Leareth is - mostly not trying to do anything in particular, it doesn't feel like he has any accessible avenues of "trying" that wouldn't involve tucking the emotions out of the way to be less distracted, and it feels too soon for that.

He isn't sure what he would want if Karal wasn't here - if Karal wasn't here, he would have been approaching all of this differently in the first place, he wouldn't have been looking at the Matteir notes so early in the process of putting the pieces of himself back together - but Karal is there, unavoidably, and Leareth is...glad of that, even if it's very overwhelming right now to be experiencing all the physical correlates of Karal's pain. He's - going to just exist, for right now, and leave it to Karal to figure out what feels right. 

Yes - his response to the offer is immediate yearning, although he waits a moment to see if Leareth objects. 

...Leareth is not in a state to object to much, apparently, which only makes Karal want to hug him, so hugging Nayoki will have to serve for both.  Just existing sounds like the right thing to do for now, and... it's true, that it makes no sense to think about what he'd do separately, because all of this is something they decided to do together and there's no way to disentangle it now.  (He notices that Leareth does want him here, despite how hard this obviously is.  He still worries about it - he's kept not being sure that his presence is helping anything, even when Leareth thinks something positive in his direction, because Leareth is such a strange person and their relationship still doesn't feel clear - but it's clearer now, without the secret plan's shadow hanging over everything, and he can feel the worry start to dissipate, replaced by some shining emotion which he doesn't yet look at too closely.)

He at least has no trouble knowing what to do with his pain.  He clings to Nayoki, and cries a little longer, and it does help.  And then he calms himself down - not by force, but in the natural-to-him anchored way of seeing that there are other people here who would like him not to hurt, and who his pain is not helping.  (He remembers how Leareth is about feelings, and he... doesn't want to give the body back, yet, but he can make it a little quieter for him.)  He manages half a smile in Nayoki's direction.  "Thank you. I'm... very glad you're here."

And what else does he want, here...  More context, another string of personal connection he can attach to the awful thing he just found out, because the more of those he has the easier it'll be to keep it balanced in the pattern of his mind, keep it from toppling and destroying whatever it falls on.

"Can you tell me what was it like for you? When you found out."

Leareth is also much calmer after a few minutes. He does know how to bear this, has been practicing that for a long time; he just hates the feeling that starting from Matteir's notes gave him, of having abruptly time-traveled a thousand years, from when there might, still, be another way, to knowing that there probably isn't. 

...He finds that he's also curious to hear Nayoki's answer, actually. It feels - important to really knowing her again - and he obviously doesn't remember. 

Nayoki returns a small smile, and pulls over a chair. 

"I was nineteen. I suppose I had known Leareth for a year - he was not going to tell someone before he knew them, a year was very fast for vetting - but I had not really known him. He told me he was immortal in the same conversation, so there was that already to absorb." 

(He hadn't told her much about the Cataclysm, not until much later. Nayoki remembers feeling irritated, and - not offended, exactly, maybe just vicariously offended on Leareth's behalf, that he hadn't even tried to explain himself as - a human person, with human feelings and motives. She's still not sure how much of it was instinctive paranoia about information security, and how much was - not wanting to put weight on the scale by sounding more sympathetic.) 

She frowns, remembering. "I - knew it would be something awful. I had already guessed he was planning an invasion - and I already knew he was against the gods, it was half of why I wanted to work for him. I think the part I could not have imagined was that it was so big? ...I am from the Haighlei Empire, which does try very hard to shape people - not to be audacious, not to even think thoughts that are strange - but I had always been angry, about that, I had not imagined it had stuck with me so deeply. Until Leareth told me, and - I found I could not really think about it at all, it did not even feel real..." 

Nayoki shakes her head. "Leareth said to take a week to think about it. And - he said that I could leave, if I gave my word not to speak of it. But I knew from the start that I would stay. I was hardly going to go do something else, knowing that all of that was happening, if it was going to happen then I wanted to be there." 

