:Yes. Well, I assume so. He's generally polite.:

:I have to say, I would have some concerns about why you still serve Him if you told me He had done all of this to you: 

She sighs, slightly. :I am not sure if this a case where my god will choose to help. And either way I need to start the work myself. It looks like whoever you saw before had a Sight-metaphor that was good for detail work but not so much the deeper damage to the overall shape, and they may not have been strong enough anyway, I am - stronger than almost anyone. ...I want to try something. This is probably going to be unpleasant, I apologize for that, but try to think at me if the pain is too bad so I know to slow down: 

She is venturing a guess that Iomedae has an absurd pain tolerance, but she never takes that for granted, and for most people it helps to be in control of it. 

Iomedae nods, and braces herself.

Kariasha's village, when she was a small child, mostly didn't use writing. There were peddlers who came sometimes, with books alongside their cheap brass jewelry and other novelties, but paper was expensive and would get ruined in the damp. But they had good fiber for twine, from the inner pith of the tall rushes in the river and from the bark of some trees and from the tall flowering shrubs with fibrous stems, and twine could be made tight and strong and, usually hung from the rafters, last for years before the moths got at it. So the household accounts, and the records of births and deaths and marriages, and even some of their histories, were recorded in knotwork. 

And there were nets, and rope-baskets, and traps to weave out of lianas, in general Kariasha spent kind of a lot of her childhood making things out of rope and rope-like things, but it was the knotwork records that always captivated her. Kariasha remembers being a very small child and sitting, fascinated, in her mother's lap, watching her mother's clever hands move with perfect confidence, twist and knot and pull and tie off and twist again... 

She sees minds as knotwork, gorgeous and intricate and often physically impossible in their structure, but always something she can learn to decipher and understand. 

Iomedae's mind is almost more beautiful in its simplicity as in its detail. Its core is a loop of, not twine, but thick strong rope, made of silk so its surface is almost perfectly smooth, and somehow woven in place as a ring with no interruptions or weak spots, supporting a perfectly balanced circular swirl of knotwork patterns. 

Or it should be. 

But Someone, and she knows Who now, tried very very hard to rip that unbreakable circle open. The Star-Eyed didn't succeed even in fraying its surface, Iomedae is not that fragile, but the ring at the center of her is very much pulled out of its normal shape. The mental force exerted - not just by Her, but by whatever her own god did, metaphorically, to pull her back to Him - must have been incredible, something a less stable and self-stabilizing mind couldn't have survived for an instant.

And her center is impossibly strong, but the rest isn't. Strings that should have been knotted together in complex patterns are torn apart; often the twine itself is half-unraveled. That part of the damage isn't worsening, everything where a piece was torn off entirely and left a disintegrating half-twine has been tied off so it can't fall apart any further. There must at the start have been fiber-dust and fragments everywhere, like the haze in the air in summer when the trees with fluffy seedpods open them, but that has at least been cleaned up. There are also signs of...things that aren't rope, sticky tree-sap and slimy residue, but that too has been mostly very painstakingly scraped off.

Iomedae's mind is trying to repair itself, some of the knotwork is recently retied and wasn't done from the outside, but she's reached a limit. With the center out of alignment, a number of places that should be able to touch and retie the pattern are instead way too far apart. Bits of Iomedae that aren't quite shredded entirely have nonetheless been flung in all directions, including directions that don't exist, and they're staying in those disrupted positions, drifting slowly if at all, as though the whole structure is weightless or underwater. (That part is normal, the Mindhealing Sight-metaphor doesn't especially bother to include gravity, you just don't normally see it exploded like that.) 

The central ring is, not rigid, but stiff, like heavy riverboat-ropes impregnated with wax to be waterproof. It's going to be really annoying to get it into an actually circular shape again. Ugh. 

:Look at the flame: she says again, and waits until almost nothing is moving, at least, and then...push, with undirected Mindhealing-energy, mostly aimed at the central area but it's not very tightly targeted and she's not trying to move anything yet, just loosen it. 

...it is not softening. 

She pushes harder. Not like the warmth of a hot sun, but like the heat rising from a blacksmith's forge. 

To Iomedae: it isn't actually painful, and it doesn't have the same awful not-pain quality of when the Star-Eyed tried to peel her apart, but it is VERY VERY INTENSE. Her senses mostly stop working; the world explodes into rainbow shards that melt and drip, she can taste the sound of the fire crackling, it is completely unclear what's going on with her proprioception but it feels like she might be...a field, or a river, or something that isn't a human body at all. 

