:If I were him and could land a scry on me I would keep it up continually. And - I have a lot to say, to the person he might be, though I do realize he might also not be that person.:

:Does it do any harm to say it, if he's not the person you think?: 

A pause. 

:If he's the person I think he is, then he'd want to hear whatever you have to say. Can't speak to what he'd do with it.: 

:If he's not then he's presumably playing some ludicrously complicated game and I don't feel like I have any guesses what'd help with it or hurt it. I guess knowing what I want to hear would help him but - I won't be able to do much here while hiding how I see the world.:

...And if Kilchas isn't wrong - though he might well be wrong, he knows he isn't the best at reading people - then Leareth already said a lot of the things that Iomedae wanted to hear. Whether it was because he wanted to trick her, or sincere, is the real question. 

:Makes sense. Reckon it's worth it, then, to - say what you'd want to say, to the person you're hoping he is.: 

She sprouts angel wings. 

"I am hoping I'm speaking to Leareth," she says aloud, "ideally not at too many levels of indirection. I'll give you a moment, if you want to notify him, though I'm sure he's as confused about what I can do as I am about what he can do, and being cautious."

Leareth has, in fact, been continuing to hold his scrying-point on her. (With one of his scrying-artifacts now keyed to the location, it only takes a fraction of his location.) 

- he's mildly startled, and - suddenly more concerned about whatever capabilities Iomedae thinks she has such that he would want multiple layers of indirection here - as far as he knows, scrying is just as undetectable to mage-sight as Farsight is... 

He is not startled or concerned enough to drop the scry. He waits to see what Iomedae has to say. 

"In my world Aroden was thousands of years old when he ascended. He travelled the worlds first, looking for - something better - because it's - quite a thing to do, really, especially when no one has done it before and there's no way to correct it if it fails. It's actually a complicated thing to get right. I am saying this because I imagine you know, if you have a plan to do it, and so all I'm conveying is that we know too. It was the work of centuries. He wasn't just trying to solve the problem for himself; he was trying to leave behind, in the Starstone, a repeatable mechanism of doing it, of turning humans into gods with human values. 

I am planning to follow Him."

...Leareth is listening. (Well, he was already listening, but. He genuinely hadn't expected this...) 

It's still, at all conceivably, something that someone who had access to Vanyel could invent to appeal to him. But he doesn't really buy that. 

Does Iomedae have more to say. 

(Leareth is putting off having any emotional reactions about what she's saying, but - he can definitely tell that there's quite a lot of weight, there, that he's pushing ahead into a future that he hopes will have room for it.)

"Some of the work is about ironing out bits and pieces inside of you that are in tension, that point, unresolved, in different ways, where it might matter which was amplified first or whether at any point in growing smarter one of them stopped seeming as if it made any sense. We have intelligence enhancement magic, and among the recommendations from Aroden's notes was to test one's thinking with and without it, to make sure that there's coherence between an ordinary human version of one's mind and the most capable version magic can shape. 

Some of the work is about figuring out how your values actually shake out, in a context sufficiently different from the one you started in. You need to handle it gracefully when there are more species of intelligent creature than you thought there were, or species that gradually split into copies of themselves or species that revert into babies or species that don't themselves lay claim to any of the conceptual vocabulary humans have for discussing what it's like to be inside our own heads. There is not one way in which humans reliably generalize, in sufficiently strange situations for the impulse to Good inside them. You want to have done as much of that generalization as possible in advance. You want to be someone who can check, and will want to check, if your human self would approve of the form you are taking, but also your human self was probably wrong about some things and you don't want to burn those in forever. It's hard for gods to change.

It's -

- I would not do the thing that you are planning to do. But I think that the thing you are planning to do, done right, is in fact the most important endeavor in history, and I can almost understand why you'd be willing to pay a price in millions of lives to do it."

Leareth - actually feels like he's missing some underlying conceptual vocabulary, that he would need to fully follow the second paragraph. It's a new feeling for him. It's not a comfortable feeling, but - it's one filled with agonizing hope. 

