“You’re going about that in a fascinating way,” Vanyel says dryly.

Pauses.

“All right, fine, I’m provisionally convinced that you’ve been messing with my life for twenty years in ways that - uh, mostly helped, or were meant to.” This feels like giving away a point he didn’t really want to hand Mornelithe; he has no idea where the man is about to go with it now. “Look, what are you trying to convince me of, here? To stand aside and let you march on Valdemar, or something less stupid than that?”

"No, it's essentially that.  Your country has stayed poor for a very long time, compared to the likes of Rethwellan or Baires.  Why fight to preserve that, if you're not fighting against a worse evil than already prevails in Valdemar?"

Vanyel scowls at him. “We’re better off than Hardorn, and it’s at least hard to judge for Karse. And Baires isn’t a fair comparison, they’re tiny and still have ten times the number of mages we do.”

"Yes, because your mages and even your Gifted get Chosen and then die before they have a replacement-number of children.  You'd think that would be easy to fix, with some sensible policy changes, and have a country with many Gifts and also highly reliable governance.  But then the other gods' pet countries would move against you, and Valdemar would cease to exist before its future iterations could become wealthy and complicated and noisy in Foresight.  You've already had a taste of that with the Karsite war, Vkandis shutting down your potential."

“What, are you claiming that’s the entire reason the war started? That doesn’t make any sense. Vkandis did an entire miracle with Queen Karis to end the war, are you claiming He just went and changed His mind?”

"Playing against the gods is not easy, Vanyel Demonsbane.  Karse moved against Valdemar when it became visible that Valdemar had a prosperous future destiny.  But the gods prioritize stopping me above all else, as a force of Progress.  Since I felt some responsibility for that prosperous future destiny that Vkandis was moving to abort, I changed my plans in a way predicated on Vkandis's moves and other observed divine moves and the Foresight of one of my minions, and became a threat that, Vkandis might imagine, Valdemar would need to be strong to resist.  I committed myself, if I saw no other divine moves based on Foresight, to conquer Valdemar with the sort of mere military force that an unruined country could successfully fight off.  I made that decision on your birthday, and Karis was empowered to stop the war within the day; the obvious timing to let you know it was me, later."

Vanyel makes a face. “Does it not make you insane to - try thinking that way against the gods? …I guess if you did go insane by trying to scheme against the gods, that might, er, explain a lot.”

"I agree it's an obvious possibility, but I'd put 85% probability that he's just like that and always has been."

"Any sufficiently advanced sanity will seem like insanity to the insane.  Of course, so will sufficiently advanced insanity."

Vanyel takes a deep breath.

“Right. So, your claim here is that you’re immortal with a centuries-long scheme to fight the gods. Who are keeping Valdemar poor. That you were justified in killing a couple of Herald-Mages and kidnapping a lot more, not that I can verify you only kidnapped them, because more people than that die anyway because Valdemar is poor. You knew I wasn’t going to take your word on any of this, so you - spent decades meddling in my life, just so that at this point you could be more convincing about - who you are and why you’re doing this. Your argument is that - it’s not worth defending Valdemar, my kingdom, that I’m sworn to serve, because in the end all I’m doing is defending the way things are, and you think that’s not good enough.

“And, you’re saying, you want me to stand aside.” He makes a face again. “I have no idea how you thought this was a plan that could work. Have you ever considered, yourself, that you might actually be insane?”

"Not really, no.  Or rather, I thought about that topic exactly long enough to be pretty sure there was no point in considering it further, which didn't take long."

"Hallucination doesn't actually create a detailed apparent external world indistinguishable from not hallucinating.  It's just that when your mind is damaged in a certain way, it's incapable of detecting what's actually a fairly blatant difference.  Similarly, insanity doesn't actually create a detailed introspective world that's impossible to distinguish from sanity.  If your mind isn't damaged, you can check for the place where those differences should exist, and see no such difference, and know you're sane."

"Or to put it more metaphorically:  When you're dreaming you don't know that you dream, but when you wake you know that you're awake.  A lot of people, when they're asleep, don't know when they're asleep and dreaming.  But that's not because there's no detectable difference, it's because they're asleep and therefore not looking in the internal directions they'd need to look to notice that they're asleep, and become lucid..."

"Oh fucking gods damned gold-plated Abyssal elephant shit."

"Can I turn Nyara into a fishgirl.  No I can't.  So this isn't even a normal lucid dream, not that it could be, it's a Foresight dream, and I don't have that Gift in this body - Nyara, if you secretly had Foresight this time around, and this is your dream, now would be a very good time to say so -"

"I don't."

"Great.  Just wonderful."

"Also, you spend twenty years doing WHAT to some innocent kid?  How exactly did you talk me into that?"

"I wouldn't have thought I'd have done that either!"

"Regardless.  Well.  It looks like that theory of how to evade Foresight is a complete bust."

"Time to toss all that right off the parapets."

"NEW PLAN."

Which is when Vanyel wakes up.