Leareth catches a glimpse of her thoughts for just long enough to start to hope - 

- and then he can't move, as she - puts a bag over his head? - except it somehow keeps going, and going, and it feels like he's going to fall into it forever, everything is dark and his Othersenses are fully stifled and he still can't move because Carissa didn't tell him he was allowed to - 

He's trying very hard not to panic, but it's hard. He has no idea what's happening - what Carissa's going to do next - the physically-impossible bottomless bag she shoved him in blocked his Thoughtsensing before he could pick up on her plan. 

There's air in the bag, at least. Some air, by his face. He can breathe.

Except that the air is already feeling stuffy, somehow thick, and each breath feels less satisfying than the last. 

Stay calm, he just needs to stay calm - it's not like anything else he does is going to help, right now - Carissa isn't going to want to kill him and even if she does by accident that's almost convenient, in a way, it'll get him out of here - 

Leareth wants it to stop, he wants to be somewhere else, he wants to be back in the north in his shielded workshop - his thoughts are tangling, trailing into fog -

- he can't remember where he is or why it's so dark or why it feels like he can't breathe... 

She has five minutes of Fly, maybe five and a half. It's time to get a little more than a mile away, at full speed. Not very far but a large radius to search, when you're looking for something as hidden as a Rope Trick, and she can do it again tomorrow if she needs to. She flies until the exact point where the spell gives out on her - Valverde's not going to know exactly how fast Fly is, he's not a caster - 

- and then casts another Rope Trick. Hers won't last as long as the First Arcane, who casts it Extended, but one thing at a time.

She climbs the rope. Hauls the prisoner out.

Leareth flops on the floor of the Rope Trick. His lips are bluish and he doesn't seem especially conscious. He gasps in a breath, starts coughing, sucks in more air, and then - still only semi-conscious, and entirely on instinct - tries to fling up a shield over himself.  

That is an impressive amount of spellcasting to do while under a geas that prohibits volitional actions! Maybe it's easier for Velgarth magic to be instinctive than for Golarion magic. Even if she had the slightest idea what kind of medical attention might be helpful, she can't do it now, so she sits down on the other end of the Rope Trick and watches through the viewing window and periodically checks that he hasn't choked on his tongue or anything.

It takes Leareth another thirty seconds of breathing fresh air before he wakes up enough to actually have thoughts. 

Where is he - 

Orient. 

His passive Othersenses pick up on - magical boundaries - a mind, familiar flavour of shields - oh, right, Carissa - 

Leareth tries to extend his Thoughtsensing further, again, but apparently this counts as too volitional, and the geas blocks him. It also blocks him from sitting up. Or even turning onto his side, which he would really like to do. 

"What–" He coughs again, still feeling very out of breath. 

"Your people showed up so we had to move." She doesn't sound at all sorry. "Looks like there will not be food today after all."

"Oh. Makes...sense. You have...good reflexes." Leareth is impressed, and doesn't try to keep that out of his voice. "I - sorry - can answer...more questions...in a few minutes..."

He says it calmly, though still pausing every few words to catch his breath, and then closes his eyes again. 

She has good reflexes? What's that supposed to mean? He feels that she has earned a good grade in kidnapping? She would, if there were a course in it, but she would not expect the good grade to be assigned by the prisoners. 

- anyway he hardly seems in a state to interrogate right now. She returns to staring through the viewing window. She should practice more with the burning rock while the adrenaline is still pumping through her and dulling pain but she doesn't really care to. They might have to move again and she doesn't want to be injured for it.

Leareth is thinking that he really should have drunk more water when he had the opportunity, because now he feels awful and Carissa is almost certainly not going to be willing to risk leaving the Rope Trick to get him something to drink. He considers asking for a blanket, at least, but he's not sure what supplies she managed to bring with them, if any, and besides talking is too much effort. 

He's very drowsy, and it doesn't seem like there will necessarily be a better time for sleeping, so he doesn't bother to fight it. He falls asleep within a few minutes. 

Even once the news reaches the main Chelish forces they're going to have a bit of a time finding her, now that she's here. They'll probably have to burn a Sending asking where she went. 

...not her problem. She just needs to get through the next nine hours with her prisoner alive.

She left the Thoughtsensing amulet behind in her hurry to leave, but he's still wearing some other ones; she takes one off to study while he sleeps. How would you make something like this.

And Leareth opens his eyes to blowing snow, white against a grey wintry sky, and a white-clad figure standing fifty feet away at the mouth of a passage carved through mountains. 

His first thought is finally and his second thought is that he hasn't prepared anything at all to say and he has no idea where to start. 

"- Leareth?" Usually Leareth is the first one to get his bearings and speak, Vanyel thinks. Right now, Leareth's expression is as unreadable as ever, but something feels off. 

"Herald Vanyel." 