I would not do the thing that you are planning to do.In my world Aroden was thousands of years old when he ascended.

...

In my world Aroden was thousands of years old when he ascended.

....It's probably not a charitable reaction, but - it's the tempting thought to follow - that maybe one of the reasons Iomedae can afford not to even consider the options Leareth is willing to consider, is because Aroden was there first, and succeeded at all of his goals. 

It's incredibly inconvenient that he doesn't have a non-escalatory way to reply. 

- actually. If he reconsiders the risks he's willing to take, given the information he has now - Iomedae's presence, and her obviously-alien magic items, and what she's saying to him right now, clearly (correctly) anticipating that he would be listening... 

:Nayoki?: 

What is it this time. 

:Mmm?:

:I intend to Gate to just outside the Valdemaran border.: He can send an approximate location for where. :I wish to be within range to Mindspeak Iomedae directly.: 

Nayoki feels like she's missing so much context, but - is she really in the mood to argue, after the last five minutes - no, not really. 

:- Interim report on the Pelagirs scrying, that you should have before you go. They are not sure yet but - it looks like a large crater. ...Significantly larger than the usual expected radius for a Final Strike.: 

Leareth...wishes he could be less surprised. 

:Thank you for the warning.: 

And he's going to raise a Gate. The initial terminus is from his Work Room, which makes it a lot easier, but the destination is unscaffolded, at an obscure point in some frozen tundra north of the tree line, just outside the Valdemaran borders but at the closest possible point to Iomedae's current location. She's almost 200 miles away, which is already pushing his Mindspeech range. 

It takes a few moments to re-establish the scrying-point, to aim from, and then he reaches out and out, looking for a mind apparently shielded by visibly alien magic...

Iomedae has continued talking.

"The reason I would not do the thing you are planning to do is that once you start to make plans like that, then most of the other people who - see it, what we have the potential to grow into and why it matters so much - will be unable to distinguish you from a warlord bent on conquest and slaughter. And because it's not a path you could - recommend to any other, it's a path that will consume most who walk it, and being possible-yet-dangerous to emulate creates a lot of extraordinary risks that are hard to fully account for. Being a person where most nearby people are very bad for the world means it is dangerous to change and dangerous to be imitated and dangerous to build things imperfectly in your image.

... and because I ...do not, actually, have confidence that anyone could be careful enough, could be sure enough that they wouldn't get it horrendously wrong, to justify paying that much to do it. Aroden was risking - more than his own life. But not ten million lives alongside his, except insofar as he could save more than that if he succeeded. I think you'd have to be even more sure than he was. And it is harder to become that sure, when you are conducting an operation most good people won't countenance or participate in.

And it changes people, to be people who will commit murder on unfathomable scales. It does not change them in good directions.

But I do - have a good friend - who I think would try the thing you were planning to do, if she were handed a world like yours. It's a - standing moral disagreement of ours, I guess you could say. And so I do want to make it clear that - while I wouldn't do it, when I imagine the kind of person who would, I imagine someone who I love very dearly, and who would be - doing her best, and in a great deal of pain.

And who would be very angry, for me to be standing here, an envoy from a better world that does not force that tradeoff on anybody, explaining to her how it isn't worth it, and I suppose I want to say to her that I do understand, and do respect, the willingness to pay that much, and that I am sorry, that you were forced to it, and that I am very profoundly not here to judge you for having been forced to it. 

But you aren't anymore."

Leareth misses a few words in the middle of that, while he's finishing his Gate and re-establishing the scrying. 

Not very many, though.

.....It feels like it has to be a trick, somehow, even if he can see how or why or what it would be aimed at, how else could anything be so directly pointed at - the things he regrets, the wounds he caused that won't ever be healed even if and when he's succeeded - 

(He also continues to feel like he's missing some kind of vast cultural context. He hates it and is desperately intrigued by it at the same time.)

