Leareth isn't going to recover. 

It would almost have been easier - or at least simpler - if he hadn't survived the frantic emergency evacuation up north, or if the Healers hadn't managed to get him through those first tense, awful hours. Because then there was hope, only slowly extinguished, as hours turned to days and weeks and Leareth still showed no sign of waking up. 

(The sequence of events that led up to his injuries was so stupid, a should-have-been-simple recruitment mission in Seejay gone horrifically wrong, but that part isn't surprising. Nayoki knows who their enemies are. It's infuriating, but it's not entirely unforeseen, and it's more inconvenient than disastrous. It's not the worst timing for it that it could be - though Nayoki is still half-expecting to find out later than the timing was far worse than it seems right now - and it probably won't delay their plans by more than a year or two.) 

Everyone involved in Leareth's treatment is cleared to know that he comes back, if not necessarily any details on how.

It still feels like giving up, when she has to make the final call and tell the Healers to stop keeping Leareth alive. 

The quiet empty pocket outside ordinary space is never a place where new memories can form, and the existence he has there isn't exactly one where he has thoughts in the ordinary sense, but there is still space to hold onto a handful of memories, and normally that includes the memory of what just happened and how he came to be there. It's generally important information. 

Leareth has no idea what happened; there's nothing there but blankness. Even when the cord of magic pulls and catches, yanking him back into the world, he still doesn't know.

He has space to start to unfurl, to be thinking actively rather than static, but he's significantly more disoriented than usual. Inclined to hang back and orient, first, rather than immediately wrestling for control of the new body. 

Where is he? What seems to be happening in his surroundings? ...Maybe more to the point, who does the person whose body and mind he's claiming - or not claiming yet - seem to be? 

The fact that Leareth appeared in the middle of a battle, or perhaps near the end of one, may be the most urgent piece of information.  The man he currently inhabits, as yet unaware of this particular danger to his mind and body among all the rest of them, is an adult in a Karsite soldier's uniform. He's strong and well-trained, but suffering from truly awful backlash on top of deep confusion about his very new ability to do magic, both of them held at bay by grief that is by far the most obvious thing about his mind.  He is, for all that, surprisingly functional, and at the moment managing to navigate this battlefield without dying.  He has no intention of re-joining the battle he was clearly taking part in a few minutes ago, but he's not leaving it, either - not until he finds his lord's body among the newly dead.

He has enough Empathy to sense other soldiers and avoid them as much as he can, but he's clearly doing that on instinct, without even knowing what it is.  The rest of his magic he isn't even trying to use. 

He's crying, quietly.

Well. That's interesting. ...And Leareth is going to worry about the exact unlikeliness of this setup, and what - or Who - might be responsible for the implausible circumstances, later. 

Leareth's first instinct, under normal circumstances, would be to Gate out. That...is not realistically going to happen right now. Leareth is still incredibly disoriented, none of his fragmented memories are clear enough to offer a Gate-location, and even with millennia of deep-engrained procedural memory in the use of magic, he's still going to be working with an unfamiliar Gift - strong, he thinks, but that almost makes it harder when the Gift is this newly-awakened and raw, and the body's reserves are unsurprisingly already drained. 

So. He's going to have to get off this battlefield the slow way. Which means shields are a priority.  

It's not difficult to seize control of the body's mage-gift, even with the original inhabitant still right there; the original inhabitant has no idea how to use it and mostly isn't. Shields - against physical attacks and projectiles, first, that takes the most power and least control - then layer a simple shield against mage-energies, and a clumsy illusion-spell to blur his silhouette a little and make him a slightly less obvious target... 

(All of this takes about a second and a half. Leareth is still expecting to end up in a fight over the body as soon as the man notices that he's no longer alone in his head - one he's almost guaranteed to win, he has a lot more practice - but he's not going to borrow trouble before it comes to him, and if he's about to be distracted he would very much rather be shielded first.) 

What just happened?  Did he-- No, he didn't do that, whatever it was.  He can't tell what the magic was for, but it was complicated and completely unlike what he did before...

