He leans a hand on Rohan's flank, and reaches out. 

:Heya. Iomedae, right? ...Herald-Mage Kilchas, Vanyel Gated me over. Leareth left us a letter. Mind if I read it to you from here? It's a bit of a walk.: 

It comes across clearly in the overtones that he's both quite tired, and also intensely curious. 

: - yes please.:

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

Iomedae listens to the letter in silence.

:All right: she says when she's finished. :It's promising, I suppose. I don't know anything about the incidents he's denying, but 'I don't want to invade' is what you always want to hear from people you don't want to have invade, and 'I don't want to kidnap you'. You know more about your world's magic than I do, is giving him one of my magic items as proof I'm from a different world dangerous? Would it let him scry me more easily, or use powerful magic to transit to the item's creator in my world or something?:

Wow this is very far above Kilchas' competence level. Honestly Kilchas also doesn't feel like he knows a huge amount about said incidents. 

:....I should actually come over to where you are and look at your artifacts, if you want me to judge that. Er, I wouldn't usually think so - and definitely wouldn't usually think it'd let him Gate to your world, if it's really another world - but it's Leareth we're talking about here, so hard to know.:

And - does it look like there's enough of a path through the trees that he can ride Rohan over to the Waystation? 

...Barely, but yes. 

:Wait there a minute, I'll be right over.: 

:I'll wait.:  She hardly has anything else to do. She paces. 

It really does seem like a promising letter. Like - the kind of letter that the person she built in her head and immediately got too emotionally invested in, hypothetical Alfirin doing this mad thing - would send. Of course, that's also a good kind of person to pretend to be while you figure out how to kill her.

And a somewhat wizened-looking man stumbles down from the back of a large white horse, and knocks on the door of the Waystation. :It's me.: 

She is not assuming at all that this isn't one of Leareth's people. She lets him in anyway, and is just very on guard. :Nice to meet you. I am Iomedae, a paladin of Aroden and the Knight-Commander of the Shining Crusade. Thank you for reading me Leareth's letter.:

He will immediately sit down on the nearest item of furniture - which is the straw-stuffed mattress in the corner, Waystations don't tend to come highly furnished - and continue staring at her in fascination. 

:I'll have a look at your magic items. - Also I can tell you a little more about the first incident he's probably talking about. Not k'Treva, the other one. If you want.: 

Have a ring of feather fall. She keeps it in her gauntlet but could put it on were she falling for long enough to swap rings about it.

He'll take it and stare at it.

She hasn't given him an incredibly obvious indication that she does want the full explanation, but - it seems worth giving anyway. 

:It was at the winter ice festival. We didn't see it coming - the Web didn't pick up on it, and it really should have. There was an enormous - fish, or eel, or something - a Changecreature out of the Pelagirs, it looked like, or a construct-creature - it broke through the ice and went for the Queen of Karse and her little daughter. Managed to grab the daughter, she's only five. ...Savil dived in after her. There was a fight, underwater. Van went in after Savil. ...Managed to get Arven out with Fetching - that's the daughter - but the monster had Savil, had hurt her badly. Van nearly died. They got to the surface somehow, but....Savil didn't survive.: 

:And that's a kind of tactic Leareth has been known to use? Or is it more - he's an archmage, he can probably do anything -:

:- I'd say more the second one? I mean, Van did say he knew Leareth could make - had made - construct-species, before. But it's - I don't know. Seems messier than his usual style? If what he'd wanted was to break our alliance with Karse, which would make sense, then - he failed.: 

:The thing he claims he wants to do - build a god with human values - in my world it exists and it is - worth a great deal. I'm a paladin. I don't murder people, I don't start wars of conquest with kingdoms that are doing their best with the systems they have. I can't countenance his plan to achieve it. But - but I am very curious about how he arrived at it and I think he's right that it might be the most important thing in the world.:

Kilchas blinks at her. 

:I don't know anything about your world. And - I agree, his plan is awful, and we're not letting him use our country for it if we have any say in the matter. ...But - I could see how it'd make sense, from where he's coming from. Just, to want to have a god that makes sense. That you can talk to.

- I don't know him. Van's the one you'd have to ask, for how he came up with this plan and why he decided it was worth it.:

The god-plan seems pretty different in character, in what it suggests about the person who came up with it, from having a construct-creature eat a young princess for unclear reasons and then denying you did it. 

She nods. 

:Well, I'm sorry for your loss and I'd offer to try to get to the bottom of it but I'm not a mage, shouldn't go near your cities, and do not yet possess the power to raise your dead.:

:...You don't yet? Is that - a power people have in your world - I saw the bit about the special planes for dead souls but that didn't sound like...: He trails off. 

:We can bring them back, sometimes. I cannot do it personally. If there were a proper Church of Aroden here they could do it. I - don't want to promise too much, if your souls get - put in another body - then I doubt it'd work - but it is a thing our magic can do, and it is of course a thing we will do for people as soon as we can.:

Nod. :I'm guessing you didn't put that in your letter to Leareth? He'd - I think he'd want to know. Obviously it'd mean more if you could prove it, but...:

He's still peering at her ring. 

:- I reckon Leareth would know better what to make of this than I do: he admits. :It's - no kind of magic I recognize, at least. ...I'd be very surprised if he could use it to reach your world. Scry you more easily, sure, but - the Web detected a Gate, Van thought Leareth had tried to send you his letter directly - which one assumes means he could already scry you.: 

:Huh. Does he speak the same language as your people?:

:Van never said they had to speak a different language, in the Foresight dream? He's immortal, I assume he's learned all sorts of languages by now.: 

:I may try to speak aloud to him, then, unless you strongly recommend against that.:

Blink. :- Oh, in case he's still scrying us right now? Guess he might be. Or has someone delegated to keep watching you, at least, he must have a lot on his plate.: