"I will try to remember that on top of the message for Leareth, then.

Will resurrecting Yfandes and the dead kyree work?"

This gets confusion again!

Eventually, "- We have remit over the soul of Companions. We would not interfere." 

"...who has the kyree?"

More sense of shuffling, as though the Shadow-Lover is putting an unusual amount of effort into figuring out what Blai means, and then even more effort into piecing together an answer. 

"In Valdemar they call Him Kernos." 

"Can Kernos hear prayers? Do You know if He has any interests contrary to allowing their resurrections?"

"...He could hear from those under His remit who stand close to Foresight. The actions of Vkandis are contrary to His interests and reversing them ought not be." 

"I will try suggesting that surviving kyree pray to Him about it, then."

He's starting to be concerned that he won't be able to retain all this information cleanly to report on it once he returns to the Material, so while this is fascinating and comfortable he should probably not stay here chatting forever.

"Is there anything else I should know or that You would like to ask?"

"There is more information, but if We cannot see yet that it would be relevant to you or to Us, then it cannot be translated. There is a path, though We cannot see the end of it." 

"All right. I will tell the kyree that Kernos has their dead; I will tell Leareth that You want him to know that You are also steering for Golarion and that if he sees more it will be good; I will tell Seldan that You will be able to get something out of situation reports from him. If that is all the major information I am ready to return."

Then the Shadow-Lover will hug Blai for a moment longer and then send him back to his body, which is unfortunately going to be a much less pleasant place to be right now than the Shadow-Lover's realm. 

Seldan is there, and is forcibly keeping a lid on his level of freaking out because he wants to be in full rapport with Blai as soon as Blai shows the slightest sign of waking up. 

(He mentally yelled a lot at Leareth's people to drag the other mages who ended up in the water within thirty feet of Blai, so they'll be included whenever Blai wakes up enough to channel. They're both in much worse shape than Blai, being unconscious and submerged for a couple of minutes is pretty bad for people, but hopefully as long as they're not actually entirely dead, it'll be enough?) 

OH right he was drowning. Channeling has no verbal or somatic components; he flails for his holy symbol and pulls positive energy through it.

Seldan is no longer bleeding, or suffering from a possibly-broken leg that he just sprinted a hundred yards on over slippery ground and now; he's pretty much back to perfect health.

He's also SO INCREDIBLY RELIEVED and not trying to avoid projecting this intensely at Blai. He's also still trying to curl his entire body around Blai. They're outside in the snow, a few yards from the river, but there's a weather barrier and the air is almost up to a normal room-temperature, and Blai's clothes are steaming from a heat-spell and only a little damp. There's a strong smell of wet horse. 

...Wow, Shavri can see now why Seldan was so adamant that they just needed to get him conscious! One moment she had just gotten to the point of feeling like he was definitely improving rather than deteriorating, but it still felt iffy enough that she really didn't want to let go of the Healing-link even long enough to rush him through a Gate inside.

And then there was a blaze of something that wasn't actually Healing-energy and looked incredibly odd to her Sight, and now he's...fine? Not fully back to his usual robust health, she doesn't think, but if she saw someone in the House of Healing who looked like that, he would go at the bottom of the priority list and get fobbed off on a trainee. 

She lets go of his shoulder and backs off, in case he's waking up disoriented. Vanyel often doesn't react well if he wakes up after a serious injury with someone touching him. 

He sits up, sort of at a weird angle to remain close to his nice warm Companion. :I spoke to the Shadow-Lover -: And he tries to remember it all at Seldan as clearly as he can because he thinks Seldan has a better memory than he does.

That's what Companions are for!  

Seldan will stomp very hard on the temptation to start freaking out again because his Herald came close enough to dying to talk to the Shadow-Lover aaaaah! It's fine, Blai is fine, it's just that this was incredibly stressful and he's unendorsedly mad that Leareth didn't think to send them someone who could cast unscaffolded Gates underwater with enough speed and precision to have just squirted Blai out through one of those in the first ten seconds. That's a sufficiently absurd thing to be able to do that possibly only Leareth can do it and there are 5847843 reasons it would be stupid for Leareth to personally show up in Haven to guard Blai, where "everything that just happened" is an excellent demonstration of those reasons, AND YET.

(These thoughts are in the background but not entirely hidden behind shields. Seldan can't actually spend the next five years concealing all the ways that Blai is important to him and threats to Blai are upsetting just because Blai is not totally comfortable with being loved by someone.) 

...Huh, the Shadow-Lover is not very good at communicating but is...clearly making an effort? And his sense is that that was actually a more productive conversation than Vanyel's usual experience; he wonders if the Shadow-Lover was benefiting from the fact that Blai's world has more state-of-the-art for communication with gods. 

Message for Leareth, got it. Vanyel already suspected that the Shadow-Lover had been steering for something other than Leareth's permanent death, and the - adversarialness - of that plot is probably explained by the fact that apparently the Shadow-Lover god can't talk to Leareth at all because Their communication interface can only reach dying people and Leareth doesn't die hard enough to count. 

The god is in favor of them reaching Golarion - that's very good to know, Vanyel had hoped They would be but wasn't sure - 

The god has Yfandes and isn't inclined to interfere with bringing her back, that's good, he's very glad they know that. The kyree god is Kernos - does Seldan know any facts about Kernos - it's not a well-organized church like Vkandis has but there are martial orders, Kernos is popular in the northern half of Valdemar, he thinks Kernos has ever been known to give people miraculous fighting ability to defend people they care about though he doesn't get the sense it was ever very targeted... 

Souls aren't actively unable to reach Golarion afterlives from here, it's just that it's not the standard destination if a Velgarth god has remit, that's interesting... 

