Leareth wishes he could! Unfortunately he has very little idea. 

A quick summary: a powerful spellcaster (?) or perhaps miraculously priestess of a foreign god (??) claims to have arrived in k'Treva Vale directly from another world (????) via unspecified means. They claim to have survived an explosion there. They claim to work for a formerly-human ascended god called Aroden (??????). They claim their world has multiple afterlife planes where souls continue on after death (!!!!!!). They are opposed to an invasion of Valdemar, claim to be powerful enough to prevent one and immune to mind-control along with various other capabilities, and are offering negotiations. 

That doesn't make any sense. 

Indeed. Leareth is also very confused, but it's not like it makes any more sense as a godplot. He intends to reply. 

...His guess about the Gate in northern Valdemar - assuming that, from Vanyel's perspective, this really did involve a foreign visitor claiming to be from another world - is that Vanyel was trying to pre-emptively relocate Iomedae to a safe distance from the nearest civilian population. Vanyel is probably inclined to blame Leareth for whatever happened in k'Treva Vale, and so of course he would be worried that Leareth will try again, even though trying again and expecting it to go differently this time would be kind of stupid. 

Leareth intends to write a letter immediately clarifying that he wasn't responsible for k'Treva and only learned that something had happened at all via this letter. He would, separately, like Nayoki to delegate some people to try to locate 'Iomedae', assuming Iomedae is in fact somewhere in a remote forest in northern Valdemar. Not to kidnap them, because that closes a lot of doors and is unlikely to work regardless of whether this is real or a trick, but - to learn more. 

All right. 

To Iomedae of the Knights of Ozem,

I am grateful for your earlier message, and for the effort exerted to ensure it would reach us promptly. If you are, indeed, of another world, then I anticipate our local gods cannot see you well yet, but will once They are more oriented be very unhappy about your intentions and I would not be surprised if attempts to sabotage our communications ensued. In fact, taking your letter at face value, I worry your safety is at risk and the gods will be highly motivated to kill you before you can disrupt the path of this world's future any further. I would offer protective measures, but of course you do not yet have reason to trust any offers I make.

If your claims about Aroden and your world's afterlives are truthful, then we have many interests in common, and I will say now that I would be eternally grateful and enormously relieved to have an alternative to my current plans. They were not lightly considered, and I have spent a thousand years looking for another way. In the scenario where you are telling the truth, I would be willing to work very, very hard to ensure that we can work together, and not be steered into pointless enmity. 

I am, of course, far from convinced of your claims; this would be the first incidence of contact with another world, the mechanism of your arrival is unclear to me, and the timing is very suspect. If I am right about when this happened, it would have been shortly after certain events in Haven that I have only recently learned of. If I am additionally correct that you have already spoken to directly with Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron, I suspect he will have said that he and the Heralds are interpreting said events as my opening move in an invasion. I do not expect you or the Heralds to believe my side of things either, until such time as I can offer further proof, but I was not responsible. I would swear to this, by every star in the sky, though of course you do not yet have reason to believe that my oaths mean anything. 

I am still unsure what exactly happened, except that I believe it resulted in the death of Herald-Mage Savil Ashkevron, who is Herald-Mage Vanyel's aunt and very important to him, and whose death I suspect of having been engineered by the gods, though I am not sure how, to convince him that I was the first to betray our previous negotiations.

I did not intend to betray our negotiations, and will state now that I am still not planning to invade Valdemar this winter, though I will defend my own territory against attacks. If the Heralds wish to take the reasonable precaution of redeploying their own troops, I will not interpret this as escalatory as long as they remain within the current Valdemaran borders. 

I was not responsible for the explosion in k'Treva Vale, and your letter is the first I learned of it. I also do not expect this claim to be believed without further proof, but I think it ought be very surprising to Vanyel to posit that I possess this capability at all; if I were able to operate in the territory of the Star-Eyed Goddess, my past plans would have gone quite differently, and if I had an agent in k'Treva Vale I am sure I could think of better things to do with them. 

 

I am aware that it is difficult to prove a negative, but I hope it will mean something to Herald-Mage Vanyel that the strategic purpose of this attack, if it were my doing, would be deeply unclear. While I will not deny that I am ruthless and willing to pay costs that the Heralds consider unacceptable, I think Vanyel ought to know enough of my past work to consider that my plans are rarely so confusingly aimed. 