Kariasha is paying so much attention to any of Iomedae's surface thoughts that she tries to push out past her shields, and if there is any internal screaming she'll ease off. A bit. 

She DOES NOT LIKE THIS AND SHE IS TRYING VERY HARD TO REMEMBER THAT SHE THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA

...That indeed looks like probably Mindhealing and not a murder attempt. 

Ma'ar did not actually think to check with the Mindhealer whether it was okay to touch Iomedae or talk to her while this was happening, so he's going to sit here on the other sofa-thing being very stressed. 

It lasts about fifty seconds, which to Iomedae is going to feel like a very long time, and then Kariasha eases off. Not all the way, she keeps it up just enough to keep things malleable. She gives Iomedae five seconds to slightly reorient before expecting her to process language. 

(Iomedae is going to notice that, one, the actual pain of the headache is gone, but two, she feels like she's floating in the liquid that everything in the room has turned into, and also - a feeling sort of like when your leg has fallen asleep and it doesn't hurt yet but it's numb and its ability to support your weight is dubious and if you try to get up and run you're going to end up falling on her face. Except the feeling is in her mind, and it's her - ability to try to do things, more or less.) 

:Are you hurting?: Kariasha asks, because this is the important question and Iomedae is obviously not go to answer 'yes' to 'are you okay'. 

:...no.: She does not sound super appreciative.

Kariasha would absolutely not expect her to be appreciative. 

:I can make you unconscious for this if you prefer. It should not be painful exactly but it is going to be at least as disorienting as the last part, for at least a few minutes. If you can bear it I would rather have you awake, so you can tell me if it does hurt: 

She says it very slowly and then waits patiently for an answer. Iomedae should already be less impaired in specifically the way where a god left fiber-dust residue all over, maximum strength Mindhealing is a great way to burn that off, but she's going to be differently impaired right now.  

Mostly she just doesn't feel very equipped to make these decisions. She's flagged herself as not trustworthy and she isn't in ongoing distress about that but it's not a state from which she's decisive. 

:I can tell you if it hurts.:

All right. Time to - 

- PUT.

THAT.

BACK. 

(Kariasha is not actually sure she can do that. She's exceptionally strong, but the force that shoved it that way in the first place was not just one but two literal gods. She is exceptionally sure that if two literal gods didn't even fray it, nothing she could do even if she were trying could cause any real harm to the visual-metaphor equivalent of Iomedae's core motivation structure.) 

The displaced not-waxed not-rope moves. A little. She's having to put in a lot of effort. 

It has a lot of the same quality where most of Iomedae's sense are coming apart into random synesthetic noise. There's also a deeply-unnerving sense of...things moving, that shouldn't do that. 

...What it doesn't feel like is being torn apart. If anything it feels like being pushed back together - like there are edges and corners of her that were completely out of reach, and are now only mostly out of reach, and she could probably strain and reach for them if it felt less like everything in her mind was half-liquid. 

Okay. It's okay. This is - not hostile. She trusts the Nameless flame, and she trusts this woman, and Ma'ar is here, and Aroden won't let anything happen to her.

It's a lot of effort but Kariasha gets about a third of the circle back into a circular instead of a weirdly squashed shape. And then - there's - something - in - the - way - 

- she doesn't try to call out to the Eternal Flame. That never works. The thing that works is a mental move that's hard to describe but that she calls 'getting herself out of the way.' 

There is no Kariasha. There's only a perfect loop of thick unbreakable rope encased in half-melted wax, and that rope is a person who matters who should be all of herself and it's not right that she isn't and it has to go back. 

That does look like something that could be better. 

Lots of things could be better. The world is full of sparks that are mortal souls, and usually it's by far simplest to just swirl the patterns of them in eddies, there are so many mortals who will do so many things if they're close enough and they have air, and they're so much closer to each other, usually that's a better angle... 

This looks very very difficult to set right from the angle that the other sparks can reach. Also it's an exceptionally bright spark, which is interesting. The god of eternal flame has been paying some corner of attention to the very bright spark for - it isn't exactly an interval of time, in Foresight, but either way it's more salient. 

It's difficult to do things with sparks and it's going to make all the other eddies noisier but... 

