The reports he gets are even more concerning. There's - fighting? The descriptions are baffling - people are disoriented, the bystanders who his Thoughtsensers could intercept don't tend to know much at all, but also what they did see doesn't match a civil war. Except he can't see what else it could be. He knows there was no invading army; he would have heard reports of it, and then the barrier would have stopped them anyway. 

He needs to know more and he needs to know it urgently and he doesn't have time to wait on his slow communication loop. He needs skill applied that he doesn't trust to any of his people, even Nayoki. 

Which is why, three weeks after the first minor reports began trickling in, Leareth travels in person to the wilderness north of Valdemar, west of the Ifteli border, and lurks in Thoughtsensing range, with a dozen of his best mages as a guard. 

He hears almost immediately when a desperate platoon of Ifteli soldiers unexpectedly spill across the barrier, fleeing an unseen attacker which apparently can't cross. At least not yet. 

It's a risk, he knows it's a risk, but he has a shielded cache and safehouse underground, within a few miles of their exit point. He can Gate directly there, without his terminus being detected, and then he's not just in Thoughtsensing range, he can cast on them too. 

He eavesdrops on the soldiers thoughts. 

They're fleeing an attack! Another one! From the bizarre portal to what they think might be another plane, which appeared out of nowhere in the northern mountains just over a month ago! And shortly later started sprouting invading forces! 

These are low-level soldiers, they don't know that much of the strategic picture, but they saw what they saw. That's more than enough to know it's bad. 

The very powerful arcane magic that has permitted her to go five days without sleep might be having side effects. Or maybe it's the other plane. She's not sure how she'd tell because one of the side effects is that the world feels very bright and very immediate, and things that are less bright or less immediate are making it harder to focus on. 

They're in pursuit of a group of soldiers going through the forcefield into the rest of this planet. If this planet flung up a forcefield against them this fast that'd be terrifying and impressive but she heard they didn't, she heard it's been there for months - that's the kind of not-bright not-immediate thought she can't follow right now. 

They're in pursuit. They have aerial support, flying devils and some pseudodragons out of Korvosa, which is good because the other people have aerial support too, gryphons, vicious and well-armored and smart. Mostly not spellcasters, though, and while the enemy outclasses the pseudodragons they don't seem to have any real dragons of their own at all - that's not bright and immediate enough, her mind keeps bouncing off it.

They're in pursuit on swift construct-horses whose feet are misty, picking off stragglers with fireballs and arrows, creating stragglers with dive-bombing attacks from the pseudodragons, but they're not going to get all of them by the time they make it to the forcefield, and they have no idea what is waiting on the other side. 

"Pull back," she says reluctantly, "- and let's get some cover, I don't like this storm - and if any of those are alive I want to talk to them about what the barrier does." What it does to Chelish soldiers is burn them alive, they did check. 

...That is terrifying.

Leareth is no less confused - he's about ten times as confused - and this is perhaps the most scared he's been in the last millennium. 

:Spread out, concealed, learn more: he tells six of his mages in private Mindspeech. To the others, :- guard a perimeter: And then he ducks back behind the cover of his own shielded room. And thinks. 

On the other side of the barrier, Carissa's people can in fact find an Ifteli soldier who's still alive, and even semiconscious, though he was seriously injured by the pseudodragon aerial attack. 

Injured is fixable, though she's not going to burn a spell slot on it unless he's unable to talk. She does burn a spell slot on Tongues. The other wizard assigned with this unit in the regrouping for the war has fourth circle but apparently never bothered to pick up a translation spell - maybe in the Hellmarch it's a sign of loyalty, to be practically unable to read books from anywhere else, whereas at the Worldwound it'd just be stupid. 

Tongues. 

"Tell me about the barrier."

The man looks at her, eyes darting back and forth. He clearly understands but does not seem particularly inclined to answer. 

The Ifteli soldiers are regrouping. Apparently whatever was in pursuit couldn't follow them across the barrier. 

Leareth reads some minds. 

...It seems like in fact the bizarre, terrifying attackers who might be literally from another plane - though they look human - can't cross the barrier? One of the soldiers seems to think it sets them on fire. This is perhaps the first time Leareth has ever had the thought 'good for Vkandis.' 

He still needs to be cautious, of course, but some discreet, directionally shielded Mindspeech is passed around. He wants his mages to capture one of the Ifteli soldiers, ideally while they're still dispersed and confused, before they can reassemble their unit and count who made it across. 

Carissa is not trained in interrogation but you can mostly get around that deficiency with mindreading, and people in a lot of pain don't make their saves. She steps on his fingers and casts Detect Thoughts and repeats the question.

"Sevar," the other wizard says. 

         "I have a spell up. Is it urgent?"

"Yes. I can Dimension Door with my familiar. I tried it. She made it across."

          "- what? They have a force field but you can just dimdoor it? - what's on the other side -"

"Empathetic link's out."

         "If you're going to send people across send - Valverde and Carvajal," she says. They're not idiots but she wouldn't be devastated to lose them. And back to her guy. "The barrier."

He's not thinking very clearly and he also expects they might have Thoughtsensers so he's trying not to think, but he can't help his mind going to the obvious. 

The barrier protects their country. It has for almost two millennia, ever since their distant answers prayed to Vykaendis and were granted a boon. In exchange for certain other preparations. Which were apparently necessary for a mysterious extraplanar invasion through a sudden portal? He's really confused about it. The barrier can only be crossed with the approval of their Sunlord. That's always been true but normally it just blocks people. Setting them on fire is new. ...He thinks. Actually he's not sure about that, it's not like anyone was ever stupid enough to press the matter before. 

...

If anyone does Dimension Door across the barrier, they'll find a northern boreal forest almost identical to the one on their side, though substantially less on fire, and a scattered line of soldiers, some of them injured, calling out to each other and trying to regroup.

(Leareth's people are creeping in to flank one of them, but they're shielded against mage-sight and Thoughtsensing by multiple talismans and physically concealed by all the trees and underbrush.) 

"'s a direct miracle by their god, several thousand years old," she says. Certainly this is known to their commanders already - so is the thing about the fact you can teleport across the barrier, no doubt - but it's new information for them. 

To the guy. "Tell me about Vykaendis. Good? Evil? Lawful?"

"I'm not sending anyone across yet," the other wizard says. "Just get some eyes on the place, see where the fleeing soldiers go -"

She nods impatiently. He outranks her but she's pretty sure being interrupted during interrogations is bad for the atmosphere and your odds of getting anything.

Those are baffling questions and he has no idea what that even means! Vykaendis Sunlord is their god and protects Iftel from harm and obviously that's good but who wouldn't say that about their country's god?

'Lawful' is even less sensical to parse. Vykaendis doesn't decree their laws - the priesthood has a few legal functions but the courts are mainly run through the secular administration with its elected officials - Vykaendis doesn't follow mortal laws because that concept makes no sense... 

Huh. So not Good, she doesn't think Good people would think that of their god, that the most important thing is that He's theirs, and...probably not Lawful, it's not impossible from that but Lawful gods don't generally leave the making of law to some other authority and it seems impossible that someone would serve a lawful god and not know that was an important thing about the god they served...

"Did Vkaendis open the planar rift?" They have conflicting accounts of that, it might well be something Cheliax did.

This random soldier doesn't have the slightest idea whether He did. He's not sure whether it's something Vykaendis could do, let alone why He would try it - it doesn't seem to have brought them anything good - 

He's mostly thinking loudly at this point that he's going to DIE and he's so scared that they're going to make it hurt. 

- oh, that's another good question. "What's your afterlife situation?"

His thoughts flash to some of the basic doctrine - Vykaendis protects the souls of His people after death, and rewards those who served Him well - but it's all very vague and hazy and tangled with half a dozen other mythologies, some of which are clearly in the 'stories for parents to frighten their children' genre - and he's even more baffled why attacking enemy soldiers CARE - 

It's one of the most important things about a god, what they do with their dead. Though she's not immediately sure what to make of it. In Golarion the only gods that get all of their followers rather than just worthy ones are the evil gods. But if you define His people more narrowly - clerics - then it could be any - and anyway these people don't go to the afterlives she knows and their entire system might be different - the only real takeaway is that Vkaendis didn't particularly care for them to know, beyond some vague platitudes. 

She respects Asmodeus's approach more.

Not the time, though. "The country on the other side of the barrier, what country is that?"

He's not actually sure, they've been moving around a lot and he's not amazing with his geography - it's got to be either Valdemar, or the patchwork of sparsely-populated northern forest and landholdings not claimed by any state. He's inclined to think they're far enough north to be outside Valdemar? But maybe it's just that sleeping outside is miserably cold. He's very tired of it. He's very tired of all of this. 

- he's wondering who got out, he knows some of them did - the plan was to head south to Valdemar, he hasn't heard any updates on Valdemar's official position on aid but the situation is getting pretty bad. 

Ah huh. "I don't suppose you want to renounce your god and pledge yourself to the service of Asmodeus." She wouldn't in his position, but it seems more decent, to ask.

What - he doesn't think it even works like that - also Asmodeus' followers are invading his country which doesn't exactly endear him to the idea and it's probably literally treason but mostly he's just never even thought of that as a thing you could do and is mildly horrified. 

Though maybe he should play along, if he keeps distracting them here then they're not trying to track his friends on the other side of the barrier, who are after all the ones who have any chance of getting out... He's too tired to think of questions to ask about Asmodeus, though. 

Huh. - not the time. "First Arcane, do you have your eyes on the other side yet?"

       "Yep. Trying to cross it with an arcane eye doesn't work but casting it from my familiar does. Forest. They're fleeing south."

She nods. "To - Valdemar. The neighboring country. Which they're hoping will side with them." 

       Sigh. "I guess we intercept, then. I have two more dimdoors. Let's take -  Sevar, Valverde, Carvajal, Lavilla - invisible. Valverde, Carvajal, I additionally want you under a nondetection, stay in the air and stay away from the rest of us. If we can interrupt them in getting to Valdemar, great, if not, let's proceed on to Valdemar."

He looks expectantly at Carissa. Why. Those orders don't oblige her to do anything except wait for the dimdoor - oh, she should kill the prisoner herself, or at least order it herself, and not behave like some kind of child who gets squeamish whenever a war isn't fought at Fireball distance. She would've just ordered it but now that he's found the situation notable enough to stare at her over she feels obliged to do it herself. She scrambles for her knife. 

The prisoner considers struggling, decides this is stupid, and closes his eyes. 

...There was magic. Magic that Leareth doesn't recognize at all. First something that felt - not like a Gate, exactly, but not entirely dissimilar from one either - and now something else - 

He has no idea what it is. It does mean that the invaders' magic can cross the barrier, even if they can't - and if that was an alien kind of Gate then maybe someone did cross and he just can't find them - but Leareth hates feeling this ignorant of his enemies' capabilities. 

He stays in the underground shielded room, but sends a mage-Thoughtsenser to creep up as close as he can while staying unseen and get a better look. 

A few hundred miles to the southwest, the Web-alarm sends Herald-Mage Savil Ashkevron sprinting to the Web-focus room. 

:- Van, did you feel that - alarm in the north - Iftel border, something new -: 

Carissa is barely paying the man she is killing any attention because she's busy trying to think through their next steps across the barrier and insofar as she is contemplating executing this man she is mostly thinking about looking like a competent professional her soldiers can respect while she does so. 

She slits his throat. There's a lot of blood. She sets the dagger down rather than figure out how to clean it. 

"We don't have orders to engage Valdemar's troops," she reminds her people tightly. "The First Arcane can take their mages alive -" - well, up to twice, with Lesser Geas - "point them out to him." 

The First Arcane is concentrating on his arcane eye, but he nods, and extends his hand for them to teleport with him. 

She takes it.

They cross the border.

Leareth's mage is incredibly startled by the sudden, even more powerful burst of MAGIC right there near his target of investigation. 

He freezes, but in the process of trying to stop mid-step, his foot catches on a root. He goes sprawling, almost directly in front of the Arcane Eye, illusion still in place but disrupted enough that it's obvious something just happened. 

Detect Thoughts is still up. She Fireballs the place where something bizarre happened, it shouldn't kill a wizard of any competence but it'll be distracting - and tries for the mind that must be there - the First Arcane is meanwhile dispelling everything around, though these people don't seem to have proper invisibility really -

The fireball in fact barely inconveniences Leareth's mage, who is thoroughly shielded, but it does disrupt his focus enough that he loses the illusion. Carissa sees a man in drab brown clothing, made to blend in well against the underbrush and carpet of fallen fir needles. 

Dispel Magic doesn't take out all of the man's protective talismans, but the one against Thoughtsensing in particular is, while it's incredibly efficient - almost undetectable by mage-sight except by a skilled Adept, and only in need of re-powering every three days or so - is also not very powerful. Its main use case is for undercover spies, who generally won't have mage-gift or the ability to re-power it themselves. 

Dispel Magic breaks it. 

The man isn't especially scared, yet - Leareth has this under control, Leareth always has the situation under control - but he's off-balance and very, very confused. He snaps out a quick burst of what's presumably telepathic communication, :under attack get Farsight on us: and breaks the connection before Carissa can get a sense of where or how far the communication was directed. 

Possibly they have just engaged Valdemar, though it'd be kind of bizarre if Valdemar guards their own borders with solo invisible people. Nonetheless best not to try to grab the guy until they know more. She throws up an illusion of her own, illusory guy-she-just-killed stepping through the forest towards the guy, hands raised - "We're looking for Valdemar, is this Valdemar?" in Iftel's local language -

While the First Arcane flies up and clear of the situation and looks for any traces of others -

Leareth's mages are good, but they've also got a lot on their minds. They're mostly relying on tree cover rather than illusions, which leak to mage-sight, and they're not optimizing for hiding from above. The First Arcane can manage to spot a flash of movement, one of the mages trying to get closer to one of the injured Ifteli soldiers. 