She looks down. "...I am not sure I could really feel anything about it, except - very small and stupid and young - for weeks. It was - months, maybe years - before I could find it real enough to really grieve for it." By which point it had felt sort of silly, and she hadn't cried then either, but that feels like a mildly embarrassing thing to admit in front of Karal and Leareth. 

"I don't think it would've felt real to me either, if I found out like that."  If he had only heard the end result, not Altarrin's story and all of Matteir's life and all the detail of Leareth's own reaction to seeing them for the first time.  It's just... such an impossible thing.  But Leareth thinks of it as real, and Karal's situation makes it impossible not to feel that.

(It's good to know something about how Leareth normally recruits his people, too.  It must take so long, if he spends all that time getting to know every one of them, but of course he'd have to.  Karal wonders how many of them do decide to leave.)

"You wanted to be there because of - curiosity?  Or anger at the gods?  I've never heard of the Haighlei Empire except a snippet of Leareth's thoughts, but - it doesn't sound like a good place."  He wonders if he would've noticed that, or if he would've grown up obedient and ordinary and with no thoughts he wasn't supposed to have.  Probably he would have - probably even last year he wouldn't notice anything wrong with it - and it's admirable that Nayoki saw it even as a child.

"Did you... still decide he was right, before it felt real?"  Maybe she's one of the people who can do that.  Or maybe she only decided to be there, and left the other question for later - it's not as if Karal wasn't willing to do the same thing.  But she's been here for so long.  He wants to know how she thinks about it.

(Nayoki will currently have way more context on Leareth's recruiting methods than Leareth himself does, but - Leareth thinks it's a minority of the people in his organization who know the full details. All the high-level researchers do, of course, but they're heavily vetted for multiple reasons, and that's - still only hundreds of people, not thousands. He...thinks he has tens of thousands, in total, when you count the military force he's amassing. But - he thinks, he's guessing what he would have set up mostly just from what feels sensible now - probably most of them know rather little about Leareth at all, the man ostensibly in charge, and certainly haven't met him face to face. Which will definitely make it less complicated that he's now back and wearing a different face.) 

Shrug. "I did not want to hide in corners while the future of the world was decided by great and powerful men a long way away. - and I was curious, obviously, and - I did not doubt for a moment that fighting the gods was something someone needed to do? I was - not very hard to convince, I think, that it would be worth the sacrifice. My questions were mostly about whether it would work, and that was - I think it was easier to agree to join before I was sure, when that was my hesitation? Because obviously Leareth would want to do it right, and so - in the world where he was wrong, it was still better for me to be there, because I might notice?" A little smile. "Maybe it was arrogance, to think I could catch a mistake he had not seen in a thousand years, but - I did think it." 

No, not arrogance. (Leareth isn't going to yank away control of their body to say anything, but he's thinking it very clearly.) Or if that is arrogance, then arrogance is something good and precious. 

"Not arrogance, he says," and even without that addition Karal's tone is different somehow when he's quoting Leareth's thought, and changes when he adds his own, "and he's right.  People should be like that, and you're clearly good at it."  He smiles a little, shakes his head.  "It would've never occurred to me, to object to the future of the world being decided by great men far away."  But it makes sense now, what sort of person Nayoki is and how she'd react to something like this.  She's very different from him, and he likes her.

And getting to know someone on this level is a very good distraction for his feelings, even if they're still on the same painful topic.  But he shouldn't get distracted too far.

"So... what now?  There's still a lot of things I should know, and even more things Leareth should know.  I'm not sure how to choose," and really Leareth should do the choosing, now that the most important part Karal was missing is done with.  He offers him the body, if he would like it back, for more reading or anything else.

(All the options he can think of will hurt, in their different ways - and spending more time on something that doesn't and then coming back to this will hurt more.  Things will hurt all the time, from now on, and he will get used to it.)

