Leareth must have a lot of experience at quickly recovering his previous life, to the extent that this experience is itself something that transfers between incarnations.  And Karal isn't surprised that things are less difficult, now that the two of them are settled in their strange situation.  He himself finds it much easier now to fade into the background and let his lord do things.  (Not having control of his body stopped feeling unnatural and vaguely unpleasant nearly immediately, and the way he processes new information is different - he still pays attention, but he doesn't worry as much, because he doesn't need to make his own decisions about most of it.)  He finds all their interaction modes easier, really, now that he feels like he knows what his place is here, and more so because it's such a familiar one.  Or maybe it's not so much a change in him as a reaction to the way Leareth feels more willing to not just trust him not to do anything unhelpful, but to rely on him.  (He still has to put effort into calming the burst of happy fulfillment every time he notices Leareth being straightforwardly reassured by his existence.  It's a little embarrassing, as if he was fifteen again - not the feeling itself, which he never lost and would never want to, but having it be so visible.)

A while of less emotionally intense reading sounds like a good idea, and he contentedly sits still for some history.  (He expects to be very uninterested in math, and will of course deal with it, but if they could figure out a way for him to do something while math is going on without distracting Leareth from it, that would be helpful.  Mage-gift or Empathy exercises, maybe, since math seems unlikely to require the former and very unlikely to have any use for the latter.)

The briefing is unsurprising in all but the number of Adepts, incredible even thought he was trying to adjust his expectations to the new level of power.  He has some soldier's questions about the army, probably a few suggestions, but nothing major in any sense.  Questions about the tradeoffs of working with what are clearly awful people should wait until he has more context, he thinks - none of this is new and the payoff is a decade away, so it's unlikely to be urgent.

The Foresight dream makes Vanyel one of the more time-sensitive issues, and Karal only sighs a little.  I expect I've already been as upset about him as I ever will be.  Which doesn't mean he won't still be upset, but... it's a known thing, now.  And of course it needs to happen - he's seen enough of Vanyel to understand how uniquely worth talking to he is, and no longer calls him the Butcher in his mind.  And I admit I'm curious what all your strange conversations were like.  It's such a strange, but fascinating and a little touching view of Leareth, when he's trying to be emotionlessly fair to his enemy and clearly getting attached to him in the process.

Then after a good lunch - and both Leareth and Karal getting a chance to talk to Rosta in the dining hall, and Karal getting the opportunity to be properly introduced to a few of the main researchers, though they mostly want to talk to Leareth about math related to the god-project - they can bring Leareth's crate of dream notes to the library, and sit down for some reading. 

The first instance of the Foresight dream happened in late autumn of 789, in the Valdemaran calendar, and recurs at intervals. It's always the same. Leareth is standing at the front of his army, assembled in the snow on the northern side of the passage through the Ice Wall mountains. (In the dream, this always feels like a normal expected way for things to be, and not a moderately baffling tactical decision.) The dream comes with a vague sense of knowledge that it's the future, when the invasion force is ready, though it doesn't come with Leareth actually knowing what year it's supposed to take place.

A Herald in Whites, with node-bleached hair and silver eyes, is standing at the mouth of the pass; he's thin, haggard, maybe in his late thirties. The dream, for some reason, informs Leareth quietly that this mage is unusually powerful. Not very much actually happens. They look at each other. They...seem to know each other's names? Herald-Mage Vanyel, Leareth greets the man. Leareth, the Herald of Valdemar says to him, and raises his hand to fight. 

...Leareth was immensely confused, the first time the dream happened, because he doesn't...actually...have the Gift of Foresight? And isn't sure he's ever had a long-range Foresight vision, though he's occasionally inherited a body with a short-range Foresight Gift. It's never seemed before like the gods wanted him to know Their plans for his future, and he's baffled about why now.

He quickly determined that there indeed wasn't a Herald-Mage Vanyel who he had somehow missed in his record of active Herald-Mages. But, of course, the dream was set in the future. He sent out feelers via his agents, and determined that there was a nobleborn Vanyel related to Herald-Mage Savil, known to him as one of Valdemar's most powerful Adepts. Future updates confirmed that some poorly-documented but fairly disastrous events in a border landholding had involved Vanyel, who was now a trainee, and...had been spirited off away from Haven, possibly-according-to-rumor to stay with Herald-Mage Savil's Tayledras allies, though this was one of a half-dozen rumors. Leareth sent agents to follow up on all of them, and (not particularly to his surprise) never heard anything. He did eventually learn that Vanyel was back in Haven and had been promoted to full Herald after an unusually short apprenticeship, maybe with the justification that he was already sixteen and had a noble's education. 

The first lucid Foresight dream was in the spring of 791. Vanyel was the one who initiated the conversation, by saying this is a dream, and startling Leareth out of the dream-state where it all seemed to make sense. 

His notes have a transcription of their exchange, which was quite short, written down as verbatim as he could recall it. It seemed important. 

Leareth
A Foresight-dream with two individuals, and we can speak to one another. Very novel. I have dreamed of this future for many months. It appears we are to meet here, and fight. Still, prophecies are not bound to come true. I have seen more than one averted. [after a long silence] You see I have my army with me – will have them with me, in this future. I intend to bring my men through this pass and conquer the area beyond, which I suppose contains your kingdom, Herald of Valdemar. I do not come to place your people in bondage; I intend to shed the least blood I can, to build my empire, and I intend this empire to be a better place to live than your Valdemar currently is or can ever be. This plan has been in motion for a thousand years. I have no desire to kill you, but you will not deter me.

Vanyel
I can’t let you just march an army into Valdemar.

Leareth
I would not expect anything less of a Herald. 

The notes add that Herald Vanyel, though he still wore the face of his future, older self, looked visibly overwhelmed and terrified.  

Of course he does.  Karal has never personally found Leareth overwhelming and terrifying, but he very much realizes he is.  (He thinks for a moment that of course meeting him as an enemy would be different, before realizing their first meeting also could be quite fairly described as that.  But... a different sort of that, still.)  And that speech certainly was.  It's almost impressive, how Leareth manages to say something that should by all rights be reassuring and, in his care not to convince people by emotional appeals, not have it sound that way at all to someone who doesn't know him already.

And the Vanyel having this first dream, for all that he looks much older, was... eighteen?  Gods, what a shock that must have been, to a boy barely out of training.  And... Why is he alone?

(Of course there are all the questions about why this is happening - Someone must be responsible, but what's the point?  It's obvious why Vanyel would have this dream, but why Leareth too and why does it let them talk - almost certainly two goals here, separate and at odds.  The second one is a little like Karal's own circumstances, positive enough on the surface that you have to wonder why.  And two such interventions start seeming like more than coincidence.  But he should wait and find out the rest before getting too tangled up thinking about it.)

Vanyel would have been seventeen, Leareth thinks. In fairness to him, Leareth wasn't actually trying not to be terrifying. He was caught off guard and didn't have a lot of time to think of a strategy, but - maybe more importantly, it would have felt like lying to try to seem reassuring and unthreatening to Vanyel (and probably couldn't have worked, when the format of the dream itself made his intentions blatantly clear.) The situation when he met Karal was different – and, after the fact, Leareth can admit that he was less inclined to be upfront about his intentions when his priority was getting off the battlefield and to a place of safety. The dream, for all its ominous stage-imagery, was almost perfectly set up to be a place where neither Leareth nor Vanyel were in actual danger, or had any way to directly threaten each other. 

Leareth was also confused at the time, and assigned significant - maybe greater than 50% - odds that this was the last time the dream would happen, because the intended message, whatever it was, had been conveyed. (His best guess was - so that Vanyel would know, not only his destined future, but that Leareth knew, with the obvious implications for how he would be prepared and Vanyel would need to take that into account. Though it still felt very confusing.) 

He still thought in depth about what he would say if the dream did recur. It seemed likely to him that if it happened again, it would happen over and over - it would be much stranger for it to happen exactly twice - and, in addition to whatever confounding implications that would have about the goals of the intervention, it would be an opportunity for communication, even negotiation. Which, however confused and suspicious he was, Leareth didn't intend to turn down. His planning for what to say to Vanyel if the dream recurred was mainly on the assumption that it would be the start of a long back and forth. 

And then, of course, it did happen again, a matter of weeks later. Again, Leareth has approximately-verbatim notes. 

Leareth
Welcome, Herald Vanyel. I was not sure if we would have this opportunity to speak again. It appears that yes. If you have questions, I will answer them. I do not wish to waste my breath on a conversation you are not willing to have.

Vanyel
I’m willing to speak with you. I would like to know what exactly you’re trying to do here. And why. You’re claiming your empire will be a better place to live than Valdemar. 

Leareth
I am not sure my intentions will count for anything to you, Herald out of Valdemar. However, I will speak of them anyway. Your Valdemar does not compare so badly, among other kingdoms I have seen, but it does contain a great deal of pointless suffering. You are a Herald. You have dedicated your life to protecting the people of your kingdom, and yet you cannot protect those children that starve in the streets each winter, nor those murdered by bandits on the roads each year. You have seen it too, and it it disturbs you. I would like there to be less of it in the world. 

Vanyel
You’re bringing in an army. I know what happens in war. Even leaving aside the people your men would kill, there would be looting, farmers having to abandon their crops. If you want fewer people starving, it doesn’t seem like a good way to go about it.

Leareth
In the short run, yes. It is a cost I accept. Have you ever killed a man to save those he would otherwise kill later, Herald? You have. To protect your people, I imagine, and you would do the same again. I say it is no different if those you save are children who would otherwise have starved in twenty years. I choose the path that will save the most lives, not only now but in the future.

Vanyel
Why lead with an army in the first place? If you really just want to help, why not come to us peacefully?

Leareth
Why do you think I have not tried already? I have been working towards this for very long time, and I have tested every path less costly than this. I now judge that this is the plan most likely to succeed.

Vanyel
All right, assume I believe you about what you’re trying to do. Why do you think you can even do it? You’re not the first person to try to make the world a better place.

Leareth
I know what I am capable of. I have done this before.

Vanyel
That’s impossible. 

Leareth
I understand why you might think so. I will lay my cards on the table, Herald, since otherwise I do not see how we can trust one another. I am not a mortal man. I have lived for many centuries. I know the ways of men well, and I have tested my plans thoroughly. Your Queen Elspeth is a good enough ruler, as mortals go, but there is an unfair comparison. She has not the hundredth part of my experience or learning. 

Vanyel
Why should I believe you?

Leareth
There is a statue of King Valdemar in the grounds of your Palace. It was carved the year after his death, and has not been altered since; you can confirm this easily. If you look carefully at the scroll he holds, it bears a very large number. I chose that number, and I know the prime factors; that is, two numbers that I multiplied to obtain it. I will tell them to you now. [I did so.] There is another thing you could check. Taver is currently your Monarch’s Own Companion, no? Taver and I met once, a long time ago, and we spoke mind to mind. I believe he will still remember what I said to him. [After a pause] I can offer a final item of proof, and it will serve as a gesture of goodwill. A great deal of lore was lost at the time of the Mage Wars, as you know. I was there, and I remember. I will tell you of a communication-spell I once used. The instructions are as such...

Leareth's main reaction afterward, according to the terse notes he took, is that he was - very impressed. Vanyel might be young and overwhelmed, but he could think on his feet, and ask insightful questions. ...And he seemed willing to talk. Leareth wasn't at all sure that most Heralds would be. 

The next set of dream-notes is dated another few weeks later. 

Vanyel
I followed up on the information that you gave me. I’m not convinced, everything you offered could be explained another way. Not easily, but becoming immortal wouldn’t be very easy either.

Leareth
I think you are not as skeptical as you try to appear. Nonetheless, I am prepared to act in good faith. It is true that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. [Demonstrate a map by dream-illusion, the dream allows this.] See this? By this place that you call Horn, under a hill shaped like so, there is a cave. I built and sealed it nine hundred years ago. There is a spell to test the air that will show this, which I will teach you and you may test in other circumstances. There is also a spell you will need to pass through the wards. I will tell you this as well. I placed useful supplies there, that I might use in future, and so I tell you this as an offer of goodwill as well as evidence. [Explanation, pause for Vanyel to memorize this] Is there anything else you would like to know?

Vanyel
I’d like to know how you became immortal. And why. 

Leareth
I will not tell you the details of my method, since we do not yet have such a level of trust. I can tell you that it involves magecraft, and that it did not involve preserving the flesh of my original body. As to why, I spoke of this already. You have noticed, as have I, that the world is not a good place. I decided that it ought to be better, and I judged this a goal I could not accomplish in a single lifetime. I also did not wish to die.

Vanyel
What do you intend to do, if the time comes and I’m here at the pass to stop you from entering Valdemar?

Leareth
I will stop you by whichever means necessary, and continue with my plan. I do not wish to kill you, Herald Vanyel, but I will not hesitate to do what I must.

Vanyel
I have another question. If you’re trying to do good in the world, why do you call yourself something that literally means ‘darkness’?

Leareth 
You know the Kaled'a'in language? Interesting. That is one translation, but the word has several meanings. One can speak of the ‘leareth’ to mean the night sky. There is darkness there, but also many lights. The lights are those things that matter, and the darkness is what must be crossed. I have always found hope in looking at the stars.

Again, Leareth's notes on his own reactions to this are very sparse, but - he was impressed. He was deeply and genuinely impressed. ...He also wrote that Vanyel "seemed like a deeply troubled and unhappy young man", though - who wouldn't be, in that situation. 

(He was amused, he thinks, by the question about his name. In ancient Kaled'a'in it primarily means 'night sky' - you certainly wouldn't choose it to talk about metaphorical darkness-of-character - and Leareth is much more fluent in the archaic version of the language that spawned the modern Tayledras and Shin'a'in dialects. It was spoken in Urtho's Tower, and where he first incarnated after the Cataclysm, and by many of the small groups barely surviving in that first century. His earliest records are mostly in that language, he thinks, rather than his actual mother tongue.) 

He doesn't remember anything else about what he thought of Vanyel that far back, though he does remember at least flickers of the conversations themselves. Vanyel's face, trying so hard to match Leareth's controlled calm and give nothing away. 

Yes, it's impossible not to, if not like, then at least appreciate how willing Vanyel is not just to talk but to really try to understand.  But it still seems... hard, nearly impossible, to convince him to agree with conquering his country and killing ten million of its people.  Who could possibly agree to that?  Vanyel is a Herald sworn to his king, Karal knows that - and the king has obligations to his people, not to some unbelievable bright future.  It's one thing to understand in principle that this might be the right thing to do, and another to agree for it to be done to your home.

(... Would Karal still be here, if Leareth meant to take Karse, not Valdemar, for his sacrifice?  Gods, what a nearly impossible question to even think about. 

...

He thinks he would.  But only because he was cut adrift from all his obligations before he found out - and even so, it would be much harder not to feel like Leareth lied to him by not making it clear early on, that they were this much on opposite sides.  And Valdemar is... better than Karse, right now, Karal knows that even if he doesn't want to see it.  A harder loss to reconcile oneself to.  Gods, what a horror all this is.)

... He wants to know if Vanyel knows that part of the plan, yet.  But he should wait and do all this in order.

That is so much strange proof.  (Math, even. How can you prove something real by showing someone some numbers?? If Vanyel believed it then Karal doesn't really need to know.)  And so much effort and preparation, on Leareth's part.  Karal isn't sure how any amount of such things would truly work to prove immortality, when Leareth clearly has so much knowledge and magic he might have used to falsify his evidence - but it doesn't really matter so much, in the end, because whether or not it's a proof of immortality it's proof of immense and strange power, and that seems like it comes down to nearly the same thing.

(Karal only just now realized that Leareth was already finished with the Eastern Empire by the time Valdemar was even founded.  This shouldn't really be news, Leareth lived through the Cataclysm and so he was obviously here before any of the countries Karal knows, but it's the first time this piece of information connected to anything actually familiar.  That is such an incredibly long time.)

Was Vanyel already deeply unhappy, at seventeen?  He obviously was when Karal saw him, but he thought it was the war that made him so.  Though perhaps knowing of the foretold invasion would be enough to upset someone enough for Leareth to remark on it...  It wouldn't be for most boys, Karal thinks, but he doesn't know Vanyel very well.  (Yet.  He will get to know him, and he still can't quite bring himself to want to, but... one does many difficult things in life, and this clearly needs to be one of them.  They should keep going.)

- oh, if and when he does tell Vanyel the entirety of the plan, Leareth absolutely expects that Vanyel's response will not, will never, be "all right, I'm on board." The best case scenario Leareth can imagine, in terms of ways he might react, is that he would try to convince Leareth in turn to do something else instead. 

And - there probably isn't something else - and so, very likely, they end up on opposite sides, as enemies who might understand each other perfectly but still cannot do anything other than fight. Which would be another stupid tragedy, to add to the very long list of them in Leareth's past, but - better than not trying to look for other, less stupid, things they could do instead. But - if there is another option, then Leareth thinks the most plausible way he ends up learning of it is by - a route like this, someone approaching the problem from a very different angle, and with very strong reason to find an alternative. It's not that it's likely to work, just - it doesn't seem impossible. 

(A quiet note of acknowledgement, that it would have been unfair to Karal for Leareth to act exactly as he did if Karse had been his intended target. He's glad they aren't in that world, though - he does think that, for some sort of symmetry or fairness or just understanding, it's good for Karal to think about how he would feel in that scenario.) 

He's pretty sure that he's ended up giving Vanyel rather a lot of information that will strengthen Valdemar's position, in the unsurprising and more-likely case where it comes to war. Though he's also fairly sure - at least, his not-necessarily-trustworthy memory thinks he was sure - that Vanyel hasn't been filling in the other Heralds about anything more than the existence of the Foresight dream. They would be acting differently, if they knew more of the details.

Leareth agrees that it doesn't, really, matter whether Vanyel believes that he's immortal, or just that he has the knowledge and magic he claims to. He does think that at a certain point, it would get to be more implausible for someone not immortal to have the resources Leareth has. 

...Vanyel has been deeply unhappy the entire time Leareth has known him. Leareth...doesn't have all the context for why, and isn't sure if he's forgotten or never knew, but it feels like one of the more fundamental Vanyel facts. He - suspects it's about more than just the invasion. 

What a tragic frame to read all these conversations in, that most probably they won't succeed at anything more than understanding and they'll have to fight anyway, with more knowledge about each other and so much more pain.  But... yes, it does seem the most likely thing.

And Leareth is still trying, is chasing a tiny chance of something better through a decade of difficult conversations and expensive attempts at proof - and more than just proof, he said he stopped some of his plans as a show of good faith, in the dream, Karal thinks he remembers that...  It must be incredibly hard, to keep trying something that almost certainly will only make things worse, but that might still be worth it.  But it's what Leareth has been doing all across his many lives.  No wonder his mind is so strange - it would have to be, to manage all this at all.  Of course some part of him assumes nothing ever just goes well, when so much of what he does has to end that way.

Karal couldn't do it.  He doesn't think almost anyone could.  But maybe he can help a little, reading these notes and giving another perspective.

... Would it help for him to try not have so many feelings about it?  He's not sure where they are, on that.

Leareth doesn't mind the feelings. It may result in him needing a break from this sooner, but - if anything he thinks it will help get all of this deeply into his memory. 

The dreams fall into something of a routine, after that. Vanyel is suspicious and wary and still, despite himself, curious. They talk mainly about magic and history. Vanyel seems to prefer talking around the enormity of what's coming in both of their futures, and Leareth is, for now, content to follow that lead. They have decades. 

The next particularly-contentful dream is over a year later, in summer of 792, and includes a note that Vanyel appeared in it visibly angry. 

Leareth
We do not have to talk, if you would prefer not to.

Vanyel
I only have one question for you. I have reason to think you’re up to something on our borders. And that you’re not exactly being honourable about it. What do you have to say about that?

Leareth
We are still enemies, Herald Vanyel. I have made no promises to you, or to Valdemar. Honour is not a word I find useful in this context. I do what I can to increase the chance that my plans will succeed, and I am sure you do the same. I would like it if we could recognize our shared interests, but I would be foolish to count on this.

Vanyel
I understand. I think we may not agree on acceptable costs. There are lines I won’t cross, no matter how many lives it might save in some distant future.

Leareth
This is as I would expect, from a Herald. I draw different lines. I think it wrong to flinch from a course of action that will save the largest number of people, simply because my enemies might think it dishonourable. I do not consider it to be a valid constraint.
[After a long pause in conversation] Have you read your Herald Seldasen’s treatise on ethics?

Vanyel
You’ve read Seldasen?

Leareth
Yes. He was an exceptionally sane man. I would have liked to have–

At which point the dream was abruptly cut off, after a much shorter time than usual. Nothing in particular was happening where Leareth was, so his suspicion was that Vanyel had been shaken awake by some outside event. His notes include brief speculation on whether Someone didn't want them talking about Seldasen. 

(Herald Seldasen lived several hundred years earlier, during a particular turbulent time in Valdemar's history. His writing on ethics is - probably about as close to Leareth's way of thinking as a Herald, bound to a Companion, can realistically get.) 

Hopefully they managed to get back to Seldasen later.  If not, that really would have unfortunate implications, although it's even more confusing, to think Someone might want them to talk but only about specific things that aren't... treatises on ethics... for some reason??  Well, it'll be clearer later, whatever's going on, he hopes.

Should you look up what it was he complained about you doing?  Karal wonders what Vanyel's idea of honor is.  He sounds like... well, Karal can't really know, but he can guess based on some of what he knows about what Valdemar is like - they have a lot of lines they won't cross, and good reasons for most of them, but...  they're different reasons, some more important or more absolute than others, and it seems as if they're treating them all the same.  They wouldn't come into Karsite territory, not even for temporary occupation, because at some point one of their kings said they wouldn't, and it's not as if it was a bad principle in general, but it would've been better for everyone, really, if they just invaded, and he thinks they knew that and still didn't.  He hates them a little for that, for dragging it all out over so many years and so many deaths, just for their stupid principle.

... But there are still some things you shouldn't do, even if an individual case of them would have a better result than not doing it, because it's that important to predictably be someone who wouldn't.  But... not everything is like that, he thinks?  He's not sure, he doesn't build his principles by thinking through them.  But it seems like if everyone involved would actually be better off if you did it--  No, that's not quite right either, if everyone would be better off and you could make this obvious to anyone else who might need to know-- Oh, this was Ma'ar's problem, wasn't it.  He sends a mental sigh.  If what Valdemar is doing is trying very hard not to go the way Predain went, there's only so much he can blame them for that.  But... they're giving up so much for it, and of course there are better ways, normal diplomacy exists now, you don't need to bind yourself to this narrow a path just to never scare anyone.  Never scaring anyone doesn't really... seem like the correct goal for what he thinks of as honor.

Ah, he doesn't know.  It's all complicated, too much disconnected abstract thought for him - he gets the impression that reading Seldasen would make his head hurt.  But he does think Valdemar's Heralds are missing something.  Focusing so much on their vision of how a good person acts that they don't notice it's possible to be... honorable, trustworthy, something... without holding to all the rest of their code.

The analysis notes from the morning might say more, but - no, they don't that much, he thinks his initial guess was right and he was deeply unclear on what specifically Vanyel had just found out about and was accusing him of doing, especially given that high likelihood that it wasn't something he had set in motion especially recently, just something Vanyel had happened to learn of at some point in the couple of months since their last dream. And, of course, many ways of probing for more detail would have involved revealing activities in the north that Vanyel might not know about.

He can make a note to ask Nayoki, it's entirely possible he tried to follow up via his agents in Haven and guess at which recent Heraldic missions might have led to Vanyel learning about it and he just didn't cross-reference it with these particular notes, but - he's not sure it mattered that much to him at the time? He undeniably was up to various plots on Valdemar's borders, that a Herald might reasonably call dishonorable. Also he's worked with rather a large number of contractors for one-off missions, and it wouldn't be entirely surprising if some of them had been claiming to have more active backing from the shadowy mage in the north than they, in fact, did. Anyway, Leareth doesn't think he would have been inclined to try to - justify himself to Vanyel, or make himself sound less hostile or ruthless, even if he had known for a fact what Vanyel was talking about. 

...Leareth thinks that Vanyel's sense of honor at the time would have been - very confused, mostly, a pile of received wisdom and gut feelings and half-thought-out principles that he hadn't yet come to terms with. Not because Heralds are like that, because eighteen-year-olds are like that. Leareth is fairly sure that Ma'ar was at least that confused, albeit probably in very different directions, when he was eighteen. 

The Heralds as a whole are at least mostly doing something coherent, and the interpretation that they're trying to steer as far as possible from the class of mistake that Ma'ar made in Predain is - not false. There are real upsides to it, things Valdemar can have that Leareth never will, but - no, he absolutely doesn't think it's worth it, or he would be doing something different himself. 

For what it's worth, Leareth is fairly sure that at this point Vanyel agrees. Vanyel still makes different tradeoffs than the ones Leareth does, but - seeing it as a trade, rather than a bright line unthinkable to cross, is something that's seeped into him. And he hasn't said so outright, but he might well think that his King is choosing the wrong trade, in refusing to invade. 

- the next dream, it turns out, absolutely does involve talking about Seldasen's treatises. 

Vanyel
I see why you called him very sane. But I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have marched an army into another country unawares. Wouldn’t have used blood-magic.

Leareth
His goals were not my goals. Your Valdemar is an odd place. Your Heralds have such commitment, and that is something I can respect, but it is to so limited a cause. You protect and serve those who live within your borders from certain dangers. Yet a child who dies of hunger and illness in the streets of your capital is just as dead as one who dies in a border raid. And a child of Hardorn is just as human as a child of Valdemar.

Vanyel
Hardorn has its own king. We take care of our people, they take care of theirs. 

(Leareth is thinking about Vanyel turning away a band of Hardornen refugees at the Valdemaran border - and then crossing, against orders, to find and neutralize the threat to them. And the way a Bard penned it and put it to song - and I protect all helpless, not just those of Valdemar -

Vanyel has changed a lot since he was eighteen. 

He wonders if Vanyel had been thinking of that long-ago conversation.)

Vanyel
No one can hold up the weight of the whole world.

Leareth
One can try.

Vanyel
We’re only human.

Leareth
Then we must become more. I do not make excuses for what is beyond my strength. I find a way to become stronger. There are things I cannot do, but I do not set down limits that are false.

Vanyel
If you’re willing to kill innocents, for power… I can’t see how that’s a limit I would ever think it was all right to cross.

Leareth
You would kill a man to save ten, Herald Vanyel. If your Valdemar was under attack, you would kill a hundred enemy soldiers with a wave of your hand, never seeing their faces, and consider it right. What is the difference?

No doubt Leareth was up to all sorts of things a Herald might call dishonorable, and Karal understands his disinclination to justify himself and even mostly agrees, but he would've still wanted to know what specific thing it was and what it said about Vanyel's opinion.  But it's true that it doesn't matter now - it's so easy to keep forgetting how young Vanyel is in these records.  Of course he was all tangled up and unsure and trying to act sure anyway - Karal certainly wasn't any better, at that age.  It'll be interesting, to see how the repeated conversations with Leareth make him grow.

But that's another one of those things - what is Valdemar's obsession with blood-magic?  Why is it supposed to be so much more wrong to take power from a dead enemy than to kill him?  --Karal does see some reasons for the prohibition when he thinks about it, it's a temptation to kill people you wouldn't and it's harder to judge that than to just not let yourself be tempted, but---  Valdemar is doing that thing again, where they decide on a prohibition for some sensible but a few steps removed reason and start acting as if it's an immutable moral law that everyone else is wrong in not following.  And... it's hard not to suspect they're like that because the Butcher in White can flood any place on the border with power without resorting to blood-magic, and their enemies can't. It's an easy position from which to feel morally superior.  He wonders if they'd truly die for the principle, if things were otherwise.  (But would it be an even more awful war, if both sides were doing that... Maybe it would.  Ah, he doesn't know, and he keeps slipping into hating them but he knows it's not really right.)

And the next thing, too - yes, there's value in protecting just your people from just some dangers, when that's all you can do.  It's better to pick some lines to defend than try for everything at once - but again people will pick their lines and then declare them to be the correct lines and everything beyond them to be irrelevant, and that's... not how the world works.  No one can hold up the weight of the whole world, yes, but you can... grieve for the inability, realize the wrong in the world and the choice you make in not trying to fix it, not turn away at least from seeing it.

(And then there's Leareth, who can do more than that - who will simply find a way to do more and more with no limits on his thoughts or goals or actions.  Karal called him halfway to a god, before, and by Leareth's own admission he was not wrong.  Nobody else is like this.  For these few sentences, Karal's thoughts are full of awe.)

And then... "you would kill a hundred enemy soldiers with a wave of your hand" - he would and he has--

--and just like that Karal is back at the moment that broke his mind open, watching Vanyel's power crash down and kill everyone in its path--

He struggles for the body or the mage-gift, in pure horrified instinct, and it only takes an instant of Leareth's resistance to make some part of him remember enough to stop, make him realize it's not real - but he still doesn't really know where he is.  He curls into himself as much as he can, just inside his mind since the body isn't his, but he feels like he can't breathe, or the body isn't doing enough breathing, something is awful and disorienting and wrong--

The blood-magic thing - and they're like that about compulsions, too, and that and the no-expansion rule all date back to the Founding - is, Leareth suspects, because Valdemar was founded by refugees from the Eastern Empire. Specifically during - oh, huh, another memory he hadn't realized he had retained until it was prompted the right way - during a particularly heinous period in its history. Leareth doesn't recall any detail, but does remember that it was almost bad enough to prompt him to go back - but it felt like a trap, and in fact the Empire didn't collapse. He's less sure of his post-Valdemar's-founding recall, but thinks it recovered to a moderately less corrupt state, and has swung back and forth within the range of "corrupt but not quite enough to cause an enormous disaster".