Leareth is busy receiving reports. They're more fragmentary than he would prefer - he doesn't understand exactly what's happening - but it definitely sounds like the invading force crossed in pursuit. 

Somehow. 

...Which means this location is suddenly very dangerous. 

He prepares himself to Gate out, but doesn't, not quite yet. Danger, yes, but the danger is still going to be there, and his own complete ignorance is its own form of threat. He's very well shielded; even a Final Strike wouldn't take out this bunker's shields except at point-blank range. Any more conventional attack would give him plenty of time to get out. 

He relays Mindspeech orders, and gets out a scrying-artifact to scope out what exactly just happened to his mage investigating the unknown spell. 

The mage scrambles to his feet. 

He's so confused. There's - magic there - it doesn't look like shields but he doesn't know what else it could be. 

The Ifteli language shares roots with Karsite, but also with ancient Kaled'a'in; he can understand it but he isn't fully fluent. He squints. ...They think he's Valdemaran? That's - actually kind of amusing, in a way. 

"You see who throw the fireball?" he says in awkward Ifteli, not answering the question. "You are being pursued - you need help, yes -?" 

"Yes, we're being pursued. The invaders threw the fireball."

("They're not Valdemaran," Carissa hisses to the soldier beside her. "Don't know who they work for except "Leareth". Tell the First Arcane -")

Leareth gets his scrying set up. 

...That's not an ordinary Ifteli foot soldiers. He's - very confused - and working at the remove of the scrying-artifact blurs his mage-sight a little, but...there's magic there and it has the same flavour as the other unknown spell - 

:It is a trap: he snaps out to his nearby sentries, for them to relay. :We should play along, but - get people closer to him, be ready for an ambush -: 

The mage receives this information via a two-step relay of short-range, shielded Mindspeech. 

He's a professional. No reaction shows on his face. His thoughts, however, are reeling. Leareth didn't say anything more, but he must suspect this 'Ifteli' soldier is actually one of the invaders - in disguise somehow - 

He wonders how long Leareth will linger before taking the route of paranoia and Gating himself out of here. 

"How do they cross barrier?" he asks. "They cannot do before, no?" 

So this person can't see through the illusion but he has - scrying backup - who can - "tell the First Arcane to fog anywhere we're acting -"

And she backs away until the illusion's at the end of her range - it'd be really nice to be flying as well but they are running critically low on spells, at this point, even with a wand for the Fireballs -

"Vkaendis burns them when they try," her illusion says. "Are your people of Vkaendis also?"

Ha. As if. This mage doesn't know all the context on Leareth's work and plans, but he does know, very well, that all of the gods are monsters. Some more than others, of course, but Vkandis Sunlord isn't one of the better ones. 

He wishes they'd planned a script more, although why would they have planned one for this. 

"No," he says tightly. 

To one of the others, :- tell Leareth to get out -: 

Leareth is ready to Gate out on a second's notice, but it takes a lot longer than a second for the warning to be - carefully, as untraceably as possible - relayed. 

And none of his people are especially nearby the hidden exit from the shielded bunker. He's told them to spread out, Thoughtsense anyone they can, get as much mage-sight intelligence as possible - 

On the other side of the barrier, about ten miles away, unbeknownst to any of Leareth or Carissa's party or the fleeing Ifteli soldiers, an unrelated fight is taking place.

It's not going well. 

An Ifteli priest-mage was cornered by those awful flying not-demons. There's no agreement yet on what they are, but they're too damned smart to be Abyssal in origin. 

He tried to take shelter in a rocky crevasse, but the enemy must have seen him enter; there are people coming now. 

He sends up one final prayer to his god, and calls a Final Strike. 

The crevasse runs deeper than he realized. There's a fault-line in the rock. Not that unstable, but unstable enough. 

The barrier shields Iftel, but it doesn't shield out forces transmitted through the underlying earth and stone. 

From the perspective of Leareth's people and the Chelish party, the earthquake comes from nowhere. One moment, nothing; the next moment, the ground heaves under them, trees uprooted, an ancient glacial plateau of stone rearing up through millennia of accumulated soil and forest - 

They're near the epicentre, but it's not actually that powerful of an earthquake, in absolute terms. It's going to knock down everyone still on their feet, and kill a lot of trees, but no gaping holes open into the earth. 

It is, however, a deeply unlucky earthquake, from the perspective of exactly where one particular well-concealed bunker lies nestled in the rock where it was carved out. 

Leareth has almost no warning. He was ready to Gate on a second's notice, but the first shock flings him into the wall - shields shatter as the stone that scaffolds them is crushed apart - he loses focus on his destination in the north, and has less than a second to react, the ceiling is already coming down - 

Leareth has finely-honed reflexes. He can raise an unscaffolded Gate in well under a second. If it's short-range. 

He blind-Gates to the surface - no, twenty-five feet above the surface, the fall won't kill him but emerging in the wrong place might and everything is going wrong and he knows exactly why - 

From the point of view of Carissa and her people, there is an earthquake, and then a sudden burst of very powerful magic and then a Gate and a man falling from midair toward the shattered trees below. 

She drops her illusion and runs towards there. 

The First Arcane's strategic assessment of the situation is that he'd like to get back to Iftel, where everyone around is hostile but there's only one faction of hostiles and their capabilities are pretty well known and do not include Gates into the sky or invisibility or scrying-based backup for random scouts. Iftel, and then a Rope Trick to sleep in. That leaves a fourth-circle spell unused, though. 

He swoops back towards the rest of his crew and conveys these orders with a sparkling incomprehensible illusion in the sky and then fires off a Lesser Geas at the falling man as he crashes into the ground, because falling from the sky is terrible for your spell saves. If it takes he'll need Sevar to convey the instructions, she's the one with Tongues up. 

Leareth falls and he's already extending all his Othersenses, and reinforcing his shields - but focused on physical shields, he wants to land uninjured, he's distracted trying to orient to what's below him - 

He feels the magic crash into him.

It feels sort of like a compulsion - at least, it's more compulsion-shaped than shaped like anything else familiar to him - but it's...blank? Contentless? And absurdly overpowered. Leareth has spent a lot of time drilling mages to cast compulsions more efficiently, because inexperienced mages make them clumsy and put in too much power, which mostly just makes them more detectable - but this is ten times that, or more - 

He struggles against it but it's unfamiliar magic, coming at him from an unexpected 'angle', and he knows even as he smashes through tangled branches that he didn't hold it off. 

And then he's sprawled on pine needles. Unhurt save for bruises, he thinks, but with the wind thoroughly knocked out of him. 

Does the not-compulsion let him Mindspeak his nearest mage and order them to GET OUT NOW. 

Yep! It's not doing anything, just sitting there, gluey -

"Don't take volitional actions I or a delegate haven't in the last hour authorized," a voice says in fluent Valdemaran, slightly breathless, and then it hardens into place and now it's doing some things. 

She takes the prisoner's hand and reaches for the First Arcane for the teleport out. 

:Get out now rendezvous in the north - I am compromis–: 

And that's all Leareth has time for. He was going to add that his people should get him out if they can, Nayoki will be able to fix - whatever that was - but he's run out of time. 

He can tell that struggling won't help, right now, so he doesn't. 

Some frantic, rapid Mindspeech is exchanged between various other mages, scattered around throughout the earthquake-smashed forest, and then the one who can do the fastest unscaffolded Gates throws one up and vanishes.

The others freeze behind shields and wait to see what's going to happen next. :Leareth are you all right: one of them sends. 

Mindspeech is an action and he can't. He would just - not shield them out - but he's wearing a talisman and shutting it off would also be an action. 

It takes an agonizingly long moment for all their people to get to them for the teleport but they're not stopped, somehow. They dimdoor back across the border. The First Arcane puts up a rope trick, which is good of him because Carissa is completely out of spells now. Detect Thoughts isn't getting anything off their prisoner and is about to expire. 

      "He's wearing some kind of protective equipment with a very minimal signature," the First Arcane says. "They all are. Dispels easy."

"Huh." She tries taking that off. 

Leareth's people considered mounting a rescue. 

But several of them were badly injured in the earthquake, and several others are trapped in ways that would be easily solvable by throwing magic around, except the invaders can clearly track magic and at this point it's not at all clear they could do better than getting themselves captured as well. They keep trying to reach Leareth, and the strongest Mindspeakers attempt to Thoughtsense everyone in the invading party, right up until the point that another flare of magic makes them all disappear. 

They hide the Rope Trick in the forest on the Iftel side of the border wall. Hauling the prisoner into it is annoying but it's much harder to use a geas to make them do things rather than make them not. 

    "I'm going to sleep," says the First Arcane. "Can you read him -"

"No. Not even with the artifacts removed. Spell's expired now anyway."

     Shrug. "See if talking gets anywhere." And he closes his eyes and apparently is immediately asleep.

Carissa is exhausted but not sure she'll have such an easy time of it. Probably it's one of those things that comes with maturity. 

She spends a minute staring at the exhaustion-fuzzed featureless wall of the tiny demiplane, chasing her thoughts in circles. - no. She can do that once Tongues runs out. 

"You can speak aloud to me," she tells the prisoner. 

Leareth lies on the floor - ground? - of wherever this place is. He's uncomfortable, but mostly because being very well shielded doesn't actually prevent you from collecting a lot of bruises when you fall twenty feet out of the sky and land in a heap. At least he didn't hit his head. 

'Can' speak aloud doesn't mean he has to, but he's not going to learn much by just lying here. They all have some sort of shields, and apparently pushing with Thoughtsensing to get through them counts as an action. 

"Where are you from?" he asks her. 

"Cheliax. How about you."

"...The north." He's not even trying to be misleading or evasive; his territory doesn't have a name. "Is Cheliax in a different plane from this one." 

"I think so. It could just be another planet. The north? The place you're from just calls itself the north? North of what?"

"North of here." Leareth isn't sure if her magic can force him to answer, like a coercive Truth Spell, and he's not going to be any more informative than he must. "Why is Cheliax invading Iftel?" 

Shrug. "Why'd you fall out of the sky?"

Leareth watches her face closely, keeping his own expression impassive. "There was an earthquake and it would have squashed me had I not moved." 

She mostly looks very very tired; she's summoned a wisp of magic that she seems to be using to examine his talismans, and her hand is shaking slightly. "If you tell us who you're from we might let you go. We're not at war with most of this planet's countries."

Leareth doesn't trust that claim at all. 

"I am not from a country, per se. I do not have any diplomatic alliance or other relationship with Iftel. And I am no friend of Iftel's god." 

This is true. He's also not sure whether he likes Cheliax any better, and he's not inclined to let an awful war play out and wreak devastation on a country of mostly-innocent people no matter which god they worship, but nonetheless. 

- so just an independent adventuring party that heard there was a war and camped out to check it out. That makes sense of everything, actually, including the very fancy magic items. She feels abruptly relaxed, she knows how to deal with adventurers. "Vkaendis, right? What's He all about?"

She's clearly just drawn some inference, one that she feels confident in, that clarifies her position on who he is and what he wants here. He desperately wishes he knew what conclusion. It seems well past the bounds of plausibility for her to have guessed the truth, from what he said, but he's not seeing an obvious story that would fit... 

"Vkandis? He is the primary god of Iftel, where He does - what you just saw. ...And apparently Iftel has substantially more of an army than any of us from outside had realized, if this war has gone on for a month and they are not yet defeated. Vkandis is also the god of Karse, to the south, where He - interferes in geopolitics in various ways." 

"Right, but - is he Lawful? Good? Evil? What kind of afterlife do his followers get? What gods is He allied with? If there were a threat to this planet, would He be one of the gods allied in doing something about it, or would He be too busy doing His own thing?"

Leareth lets his lips twitch slightly. "- I think we are operating under very different paradigms, here, most of those questions are - not ones I would consider it made sense to ask. And our knowledge of Vkandis, as of other gods, is very limited. ...I can try to answer nonetheless, if you can define your terms more clearly." 

"Sure. So, where we're from, you can categorize gods by how they relate to - god-concepts, they don't have exact human analogues, but we call them Law and Chaos and Good and Evil. Law is coordination. Giving, and keeping, your sworn word is Law, having armies where soldiers obey orders is Law, order is Law. Chaos is the opposite. The Chaotic gods - reject the idea that their future selves ought to be bound by their current selves, or reject the idea that they have continuity with their future selves, or they just do what looks strategic in the moment without trying to be the kind of entity that other entities can coordinate with. 

Good is, you know, feeding orphans and fighting demons and being merciful and protecting the innocent - acting in the interests of others. Evil is acting in your interests.

So people who follow a god where I'm from, they'll say, "oh, I follow Calistria, Chaotic Neutral, She's the god of revenge and escape and abortions and shelters for women fleeing their husbands. Or, Sarenrae, Neutral Good, She's the goddess of orphanages and food banks and nice stuff like that. And - of course the actual gods are more complicated than that, of course humans are very small next to gods and don't really understand them, or their motivations, but Sarenrae's going to give most of her miracles to nice people who run orphanages, right, it's not whatever She really truly is but it serves Her interests for there to be more of it, for whatever reason, and if you imagine it's because She's just like a nice grandmotherly person who wants to feed the hungry you'll be wrong but - but you're going to be wrong whatever you imagine, humans can't understand gods."

The thing Leareth is thinking, (hopefully) behind the privacy of his shields, is that some specific humans understand a lot more about gods than she can imagine. 

He's not sure if his mind is still private, though. He didn't miss that they noticed and removed his Thoughtsensing talisman. He still shields natively, of course, he's a moderately strong and very well-trained Mindspeaker as well as a mage, and it seems that maintaining the shields he holds by default all the time isn't an action. Possibly they could order him to take his shields down but they haven't, yet, and maybe it's hard in the same way using his kind of compulsion to force precise actions is hard? 

Still, he nudges his thoughts away from that entire area. 

"I see. That ontology is - not how I think of our gods. I am unsure if our gods are even more alien and inhuman than yours, or if They simply communicate less. Certainly I cannot easily say whether Vkandis counts as Good or as Evil. He - promotes geopolitical stability, when it aids Him, and that also helps the citizens of His countries. He has worked a miracle of Healing through one of His servants, before. But also He is not averse to setting His enemies on fire." 

" - I mean, even Good gods will set their enemies on fire, if it advances their goals. Good humans sometimes won't but that's because being a Good human is really hard and you kind of have to err on the side of not doing most things that advance your goals, if you want to stay in Good. The Good gods are less limited."

"- I see. That is reasonable." 

Leareth tests whether the compulsion is going to let him sit up. He's tired of lying sprawled on his back on the floor of this weird not-space. 

Nope. 

"What other gods do you know of?"

That's inconvenient. 

"The Star-Eyed Goddess is one. There is a god of the Valdemaran region but They are - more subtle, and as far as I know not worshipped under a specific name. There is a minor local god in the north, Kernos, likely allied with the Valdemaran god. South there is Anathei of the Purifying Flame, and..." 

He can list out a few more remote gods, including the gods of the Haighlei region. "- I suspect They count as Lawful, under your system? They certainly seem to prefer that the world proceed in an orderly fashion, without any unexpected hurdles." 

"That's good."

"I have not found it to be so, particularly? A world trapped forever at where we are now, stagnant and unchanging, is - still one where many people starve, pointlessly, or labour their whole lives to eat, when they could otherwise have learned and built something new." 

" - I think stability makes those things easier to fix, actually? If you know there's not going to be a war you don't have to waste time training for a war, and can spend it inventing new magic or whatever. If you aren't worried about bandits on the roads or pirates at sea you'll send out more ships and get more trade goods. If your kids are probably going to live, you send them to school, spend more money on them..."

Leareth gives her a startled and mildly impressed look. 

"- Ah. We are using the word differently, I think. ...Or perhaps it is merely a difference in degree? I agree, a certain level of stability is essential for progress, but...my impression is that the Haighlei gods in particular are optimizing for stability alone, at the cost of everything else. Their society is incredibly averse to any changes, unless they are approved by the gods which is rare - that includes adopting a new invention or form of magic and for all I know it bans exploring new trade routes. They do have schools, they are literate, their children are educated, but...nonetheless their society has progressed very little in a thousand years." 

"Huh. - well, Asmodeus isn't going to do that, Cheliax gets richer every generation."

"I am glad to hear that. Asmodeus is - Lawful, I am guessing, you seem to approve of Law. Lawful Good, then?" 

"Asmodeus is Lawful Evil."

"...I think I failed to follow one of your definitions of terms, then. Evil is seeking one's own desires - why would Asmodeus care if Cheliax is richer– Oh. Of course. For instrumental reasons - if Cheliax is His resource, that He can use to accomplish His other goals?" 

"Yes. People are a resource and wealthier, smarter, more competent people are a more valuable one. A King would rather be King of a rich populous country than a poor stagnant one, at least if he can control it, and the same goes for gods, at least our gods."

"I see." It certainly makes sense to Leareth, as a paradigm; if anything, what he's not used to is other people pointing it out so blithely. "So - do you consider yourself a resource belonging to Asmodeus, then, to be wielded as He wills it?" 

"Yep. We also pay in, you know, money and magic items, though, if that's more your speed."

"Well, if you are a tool wielded by Asmodeus, then I think I need to know what Asmodeus' desires and goals are, here. And then we could speak of payment in magic items, if I - feel inclined to ally with Him at that point." 

"Asmodeus rules Hell, and He wants people to go there when they die, where they're useful to Him, and are transformed into the devils that are His servants and that are like humans without all of the weaknesses and failings like not knowing what you want and knowing what you should do but not doing it and being upset about things that are actually fine, which on Golarion were introduced to the world by other gods who wanted humans to be free willed. He prefers that Cheliax be stable and prosperous and it is wealthier every generation. Cheliax defends our planet from the Worldwound and from other dangers that might destroy or destabilize it, and trades with other countries, and is prosperous enough that every student with the potential to be a wizard gets to study to be one. It allows women to become wizards too." She says this like she considers it a substantial selling point next to most places. "It is His eventual intent that every soul will go to Hell, because the other afterlives are irresponsible with them."

"You ought probably be aware," Leareth says dryly, "that the word 'Hell' as it is - being translated by your magic, I suppose - does not exactly have positive connotations to most people in this world." 

It's not the most important point to be responding to, here, but it's true - while still saying little about his own beliefs - and it buys him time to think. 

Leareth is suspicious and on edge and so incredibly confused. Her explanation mostly coheres, to him? It does feel significantly as though she's defending against people who aren't him - who aren't even from his world - but of course she would be. 

He's...actually very curious about the 'human weaknesses' part.

- Not knowing what you want and knowing what you should do but not doing it and being upset about things that are actually fine - 

He wouldn't disagree that all of those are weaknesses. He WOULD disagree that they're in any way related to 'free will' as the scholars of Velgarth conceive of it. Not that Leareth necessarily thinks of that as a coherent concept at all. Mostly he's...wondering if the training methods Asmodeus uses are anything like the ones he's figured out for himself, over long millennia of trying relentlessly to make fewer mistakes. 

Maybe they're better. 

"Huh. Maybe we should call it something that doesn't sound like a local afterlife it isn't. The Nine Circles, does that sound neutral?"

"It does, yes. ...Why does Asmodeus feel that your other 'afterlives' are irresponsible with the souls they hold?" 

"Well, Abaddon has daemons that just eat souls! Then they don't exist anymore! And the Abyss doesn't have people who eat souls recreationally but a lot of them still wind up destroyed one way or another. And in the Maelstrom everyone eventually turns into a bundle of chaotic energy that can't have effects on the world or be affected by it. Elysium is an infinite wilderness where you wander around forever. In Nirvana you turn into an animal. In Heaven you become a being of pure Lawful Good, which means you only care about others and not yourself and you don't have any desires or preferences as an individual. In Axis you become a being of pure Law, which loses even more. And the Boneyard doesn't want to have souls so it only holds onto them for a bit until it can shuffle them off to some other places."

"I see," Leareth says, neutrally. 

(He is deeply suspicious of that explanation. It feels particularly - motivated in a certain direction? And even if he doesn't fully understand what these directions mean, yet, he can still be suspicious about bias in general.) 

"Anyway. What does Asmodeus wish to achieve by conquering Iftel?" 

"I have no idea."

"- Well, that does seem relevant to whether I wish to sign on as - what, the head of an auxiliary mercenary company? I have little concern with Iftel specifically. If Asmodeus intends to conquer the entirety of this continent, that may be a different story."

Leareth says it quietly and sincerely and none of it is exactly false. He's busy taking down half a dozen mental notes to pursue later, when he's less distracted - ideally when his captors are more distracted, just in case they have Thoughtsensers who can slip through his shields unnoticed - but at the same time he can't let that paralyze him, he can't just stop having thoughts - 

(He's also terrified, but quietly, in the back of his mind. It won't help.) 

"I really doubt He means to do that. I think Iftel started it and now we've got to finish it but we haven't got a grievance with anyone else, and it'd be pretty ill-advised to go to war with an entire continent. But probably a lot of this depends on negotiations among the gods and you and I aren't going to be able to guess how those'll pan out."

Leareth is buying very little of that! He's not sure how much he thinks Carissa is lying, versus was given false information, versus - some sort of broader and even worse systemic distortion, where everyone believes the false story they tell themselves... 

He really needs a plan here, for where he's steering this conversation and what he wants the outcome to be, but he's trying to piece that together on the fly, and without pausing so it's clear he's doing so - 

"I see. ...To be honest, I have no grievance against Iftel as a polity, and whatever I may think of Iftel's god, I am not sure whether I would be interested in killing Iftel's soldiers, even for money. However, I also, of course, prefer not to remain a prisoner." 

"Maybe we can send you to the Worldwound or something. It wouldn't be my call."

"I understand. Whose decision would it be, then?" 

"Not gonna answer that. What kinds of magic can you do? That'll be relevant to how much effort they'd be willing to put in to getting you to the Worldwound in the middle of a war."

Leareth's eyebrows lift slightly. "I am a mage. As I am sure you noticed. I have the capabilities one would expect, which I am also sure your leadership has been cataloguing." 

"Not all mages are the same and we haven't seen any other ones fall out of the sky when startled. They haven't been wearing gear like this, either."

"- I have unusual skill at building mage-artifacts, that is true." He could try to bluff that they're not his work, but anyone with Adept-level skill would be able to recognize his magical signature on the work. "And I can cast Gates without a doorway to use as scaffolding. The skill is difficult, but not so difficult; mostly it is not something mages of other countries think to train."

It might be worthwhile to volunteer other abilities, but he'll see where this gets him. Ideally what he wants is for her leadership to remove the compulsions on him, while he still has some secrets in reserve. 

(And if they're mindreading him, well, he's almost certainly lost and the only way to mitigate it is continuing to notice that he doesn't actually mean them harm, based on what he knows so far.) 

"I'm specialized in crafting magic items, too. I don't even know how I'd start on doing something like this, though. Maybe when the war's over you can show me."

"You seem to have been trained to use magic in a very different way! You were able to cross the barrier, but it looked nothing like a Gate." 

And whatever she did to his head is vastly overpowered and differently-laid-out from a compulsion, but he's not going to poke at that quagmire just yet. 

"When we're not at war I think it will be a lot of fun to show you all the things we can do and compare notes! Probably there are some useful combinations of techniques."

"I imagine so! Anyway, thank you for the explanation. I badly wished to know what was happening in Iftel, which is why I was hovering nearby, and - now I know more." 

Leareth smiles a little, then closes his eyes and lets his head rest propped against his fist, as though just realizing that he's tired. (Which he is.) 

It's fairly clear by now that Carissa has concluded - not wrongly - that Leareth isn't acting on behalf of a state, but rather leads an independent group. She's probably assuming a military-focused group, and she didn't dispute that characterization when he slipped it in. She knows that he's unusually skilled in magic - and she doesn't seem to find this odd or surprising - but Leareth thinks she still has no idea of the scale. 

...All right. Just to test if anyone in here is paying attention... At this point he's fairly sure they're not, the woman questioning him is visibly exhausted, for good reason after that fight, and it would be an epic challenge to act that well after the fight they had. But still.

Leareth, still in his tired posture, spends fifteen seconds thinking about BUILDING A GOD. (Without covering any specifics.) And, with his peripheral attention, watches for any reactions. 

Carissa is staring off tiredly into the middle distance, contemplating whether that's as much as she's going to get out of being friendly and it's time to switch to threatening him. She has another half hour of Tongues, so she shouldn't leave it too long. Maybe a few more minutes, give him some time to think, and then - suggest gently that when he wakes up the First Arcane is going to want to use magic to extract the rest of the answers they need, and it'd really be better if Carissa could just know them already.

She is not reading Leareth's mind and cannot react in any way to the idea of BUILDING A GOD.

Leareth would have quite a lot of thoughts about this, probably, if he had any way of knowing what Carissa was thinking! 

...He is, in fact, after his quick test, trying to check whether if he relaxes in the right way he can trick his mind into "extending his Thoughtsensing further to absently scan his surroundings" not being a volitional action. It's in fact something he does often, as an instinctual rather than voluntary motion, but it's not a continuous effect the way his passively-open Thoughtsensing is - he's pretty sure he could get thoughts off anyone unshielded, with that, but everyone here seems to have adequate shields - maybe when they move him later... 

He's going to keep trying to hit the right half-daydreaming mental motion, though, until it either works or his captors interrupt him. 

She interrupts him a couple of minutes later by reaching into her backpack for paper and pencil. "I'm sure you would love a nap, and I would too, but there's a bunch of geopolitical context on the world we actually need first, let's do that really quickly. I get the sense people in Iftel don't know much about anywhere else, so it's lucky we ran across you. You mentioned - the Haighlei Empire? Where's that, relative to here?"

"Far to the west. On the other side of an impassible wasteland. I know of it and some of its history - it can be reached by sailing around from the far south - but it is quite inaccessible from this region." 

Leareth is fairly sure that at some point, someone - who may or may not be his current interrogator - is going to stop playing nice. (And also that none of them are currently reading his mind, so now is a good time to give simple straightforward answers while he considers any longer-term plans.) 

"What're the closer countries?"

Iftel has maps. They're a prosperous country; plenty of merchant caravans cross their borders and the barrier, even if no military forces do and mysteriously all his attempts to slip in spies fail. He's fairly sure that naming some countries isn't giving away intelligence that these invaders - their leaders, at least - don't already know. 

"Hardorn - directly south. Valdemar, mostly west. Karse, west of here, south of Valdemar. Rethwellan, further west from Karse. Jkatha, south of Rethwellan. Velvar, south of that. Seejay, east of Velvar and - Karse, I think...?" 

She's trying to draw a map. "What're they like? What's Valdemar like - it's the closest, and we'll want to get along with them -"

Leareth thinks briefly through the categorization system she explained. "...Valdemar is very Lawful Good, by your reckoning." 

"Huh. Well, could be worse, I guess, unless it's the kind of Lawful Good where they'll hear we're Evil and invade right away. The Lawful Good countries at home are - all right, I feel kind of sorry for everyone involved but they're not bad neighbors."

"My impression is that most places in this world think of Good and Evil in less - black-and-white - terms. And then there are the pragmatics, of course. Iftel and Valdemar formed an alliance a generation ago, and so Iftel must have already requested aid," this is true and he's just omitting the part where he knows it directly because he has a network of spies, something no random mercenary would have, "but Valdemar of course has - resource constraints. And Iftel did not offer help in their last war. ...It would depend, I suppose. If your army were murdering babies for blood-power then I cannot see the Heralds leaving it be." 