Leareth...isn't sure what next? That was a lot of information to absorb, he was concentrating hard on fixing it in his memory even while he had emotions about it, and - it's probably related to being newly in Karal's body and brain, having to adjust how he thinks and all the constant reaching for habits-of-thought that aren't quite there, or are there but only half complete - whatever the cause, he's actually very mentally tired.

(Also he keeps having a vague reflexive desire to - give Karal space, or something, let him absorb and think about this somewhere Leareth isn't staring at all of his thoughts, but that's not an option and he's also not sure Karal would even want it if it were.) 

He takes back control of the body anyway, he might as well, and looks levelly over at Nayoki. "...I did look for alternatives, right? It has been a thousand years, there was time..." 

"You did." Nayoki's voice is soft. "- I am not going to do a full briefing now, you are exhausted."

(She's been peeking with Mindhealing-Sight, and there's - more of Leareth, now, he's consolidating his mental habits and building more pathways to interact with Karal's body, but it's not surprising that much mind-growth in a day is tiring, and she can see the strain.) 

"...Matteir died being set on fire by a miracle of Vkandis," she says. "I gather he was trying to establish communication with Him. It was not even the only time you tried that! ...After Matteir there is a gap of multiple years where neither of us has any idea what you were doing, your records were not updated but it seems far too long for a gap between incarnations. After that, you - well, first of all got around to recording what happens when you try to get a god's attention on purpose, apparently you remembered that even two lives later, and then you - came to terms with it. You made a more systematic attempt to establish communications with all of the gods. You gathered that the god of the Valdemar and Rethwellan region is either less hostile to you than average, or at least less inclined to blatantly interfere in mortal affairs, but - that was the closest thing to progress. You were unsure, when we last spoke, if you ever gained entry to Iftel, but certain that if you did you never left it alive to update your notes." 

Pause. "...The problem with collecting node-energy over time, or that plus the energy released from natural deaths - even if we could solve the storage difficulty, and that part is not solved robustly enough to survive a run of bad luck - is that it is too slow. You spent centuries looking for alternate power sources, including very dangerous ones - you died by exploding yourself in testing one potential method. There are alternatives, but - nothing stable, nothing where we could afford to be even a little unlucky, and we need more certainty than that, because the gods will interfere. You - would have been willing to try something else, if you had gotten any hint from Valdemar's god-in-the-shadows, or any other god, that you could expect cooperation or even a commitment not to interfere. But you never did. 

- you were still hoping there might be time for that to change, I think. But not with high enough odds to wait another century, and I do not think you were wrong." 

That all makes sense. Leareth is neatly filing it away, as much as he can with his mind still this disorganized, but he's too tired, or too - something - to feel much about it.

(Except that he really hopes Matteir's adopted daughter was all right, after he died doing something incredibly stupid. Did she ever know what had happened to him? ...He's not sure even the notes will answer that question, if in his next short lifetime he didn't write anything down for some baffling reason; the Leareth-life after that clearly remembered Matteir's death, but how much of Matteir's life would he have retained?) 

...He's not actually sure which of their benefit Nayoki was speaking for. Maybe she thought Karal needed to hear it, as well as him. 

(Karal likes Leareth seeing all of his thoughts.  Being known like this, not having to put in the effort to word things usefully, not risking giving the wrong impression by saying something or not saying it, the instant feedback when he's missing something and second perspective even when he isn't - it's wonderful, being able to just have all that.  There are some things about their shared situation he's not entirely happy about, but this, the thought-reading and the company in his mind, he just straightforwardly likes, and he tries to show the feeling to Leareth as clearly as he can.  He would choose this freely, in some hypothetical mad circumstances where that choice would make sense separate from all the rest.  If there's anything he feels bad about, it's that the situation requires Leareth to pay more attention to him than Leareth would probably prefer, although he knows there's little point in worrying about it when it's inseparable from everything else.)

...