This is besides the point. Leareth focuses on reading.

He's distracted, and becomes aware of Karal's panic only after he instinctively shoves Karal's grasp for control aside and clamps down.

- was that a helpful way to react, he has no idea, but it doesn't seem like offering Karal back control of the body now is going to help - the thing he would benefit from most if he were this panicked would be to be alone, somewhere behind very good shields, but that seems like the opposite of what Karal would find helpful - 

He can be calm, at least, keep his breathing slow and even, setting aside the notes to focus entirely on that. He can hold his thoughts fully open to Karal, not shoving them at him but making everything as transparent as possible, and he can make sure that his mind is mostly full of the room around them - they're not on a battlefield, they're in a quiet library, it's warm and the air smells like paper, and mage-sight sees only the bright set-spells for the permanent mage-lights and the beautifully intricate layered wards - 

He unshields their Empathy fully as well, because it would probably help Karal to be aware of people around them, but inconveniently the library is thoroughly shielded and nobody else is in range. Leareth will keep sitting here being calm, then, and decide in a minute if it seems like he should instead get up and go ask Nayoki for help. 

It doesn't help immediately - Karal spends another dozen endless seconds in uncomprehending shock, suspended in the void and too panicked to pay attention to anything that isn't right there.  But slowly he does start to notice the things around him that aren't quite a void, the faint calm light-filled thoughts and sensations that... aren't quite his?... the magic bright enough to catch his attention and lovely enough to hold it, but why is there magic--  why are there thoughts--

... The first subconscious instant of recognition is enough to calm him, safety and warmth and belonging, before he remembers the name of the presence or anything else about it.  But that knowledge comes back quickly enough too, and soon after it the memory of where he is and why and what they were doing.

Oh.  I-- I'm sorry, I didn't--  I didn't know that could happen--

He still feels like curling up and crying, but not in the awful confused way from a moment ago.

You need not be sorry. Leareth is emphatically not angry or upset or frustrated, and is doing his best not to be impatient, though that part takes some actual effort. It is not that unexpected - everything happened so recently for you - it will be easier with time, I think. 

(And Leareth vaguely recalls that he has some sort of process for getting his mind to stop doing that after some horrible thing happened, not that he remembers what the process is right now, sorry. He doesn't think he ever gets as disoriented as Karal was just then unless he's, for example, injured and in pain and has also just woken up from dreaming about the thing happening again, but he's pretty sure he has absolutely reflex-Gated to a random records cache in that state. And plausibly, for Karal, not having control of his body is - unbalancing in the same way as being injured and half-asleep.)

He sits there being calm for another few seconds before asking, would it help to have the body back for a little while, or no? 

There was no expectation in Karal's mind that Leareth would be angry about this (--safety, belonging--), but it's still not a good thing to suddenly have happen, and it would be worse if it happened at some moment that wasn't them sitting alone in a library. 

It probably will be.  (And he'd appreciate if Leareth could find his notes on the not-doing-that process, when he has time.)  I just-- wasn't expecting that, so it caught me by surprise...  Earlier, when talking to Vanyel or thinking about the war, he'd known to be careful of his thoughts, felt enough of the grief to instinctively clamp down on it - but today he managed to relax into the discussion of ethics and decade-old dreams, and didn't expect the present to come up so suddenly.

He does think it was not having control of his body that made him feel so disoriented (--suspended in the void with nothing there to touch or push against... There's a moment's sharper distress, but he manages to stop it without spiraling down into that state again--), yes, it would help, please-- 

The conversation and another few seconds of Leareth's enforced calm were enough that he doesn't in fact curl up and cry, just sits there and breathe more heavily, wraps his arms around himself to feel a bit more anchored for a moment.  Stands up to walk around the library, only a little shakily.  I do think it would've helped, to have that immediately, but - I don't know what I would've done, and, a touch of amusement, you did let me wear a sword into your library.  ...Definitely don't let me have the mage-gift, but I can't imagine you would have.

I was also not sure what you would do. Also the physical correlates of that sort of panic-reaction are genuinely very unpleasant; Leareth could stay out of the way and let Karal have full control of the body anyway, if it were what Karal needed, but he knows he wouldn't like it. ...They can talk about how to handle it if it happens again later. It would have been a lot worse if it had happened, for example, in the Foresight dream, though it might have been much less likely to happen if Karal hadn't been relaxed and thus off-guard. 

He can give Karal a few minutes now, until he's definitely calm again, and then - he does kind of want to finish the notes on that particular dream, and after that they can take a break? 

Probably not worth giving him control, then - losing the fight for the body helped too, in a different way, and-- right, later, yes of course.

He will walk another slow circle around the library, touching some of the shelves and wishing vaguely for a window to look out of, then sit back down and let his lord take over for more reading.

(If Leareth pays attention, he might notice Karal still being off-balance and maybe a little too quick to ignore it when prompted to, but not in a way that will do him harm or that can't wait to be addressed until later or for that matter never.)

(Leareth is not paying close attention to Karal's feelings right now, he has other things on his mind, but he is intending to pay attention later, and to make sure Karal has a chance to do things that are relaxing for him - just on priors, five minutes isn't nearly enough time for him to have fully recovered. He does remark on the wistfulness about lack of windows, and makes a mental note that they should get outside in the next day or two.) 

From the point in the conversation where they left off earlier, Leareth goes into some hypotheticals that he was, in fact, grabbing directly from Seldasen. There's an example involving a woman and children trapped outside the castle walls during a siege, but known to be infected with a plague, and the commander's decision is whether to allow them in - or whether to kill the woman if she's about to scale the walls.

I don't know, Vanyel admits, clearly frustrated. And, it's not the same.

What would you say, Leareth asks him, if you were in your position? Would you accept your own death, to save hundreds? And Vanyel answers without hesitation, yes - and Leareth remembers that image, Vanyel's face, the flash of relief he saw...

People do not always take those actions they would know to be right, if they had the time and space to think, Leareth said. People make mistakes, and I agree that it does not make them evil, and that they are still worth protecting. He remembers that, too, and - how Vanyel for a moment failed to hide the distress in his face, and Leareth wondered what it was reminding him of...

The problem with treating every life as sacred is that it does not allow us to make good trades, he said, and Vanyel mostly looked confused, the off-balance expression of someone struggling to wrap his head around the framing, on some level not wanting to understand, but not actually able to flinch away from thinking about it entirely.

and -

Leareth
It would take a very long time to explain all of my plan, and there is information of strategic value that I will not reveal to you. However, given what I work towards, in expectation, this plan will bring good that far outweighs the costs.

Vanyel
In expectation? You don’t know? You mean you’re willing to kill thousands of people, invade my kingdom, and whatever it is you’re even trying to do, you don’t know if it’s going to work? It might just fail and you’ll have killed all those people for nothing!

Leareth
We never have certainty, Herald Vanyel, not for anything in this world. We must act anyway, and deciding not to act is also a choice.

(It's a sort of safety, too, that Leareth will ignore him if he wants to do something else, so Karal doesn't need to preemptively worry about worrying him in turn.  Good.)  He focuses on the records easily enough.  Asks to look back to the line they stopped on (and only feels the normal muted ache of grief, when he reads it this time), because there was a beginning of a thought he had there, before that happened--

You're right.  I wanted to say that to him, earlier, but of course you already did a decade ago.  That there's only a difference of degree, between what he does and what you do.  He can draw a line - everyone draws a line somewhere - except you, a faint touch of fondness and awe - but the lines aren't real, and they... dissolve, when you think about them enough.  But of course he's terrified, of having everything dissolved like that.

Of course you kill the woman and the children - it's a tragedy but it's a straightforward one, and it's another point of frustration, the way Vanyel thinks he lives in the kind of world where he could afford to do anything else.  (But he was eighteen, Karal reminds himself. No doubt he knows the answer, now.)  And yes, you do it even though you don't know - maybe they have the plague or maybe they don't, maybe you'd manage to isolate them well enough that nobody else would die of it - sometimes you do end up killing people for nothing, that's how human war and human justice inevitably is, and even the gods don't seem to do better.  He realizes that this too is not really different from what Leareth is doing except in degree, and in Leareth's willingness to consider possible outcomes that nobody has ever seen happen before, and to trust himself to predict them anyway.

(... Maybe he would like Seldasen well enough after all.)

But it he thinks he sees the arc of the future conversations now - Vanyel doesn't like all the lines dissolving, but he's thinking about it (and it's admirable, Karal thinks half unwillingly, the way he's still thinking about it despite how much he clearly hates the idea), of course he will keep thinking about it, and Karal has little doubt that he'll come closer to Leareth's way of thinking, over time.  He's curious to see how far.  Although he remembers from yesterday night's dream that it may not be that simple - things happen in the waking world that make it impossible to have a relaxed conversation about ethics, to Vanyel just as much as to Karal.

... And Vanyel wants to die.  Something awful happened - someone he cares about did something awful, that pain is clear enough to see, and Karal feels the echo of it in himself even though he's never felt it - and he wishes that duty would require him to die rather than keep living.  He's wished it for a decade, and kept living anyway, to serve all the people who are clearly relying on him so much that it feels like everything would collapse without him.  Of course he couldn't do otherwise, but it's one more note of pain in the entire tragic story they're tangled together in.

(Karal hasn't met anyone like that before, but there's still something familiar about it... Another memory of Leareth's, not his own, and he doesn't have so many of them yet that he can't look through them and find it...  Bastran, that's who was like that.  The thought doesn't go anywhere further, but he notices the similarity, and both of them being close to Leareth in lives a thousand years apart.  It's not surprising, really, that Leareth would feel drawn to people like that, or that it would happen twice, in such a long time.)