"Is that common? Seems kind of like burning your seed corn."

"- It is not common, no. Killing infants in particular is rare outside of some odd cults in the far south. Valdemar - would also have ethical objections to an invader taking blood-power from the deaths of enemy soldiers, who they were killing anyway, but... I am less sure they would intervene on those grounds alone. Anyway, currently I think neither I nor they have any indication that your forces are doing that." 

Carissa has no idea what technique he's even referring to but doesn't care to reveal that. "If we sign a treaty with them we'll abide by it, even if it bars something we'd otherwise find useful. That's why Lawful Good countries generally make okay neighbors, you can hash out whatever you each care the most about and then let live. At the Worldwound we fought alongside Lastwall, which is Lawful Good. - how about Karse, what're they like."

"...Rather messy, recently," Leareth confesses. "They were at war with Valdemar for four years, and a little over a year ago they brokered a peace treaty, with a state marriage between their two rulers. The leadup to that peace treaty is when Vkandis performed a Healing miracle, supposedly. There are pockets of civil war. Their priest-mages used blood-magic and personally summoned demons during the war, both of which I think that Valdemar - and I assume your world's categorization - would see as evil. The current administration is clearly very dependent on Valdemar's goodwill, though." 

" - Vykaendis did one healing miracle to communicate his support for the alliance? Are ...miracles that rare?"

"- Yes? Are they less rare in your world?" 

Their unit doesn't have a cleric because he died two days ago but every unit has one. She's not allowed to share information about the capabilities of their forces. 

"Healing is a very easy miracle with our magic, and Good clerics usually do it at the slightest provocation. They'll enter a village and everyone'll run up to them for miraculous healing," she says instead. 

Iftel definitely has Gifted Healers, so mentioning that won't give anything away. 

"- Perhaps our gods offer that at one remove?" Leareth suggests. "Healing is a Gift, here, analogous to mage-gift - and many people believe that the gods can nudge toward a certain number of Gifted children being born, in Their regions." 

"Huh! I rather like that, actually - in Good countries Healing is all through the churches, so you'd better be on friendly terms with them if you want it. In Cheliax it's done with wizard magic but that's much more expensive. I haven't heard of anywhere where a significant number of people are just born with a Gift for it. It seems like our version serves the gods more, offers them finer control - they can take cleric powers away if they're displeased with a follower -"

Leareth shivers - tries to hide it - decides against trying to hide it... 

"Given what I know of most gods," he says as lightly as he can manage, "I - would not find that reassuring at all." 

"Well, yeah, it's worse for us, but since it's better for Them I'd expect Them to do it, if they can. Anyway, Cheliax isn't like that, we've got arcane healing."

"- I am glad? ...And, yes, I agree, that state of affairs could be more beneficial for the gods." He looks into her eyes. "But I am not a god. And neither are you." 

" - well, no. Wasn't even particularly planning on it. Rethwellan?"

"Rethwellan is - doing fairly well. Centre of scholarship, has the most famous academies and hosts many of the best schools for mages. ...Were not planning on – is there a sufficiently known route to becoming a god, in your world, that some people do plan on it?" 

Leareth is watching her particularly closely, and throwing a lot of his attention at finding ways that getting around her native shields to read her thoughts wouldn't count as an action. And also he's watching her face, of course, just as a fallback. 

"Some of the gods are ascended humans. Not here?"

"- Fascinating! Not here that anyone knows of, no." It's not impossible that someone could do it - some of his own plans rely on it - but they...wouldn't really, in any very meaningful sense, be the same person afterward. 

"Almost everyone who tries fails and the last success was a thousand years ago but particularly ambitious wizards usually at least contemplate it. I want to be a devil and do magic research, though."

Leareth isn’t sure if he can keep his face and tone entirely neutral while talking, so he just nods, makes a noncommittal noise, and waits for the next question.

"Jkatha?"

Leareth has relatively few facts cached about Jkatha, in this current lifetime and this brain.

”Trade hub between Rethwellan and Seejay. Borders on the Dhorisha Plains.” 

"What're those?"

“Dhorisha Plains? Desert. Under strict control of the Star-Eyed Goddess and Her people.”

"Star-Eyed Goddess?"

“- Has a pact with two different peoples. The Tayledras are repairing lands damaged by a Cataclysm thousands of years ago - west of Valdemar and Rethwellan, now, it was larger before. The Shin’a’in people guard the Dhorisha Plains from outsiders.”

"A pact? What does that mean? She's Lawful?"

“I suppose that is the natural interpretation? She made an agreement with their peoples and all their descendants, in exchange for Her protection, and a few - gifts of magic, I suppose.”

"What're the terms, do you know?"

“Not exactly, no - I am not of their people. I suspect only their priesthood knows, if anyone still living does at all.”

Nod. 

"What kind of military aid might Valdemar send Iftel? What share of their population is mages?"

"Of Valdemar's population? Low. I doubt they would want to risk any of them." 

Leareth is not, he decides, going to willingly mention Vanyel's existence. He'll do what he can to elide it under whatever their other interrogation methods are, but...well, he'll have to see what those are. At least he can draw it out. 

(Maybe long enough to even have the dream...) 

"I don't know if this is true of Velgarth magic, but you can't be a wizard if you're stupid."

"- Fascinating! I think this has been studied here, in the past." By Leareth. He studied it. Back in the Eastern Empire, which actually had the ability to collect useful census data; he desperately misses that aspect sometimes. "It correlates somewhat with mage-gift being present, but - no more than the extent to which mage-gift correlates with general good health. Within the population of mages, more powerful Gifts do not seem to correlate with intelligence at all, though of course skill and finesse does." 

"Huh. And yet it seems to me that you are not stupid, and you run a sophisticated competent mercenary outfit that operates on Valdemar's northern border, and so I feel like we should be able to come up with a more detailed guess, here, for Valdemar's likely contributions."

Ah. Is that what that comment was about. 

"I think it depends heavily on what intelligence they receive about Cheliax and Asmodeus, and whether they feel that they will be next, if Iftel is conquered. They recently fought a major war with Karse and are low on resources - they would not risk their people lightly. In order of what they would be most willing to offer... Supplies first, I think, then un-Gifted troops - oh, and I heard a rumour that they are already sending Healings. They do also have a substantial network of Mindspeakers, close to a hundred, but most are part of a government institution which has historically not been allowed through Iftel's barrier at all." 

She's obviously going to ask why and he'll have to say something about servants of different gods, but it's not like he fully understands why Iftel doesn't allow Heralds in, and he's also curious what this wizard will infer first. 

"Who does Iftel allow through the barrier?"

"Merchants and diplomats, mainly. Mercenaries who accompany merchant caravans, though I think sometimes they are asked to stay behind at the border. Couriers. Their own people are allowed to leave and return, of course, but - well, I was not aware they had a substantial number of military-trained gryphons until very recently. They are secretive as a country." 

"Ah huh. Why don't you want to kill their soldiers."

"I have a general preference against killing people unless it is absolutely necessary to achieve my goals? And in this case, I am unsure whether Iftel is to blame for starting this war, and - well, also I am unsure which side is most aligned with my own interests."

This isn't the most conciliatory thing to say, maybe, but it's true, and Leareth has a suspicion that this woman is almost as paranoid as he is and, whether or not she can mindread him, isn't going to believe him if he tries to seem like he's more on Cheliax's side than he really is. 

"Well. I'm not going to convince you on who started the war, though if we'd started it I think our Queen would have recalled the bulk of our forces from the Worldwound before starting it and not in a desperate hurry once it was already underway. But your interests seem - very clear to me, here. You have something very valuable to us - you understand this world, you are used to operating with this magic system, you know what it can do, you know how wars are waged here. You are also very expensive and logistically difficult to hold prisoner in territory we don't control. That is a situation where I would name my fucking price, not hold out for someone who shares my life philosophy."

She isn't wrong to notice her confusion, and Leareth also isn't sure how to elide around it for much longer. Not without either literally lying - and however good he is at keeping his expression neutral, she might notice - or making an agreement he's unwilling to keep. 

The problem is that he doesn't know enough. He doesn't know which agreements with Cheliax he would be willing to keep, because he's holding far too much uncertainty, right now, about what Cheliax really is. 

"You know," he says lightly, "it is not uncommon here for mercenary companies to hold to strict codes of ethics, in terms of which contracts they are willing to take. I suppose one could say that is part of the price they ask. Is that not the case in your world?" 

Leareth is fairly sure at this point that both of them know this is an evasive answer. 

"Sure."

"It is entirely possible I would be willing to work for Cheliax, if I had all the information. But - making that decision without the relevant information, is one of my own standards, and so is part of my price." 

What in the world does he think his alternative is.

"Then if I were you I'd be trying to learn those things about Cheliax as quickly as possible."

They're not going to kill him.

...Honestly it might be more convenient if they did, it would cost him five years of catching up but he'd be free. But Leareth is fairly sure that he's too important a prisoner, right now, even when they have incomplete and misleading information on him. 

"That is why I was asking you questions, before," he says quietly. 

And then doesn't add anything else, and waits, calmly. He's very aware that most people in his position would be terrified, and he's - not not scared, but it's unhelpful and he's setting it aside. He can tell that the wizard finds this confusing. He's - curious what will happen, if he keeps confusing her. 

Presumably like any adventurer with magic items this nice he has a resurrection lined up, so he thinks his alternatives are fine. It's rarer, here, what with the lack of divine magic, but you could still do a clone. 

They could trap his soul but she's not sure if that's a useful observation or just a very, very escalatory one.

"When the First Arcane wakes up," she says, "he's going to want you to stop that shielding thing you're doing so we can mindread you. So personally I would try to have my questions all resolved before that."

Of cours. Leareth nods, with the faintest hint of a smile. He was wondering when the inevitable escalation would happen and what it would be. It's nice to know. 

He doesn't trust most of what she's saying and it's impossible for him to verify, but maybe there's an area where that matters less...

"The Worldwound," he says. "Could you tell me about it? It sounds - unfortunate, that Cheliax's armies have been pulled back from it to wage this war instead. How bad is that?" 

"It's a planar rift torn between my home planet and the Abyss, where there are infinite demons. It's a hundred miles across. Cheliax was the bulk of the forces defending it and it's going to be quite bad, without us. Hopefully we can wrap this mess up very quickly and get back to it, I think they'll hold on three months without us but I wouldn't bet on them for a year."

Leareth goes very still. 

The mental image of a hundred mile wide rift leading to the Abyssal Plane is...not one he especially wants to be imagining but now he is. 

"- All right. If that is true, then I would have minimal objections to fighting at the Worldwound on behalf of Cheliax, in exchange for my freedom. That– I cannot imagine it would be good for anyone on your planet if they failed to contain it." 

"No, it'd be a disaster. Which is one of the reasons I don't think we would've started this war. I'll see, about getting you there. We'd need to verify you mean it."

"Yes." And Leareth is fairly sure that he does. 

- there are also a number of other intentions he has, many of which Cheliax - or one of the possible ways Cheliax could be, at least, within the bounds of his uncertainty - would be less pleased about. But if what she said about the Worldwound is even half true, then it's not difficult or controversial at all. 

"...I agree," he adds thoughtfully, "that - does make it seem less likely your country would have started the war by invading here." 

"There are a lot of serious threats to Cheliax at home and we haven't started a war with any of them. And we get a lot less out of a war in a foreign world. And if we'd known we were about to fight a war we'd have redeployed people first."

"I am also unclear on what Iftel gets out of it. But I see your point." 

Leareth yawns. It's an unfeigned yawn; it's been a long day and he did a lot of magic. Which means he also burned a lot of energy; he's not hungry, but that's to be expected too. 

"Are you willing to feed me, in the meantime?" he asks. 

"I don't object but we don't actually have any food. Maybe in the morning, if there's a village near here."

Leareth nods. He can unfortunately predict that he's going to feel terrible by the morning if he doesn't eat. And he badly needs some sleep, too, but he also has a lot of thinking to do...

"Using magic is tiring for us," he explains. "Do you have water, at least?" 

They all have Rings of Sustenance. An astonishing expense, but wartime logistics are also an astonishing expense and they were expected to be operating far from their supply lines. "I can send some people out for water once they're awake."

"...I understand. Tell me when the First Arcane is awake?" Still lying on the floor of the not-floor of the not-space they're in, he closes his eyes, waiting to see if she'll interrupt him again. 

That seems fine. "You may shift your weight occasionally," she says, and - she'd love to lie down herself, but then she's going to fall asleep, which she shouldn't - 

- stands up, and leans against the wall, and Prestidigitates her hand and sleeve clean of dried blood.

Leareth appears to fall asleep promptly, his body relaxing and breathing deepening.

In fact, he first spends a while thinking. It could be his last opportunity for private, uninterrupted thought in a long time.

What are his prospects, here? Not ones he's delighted about. His captors might kill him, if they decide he's too dangerous and can't be trusted to let loose at the Worldwound but is too expensive to keep captive. (That claim, if it's true, implies that whatever they're using as a compulsion is costly to them - maybe it's tiring and limited duration?) They might sent him to this 'Worldwound' with precautions still in place that prevent him returning to Velgarth. 

They might absorb the cost and just keep him prisoner. It could be unpleasant. Leareth can endure unpleasantness. It's more concerning that the longer they have him, the more chances there are for them to learn things he would rather they not. 

His people may be mounting a rescue - are probably planning an attempt, at least - but this is Vkandis' territory. And a lot of things went perfectly wrong, for him to be captured at all. Vkandis isn't going to let him slip away so easily. 

...Leareth does some emotional processing, because it's not like he'll have a better time for that either. He's scared. Frustrated with himself, for failing to be cautious enough. Significantly more frustrated than that with Vkandis, because seriously?? 

He's also thirsty and exhausted, though, with a headache sprouting behind his eyes, and he doesn't know how long they'll grant him to rest. So he folds away the emotions, again, and sleeps. 