Karal did very much need to hear all this, for all that it hurts all over again, in a different sharper way.  He doesn't mind that it hurts, but he minds that it happened--

Matteir, no, why couldn't he have lived the rest of that one good and full life without some awful death or another, why did he risk it, when he was so afraid... 

Not just some awful death - it was Karal's own god who did it.  Presumably He had a reason, but... no, it still cannot be right, to hurt someone who's trying to talk, to punish an impulse toward cooperation.  It goes against Karal's deepest instinctive principles - in a world full of wrongness, when someone reaches for something even slightly better you have to reach back, or at least not make them regret having tried (the way it would be the worst possible thing to make Leareth regret being kind to him), or else you're abandoning the hope of something better ever happening.  It's the same, in a sense, as his newer realization, and as Nayoki's grudge against the gods - for the world to get better you need to let people try well-intentioned new things, even if they won't work, even if they're just blindly groping in some direction they only think might help, you can't punish the attempt or you won't get better ones.  If Vkandis Sunlord would do that deliberately, then He is not a god Karal can worship.  (He lets himself have the full thought this time, stares at it in his mind and doesn't flinch away from what he just realized.  It's true.)  And if He did it because He couldn't see what it meant, then that also is a horrible wrongness in the world, that gods are by nature not the sorts of entities that can deserve how people feel about them - and Leareth is right, if not about his methods then at least about his goal.  (Or if it was just some awful mistake that doesn't mean either of these things - but it wasn't, Leareth is more careful and more thorough than that, Nayoki said he tried it more than once and of course he did.  If it didn't work it's because it can't.)

Then some other awful thing happened, a whole life lost to who knows what.  And more lives spent in endless careful attempts to find a better way, because Leareth is like that, Karal has seen enough of him to know he will keep trying no matter what happens - the unyielding certainty of his goal, the endless fundamental strength that will keep him coming back to it, and the almost inhumanly principled mind that won't let him ignore any alternative or complication, not even an unfairness he has already decided not to do anything about.  Almost nobody in the world is like this, because almost nobody can stand it - for one lifetime, let alone so many of them, so hard, and so alone.

Nayoki explains the rest, and-- it's the worst part, that it's all such an awful tangled tragedy, that the reason why Leareth's plan has to be this horror instead of some other easier possibility is because Nobody will reach back to him, because if he tries to do something better They will twist it and make it fail.  They've admitted no possibility of trust or cooperation, and that's why the awful thing They're trying to avoid has to be that way-- (or maybe They would want to avoid it just as much if it was done without all the death and suffering, but if that's it then Karal doesn't care what They want.  --Only for a frustrated moment.  He does care - there might still be a good reason, even for that.  But if he cannot know it, and will be punished for trying to find out, then it can't really make a difference.)  The whole problem is twisted back on itself - the reason why the world can't be better is because people will be hurt for trying--

The thing Karal wants most in the world is for things not to be like this.  He cannot have it - or at least he cannot have it until Leareth succeeds.  But he can have one little piece of a world in which people can try to trust each other, can reach out to each other and have it help even if everything is tangled and wrong, in which Leareth's honesty and striving gives him more options rather than more constraints.  A world in which Leareth doesn't have to worry about Karal's decisions, about his possible opposition or judgment or even just withdrawal - a world in which Leareth can be, on some basic level he feels but can't properly describe, less alone in this.  Karal wants so badly - he's wanted for a long time already, without quite letting himself think about it, until everything came together clearly enough to wash away all objections - to give him something better.

I would be yours, if you'll have me. 

And immediately he looks at Leareth's quieter thoughts, after having been lost in his own, and adds in a softer mental voice:  I'm sorry - you're so tired, and I keep... feeling things.  I can wait until you've found your balance.

...Leareth hates that his first, instinctive response to Karal's deep and heartfelt declaration is to be suspicious. It feels wrong, it feels like he owes it to Karal to be able to - actually recognize and acknowledge it - but it's hard to drag his thoughts away from what did Vkandis WANT here, in this strange and surprising pileup of events. 

