"I bet I could figure out how to make it permanent."

"I think that would be good. And if you are wearing it then you are - not impossible to injure, but it would take a Final Strike at short range, anything short of that ought give you at least some time to fly away and teleport."

"I have noticed that. It's a very good artifact. If I do get murdered you will just have to build your god and get me back." You have to say that sentence very, very jokingly for it to not be pathetic but she thinks she managed it.

(Leareth has a few much more serious plans in the eventuality of Carissa's murder - for one, he could prioritize finding Golarion a lot harder and try to persuade one of the non-Evil gods to tell him how resurrection works - but he doesn't mention that.) He ducks his head, almost chuckling. "Yes, of course. So three days there, three days back - how long do you intend to spend in Haven?"

"I don't know. Possibly a week?"

"All right, I will give it a fortnight before I become seriously worried about not hearing from you. I should also station someone up north to meet you on your return."

"You should tell me more about Valdemar. Calib explained the general history, but I don't know - why you picked it, whether they know..."

"I - am not altogether happy with the choice, though mostly I am not entirely happy with the plan of murdering ten million people to begin with. Valdemar seemed the best of several non-ideal options; it is geographically accessible from here, it is relatively poorly defended since it has fewer mages than most places - Gifts are hereditary and Valdemar does the opposite of what is sensible given that, most Heralds accept it as a vocation and are too busy running the Kingdom to have children. It is under the territory of a less overtly meddling god and there is some existing magical infrastructure that I could repurpose if I can capture it intact."

He glances down. "However, there is some sort of god-meddling afoot here and I do not particularly understand it, yet. I am not even Gifted with Foresight and yet a couple of years ago I began having a vivid recurring dream, of meeting and fighting a powerful Herald-Mage in the north, at the location where I had planned to take the main body of my army across the mountains. And about eighteen months ago this rather inexplicably became a lucid dream. One where both of us are present. So - now I have regular lucid prophetic dreams where we have awkward conversations about it. My best guess is that the other leadership are aware of the dream's existence but not of the second part, or else I would surely have heard more of it. The Herald-Mage's name is Vanyel Ashkevron, he is currently still very young, and - in terms of raw power, he is by far the strongest mage in the world. I am fairly sure this is not a coincidence either, and some god or gods arranged a horrific magical accident to cause it. Questions?"

"In Golarion power is straightforwardly just - uh, I've been thinking of you as a ninth-circle wizard and past ninth circle it's just a matter of inventing new spells and techniques and accumulating resources, there's no sense in which someone can be more powerful than you without being at least a little bit a god. What does that mean, here..."

"I think we are more similar to Golarion sorcerers than wizards, but I suppose the same might hold of them. Here, a mage's raw channeling power is mostly based on the innate strength of their Gift, rather than a matter of experience; it can be increased with practice, but by twofold at most, not more than that. To the extent that I can compare with a ninth circle wizard from your world, it is because I know many uses of magic, some unknown by anyone but myself, and I am very skilled at doing magic fast. And, of course, I can throw together artifacts like the shield-amulet you are wearing. However, in terms of channeling capacity, I am not that much stronger than the average Adept, like Nayoki." He shakes his head. "I could almost certainly beat Herald-Mage Vanyel in a fight, still, unless he resorted to Final Strike, because I would fight smarter and I would arrive very, very overprepared. But, from what I have been able to gather - which is limited, Valdemar is understandably secretive about him - Vanyel's maximum channeling capacity could easily be five times mine, and has been since the day he became a mage."

"Wow. With Golarion magic that'd mean there were a lot of things you couldn't do at all that he could learn to do?"

"Oh, I am sure there exist vast numbers of possible spells that have never been explored, here, because nobody can channel the required power, and if he has a chance then Vanyel could discover them. Among other things, I suspect he is powerful enough to directly modify the Web, the ward-structure that King Valdemar set up; it is partially the miraculous work of a god, so it is more powerful than anything an ordinary mage could work on alone, but I think Vanyel could do it. Though I am not sure he has recognized this fact yet and I do not intend to enlighten him."

" - right." Sigh. 

"If it's your country could you kill the people - when they're old, when they're going to die anyway..."

"I can make some choices around that. But - if this ends up being the plan, in the end, I am likely to have less leeway than I would like, and most of it needs to be within a very short period of time. If there were a way to store huge quantities of mage-energy, like water behind a dam, then there would be less need to use blood-magic at all, I could accumulate it from nodes over a very long time instead."

He sighs as well. "I do not want to be Vanyel's enemy. It is stupid and tragic and - I am trying to persuade him..." Shrug. "I am not sure what I hope to accomplish with it, he is a pawn of the gods being steered on the path They want him to follow."

Carissa has never seen Leareth visibly upset before, or even sad, but there's a flicker of it now.

"Everyone is. Except you, I guess."

Leareth says nothing, just nods heavily.

Carissa works on making Leareth's shield-amulet less visible to mage-sight and reads books about Valdemar. She doesn't try to learn the language because she hates languages.

Leareth asks about her progress at their next weekly check-in and how much longer she needs. He's very serious, no sign of the smile and warmth from before.

That seems like a bad sign but she doesn't know what she did wrong. "I can get it in the next couple of weeks."

"No need to hurry, this trip is for you." Leareth sits back, takes a breath and makes a deliberate attempt to relax his shoulders and soften his curt expression with a smile. "- I am not irritated with you. I am just - it is very wearisome to fight the gods, sometimes. Especially when They try to point bright children toward killing themselves at me."

"I....guess it would be. I'm sorry."

"Thank you." Leareth breathes in and out, and manages a slightly more genuine smile. "Anyway. Keep me updated, I suppose. And...that is my hope, right, in learning your magic and in having you on my side. That there will be a better way."

"I could almost definitely kidnap this specific guy? But - maybe he's metonymy, and I don't know the general solution, there. Probably fighting the gods is very hard even with an additional magic system."

Sigh. "Probably. I have sometimes had the hope that if I could just sit down in a room with Vanyel and have him listen to me, I could convince him that I am not working for evil. But - it is not actually that simple."

"I mean - it would suck to have your country invaded to be blood sacrifices to make some guy's god. I would surrender, if it didn't look like I could win, but - I wouldn't like you about it. 

And you probably are Evil. I've been - thinking, about what you'd see if you went to Golarion, and - I think it's true, that most big ambitious things are Evil."