Leareth also wasn't expecting it! He was in control, but not actively defending it or clamping down; his attitude had been one of half-waiting for Nayoki to tell him to surrender it entirely. 

He does resist, of course, without thinking about it. (And one of the first things he does, mostly involuntarily, is yank his surface thoughts back from where Karal can see them; for at least the next second or two, Karal won't know in detail what Leareth is thinking. Leareth can still see all of Karal's thoughts, of course.) 

In the places where Leareth's attention is, his force-of-will is undeniably "stronger" than Karal's, an iron wall that won't budge to any mental pressure Karal can exert. ...But Karal is also right, that Leareth doesn't know this body the way he does, doesn't feel ownership of it in the same way - Leareth honestly isn't a person who relates to being physically embodied that way in general - and Karal is the one with physical habits and reflexes attuned to this body in particular, which has been his for his whole life, and he has a lot more angles to push from. Karal can very quickly have Leareth off-balance, and start to consolidate more control from there.

...If this had happened at any point before about five minutes ago, Leareth's response would, probably, have been an all-out assault, almost certainly ending in Karal evicted from the body entirely. Leareth isn't sure he could have had a different response to feeling under threat. But - he doesn't feel threatened, right now, not in the relevant way. He's back in the safety of his northern operations base, Nayoki is there and watching, and this is a deliberate test. It's in the reference class of sparring, not of a surprise ambush, and Leareth does bring quite a lot of intent-to-win to sparring, but - within bounds, and even if the rules for this particular bout weren't exactly negotiated in advance, it's not hard to tell what rules Karal is seeing himself as following. 

Leareth could still win, he thinks, but - not without going on the offensive, and mentally attacking Karal in directions other than his control of the body, trying actively to hurt him. He's not going to do that. He's going to make Karal work to get full control, but only defensively, and his defensive motions are just a lot slower than what Karal can muster.

Even at the speed of thought, it takes over a second, and then Leareth is no longer in control of the body. ...And unhides his thoughts from Karal. Mostly to convey that he's impressed, even faintly delighted (and not upset or scared or annoyed), though he's also quietly noting that he still has full control of their mage-gift, Karal has far fewer angles to contest it, and Leareth could if he wanted just place a compulsion on Karal to give him the body back. Maybe. It's fiddly magic and Karal might - Leareth would give him one in five odds - be able to distract him enough to disrupt a casting. (Leareth has no intention of actually doing this, it's more that assessing the tactics still available to him is itself an instinctive mental motion.) 

Well. That was very informative. (And fun to watch, actually, the same way it's fun to watch Leareth sparring with magic.) 

It...says a lot, she thinks, that Leareth, despite being startled, clearly didn't feel genuinely threatened. That might be the most informative observation she's made so far. Leareth is - a lot more paranoid by nature than she is - and he hasn't even had that long to develop a rapport with Karal. But he can see all of Karal's thoughts, and - clearly, whatever he saw was enough. 

Also! Now she's looking at Karal's mind in the foreground, and also presumably his body language. She smiles reassuringly at him, and - focuses on what more she can pick up from the deeper motivational structure of his mind. 

Oh good, nothing is wrong.  He takes a slow breath, settles himself in his body, the transition obvious from Leareth's more closed-off and careful body language.  Grins, and gives them the seated approximation of a duel-winner's bow, radiating satisfaction and pleasure.  He did very much enjoy the strange half-physical battle - it was an oddly exhilarating feeling, partially the fight itself and partially, he thinks, the new ability to let go a little instead of being so careful with each other.  Putting a bit of weight on their trust and their feeling of safety and finding that it held.  He mirrors Leareth's delight, is impressed with his strength and his reflexes when ambushed and grateful for his self-control, and appreciates his tactical comments.  (Wonders briefly whether he could contest the Empathy and if there's anything to be done with it, but that's a thought for later.)

He also deeply appreciates the pure amount of mind-reading going on - the fact that neither he nor Nayoki had to wait even a second to be sure that everything was all right is wonderful.  "Well. I should apologize for taking that risk, but it looks like I was right to try it. And," another half-bow in Nayoki's direction, "I'm pleased to meet you too. Did you see what you wanted?"