- also he doesn't really know what to do with it, on an emotional level, having that clear bright intention pointed at him. It feels like - not how reality is supposed to work - which is an absurd way to feel when every individual piece makes sense, he can see right there how it fits together, but he's still struggling to feel any emotional reaction other than "disoriented." 

Sorry, he thinks. And, Thank you - and try to focus - 

He really probably shouldn't be - making long-term decisions right now - but it still feels like he can step back and see the pattern unfolding, and obviously he isn't going to turn his back on a declaration of alliance. 

Well. That was fascinating to watch with Mindhealing Sight. 

(Also Leareth is really not very okay right now, which is incredibly unsurprising but no less upsetting for that. But Nayoki can still recognize when something about this tangled-up situation is good, and be glad.) 

Karal has - made his decision, and so everything in his mind is easier, and he genuinely doesn't mind waiting for Leareth to get his mind in order and decide whatever he will decide (although yes, it's not as if it isn't obvious what that will be, in the end).  He sends warm acceptance at Leareth being so incredibly himself about it, mixed first with amusement, then with sorrow at how much Leareth feels like there's some fundamental law written into reality that means he cannot have this.  (He is, again, so glad Leareth can see all his thoughts.  This would be so much harder if he had to explain why he was making this sudden and only halfway consciously processed decision - if it can be called a decision at all rather than an inevitability.  He knows it's right, but he knows it on the instinctive level, a single shining impulse he has no reason to doubt, and he'd have trouble using words to disentangle it into the underlying logic.  Even now, when he's seen enough of Leareth's thoughts that disentangling his impulses into logical expressions of values is becoming a familiar mental motion - and if he'd never had the opportunity, he doesn't think he could've made it make sense at all.  He's very glad that even through his surprise Leareth can see that it all does fit together.)  It's not that it doesn't hurt a little, to be met with suspicion and confusion, but - in this moment Karal cannot be anything other than all right, on a deep level, having realigned all of himself around this relationship in fealty and trust.  He doesn't need very much back - he wants it, of course he does, even if he tries not to admit it to himself, but it's still in his nature as a person to serve someone he feels this way about without worrying about how the feeling is answered, and to be all right regardless.

(It does look fascinating under Mindhealing Sight.  His entire mind is - relaxed is not really quite the word, but more itself, closer to the right shape for it, with so much less strain in it than last night or even five minutes ago.  Most of it is softer, getting out of the way where it needs to, a few regions already thinning in instinctive anticipation of Leareth needing more of that space;  some of it is denser, where it's needed to support some more complicated structure that might not even be possible if there was only one of them. All of it is more flexible, aligning and reacting to the changes in Leareth's part of the half-shared mind.)

He goes emotionally quiet again, much more easily now, trying to let Leareth have the space and support and time, to eventually get to a place where he'll feel able to make long-term decisions and feel like he can think clearly without having to struggle with it. 

I don't think Vkandis would've predicted this, he sends tentatively - this time he even more doesn't have logic behind it, just a new and barely-there intuition of the god's shape, that if He isn't capable of trust like this Himself, He will not have seen the possibility of it in Karal. 

Leareth knows that Karal doesn't need much, and he both admires that - the trait as well as the awareness of it - and appreciates the flexibility of it, especially because he thinks there predictably will be times when he has very little mental space to track or worry about Karal's emotional needs. He's spent a long time getting to a point where he can ignore his own emotional needs for weeks or months, if he needs to focus on higher priorities. But - that doesn't mean that ignoring Karal's feelings and wants is how he wants things to be by default, when - it feels like doing better than that oughtn't necessarily cost him anything - this will definitely be easier to think about when he's rested, he just wanted to acknowledge that he's aware of it.

- and no, Vkandis almost certainly doesn't understand - this - and the nuances of how Karal and Leareth are relating to each other as people aren't something that Vkandis, or any of the gods, can steer very precisely. It's confusing because it feels half-inevitable that they would have figured out how to cooperate, and inevitabilities ought to show up in the Foresight shadow, but - it's not like "cooperation" is something the gods can see the world in terms of, probably. It might well be something incredibly stupid and trivial from a human-level perspective, like "Karal being there means that in six months Leareth will be in some city a week earlier than otherwise", in which case overthinking how something might be subtly and invisibly wrong on the level of - trust and cooperation and human relationships - is pointless, and so there's nothing to be done other than the habitual caution and paranoia that make Leareth reasonably hard to corner into godplots to kill him. (Though, obviously, not invulnerable to them.)

...Leareth thinks he wants Nayoki to see what Karal is thinking, actually, she's looking at him with that expression that means she's noticed something significant is going on in his - their - head, and he's really quite sure that Karal won't mind him dropping their shields but he's still going to put that thought out clearly and distinctly before doing it. 

Karal has noticed that Leareth doesn't mean to generally ignore him, and appreciates that quite a lot - he just wanted to be clear that he doesn't need anything right now that Leareth is too off-balance to give him.  They can rest, and settle whatever is more urgent, and think about it then.  And yes, it makes sense that the godplot (it's still strange, to see the world in those terms, the gods as something to oppose - but it's more straightforward when it's not his choice any more) would be about something else than how they relate as people, and so there's probably little to be usefully done about it on this level.

Karal continues to be entirely in favor of Nayoki seeing anything she likes about him, and would be curious to hear her thoughts.  He remembers that there is, still, a question of whether all this is not good for Leareth's... self or stability... in the long term, and perhaps what just happened has some impact on that.  He's not sure in what direction, if so, and if Nayoki can think of something it would help to be doing differently about how he relates to Leareth, he could try.

Leareth sends a quiet mental acknowledgement, tries to relax back into the chair and, smiling tiredly at Nayoki, drops his shields. 

He's thinking that he isn't sure if she said all of that on purpose to, what, shock Karal into making a decision? He was too distracted to flag this at the time, but in hindsight, Nayoki choosing to lead with Matteir's cause of death was harsh, given Karal's country of origin. But, either way, it does seem like it was - context Karal needed to hear. 

And, yes, he also wants Nayoki's input on how this seems likely to affect his long-term stability. It's hard for him to assess internally or think about right now, given how he predictably feels incredibly off-balance and would even if Karal wasn't here. 

Nayoki slides her chair closer. It's not particularly necessary or even helpful for Thoughtsensing but it feels right. 

...All right, first of all, awwwwww!!!! 

That reaction out of the way, Nayoki is going to lower her own shields and lean into concert-rapport - Leareth should still have the mental habits to hold himself open for that, even though he no longer has his own Mindspeech Gift - so she can share her own thoughts and reactions more directly rather than having to put them into words. 

She understands Karal's reaction. It's - not exactly the place she's landed for herself, it's kind of fundamentally different when you aren't sharing your body and all your thoughts with Leareth, but it's such an understandable way of reacting to someone like him, even if Leareth himself apparently has a hard time seeing the obvious. Nayoki herself took a lot longer to get there, but - she had less practice, in being loyal to someone worthy of it. She is very very sure that Leareth is worthy of it. 

It's going to be hard. Nayoki is sure that Karal already knows that. Working for Leareth is - something that will sometimes hurt for almost anyone, and Karal is clearly someone who feels things deeply and isn't willing - shouldn't be willing - to stop. (Nayoki herself can admit that she's not like that. She's not particularly embarrassed about it, or inclined to see it as a character weakness in herself, but - that doesn't make Karal's thing not a strength.) And Leareth can be incredibly demanding of his people, and occasionally oblivious and frustrating, though that's prooooobably easier not to take personally if you can see the thoughts generating it. And, of course, there's Vanyel, and it's not fair but Karal is going to end up having to ram through a lot of complicated feelings related to the war in Karse rather more quickly than would have been ideal for his emotional wellbeing. And, just in general, Karal is going to be pushed to change in ways that aren't comfortable and - aren't necessarily what he would have chosen for himself, or a direction that's natural for him to grow in. But Nayoki is inclined to see that as a tragedy about the state of the world, not - something wrong with, given the state of the world, making the choice to work for the one person who actually has any real chance of fixing it. 