In two hours the First Arcane is ready to trade off. She hands him her notes. "Leader of the adventuring party or maybe mercenary outfit that was hanging around by the border. He's not religious, I think he's Good but I could be misreading him, he claims to want to go help out at the Worldwound. He's halfway cooperative? Withholding a fair bit but he could get a fair bit less useful, too, so I thought I'd wait for your guidance on how much to push him. We've got a map, some notes on nearby countries. Valdemar's allied with Iftel but he thinks they won't send spellcasters."

      "We'll need to check that."

"Yes, sir. I can get you a translation spell once I've slept. - he also asked for food and water."

     "I'll send someone out for water." He squints at Leareth. "...Lawful Evil, actually. Why'd you think he was Good?"

"He didn't want to kill the locals. He seemed sympathetic to Valdemar. I guess he might just feel -- allegiance to his planet over ours. He seemed very concerned with - things that I wouldn't expect to concern him." Shrug. "He seemed to care who had started the war."

       The First Arcane scowls at their sleeping prisoner. "Get me that translation spell."

"Yes, sir." She closes her eyes and has time to feel frustrated that she isn't asleep immediately but is asleep before that thought has passed.

Leareth was hoping they would let him sleep long enough to overlap with Vanyel's sleeping hours - which are often very late, Herald Vanyel's long working hours are notorious enough that Leareth's spies in Haven actually hear about it - but it seems like that isn't going to happen. 

He's not sure exactly how long they let him sleep, but it feels like about fifteen minutes later that someone is waking him. He has a throbbing headache and feels incredibly dehydrated. 

She's given the First Arcane Comprehend Languages and herself Tongues, since she's the one who can give him orders. "You can drink." They ventured out and found a well; probably the locals aren't at the point of poisoning their own wells and if they are, all that'll be lost is the prisoner. "And you can speak," since the geas has a one-hour time horizon and that will have expired.

He looks dubiously at the water they've brought him. It's probably fine, but war, with all its dead bodies, is not exactly good for sanitation - if they got it from anywhere close to a river that at some point has dead bodies in it...

"May I use magic to sterilize it first." 

"I don't know enough about how your magic works to safely let you do that."

Well, hopefully he's not going to die of dysentery now. ...They do have healing magic, he remembers, and probably letting that happen would at least look embarrassing to their superiors. He drinks the water, and waits for further instruction.

"You are blocking mindreading, even in your sleep. I want you to take down your shields so we can read you for confirmation of what you told me yesterday. Confirmation you're serious about the Worldwound will be helpful for arranging transit there."

"Of course." 

How thoroughly does the compulsion actually force him to do that? 

It doesn't seem to; it seems to be entirely blocking actions, and not obliging any.

He lowers his shields in the way he would for close concert-work with another mage - not entirely, enough to pick up on intentions and loud surface thoughts without his deliberately sending them, nowhere close to enough to allow a deep-scan or poking at his memories. 

Leareth's current intentions aren't hostile. He's tense, but not exactly afraid. Mostly he's curious. Curious and confused and wondering (on a level deep enough that Carissa won't be able to get all the threads of association from this thought) if the whole thing Vkandis was trying to achieve here was getting him off this plane. Inconvenient, but the Worldwound does sound deeply concerning. They would have to be lying to him about a lot of things before he would no longer be willing to help cover that gap, and it's not obvious to him why they would be motivated to lie about that. 

"What questions do you have for me?" he says, addressed mostly to the First Arcane. 

He says something to Carissa in another language. 

"Valdemar. What do you know about their capabilities?"

"They have a non-magical army of - in the vicinity of ten thousand total troops, I think? Though many are still tied up with the civil war situation in Karse. Their government is run by an institution called the Heralds, who are - indirectly selected by their country's god, in a way, via a system set up eight hundred years ago when the kingdom was founded. Heralds almost always have Gifts, but mage-gift is oddly rare there, and their casualties during the war were high. There are approximately a hundred and fifty active Heralds at this time. Around a dozen mages, I believe, not all of them strong." 

Some of them, of course, are strong, but they're also the ones Valdemar would be least willing to risk; their most senior mage, Herald-Mage Savil, is Adept-strength and from all reports very impressive, but she's almost eighty, and deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the government. (The rest of that thought stays well below the surface.)

Leareth says some more things about Valdemar's resources: the House of Healing and their unusually good education system for Healers, the Bardic Collegium and its use for propaganda. Valdemar also has a higher rate of Mindhealing Gift than most places, though 'higher' is still...five or six, he thinks, in the entire kingdom, it's a very rare Gift, and of course all of those groups are noncombatants. 

Leareth's thoughts are mostly very focused on the content of what he's saying, retrieving facts and statistics from memory. It comes across that he has some sort of interest in Valdemar, moreso than in, say, Hardorn. He manages to avoid raising to surface thoughts that the information sources he knows this from are his spies, as opposed to more general information-brokers who he paid for their intelligence. 

She doesn't seem to need to translate for her superior when Leareth is talking; he's nodded along. They both relax considerably, at the claim that Valdemar has a dozen mages. 

"Does your organization have plans to interfere in our operations in Iftel?"

Huh. Some sort of magic, he's guessing. In a layer of his sensory-perception that he's not sharing right now, Leareth lets his mage-sight play around both of them, noting details to think about properly later. 

"Not at this time, no. If I remain out of communication with my people, I predict they will begin making plans for a rescue, though cautiously because we are not allied with Vkandis." Leareth's visible thoughts hint that this is a serious understatement. "Our operation near the border was simply to understand what was happening, since as far as I know it is unprecedented for Iftel to be at war." 

His thoughts flicker to various hypotheticals under which he might have considered interfering, though of course all of that is moot now that he's their prisoner. 

They both have a fair bit of magic up! It's quite different from mage spells - precise, defined, intricately knotted, weirdly high-power for the things it's visibly doing. 

"You read as Lawful. If you were to give us your word about - going to the Worldwound and not interfering with operations here, or about agreeing to join our fight, are there circumstances under which you'd give it falsely, or betray it later?"

"...It is not entirely impossible, I suppose, if I found out later you had lied or substantially misled me about this war, or about the Worldwound itself, or other relevant parts. However, when I give my word, I take it very seriously. ...Relatedly, I would be reluctant to make an unconditional, indefinite promise. It would take much less, for example, if you asked only that I give my word to remain at the Worldwound and not interfere for a year." 

Leareth is mostly thinking that he dislikes negotiations like this, where he's missing vast swathes of context and has little recourse to fix that, whereas the party he's negotiating with has much more resources and can freely gather information. It's frustrating for someone else to have the upper hand. He's - well, out of practice at it. 

(Though they'll have a hard time finding out much about Leareth himself from anyone but him directly - he keeps that thought folded away, though.) 

She asks him to repeat everything he said to her the night before, about Karse, Rethwellan, Jkatha, and the Star-Eyed Goddess.

Leareth does.

All of it is, apparently, the truth according to what he knows. His thoughts let slip a little more personal context; he's operated frequently in Rethwellan, recruiting mages and consulting scholars. He has contacts in Jkatha. He really doesn't like the Star-Eyed Goddess, though from his perspective She was the one who was hostile first. He gives the Dhorisha Plains and the Pelagirs a wide berth, which is inconvenient. Also Valdemar now has a Heartstone, a Tayledras magical technique that's believed to be miraculously granted by their Goddess, and this means Haven is not a safe place for him to ever be. 

"What's your objection to the Star-Eyed Goddess?"

Leareth's initial, instinctive, half-suppressed thought is 'that she does not appear to care at all about human flourishing in the long run.' His second thought is that he's not at all sure how to answer that question in the framework they've been speaking within. 

"I suppose She is - narrow-minded, in a way?" He takes a breath, slowly, lets it out and tries very hard not to think of previous plans that ended in pointless disaster. "She protects Her interests, which are highly specific, and does not care how many human lives this disrupts - which would be fine if one could communicate with Her and make arrangements to account for that, but our gods are - not especially able to communicate, and rarely interested in trying. ...Also I feel that Her pacts with the peoples who serve Her are not very fair to the humans now alive and serving those roles."  

See, he does keep talking like he's Good, no matter how he reads. "Why does that bother you."

"- Because if they were fully informed, I think they would not choose to make such a pact? And I...feel that an important part of what contracts and agreements mean is that - both parties should endorse a commitment to those conditions? Also, I am not sure what I think of the fact that children born now to the Tayledras or Shin'a'in peoples do not realistically choose it for themselves at any point." 

Leareth is trying to parse Carissa's expression. She's having some sort of reaction, he's pretty sure? But he's still confused enough about what her philosophy is - separate from what Asmodeus wants, which he's also pretty in the dark about - that it's difficult to predict which part of his perspective she would even find surprising. To him it feels like a natural extension of what he thinks she means by Lawfulness? Of course, maybe there's a failure to communicate concepts there as well. He should expect a cultural gulf, and magical translation - however that works, the fact that it's even possible is a revelation he needs to pore over later - but he should expect it not to perfectly compensate for differing worldviews. 

Most of these thoughts he holds pretty close to the surface.

"I...don't see how that affects you in any way."

"...Many things about the broader state of the world will end up affecting me in some way? I live here." 

Also, Leareth is thinking, it's not actually weird to care about things that affect other people. It's rarer that people explicitly care about the future - about people who don't exist yet, who they'll never meet - but a lot of people would, if they ever sat down and laid out all their goals and values and reasoned through to the natural conclusions. 

(Vanyel did. Vanyel cares. Leareth keeps this thought tucked well away in the depths.) 

- whatever. Arguing with the prisoner: not productive. "If I gave you permission to use magic to demonstrate the making of magic items like the ones you took off me, would that also enable you to do anything else?"

Leareth isn't sure! He sort of mentally pokes at the compulsion pinning his mind in place. How specific would that exception be? 

It's not very obvious from the inside, either. 

She sighs. "He won't be able to tell until we do it. We'll try it after you step out," she says to the First Arcane, switching languages. 

       The First Arcane nods distractedly. "Numbers in his organization?"

"How many in your organization."

...His answer is going to surprise them, Leareth thinks dully. 

(He had vaguely been hoping they wouldn't ask, but he manages to keep that thought, and the concern about it, tucked away behind his deeper shields.)

"Three hundred combat mages. Another hundred more academic specialties." He can't help his thoughts drifting a little toward the content of said specialties, but the flickers of math, math, and more math - and domains more obscure than that - probably won't mean that much to outsiders. "A little under a thousand support personnel, for them." 

Which is, in fact, the main core of his organization, though the military troops who report to him number...a lot more than that. The agents in other countries come to a much smaller total number. Various contractors don't particularly count as part of his organization, Leareth thinks; everyone relies on external resources sometimes, it's a different thing. 

"Avernus that's a lot of people. That's - practically the size of the Academae." 

         "He's not lying?"

"He's not lying - or if he is he's very good at it - sir, I think we'd better feed him."

"Valverde, Cardejal, there's a farmhouse up the river, yes? Hit them up for supplies, retreat if you're engaged by anyone a Fireball can't handle."

          Valverde stands up. "Can we grab a girl? There's room for one more, in the Rope Trick -"

"No," snaps Carissa though the question wasn't even directed at her. "It's unprofessional and we're trying to build rapport, here. Once we have some facilities, I don't give a shit, but we're in the middle of an interrogation."

- the First Arcane slaps her. With a cantrip; it wouldn't have the right effect if he'd had to scramble halfway across the room for it. Now her cheek is bleeding. - fair enough, really, she answered that like he wasn't in the room. 

"It's a no," he tells Valverde. He doesn't say anything more to Carissa about it; he doesn't need to.

- yes, that definitely got a reaction. A stronger reaction than anything else yet. His first impression is of an...overall positive reaction? Leareth can't understand any of the words, of course, but they seem impressed. There's a flurry of new instructions being given. 

Then the female wizard who's been leading the questioning barks something in a tone that sounds frustrated and angry. And then Leareth's mage-sight catches the spell as the other wizard - the one he thinks is senior - uses it to hit her. In the face. 

It catches Leareth off guard. It's hardly a level of violence that would normally make him feel threatened; he shields against physical and magical attacks by default when in combat, natively as well as with his talismans, and they didn't actually bother to remove the talismans other than the Thoughtsensing one.

But he's currently helpless on the floor, prevented by a compulsion from moving voluntarily. It's already been taking an ongoing effort of will to stay calm about this; letting it bother him won't help. Startled, though, he tries to move back and raise a shield - can't - the alarm shades into an edge of panic - 

Orient. 

Instinctively, without deliberately choosing to on any level, Leareth extends all of his Othersenses to their full range and power. Which doesn't help all that much, he can't See past the bounds of their odd magical pocket-of-space.

But it does boost his Thoughtsensing enough to get past the odd semi-opaque native shields of everyone nearby not using more active mental protections. 

She's quite focused on keeping her face still, and not checking how much it's bleeding. She lost the Detect Thoughts, which only had a minute left on it anyway but still, the expectation at third circle is that you can hold a divination with your hand in a fire, and it doesn't really matter that she wasn't a combat wizard a month ago. What were they on before - right, his mercenary company. It's very big. She had been under the impression that mages in this world were rarer than wizards in hers. The entire country they'd been discussing a minute ago had a dozen mages! (Blood is running down her cheek, now; she's ignoring it.)

He's worrying about the rescue operation that is presumably being planned. You don't have to be competent or have the alliance of the local gods if you have hundreds of high-level casters. They haven't evidenced the ability to get through the barrier - they were spying from the other side - but that probably shouldn't be counted on - what's the fastest he could plausibly get back to Cheliax, if he decides this warrants expending all their emergency resources - 

- the guy at the door is thinking irritably that his superiors get paid enough to be all work and no play for the entire duration of the war but everyone else does not. He is planning to obey orders, though, and not bring a girl back.

- oh good they're not reading his thoughts right now. That was close. Leareth shields also snapped back up to full strength when he was startled, just as non-volitionally as the rest, but he's not sure that would have hedged her out when she was already reading him. Either way, they probably didn't notice, but - he needs to be more careful than that. 

He is, in fact, fairly sure that you do need to be competent to pull off a rescue attempt that Vkandis personally wants to prevent. And Nayoki won't have any context on Cheliax's magic; he barely has context, he has no idea how the pocket-in-space works or whether it's findable from the outside with mage-sight. 

If they decide to hustle him back to Cheliax that's...unfortunate, overall. Reduces his options. They have the upper hand here in a lot of ways; to the extent he's kept most of his important secrets, it's because they're not throwing everything they can at it. And because they have no idea what the relevant questions are to ask. 

He doesn't need to exert willpower to hold still, which is one convenient side effect of the stupid compulsion. His face probably did look surprised, but everyone was distracted, and he's already smoothed his expression back to its previous neutral calm.

He waits for the interrogators to collect themselves and keep asking questions, and deliberately doesn't think about what his Thoughtsensing is doing, it can just keep doing its thing in the background. 

She doesn't indicate that she's lost Detect Thoughts, it'll probably keep him more honest if he thinks it's still up. "Well. The suggestion that you name your price still stands but you could probably name a pretty high one. Tell us about what all mages can do."

"Heat and light spells are very simple, even self-taught mages usually figure it out. Fire, levinbolts, for combat magic; more powerful Gift-potential matters more than training and skill. Shields - physical, magical -"

Leareth lists off all the basic mage-techniques, the ones taught nearly everywhere. He doesn't mention compulsions, since in fact not all mages "can" do this, it needs to be taught and a lot of places don't teach it. He does mention Gates, but adds that only Master-level mages and above can channel enough power to Gate useful distances. 

"What differences have you noticed, between our magic and yours?"

Their compulsions are stupidly overpowered and way too broad-encompassing, and also bizarrely useless for specifics? Leareth doesn't say this, and is aware that she can't tell he's thinking it. 

"Your magic is - more structured? You seem to have techniques that I am unsure are possible for us. The translation magic, for example. And - whatever this place is. It also appears that your people can fly, which is not impossible with our magic but is almost never practical." 

There are a lot more things, but it's not like the compulsion can force him to be thorough the way a second-stage Truth Spell would. 

"What do these artifacts do?"

"The ones I am wearing are all protective. You took the one that shields against mindreading. The others are for magical attacks and physical attacks. I also have an artifact to assist scrying, and one to assist with a communications-spell."

They're in his pockets, but these people have something equivalent to mage-sight - though interestingly it looks like it's an actual spell they have to cast, not a passive sense like vision. And he doesn't think they've actually noticed, yet, that his method is different. It hasn't explicitly come up, and he was keeping that sensory input still tucked behind shields. 

"How are they made, what materials are required?"

"It requires a crystal for the focus - quartz is perfectly adequate for most kinds - and a mage with the plans for the design and adequate training." He quietly doesn't mention the part about needing a mage on an ongoing basis to re-power them.

"There are many other kinds of artifact as well. What kinds of talisman would Cheliax want, if I were willing to sell them to you." 

He isn't sure whether this is something he would want to do, but he's gotten away this long with having Thoughtsensing extended, Carissa isn't reading him, and he may not have many more opportunities to fish for more information about Cheliax. 

The spell resistance, obviously, but she waits for the First Arcane to say it so she can translate it. 

"The magical shielding. That's expensive to do with our magic. It only requires a crystal? Not spellsilver - rare metals that can hold onto magic?"

They're being inconveniently disciplined in their thoughts. Can he get anything off the First Arcane, who seems more likely to be planning the team's response to his recent revelations? 

"No. What is 'spellsilver'?"

"It's necessary for the kind of magic artifact I know how to make." She's confused about how you'd power it, otherwise, but she can pick his brain about magic artifact making later - or just try her hand at duplicating it herself, it might be possible. - it's not the time to try to understand the artifacts, tempting as that is. The important takeaway here is the high-level one that mages will be an extremely valuable resource for Cheliax, for reasons probably already known to the Queen, and possibly that Leareth personally is very valuable to Cheliax - these are higher quality than anything they've seen Iftel's soldiers wearing, but they mostly haven't engaged Iftel's elite units -

The First Arcane is thinking he should escalate this before Leareth's people try to rescue him. The problem is that they are operating very far from Chelish-controlled territory; he can personally cast Overland Flight, probably, though he's not fully fifth-circle yet and it'll wipe him out for the day, and then he could fly back to Chelish territory almost certainly unimpeded, higher than the gryffons fly (but vulnerable to interference from Vkandis, maybe - but it seems plausible Vkandis wants Leareth taken to Cheliax?) But Overland Flight's self-only, so it means leaving the unit here, and Sevar will be out of her depth if there's a rescue attempt by dozens of skilled mages - on the other hand, she's been in nine years, if it does work out badly she's clearly senior enough that the blame for that would be easy to pin on her -

What are the alternatives. Get Phantom Steeds up for all of them and head back towards the rift, hoping to run across Chelish forces before opposed ones - easier for Leareth's people to track him for a rescue attempt, easier for Vkandis to interfere with if He wishes, decent odds of running across Iftel's forces first - and it's a bad plan because it works out worse if the war is going poorly, and is most likely to work if the war is going well, and a game-changing thing like this is most important if they're losing. 

He prays, briefly, not expecting an answer. Make me an instrument of Your willl guide me in how my life can be best spent in Your service -

- Leareth appreciates the fact that Carissa is curious about his artifacts, wants to ask him questions, is tempted to do that right now. He also, separately, appreciates that she's withholding for strategic reasons. 

The First Arcane is thinking ahead and Leareth respects that too. He's not sure which option he would scheme toward, assuming he had any non-terrible options to scheme at all, which is...dubious. He definitely could, if he were trying, help them come up with plans more likely to succeed at returning him to Cheliax...

Leareth doesn't know if he wants that. It's - certainly the fastest route to learning more about Cheliax, and so much of his decision-relevant reasoning here is bottlenecked on his lack of context.

It...would also reduce his options, substantially? Presumably they would be throwing substantially more resources and stronger capabilities at both keeping him prisoner and reading his mind. 

- It's not that hard to find a way to kill himself. It wouldn't take that many mistakes on their end, to allow that. As a fallback, at least that would drop him back in Velgarth, with some salient memories... 

It doesn't actually make sense to try keeping this particular secret from them, and Leareth is curious if this explains the difference. "...Our artifacts do require a mage at intervals, on an ongoing basis, to re-power them once they are drained. Do yours require this as well?" 

"No, once they're made they work forever. There are magic items that require refilling but - talismans you wear to get spell resistance wouldn't be that kind. I wonder if we can refill them - maybe later you can show someone how it's done -"

She is also realizing they need to escalate this. The guy is clearly more like a head of state than like a powerful adventurer, even if he's taking having been captured more like an adventurer would than like a head of state would, thankfully. If they can bring him around -- or get more out of more closely targeted geases - they could settle the war a lot faster, and it'll also be game-changing for Chelish capabilities in Golarion.

"Maybe later, yes," Leareth says noncommittally. 

It seems that the situation is on its way to escalating, and he has very little opportunity to intervene. Whether or not he wants to, in either direction. He mostly just doesn't have enough context to know what he wants, yet... 

- He does know enough to prefer that his people arrange a rescue in time. He's learned a lot. Albeit not as much as he would prefer, but enough to have threads to tug on, and Nayoki could undo the overpowered not-compulsion, giving him freedom of action... 

But of course there's nothing he can do either way, from here, to make that more or less likely. 

He listens to Carissa and the First Arcane's thoughts, and waits. 

"All right," he says after a second. "I'm going to make a report. Expect further instructions in ten hours. Sevar, you need to learn to hold a spell in a combat situation." And he pulls something out of his backpack and tosses it to her. "A passing grade is ten minutes holding it against your wrist with Detect Magic up consistently. If you're not contacted you can heal it tomorrow."

It's an emergency heating stone. It's not safe to touch them directly, they'll burn you. That's - being mildly a jerk, on top of having responsibility for the team and for the prisoner in enemy territory for the rest of the day. He must be annoyed about earlier. 

She sets it against her wrist and raises an eyebrow at him. "We'll await instructions."

And now he has to prepare Overland Flight. You're only considered a fifth-circle caster if you can prepare a fifth-circle spell and be competent for combat afterwards, which he very much isn't - it'll be all he'll have for the day. He shouldn't need much else, though, and there's a wand of Fireball for emergencies. 

He starts building the artifice for it in the air. It's a lot of magic. 

Carissa practices throwing and catching Detect Magic while the heat-stone sears her wrist. Watching someone prepare a fifth-circle spell is at least wonderfully distracting. 

Watching it is distracting, and fascinating. And, separately, Leareth has...some concerns...around what the leadership decisions here indicate about Cheliax as a country. 

He lies sprawled on the floor, spending rather more willpower on not-panicking about the immobility than he would prefer.

And considering what to say to Carissa, once her superior finishes his spell-preparation and flies off. He's not really sure where to start but it - seems like it might be important, to attempt a conversation at all. 

She loses the cantrip three minutes in. The burn of course does not really hurt any less once she removes the heat-stone.  That's the thing that sucks, about assignments like this one - the more you fail at them, the harder they get.

Of course, that's often how life works. 

She can give it a try again after Tongues has run out; maybe once she has a lot of burns it'll be easier, because there'll be no background expectation that the pain'll lessen once she loses the cantrip. 

She re-prepares Detect Magic, since she's going to need it if she's going to get the prisoner to teach her artifact-making while they wait. She sees the First Arcane off. 

"How do people learn artifact-making, here?"

The other wizard with a translation spell has left. Which also means he's on a timeline, here. He could continue speaking with Carissa once her spell runs out, if she clears him to use Mindspeech, but he's not sure he wants to poke at that yet. 

"Most frequently in apprenticeships. There are a few academies." He pauses. "- May I stand up and walk around? I am somewhat uncomfortable from being immobile, and it is distracting." 

"With the constraints that you cannot leave the space or approach within a foot of anyone, you can stand up and move around for five minutes."

"Thank you." Leareth picks himself up from the floor, going slowly with the position change; he's been horizontal for a while and hasn't eaten. He waits for the lightheadedness to pass, then mentally marks out a square that avoids approaching anyone else too closely, and paces. 

"...Why did your superior order you to - do that, with the heating-stone?" 

"Huh? Oh, it's practice for spellcasting distracted. There is a standard combat course on that but I missed it since I did artifact enchanting, before the war."

She is thinking that perhaps there was something deliberate in her never signing up for standard combat courses. She is a spectacularly good artifact enchanter and only an average combat caster and - it just didn't seem fun. A stupid reason, now, but probably she can in fact catch up at this specific thing in the course of a day.

"Ah, I see. I think there are more effective exercises for that, but - perhaps less easily practiced now, when you are already out in the field. I had been unsure if it were a - punishment, for something he thought you had done wrong...?" 

What's he angling at? ...hoping your captors are having internal strife is entirely reasonable, actually. "I would think the time to resolve discipline problems would be once we've reached Chelish-held territory, really. This is just something I need to know how to do."

That's not exactly what Leareth was angling at but it's not implausible as a guess. 

"- Why did he hit you? ...I assume it was him, since it appeared to be done with magic, which must take some skill." 

"I was out of line. It doesn't take that much skill, 's not like hitting a civilian or a kid where you need very precise control over how much force you're using."

"Ah - are you shielded all the time, or something?" Leareth hasn't noticed shields on her, but he does already know that their magic is different from his. 

"I'm - a spellcaster? It takes a lot more force to hurt a spellcaster. Is that not true of mages if they're not shielding."

Leareth spends five seconds trying to think about whether he wants her to know that, no, mages aren't inherently physically tougher.

...It's probably not something he can hide in the long run - quite possibly her superiors already know, via reports from other parties elsewhere in Iftel - and it would be awkward if they seriously injured him by accident because they didn't know. 

"...Not to a significant degree, no? Healers are more resilient against illness and injury, since they will often do self-Healing on a subconscious level, but an unshielded mage will take the same bruises from a strike as an un-Gifted civilian. Though, of course, mages are rarely unshielded if they expect danger." 

"....huh." That suggests that maybe it's the divine healing after all that makes adventurers more resilient, which was a theory but never quite persuasive to her. "Well, where I'm from spellcasters are physically tougher." That cantrip is safe to hit students with but only in the back, buttocks or thighs, not the face. She doesn't expand on this because it seems like he has some weird expectations about punishment and that doesn't necessarily seem like a rift it's wise to explore.

It's a rift that might be interesting to explore, according to Leareth - and it's interesting that she's noticing it explicitly and trying to steer around it - but he's not thinking of a good plausibly-deniable way to poke at it, right now. He's still distractingly hungry, and the lightheadedness never entirely cleared. It turns out that heavy casting followed by far too little sleep and no food is - not an ideal combination. 

He sits down heavily, letting his tiredness show a little just to gauge how Carissa reacts. 

They are aware that the locals don't have good magic for skipping sleep - certainly nothing as good as a Ring of Sustenance - but sleep deprived prisoners are probably more pliable so this just seems good. "We sent some people out for food," she says. The farmhouse wasn't far - less than a mile - so unless something went wrong they should be back soon.

It might be in his interest to appear more impaired by exhaustion and hunger than he is, then. It doesn't require too much in the way of acting; he in fact feels terrible, he just has a lot more practice than most humans at working through this. 

He yawns. "I am glad. ...You must have magic for going without food, if you do not carry any with you? That is - interesting, if so. Our magic cannot do that." 

"Yep. It's expensive but this is an emergency." Their magic is more convenient for logistics on the whole - Gates are a lot better than teleportation for that - but this doesn't seem like something he really needs to know.