The deeper level of his mind is entirely consistent with the outward picture, and all of it is structured to be easy to see.  He's a very honest and straightforward man, and he likes people, nearly all of them, with rare exceptions, and wants his presence to make their lives better rather than worse.  He feels secure in himself - he'll be all right, on some level, nearly no matter what happens, and perhaps a lot of that is through not expecting much, but it does still feel like a basic level of psychological safety that most people lack, a secure base from which he can reach out to others and see if he can connect and help.  The principle of trust is still there just as deeply - it's the most important thing in the world, when other people reach back to him, and he will not make them worse off for it no matter what else they've done.  He calls it honor, when he thinks about it, but it's a different and wider concept than what most people mean by that.  He doesn't think about it very much - he runs most of himself on instinct, doesn't attempt to think through all the concepts and possibilities the way Leareth does, and his internal structure is straightforward and self-consistent enough that this works.

He wants all this known about himself - wants all of himself known, really, and beyond tactical reasons he would be entirely happy to have people able to read his mind at all times.  It's clear that the connection with Leareth is good for him - it's not that he's been lonely in his earlier life, but he still loves not being alone like this, being really seen, the instant feedback between their thoughts.  Most minds would flinch at least a little from being this entangled with another, but he genuinely seems like he can be comfortable in their strange shared twisted structure.  And that he will keep a boundary there - a soft one, but his mind isn't trying to merge with Leareth's.  He keeps a mental structure for their relationship, wants to know who they are to each other and what their mutual responsibilities are, doesn't mind that they might disagree or argue. 

Another thing that's obvious upon deeper inspection: a lot of this isn't new.  He hasn't shared his mind before, but his life has belonged to others for more than a decade, and he's used to a shape that leans on someone else and is leaned on in turn, even though the someone else is not usually present in the same way.

All of that seems - very good. The best news she could possibly have hoped for, really. ...Implausibly good? Maybe, but what exactly are you supposed to do with that. Leareth is the one who's good at spotting godplots. Nayoki is failing to think what Vkandis could even be hoping to accomplish with this. 

Well, it's probably not urgent on the level of candlemarks. And...Leareth has also been the one to point out to her in the past that sometimes the gods aren't actually that good at steering mortals. Their advantage is that They can lay a lot of them - including ones that don't look plotty at all - and sometimes it's not particularly costly to Them if one fails. It's not absurd to posit that maybe it was just cheap for Vkandis, in the moment, to trigger a mage-gift to awaken with convenient timing and hope that His pawn would stay a pawn. It's plausible that Vkandis just can't see very clearly what happens to a mortal mind in close contact with Leareth - or maybe the intention was to somehow corner them at Karal's castle estate, but it didn't come together in time, or Leareth successfully dodged a trap without even recognizing it as that... 

...she hates this kind of reasoning. In any case, in the scenario where this isn't a throwaway godplot that's already failed, it can probably wait for Leareth to be in better condition to reason about it? They're in the safety of the north, now, a long way from Vkandis' remit; it's hard to imagine what could go wrong before tomorrow morning. 

She bites back a sigh. "Leareth, I will not keep you much longer, but - I do still want to see your core memories. And it would be good for Karal to see as well, I think." 

...Right. 

(The feeling Leareth has isn't exactly hesitance, more just - recognizing the significance, and what it means that he's not especially hesitant to show Karal the innermost part of himself.) 

Leareth was, as far as he knows, born more than 1800 years ago, in Predain, a kingdom that no longer exists. His name was Kiyamvir Ma'ar.

He doesn't remember his childhood, exactly, just memories-of-memories, now whittled down to the bare fact that certain events happened. He was, he thinks, from a semi-nomadic herding people, and by the time he was reaching adolescence, conditions had gotten...very bad. He knows that his clan practiced infanticide, and that - there would have been a sister, one year, if they hadn't been already too close to starvation by the time the baby arrived. He knows that his father died by violence, and his mother in childbirth. He knows that he was different – mage-gifted, and...different in some deeper way. He doesn't remember being that child, not really, except as a formless emotion, the sense that, for all that he hadn't yet known anything different, he knew that this wasn't good enough. 