...The obvious way it could be bad for Leareth's self or stability, is if Karal dies, and Leareth has to go back to not having - this. Nayoki can easily imagine it taking Leareth - a lot longer than usual - to regain his equilibrium after that. But it won't destroy him. Leareth has lost people he cared about before. Nayoki is still rather firmly taking the position that he's probably going to be better off if he manages to be more willing to care about specific people, not less. And of course they'll be careful, and Leareth is hard to kill, and it seems like Leareth plus Karal should really be harder to kill, once they've figured out how to work together smoothly. Anyway, it would also be - being steerable by the gods - to shut down opportunities for something temporary but good and beautiful, just out of fear that it might make you vulnerable. Leareth probably does too much of that already and Nayoki thinks it's a very understandable habit but not one that's good for him. 

Warmth. Recognition. Welcome to the team, Karal. 

He sends warmth and recognition back.  Thank you.  I'm very glad he has you - that we both do, really.  He sees how Nayoki's loyalty mirrors his own, and he's happy, to not be alone in it.  (And if she did say all that on purpose, to push him in this direction, he doesn't mind.  It was the right thing to say, and he's pretty sure he would've gotten there anyway.)  It's good to have someone else to ask when Leareth is being... oblivious and frustrating is not an entirely wrong description, he admits, although his own feeling about Leareth's confusing reactions has mostly been affection so far.

Of course it's going to be hard, and it's going to hurt terribly sometimes (most of the time, maybe), he can see that - but that's never felt to him like it mattered, not in the way where it would be a reason not to do something.  Or a reason to stop hurting.  There's obviously nothing wrong with Nayoki being different in that - it might be a better way to be, in many ways - but Karal is just like that about emotions, and he doesn't think it does him harm.  Besides, he's been through years of the war, serving someone who, he admits with fondness and grief, was not at all an easier or less frustrating person.  He's used to suffering, and now it feels more like there's - not a point, there was always a point, but a path for things to truly be better someday.

...Whether it does Leareth harm is another question.  He doesn't feel like it should, in the long term, but Leareth is such an intensely strange person about his emotions that Karal can't be sure.  He hopes Nayoki can tell him, if it looks like something is going wrong there.  Trying to feel his own emotions differently would hurt, in a worse way - but still fundamentally something wrong with the world, not with what they're doing in it, yes.

In the meantime he's very glad Nayoki thinks it'll be good for Leareth to be a little less... insistently alone.  Of course it hurts, the thought of Leareth being upset when they die - and it'll happen no matter what, eventually, but yes, they'll be careful, and he does think he can help.  And seeing the way Leareth felt like... like this wasn't the sort of thing that could even in principle happen to him... was worse - he doesn't think that can possibly be a healthy way for someone human to be, for all that it's obvious how Leareth got there.  

So - you're sure it's all right?  Or is there more to look at?  He sends a touch at Leareth's thoughts, too - it might be harder for him to tell whether he'll be all right, but it's ultimately his decision.

Leareth doesn't think that Karal having emotions is the sort of thing that would cause him harm? It seems like it would be surprising if his emotional stability were that fragile. He's very tired and off-balance, right now, but he's not really in pain - or at least not the kind of pain where it feels like he ought to be doing something else instead. Nayoki can check this, but he thinks it's normal for everything to be - more of a struggle - when he's recently in a new body. ...Also he's still not sure how he died but it would make sense for that to have been traumatic in some way?