The Healers are very very gentle with Iomedae. The sleep technique isn't safe to use for that long at a stretch, so they need to let her wake up at least briefly every candlemark, at which point they help her her roll over because the Healing-sleep mostly prevents tossing and turning, and offer her top-up doses of painkillers unless she starts protesting this. She is physically most of the way back to perfect health, by now, and only very debatably needs Healing attention at all, but if they're going to keep giving her unreasonably high doses of drugs they should be monitoring her, and even though her injuries aren't physical in nature, they aren't going to assume she feels well enough to do anything unaided. 

They don't have a language in common with her right now, and have no way of talking to her that doesn't cause her additional pain, and no way of understanding her while she's awake. They'll arrange for a Thoughtsenser to start reading her just before each time they let her wake, since otherwise her shields snap back into place as soon as she's conscious and then they have no way of understanding her if she wants to ask them for something or convey a worrying symptom. They're trying pretty hard to avoid Mindspeaking her extraneously, 

Ma'ar is arranging peace talks with Urtho, they let her know when it seems like Mindspeech might not be too awful. Ma'ar offered that she could suggest other people she's met in Velgarth, if she would rather not be among strangers right now. They won't offer other updates spontaneously if Iomedae seems content to rest and not do any things. 

The afternoon passes. 

The ceasefire continues to hold. 

When Iomedae wakes she wearily reconstructs that a hostile god tampered with her brain and tells them to kill her. When they don't do that she settles in to endure. She asks for people, sometimes, but people from her own world, her friends and allies. Her memories of everything since she came to Velgarth are much fuzzier than her memories of home. She's ...pretty sure there's a war. With the Star-Eyed Goddess. Ma'ar is winning, probably. 

They can figure out what she's asking for from her surface thoughts. They can't fulfill that request, but they can keep her as comfortable as possible in the meantime. They're pretty worried about the apparent memory loss but at least she's calm, and Shakat can have a look tomorrow and see if he can figure out what would help. 

It's a wearying afternoon. Ma'ar is having some trouble convincing his King that Urtho is still even in a position to negotiate for peace on behalf of his country, seeing as it definitely looks like his country's major decisions are instead mostly being made by random cultists of various gods. This is kind of hard to argue with, especially given that Urtho himself is still resting and mostly not a point of contact for them. 

But, by the time he finally drags himself to bed, they have an agreement on a place and a time for both sides to meet, and an agenda to discuss. Neither Ma'ar nor Urtho will be there in person, yet; one of the things they need to discuss, and come to agreement on, is what precautions Tantara will be taking against rogue god-followers showing up and ruining everything again. 

He spends some time visiting the recently-freed Predaini prisoners of war. Most of them spent months, some over a year, in terrifying and confusing conditions of captivity and with very little information on whether their kingdom was winning or losing, but his people are used to hardship. They'll be fine. 

He manages to sleep well, somehow, which is surprising. 

In the morning, he checks for updates, confirms that nothing exploded and nobody died overnight, and then heads to see Iomedae. At least for the first half of today, he probably can do quite a lot of his ongoing work from Iomedae's bedside. 

The Mindhealer is also arriving, yawning and with tea. Iomedae is still in Healing-and-sedative-assisted sleep; he'll have an initial look before they try to wake her. 

She's still in terrible shape! (Well, perfect physical condition, but oil-tapestry terrible shape). The distortions that seem related to the headache might be starting to get a bit better, but they're still pretty bad.

Yeah. This is about what he was coming to expect – there's a lot of acute damage, the mental equivalent of the swelling and pain around a broken bone, that seems likely to subside by itself, though far slower than he would prefer. She's eventually going to be in less pain and (hopefully) less impaired as a result. 

A lot of the other disruptions don't look like they're going to heal back to their previous state, or to any kind of healthy state. A broken bone that isn't set will heal wrong, and poorly-treated injuries can cripple someone for life. 

The last dose of sedatives should be starting to wear off; Iomedae's body burns through the drugs fast. He thinks they should let her wake up fully - with Ma'ar reading her, unless he's too busy remotely running peace talks, but he was better at it than the other Healers with Mindspeech - and see if she can be nudged into explaining what her world knows about the problems caused by gods messing with your head. 