Ma'ar left. He doesn't think he knew, at the time he left, where he was going, just - that if he stayed, nothing would ever change, and something had to. 

The first memory that can really be called that is of Urtho's Tower, in the neighboring kingdom of Tantara. It's a memory consisting more of emotions than of anything more concrete - it was a place of wonders, of incredible magics, of books and learning, and it was a place where he never really understood any of the other students because they had grown up safe. But he does remember standing on a high balcony, looking at the stars - so many lights - and then at the ground, the bustling wealth of Tantara spread out in the darkness. Fewer lights than stars, but - still so many, and there could be more. He could take what he learned there, and bring it to Predain and fix it, and - and then to everywhere, because by now he knew there was an entire world. Maybe it should have seemed more daunting, to leap from fixing one country to fixing an entire world, but he thinks it wasn't as daunting as leaving the plains of Predain in the first place. 

He made a promise, there at Urtho's Tower, that he wouldn't stop until everything was fixed and everyone had the safety and wealth and wonders of Urtho's Tower. 

(Later, though he thinks not very much later, he realized it would take a lot more than one human lifetime, and began searching for a magical solution to immortality. He found several. The one he's using now was - a last resort, a final backup that he thinks he was only willing to countenance because he shouldn't have needed it. But, unfortunately, events went - differently than how he had planned.) 

Ma'ar studied at Urtho's Tower until adulthood. He was, he thinks, reasonably close with Urtho - only one of his students, but a particularly brilliant one. He knows he very badly wanted Urtho to be proud of him, and...he thinks that at least sometimes, Urtho was.

And then he left, now a young man, and returned to Predain. Again, what he remembers here is unclear and mostly in emotional impressions. He remembers that Predain was a rougher culture than Tantara, living closer to the edge of violence - and he knew it wasn't the end state, wasn't what he wanted to build, but it made sense to him like Urtho's Tower never had, and he knew how to work with it. He remembers being impatient, hungry, frustrated that the best plans he could come up with to increase Predain's wealth and stability - and to improve the lot of the desperately poor regions bordering on Predain - would take decades to pan out. In hindsight, "decades" was an incredibly short timescale to be working on, but - he was young. 

Ma'ar knew how to navigate Predain's culture and politics, and rapidly had the ear of the King, but - evidently he was lacking a lot of skills related to international relations, because - and it seems obvious now, but it really wasn't at the time - Tantara's King was alarmed by Predain's expansion, and Urtho had always been disturbed by political ambition, and - he doesn't know what happened. The records are gone and any memory of it is lost in fog. But, one way or another, the two kingdoms ended up at war. 

Predain was winning. Ma'ar was - good at waging war, and Tantara had been at peace for over a generation and had no idea what they were doing. Leareth...is still pretty sure that Ma'ar tried to negotiate for peace. It's not as though he wanted to conquer Tantara, when Tantara had been stable and prosperous and doing fine. 

Whatever he tried, it wasn't enough. He learned, too late - pieced it together after the fact, really, when he woke up in a teenager's body in a devastated world - that Urtho had weapons of incredible power, and that Urtho was willing to wield them, not just to send after Ma'ar in Predain, but to destroy his own Tower and everything he had built before it had any chance of falling into Ma'ar's hands. 

(Leareth doesn't think that Urtho meant to set off the Cataclysm. It seems more likely that part was a miscalculation. But whatever the intentions, what was left afterward were two craters and a swath of unlivably damaged territory between them. He has only guesses at how many people died, but...it was in the millions. It might have been tens of millions.) 

