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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?"
Everyone is assembled and ready. He has all of his notes packed up. Now all they need to do is - actually go discuss the situation.
:I am going to Gate to Aktun with everyone: he tells his Carissa. :Can you - make sure everything here is all right while I am gone? ...I am going to take our Ma'ar with me, but not Tadesse, he seemed overwhelmed enough already:
:I'll do my best. I hope it's productive and I have no doubt it'll be awfully interesting.:
:I am sure I will have plenty to say to you afterward:
And Leareth gathers up everyone, and Gates them to his operations building.
"Yeah! It's Earth people extrapolating what it'll be like once they have spaceships that go faster than light, they don't yet..." And she puts it on.
And the group of them land in the most thoroughly shielded room of Leareth's operations building in Aktun, under the protection of Abadar's divine domain.
Leareth nonetheless checks all of the wards and magic detection before he ushers them into the office.
"Make yourselves comfortable," he says quietly.
The human Aroden from Mhalir's Golarion is mostly as Leareth remembers theirs, but - sadder, wearier, and somehow older-seeming even though his face is exactly the same.
He glances around at the room, nods approvingly. Sits without saying a word, his movements sparse and efficient.
Ma'ar is SO NERVOUS about being here and he's kind of mystified as to why Leareth brought him when he didn't even bring Tadesse, but it's not like he was going to refuse.
Mhalir wonders if he feels the most oriented to - all of this - just by dint of being in Leareth's head, able to watch all of his thoughts. Though, Leareth is still the only person since Aroden with whom he's felt unable to keep up with his host's thoughts, despite being a Yeerk and very well optimized for this.
He feels tired and scared and he wants this to be over - and doesn't at the same time, because the only way it's likely to end soon is in the worst of ways.
He misses Carissa.
"I think," Leareth says after a moment, "that the most efficient way of doing this is to start out by all of us speaking with our Aroden. I think normally it would be an excessive load for him, pulling all of us into the same conversation, but since we are all - versions of him, we are easier to talk to." Glance around. "I think that all of you except you, Ma'ar, have prayed to a Golarion god before?"
Leareth turns to the adult Ma'ar. "So the method of prayer that usually works for me, is just to think about what I most value, the driving force behind everything I do in the world– is it Urtho's Tower for you as well? Seeing it for the first time, with the stars behind it...?"
"Ready?"
Leareth glances around, makes eye contact with everyone briefly, and then closes his eyes.
Mhalir, I am not sure if you need to pray separately - probably it will help if you do...?
<I did before.>
And Mhalir leans into the memory of the first time he saw his homeworld from space.
Remembers vague wispy memories of his thoughts during those first days and weeks in Golarion. The cleric of Sarenrae's impassioned words to him. His half-incoherent reasoning on what to do with Alloran - a decision that was the wrong one on almost every axis, strategically speaking, but nonetheless changed everything...
What he wants for Carissa. Why it feels like growth, like something precious, for her to have literally tried to murder him.
- none of this seems like it's really on topic for the current problem, and he's not sure why his thoughts are having such a hard time going in that direction, but he holds it up anyway, everything that he is, where Aroden can see him and recognize the parts that are the same.
Remembering that he won't, ever, give up on trying to fix the world. That feels core to it - to him, to them...
It's hard to focus on following Leareth's prayer instructions because Ma'ar is mostly in a lot of pain.
...but maybe that pain is the relevant part, here, right.
He doesn't want the population of Hell to belong to Asmodeus, forever, to be hurt by Him and shaped by Him. And he doesn't want them to cease to exist forever. Because they matter, just by the fact of being conscious beings, because that's what he cares about - he doesn't know how these two things trade off, but the tension between them, right now, is what hurts so badly...
And he holds that up.
Ma'ar has prayed before and even talked to Aroden before and you would think that he would know how to do it, by now, but nonetheless it takes a little while before he can summon anything at all coherent.
I'm scared. I - want no one to ever die ever ever again I want - to find the best path here - to save as many people as we still can, from here...
...Aroden wonders what it was like, for his other self from another world, in the moment that he touched the Starstone and ascended to godhood again. He remembers it, in distorted echoes, only those fragments that a human mind can hold at all.
He - is confident that he made the best choice, at each step where he had the opportunity to decide anything at all. He thinks the other Aroden will agree. But it still hurts, holding the path of his own world up to this new light.
And he holds that as well, because he knows the other him will understand.
He doesn't know, yet, if in this retelling of their history, they'll be able to find a less destructive and tragic ending. But he very, very, very badly hopes that they will.
Leareth, King of Cheliax, talks to Aroden-who-is-a-god almost every day.
It still feels harder, this time, to summon the parts of himself that he knows they recognize in each other - the tower, the stars, the relentless determination.
But he does it.
And then all of them are somewhere else.
It's dark, and quiet, and gives the impression of being very far underwater and very far away from anything else.
It feels safe.
...
"...It would be very convenient," Aroden says, "if this could have waited just ten years so that I could become used to being a god again before needing to make this scale of decision."
"This is very relevant new information," Aroden says to all of them. Not quite in words. "It calls for shifting our priorities, but - not, necessarily, immediate decisive action."
And somewhere else, in parallel to the group conversation:
"- Were you afraid?" the human Aroden asks his godself.
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