"...l guess I'll either talk him into it or get it from him against his will." Sigh. "It's a deal. Thank you." 

"You are very welcome, Vanyel. Shall we go now?"

"We wanted to do it while he's asleep, since I'll be able to scry him more easily - do you need to scry yourself or can I share my senses or a memory with you to target the spell - also I'm not actually sure what time it is in Velgarth right now, it could be different from here." 

"He is asleep, but won't be for very much longer! That is why I delayed my morning tea for you."

Vanyel, again, blinks helplessly at her for a moment. "...Then let's go, I guess. Mahdi, um, do we have too many to teleport now? I guess I can Gate us, if I get a Delay Pain." 

"Gates do not cause you pain, Vanyel. The expectation is what causes you pain. I can teleport us." And she holds out her hands to them.

"...Sorry, what?" Nevermind, he can unpack that later. He takes her hand. 

Yfandes cannot do that, but she can shuffle up against Vanyel and sort of gently nip the cleric's sleeve in her teeth, is that good enough? 

As long as Yfandes is in contact with her it will work fine.

"The pain, it doesn't come back later, does it?" she says, and Teleports them back to the buried palace where Hagan is waiting. 

"You should tell me when you are ready," she says seriously. "It will happen very quickly, after that."

"I want to scry to check that he's actually sleeping," Vanyel gestures at the crystal ball, "er, or you could do that, I guess, if I share what he looks like..." 

"No, no, go ahead."

Vanyel stands in front of the crystal ball and attempts the now-familiar mental motion of scrying for Leareth again, with Yfandes riding along in his mind. 

It works. 

Leareth is asleep. Vanyel can see with mage-sight that the room is incredibly well-shielded and Leareth himself is wearing multiple artifacts. 

Yfandes can relay this image on to Nefreti, if the cleric wants? It'll be a little blurred, passed between two minds, but Companions are pretty good at this. 

"You will give me those artifacts, Vanyel?"

"Er, yes, of course."

(Leareth is not going to be happy about this at all, he can just picture it, but what else is he supposed to do?) 

She stands back. 

She stretches her arms wide.

She - pours magic into the room, it's much much more magic than the spells Vanyel has seen here, it's more magic than Vanyel himself could wield -

- and then there's a portal in Leareth's bedroom in Velgarth and then he's flying through it into the starry room, and then it closes again, and the magic recedes, and is gone. 

....That was terrifying. Vanyel is officially very scared of the strange cleric who can snatch anyone she likes out of their bedroom in another world. 

Leareth is awake in a fraction of a second, as it happens, but not quite in time to do anything except (pointlessly) fling power into his shields, before he's suddenly not in his bedroom anymore - there are stars–

–orient, and he opens his Othersenses, and - they aren't there, he can't sense minds or magic, it's not just a lack of either it's that his senses are blind, no, gone. His shields are gone, or at least he can't feel them. His artifacts aren't working. He tries to put a barrier around himself and that doesn't work either - and he's falling, except not, he's floating and not moving all that fast but he feels like he's falling–

–this is what the emptiness between stars would be like, he's hypothesized, except that that wouldn't have air, and whatever else is happening, he isn't currently suffocating. 

What where why how– 

Leareth is terrified. Possibly more afraid than he's ever been. He doesn't know where he is, he can't orient because he can't see, nothing makes sense–

And panicking about it absolutely isn't going to help, so he doesn't. He floats, unmoored from everything, in a bottomless pit of stars, and he looks at them with his mundane eyes - the first thing he thinks to check, rather pointlessly, is whether he recognizes any constellations. 

(He does not recognize any stars.)


Nefreti Clepati waves a hand and makes herself an armchair and sits down in it. "I haven't seen him in a long time," she says.

Leareth doesn't recognize the voice and is even more baffled, but he starts attempting to twist himself around to see in that direction, experimenting with various ways of wiggling body parts to shift momentum. 

"You've met him?" Vanyel says blankly, keeping his voice low. He's still trying to think of what to say to Leareth; gods, he started making a list of questions but didn't even finish. 

In that direction there is a doorway. The doorway looks out on a room made of stone. Through the door of stone there are some men, formally dressed, standing there cautiously, and an old woman in an armchair, looking at Leareth, speaking with Vanyel. 

"Oh, not this one," she says. "Our own, I loved, when I was a child. This one does not know love. He would love your brother," she adds to Hagan, who stiffens. "But for the burdens they both have taken up and cannot put down."