--And it still doesn't matter.  Maybe he'll go insane tomorrow, maybe this is why the priests do what they do, but right now anything that isn't in his way will wait. 

(The man is surprisingly good at controlling his thoughts.  Once he decides not to think about it, he genuinely doesn't, even though he would have no trouble noticing Leareth's presence if he paid attention for a moment.)

He kneels to pick up Kadrich's body - it's still warm - and when he stands up with it he nearly falls right down again.  His head feels awful.  None of that matters either.

Their camp was uphill, so he'll walk in the opposite direction, where he hopes there's nothing for anyone to pay any attention to.  He would very much like to be elsewhere, somewhere far away from here - there's an image in his mind, of the castle, the graveyard near the back wall, a glimpse of the mountains behind it.  He has no way to get there, and no idea where around here is safe, if any place is.  Likely not, but he doesn't need to be safe for very long, so perhaps however far he can manage to walk like this will be enough.

...Leareth likes this man. He's faintly surprised to catch that thought flitting past, but he does. 

He has a hazy but mostly legible view of the man's surface thoughts as they move past, and relatively little access to deeper memories and context unless he decides to make his presence a lot more obvious and have a dig around. Which he doesn't think he can spare the attention for yet anyway; so far they don't seem to have come under direct attack, but this is not a safe area to be distracted. 

Carrying a dead body is slowing him - them - down. And it's not like there's anything to be done for the man now. Leareth feels, and sets aside, a brief flicker of regret that he didn't manage to show up a minute or two sooner, when he might still have been able to change that outcome. 

You need to leave him, he thinks in not-exactly-Mindspeech at the mind now sharing his body. There is nothing you can do for him now that is worth dying for. He doesn't, quite, add explicitly that surely the dead man - a relative? beloved, one way or another - wouldn't want his - whatever this man was to him - to die as well, pointlessly. 

Survive first, he adds after a moment. If you survive, you can come back for him. 

No, he thinks back, fiercely and immediately, and only then processes where the not-voice came from - briefly gives in to the instinct to struggle against the intrusion - stops it, quickly and entirely, his thoughts taking on an apologetic tone for a moment.  He's still deliberately ignoring anything beyond the one thing he cares about, such as what in God's name is going on in his head, or whether he will survive tomorrow.  But that was an attempt at immediate advice, and thus deserves an answer and not violence, even if he didn't like what it said.

You do not leave a dead body in a forest and expect to find it again. I will bury him, and if I die in the trying, it'll still be worth it.

He means that, and it's clear that he cannot be persuaded out of it, at least in his current state of mind.  But he's not being entirely unreasonable - the battle has moved on, the remaining Karsite troops retreating in disarray and Valdemar following.  Of the fewer people still nearby, so far nobody has decided to attack a man visibly too burdened to pose any danger himself.  There are plenty of bodies to loot without at fight, for those looking for them.

...Fine. The extent to which having both hands occupied in carrying a body makes them visibly not a threat might, in fact, be enough to outweigh the danger of moving more slowly. Leareth is still wary of ending up accidentally in the way of a mage-attack - if he's right that Vkandis did some nudging for this man's mage-gift to awaken traumatically with exactly the right timing to catch Leareth's spell, that was probably for a reason and not one in Leareth's favor - but, given that Gating out remains off the table, he can best address that by focusing on their shields and on maintaining situational awareness, extending the body's Othersenses for nearby magic as well as the glow of minds. 

(Now that he's had more than thirty seconds to reorient and piece together his especially-fragmented memories, he - has a suspicion that Vanyel was involved on this battlefield – but almost certainly from a distance, and they aren't currently within Valdemar's Web. As long as he sticks to defensive magic only, even if Vanyel still has Farsight on the scene, there's nothing to make a burdened man clearly not in a mage's uniform stand out.) 

- and, as they make their way further from the remaining battle, he dares some gentle probing of the man's memories. Starting with his attitudes toward Vkandis. He - feels an unusual inclination not to try to take sole control of this body, at least not until it's more obviously unworkable, but 'devout follower of the Sunlord' would be more than unworkable enough. 

