She's in a dense forest. It's snowing, and everything within more than ten yards of her fades into blurry grey-white. The trees are leafless, and gnarled as though by intense winds, but otherwise look sturdy and healthy. Something chitters in the undergrowth but doesn't emerge. 

She can't see much of the terrain through the falling snow, but it doesn't feel mountainous. There is no sign of human habitation, at least not within ten yards in any direction. 

Huh? She can't actually think of a spell or outsider-ability that sends you to a random snowy forest without anyone touching you, short of a Wish, but that does seem to be the thing that's happened. The snowy forest rules out anywhere in Xopatl, they haven't gotten snow this bad in years, but it isn't otherwise very distinctive.

She already has Endure Elements up, so she finds a place to sit and waits for Aroden to scry her for a Teleport location. It shouldn't take much more than an hour.

She is unfortunately not quite going to get an entire hour uninterrupted. 

The rustling and chittering in the undergrowth continues intermittently, though whatever local wildlife is making the noises keeps out of sight for a while. It's not until three-quarters of an hour have passed that some of them seem to conclude that they might have found prey, and start circling her. She still can't quite get a clear look at the somethings, just flickering glimpses behind trees that don't entirely seem to line up – a vague impression of some kind of large toothy cat, but they seem to be...mostly invisible? Arazni can glimpse the angle of a head and ear here, the tip of a tail there, an elegant paw that slides in and out of visibility. The print it leaves in the snow stays put, at least for the few minutes it'll take for the falling snow to fill it in. Though the creatures investigating her probably won't wait that long to attack. 

(There is still no sign of Aroden.) 

Concerning. (Both the circling creatures and the lack of Aroden.)

She's completely out of spells, actually, but she wouldn't have lived long enough to learn magic if she didn't know how to defend herself without it. Her first resort: animals usually hate fire, many types of monster included. She starts gathering branches into a pile, and then lights them with a Spark, which ought to work in spite of the weather.

Without waiting to see if that deters the creatures, she draws her rapier and uses her Pearl of Power to recharge Glitterdust.

The creatures seem...a little...deterred by the fire? They don't run away, but they circle more cautiously for a while. The paw-print has time to soften and fade under more snow. 

...They are not deterred enough to leave, and eventually a couple of them are going to try leaping at her from opposite directions. They can fade to almost full invisibility for a moment or two, apparently, but if she's paying close attention, the scuffle in the snow and movement of air will be enough to warn her. 

Glitterdust stab stab and run like hell.

... well. That was the plan. She gets off the Glitterdust, but she didn't plan for two of them attacking in the same moment, from opposite directions. The one in front of her gets a rapier through the back of the throat and goes down. The one behind her lunges blindly and manages to hit her with a clawed paw, knocking her into the snow and leaving a set of scratches across her back.

(She's dazed but conscious, and bleeding but not dangerously so. She's tougher than an ordinary person. She'll be fine.)

(Probably.)

The Changelions harassing her are smart enough to know that the two-legged creatures that can make fires to warm them come in different varieties. Only some of them have the strange detachable and hidden teeth, and even when they do - even when it's a big, sharp tooth, like this one wields - a two-leg stupid or unlucky enough to be camping alone will usually go down to a pack's combined efforts. (The Tayledras scouts are not, usually, stupid or unlucky enough to go anywhere alone, even here on the relative outskirts of the Pelagirs.) 

But a few of the two-legs have more than just teeth – they have magic, and not just one kind like invisibility. They're tougher and harder to hurt, like they have an invisible armored hide, and they can kill pack members from a distance, when they wish to, with gouts of flame or lightning from nowhere. And this one, apparently, can blind you. 

The two-legs with magic aren't worth attacking. (And this pack has no way of knowing that Arazni, unlike a Velgarth mage, can be - and is - out of spells.) They scatter, with some difficulty given the Glitterdust, leaving their dying comrade bleeding into the snow. It's fully visible now, and clearly some kind of large cat, with dun fur and saber-like canines. 

Slowly, she gets back to her feet, verifies that the invisible not-jaguars are (probably) gone, and then opens her Bag of Holding and takes out a few of the emergency items Aroden gave her. She activates the wand of Cure Light Wounds and then considers her situation.