I would be eager to arrange a way that I can prove my intentions to you, or at least provide stronger evidence than words. I appreciate your offer to testify to your claims under Truth Spell, though unfortunately this would need to be done with the Heralds' cooperation, since the Truth Spell is a form of magic I do not have access to myself, and my usual methods for confirming honesty would count as mind-affecting magic that you claim to be immune to. 

Unfortunately, my current information state does not rule out that the contents of your letter are a ruse intended to disrupt my plans and potentially to cause my death, though I admit it would be even more baffling and unclear in its goals than most godplots. Nonetheless, I am reluctant to place myself in a position of greater vulnerability, for example by coming in person so that I might speak under a Truth Spell to confirm that I was not responsible for the attacks on Haven or on k'Treva Vale, until I have less reason to believe that the gods will use it as an opportunity to assassinate me again. 

I am sure that you can think of more ways than I for how to provide evidence of your otherworldly origins or of Aroden's original humanity. 

 

I do not expect you to update on this until you have seen further proof of it in my actions, but I will nonetheless express now that I have no desire to start off on a hostile footing, and do not currently intend to make any attempts to kidnap you. I will admit that this is partly because I do not expect that kidnapping you will succeed or achieve my goals in most of the possible scenarios here. If your claims are true, then I doubt my people could capture or hold you at all – which I am admitting to you in a good-faith offer of information, and have no expectations about how you will use this information – and, of course, if the letter is fraudulent then you probably do not exist and it does not matter.

I am not at this time comfortable giving a more formal oath, but mainly because I am deeply lacking context and so have wide uncertainty on all of my future plans, and because I would not hesitate to 'kidnap' you if I believed that the alternative was your assassination by our local gods.

If there is any way to arrange it, I believe it would be valuable to have a channel of communication independent from the Heralds. I do have a measure of trust in Herald-Mage Vanyel, given our years of communications, but the Heralds as an institution are servants of the local gods, whose intentions here I do not trust at all. 

I hope that this letter will reach you in a timely manner, and I await your reply.

- Leareth

(And he's going to include an unusually detailed postscript conveying the point in time at which he wrote and sent this letter, just in case that ends up mattering.) 

- and then Leareth is going to make several copies of the letter, immediately, and drop a couple of them off with clerks off-site in other facilities and one in a sealed records cache, because this feels spectacularly high stakes and he's incredibly confused and - he doesn't even specifically know in what scenario it would be useful to have a copy of his letter in a sealed records cache, but it feels worth sixty seconds' of effort to take the precautions he can think of off the top of his head. 

And then he will ask - not Nayoki, she has enough on her plate already - one of his other highly-trusted staff to handle delivering this letter - multiple copies in fireproof boxes, please - to the message-drop location. 

...He doesn't really expect this to be sufficient. It's already evening. Vanyel has - even taking any of this at face value, maybe especially if he takes any of this at face value, Vanyel has had an incredibly exhausting day. Leareth is not entirely clear on who else among the Heralds, if anyone, Vanyel has delegated the responsibility of checking the message-drop location. 

- and if this is true the Iomedae is trying very hard for - something better than war - and he wants to reciprocate.

He's going to go try some direct personal scrying. He doesn't really expect this to work, because 'possible follower of an alien god from another world' is not a valid scrying-target even for Leareth, but it's worth a few minutes' effort. 

First, though, he's going to pass on to Nayoki that they should get one of the longest-ranged Thoughtsensers to the closest point they can without, technically, crossing the border into Valdemar. (The Web would detect it. Maybe more importantly, Iomedae might have the ability to detect it.) 

- also he's going to delegate to someone else, who can cast very fast unscaffolded Gates, to drop a few copies of this letter into midair above the city of Haven. It's a gamble, but - just in case the Heralds are on board with passing on messages and the sole issue is that Vanyel didn't think to put anyone else on duty to check the standard route. 

The letter-drop in midair sets off a Web-alarm! 

Ughhhh. Why is the Web-alarm going to him. Kilchas is not in the mood for this. 

- Gate in midair? High up in midair....? That's - not a thing - 

- Leareth, obviously. 

Well. Kilchas will drag himself out of bed and go see what's going on. 

And Leareth's staff will dispatch a Thoughtsenser with a range of over three hundred miles to just outside the official Valdemaran border.

His instructions aren't to try to read any of the minds he can sense - the population of the northern region numbers in at least the tens of thousands - but just for minds that seem unusual. Like they might be aliens. 