Leareth thinks that for many people, it - feels like damage, to have to face the reality of a decision where there are no good options, and any choice they make will involve hurting someone or crossing a line - it feels like becoming the kind person who would hurt people and cross moral lines - and so having to consider in advance what they would do, if the question came up, feels like a weaker version of that same damage. 

There's...not nothing true to that viewpoint? War often does damage people, Leareth thinks, not just the parts that involve awful things happening to them, but the part where they need to do awful things to others. But Karal is also right, that it's naive for someone to think they live in a world where those choices won't come up, where it's viable at all to be someone who ever does the "right"  thing and not just the least awful thing. At best, some people will face fewer hard choices because they got lucky, but - Leareth doesn't, actually, think that any real person has ever been lucky enough not to face any hard choices. Not in this world. Maybe in a better one, someday. Most of the time, if someone thinks they've never faced a choice where all the options involved hurting people, it's - more likely the case that the people they ended up hurting are far away and they never had to see it. 

(...A lot more lines dissolve if you expand your view beyond the choice in front of you, if you're trying to track how the ripples of that choice affect the wider world and the more distant future, and especially if you treat inaction as a choice just as deliberate as acting. But Leareth recognizes that it's very difficult to live and make decisions that way, and not just emotionally. The more you try to take responsibility for, the bigger your potential miscalculations. Ma'ar learned that the hard way. Leareth...doesn't actually think most people should try it. There's an argument that Ma'ar shouldn't have been trying it, given that he was clearly without the resources to learn to do it right before he caused enormous harm.) 

- huh, now that Karal is noticing it, he does see some similarity between Vanyel and Bastran – and the pattern where of course he's drawn to mentor people with those qualities, people who will keep trying even when it hurts very badly. (Not that Leareth is the one who picked out Vanyel in particular; the gods seem to have done that for him, without asking either of them for input on the matter.)  

Which feels like a deeply sad thought - why - maybe just because imagining Vanyel in the Eastern Empire makes it starkly clear how awful a place it must have been for someone like Bastran. Leareth wonders if, at the time, he really understood how much he was asking. Of course there's an obvious argument for why, if you have to give anyone enormous power over others, it's in many ways better - at least from the point of view of the people living under that power - for it to be someone who doesn't want it, who questions themselves constantly and feels unworthy of it, who is deeply distressed by having to choose options that hurt people, but still refuses to flinch away from seeing the consequences of their actions and live in comfortable denial instead. 

But it's still tragic, if the people with the most integrity and - Leareth doesn't really like the word honor, it smuggles in too many other associations, but there's a concept underneath that does feel important and real - are also the ones who will suffer the most from holding positions of power in such a broken world. 

On the bright side, at least Vanyel has a Companion, and is surrounded by fellow Heralds who understand him? ...On the less bright side, Leareth is not at all sure that the Heraldic culture is a good thing, for someone already overly inclined toward self-sacrifice. 

Leareth is right, of course, about the damage.  It's not good for people, to have to live like this.  But... there are no very good options, unless you're lucky, and he doesn't think many people are.  And, yes - if you think you aren't hurting anyone, you probably still are, you just don't know, and it'll be worse when you find out.

Karal doesn't think this life, knowledge of the awful choices they're making, will damage him - hurt, yes, but not damage, and there's a bigger difference between those for him than for most people, he suspects - but he might be wrong.  Well, he will inevitably find out, in this service, and at least for the moment he can still manage a pensive smile about that inevitability.  Trying to be Leareth would damage him, and like most people he shouldn't try, but he doesn't need to.  Ma'ar... no, Karal doesn't think he shouldn't have taken responsibility, just that he should have - learned more, realized the world was bigger than he knew of, tried to find more options before acting.  (Found allies who could understand him well enough to tell him that.)  But it's clear how thoroughly Leareth has learned that lesson.  (That's another piece falling into place in the puzzle of Leareth's personality - of course he tries so hard to find other options and research even the most unlikely thing, when that happened to him.)

He's not sure that either Altarrin or Bastran, under all their compulsions, were capable of understanding how much Altarrin was asking, let alone of doing anything differently.  He's glad Leareth is free of that place.  Yes, it was still likely the right choice, but a tragic one, and - again, it feels like there must be something better, but he doesn't know what it is, doesn't even really know what direction to look in.

But it makes more sense to think about Vanyel, who is at least still alive.  And free to at least think for himself, if not to make his own decisions.  Karal wonders if he's talked to his fellow Heralds, if not about Leareth then maybe about Seldasen.  Their culture is doing many things wrong - and should likely be considered responsible for a lot of what led to Vanyel as they last saw him, miserable and exhausted and alone - but maybe it's at least capable of change.

... What is a Companion exactly?  Fancy (and possibly magic??) horses, is his understanding, but that doesn't seem like that much of a helpful thing to have, and Leareth makes it sound as if there's more to it.

- right, in Karse they wouldn't know all that much about Companions. 

First of all, Companions are divinely created entities; legend says they appeared in Valdemar in response to a prayer by the first King, and Leareth wasn't personally there or anything, but he was operating in the region not very long afterward, and a weirdly specific miracle does seem like the best explanation. It was initially done at the same time as the Web, which– ...he'll get into that later. 

They look like horses, but they aren't, exactly. They have human minds - literally, he thinks, formerly human souls - wedged into a body that resembles a horse, but is definitely innately magical; Companions have much greater stamina than horses, and are generally more physically resilient. They all have innate Mindspeech, with substantial range particularly between themselves, and - possibly other innate magical abilities, Leareth isn't sure, they're quite cagey about it. They do all seem to have, not exactly the Gift of Foresight as humans have it, but at least a kind of sensitivity that gives them premonitions of danger. 

They also have an innate ability to form soulbonds with Heralds, bearing some resemblance to lifebonds but without the romantic-love element, in response to a "call" that seems to come as a Foresight premonition. That part is presumably added on purpose by the god or gods that created them. Companions invariably die when their Heralds do, and Heralds rarely survive the death of a Companion either. The story told is that Companions Choose particularly virtuous people, though as far as Leareth can tell they mostly Choose all the Gifted people, and rely on the fact that anyone pulled into the Heraldic culture and expectations at age thirteen or fourteen - which is considered an honor and privilege, in Valdemar - and then mentored for years by someone who's constantly in their head, is likely to turn out as an upstanding citizen. 

...It's possible for a Companion to repudiate their Herald, generally in response to the Herald doing something that breaks the Companions' moral rules. It's happened a single-digit number of times in Valdemar's entire history, but Leareth suspects it has a disproportionate effect on the culture. Valdemar's entire government is more or less built on the premise that Heralds are automatically trustworthy.

(While he's thinking this, Leareth is going to mark his place for next time in the notes and put them away, and then give Karal control of the body. It still seems like a good time for a break, and Leareth is much less exhausted today and is more up for interacting with people or riding along while Karal does that, if Karal is in the mood for socializing.) 

The gods did what??  That is just... Karal is sorry, but that's an incredibly bizarre thing to exist.  And a rather good explanation for why Valdemar is... like that... 

Not that Karal has any standing to complain about people showing up in other people's heads, he supposes, but... it'd be different, if he was thirteen.  (Yes, Leareth's hosts usually are, he knows.  Leareth is not claiming this is a good thing for them, and Karal is quite certain he wouldn't be claiming it even if he didn't generally kill them.  There's a moment's grief in his mind for this, as there always is, but... it's not many lives, compared to everything else.)  And with a lifebond on top of that - he barely knows what those are, something out of stories rather than something that happens to real people he's heard of - but it doesn't sound like a situation in which you can grow up to be yourself.  Nor a situation you can - not just leave, but even think of wanting to leave.

He knows, trying to be fair for a moment, that if he had grown up in Valdemar no doubt he'd also think it an honor and a privilege, and that part of why he instinctively dislikes it is just that's it's a custom of his enemies, an accident of birth.  And another part is Leareth's dislike of the gods - if the Sunlord did something like this, Karal a few years ago would've thought it wonderful, and Karal a month ago likely wouldn't be difficult to convince either--  No, the Sunlord has done something very much like this!  There are so many stories about Suncats choosing a virtuous king or high priest or lord at a time when one was needed.  (And why hadn't now been one of those times??)  Augh.  Karal does not know how he feels about all that, and it's probably not urgent to figure it out.

Back to Valdemar and its Heralds - they have something like that, but all the time and for nearly everyone important.  The part of him that's learning Leareth's suspicion of the gods notices how very convenient it is, but...  It might be worth it, really.  The ability to give the country so many people who are automatically and visibly trustworthy would be worth quite a lot, if they truly are, and... thinking fairly, he has no reason to think they're not.  They have a country in which the coup currently strangling Karse could never happen, and he's not sure he wouldn't give up one in a hundred children for that.

... He still doesn't like it.  It's...  Valdemar was built out of refugees from the Eastern Empire.  What they have is a better system, clearly, and certainly a happier one, but... there are still too many similarities there to be comfortable.  (He wonders, a little, what Vanyel would think of the comparison.  Hate it and find it insulting and still admit there was some truth to it, he suspects, having known the man for one dream and one morning of record-reading.)

A break does sound like a good idea.  Karal stands up, stretches, takes a few deeper breaths - and yes, he would love to interact with people.  Hmm, he could ask Nayoki to introduce him to someone he should know, but... he has to admit he enjoys just running into people in the hallways.  It's the way it makes it feel like a home and not just an organization, maybe - something structured by the natural ties of people spending their lives around each other, and not only by their duties.  It will do him good, to have a little more of that.

So he'll take a random turn out of the library, and walk, with a slight smile and his usual un-Leareth-like body language, until he finds someone who doesn't look too busy to be asked a few questions (and doesn't look like they'd prefer to avoid him, for whatever reason). 