He's not that likely to be interrupted urgently in the next candlemark, unless of course the Star-Eyed Goddess or Vkandis send someone to sabotage the peace talks. Ma'ar takes Iomedae's hands, and slips into her mind while her shields are down, and waits for her to wake up. 

Pain. 

Godheadache.

Not Aroden. Someone else. 

He Mindtouches her, still as gently as he can manage, though the Mindhealer thought that she might now be getting to the point where receiving Mindspeech isn't going to cause more pain than the baseline. 

:Hey. This is Ma'ar. You are in Predain. Peace talks are starting - your draft was good. Star-Eyed and Vkandis have not tried anything yet. ...How much do you remember?: 

Agony and horror and Aroden and she needs to kill the Star-Eyed goddess. Immediately. They were interrupted. She needs to finish it -

- hostile god in her brain, she needs to not do things -

- they should kill her -

So more or less what he thought; he would like to have more detail but he doesn't need to, most of what they need to know is conveyed perfectly well in the mess that was left of Iomedae's mind. 

:Aroden went to significant lengths to keep you alive and I trust His judgement: Contacting Ma'ar, not even one of His worshippers, is probably the sort of thing that was very costly even on top of the sheer distance. 

(Figuring out how to Gate between planes or between worlds or whatever it would take to reach Golarion is not a top priority right now, however badly he wishes he could make that happen, arrange for Iomedae to wake up with her actual friends and colleagues around her. He can add it to the list of reasons why a peace treaty is the highest priority, really; if he and Urtho are allies then he can request Urtho's help and do it that much faster.) 

:You might be compromised. We have you under guard: albeit mostly not because he was worried about her suddenly turning into a puppet of the Star-Eyed Goddess, she can barely move. :We are not going to let you do any things. ...We have a Mindhealer, we can fix it: 

She thinks very very slowly, but mostly clearly.

If she's dangerous there's not all that much a guard can do. At home under some circumstances they'd dump her in a demiplane, paladins do not have a way to stab their way out of demiplanes. 

She thinks she is not dangerous to her guards. She is - not reliable to make the kinds of high stakes decisions it is net good for her to make when she can trust herself. Different category of problem.

She should not make decisions like to kill a god.

Aroden thought the god needed killing, though.

There should be a church of Aroden here so He has more visibility and can help more cheaply - no, that's the kind of high stakes decision it is bad to make when she can't trust herself.

This is straining her oil painting pretty badly; she pushes through it. She needs to tell Ma'ar he is doing a good job so he'll keep working on the peace talks.

Ma'ar definitely has some sort of feeling about the fact that Iomedae apparently considers his...self-confidence, or something? to be one of the key limiting factors in the peace talks working.

He also has some sort of feeling about the fact that she's not wrong. This is...now moving into the realm of decisionmaking where he doesn't feel like he has long-established heuristics and mental habits, such that proposing a problem immediately results in his mind generating a plan. 

- it's not some kind of entirely new and mysterious realm, though. It is, fundamentally, understanding Tantara's side of things, and figuring out what costly signs of goodwill they need that will actually reassure them that Predain wants peace. And then talking to Urtho. Mostly this is going to be talking to Urtho. He...has never exactly been good at that, but it's familiar, and - the advice he's gotten from Iomedae, even in the little time they had, resolved a lot of things he had somehow never figured out despite years of debates and letters. 

He wants Iomedae BACK it's not fair, Gating into Urtho's Tower to rescue her was supposed to mean that he would still have her help 

He takes a deep breath. :We are figuring out all of that, it is not on you. The only thing we need from you right now is to help us figure out what the Star-Eyed did to your head so that our Mindhealer can fix it: 

She thinks.

She doesn't remember. Except that whatever She tried made Aroden very very angry.

Yeah. Ma'ar himself also doesn't remember anything about Aroden contacting him - including whether or not it was definitely Aroden, but he's inferring that it was just based on the context, it certainly seems unlikely it was the Star-Eyed. But 'angry' seems right. 

:You recognized your symptoms as a godheadache before you remembered the events. Has this happened to you before?: 

Talking to gods is always excruciatingly painful and if the god isn't very careful and the conversation short can also cause dissociation and memory loss. 

(When she is a god she plans on being better at it.)

How long does the pain usually last afterward? It's been about a day, should they be worried that she's still in this much pain? ...Probably this was neither a short conversation nor one where Aroden could be particularly careful, and so maybe it's entirely to be expected that it's worse. 

Does the memory loss get better over time? Is there anything that might help, like going through a written timeline of everything that's happened since she landed in Velgarth to help jog her memory and put the fragments she does recall in order?

(He's pretty sure they can do that, once he's working closely with Urtho, between the two of them and the magic sword they should be able to compile a list of all of Iomedae's activities and choices, and even if she can't retrieve the original memory of it, she'll at least know what should have been in those gaps. It's what he would want to do, if he woke up missing a lot of memories.) 

- he's also not sure how much it's actively damaging for her to be trying to think and talk, right now. They don't have to figure out all of this today, if she needs to rest and only try to communicate in very brief chunks. 

She has no idea how much godheadache to expect for gods warring over your soul. She'd really expect that to just kill you, actually. 

The memory loss is sometimes permanent even if gods weren't warring over your soul. Probably once the headache has gone away it will be helpful to reconstruct everything.

It does seem like the sort of thing that would kill most people! Iomedae is, as has been previously demonstrated, extremely hard to kill. Maybe it will at least discourage the stupid local gods from trying over and over again, that it keeps not working. 

She should focus on resting, then, and the Healers can keep giving her huge doses of painkillers so she can be as comfortable as possible. 

...Do they have her permission for the Mindhealer to keep fixing obvious problems in her head, even when she's not really with it enough to consent case-by-case? He can't retrieve information that was totally destroyed, but there are probably still a lot of things where it'll be obvious to him what broke and how to put it back. 

She doesn't know what Mindhealing is. If he trusts it, sure.

(It would be convenient if they had at some point found time to explain it to her, but - then again, she probably wouldn't remember it anyway. He would hate having things done to him that he didn't understand, but...if she's willing to trust his assessment of it...it does seem like it might be a faster way to get enough of Iomedae back that they can properly orient her to everything...) 

Yes. He trusts his people, and the Mindhealer who's been working with her is very experienced and very careful. He may not be able to fix everything but he's not going to slip up and make things worse. 

Iomedae is among allies. That is not enough for things to go well, but it is good and she is grateful. 

She is also really really struggling to string her thoughts together, at this point.

She is among allies! One of whom is currently in possession of her incredibly powerful magic headband that makes you smarter, and also got an entire full night's sleep last night, and is actually feeling relatively hopeful and in control. 

(The headband helps a weirdly large amount with meetings, which is not at all what Ma'ar had expected after his first experience of it, when he was way too lost in endless rabbitholes in his own head to particularly hold a conversation. Maybe it's just that his baseline is better right now, but it absolutely seems to be making him more persuasive. Last night he was vastly better than usual at flagging all of the places where the King is uneasy, exactly what he's uneasy about, where his understanding diverges from Ma'ar's and what sequence of words would bring him over to Ma'ar's viewpoint. 

...he has mixed feelings about this, honestly, it seems potentially dangerous to be supernaturally convincing when he isn't necessarily supernaturally correct. But he did actually try to consider it, and - he does still think that he's more likely to be correct, on most questions, than anyone in this entire world except for Iomedae. When she's not damaged.

But right now he's looking out for both of them, and his whole world, and - it might not be enough, but he thinks he's the best person for it, and Iomedae seems to think he's the best person for it, and so he's not going to turn down anything that makes him more effective at accomplishing his goals.) 

The Healers want to give Iomedae painkillers and then let her fall asleep on her own, they've been doing more Healing-enforced sleep than is really ideal. Ma'ar sits with her and holds her hand until she's definitely asleep, and then leaves, because he theoretically can work from here but he's better at it if he can be somewhere with the rest of the King's advisors and a lot of tablespace for maps. 

Shakat stays with Iomedae.

He's not going to try to reconstruct anything that was shredded badly enough to be left unrecognizable, but he's on the lookout for places where pathways were interrupted, by metaphorical glue or acetone or water-damage, and where as a result areas of her mind are mostly not linked up to the rest like they should be. He thinks he can make some headway on that.