...And Leareth wasn't among them. He had taken just enough precautions, and his last-ditch contingency worked even when all of his other immortality setups had been destroyed. He was, for better or worse, one of the few survivors of a final escalation that he - may not have intended to push Urtho into, but that was still causally his fault - and he had made a solemn vow on the stars to fix everything, and learned the hard way how badly it was possible to miscalculate, and - 

- he wasn't done. It's only the beginning of the story - Karal will learn a lot of the rest along with Leareth, there are huge swaths of his life that he has only the vaguest inklings of and he needs to spend a few weeks with his records, catching up - but that's the core of it. 

(- never to die - never to give up - never to walk away -) 

Oh.  Oh, what a dizzying superposition of things that make all the sense in the world and things he cannot comprehend at all.

He isn't like that at all, himself.  He would have never thought that things could be that different, that much better.  He certainly wouldn't have left everything he'd ever known for a nebulous hope of change.  It would never occur to him - he still cannot really wrap his mind around the concept of wanting to fix everything and everywhere.  Of deciding to become immortal in order to do something a mortal man couldn't.  No wonder Leareth thinks he can fight the gods, when he's halfway to one himself. 

But Karal knows with immediate certainty that if he had been in Predain, he would have been Ma'ar's, absolutely and completely.  He would have served him with all his soul for a tenth of that dream.  Maybe he could have helped, could have done something to prevent that unimaginable disaster. 

He isn't sure what that means now, nearly two thousand years and the gods only know how many lives later, but... something, surely. 

Yes. Let me help.

That is kind of a baffling response to admitting that he was responsible for almost destroying the world

(Leareth mostly isn't...assessing...Karal's reaction yet. He's busy tucking his core memories back into the metaphorical vault where they belong, and getting his emotions under control. It's obvious that nearly all of his motivation runs through something built on that tight bundle of memories, and equally obvious that he doesn't intend to spend all that much time dwelling on it. It's in the past. The lessons he can learn from it are learned, now, and there's no point in re-imagining how he could have acted differently, or even in wishing he remembered more.) 

It's a perfectly sensible response, Karal argues back, because Ma'ar didn't want to destroy the world, and so him having someone who could have maybe had even the smallest chance of making that go better would be just about the most important thing possible.  That's part of what he meant earlier, when he said the most important question isn't even whether he agrees with Leareth's plan, but whether he can make something better.

(This explicit reasoning isn't really why he would have done it, he doesn't naturally think that way, but it's what his instincts are pointing at when he does the things he inevitably does - and he's absorbed enough of the way Leareth thinks that he can begin to see that.)

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. 

Nayoki is capable of making observations other than how sweet this is! She's carefully assessing whether Leareth's memories - or perhaps more importantly, the attitude bound in with the memories - seem as she knew them before, and whether the crumb-pattern of his motivation and thinking seems linked up in the right way. 

She smiles at Karal with quite a lot of warmth. (At Leareth, too, but he'll get more from the waft of relief and reassurance she sends along the Mindspeech link, and right now Karal is in charge of the body, and it's still more natural to think of the face she's smiling at as belonging to him and not Leareth. She will get used to Leareth not looking the same, but it's going to take more than half a candlemark.) 

"That is everything urgent to cover from my point of view," she says. "Leareth, you are clearly yourself and that is the most important part. I am - suspicious that this looks steered, but I am not actually seeing any way that Vkandis could use Karal to harm you before tomorrow, so we can discuss it then. ...Do either of you have anything else now before I let you get some sleep." 

Leareth does kind of want a ten-minute briefing on the state of affairs in Valdemar, but he'll wait to see if Karal has other questions first. 

Nothing is urgent, although Karal would appreciate an opinion on whether what he just thought made sense.  If not an answer to the rest of his reaction, which really should wait for tomorrow.

"I was going to ask if you could help me sleep, but after the last few minutes I think I'm emotionally wrung out enough not to keep myself awake."  He still doesn't want to have the dream, but a perspective that includes the Cataclysm would make any horror pale. 

"It made perfect sense to me."

