would still be pretty worried about whether he was going to survive this at all if she didn’t have previous observations of him being a weirdly resilient person because of the god-magic. 

She will keep sending him energy and see what happens.

Blai is going to find himself in a strange empty white place where nothing hurts — where nothing can hurt, either physically or emotionally.

(This is, from the perspective of the Shadow-Lover, not actually required. It wasn’t that close a call, really, there’s no intervention required by the Shadow-Lover avatar to send this soul back. But the soul did brush near enough to the twilight area between life and death that the Shadow-Lover can step in; it’s not unprecedented to do this, when the soul in question is a Herald, it can be within the Shadow-Lover’s remit.)

A petite woman wearing Heralds’ Whites that look oddly undetailed, like an unfinished painting, stands across from him. Dark brown hair falls across a face hidden in shadow, though the shadow somehow doesn’t conceal her piercing blue eyes.

“Herald Blai. There is information you ought to have.”

"- is this expensive for Iomedae, You mustn't do anything expensive for Iomedae -"

“It is not. We would ask no price of anyone. This is simply a place to talk, and a time to think where no pressing matters will intrude.” A pause; there’s a sense of something shifting behind that shadowed face, distant and inhuman, putting together words.

“The Star-Eyed Goddess paid a great deal for the events to arrange this meeting,” the Shadow-Lover says eventually, carefully, “and achieved little of Her own aims.”

"Oh. ...well, that's good, then. - is Seldan all right?"

“Yes. - you will be going back, in a little while, unless you would prefer not to. Seldan is waiting for you.”

Another pause, the sense of distant alien concepts being shuffled into a sentence. “It costs Us little to offer this when a soul passes through the shadow, and cannot be offered at all at other times.”

"...do you want to be able to talk to people more often?"

There is the sense that something in there is perhaps an especially difficult concept to translate back and forth.

“..It would change many paths, if that were possible.”

"If the problem is just that you need someone to be dead for a moment Breath of Life is the same circle as Commune and this seems higher-bandwidth."

Something like a nod.

“…There is one soul We have never seen to pass through the shadow. There is information that soul ought have, if it were to pass through this place, but it never has.”

"...who, Leareth? Because he's immortal?"

(The Shadow-Lover does not know people’s names unless it’s the name of the soul the Shadow-Lover is talking to at a particular moment, and even then “knowing” might not be the best word. Blai knows it, and is here, but it’s a less obvious translation than the Companion who was sent at this soul yesterday.)

”The one that returns to the world again and again, and has turned its back on all the gods.”