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Ma'ar is watching the wards and the hypnotic swirl of the Void on the other side of a shimmering barrier, and practicing illusions. He's never been very good at them, but practice helps with everything.
- something, a flicker, a ghost, maybe nothing at all, but it doesn't fit and it jars him out of his half-trance of watching.
He keys into the navigation wards. Tells them to look here.
"- Urtho? Can you come look at this?"
"Maybe it'll work out better than last time. Just, I don't expect so."
...No, apparently not. Even though he was in her mind the entire time.
Even though, if he had stopped and ever, actually, considered the hypothetical of 'we learn about another Golarion with another Hell and another Aroden', he...could probably have predicted which way Carissa would jump.
...
Suddenly it hurts too much even to finish thoughts.
"- Carissa?"
The young man they saw before on the Elves' internet from Valinor, the one who looked ethnically from Predain and sort of like Ma'ar, takes a step forward. And - the way he says her name, the entire way he moves, is suddenly...
"Ma'ar," Mhalir hears himself say, distantly.
...He thinks Leareth even mentioned it, before, when he asked about crossing the Gate; his mind just apparently didn't bother to process it until now.
- wow, that's weird.
"- Ma'ar," she says, in a slightly different tone of voice. "Right. Because there are - lots of Velgarths."
"...You found me," he says, quietly, in Taldane. "- The other you, I mean. In Predain, when I was thirteen. You - rescued me, helped me - took me to Urtho, even when you didn't trust him..."
He ducks his head. "I'm sorry."
"It went really well." Flatly. "Good triumphed over Evil and everything."
"I'm not Good." He says it with equal flatness. "If you know another me then you must know that."
Leareth turns away from them, catches Urtho's eye. "Take us home," he says quietly.
He should have questions. Or something.
"How long?" he asks, since apparently these people speak Taldane.
"Yes. ...They called it the Cataclysm, afterward. I did not find out the full cause until much later - it was Urtho's work, Urtho's superweapons that I did not know he possessed -"
Leareth glances back, meeting Urtho's eyes for a second, then returns his gaze to Carissa and Mhalir. "I tried to rebuild. And it turned out that the gods of Velgarth were very against this, though it took me a thousand years to put together the pattern - They operate from the shadows, indirectly, by subtle nudges and coincidence. As I imagine the gods of Golarion did before prophecy was broken."
Leareth goes on. He recounts the early centuries of his work - the eventual realization that the gods of Velgarth seemed to be against progress or change generally and him specifically - the decision that, if he wanted anything to ever be different, he would have to bring the war to Them first.
His gradually-shaped plan to make a god of his own, one that wanted to work with sentient beings, toward their flourishing.
The cost, in blood.
A country called Valdemar, a founding King's prayer; a race of sentient magical horses, and their Chosen soulbonded Heralds.
A young mage called Vanyel, appearing in a Foresight dream to face Leareth and his army alone.
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