She switches to Mindspeech directed just at Karal, which isn't actually private but feels a bit less like she's talking about Leareth in the third person to his face. :Leareth is not confused by your reasoning, I think, he just - he decided a long time ago that it was worth it to - use strategies that most ordinary people would consider beyond the pale. To be someone most ordinary people would consider evil. It was a difficult choice, that he made only because he thought there was no alternative. I think he finds it surprising when people want to help anyway, even if it makes perfect sense and he should know better. ...He is also very impaired, right now, and reacting from habit more than usual. I think he will feel less confused about it tomorrow.: 

Well. Nayoki does know him very well. 

We should probably have a Healer look at us just in case, he thinks loudly at her, assuming that she's still reading both of their minds. They could safely help us sleep as well, if it still seems helpful then. 

Karal smiles at Nayoki.  :That makes sense of why he keeps... being like that at me. I can hope he'll get used to it eventually.:  This in no way means that he won't end up finding some things Leareth does evil and horrifying.  From how everyone thinks about them, they probably are.  But he doesn't think that will stop him from wanting to help.

For everything else, Leareth and Nayoki clearly know what they're doing - they can have a Healer and a Valdemar briefing, and it doesn't seem like he needs to worry about whatever else should happen before they sleep.

Update on Valdemar, then! Including on aspects of the strategic situation that well predate Leareth's death, because he probably doesn't remember things like "how many Herald-Mages were killed in the war and how many are left."

(The answer is "very few." Some of Leareth's earlier plans were involved in whittling down the number - often before the point when they could even be Chosen, though he should know that Vanyel knows-or-suspects anyway - but the war deaths weren't, actually, particularly downstream of anything Leareth did. It seems like maybe Someone, for some reason, wants Valdemar weaker on mages specifically, though of course Vanyel alone is equivalent to five or ten Adepts.) 

In recent news, it's mostly that tensions are heating up between the tiny neighboring countries of Lineas and Baires. Valdemar has yet to take any official actions about this, but may be quietly taking unofficial ones; Leareth's spies have limited penetration into the Heralds' operations, and any unofficial actions being taken aren't known to the Council. 

Vanyel is still, as far as they know, alone on the border, acting as their main active Herald-Mage. Karse's priest-mage numbers are of course enormously down as well. 

Are there any prospects for Vanyel not being alone on the border? 

(The feeling behind Leareth's question, obvious to both Nayoki and Karal, is a lot more complicated than "concern for Vanyel's wellbeing", but definitely isn't just about the tactical situation of two nearby kingdoms at war. The war is...bad for Vanyel, and makes him worse, and Leareth is very suspicious that Someone wanted it that way.) 

Some of the Herald-Mages injured earlier in the war are making a recovery? If there are specific plans, then Leareth's spies in Haven are unlikely to find out until they're actually carried out. 

(Nayoki is a little worried that Karal is going to be finding this conversation weird and uncomfortable, but she's not going to make that obvious, since she expects that would if anything make it more weird and uncomfortable.) 

It is weird and uncomfortable and he's mostly trying not to think about it, but there's not much to be done about that.  Well, he supposes they could have the conversation where he couldn't see it at all, but that wouldn't be comfortable either.  He'll just have to get used to this.

It's true that the war makes everyone worse and that almost no one deserves that, no matter his feelings about Valdemar and its mage, and about him being the center of everyone's concern.

Thinking about the Cataclysm helps.  This isn't about who deserves concern, it's about what might keep things from getting worse.  Things more important than their border war, he expects.

(Unfortunately Vanyel is a central figure in...kind of a lot of things. And much more obviously a pawn steered by the gods than Karal. It won't help to say that she's pretty sure Vanyel hates this situation even more than Karal does, so she won't say it, but she's thinking it.) 

They can keep the conversation quick and efficient. ...It's been a while since the last Foresight dream, is perhaps a useful addition. The frequency has always varied, but it's been nearly two months, which is an unusually long interval. 

So he would be going into this with a lot of uncertainty about Vanyel's current state of mind even if he weren't missing memories. 