Karal hasn't been consciously thinking about how being visibly at a disadvantage helps in a situation like this, but he knows it does, on the subconscious level on which he knows things like this.  And on the same level he knows very well how far away people are, and exactly how fast he could draw his sword anyway, if he needed to.

Magical attacks, on the other hand, he doesn't think about at all, consciously or otherwise.  Surely nothing happening here now would be worth it - and he has no inkling of how untrue that is.

He feels the touch at his memories, and allows it with barely a conscious thought.  He was a devout follower of the Sunlord, that's entirely obvious.  But then there were the new priests, and the war, and... it's clear enough that the Sunlord either cannot protect his people the way they were always told He would, or doesn't want to, or something else is wrong.  Karal doesn't know what to think, but he can't just believe what he was told, any more.

You can tell me what you think, later, if you want.

That...is a surprising response. Leareth isn't sure if it makes sense to be as surprised as he is - something is wrong, he's not usually this disoriented even in the first seconds in a new incarnation - but it's not what he expected. (He keeps those thoughts to himself.) 

It's certainly not a topic to explore right now. His current priority is to get out of sight of anyone involved in the battle, and then ideally somewhat further away than that, and find a place to hunker down behind wards where no one is likely to stumble onto them. And rest - it would be ideal if they could sleep, to recover as quickly as possible from the backlash, but Leareth isn't expecting to find a hiding-place that feels secure enough for that, and just sitting for a few candlemarks will suffice to ease the backlash headache and get back some reserves. 

...And then Gate, to - somewhere else. The memory he glimpsed in the man's thoughts ought to be clear enough for a destination, if it's a safe place and if they're - on cooperative terms - which so far doesn't seem impossible - 

- he tries to make those thoughts visible, he might as well. 

Karal gives the thoughts an acknowledging mental nod.  They're at the edge of the denser forest now, and should be out of sight soon enough, if they don't stumble into anyone else trying the same idea. And if Karal can keep walking for a while longer, through the underbrush, with the body in his arms.  He thinks he can, if only because he will not let himself consider any other answer.

I don't know what you are or what you want, but if you can-- take me home, after we rest, and let me bury him there-- I'll be in your debt.  He doesn't want to think yet about what will happen afterward, or even about what exactly is happening now - it's too much at once, and he needs to grieve properly before he can start dealing with anything else.  He realizes it's rarely a good idea, to make and accept promises like this without knowing anything about what they'll mean, but - he's trustworthy and means well, he leaves himself open enough for that to be entirely clear.  And whatever cooperation means here, he expects himself to be able to manage it with most people.  If people are what he should be thinking of.  But it has seemed like it, so far.

Leareth is happy, for now, to let Karal take charge of the body, and of continuing to put one foot in front of the other. He keeps some of his awareness on the body - he would like some warning if Karal is about to collapse - but Leareth has his own experiences with pushing himself past the limits of exhaustion, and he doesn't think they're about to collapse. He can deal with the underbrush when it impedes them, discreetly snipping branches aside with crisp, tightly controlled bursts of mage-energy. 

(Leareth is having...some sort of complicated feeling...about what he's picking up in Karal's thoughts. It seems off, somehow, for Karal to consider himself in Leareth's debt for something that costs Leareth nothing - he needs a safe destination to Gate to anyway, within a distance he can actually reach on limited reserves, and Karal's ancestral home is certainly better than attempting a blind Gate in a random direction and hoping for empty forest. He appreciates the cooperation, freely offered even though Karal is clearly aware that he doesn't really know what that promise means, but - it probably isn't enough. Leareth isn't making decisions for the longer term, right now, his memories are too fragmented and he really needs several candlemarks in a place where it's safe to think, but he does remember, blurrily, that he doesn't normally end up deciding that sharing is tractable. And that there's almost certainly a reason for that, one that will come back to him once he has time to think it through. And that whether or not it should be harder, to kill an innocent man and wear his body after rather than before taking him home to bury his dead relative, it predictably will be harder. Which - doesn't mean it's the wrong decision, but.) 

