Leareth projects his mind deeper to the Void as they do, offering rapport to Cayaldwin if he wants it - from that perspective, what does he see? 

The ship's jump machinery - cuts through to the Void, not like a Gate would do it but recognizably, and pulls the ship in, and then something very powerfully pinches together bits of nothingness so the ship can cut its way out of the targeted one and then they're back in ordinary space. It all happens almost too quickly to say he witnessed it. 

Most of the dizzyingly complicated math is about targeting, not that the physics of the jump machinery is trivial. They're now floating in deep space, very far from any stars.

Huh! Leareth shakes his head, trying to reorient, and then reaches out for the Void again. It feels, weirdly, like he's reaching in a different 'direction' than he would have to from Velgarth, but watching as he was yanked through by an outside force was very valuable here. 

He pays attention to whether the odd difference in 'distance' between the planes is even more marked here, where they're so much further from any gravity well. 

The difference between Velgarth and just above Velgarth is more dramatic than the difference between just above Velgarth and here, but there's some additional difference here.

Leareth shows this to Cayaldwin. He's unsure exactly what it means, but either way, he thinks he has the way back. Not that he can possibly wrap his human head around all the dizzying math, so a lot of it has to live in his intuitions, but they're very well-developed intuitions.

He takes a moment, though, and just stares at the stars. :They - are so much clearer from here: he breathes, captivated. 

He can make the Dome stop being mostly opaque, and does. <Many people find space travel oddly clarifying.>

:I already knew the universe was very big. It - does not change any of my beliefs about the world, exactly, and yet...: 

Leareth is quiet for quite a while, maybe five minutes, just staring out. Absorbing it. How much is at stake, if the Yeerks take the rest of this galaxy. It almost doesn't matter, at that point, if they find Velgarth, which is so much further away. One world more or less, out of hundreds. 

Finally, he blinks hard, and turns back to the Andalites. "I am going to attempt a Gate back. I should go alone, I think, because I expect it will be very tiring and I will not be able to hold it for long, and also I am the most thoroughly shielded. Once I go and the Gate comes down, you can jump back to check in." His lips twitch. "I am not sure what happens if you jump with an active Gate on the ship, and I am not especially keen to test it." 

<We will wait for the Gate to go down.>

:You can watch it with your sensors if you wish - assuming they can look at the inside of the ship too, I suppose: 

Leareth starts weaving the Gate-threshold. This end isn't much different than usual; he makes it stronger, though, putting in around twice as much power as usual, so it'll hold firm against the much greater tension he's about to put on it. He's well rested and it's not enough to strain him at all, yet, but the search is going to be harder. 

Aiming, half from the memorized math and half from the raw intuition of 'go back the way he came', he sends out feelers of magic. Searching for Velgarth. Specifically for the woods next to where the ship was parked, but getting a specific spot on the planet itself is the most trivial part; finding Velgarth at all is the challenge. 

It takes significantly longer than getting a Gate within Velgarth. He can feel that he's searching a far, far larger space. 

And eventually -

There! He recognizes Velgarth. That part he's sure of.

The Gate completes - it takes more resistance than usual, in some way, sticking the other threshold into place - but when he's finished, the spell snaps into stability. It's still draining him noticeably to maintain, and the threshold is, for some reason, milky-opaque rather than showing the other side. 

Leareth smiles, triumphantly, for half a second. 

:It is definitely in Velgarth: he tells the Andalites, and then, without hesitation, he steps across - 

And suddenly he's falling, everything hurts and everything is wrong and he's so cold, and there's nothing to hold onto - the Gate crumbles behind him as he loses all focus on it, he doesn't even get to reclaim the energies, which backlash onto him and metaphorically whack him in the face instead. And then there's nothing, his mage-sight feels only emptiness, his ears aren't working. He catches a blur of something blue-green-white in the darkness before clenching his eyes shut against the pain - he can't breathe - 

Focus. The thing he needs to do is FOCUS and GET BACK. 

It's really, extremely hard to concentrate on raising a Gate, even an unscaffolded one, and it's the sloppiest Gate Leareth has ever cast and takes the very last of his strength. 

But then it's up and the search finds the woods where he meant to land and the Gate is up and then he's through it - fumbling to take it down, dropping it on his own face again, sprawled on ground he can only barely feel and fighting to get air into his lungs. 

:Help: he flails out with barely-Mindspeech to, hopefully, anyone nearby, he's too disoriented and out of it to actually find a mind and establish a link, but he can manage that much before he loses consciousness. 

They hyperspace jump back and then coast back over to the planet, and descend slowly into the mountain valley where they were before.

A couple of Leareth's people and some of the closest Andalites get Leareth's frantic Mindspeech message, and someone grabs a Healer and sprints. They're somewhat limited by having no idea what just went wrong, and by the time they get there Leareth is unresponsive and not telling them. At a glance it looks like power-drain shock and backlash, which is concerning because Leareth's estimate had been that the Gate wouldn't be that hard, and there are maybe other injuries but the Healers have no idea what they're looking at.

They scoop him up and carry him toward the shuttle in case someone there can help, and as soon as the ship itself appears and is in Mindspeech range, one of the Healers with strong Mindspeech is yelling out to them that something went wrong and they don't know what and Leareth seems to be injured. 

- they don't know what would've gone wrong, exactly, but they can land and get him to the medical bay, at least. They're really confused. From their end it looked like he made his Gate and walked through it.

Leareth is still unconscious, though that could be just magical exhaustion. He's also struggling a bit to breathe, which the Velgarth Healers can't do that much about, but he's otherwise responding well to having a lot of Healing-energy frantically thrown at him. 

They can put him on oxygen, though they have no idea whether this is safe for humans. Maybe they can put him on, like, thirty percent oxygen and see if that seems to be improving matters and go from there with Healers watching closely.

It does and they're really impressed!

Sandra catches up at a run and tries to figure out what's happening. "- Oh, that, I invented a spell for that." 

<That's impressive, primitive peoples usually don't even know there are different elements in air> one of the doctors says distractedly. <I want to scan him - and a healthy human for comparison ->

Sandra ignores the mild insult of being called primitive - they're behind the Andalites in technology, true, but way ahead in magic. She would volunteer to be scanned as a healthy comparison, but possibly her war injuries would confuse it. 

One of the Fetchers is definitely healthy and will volunteer. 

The doctors stare at the scans. 

<I think that he has decompression injuries in his lungs. Could he have been - briefly in vacuum - is that a kind of way that magic can fail ->

The mages look around at each other. 

"Gates don't land off by that much very often," one of Leareth's mages says, "but - it was a very long range one, and a new technique for them - I suppose he would not have needed to be all that far off to land in space near the planet instead of where he intended...?" Frown. "Could you see where his Gate led to? Usually one can."