...But there is an alternative, that - maybe anyone, or any group of people, who care about all of the people, everywhere, including the ones not yet born - maybe there's something you converge on, even in another world. Maybe it's neither an accident nor a ruse, just - Iomedae speaking as though to her friend, and saying words that hit hard for Leareth because they care about the same things. 

It feels hard to believe but maybe that's mostly out of habit.

Or maybe the gods are still lining up to murder him yet again. But he's well shielded and outside of Valdemar's borders and it doesn't make him that much more vulnerable, to reach out and try to find Iomedae's mind. 

:This is Leareth. I am speaking to you from several hundred miles away. - This is taking a greater risk than I would usually have considered, at this point in our negotiations, but it seemed worth it.: 

She is surprised; she blinks, on the scry. 

:Hello, Leareth. I don't intend to hurt you. I'm sure it's been done and doesn't work, and - these are peace negotiations. I would never kill someone through peace negotiations even if it'd work perfectly and solve all my problems. : She either means that utterly or is a spectacularly good liar even over mindspeech.

This is not necessarily a helpful point to poke at if his aim is just 'positive diplomatic relations', but it's not just that, and if he mostly just wants more information - 

:- Have you ever actually faced that tradeoff - where killing someone through peace negotiations would work perfectly to solve all of your problems, and you nonetheless chose not to?: 

In Leareth's experience, that seems like a bizarre tradeoff to face, and not generally how reality works - but, also, in Leareth's experience, pretty much anyone faced with that situation would pick the option that solved all of their problems. Both of these feelings will leak through in the Mindspeech overtones, he's not especially trying to hide it. 

:Not specifically? It's rare that killing someone works perfectly to solve all my problems, peace talks or no. And obviously if I did something like that Aroden'd renounce me and the Crusade would fall apart, so it'd be rarely even in my self-interest.

But - one of those knots you can't advisedly have inside yourself if you're going to ascend is - wishing you were a different shape of person than you actually are - so I don't wish that I could betray people, and if I could and Aroden would never know I still wouldn't, and if Tar-Baphon showed up to peace talks with his phylactery in hand I would not even consider attacking him and destroying it.:

Leareth doesn't immediately know how to reply to that - he's very curious about 'Tar-Baphon' and the context there, but it feels like it would be a digression from the rather time-sensitive situation here - so he pauses. 

- what does he actually need to learn, from this conversation? What information does he need from Iomedae to confirm that this isn't a trick, or at least reach enough confidence that he would be willing to approach her more directly? 

If it's a trick, then someone - or Someone - engineered it, and that calls for an explanation. Leareth is actually having quite a lot of trouble thinking of one. It feels wildly unprecedented as a godplot; he wouldn't have thought the gods had the precision for it, to aim someone at him who could convincingly play the character of Iomedae as she's presenting herself. Vanyel has enough context on Leareth to know what kind of temptation would be called for to convince Leareth to take an uncharacteristic risk, but - he can't actually imagine what it would take to steer Vanyel into trying that, or the Heralds into cooperating with the deception. 

He saw her artifacts, on the scry. He saw her impossible reflexes. And, more subtly than that, she speaks like someone of another world, with a different history and culture. Which is subjective, of course, but - his subjective sense is that it would be hard to fake. 

If she's real, then the question is how she ended up here from another world, and why now. 

...And how the gods are going to respond as soon as They figure out what's happening. He's quite worried about that. 

(And even if Iomedae herself is real, and not originally a godplot, that doesn't mean she can't be made a pawn of one.) 

:I do not currently consider myself at war with Valdemar: he sends, carefully. :I expect that they disagree, but - I had committed to not escalating this first even before I learned of your arrival. it would grieve me greatly to be steered into a war at this point, and I suspect that the gods seeing fit to force Valdemar's hand, now, means that They anticipated that if we had more time, we might have found an alternative. 

I have no intentions of harming you. ...I am worried about your safety. I am also worried that our gods will be inclined to steer you into war with my people. I am not sure what assurances you would need, to be willing to relocate to one of my secure locations outside of the gods' territory, but - I am willing to offer that now.: