The body has some scrapes and bruises, and even a couple of strange relatively fresh burns from his first violent experience with magic, because Karal has not been being careful with himself lately (or for the last weeks and months and years), barely even notices these things and cannot bring himself to care.  But under all that he's very strong and healthy, and would have healed most surface damage fine on his own given time.  He lets the Healer do whatever he thinks is needed, without concerning himself with it much one way or the other.

I don't know that you have much of a choice about me shifting it, if I end up in the dream at all.  Maybe even if he doesn't, over the long term, though maybe Leareth is good enough at controlling what he lets people see that nothing about Karal will show through.  It seems like too much of an important change not to affect everything.  And...

...Oh, of course.  Karal swears internally.  That's what the trap is, if there is one - for me to hate him so much that I ruin whatever careful thing you've built.  He doesn't think he hates him that much, not really, but he's hurt and angry and grieving, and it would be so easy for someone - Someone - who didn't know all the details of his mind to expect him to burn everything down with it...

I wouldn't have, I think.  But now I'll try harder.

Now he'll have to be reasonable about Kadrich's death, and god, he doesn't want to.  But neither does he want his pain to make the world worse, and he can accept everything that's happened, to avoid that.

Oh. That - would be it, wouldn't it. Leareth is now torn between feeling annoyed with himself for not thinking of that sooner, and impressed that Karal did think of it this quickly. ...Also a flash of anger, tired and quickly past and definitely not aimed at Karal - it's exactly what the gods would do, isn't it, taking someone's fundamentally human strengths - Karal's loyalty to his people and his country - and lining things up just so, aimed such that those same strengths make everything worse... It's almost never productive to dwell on frustration, and he doesn't, but it's there. 

(There's a flicker of relief, too. It feels less - waiting for the other shoe to drop - to at least have a coherent theory of why this entire situation feels so...obviously steered.) 

He - does think that if that's what this is meant to be, Vkandis miscalculated. Which wouldn't be that surprising. The gods are - (a flicker of not-quite-unpacked concepts, how Leareth sees the shadow of fundamentally alien entities cast on the world, beings that swim in Foresight and don't, actually, have all that much ability to perceive the world the way humans do) - the gods don't necessarily understand people very well. 

...Leareth still notices that he feels quite stressed about the prospect of Karal, if he does end up sharing the dream, speaking directly with Vanyel. He...doesn't think it's that he necessarily expects it to go badly? (He actually thinks that Vkandis would be underestimating Vanyel, if He predicted that Leareth sharing a body with someone who hated Vanyel would explode everything.) He also doesn't want to force Karal to think more about this right now, if it's - a bad time - he's just making the mental note that he is, in fact, stressed about not knowing what Karal would say. 

(Also Karal should maybe shoo the Healer if they want to go over this more rather than immediately sleeping and wanting help with that? It doesn't seem like they need any immediate Healing, and it's at least slightly distracting having another person in the room.) 

Karal shoos the Healer, and promises to wash the burns and give them another look once he's had a chance to sleep.  He'd usually want to know much more, and some part of him still does - who does this man think he just saw, what's his name, does he have a family, what does he do here... Not that he needs to know these things about every person he encounters, but he's already thinking of Leareth's people as his people too.  But there's so much happening already, and they're so tired.  He can find these things out tomorrow.

He, too, is angry, and not suppressing that.  He still can't really bring himself to confront the idea that it's the Sunlord who did all that to him, but that anyone would - and not just Karal's good impulses, but Leareth's too, because he could have simply killed him and he didn't and he should not suffer for that choice - it's a horror, a wrong so deep he can barely stand the thought of it, and if the gods truly are like that then he can see why Leareth is their enemy.

And he will not let it work.

Explaining to Leareth how might almost be the harder part.  I don't know what you imagine a good time might be, a wry hint of a smile.  But I don't really understand what you want from me, either.  I will... see him, and say whatever seems right to say when I have some idea of who he is and how he reacts to me, and... He struggles to form a conscious concept of why that's how things work and doing them differently is impossible, but this is important and he has to try, so he imagines doing whatever it is Leareth wants him to do and how he thinks that would go.  I could try, maybe, to learn more about him now and imagine in advance what I might say to him, but - if I said it, later, I would sound like a stranger who knows too much about him and is repeating rehearsed words to bend him to some planned goal, rather than like a man who just met him and is genuinely reacting to what he sees, and I don't think that would help anything.  He hopes that makes enough sense.  He likes Leareth, but attempting to straighten out the tangle of his instincts into a Leareth thought-shape is so hard right now, and he's so tired.  He can try to... explain what he wants out of that conversation, in some more general sense, if that would help... as long as it feels like thinking about it and not like a rehearsal.  It does make sense for Leareth to be worried about all this.

Leareth has definitely been forming the impression that Karal is - very good at difficult conversations - and that he keeps that skill is in a completely different place from where Leareth keeps his skills for navigating interpersonal interactions. It's important for Leareth to go into high-stakes conversations not with exact words rehearsed, usually, but with an idea of what he wants and what he expects to present obstacles to that, and at least a vaguely-sketched-out decision tree for various ways he expects it could go. ...This is obviously easier when he has extensive information on someone in advance, which he does for Vanyel, and to a lesser extent had before they ever spoke. He...agrees that it feels wrong to just try to convey everything he knows about the man now; there's value to him, possible new information, in Karal having the chance to form his own impression with fresh eyes. 

...Though, yes, it probably would help Leareth's stress levels about this if he - understood better the angle that Karal is approaching this from, even if it's still underdetermined what he's actually going to say. 

Oh good, Leareth does understand that they're doing fundamentally different things both of which work.  (Or at least he assumes the thing Leareth does also works - he just definitely couldn't do it himself.)  That's the important thing, really, and he can try to think through things more easily when he feels like Leareth understands.

... It helps that he's too emotionally wrung out, after this endless day, to feel as much about all this as he would otherwise. 

Even so, he's in a lot of pain, and he wants... some acknowledgment of that, from the man who caused it.  A reaction, whatever it'll end up being.  It might be that Vanyel won't care, and that will be information - not information he'll like, but it would mean he can just be angry and not risk upsetting anything, which might almost be easier.

But from what he's seen in Leareth's thoughts of the man, no matter how much he's tried to avoid them, it seems likely that he will care.  That it'll hurt him - and Karal does want him to hurt, he can't pretend otherwise.  But he thinks that once they've both seen each other hurt, they will... be able to do something better.  Or at least he himself feels like it'll be easier to talk to a man who understands on an emotional level what he's done to him, than to one who hasn't ever had to think about it.  He can get past the pain, once he feels like he doesn't have to pretend it's not there, and he thinks most people are the same way.  It's not even as if he thinks Valdemar's Herald-Mage shouldn't have done what he did - and he can say that to him, but it'll be so much easier when it's clear how much it costs him to remember that.

(And now there are tears running down his face again, emotionally wrung out or not.  It's definitely good that the Healer is gone and nobody can see them.)

(Leareth is impressed by the thing Karal is doing! It feels like an obvious value-add over and above what Leareth himself already knows how to do, it's - one of the reasons he's now so determined to make cooperation with Karal work, whatever hidden angle of sabotage might or might not be present in the situation.) 

...Vanyel will definitely care. Leareth could generate a lot of hypotheses about Vanyel's exact reaction, and - isn't going to, right now, he's tired and it does take some effort and doesn't seem likely to help Karal orient.

Anyway. If what Karal wants is mostly just for Vanyel to witness that his actions had consequences that hurt people, before they can move on from that, that seems fine? Leareth doesn't expect anything terrible to happen. 

Anything else before they sleep? 

Ah, so that part was simple.  He never knows, with Leareth, what will be and what won't.  But he feels affectionate about this, and expects to get better at guessing.

(He appreciates the bit of additional information, but yes, he definitely doesn't want any more detail, it wouldn't help at all.)

The other thing he wants, which also doesn't seem likely to make anything terrible happen, is to explain the situation with Leareth sharing his body in a way that... matches how he feels about it.  He knows the obvious story is that something awful has been done to him, but it hasn't, and it's important to him that this be clear to anyone he expects to do a lot of interacting with.  (He sends an affectionate expectation that Leareth will have some sort of weird complaint about this, but he insists that if he's the supposed injured party then he gets to decide how injured he is.)

Karal obviously has the right to feel the way he feels about this, and to express that. Leareth...does feel like it's relevant that most of the time, someone who decides to reincarnate themselves into other people's bodies will be wronging them thereby (even leaving aside the part where usually he just kills people, and usually those people are twelve to fourteen). Karal not feeling wronged is relying a lot on very specific facts about who he is as a person, and equally specific details of the when and where, and Leareth couldn't reasonably have anticipated that being the case. 

...Also there's a tactical concern that Vanyel might be less likely to believe him if he says something that - sounds like it would be very convenient for Leareth if it were true, and might therefore be something Leareth coerced him to say. Leareth would absolutely not do that - at worst he would prevent Karal from speaking, he wouldn't force him to lie - but Vanyel doesn't know that. 

(Leareth wants it to be clear that he's not particularly making a bid for Karal to do something different, just - presenting information that immediately occurred to him.) 

Yes, all of that is important too, and Karal is definitely not arguing that there's nothing wrong with killing children.  (There were people out there who felt about these children the way he feels about his own dead, and it's not any less a tragedy just because they aren't here to speak about it.  He knows, and he's quite sure Leareth knows - and also children die all the time, and so do adults, and nobody can give all this suffering the attention it deserves.)  Just that there's nothing wrong with his specific situation, because that matters too, separately from everything else.

... The possibility of not being believed did not occur to him, and he hates it.  Is there any way to prove he's telling the truth?  If there was, presumably Leareth would've already used it on more important questions.

(There's a fleeting wordless note that if Leareth did try to force him to lie, he would fight him all-out and likely die for it.  But he hasn't been considering that as a possibility ever since their first real conversation, so it barely rises to the level of conscious thought - it's just a fact about Karal, irrelevant to the situation he's in.)

But it seems like a stupid lie, when he thinks about it.  If Leareth wanted to coerce him into a convenient narrative, it really would be easier to just not let him speak and pretend he didn't exist.  Well, depending on what face they show up with, he supposes...  But there are still more convenient lies, there's "he was dead already" or "I asked him first" - and probably there's some convoluted scheme in which his specific story is the best possible option, but he doesn't expect most reasonable people to really suspect that.  Unless Leareth has a good idea for how to explain the truth and be believed, he'll just have to try and hope it works.

Leareth is in fact pretty limited on ways to prove anything at all to Vanyel; the best he can do is, sometimes, point Vanyel at externally-verifiable evidence where, even if Vanyel can't be sure that Leareth couldn't fake it, it seems obviously not worth the effort. 'It would be a stupid lie' is in fact a decent angle for being believable, and Vanyel is smart enough to reason through it and notice that for himself. ...And Karal may, in fact, just be able to speak to Vanyel with conviction and be convincing that way. There's a skill there that Leareth has much less of, and in some sense made a deliberate choice not to invest in. Certainly it seems worth trying. 

That seems well enough.  They should finally sleep, if there's nothing else.

Sleep is good. There hasn't been nearly enough sleep lately. 

And they are, in fact, granted several candlemarks of actual restful sleep, interrupted only by ordinary dreams, before they find themselves in a snowy dreamscape. It's very clear and detailed for a dream; it's probably just because of Leareth's long exposure to it that it feels vaguely like theatre set-dressing.

There's an army behind them, and mountains ahead, with a passage carved between them, straight and level. The dream-setting presents it as a sourceless known fact that this is a real place, and that the pass was carved by blood-magic (no other way to do a working that significant without the magical ripples being detectable halfway across the continent.) 

And, standing in the mouth of the pass, a man dressed in ragged, travelworn Heralds' Whites. Slender, almost gaunt, with node-bleached hair, matted in the wind, and haunted silver eyes. 

(Vanyel is so, so tired. The dream hasn't come as frequently, as of late – maybe pushed out by nightmares of dead children and villages burning, maybe because he's so often been too tired to dream at all. It's beginning to feel like the world will never be anything except ruins and corpses. He's genuinely unsure when he last spoke to a living human being face to face.) 

He's already taken a few steps forward, on tired habit, before it registers that, for all that the dream is informing him in its neutral sourceless-fact way that the person facing him across the snow is the immortal mage he's known for years he would die fighting, that person...does not actually have the same face that he's preeeeeetty sure Leareth had in the last dream several months ago. 

What. 

Vanyel isn't quite concealing a double take, so presumably he does look different.

(He's - not actually entirely sure how he would know, otherwise, it's not like he's ever looked at himself in a mirror here. In fact, given that the dream is supposed to take place at least several years into the future, it wouldn't be that strange if he had always looked like Karal here - except for the fact that he does, actually, suspect that the sequence of implausible events leading up to his unlikely death, let alone incarnating into Karal's body, was a recent set of interventions, perhaps in response to earlier-laid plans not actually going as the gods involved had hoped.) 

...Also, Vanyel is obviously not okay, and this may well be even more obvious to Karal, who's generally more attuned than Leareth to reading emotions in others. ...Assuming Karal is here and also experiencing this as a lucid dream, is he...? 

At first it felt to Karal like just another dream, not out of place among all the other confused and awful visions of the war. 

But there's someone in his head - Leareth - and he remembers what happened yesterday and what he was expecting to happen.  The first fully conscious sight of the man in white makes his whole mind flinch in horror and grief, but- he wanted to meet him, to say something to him, so he makes himself see him rather than his own nightmare, and--

Oh god, he recognizes that look.  He's seen it on so many people, but rarely as bad as this, what happened to this man - he knows the war happened to him, but he didn't think it was like this--  He cannot want this man to suffer any more than he already is.  He's not sure anyone could.

"God, you're worse off than we were. I didn't know. I-- I'm sorry."  He makes the mental motion of talking, but it's barely a push for control at all, he's just too dream-addled to have thought about whether he has it or not - so perhaps the words won't even come out. 

Leareth almost cuts him off from saying the words out loud, if nothing else Vanyel is going to be spectacularly confused, but - he's not, actually, sure that's a bad thing? There's something Karal is doing, that Leareth doesn't entirely understand but has already seen the effectiveness of, and it feels like there's something valuable in Vanyel seeing Karal's actual, genuine, first reaction. 

He lets Karal speak, and have control of their facial expressions and body language. 

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

...Honestly, Vanyel looks substantially less horrifyingly haunted than he did five seconds ago, if only because there's now too much utter bemusement competing with it. 

Leareth takes back control of their body and mouth. "There are some things I should explain. - I look different from before, I am guessing?" 

All right, that's definitely Leareth, everything makes sense agai– everything absolutely does not make sense again, unless he's somehow short enough on sleep to start hallucinating things IN A FORESIGHT DREAM - but Leareth is acknowledging and reacting to his confusion - what - 

"Yes," he manages. "I– oh. You...died? And came back." Vanyel...has some sort of emotion about this. He's genuinely not sure what emotion it is. "I, er, would ask how you died, but it's not like you have any reason to tell me, do you." 

(Perhaps more to the point, Leareth...still doesn't actually know how he died. It wasn't one of the top priorities in tonight's - last night's? - rather hurried debrief.) 

Vanyel put it together very quickly. Leareth is quietly impressed; it's not going to show much in his face, but he isn't going to bother to entirely hide it, either. Vanyel is intelligent - moreso than he really gives himself credit for - but it's particularly impressive that he put it together on the spot while as obviously exhausted as he is. 

"It is not very relevant," he agrees, levelly. "As I am sure you can observe yourself, I - do not come back as an infant." He did at one point consider if that would work, as a modification of his existing setup rather than trying to slip an entirely new mechanism past the gods, but without some kind of external temporary memory storage while the body and brain became capable of sustaining his adult mind, it would be just as bad on fidelity-of-self as ordinary reincarnation. "Likewise, I am sure you can gather that when I appear in a new body, it previously belonged to someone else." 

Vanyel had in fact put that together, at least as one guess; the publication dates for work by a handful of the scholars who were Probably Leareth wouldn't have worked, otherwise, though it was conceivable Leareth just liked to swap around false names.

He's not really sure where Leareth is going with this? 

"...Normally this involves killing the original person," because apparently Vanyel is out of energy for putting the pieces together himself, and Leareth is going to have to spell this part out, "but it is - not magically required by the setup. And, this time..."

Karal, would you like to introduce yourself?