This is an extremely bizarre instruction to receive but he will do his best, and start a methodical scan-pattern looking for the presence of minds that seem Weird. 

Like by being extremely well but bizarrely shielded, as if by a dozen different half-overlapping magics?

He's experienced at his job and that's - definitely noticeable even on a very quick and very-at-a-distance scan, yes! He will report in that he's found something that looks weirder than anything he's seen before. 

(And Kilchas, on Companion-back, makes his way toward the field where probably anything dropped through a Gate would have landed.

He has gotten a very quick Companion-relayed briefing and he has so many questions.) 

And Leareth receives a rapid-fire Mindspeech report, sooner than he had really expected to. 

- that's - probably information in a particular direction -? 

He is going to immediately delegate to have several of his best scrying-specialists run a search-pattern over the approximate source. And he'll try himself, of course - it would be much easier if he felt secure enough to Gate over to within his own Mindspeech range of the estimated site, but he really doesn't, yet. 

Leareth is, however, much faster than average at moving around an initial scrying-location, and he has his best artifact to boost the spell, and a map of what they know about the newly-added northern reach of Valdemar...

- Heralds' Waystations. Assuming anything in the letter can be trusted, Vanyel would be considerate about sending his alien visitor to a remote location that also offered a roof over their head. 

Once he narrows it down to that, there aren't very many options. 

...Those sure do look like some sealed (totally non-magical but otherwise rather well-reinforced-looking) boxes in the middle of the Companions' Field! 

Kilchas is going to approach them very cautiously, even though - if this is a reply from Leareth, to the bizarre missive that Vanyel apparently convinced Randi to approve sending - he's kind of desperately curious. 

Nayoki is - actually pretty concerned about Leareth, right now, for reasons she hasn't entirely put her finger on. She's also way too busy to dedicate any further attention to this. 

- the scrying-specialists on duty searching the Pelagirs think they might have just spotted something. 

The Heralds' Waystations do not have any permanent wards on them. (There haven't been enough Herald-Mages to do that kind of maintenance in centuries, and certainly not in the brief time elapsed since the new northern region was annexed.) 

Leareth checks the few remaining options one by one. It's not instantaneous, narrowing down on where the Waystations - which are not that easily detectable by mage-sight, given the lack of warding, just by looking at patterns of felled trees - but he can do it in minutes and not candlemarks. 

The box is apparently not going to explode when picked up. 

...Kilchas is nonetheless going to haul it to a Work Room, in case it explodes when opened. 

- this one? no. 

Next one - anyone there...? 

There's someone there. 

- evidence, pointed (mostly) in one direction. 

(Leareth is carefully not having emotions about this yet. It wouldn't help.) 

If he pushes as much energy into the scry as he can, to get the highest-fidelity mage-sight possible, what can he pick up? 

A woman in incredibly magical armor, built with incredible intricacy out of an unfamiliar metal and unfamiliar magic. 

Her eyes are closed in quiet reflection. 

Leareth continues to recognize the cost of setting off Web-alarms - especially if they might look like they're targeting Iomedae for a kidnapping attempt - but this is now much closer to the same tradeoff as raising a brief midair Gate above Haven, which was clearly justified. 

(And it's been at least fifteen minutes, and 'Iomedae' - whoever that is, whatever it means - does not seem to be currently reading through his most recent letter. Which...doesn't mean much, it's late and the Heralds are personnel-limited and honestly move slowly at the best of times...but it means something. Namely that Vanyel is probably not the one handling this personally.) 

One significant difference is that he isn't (at this point) sending through one of his agents, who will be at risk from both the Heralds and the gods as long as they are operating within Valdemaran territory. Just an incredibly brief and small unscaffolded Gate, which - if Leareth casts it personally - he can have up and then down again within less than two seconds. And even if 'Iomedae', or some other Power, blasts his Gate, then - he's still one of the few people who can almost certainly survive that. 

(And if he doesn't, he'll come back, but dying even temporarily here would be an almost unacceptably high cost, given the stakes and the time-sensitivity.) 

Leareth will give himself thirty seconds to consider tradeoffs. 

Work Room. 

Kilchas will, very carefully, try to open this box. 

:- Sandra?: 

Mrrrrghhh? 

He doesn't actually have a question or a particular request, he's just pretty stressed and maybe about to die and, if not that, probably about to learn something fascinating and-or horrifying. So he sort of wants Sandra in his head for it.