Vanyel takes a deep breath. Leareth has said this to him before, and there's an odd echoey sense of deja vu in it. "Leareth, er, I - think I'm missing some context? Did something...bad happen? Are you all right -?" 

Leareth licks his lips. "Many things happened. I suspect you have noticed some of them. If you are willing to listen, I - have a great deal to tell you." 

Vanyel, despite himself, finds himself walking forward from the mouth of the pass, crossing the distance between them. 

Leareth's voice is almost perfectly level. His expression almost impassive. Probably no one but Vanyel, who's spent over a decade in this fraught, cautious, terrifying dance, studying every flicker of Leareth's eyelids or twitch of his mouth for information, would notice anything odd. 

Vanyel is pretty sure that Leareth is incredibly not okay right now. Which is, it turns out, a completely different flavour of terrifying from everything else that's passed between them. 

"Tell me," he says quietly, once he's close enough that they can speak at a normal volume. He casts a heat-spell, or at least a facsimile of one with the odd false-magic of the dreamscape. He tosses up a mage-barrier against the bitter wind. "Leareth, by chance does this have anything to do with, er, with whatever's going on in Iftel?" 

Leareth is grateful that Vanyel took the step of joining him and making the environment a little more comfortable. Apparently, even in the goddamned dream, the geas isn't letting him move or do any magic, whether or not it's real magic. At least Carissa gave him permission to speak; it would be so much more frustrating if he were here and couldn't even tell Vanyel anything. 

He notices, in Vanyel's guarded expression, the signs of concern. Of course Vanyel can tell. Leareth thinks he was coping mostly fine up until the bottomless-bag experience. Which he should maybe be less upset about than he is; if he had died, he would just have woken up in a new body. 

...Weeks or months later. With limited memories of the occurrences. And at this point he knows enough to guess how much trouble Carissa would have been in with her superiors. Dying would have been decidedly non-ideal. And, either way, being helpless and unable to move while slowly suffocating is not an experience he ever wants to repeat. 

"It does, yes," he says distantly. "I have...a great deal of intelligence on the situation there, which I would share with you. If you are willing to believe me, of course - but I assure you, it is not in my interests here to lie."  

"Probably not. I definitely want to hear it." 

Though, if it turns out to be important - which it almost certainly will - Vanyel is already flinching away from the conversation that he'll inevitably need to have with the Senior Circle. He can't think of any way to explain how he learned it without confessing to the dream conversations...

Leareth sees the uncertainty flicker across Vanyel's face. He can guess what it means. 

"If you are concerned that you have not told your King or the others about our conversations," he says quietly, "you might claim it was a new Foresight dream? They would still wish to confirm it, since Foresight is not perfectly reliable and is often difficult to interpret correctly." 

Vanyel blinks, startled. He wasn't expecting advice – though, at this point, he really shouldn't be surprised anymore. Leareth has given him all sorts of good advice, before. Part and parcel of what makes the man so agonizingly confusing. 

"Mmm," he says noncommittally. "Anyway. Go on." 

Leareth finds himself feeling - something, he's not sure what to name the emotion - about the prospect of telling Herald Vanyel that he was captured. That he was insufficiently paranoid in his precautions. It should have been more than sufficient, of course, and he still thinks that, in expectation, the risk was worth the upside. But he hadn't predicted the level of blatant interference that Vkandis Sunlord was apparently willing to throw at getting him captured by invaders from another world. Especially since, from his perspective, it seems that the enemy having their hands on him is going to substantially weaken Iftel's position in the war... Was Vkandis really willing to risk that much for a chance of taking Leareth off His gameboard? Or is there something else, something the gods Saw in the future, that Leareth himself is still missing... 

He tries to concentrate. "You are aware of a situation in Iftel. You must at this point have inferred that they are at war? I - received reports from my agents of the Council vote on aid, along with many other reports, and I decided to investigate more closely. I was near the Ifteli border, north of Valdemar proper, when a scattered platoon of fleeing Ifteli soldiers crossed the barrier - it initially appeared that their attackers were themselves unable to cross..." 

Vanyel doesn't nod. So that was the Web-alarm he and Savil responded to. He had Farsight on the location within a minute of Savil's worried summons, as soon as he could reach the Web-focus room to boost his Gift to that distance; he spotted some people, including some who seemed injured, and 'Ifteli soldiers' fits. 

Leareth doesn't need Vanyel's nod to confirm. It shows clearly in his expression, however carefully-controlled. They know each other well. 

"However," he adds dryly, "shortly later that guess was proved wrong. The invaders cannot physically cross - the barrier sets them on fire if they attempt it, which is not what it usually does but for once I cannot fault Vkandis' choice there - but, they have transport magic. More similar to Fetching than Gating - or I suppose what it most resembles, is the Suncats' odd ability to easily Fetch themselves and accompanying others over long distances–" 

"Suncats can– what?"