Leareth notes that thought. He hadn't been sure, himself - it wasn't clear up front how costly their teleportation was, relative to the energy-cost of Gating - but it's relevant. 

He yawns again. "- Anyway. I am curious - how do you find the working conditions, as a combat wizard for Cheliax? That seems relevant, if I am considering my price for signing on to work with your country's forces." 

It's also a question one would ask if they had zero intentions of signing on but were expecting a rescue. What's useful if he wants to join up and less useful otherwise - "the pay is excellent. A priority of Her Majesty is that combat casters get better over time, there's plenty of opportunity for research and study. Resurrections are available for senior people who die well in the line of duty. The sexes are integrated." Men tend to consider that a perk. "We have the world's most wizards and premiere institutes of wizardry. If you have good test scores or a sorcerous bloodline they'll pay women to have your children," also a popular perk. "Pay has never been late, healing is consistently available, magic items are standard issue where they're necessary for mission objectives."

"That sounds...well run." Which is a good thing only to the extent that whatever Cheliax is trying to do, overall, is something Leareth approves of. He's having more doubts about that.

"Your magic does resurrection in a repeatable and scalable way?" he adds, neutrally. 

"Yes. It's very expensive, but Cheliax is very wealthy." - okay, his society has got to have resurrection, no one's this calm about being captured if they don't have a backup plan - well, she could just ask, let him assume she got the information from mindreading him. "Why isn't your method scalable?"

All right, this isn't even veering dangerously close to topics Leareth would rather not to discuss - it's well past that line. 

She's not in fact reading his mind. Leareth could lie. ...He doesn't want to, though, if he can avoid it. He hasn't outright lied at all, up to this point; he's omitted a lot of information, occasionally in ways that let Carissa jump to misleading conclusions, but there's still a line there which he hasn't, yet, crossed. 

...And there's a true and relevant piece that he thinks might resonate with Carissa, for all that her overall philosophy is somewhat baffling to him. He's curious to test that theory. 

"It requires a costly and difficult magical setup, and - based on Their past actions, our gods seem to be against humans being resurrected, except in specific cases that accomplish Their purposes. One must be very well-resourced and competent to manage it oneself against Their interference." 

"Huh. 

What is the afterlife situation, here - the Iftel civilians seemed to have only the vaguest idea -"

Well. That's especially interesting. 

"Most people have little idea." Leareth frowns. "I want to make sure I understand your afterlife situation right, so that I can explain the differences. In your world, souls - go the the afterlife run by the god they worshipped or served? Divided according to the axes of Law versus Chaos and Good versus Evil. And the souls - stay there indefinitely, as approximately the people they were in life - and in some cases change over time to be less human - but only return to the material world if resurrection magic is used?" 

"When you die you get sorted by Pharasma, god of the dead, off how Lawful or Chaotic or Good or Evil you were. There's nine Outer Planes, and you can get sorted to any of them. Sorting takes a while and people don't remember it clearly but it involves appraising your deeds in life, and your goals with those deeds, in addition to which gods you served. Most people who do anything of note are Evil - you are - but people who specifically spend their lives trying to be Good can usually wrangle it I think. In the afterlife you become - something more closely aligned with that plane. In Hell you become a devil. In Heaven you become an angel. In the Abyss you become a demon. Abaddon just eats people because Abaddon's horrible. And yes, you stay there forever unless you get resurrected, which has to be done promptly after death."

Leareth nods. "I see. In this world, souls are usually caught by the god with remit over them, held for a time, and - according to my current knowledge, at least - are usually eventually sent back. But generally attached to infants, and the soul itself does not contain all that makes up a person, so reincarnated mortals generally recall little if anything of their former life. Or lives. There are some ways around this, as I mentioned. And occasionally gods will deliberately return mortal souls to a vessel created by Them for that purpose, with many memories retained. The Companions that bond to Heralds in Valdemar are an example of this." 

Leareth is paying very close attention to Carissa's thoughts as she reacts to this. 

Wow, that seems really unfortunate for the locals! Never getting anywhere, just - being born again and again - unless you're very loyal and useful. She can see why the gods would set it up that way - presumably they find creating new souls costly - but it seems like a system in which it'd be very terrible, being mortal. It seems obvious to her not to say this, not really for information security reasons but just because sympathy for strangers is a ridiculous sort of thing to express. "I see," she says. "I don't think that'd serve our gods. They benefit from their afterlives being full of conscious intelligent people who serve them, and creating new souls isn't that hard on our plane."

"That makes sense. I am not sure how hard it is for our gods to create new souls; it is obviously close to impossible for mortals." 

...Leareth could do it, probably, if for some reason he wanted to. It's a different kind of project than building a god from scratch but it's not totally unrelated. Most of the expertise would transfer. 

And - all right, he's going to make a bit of a gamble, here, because it seems like the situation is escalating fast, and he may have a very limited window of opportunities when he can speak without anyone reading his thoughts. 

He yawns again, not especially feigned but it helps make it seem less serious. "I have considered," he says lightly, "how I might change that state of affairs, here. It is - not what most people would choose, if they had a choice." 

"Asmodeus would, I think, make better use of these people, and Hell would be a better place for them to go. I don't know what He would need, in order to achieve that."

"I imagine that the active cooperation of a local would help." Leareth smiles. It's not entirely a genuine smile, but he thinks his exhaustion should cover that. "What does Asmodeus use people for, exactly? What would that look like for the people in question?" 

And, again, he's paying a lot more attention to her thoughts than to the actual words said. 

"He wants Cheliax to be wealthy and influential, and to combat threats to the world like the Worldwound. And He wants Hell to be powerful and wealthy and organized, so it can fund Cheliax and so it can expand into the other afterlives."

She is in favor of Hell's control of Cheliax, which seems to straightforwardly benefit everyone there - they are richer, and get to be wizards if they have the talent. She's heard of other countries and they seem worse in every way, except their people believe it's worth it since they're less likely to go to Hell. Hell's plan to expand and conquer the other afterlives is in the distant future, and she doesn't know much about the details - no one living really does -- though it's tempting to wonder if this situation is at all related.

...All right, so people in other countries think that being under Asmodeus' remit and ending up in His afterlife is bad in itself. Leareth badly wishes he had a better sense of why. His only other context, here, is what the translation magic seems to want to translate their term for it as - but the Hells as discussed in various Velgarth mythologies do not, as far as Leareth knows, actually exist. And he doesn't know how the translation conventions work. 

"I suppose what I mean is more - what would a dead soul's day to day look like? Would a farmer in life continue to do farming work there - does that concept even make sense, I am not sure what the physical laws or material constraints are like in Hell...?" 

"Devils don't farm, they don't need to eat. I think Heaven has farms even though they don't need to eat but just because farming is virtuous. There are cities, in Hell, they have mining and manufacturing and magic item making and the defense of Hell against extraplanar incursions and they spend a lot of time on the Material Plane, trading with people. I want to do magic research." The process of becoming a devil hurts, and takes a long time, and some of the middle stages look quite ugly, but she thinks it's stupid how much people emphasize that, and she has no interest in mentioning it.

"Farming is virtuous? That is - an odd definition of virtue." 

Leareth did not at all miss Carissa's thoughts, and it fits. It makes sense of why the translation spell wanted to pick that particular word. 

"Why does Asmodeus wish to extend Hell to the other afterlives? I would expect your god of sorting dead souls - Pharasma, was that what you called Her? - to have some objections." 

"I mean, yes. Several other gods will have objections. It's a long term plan. But the other afterlives are stunningly wasteful with their souls and Asmodeus doesn't mean it to go on forever."

"I see." 

Leareth does kind of see why Asmodeus would want that, at least. He doubts the souls in the other afterlives would be on board. And he's dubious just on priors that this is a genuine, actually-feasible plan as opposed to, well, propaganda. 

...Another high-variance, but possibly revealing, question is occurring to him. 

"It seems your gods are in general more willing to communicate with mortals. How would I go about speaking with Asmodeus directly about - possible cooperation on this, if He were interested in that?" 

"He doesn't talk to mortals directly, he sends devils to advise them. You could - request to speak with the Queen's devil advisors -" which is a stunningly bold thing to do and also incredibly dangerous and she'd never dream of it but probably this is in fact the sort of thing they'd want to concern themselves with. 

...if things get such important attention she'll be under a lot of scrutiny, if she said anything wrong that biased Leareth against this alliance. She spends half a second frantically thinking back through what she's said so far, then - no, that's unhelpful, either she's made a horrible mistake or she hasn't, but she should try not to make one going forward, and probably either way they'll be at least slightly hesitant to execute their combat wizards in the middle of a war.

"I will keep that in mind." 

Leareth is slotting some more pieces into his picture. It's an incomplete picture, still, but the outlines starting to form are...worrying. His error bars on what Cheliax is really like are starting to narrow down, and at this point he's eliminated the more optimistic end of that spectrum. There's still a lot of uncertainty, of course, a range where the truth could lie, but. 

He's trying not to have emotions about it right now. It won't help. Attempting to reassure Carissa also won't help, both because their relative positions - and all the information Leareth is concealing about himself and his abilities - make it difficult and confusing to convey, and also because most of what he would want to reassure her about are worries he knows because he's reading her mind. Which she doesn't know about, and it should stay that way. 

He's also incredibly tired. He can push through for a while, forcing his brain to work against the resistance of sleep deprivation and lack of food, but it has a cost, and his headache is back. 

"...You said the food ought be here soon?" he asks hopefully, and then puts his forehead down on his knees. 

"Should be."

They're actually running a bit late. Possibly the farmhouse was deserted and they had to go one farther, which was authorized. Possibly they encountered opposition. ...possibly, having been denied permission to take a girl back but not specifically denied permission to take a girl on the spot, they're doing that, in which case Carissa should scald the tips off both their dicks when they get back, that'd be stunningly unprofessional.

She stands up and goes to the clear window in the floor of the Rope Trick, watching the surrounding forest for any signs they're on their way (or in a fight).

It's - well, not actually that unusual for soldiers to do things like that. It would indicate suboptimal discipline and recruiting practices, maybe, but not necessarily an unusually evil leadership. (This is one of the places where Leareth sometimes makes use of voluntary compulsions.) 

He doesn't have deep enough Thoughtsensing access to see through Carissa's eyes, but he notices that she's worried. "Is something wrong?" 

"Not that you can do anything about, even if so."

It's probably nothing, and if not it could be any number of things, but possibly it's a rescue attempt. 

...If Leareth were capable of MOVING, he now knows how to get out of the pocket-in-space. And then, if he were allowed to Mindspeak deliberately, he could try to contact his people. 

He's so tired. He's almost hoping that it's nothing and the party is about to get back with food and then they'll let him SLEEP. Unfortunately, if he sleeps he'll definitely lose Thoughtsensing on Carissa, and he's not sure he could manage to get it back again unless something startles him again. 

Head down, eyes closed, he waits to see what Carissa will do next. 

Think through the possibilities. They're doing their job but it's taking a long time. No action needed from her. They're fucking around. That's a discipline problem, she can handle that. They were attacked by Iftel's forces and either killed or just sensibly decided to draw Iftel's forces away from here. She should - monitor closely and use an illusion to hide the rope if anyone gets near. Leareth's people attempted a rescue. ...same implications as Iftel, except if they do find her surrender is more viable as an option. (Not very viable; in Leareth's place she'd probably kill the hostage-taker just so Cheliax didn't have a scryable point of contact in their territory, and if they can grab her they can certainly grab other wizards who can teach them Golarion magic. But not absurd like surrendering to Iftel would be; she could assess it on the spot.)

Another possibility: a god interfered. She should....do nothing about that, probably, it is pathetic to try to fight the gods.

They continue not returning.

If it's Iftel, Leareth doesn't want to be captured by them but he could ask Carissa to give him new instructions, so the compulsion will let him use magic; he's confident that he could hold off any reasonable number of soldiers, that way. If it's his own people... He should stay put. If it's a god - well, Vkandis got him into this situation in the first place, if Vkandis is messing around with it more than Leareth has no idea what He even wants. 

Also saying anything to Carissa, to nudge this one way or another, risks arousing her suspicions, and she probably wouldn't listen anyway. 

He waits, and hopes - muses on whether the magic of the 'Rope Trick' would be visible for a distance - tries not to fall asleep, and waits... 

The prisoner is apparently asleep, which she doesn't trust but which would sure be convenient. The burn on her wrist hurts. She presses herself against the viewing window with an illusion at the ready and tries to think how long it's been since the First Arcane left. Not very long. Nine and a half more hours until she can reasonably expect rescue.

A few minutes later, several people approach the place where the Rope Trick is hanging in the Ifteli forest. 

Three of them are wearing the same drab, unobtrusive uniforms as the other mages accompanying Leareth the previous day. 

One of them is Valverde, being herded along, apparently under some kind of magical control. They're moving in almost complete silence, thanks to a discreet sound-barrier cast ahead of them. 

They stop. No spoken words are exchanged; the presumably-mages just look at each other, tersely, and then one of them turns and glares at Valverde, and then they turn and head toward the clearing where the Rope Trick is set up. 

Shit. Okay.

Surrender isn't certain death but it's awfully likely death. Running away without the prisoner is - also probably death, at different hands. Running away with the prisoner -

- she takes her bag and pulls it over his head, and then over the rest of him, and then picks it up; it's not any heavier. That's how Bags of Holding work.

She goes invisible.

She casts Fly.

She grabs the stupid goddamned torture rock she's supposed to use to practice combat spellcasting with. 

And she swoops out of the Rope Trick and flies as fast as she can away from the clearing. 

It takes at least a couple of minutes to suffocate in a Bag of Holding. She's pretty sure.

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?" 

"They are secretive about their abilities." 

"Huh! Another way they're like Companions, I guess..." Vanyel shifts his weight, then shrugs and makes a stool for himself out of snow. "Leareth, er, you can sit down if you want." 

"Actually, no, I cannot." 