(Oh, right, Suncats are a thing! That exist! Leareth...had forgotten that, or at least it hadn't been very close to the surface of his memories. He agrees it's a similar intervention, though the enormous blatant magical barrier around Iftel seems to be overall more Vkandis' style. ...Valdemar doesn't know which god is responsible for the Companions, interestingly. King Valdemar prayed to all the gods whose names he knew at the time, and whichever god or gods answered didn't seem inclined to claim credit for it.) 

(Nayoki made sure to brief everyone in the facility about Leareth's new situation, and everyone is unsurprisingly very curious! Rosta, who tends to move around between a few of the research facilities anyway, transferred over - partly on Nayoki's suggestion - so that she could keep up her acquaintance with Karal, and she's been sharing gossip about how "friendly and sweet" he is. Neither of which are words that anyone particularly associates with Leareth, and the staff are very curious.)

It's still the middle of the afternoon, and there aren't a lot of people ambiently in the hallway, but a few minutes of wandering will bring them to one of the common areas where people tend to congregate when taking breaks. It's also lit with mage-lights, and furnished with rugs, a small round table with chairs around it, and a few soft cushioned armchairs. One of the stone walls is polished to a smooth matte surface, and seems to see regular use as a surface to write on with chalk; half of it is covered in what's either obscure math or obscure magical notation, and the entire lower region, around knee-height, is covered in clumsy but quite detailed drawings of birds. 

There are three people there right now, none of whom Karal has met; two men are playing some sort of game with polished stone pieces, and a woman is reading a book in one of the armchairs. 

(...Wait, the enormous what around where??  Reading the rest of the context from Leareth's mind doesn't... make this any less boggling... but it does at least explain why there's a country not that far away which Karal has never to his knowledge heard of.  All the maps just assume there's nothing north of Hardorn the same way there's nothing (ha) north of Valdemar.  He wonders how many other bizarre things are going on in the world outside of his increasingly obviously limited circle of knowledge.  But yes, he really should have a normal conversation with someone, instead of thinking about strange things far away until he forgets how being a person works.)

What a good home-y place.  --And oh, that is adorable.  Since nobody's in the middle of a conversation he feels immediately moved to join, Karal will sit down on the floor and carefully add a bird to the collection - one the wall doesn't have already, if he can think of one, but probably this small child (?) hasn't gone through all the common species specifically from Karse.  Or is he wrong about that?  He looks at the existing drawings, curious whether the child is going out into the tundra to see the local birds and draw them, or copying from books, and if so whether the books are from a familiar region or somewhere with different species entirely.

If anyone's looking at him when he's done, which he wasn't aiming for but thinks is likely anyway, he'll smile at them and introduce himself; otherwise he'll go see how the game with stones works, since many people don't like to be interrupted while reading.

It is kiiiind of hard to tell what some of the drawings are going for, but it's probably birds from books, given the variety – in addition to recognizable ducks and geese and what are probably little songbirds, there's a bird with incredibly long knobby-kneed legs, and that one has an enormous two-pronged tail, this other one has a large spoonlike beak that Karal has never seen the like of before. 

One of the men at the game-table smiles back at him. "You'll make Kalira very happy," he says in Rethwellani, with an accent Karal doesn't recognize. "- I'm Barjon, by the way, and this is Galit. Care to join us?" 

It's a strategy game, with some elaborate rules involving which positions of stones let you "capture" one of your game-partner's stones. Barjon is happy to explain the rules, which seem like they would end up involving a lot of mental math to carry out.

"I'd like that."  It's a good thing they were in the middle of a game already, since it means Karal can watch and try to make sense of the rules instead of immediately being invited to try it himself.  He asks questions until he can follow what's going on, but he's not sure it's his sort of downtime activity.

"Where are you from?  I don't even recognize the accent."

(Leareth wonders vaguely if he taught people games like this to encourage them to do something that trains working memory, if they're going to be gambling on it anyway - which they will - or if it's just inherently popular among the sort of people who tend to end up working at one of his research bases. He doesn't start out remembering this exact game, but does clearly pick up the rules much faster than Karal does.) 

Barjon grins. "Velvar! It's south of Jkatha, west of Seejay. By the Dhorisha Plains. Though I was recruited in Mournedealth."

(Karal probably has heard of Mournedealth – it's in Jkatha near the border with Rethwellan, not that far from Karse, and it's known as a top destination for recruiting mercenary companies.) 

(Of course he does.  It makes Karal tempted to try letting Leareth play while he chats with people, at some point, but it would probably be strange or even intimidating and he should leave it for much later.  The idea of Leareth trying to optimize the games people play for their benefit is both funny and plausible, but Karal suspects it wouldn't work if they weren't the sort of people to do that anyway.)

"I think I could find some of these places on a map," he grins.  "I've barely been outside of Karse before this week."

"What do you do here?  I know what I've heard of Mournedealth for..."  He looks the man over curiously.  Not that he objects to math people liking math, or magic, but someone more familiar would be nice.

Grin. "I was a mercenary! It's a family business, more or less. My grandfather was a mercenary all his life, split off to start his own company eventually - over some feud with the captain I never really understood, for all that he brings it up half the times he's in his cups - then my father took over from him. My older brother Gestaf's going to take it over, someday. I was never in the running for that, but - it's a good career, for a mage. Figured I'd save up for a while, leave the business and settle down when I met a nice girl. Up until Leareth hired our company for - well, I guess it was a test mission. He wanted us stationed in some Jkathan town to 'keep the peace' during their Midsummer festival, which I thought'd be dead boring, but Father said that's the best sort of job if you can get it."

He shakes his head. "Only, I guess Leareth'd found out by accident, when he had his spies looking into something or other in the area, that one of the other noble families from the area was plotting mischief with the local lord and his family. Over a girl and a marriage that hadn't gone as planned, I never did follow all the details. But we ended up pretty busy after all. And meanwhile Leareth had one of his people staying at the same inn to keep an eye on us - he was vetting us for if wanted to hire my father for his plans later, I guess - and I got to talking, and - might've been showing off, a little, I'd bought a book of obscure combat magic the last summer and was trying to teach myself some of the techniques - and next thing I know, the man was asking me if I'd ever considered inventing new magic for a living. Which I hadn't, but it sounded intriguing, and," shrug, a slightly embarrassed grin, "one thing led to another." 

Karal likes this man and his stories.  "Why did Leareth even care about some Jkathan noble girl's marriage?  Or was he only looking for something interesting to get you to do for a test?  Sounds like it worked out well, either way."

"What sort of magic have you been inventing?  I'll admit I was hoping for the other sort of mercenary - one day I'll have to find someone here to spar with - but combat magic still sounds closer to something I might be able to wrap my head around than the other things going on here."

He can keep up a cheerful conversation for a long while.  He's definitely interested in combat magic on the tactical level, and might be interested in the invention process if it turns out to be the sort with relatively less math in it.  He wants to know how long Barjon's been here, how he likes it, if he has any complaints about living far north in the middle of nowhere.  He could be talked into a game, although preferably a less complicated one.

"Oh, I assume it was just a good test mission - makes sense in hindsight, he's planning to occupy a country, he'd want to make sure all the mercenaries involved can keep things under control without killing anyone -" 

Barjon will also mention that he's probably up for sparring! It's not his favorite leisure activity, but he does try to stay in shape, and he spends part of his time teaching combat magic to the researchers who don't have that background - it's just pretty useful if everyone can defend themselves in an emergency - so he needs to stay in practice to avoid embarrassing himself. The tactical aspect is more interesting to him than just sparring - he's particularly drawn to looking for ways to invent low-power combat techniques. He's been working on a little spell that makes the ground impossibly slippery, so that anyone not paying attention will lose their footing or at least be distracted. 

(He likes the north fine, though he does look forward to the occasional trip to somewhere that isn't tundra and has, like, shops and taverns. And pretty girls. Not that there aren't any women here, but the ratio is not even.

Galit also contributes occasionally, though he's much quieter and clearly not entirely fluent in Rethwellani. He's from Crane, a tiny country all the way on the southern coast, and only joined up six months ago.) 

Barjon can teach Karal the original game that this one is based on! It's a lot simpler! The variant is, well, see, one time they were waiting for a magical experiment that was going to take a while to finish, and someone decided it would be fun to come up with harder rules and make bets on who could still keep track of it in their head versus needing paper... 

Great, Karal will absolutely look for him for sparring sometime.  What he's good with is just the sword (and he's decent with a few other things and unarmed), but he should learn some combat magic at some point, "My mage-gift only awakened last week, I don't know how to do anything," so practice with that should be helpful too, once he gets to the point of having anything to practice. 

Shops and taverns are indeed great.  Karal spent his last several years at the front, so this place seems wonderfully comfortable, although he's not fond of being underground so much.

Karal was not, to be honest, clear on there being a southern coast - he really needs to get a map and hang it in his room and maybe put little pins in the places he meets people from.  But he wants to know all about what far-away countries are like.

He laughs at the story behind the game complications.  "Why are you all like this!  Well, I know why, but it still makes for such a different place."  He shakes his head.  (And sends Leareth an amused thought about how the harder version of the game was immediately used as an opportunity for more gambling.)

He will learn the original game, though, and do halfway decently at it - it's one of those things designed to mirror real-life tactical intuitions and he can make sense of it that way more than by counting anything explicitly, although that does result in the occasional ridiculous mistake.

The map is a good idea. Leareth's own sense of where places are is definitely not entirely intact, so it'll be helpful for him as well. Karal learning some mage-work himself is also not a bad idea, even if it would usually make sense for Leareth to be in charge of that - it seems like it would be good for him, and it's almost always better to be able to do more things.

He makes a mental note to make sure Karal gets some time in control of the body when it next makes sense for them to travel to a city. ...Not that he's incredibly inclined to have that be soon. 

Karal plays very differently from how Leareth would, and it might be interesting at some point to play in a more collaborative way. (He wonders if there's any way they could play against each other - it would require Leareth deliberately not looking at Karal's thoughts, or else a game and setup that still made sense with both of them able to see the other's thought...) This is Karal's time, though, and Leareth is content to hang back. 

Galit leaves halfway through the game to return to his work. The woman also puts away her book at some point, though she pauses before leaving to wave and introduce herself as Esta.

Barjon wins, though not by an enormous margin, and seems to enjoy himself enormously. He looks tempted to stay for a second game, but excuses himself as well. "See you at the dining hall tonight, maybe! Though don't wait for me or anything, I might be finished late." 

Karal continues to be friendly to everyone and very much enjoy the company.  "Some other day if not tonight!  It's been good talking to you.  And don't think I've forgotten about that sparring offer."

Playing against each other sounds worth trying sometime!  It seems a pleasant enough relaxing activity, and of the sort that won't leave Leareth bored.  (Playing collaboratively would be interesting, but would also feel like - not exactly cheating, it might be fine and in fact it might be entertaining for everyone involved to see if people guess that it's happening - or of course he could just say it in advance - but either way he'd need to know people better before he can guess how that would go, and it seems better to get them used to him and Leareth separately before making the social situation more complicated.)

He'll look forward to a future city visit, but it's not important at all.  This place, strange as it is in some ways, is good, and Karal thinks he'll be happy here.  He wasn't sure what it would be like - given what the purpose of it is, the closest natural equivalent is less a castle or town and more an army encampment or maybe even a bandit camp, and those vary a lot - well, army encampments do, he doesn't know about bandit camps but he assumes the same - from reasonable homey places full of friendly people to groups of strangers too full of mistrust and resentment to be anything else.  It speaks well of Leareth and his ability to manage his complicated large-scale plans, that his people are like this.  (It's not that he had doubts of Leareth's ability to manage large groups in general - Altarrin obviously could - but it wasn't really an option, in the high positions in the Eastern Empire, to have people feel friendly and trusting.)

Well, Karal feels recovered enough.  Which of their long list of necessary things should they do next?  It still feels like something that isn't more dream records would be a better idea, but it's not as if that doesn't leave them with multiple options.  (And first they could- well, he's not sure if a map large enough to hang on the wall is something he can just find in the library and take for himself, or if he should ask someone to buy or copy one, but presumably there's some way to get that to happen.)

(Yes, playing collaboratively is definitely something where he would intend to tell people they were doing that, and probably play with a separate handicap - or maybe against multiple other people, if they pick a game where that's a thing.) 

Leareth is glad that Karal likes it here! It feels like particularly high praise, coming from him. And Leareth does think he's worked hard on it; it's certainly not something that comes automatically, when everyone involved here has been filtered for being willing to countenance a plan that involves invading a country, building an empire, and killing ten million people for power. But it's particularly important for the scholars, he thinks, to feel - relaxed and comfortable and like they have space to be curious. He suspects the more purely military bases have a different feel, though it also seems possible that Karal would feel more at home there in some ways. 

What to do next... Leareth needs to at some point review all the technical details on the god-creation process, which might be boring for Karal but probably won't be intensely emotional? He should spend some time in a Work Room reviewing magic he knows; the fact that Karal's Gift and body are at full adult strength means it's less critical for him to spend a lot of time practicing - usually it's a critical part of pushing an adolescent Gift to full power as quickly as possible - but he probably has forgotten a lot of fiddly details, for magic that he would have used more rarely, and he does eventually want his old comfort and fluency with it back. And of course there's a huge amount of historical records still to review, from the periods both before and after Altarrin and Matteir's era. All of these are projects of weeks or months, and about equal priority – does Karal have a preference? 

He's most curious to see more magic.  (Leareth is right that it's not a high priority for Karal to be able to do any, but yes, he does just like the ability to do more things, and in the meantime just watching Leareth do them will be enjoyable too, and probably useful for future learning.  He remembers how fascinating the Gates felt.)  Technical details sound fine too - he still wonders if there's a way for him to do something else while Leareth does the sorts of things that will definitely not make sense to him, but probably they should spend some time on it without any complications first.

They also wanted to do compulsion and other testing at some point, in things he's specifically interested in. 

That's a good idea! And would combine well with reviewing specifically concert-work types of magic. Leareth is inclined to see if Nayoki is free for it; she's likely to come up with the most informative compulsion-experiments, and - everyone at this base is trusted, obviously, but he doesn't on an emotional level trust most people to cast compulsions on him. 

That is incredibly reasonable of him!  And Karal was assuming Nayoki would do it anyway - she has a unique view of minds that might help if they get any complicated results, and besides, she sounded so excited about it.

He is... not sure how he feels about anyone casting compulsions on him, now that he thinks about it... but he will deal with it anyway, for an experiment.

...Would it help to have experienced it first? Leareth definitely can't do the experiment properly, but he can probably cast a simple compulsion on both of them, given how he knows for sure he can cast one on himself. 

He... should in theory obviously do that, yes, but it'll take Karal a moment to actually bring himself to say so, apparently. 

What a terribly unpleasant concept, compulsions. 

It's not that he doesn't trust Leareth to not make it terribly unpleasant, which he assumes is an option in theory - probably it won't even feel like much? - but the thought is still so wrong. 

... Leareth is his lord and can do whatever he likes to him, and it's all right for him to.  (He could have agreed without this, of course.  He is not a child.  But this way he can genuinely relax, instead of tensing up in anticipation of some invisibly terrible thing.)

Yes. 

...Leareth is a little curious why it seems so viscerally awful to Karal - it feels like there's something more there than his own pragmatic wariness, and it's probably something different from the Heralds' bright-line moral rejection of the concept, he already noticed Karal not having that about blood-magic - but it's not necessarily relevant right now, if he can tell that Karal is relaxed about it. 

Skillfully done compulsions don't intrinsically feel like anything in particular, unless you count them showing up to mage-sight. The standard secrecy compulsions used in the inner circle of his organization wouldn't feel like anything, since the action banned - "revealing sensitive project information to someone not cleared for it" - is not actually possible while everyone in the building is so cleared, and it's not trying to ban thinking about the concept of, say, Gating somewhere else to reveal project secrets.

(In his post-Eastern Empire work, Leareth tries quite hard not to use compulsions that block thinking about something; if you're looking at a problem and feeling like it could only be addressed by motivation-affecting or thought-affecting compulsions, that's a good flag that either you haven't laid it out clearly enough to specify an action-affecting compulsion, or else should be looking for non-mind-control solutions. Under the current model, someone shouldn't be in the running to get a secrecy compulsion and learn sensitive project information in the first place unless they've been thoroughly vetted and Leareth trusts their intentions and their ordinary oath - it's just that, in practice, additionally using secrecy compulsions does add further protection and reliability, if only by preventing some of the implausible and contrived scenarios that the gods would otherwise be inclined to engineer.) 

Leareth will do a simple action-blocking compulsion first, not to leave the room. Karal will be able to notice the whisper of mage-energies moving, if he's paying attention to mage-sight - it's really not a lot of power, it could easily be missed in a fight while much 'brighter' levinbolts and fireballs were being flung around - and, since Leareth is also holding his thoughts open by default, he can pick up on Leareth's intent, though it goes by very quickly. Once it's cast, it indeed doesn't feel like anything as long as Karal is not in fact trying to get up and leave the room. 

(It's very simple, and thus unsophisticated; Leareth didn't put any particular thought into trying to loophole-proof what counts as "this room" or "leaving", and it's not self-protecting, there's nothing stopping either of them - well, except for lack of skill with the mage-gift in Karal's case - from just removing it again.) 

He's not... entirely sure why?  Maybe it's just that he didn't realize it was possible until this week, to do something like this.  It feels more invasive than anything that can be done to the body rather than the mind, and more clearly unpleasant just because of the suddenness of the new knowledge.  But no, it's not really a moral rejection - he sees how useful it is and there's nothing wrong with it in theory when all the alternatives are worse, just... augh.  It's... making someone less of a person, in something like the same way as he felt about the concept of Companions bonding nearly-irreversibly to children.  Making choices is what people are for.

(Probably the fact that his first significant exposure to the concept was the awful tangle of the Eastern Empire didn't help - he doesn't think he'd be entirely happy with the idea even with a better introduction, but there are options that would make it feel a lot less wrong.  Taking prisoners and compulsioning them not to try to escape seems fairly straightforwardly all right, he thinks because it's clearly adversarial rather than some more unpleasantly blurry thing.  Blocking actions rather than thoughts helps somewhat, although it's not quite the distinction he's making.)

His instincts rebel at the idea of being under a secrecy compulsion too - mostly because of how insulting it feels, if his word is not trusted then what is the point - but Leareth's careful reasoning does make it better.  If the underlying reason is not lack of trust but wanting additional protection against bizarrely improbable god-manipulations, yes, he can see how that makes sense.  Although there's still something nigglingly wrong about it...  People grow by being trusted, by learning to be as trustworthy as you expect of them, even faced with bizarre and improbable things - and of course letting them learn it would mean taking some risks, but there's something lost, too, by not giving them the chance.

Once he sees the compulsion in Leareth's thoughts, he immediately does try to get up and leave the room.  (He didn't consciously realize he'd have that impulse, but apparently he does, his mind instinctively pushing against the wrong thing in it.  That too seems like a way in which compulsions might make people worse allies rather than better ones, but maybe most people don't have this problem in the first place.)  Of course he can't, and it's all right, it just feels better to feel the inability than to have it a strange invisible unfelt thing.  He does take a few seconds standing there getting used to the idea, and then tentatively reaches for the mage-gift to see if he can still find the compulsion once it's in place, and whether he could pick it apart.  (Presumably Leareth will stop him if he's doing something that's a bad idea.)

Leareth agrees that it feels much cleaner, to use compulsions in obviously adversarial situations, where the alternative is generally violence or literal chains. 