Iomedae is no longer in the cave. 

It doesn't feel like she abruptly shifted location. It feels more like she's been here, wherever here is, for an indefinite time, and was daydreaming about a cave and a flame and Ma'ar and unpleasant things happening to her senses, and then she blinked and remembered where she actually was. If anything it's the opposite of disorienting. 

Where she is: does not really have any features. It's foggy and bright at the same time, bathed in warm light that comes from nowhere in particular. 

It feels like she hasn't been using her head to have any thoughts, but at least at this moment it feels perfectly clear. 

Hopefully this helps! The Nameless God can also communicate with sparks but it's difficult, it buffets them around and this spark probably needs less rather than more of that. 

What?

Her mind does feel clear, though.

Okay. 

This is another god intervention. A friendly one; it isn't even hurting. It's just - giving her a place, where she can think, and where she can probably reconstruct the damage so that when she's back in the damaged mind she knows which parts of her can be relied on.

Thank you, she prays briefly, and then starts trying to pace through all her thoughts and memories to figure out how bad the damage is and how it can be introspectively identified if she can trust herself to do that. 

It's confusing to explore! 

For one, it's hard to access most of her memories, except some very core ones - she can remember Aroden just fine. It's as though the part of her that thinks, the thread of moment-to-moment consciousness, is entirely here, and - entirely not impaired, her emotions are level and she can hold onto as many complex thoughts at once as she could when she wasn't brain-damaged and was wearing her the headband - but, unless she does some kind of other motion, a lot of the content of what she's trying to look at feels like it isn't, quite, here. 

She can find it, with a specific effort of will, but it's a lot more like looking at it than like experiencing it. The her that's looking isn't pulled in. 

That being said: her mind is a mess! Her core motivation is...off, not exactly weakened but somehow not quite lined up...that might actually just be the not-trusting-herself thing, undamaged-Iomedae is very much a person who takes actions to solve her problems and damaged-Iomedae doesn't risk it. 

A lot of her habitual thought patterns, around orienting to new situations and forming assessments of people and laying out considerations for an against a plan, are there but randomly hard to get to from a lot of the usual angles, the mental pattern of 'if this happens, pull up this mode of thinking' disrupted. Her emotional regulation is a mess, though somewhat less of a disastrous one in practice since she continues to be incapable of fear. 

A bunch of her memories, particularly of recent days in Velgarth, are still just missing. Her interpretation of events seems to be better retained than the actual events; she can draw on names and faces and character assessment of Ma'ar, of Urtho, of Marlana and Thaliss and the priest of Vkandis, even though she is having a very hard time tracking down memories of specific conversations. 

...weirdly, she can remember the conversation with Aroden, insofar as it can be called that when it was mostly not-very-human-legible godconcepts, significantly better here. It's - pretty clearly not stored in a way that would be easy to get to from normal modes of thinking - but here it's no harder to get to than anything else. She even has enough mental capacity to unpack the godconcepts rather more than she usually could. 

Oh, that's useful. 

She doesn't want to start trusting herself unless the person that would be doing that is trustworthy. Is she? Did any of the pulling out of shape interfere with her ability to have it actually be a good idea to try to ambitiously fix things?

It depends how much she needs to trust? 

She absolutely can't trust that she would remember a specific event that happened, or a specific fact she knew before, and a lot of that lost information is probably important for planning purposes. She definitely can't trust her current emotional reactions to things to be ones she would endorse as useful. Enough of her minute-to-minute reasoning habits are disrupted that she probably can't trust herself to make quick judgement calls correctly, or decide on a tradeoff based on an intuitive sense of the better option rather than by explicitly reasoning through it, and her explicit reasoning is going to be slower because there are a lot of holes to fall into. She should almost certainly not be getting into fights that involve relying on her reflexes, that's actually more intact than memory - it's deeper - but falling into an unexpected pit would be pretty bad. 

It doesn't seem like she's missing the key elements for self-awareness of this, for having a calibrated sense of what she can and can't try and expect to have it work. And from this angle, at least, it doesn't feel like the things she wants, or how deeply she wants them, have changed at all. 

Like being a teenager all over again. She had all the principles, and was missing a lot of details of execution. But it's different than being untrustworthy to herself. 

She looks at it closely until it feels like it all makes sense, until it feels obvious where all the errors are.