Tantras just looks deeply confused. "That seems very unrealistic? I don't see how a person could do that. Even if they wanted to be that evil." 

"For the sake of argument let's assume this was achieved by normal human politics and fancy magery, somehow, and evaluate from there." But she does write down 'even if they wanted to be that evil' in her notebook.

Now Savil looks suspicious and also incredibly uncomfortable! 

Dara gives Tantras a faintly exasperated look. "You're talking about Vkandis, aren't you. ...Wait, what's the other country? I really should know who we have alliances with... Or is it more hypothetical than that and actually it's something other than an alliance or not even about Valdemar specifically?"  

"Iftel. It's got mind-control magic around the whole country so it doesn't seem interesting. But it's Vkandis's and I wrote 'Iftel is more interesting than it seems' on every page of my notebook divisible by five till I got in the habit of not ignoring it."

"What? Really?" 

"That sounds really fake, honestly - you're saying Vkandis can mind control everyone in Valdemar which isn't even His country?" 

Dara just looks kind of relieved. "Oh, is that why I forgot we have an alliance with Iftel? You're right, we do, I just - forgot..." 

"Vkandis can apparently mind control everyone about Iftel even not in his own territory, yeah, it's scary. But you all know it exists now that I've reminded you, and that Elspeth married an Ifteli, and that Heralds never go there, and that you import wine and stuff from there but nobody moves there even to handle their trade operations let alone because they hear the weather's really nice."

"...That's...very scary actually..." Dara says faintly. 

"I think it makes a difference that Vkandis isn't a normal human person?" Tantras says. "We expect gods to do weird god things for mysterious god reasons, and to not be able to intervene sometimes even though they can other times, and–"

"You literally just said it was really evil." 

"I think it might be time to think about why you expect that, and whether you think - finding it unsurprising - is the same kind of expectation as considering it appropriate."

"I...also don't - find it surprising," Savil says, the words coming out sort of fragmented and uncertain. "I don't like it. Gods poking things makes me uneasy. I mean, we suspected a god or gods might've intervened so that all the events leading up to, well, Vanyel's Choosing, ended up happening. And that makes me very uneasy. But it's sort of not something you can do anything about, you know? I think it is more like the weather than like a person, from our point of view." 

"Mages change the weather all the time," Dara points out with a raised eyebrow. 

"You know what I mean." 

"I don't! People can talk to gods sometimes, right - fine, maybe conversations don't really work if they're made of Foresight, but we can at least say words to them, unlike the weather. We could tell Karis to give Vkandis a piece of her mind about the war. I sort've assumed she'd done that already, actually, it was very obnoxious." 

Tantras is starting to look kind of upset. 

"People can talk to gods," agrees Belrun. "I think it could stand to be tried more, if you or anyone you know think you have an angle on it and think it won't just end up with you manipulated, hearing whatever words make you do whatever the god wants. It's, uh, not what Leareth expects to work, but I think it's worth a try or three. I would be a little surprised if Karis had already chewed out Vkandis about anything, we think it's expensive or something to possess people who aren't fairly well aligned with the god doing the possessing."

Shiver. "I hope that's true. I'd have had a lot fewer nightmares about the Karis incident if I were sure of it at the time."

"It's hard to identify the limits on gods' power because they behave so erratically, often subtly, and have to navigate around each other some unknown amount, but it seems like both their home turf advantage and their hold on specific people is likely to affect how appealing they find possessing those people in those places. So, for instance, I don't expect to be possessed at all, your non-Herald friends without particular religious convictions are probably safe, you might be possessable by whoever's responsible for Companions but likely not Vkandis since they're probably different, based on stylistic tells, and Companions are... I'm not sure but can't rule out 'kinda halfway possessed all the time by default' though that's really an upper bound."

Dara makes a small "ack" sound. 

"They don't seem like it," Savil says, sounding more curious than uncomfortable now. "I mean, they've got Companion-Foresight, which must've been something the god that made them set them up with, I guess they could get direct messages or orders that way but it seems to me that what they get is a lot fuzzier than that." 

"Yeah, I don't know as much about Companions as I'd like, I've been chatting with the one who interrupted Jisa yesterday but while she's friendlier than I expected she doesn't answer everything and doesn't seem to know the answers to everything either."