....Focus on practicalities. Are they carrying any food or water? It's not essential, they won't starve in a few candlemarks, but eating and drinking will help rebuild reserves more quickly, and make the upcoming Gate much less draining. 

He appreciates the help, and does his best to learn to relax into the deeply odd experience of his magic being used by someone else.  It feels stranger than suddenly having magic in the first place, but not by that much, and the results are certainly better than he could manage on his own.  (That's all that matters. It's obvious in all of Karal's thoughts - the reason he's acting like this about what is objectively a bizarre and frightening experience, the reason he's willing to take on an unknown debt to an eerie stranger, is because nothing about the rest of his life matters to him nearly as much as the body he's carrying.)

He doesn't collapse.  Once they're what seems like a reasonable distance from the site of the battle and all other signs of people, far enough not to be seen or heard by someone who only goes a few minutes into the forest to look for shade or privacy, he lays Kadrich down as carefully as he can manage when he can barely make his limbs obey him, and stays down next to him, overtaken by the exhaustion and grief he's finally stopped fighting against.

Basic awareness of the body and its surroundings will tell Leareth he has a waterskin on his belt, half full, but Karal doesn't think of it or even seem to remember it's there.  There's no food.

Now does not seem like the time for a conversation – about anything, really, but particularly not about who or what Leareth is. Not that leaving it until later will necessarily make it easier, but - well, Leareth is tired as well. (Or if not exactly tired, something else with similar effects.) He - they - can rest first, and figure out the future later. 

Does Karal resist if Leareth tries seizing control of their arms in order to unhook the belt-waterskin and drink some? 

It's more of a startle reaction than real resistance, and he stops it more quickly than last time.  He's a little wary as he watches his body move without his input, but the action turns out simple and obviously helpful.  He manages a smile in response, because yes, he did need the water and he's not sure when he would've managed to think of it.

It would probably be - 'polite' isn't quite the word, is it, but - helpful in expectation, maybe, to actually communicate something in some way about his intentions. (It's not like it'll make it worse, if he does end up killing this man for the body.)

For whatever reason, it...feels harder, than just doing what he was going to do anyway. Maybe the physical fatigue is affecting him more than usual, when he hasn't yet gotten himself established or reconsolidated his core memories. 

It makes sense to rest now, he thinks at Karal. We are as safe as we are going to be, until we can Gate out. I think that will be in - two, three candlemarks. And then they can talk, except that the Gate itself will be exhausting, maybe more exhausting than the battle was, and Karal's grief won't necessarily be any less once he's somewhere safe. 

I will plan to - explain more - once you have buried him, he settles on. 

Karal nods at the plan, and his inchoate thoughts about coming back home indeed don't seem like his grief will be any less.

Yes. Thank you.  Relief, that there's nothing urgent enough to force the conversation to happen earlier.

Although is there anything they do need to talk about before then?  He should think about it, hard as it is.

If you could not-- do things-- once we're around people? I don't think they should know.

They shouldn't. Leareth sends his silent assent. 

(The case where Leareth would plan to 'do things' is the one where Karal tries to tell someone about the new presence in his head. In which case Leareth will definitely take control, which might or might not - but probably would - require evicting Karal entirely, and - depending on his level of exhaustion - either Gate out immediately or impersonate Karal to his family, which ought to be made easier when Karal's relatives can blame uncharacteristic behavior on exhaustion, grief, and the aftereffects of war.

He keeps that line of thought to himself, too tired to find a way of conveying it that won't just be read as a terrifying threat.) 

Do you plan to explain the new mage-gift? Leareth thinks at Karal. Who will be there, and are they likely to ask questions? Gates are advanced magic, not something you could improvise on the spot - will anyone know to be suspicious of that? 