The last dream he really remembers clearly is...from the year 799 in Valdemar's reckoning, probably mid-spring, so - a little over two years ago, it's summer now. Leareth is slightly surprised to note that he remembers the date that clearly. He remembers the pain and doubt in Vanyel's eyes, and his response when Leareth asked what was troubling him. It was surprising that he answered, but - only a little, by then. The war had been wearing him down, and one side effect of it was that he spoke a little more openly. 

I had to make a hard choice. There weren’t any good options, and I – I would regret having chosen the other way as well.

I do know what that is like, Leareth remembers saying to him.

Vanyel smiles, crookedly, bitterly. “I didn’t do what you would have. I didn’t compromise what I think is right.”  

And Leareth remembers his answer. He also remembers that he thought about it quite hard as he chose the words. 

Herald Vanyel, all decisions involve a compromise. Otherwise the answer would be obvious, and there would not truly be a choice. I suppose you mean that in the tradeoff between actions you think are right and results you think are good, you chose the virtuous action, perhaps at the cost of failure. 

It is a simplification to say I would always choose the other way. I think that everything is grounded in results, in the end – but the world is very messy, and sometimes there is not time to explore and chart out the results I anticipate from each path. Sometimes, when time is short, it is in fact better to fall back on rules I have set, before, when things were not so rushed. And so I choose an action based on what you might call virtue, and afterwards when there is time I evaluate if, in fact, that is the decision process I should have been running, that would have had the best results over all the possible scenarios, and if not I change it. But in the heat of battle, I do not often break those rules I have set, even if I am greatly tempted. 

He doesn't know what Vanyel's hard choice was; if he had any guesses based on recent events, he doesn't recall them. He might never know.

There have probably been a lot more hard choices, since then. 

....Aaaaaand he's going to put those thoughts aside, and ask Nayoki where they should sleep tonight. 

This facility isn't Leareth's usual base for his research, but it's as secure as it - arguably more secure - and has comfortable guest bedrooms available. Nayoki is guessing Leareth would prefer that to having to relocate somewhere else by Gate right now? 

Yes. Please. Can Nayoki show them there and have a Healer meet them? 

(Leareth doesn't think that he is going to need any Healing-assistance with sleeping, given the exhaustion rapidly catching up with him.) 

He'll let Karal do the walking. 

Maybe they should be having the Vanyel conversation where he can't see it.  He feels like he would like to at least meet the man by himself before ending up convinced to pity him, as seems increasingly inevitable no matter how much he resents that outcome.  (He knows he's being irrational about this.  He thinks he has the right, if the cost isn't high.  Perhaps it is, but-- if what happens here is years of conversations only a month or two apart, then it seems likely that the best way to deal with it is to let them have their emotions at each other and then fix things, rather than preemptively trying to arrange for calm cooperation that, with the underlying issues unresolved, is unlikely to stay calm forever.)

He can walk, looking around this strange place, and use the physical details to distract himself from all that.  And yes, he thinks he can fall asleep on his own afterward.  He's not quite to the point of looking forward to it, even exhausted as he is, but - to the point of wanting it over with, maybe.

Leareth absolutely thinks that Karal has the right to - he's not even sure 'being irrational' is a useful framing on it, all of Karal's feelings are based on true facts about Vanyel. He's - going to spend a while dwelling on things related to Vanyel, but he can keep that where Karal doesn't have to see it. 

(Leareth is...used to holding a perspective where the actions of individuals slip out of focus, and what he sees in the foreground, when he looks at the situation between Valdemar and Karse, is a stage set by the gods, with goals he doesn't fully understand but that he suspects have more to do with making Leareth's life difficult than with the people or nations being steered. But he's not actually sure that it's fair to Vanyel, to - attribute so little agency to him. Seen from the human level, Vanyel is the one making his choices.) 

...Leareth does feel intensely mixed about the prospect of Karal and Vanyel 'having their emotions at each other'. Maybe just because this is something he's been managing very, very carefully for a number of years, and he's not sure what happens if Karal shifts that dynamic. 

A Healer will meet them at the guest bedroom! (Leareth has no memory of the man.) Is anything obviously wrong with Leareth's new body to Healing-Sight?