Moondance interrupts. :Starwind, ashke, this one - Leareth? - is not in good condition - ask her what she did to him -: 

:What did you do to Leareth?: Starwind demands. 

Well, she was trying to leave, and this put them in the Void, but this really shouldn't have hurt him that badly, she's only third circle and she feels like someone lit her on fire briefly but not, you know, unconscious, and he believes himself to be thousands of years old and very powerful so it should barely have affected him at all. Maybe it's because he hasn't eaten or drank anything all day?

It's about an hour until Cheliax will look for them. She thinks the rest of her party was captured; Leareth asserts they'll still be alive, but she hasn't thought about it much because it'd be a terrible idea to care. 

:He is mostly suffering from backlash: Moondance tells Starwind privately. :Lack of food and water is not helping, though: 

:We need to go. Now. Can we move him safely?: They don’t have permission to Gate across the barrier, so it’s going to be a mile on foot. 

:I would prefer not, but his condition is not life-threatening, and - there is little enough I can do for him here: 

Starwind looks to Melody. :Can she walk: 

:I’d have to muck with the set-command. Tricky to let her walk but not run away. It’d be faster just to carry her, honestly. Sorry: 

None of this Mindspeech discussion includes Carissa. From her perspective, about a minute passes in silence, and then one of the rescuers - a tall, muscular young man with his hair dyed in an odd green-and-brown forest camouflage pattern - unceremoniously picks her up and slings her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. 

The others are packing up Leareth onto a stretcher, more gently but not that much more. They’re in a hurry. 

Carissa had no particular expectation anyone would talk to her. She's not particularly invested in trying not to think anything informative, either, that seems hard and she's - very tired. Out of options and very tired. Whether things could have gone better is not really worth figuring out, now that they can't.

There ensues about half an hour of tramping through a dark forest; the scouts seem able to move just fine without using mage-lights, even burdened with Leareth unconscious on a stretcher. All the discussion takes place in Mindspeech, thoroughly excluding Carissa. 

...And then they approach the barrier.

From this side it's clearly visible, shimmery and golden and glowing very faintly, tinting and distorting the forest on the other side. They seem to be intending to just walk across. 

So not Leareth's people, who are at odds with Vkandis. She already suspected that, though; they look of a different ethnicity. 

Valdemar? Maybe one of them is Vanyel? They didn't seem to know Leareth personally, but things happened rather fast. 

Well, the good news is that Valdemar is Lawful Good and also Cheliax is not at war with them. Yet. The bad news is...everything else seems like bad news, really. It's quite enough good news to be holding onto, though.

The barrier looms ahead. 

The Adept carrying Carissa over his shoulder steps across without hesitation. 

- and for an endless, timeless instant, something catches her, like a fly in honey. 

It seems to turn her from side to side, then - inside out, in some disembodied metaphorical way - 

What are you? A question not in words, barely in human-legible concepts.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

- mortals are these temporary ensouled agents that live on the Material Plane and get, by agreement of the gods, a hundred years there, to give everyone who matters (that is, the gods) a fair shake at making them useful -

The inhuman presence pokes at her some more. 

An agreement was made, it declares, finally - again, not exactly in words, and the concepts conveyed are too big to fully grasp. Do not break it. 

And she's on the other side. 

Leareth was deeply unconscious, up until the moment that Moondance and the other litter-bearers carried him across the barrier. 

- and for a timeless forever he's lost outside ordinary space, being examined in detail by a Power which has never, before, deigned to talk to him. 

You. 

Leareth isn't sure what Vkandis wants from him. Yes. It's him. Conveniently trapped and helpless. Vkandis could absolutely set him on fire, right now, and there's nothing the Tayledras - or Carissa - could do. He's pretty sure Vkandis still doesn't have an angle to prevent him from coming back. 

He would be willing to negotiate. If Vkandis is interested. That's the shape of pattern that a Leareth is. Holding grudges over previous deaths by fiery conflagration would be stupid. 

There is an agreement. 

The vast alien presence feels - vaguely unhappy about that. 

You are Hers. For now. 

The Tayledras have a much less eventful out-of-body experience and then they're on the other side. 

When they emerge on the outside, Leareth is screaming like someone who has just been set on fire. The set-command is apparently not preventing this. 

- he hasn't, visibly, been set on fire, or otherwise harmed, but he seems incredibly distressed. 

:What is wrong with him - Melody, please make him stop doing that–: 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 

obviously she won't deliberately break an agreement that gods made regarding her (?????????) but it would be helpful if she had any information at all about WHAT IT WAS!!!!!

- well, probably, if she never again takes any actions, that will ...not be breaking it????? she has the ring of sustenance, she can just lie here until someone kills her, and then she will have kept the agreement.

Carissa is less distraught than Leareth. She just lies there.

Leareth is incredibly disoriented and in too much pain to finish thoughts - he has no idea where he is or what's happening or why he's hurting so much, except that his entire mind is screaming an alarm of DANGER - 

He tries to Gate out, which doesn't work at all, both because Melody's set-command is a lot more thorough at blocking even instinctive magic - including his Othersenses, he feels blind and deaf and claustrophobic - and because he has no reserves left to speak of.