He might under different circumstances recommend Gating some distance away and not revealing the mage-gift, just for simplicity, but he isn't sure if their body will be in any shape to walk after a Gate - what distance is it? - and it would be difficult to explain how else Karal covered the distance so quickly with a fresh corpse. Leareth shares those considerations as well, pushing the thoughts across without bothering to neatly formulate words. 

God, that's too many questions.  He doesn't want to deal with them.  He doesn't want to attempt to... explain his entire life... to a stranger with no reason to care beyond a strategic puzzle, and especially doesn't want to attempt to do it in words.  He can show him, once they're done talking - it's not that he minds him having the information, just that... everything hurts. 

I'd rather they not know that either. I think - but he isn't sure - that if I ask my lord not to ask me questions, he won't.  Everyone in Karse this year knows that there are some things they are better off not knowing.  And that's a separate grief, that his country is now a place in which he cannot be honest with the people who matter most to him.  A place in which he cannot stay, he suspects, although that decision will have to wait for later.

I can find somewhere people won't see. His thoughts are considering doors of various rarely-used outbuildings - he doesn't know Gates without a door can be done at all, and knows little about them in general.  He's never seen one up close, let alone been through it.  But walking through them is not, he thinks, the complicated part, and it's not as if he expects to be doing anything else.

Leareth would also prefer not to have to extract information about a stranger's entire life under...what isn't not duress...when it's clearly a particularly painful time for it. Unfortunately it does seem kind of time-sensitive. He keeps this thought tucked away - it really won't help - but he doesn't feel particularly safe trusting Karal, in his current state, to navigate a fraught interaction with his family without raising any suspicions. It's not like jumping in to impersonate him is likely to go any better - and for this very specific goal, he thinks they do want the same thing - but it's hard to figure out how to help. 

...Their goals might converge for longer than that, if Karal does end up wanting out of Karse. Though that in itself is surprisingly convenient, which makes Leareth immediately inclined to suspicion. To find himself in a conveniently adult body, with a conveniently awakened-to-full-power mage-gift, and sharing with an existing mind as...amenable to cooperation...as Karal, are all adding up to feel like being steered. Which he's inclined to be especially watchful of here, in the core of Vkandis' territory - 

- not decision-relevant right now. The only decision he could make differently is, what, evicting Karal from his body now on the strength of his suspicion that Vkandis is angling for something? And then what - it would be one thing if he had a different Gate-destination lined up, but he doesn't, just a very hazy recollection that he has a safe base waiting for him somewhere or other. North, he thinks. Outside of his current range even if he could manage a blind unscaffolded Gate to somewhere in the right general vicinity. 

Anyway. He's not going to do it. He might feel differently if he did have a plan to immediately evacuate to safety without a risky detour (or, maybe, if he didn't have a safe place to retreat to later, where he's pretty sure someone whose judgement he trusts can assess whether sharing the body with Karal's mind is affecting his judgement.) He's going to be on his guard, and he's going to get them safely to Karal's ancestral home, and then - handle whatever happens, one way or another. 

A doorway in a rarely used outbuilding would be fine. Leareth doesn't really want to gamble on his ability to raise an unscaffolded Gate in his - their - current condition. He would ordinarily scry ahead to check that the area was unoccupied, but without a focus it's nearly as complex a casting as Gating (and much less deeply overlearned until he can cast it nearly on pure instinct) and he doesn't think they can spare the power for it. If telling them not to ask questions fails, you could claim that a priest-mage did the Gate and dropped you off? I am not sure how plausible that would be, but it would be hard for them to quickly check. 

He would appreciate peeking at Karal's memories, if that's being offered. (Leareth doesn't actually need permission or cooperation for that, but he's trying to be polite here.) 

I'm not going to lie to my lord - his mental tone is insulted at the suggestion, although he realizes it's unreasonable to expect the voice in his head to have known that - and in any case I'm a terrible liar.  He really is.  If I have to admit to the magic, I will - it's mostly for their safety that I don't want them to know about it.