"What? Why...not?" 

Leareth finds himself very unsure how Vanyel is going to react. Which is unusual. Normally his predictions about Vanyel are quite accurate. 

"This is jumping ahead, but I was taken prisoner by the invading force, after they crossed the barrier. A number of - unlucky coincidences - were involved. Vkandis has a great deal of power, so close to Iftel." 

"I - what - oh." 

Leareth did mention, offhand, at some point in their conversations, that Iftel was under Vkandis' influence. Or Vanyel thinks he did. It's bizarrely difficult to remember, and...why didn't he even think about that, in all their frantic strategy-meetings about the aid request? It would have been awkward to actually mention– not that awkward, really, he could have claimed he read it in an obscure book, everyone knows he reads ten times as much as most of the Heralds... 

"So the barrier is Vkandis too - that's why you -" Vanyel feels slow and stupid and five steps behind. "Er, right. The...earthquake? Was that related?" 

"Yes. It was unusually extreme, the gods tend to meddle in subtler ways; it must have been rather costly for Him. From which I infer that He wanted me taken captive very badly." 

Leareth's tone is calm, his expression unreadable, his black eyes like still pools... Leareth stands very still, but apparently that's because he's under a compulsion, or something, not to move? 

"Leareth, I - gods - are you, did they hurt you -?" 

"I have not been physically harmed, no."

Why does he care so much. Leareth is his destined enemy, who's he almost certainly going to have to try to murder, someday, and die in the process. And yet. 

"I believe I am currently on the Ifteli side of the barrier, not far from the site where your Web-alarm would have triggered. ...I am not requesting, nor expecting, a rescue attempt - we are enemies, after all - but I think Valdemar ought to know the danger. The invaders are - from another world, coming in through an interplanar rift of some kind. They have different magic, and are very well-resourced. Iftel is going to lose this war, perhaps soon. And - given what I know of the invaders' leadership, they are rather expansionist. Valdemar could be at risk next."

Leareth takes a deep breath. He's feeling kind of shaky. Maybe it's just from hunger, though that doesn't usually affect him in the dream.

"...I told them you have only a dozen mages," he goes on, with a note of apology in his voice. "It seemed not-unlikely the higher-ups knew this already, from other interrogations, and in any case they would have found out soon enough. I managed to avoid letting anything slip about your existence and unusual power, let alone about our ability to communicate. So you in particular ought not be a target, yet. I am not sure how long that situation will last. My captors initially assumed I was an ordinary mercenary captain, and I let them, but they eventually pieced together that I am - more important than that - and are now escalating the situation. If I do not manage to escape or be rescued in the next nine hours or so, I think they will transport me back to their world, and I must assume they have...other options for interrogation, there." 

Vanyel doesn't miss the very slight tremor in Leareth's voice. He's scared. Which is...an absolutely terrifying fact in itself. 

Focus. He can go through all the implications of this later. 

An interplanar rift - another world... It seems impossible. Absurd. But the situation was already bizarre, and this - does explain it. How Iftel, despite its impassible shield-wall, could have ended up in such a bad position, begging for help from its neighbours. 

"Right. Can you tell me what you think they do know, so far?" 

"Yes, of course. I shall also tell you everything I have learned of them, so far - their goals, and their capabilities..." 

Leareth does his best to go through it efficiently, in a sensible order. He'll have to talk fast, to cover everything before the dream ends. 

And Vanyel does his best to listen and commit everything to memory, for later debriefing with Yfandes. Who's going to have...a lot of feelings about this. Vanyel has plenty of his own feelings, which he's tamping down as hard as he can. He can deal with that later. 

By the time the sky starts to come apart, Leareth has managed to cover everything he knows - or, well, mostly his guesses and inferences - about Asmodeus and Hell and Cheliax; their philosophy, their goals, their resources and available magic. He's quickly summarized the main content of his interrogation, mostly information about Velgarth geopolitics and Velgarth mages' capabilities. 

"- One weakness is that their magic needs to be prepared in advance," he's saying. "It is apparently not tiring to cast at the time, but once they have used up all of their 'spells' for the day, they cannot do any more. It also requires concentration, which can be disrupted–" 

And it looks like they've just run out of time. 

Damn it. Damn it damn it damn it. There's no reason for Vanyel to want to, what, to comfort Leareth - but apparently he's going to regret it if he doesn't. 

Leareth comforted him, once, in the dream. On the Sovvan-night he spent in the ruined palace in Highjorune. Leareth had so little of the context, and Vanyel was trying so hard to hide his emotions, but apparently his destined enemy could still see that Vanyel was in pain. That he was alone and scared. 

Apparently now it's Vanyel's turn to notice that in Leareth's shuttered expression. 

Vanyel rises from his snow-stool and steps closer, until they're directly face to face. Takes Leareth's hand. 

"It's going to be all right," he says, which is a stupid thing to say but now it's out there, hanging between them. "We'll - I don't know what we can do, but we'll figure something out." 

- and then the dream ends, and Vanyel is alone in his tangled covers, staring at the ceiling and a thin bar of moonlight shining through his curtains.

He lies there for over a minute, frozen, stuck, pinned by the enormity of everything he just learned. Or everything he just heard from Leareth - he can't afford to take it at face value, of course - except why would the man lie about that - 

Eventually he shakes himself loose of it and sits up. His hands are trembling as he casts a mage-light and reaches for the paper he keeps by his bed. 

:Yfandes?: 

He doesn't know what he's going to say to her, either, but he can't do this alone. 

And Leareth wakes with a start. Finds himself still lying on the floor of the stupid Rope Trick demiplane, heart racing, breathing hard. His mouth is still parched and his head aches viciously, from lack of sleep as much as anything; he can't have been asleep more than a candlemark. 

For some reason, even though the dream represents a lot of progress, he feels a lot more scared and shaky and trapped and helpless than he did before. 

Orient. 

This time, at least, he does manage to fling out his Othersenses on an instinctive-enough level to push Thoughtsensing past Carissa's baseline shields. 

She's trying the casting-in-pain exercise, again, mostly because it's something to do with herself. She's at eight minutes and still holding the cantrip - Prestidigitation, this time, she's using it to clean her clothes - and she's thoroughly absorbed by the pain and her various efforts to set it aside and focus on casting. Hell hurts more, she reminds herself, and it doesn't end.

Eight minutes and ten seconds, now.

At least she's distracted enough not to have noticed he's awake. Leareth lies still, forcing his breathing to slow and his muscles to relax. 

He's scared. 

If his people don't manage to rescue him - he has no real hopes that Vanyel will even attempt it - but if he's not rescued within the next, gods, eight hours or less by now - then they're going to take him to Cheliax. And - probably hurt him. 

He's mostly not afraid of the pain. Carissa isn't even wrong, that practicing casting while in pain is an important skill. It's one Leareth has a lot of, and right now he's using it to concentrate despite the headache.

(He's almost relieved that something is likely to happen within eight hours; it puts a cap on how long he'll need to keep going without food or water. Almost relieved.) 

But it's - evidence, right, more evidence of what Cheliax is like, what Asmodeus is like and how He runs Hell. More evidence of why it would be disastrous if Iftel, inevitably followed by Valdemar and its neighbours, fell into Asmodeus' hands as well. 

If he falls asleep again he's going to lose Thoughtsensing. This is such a frustrating constraint to be under, but Leareth forces himself to stay awake. He can't even pinch himself because that's a volitional action, but he can - lean into the fear, a little, enough to keep some adrenaline going. 

And he watches Carissa's thoughts. 

She makes ten minutes.

Ha. She knew she could. A stupid decision, not to learn years ago, but not one that'll cost her too much, hopefully.

The burn somehow hurts more once she's stopped. 

Leareth eventually decides that they're going to be here a while, and it's the best opportunity he's going to have for - 

- for what? It's not like he has a plan. 'Wait to maybe be rescued' isn't a plan. A plan is something where his own actions matter. 

He - mostly can't take any actions, right now. 

What options does he have? He...can talk. That's about it. He has a window of seven or eight hours when he can talk to Carissa, and hopefully read her thoughts without her knowing it. 

...He had even less than that in the dream with Vanyel. And, quite possibly, a larger gulf to cross - and it's not clear what that will end up accomplishing, but at the very least it got to the point where he could tell Vanyel honestly about his last day, and maybe hope for actions to be taken about it. 

Of course, he had a decade, not just a few hours... 

- also apparently he can't talk. The time horizon on the geas must have passed. Opening his eyes is allowed, though, and apparently taking a deep breath is, too, and it inevitably makes him cough and maybe that will get Carissa's attention. 

Prisoner's awake.

She only has one more Tongues today. She contemplates whether there's a reason to save it for anything. It seems like...not really?

Leareth waits for her to make a decision on that. He really wants to be able to ask permission to roll over; the floor of the Rope Trick space isn't exactly soft, and he has bruises from earlier. It would probably be good for his physical condition to ask about standing up and walking around, too, but at this point he's feeling a bit dizzy and lightheaded even horizontal. Mages don't cope well with long periods without any food; Leareth usually brings some with him, but in this case everything he brought is still in the collapsed remains of his safe-room and records cache. Even if he hasn't been doing any casting per se, he's been using his Othersenses pretty hard. Being half-suffocated can't have helped. 

Carissa took off his talisman against magical attacks, too, which makes him feel panicky. He tries to ignore it. 

She spends ten minutes thinking about it, because there's no hurry. She might want it if she's trying to visit Iftel villages for food? Probably that's not worth doing today, if no rescue comes tonight she'll have to do it tomorrow but he won't starve today.

He looks in pretty bad shape. That decides her; if he needs medical attention she ought to know. 

She casts Tongues. "You can talk."

"Thank you." Leareth tries to moisten his lips, without much success. "May I change position." 

"You can sit up. How is this made?" She waves his protective artifact at him.

Leareth sits up. It makes the lightheadedness worse. 

"I told you the basics already - I can try to explain some more detail, but it may not make sense without training in our approach to magic, and I do not have the design memorized or a copy on my person. ...Also I think you ought know that I will become impaired at answering your questions if I go much longer without any water to drink. And I would appreciate an opportunity to relieve myself, at some point." Though, conveniently, he's dehydrated enough that needing to pee isn't that urgent. 

"I'll keep that in mind." Leaving seems very dangerous, right now. 

Sensible of her. Leareth sighs, though, letting a hint of disappointment show, along with fear and sheer exhaustion. It might actually work in his favour, for Carissa to think he's more, what was the word she thought - more pliable than he really is. 

"What do you expect will happen after this?" he asks. "Will your superiors retrieve us and bring me to Cheliax?" He's not expecting her to actually answer but she may well think something informative. 

"How about you show me how these things are created, and then I might tell you about our plans."

"All right. I am not sure your magic could easily replicate it, though. ...Do you have paper I could use to draw diagrams?" 

"Yes." She can get him some paper. "You can write."

So Leareth spends the next twenty minutes explaining the basic design for a shield-talisman against magical attacks. It's the simplest kind, conveniently. He sketches out some diagrams as visual aids, to the best of his ability; his hands are shaky, more from low blood sugar than nerves but he's not not scared. And he's bleary enough that he can't recall a lot of details. (He doesn't try especially hard to jog his own memory on it, either.) 

She'd honestly prefer to feed him but it doesn't seem worth leaving over. She tries her best to keep up with the magic conversation, at least. It seems like she can't do this, not easily, probably not without developing a new spell. 

"I expect our people will take you back to Cheliax tonight," she says eventually.

Leareth appreciates that she's not letting him go hungry as some kind of deliberate deprivation to make him more cooperative, but her intentions don't change how he feels, which is like shit. 

"And then what?" he says wearily. "They throw me in a dungeon for some less friendly interrogations?" 

"I think you'd be a valuable ally, if you'd rather that."

"I am aware I would be a valuable ally to - well, almost anybody who could convince me to help them. ...I am, however, unsure if your Asmodeus is someone I wish to help achieve His goals." 

"They don't have to let you go back once you die, you know."

Leareth isn't surprised. With what he knows of their magic so far, and what he's inferring about Asmodeus and His character, it fits.

"Really? What would they do instead?" Hopefully Carissa's thoughts will tell him whatever she's not willing to say. 

"Send you to Hell. Where you'll serve Asmodeus. So if I were you I'd just skip some steps and serve Asmodeus."

"If I judge I do not want to serve Asmodeus, I will still not want to serve Him if I am in Hell, you know." 

"In Hell it really, really does not matter what you want."

"- See, if that is true, this does not lead me to believe that Asmodeus is making use of human souls in a way I would deem effective or approve of! In which case I would not want to go to Hell, but I also would not wish anyone else to go to Hell, which one assumes would be the result of working for Asmodeus." 

"You'd rather they just get no afterlife at all? Hell is the most useful a human can be to a god, which is the best deal humans can get, and no one cares at all whether you approve of it, and thinking like that is a great way to get tortured until you stop having opinions."

Well, this isn't going to go anywhere interesting unless he can push Carissa into talking about the actual crux of their disagreement here. And her answer here seems...pretty close to that. 

"In my experience, no, it is not the best deal humans could get. It seems to me like a rather terrible deal, in fact. I aim to do much better. ...On behalf of everyone in Velgarth, not only for myself. - On behalf of you as well, if I can. Since I think, personally, that torture is bad and I would prefer a world where nobody is tortured even if they think they are agreeing to it because it is the 'best deal they can get'." 

This seems likely to get a strong response of some kind, and so Leareth pays especially close attention to Carissa's thoughts. 

- wow. 

She's had conversations sort of like this at the Worldwound but - it seems different coming from someone who is already in Chelish custody, someone who isn't relying on 'well, I'm going to Heaven and Heaven might not fall to Hell' but on ...what is he even relying on -

"It...makes sense that yesterday you were aiming for better?" she says, though it doesn't really. "But, uh, at this point it's just delusional. Your people aren't going to find you."