Evidently, she can't just sit here and wait for Aroden to rescue her. She could try to use her scroll of Sending to reach him, but if Aroden hasn't shown up already then either Aroden is dead, Aroden is uninterruptibly busy with something more important than her, or she is utterly beyond the power of arcane magic to reach, at least if you don't have a Wish diamond handy. (Aroden has several, but he needs them for the Veins of Creation and they both know it would be foolish to use one to rescue her instead.) She could try to Send to someone else, but anyone else she could contact would have little they could do to help her, except tell Aroden, who, again, might be dead.

She could use the scroll of Teleport*, or the Plane Shift if it turns out she's not on the Material. But even apart from the fact that she might not be able to activate them at all, she's already raised the possibility that she's too far away from home for a Teleport to reach. Sending is cheaper, so use that first.

You can Send to the dead with only a small chance of failure. Therefore: Sending to Aroden. If he's alive he'll come get her as soon as he's able. If he's dead she'll use the Teleport. If the Sending itself fails then the Teleport probably would too and she should plan on being here for the forseeable future.

In unknown location, snowy forest, unfamiliar invisible big cats. Your status? Request pickup at earliest convenience.

(*This is the spell called Greater Teleport in modern times; the "compressed" fifth-circle version hasn't been invented yet.)

She does not get an answer. 

On the bright side, if she is on another planet then it probably won't recently have had an apocalypse. (For all the good that it does her if she gets eaten by invisible jaguars.)

It's too early to sleep, so she picks the direction that seems most likely to lead out of the dense forest and starts walking.

The local wildlife is giving her a wider berth now. (Most of the Pelagirs Changecreatures are sensitive to magic, and have encountered human mages before.) The rustling in the undergrowth mostly keeps its distance. 

It takes a while, but the forest does seem to be gradually less dense, the trees straighter and less oddly twisted. There's a lot less undergrowth, and barely any deadfall wood; any paths are obscured under the blanket of snow, and any footprints wouldn't last long, but it's starting to look like you might expect if people were regularly picking over the forest floor for firewood. 

A squirrel watches her from a branch. It looks like a perfectly normal squirrel, not half-invisible at all. She probably has an hour or so of daylight left. 

When it gets too dark to walk she stops, and builds another fire, and—no, actually, she probably should not sleep out here, however badly she needs to regain spells. This precise situation is what the scrolls of Keep Watch in her Bag of Holding are for.

(She has a Ring of Sustenance, but it only does sustenance. Sleep-related abilities won't be added to the standard version of the item for several thousand more years.)

Non-magical wildlife, which is all that's nearby, knows better than to bother a human with a campfire. Arazni is left alone. 

Meanwhile, a Companion is currently galloping as fast as he possibly can toward the source of his Call. 

He is not grumbling about the timing. Choosing is an honor that every Companion lives for, and besides, there's a young future-trainee out there who, given the abruptness and urgency of the call, probably needs him very badly. So what if it means he's missing the rest of Della's sojourn in Haven while her Chosen, Herald Davret, is on leave; there will be lots of future meetings, and you only get to Choose once. Sure, normally one gets somewhat more warning than this - the other Companions talk about how they had a vague feeling for weeks or months - but not always, it's not like it's a rule. 

He wonders what his Chosen will turn out to be like. ...And he really hopes they're not in bad trouble right now. 

(Companions can move very fast, but the border is a long way from Haven, and for the last forty miles or so there are no real roads. It's going to take Ketran until morning to get there.) 

Time enough, then, for the snowfall to end and the sky to clear.

She spots the first bright point of light through a break in the clouds, and her breath catches in her throat. She's been to space with Aroden, and this would be, even under an entirely clear sky, a far less impressive view than that; but it does confirm for her what she had already begun to suspect: unless the gods have finally decided to rouse themselves for a miracle and clear the skies of Golarion overnight, she is a very, very long way from home.

She isn't afraid. A significant part of her desperately wants to get home, but being sent to another planet is not, actually, the right sort of thing to make her afraid.

Ketran will find her staring at the sunrise with a strangely intense expression of wonder.

(The first thing Ketran will notice about his Chosen is that she isn't Valdemaran. Her skin is about the right shade to be Karsite, though her facial features don't quite match, and her clothing matches even less. She's a little older than typical Choosing age—maybe sixteen, but the sort of sixteen who really didn't get enough to eat as a young child. She's wearing kind of a bizarre amount of jewelry considering the somewhat rough and tattered state of her actual clothes, including a slim golden circlet on her head and multiple rings, bracelets, and necklaces. All of it is very visibly magical to anyone who can detect that, but she isn't, herself, Gifted in the sense known to Velgarth.)