Ah, this is such a needlessly confusing way to talk about it all.  It's clear how much it doesn't come naturally to Karal to try to think through all the possibilities and consequences of an conversation in advance like this - he'd rather not do it at all, he doesn't think it'll help him have the conversation, but... the stranger doesn't know that, does he, and it makes sense to be frightened by not knowing.

We're doing this all out of order. Will you be quiet for a candlemark, and I'll show you everyone?  He'd like to have some time to just remember, and it seems like they can spare it.

(Leareth could probably have inferred from what he's already noticed that Karal would be unwilling to lie, if he were himself in a better state for thinking ahead. It's clear that Karal is in a position that his skills aren't well specialized for - it's starting to seem like a fundamental trait of his that he wants to be openly cooperative with the people around him, and having that suddenly be unsafe is...going to be an adjustment. That part isn't entirely Leareth's fault, it seems like the mage-gift alone would be a problem, but Leareth is definitely not making it easier. It wouldn't help to feel guilty about that, and he doesn't, but he does feel...something.) 

Yes, of course, and then he stops and tries to leave Karal space to think. 

He sends wordless gratitude, closes his eyes for a moment, and lets himself remember.  Not in a particularly useful order - they have the time, so he'll just grieve, the way he would anyway, and think about why it hurts so much and how he got to this point, and all these memories will fill in the shape of his life well enough.

Balthin, his lord, who he's loved quietly and from a distance since he was a boy first sworn into service.  He's a good man, thoughtful and honorable, who doesn't get along with the new priesthood and would've hoped to stay out of the war, were it possible.  He will likely trust Karal enough to simply not ask questions, but even if he doesn't (there's a well of pain tangled with this possibility), he will not press him too much, or refuse to release him from his service, if he asks.

Kadrich, now dead - the lord's oldest and illegitimate son, proud and difficult, who Karal loved perhaps even more strongly, and certainly more complicatedly.  With whom he felt needed, because the boy trusted few people, and so being someone he could rely on felt like it could really make a difference, help him grow up into the great man he could be - could have been, now.  Kadrich never wanted anything more than to prove himself, and when the war summons came, of course he volunteered to go, and of course Karal went with him, on Balthin's request and with his blessing.  Swore to follow and serve and protect him, and failed at that...  He knows it's not his fault, but it doesn't make the failure feel any less awful.

He wonders for a moment whether the voice was right, that Kadrich wouldn't want him to die just to get his body off the battlefield...  He's not sure, in truth.  It's not in his nature, when he devotes himself to someone, to think about what he's getting in return.

More distantly, in the background of many of the memories, there's the lady, and the other children - precious, but too young to figure much in a warrior's life.  There's Karal's own family, who he hasn't seen in a decade, after an argument his memories barely touch on.  There's the castle itself, not a very large or important one, in the foothills of the mountains halfway down the border with Hardorn.  So many memories of his life, work and training and service, all centered around these two men, whether they were there or not.

He's crying nearly the entire time, but has the presence of mind to be quiet about it, not being in a safe place.  Subsides, eventually, and pushes a formless question, still not feeling up to thinking of words - anything else? was that enough to understand?

That's - helpful. Clarifying, at least. (Leareth had definitely been under the impression this entire time that Kadrich was a close relative - brother? particularly close cousin? - just because of the sheer weight of emotional importance to Karal, but it's not like anything in Karal's memories doesn't make sense.) 

...Stupid, pointless, tragically wasteful war. Leareth isn't going to dwell on that thought where Karal can see it, it really isn't the time, but - anyone sane would prefer to stay out of it if they could. 

That is enough to go on for now, he thinks to Karal. He doesn't understand everything, yet, but he feels oriented enough to Gate there, and - willing to trust in Karal's planned approach. 

They're still not quite rested enough to Gate, at least not without immediately collapsing at the destination. Another candlemark should do it. 

Then Karal will spend another candlemark crying, and maybe remember to drink some water himself.  The grief doesn't seem incapacitating any more - it's there, and will be for a long time, but his mind feels like he'll be able to focus on something else once he decides to do that.

He wonders, a little, what the stranger thinks of it all, but he doesn't ask.