Seldan can maybe get messages to the Shadow-Lover! That's really interesting! Because he's...closer to Foresight...ohhhh he thinks he sees how, now...wouldn't have occurred to him to try it otherwise, but mostly because he wouldn't have assumed the god was paying active enough attention to act on anything he tried to communicate... 

Awwwwww Blai got a hug. And liked it! Awwwwwww. That almost makes this feel worth it. 

Seldan definitely getting the sense that the Shadow-Lover god allowed the Star-Eyed to intervene for this to happen - maybe They were counter-intervening just a little at the end, it was a coincidence in their favor that Vanyel was close enough to be there within two minutes, but They let the bridge collapse happen because the Star-Eyed was paying for it but it was incidentally quite convenient for the Shadow-Lover's god if Blai could almost die. Maybe that wasn't actually unfriendly, maybe this is literally the closest to friendly that the god can manage, but also SELDAN IS KIND OF MAD. NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO DROWN HIS HERALD.

It's actually an amazing deal if somebody only almost dying costs a hostile god a lot AND gets them, like, that has to be at least five Communes worth of information because Blai didn't have to render everything into yes-or-no questions, that's an incredible bargain! Blai is fine! And maybe tomorrow he'll be able to hang a second freely-allocated third circle spell too!

Fiiiiiiiiiiine. If the mysterious Shadow-Lover's god can make the Star-Eyed Goddess waste a lot of Her resources on attempts to kill people that don't work, and get conversations with those people in the bargain, that's - in fact pretty clever. And maybe it only looked like a terrifyingly close call to them and not to the god. 

Seldan is still poking at Blai's memory of the conversation, before it gets any hazier. Huh. Something about Brightstar...tool of the Star-Eyed Goddess, that part is obvious...could help? Won't be willing is obvious, but it's intriguing if Brightstar has the capability to help with travel to Golarion - actually, maybe that's not so surprising, he's the one who found Leareth's immortality hideout that the gods themselves had been unable to do anything about for millennia, that's got to be an indication that he's bloody brilliant at planar magic. 

...He wonders if they could convince Leareth to have a near-death experience somewhere the Shadow-Lover can reach him. Is there a way to make it low-risk? Blai doesn't have the Breath of Life spell but he does have Stabilize and Seldan thinks he probably wasn't too far gone for it to have worked, if someone else had cast it on him the moment they hauled him out of the water? And that seems much more like something that Should Just Work - and has fewer surfaces vulnerable to Star-Eyed interference - than Velgarth Healing, where a Healer can definitely get more or less lucky. They might have to do some terrifying experiments to be sure of how close to dying someone can come and still have it definitely work...

Blai doesn't think that Leareth would be remotely convinced to try this, and, like, he could definitely be interrupted at stabilizing somebody if anything happened to his hands or his voice or his focus. If more people want to try it he's okay to stand by casting Stabilize but it can actually be pretty hard to get people precisely dying-not-dead (source: torture class) on purpose.

Maybe Brightstar would be moved by the possibility that eventually he could get some of his family True Resurrected? That's what it would take, with the remains obliterated, but he's young and capable and could take on various jobs for the church of Abadar and save up for a long time and there's probably lots of diamond arbitrage to do. ...the Star-Eyed probably has all their souls, Blai doesn't know if She'd be motivated to keep hold of them in this circumstance.

That indeed sounds like something Leareth would understandably not be convinced to risk! It - seems like it would probably actually go fine, if it's true that the Shadow-Lover's god wants to communicate more effectively with Leareth and does not want Leareth dead, and thus would be nudging for that, but - since the whole problem is that Leareth doesn't know that for sure because the god has never once been able to communicate Their intentions to him, that seems unlikely to help in convincing him. 

That does sound like a conversation someone should absolutely try having with Brightstar. One way or another, really, he deserves to know it's a possibility.

It's almost certainly not enough to get him to work with Leareth on achieving contact with Golarion sooner if he still thinks Leareth is the one who killed his parents in the first place, which - makes sense, the Shadow-Lover didn't claim to see any actual paths where getting his help was possible, and just...wanted them to know that Brightstar could hypothetically help?

Which is actually pretty interesting, if the Shadow-Lover can only communicate things where the act of communicating it to someone results in an effect on them visible in Foresight. That implies that there are things they can do differently if they know this, and - no, he's still not sure where to go with that, it just seems like it might be important. 

Possibly Brightstar could help because he has relevant training or tools and someone else could pick up the same?

Possibly! He may be the only Tayledras Healing-Adept with training at the White Winds school. Jisa probably knows more about the exact extent of Brightstar's unusual abilities, though if Jisa herself had the same abilities or tools you would think the Shadow-Lover would have said so. 

…Does Blai maybe want to go inside? Seldan’s first inclination had been to get Blai out of Haven the instant he was stable enough to move through a Gate, but actually Blai is fine and Seldan is also fine and - maybe Haven is a terrifying place to be, but if that's the worst the Star-Eyed can do even working through the Heartstone, it might not actually be too dangerous to justify staying? Also it's barely been five minutes, they could sneak in for the Nap Stack. Seldan is absolutely not letting himself be separated from Blai for it but maybe he can pull rank and claim a less desirable spot for both of them. 

It's possible the Shadow-Lover couldn't say so, She had some peculiar blocks in how she talked and maybe "Jisa" was unsayable.

A Nap in the Stack sounds good. It'll help him heal off the rest of the damage, too.

That sounds like a good plan, then. They might not quite get a full two candlemarks but if any sleep there counts for four times as much, that should still be pretty good. Seldan can kneel so Blai has an easier time climbing onto his back if he's still feeling a bit banged up. 

(Leareth's mages circle up closely around them.) 

Blai's still a little banged up but it's not like he can't bend his knees just because they're banged up or anything. Up onto Seldan he goes.