...Oh. That's what it feels like, to see your Chosen for the first time. 

(Ordinary Companions don't exactly have mage-sight in the usual sense, but they do have a kind of sensitivity. There's a brightness and a thereness to her jewelry that catches Ketran's attention and makes him wonder.) 

He approaches slowly, making more noise than he needs to; he doesn't want to startle her. He - should probably be taking this slowly, actually, if she isn't from Valdemar then she might only know vague legends about what Companions are. 

Arazni will see a large snow-white horse, wearing a saddle and a blue-and-silver bridle only slightly worse for wear after galloping much of the night through inclement weather. (Ketran wasn't in quite enough of a frantic hurry to forget that part, when he's been told multiple times by the older Companions that your Chosen might never have ridden a horse before.) The horse has an unusually broad forehead, and large, long-lashed, oddly forward-facing blue eyes. 

:Hello: Ketran sends in Mindspeech, ducking his head shyly.

The first thought her brain jumps to, on being telepathically addressed by a horse, is 'Nirvana petitioner', because, as she's just now realizing, it's actually a lot more likely that she died than that she got randomly Wished to another planet. Except that Nirvana probably doesn't have things that attack you, and also she isn't a cute animal. E...lysium? There are plenty of things that discourage that hypothesis but none that conclusively rule it out.

:Hello,: she says to the horse. :Where...am I?:

Oh no is she lost, that must have been so frightening. Ketran doesn't know how he could have gotten there any faster but he still wishes he had, somehow. 

:Valdemar. Well, the edge of it, you're half in the Pelagirs. ...Are you all right? It's not - very safe here.: 

:I've survived worse but if you're offering a ride out of this forest I'd be grateful,: she says.

:Uh, I don't know what happened but I'm pretty sure I'm much farther from home than it's possible to get without powerful magic—:

(—the brief wordless image of Golarion from space, completely shrouded in ash and dust—)

:—I've never heard of Valdemar...this is the material plane, right? I thought for a moment I might have died but it's not obvious which afterlife this is and I think for the real ones it, uh, should be.: (She speaks of the afterlives as if they're...real places, far away but as much a part of the world as the trees around them—a lot more concretely than any tradition in Velgarth does.)

:No, gods! You're not dead, this is - the material plane.: Though what a bizarre way to refer to it, the way someone might say "this is Karse" or "this is my parents' farm." (The earlier claim is...more bizarre...but Ketran is mostly failing to actually think about it concretely.) 

He hesitates. :If you've never heard of Valdemar: because she's claiming to be from a different WORLD entirely????? :then - you probably don't know what Companions - like what I am - are? Unless they have them there as well?: 

(Some additional context comes across with that word. Companions are - servants of a god, but in a very nonspecific way, and also servants of a particular country, and - confidantes, protectors, mentors - and some concept not entirely different from 'Lawful' as it would be known in Golarion.) 

:I'm not sure that we don't have Companions, we have a lot of species, but I've never heard of you. Are you—some kind of outsider?: (This is how the 'servant of a god' connotation comes across to her; the connotations in her own Mindspeech are of people from, well, outside the material plane, often but not always associated with a god, usually more—fixed in their values than humans are, along particular directions that don't quite make sense just from reading Arazni's thoughts. It's a category that doesn't not apply to Companions even though they are not, actually, instances of the thing.)

:Er, I think we might be like - that thing - but I don't know because I'm not sure if we have that thing around here.: 

THIS IS SO AWKWARD Ketran just wants to stare into her eyes and Choose her and have it be - like all the stories and songs - but he really cannot do that when she doesn't even know what's happening, it wouldn't be fair at all. 

:We're - created by a god, to serve Valdemar. We're from the material plane, though, and I was born like a normal horse and everything - I guess the Groveborn aren't, they just walk out of the grove fully formed...: He tosses his head. :We Choose good and brave people to be Heralds - well, they start out as trainees, but to be Heralds later - and we teach and advise them and help them - do the right thing for Valdemar.: 

This is more or less the explanation he practiced given in case his Chosen had only heard wrong stories, but he's not at all sure it's going to be enough for someone from ANOTHER WORLD AAAAAAAAH.