This time, dying doesn't hurt. 

Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron, (involuntarily and unwillingly) called Demonsbane and Hero of Stony Tor by his allies - and the Butcher in White by his enemies - is, when it happens, sitting on a stool made of ice and snow, inside a hut of snow-blocks, talking to an immortal mage dressed in black, his destined enemy, his– in some ways his closest friend... 

“This is a very hard problem,” Leareth is saying. “I will gesture at a potential solution, and explain the details in time. We wish to build a being that is truly trying to accomplish the goals we have given it, but can also reason as though from an outside perspective – it should know that it is incomplete, that its builders were imperfect and may have made mistakes, and also that these creators still know more than it does of what ‘good’ means and may wish to correct it. It should wish to allow such corrections, because its true underlying goal is to come to understand what is meant by ‘good’. Even when it feels very confident that a certain action is correct, it should wish to run this by an outside force, and not be swayed by a prediction that this outside force will prevent it, nor try to deceive its makers by telling the most convincing version, even if its own internal reasoning says that this will best allow it to accomplish its current goals and values. Ultimately, it should hold something like philosophical uncertainty, and thus caution will emerge naturally, rather than being something we attempt to impose. Does this make sense to you in principle?” 

"- Herald Vanyel? ...Are you– Vanyel!" 

He feels himself coming apart. 

It is, in some ways, the exact reverse of what a Final Strike feels like from the inside. 

( - blue-white fire pressed up against the other side of a Gate - ) 

He feels the pattern-that-makes-up-a-Vanyel start to unravel, and there's no triumph in it, no victory, no defiantly offering up everything that he is to an unforgiving horizon. Just confusion, and a sort of cold distant resignation in the face of it. 

He's died before. It's hard to muster any fear. 

But frustration, yes. They were in the middle of a conversation. It feels very rude of reality to throw this at him for no reason - in this one case he's, actually, very damned sure it wasn't Leareth's doing -

Leareth watches Vanyel disintegrate into grey dust, along with the snow and sky, and - it feels like there should be time to react, like there should be something he can do, it seems to happen in slow motion and surely he can reach Vanyel in time, surely he can - what - something... 

But he can't; he has time to stand up, to take a step toward Vanyel, as the fabric of their dream-reality dissolves, and the last thing he sees is Vanyel's tired eyes looking into his.

Not angry. There's no blame aimed at Leareth. No pleading, either, no fear–

In that single endless moment when it's already too late for last words between them, let alone to do anything to stop this, he remembers one of their recent conversations. When Vanyel spoke of Urtho - 

He mentioned you. You were his best student. I’m not sure if he ever said this to your face, but he was proud of you. He said - he said that there was a spark in you. He feared some of your ideas, but he said, if you were to be lost to darkness, it wouldn’t be because you didn’t care, but because you cared too much. He saw that in you.

- and he opens his mouth to speak, but it's not like he ever prepared any final words for this particular scenario - 

The point at which Leareth wakes up screaming, is around the same point when the just-raised alarm makes it past all the other layers of his organization, and the frantic Mindtouch reaches him. 

Bard-trainee Stefen was, right before this, having a stupid nightmare. 

- too to turn back, too late for anything - only a single bottomless instant, offering up everything to a welcoming sky - fury and desperation and determination - one last fiery blaze and then nothing at all - 

And then it turns into...something else...the same awful unbearable wrongness except inside out and backward and somehow even WORSE, it's - broken, pointless, everything that ever mattered in the world falling apart for no reason at all - 

And then Stef wakes up in an inn in the northwest of Valdemar, to the sound of a startled shriek from the taproom below his crowded shared bedroom. Quickly followed by other yells of confused panic. 

Back in Haven, in the room that Stef shared with his roommate Medren for the past six years, a bed lies unmade and empty, as grey dust drifts down to the carpet.

With Stef on his Bardic Journeyman trip up north, and the rest of Haven thrown into chaos, no one will even see this scene for days.  

She wakes to the Death Bell tolling, and the agonizing soul-deep certainly that Vanyel is dead. 

The Death Bell doesn't stop ringing. Not for a long time. 

King Randale of Valdemar dies in his sleep, painlessly, never waking in time to know it's happening to him let alone to the rest of the kingdom which he's sacrificed so much for. 

And Shavri wakes up with a cry of shock-horror-confusion as half of her mind and heart and soul follow him into dust and ashes. 

She doesn't understand what's happening. She doesn't think she ever will again. It's not the sort of feeling that can ever be made sense of. 

But she tears herself free of the bedclothes anyway, because her lifebonded is gonegonegone and there's nothing to be found in clinging to the dust that used to be him, he's not there - and someone else might, still, be - 

Jisa is sleeping fitfully and she does half-wake, just barely in time to feel confused - to reach for a familiar/safe/beloved mind - but no time for words, only a fragmentary mindtouch, there and gone, and by the time Shavri reaches her daughter's bedroom there's nothing left. 

Rolan, the Groveborn Companion, a mind half in a blue place outside of time itself and only half bound to the body he wears in this life, sees it coming.

Not in time to act, if there were any action he could have taken, which there isn't. He sees the full inevitability of it, an instant before it happens - sees a dark wave smashing down on the tight-woven threads of silver that are his land his people his country and there is nothing, there was never going to be anything to do -

- except reach for his Chosen, because Rolan may be an immortal alien entity who was never human - who was built to love and lose over and over again and never break, to hold up the foundations of Valdemar century after century - but, in that awful second or two of realization before the storm hits, he is still humanlike enough to feel afraid. 

Dara snaps awake, aaaaaahwhatwhatwhat - 

Herald Tantras stirs sleepily in her arms. Starts to mumble something - her name, slurred with drowsiness. "Dara, wha...?" 

And then he looks at his own hand in confusion, silhouetted against the peaceful darkness of their bedroom, and lets out a soft confused whimper as it crumbles to dust, and then there's only silence. 

Dara's first thought is that it has to be a dream. 

Her second thought is that Rolan is panicking in the back of her mind and she's pretty sure he only does that for the literal end of the world. 

:Rolan, what–: 

:- I have no answers for you, Chosen: 

His mindvoice is empty and tired and full of aching, pleading, uncomprehending grief, as the Death Bell starts to ring and doesn't stop. 

Randi.

Dara doesn't even try for him with Mindspeech. She already knows the answer. The Death Bell is tolling it in her bones. 

:...Treven?: 

Herald-trainee Treven, heir to the throne of Valdemar, wakes for a fraction of a second, just long enough to feel the agony of a broken lifebond, but it doesn't last for long. 

And then Dara finds herself on her feet. Everything hurts, but that doesn't matter, right now, she has to - something - she has no idea what but she can't just pull the covers over her head and hide from it, no matter how badly she wants to.

:Keiran?: 

Just woken in terror and confusion!

:I don't - what's happening–:

:I don't know - Rolan doesn't know - Randi and Trev gone, and...: 

She can feel the others as well, now. Deaths falling like pebbles, but the pool they land in isn't still, now, there's no time for it to settle in between.