He agrees that it's - giving something up - to rely on compulsions instead of building trust the normal way, and giving people space to build trustworthiness. And he can see why that might be particularly salient to Karal. He remembers watching Karal's thoughts crystallize around giving his oath not to act against Leareth, how it settled into being unthinkable. Obviously it's better, if people can be - fully in alignment with themselves, like that, choosing to constrain their future options because they fully endorse the consequences of being that shape. Leareth feels a not-dissimilar way about giving his own oath (though, relatedly, he does it rarely and is very careful about what exactly he's agreeing to and what the other party thinks he's agreeing to.) He's...maybe in the habit of not expecting most people to be like that, or particularly interested in trying to be like that?

(And there are a lot of ways someone can feel bound by their honor that he thinks are - mostly bad, or at least reduce his options for working with them - especially when they've come to it instinctively like Karal. He actually thinks it's rare, and surprising, and definitely impressive, for someone to be - the general sort of person Karal is - and still be this able to work with someone like Leareth. Though maybe he's wrong about that; it's not like he's been sharing thoughts to this extent with very many other people.) 

Leareth knows that he currently uses compulsions in a few other situations – in particular, he's planning to use strictly time-limited compulsions to enforce the required code of conduct for his soldiers during the invasion, because this is predictably very difficult otherwise even if you try to vet everyone in advance and only accept people willing to sign a contract and swear an oath saying that they definitely won't rape any civilians. 

He thinks he's also tried to use compulsions in the past - in Predain, specifically, but quite possibly at other times later - to, basically, jump from an equilibrium where it's taken for granted that all the authorities are corrupt and the real rules are "you can do whatever you have the power to get away with", to one where the official law can actually be treated as real? It's clearly not as good as the real thing, it's - cheating, in a way, trying to force the matter through imposing your own power rather than appealing to higher principles that people might have in common. And he would hesitate now, knowing more than he did then about, not just the limits in how well it works in the first place and how much corruption still fits in the cracks, but the difficulties of moving on from a heavily compulsion-based hierarchy to one where people are trustworthy and behave themselves without that. But he does feel sympathetic to Ma'ar, young and desperate, looking for a way that things could change this year and not in some nebulous future. 

He lets Karal have the mage-gift to poke at finding the compulsion. He's hovering "nearby" in case Karal does something ill-advised by accident, but compulsions are sufficiently low-powered that even breaking one clumsily will just be startling, not harmful. And he's very curious if Karal will be able to figure it out.

(The compulsion is hard to find again now that it's been cast - it's lower-power than, for example, a lot of the shielding on them - but Karal did see exactly where and how Leareth deposited it.) 

Karal is... not sure how much other people are or want to be like that.  In some places he does think they are, and his home was one of those, but - even so it's often an idealized concept more than something people try to be fully shaped by the way he is.  He too was surprised to find something matching that in Leareth.  It may well be true that most of the people here have shaped themselves in different ways, and it wouldn't particularly matter to them.

He does think Karse made him more the sort of person who could work with Leareth.  There are old ideals of honor there, but there's also a lot of cruelty and violence and lawlessness, and it forces you to think about which parts of honor are the important ones, what you need to hold to in order to maintain the ability to do something better even among enemies, or just people you disagree with about a lot of what's acceptable conduct.  The Heralds in Valdemar can declare all their principles infinitely important and not have this quickly lead to disaster or contradiction - or at least contradiction that's obvious enough, and that touches someone or something they care about.  (He wonders what they'd think about the compulsions planned for the invasion forces.  That seems fine to him - an obviously worse choice than if you could have an army that simply won't, but you almost never do.  It might be possible, sometimes, to build that much trust with nearly all your soldiers, up and down the entire command structure, but - it would be extremely rare, and in Leareth's unexplainable war it has to be just about impossible.  Valdemar can simply say they will never have the question come up, but he agrees with Leareth that this is giving up too much - and that it hobbles their thinking, when they say "we'd never do this" and thus not only don't require but don't allow themselves to consider the question of which way they would consider better if they had to.)

He doesn't know that Leareth did the wrong thing in Predain, either.  He doesn't like compulsions, but he would even less like being in a place where people assumed they couldn't trust his word.  One could build something just with thoughtsensing verification, if you could convince enough people to genuinely intend to be trustworthy and trust that their intention would hold, but... yes, it would be hard and he doesn't know if it would work, when none of them were used to it.  If he had been Ma'ar's, he doesn't think he would have considered his choices wrong.

... One thing Karal clearly isn't good at is making sure other people know what exactly he means, especially people he didn't share a culture and half his life with.  I do owe you another oath, once you've had time to think about it.  (But the mindreading helps, he assumes.  It's so good, that Leareth was able to watch him give his word and see what it meant.)

In the meantime he would still like to do something about the compulsion, although all this thinking is making him feel less opposed to it.  Finding it should be... similar to the way he looked at Leareth's mind with Empathy, and then tried and failed to look at his own, shouldn't it...  He tries doing something like that.  Mage-sight feels different enough, and less instinctive to him, that it takes a few tries to figure it out, but once he's figured out how to look at things at all, he can find the compulsion - he knows where it is, and by now has some feeling for what shields look like.

And then what?... He can try... pulling on it... Ugh, no, that just makes it slide weirdly over his mind and maybe do something it shouldn't be doing but definitely doesn't make it stop.  What can you do about magic?  His instinct with a shield would be to try to smash through it the way he would with a physical barrier, if going around wasn't an option, but he doesn't think trying to smash things in their mind would be a good idea.  What he wants to do is just... touch it in some way that will make it disappear, the way you can just appear magic by intending it... but it does not seem to work both ways.  He stops trying things and looks more closely - there seems to be some... flow or tension... to the structure?  Something that makes it look like if it's cut in a specific place it'll come undone rather than just leaving two spell-halves.  It still takes him a while to figure out how to do that, but... like this, maybe...?

That works! It does feel like he maybe did it a little bit wrong, or something - the tiny loop of magic destabilizes and snaps back on them rather than just dissolving, not intense enough to hurt but it's certainly disorienting. 

Leareth is impressed! A brief flash of delight flickers across his thoughts, notable just because Leareth's emotional affect is usually on the flatter side. Karal clearly has excellent intuitions for magic use, and must have been ambiently picking up mage-work-related habits just by watching Leareth, most people need a lot more formal training just to make sense of mage-sight and control it finely enough to focus on the compulsion like that. 

He's happy to have gotten it right, and more happy to know Leareth thinks he's good at this clearly important skill.

He has been watching Leareth very closely, because magic is so fascinating - he likes the way it feels, nearly physical, like learning to use an invisible muscle you never knew you had.  He likes the way it feels when Leareth does it, because there's nothing in the world like the detailed view of someone being that skilled and fast at a complicated physical task.

(And the way he's getting the complete inside view of it must help with learning.  Not just seeing the pattern of the spells, but what thoughts precede them and how it feels to get it right - and to get it really right, the way Leareth does, a single instinctive complex motion, not simplified instructions for a beginner thinking through every step.)

... Ah, they were going to find Nayoki, weren't they.  He can do that with Empathy, much more easily than yesterday, and walk in her direction while seeing if he can push a touch of curiosity toward her without getting everyone else in range.  (Since Leareth did say it's all right to risk doing harmless surprising things to people around here.)

(They do mildly startle one woman coming out of one of the rooms off the hallway - not someone Karal has met before, but after a couple of seconds of blinking and looking bemused, she smiles and waves before hurrying off to wherever it is she needs to get to quickly.) 

And it does seem like Karal was successfully able to get Nayoki's attention, because she sticks her head out of the room she's in before they've actually reached it! "Karal! And Leareth. How are you?" 

("I'm sorry, I've only had Gifts for a few days," Karal explains to the startled woman, and assumes she'll figure out the rest of the story from there.)

"Quite well!"  Except that bizarre moment of confused panic earlier in the day, which he maybe should talk to Nayoki about at some point, but it doesn't feel important at the moment.  He's had a very good couple of hours since then.  "We wanted to try some experiments with compulsions or other things where we're not sure if they'll affect one or both of us, if you have time?"

(It's probably a good idea to talk to Nayoki about it before they dive back into reviewing the Foresight dream notes, given how Leareth has little more idea than Karal does what's going to come up in them, and it would be surprising if it didn't involve more reminders of the war. But Leareth also doesn't feel especially driven to get into it right now.) 

"Oh! That is a good idea. And, yes, I have time now. We should go to a Work Room." She can lead the way. "Have you made friends with anyone else here yet? I know everyone is very curious about you." 

He'll follow her to a Work Room, and add all this to his small but expanding mental map of where everything is in this place.

"Yes!  I had fun talking to Barjon just now, he's great, even if he's another one of those people who will take a complicated game and make it five times more complicated just for fun."  Nearly everyone here will be like this and Karal isn't really complaining.  "And I met Galit and Esta, they were quieter but they seem like nice people.  I was just telling Leareth how surprisingly good and friendly this place is."

"I am glad! ...People will want to be people anywhere, I think, I am not sure that is the hard part? The hard part is - making it so people can remember to be careful enough and paranoid enough, but still be relaxed and trust their friends here?" 

Work Room! It's one set up for sparring or the explosive kind of spell-testing, rather than other kinds of research; it has approximately no furniture, just a couple of easily-replaceable wooden folding stools against the wall. Nayoki seems content to stand. 

"Hmm. I think first, I would be curious to see if a compulsion to limit movement - if I cast it quickly without much care, which is realistic for a fight - also affects the one of you who is not in control of the body at the moment it is cast, or whether it gives you a way to route around it? Which way do you want to try it first?" 

Does Karal have a preference? Leareth is pretty curious to see if Karal can take control if Leareth was the one in charge and was compulsioned; he feels like Karal will have more avenues to try interesting things. 

Will he?  He's not currently thinking of any interesting things, but they might come to him once it's happening.  Might as well start with that, then, since they'll want to do both in any case.

"That sounds really useful, yes.  Leareth's going to take over and you can try it then?"

Leareth takes over. It's quite obvious to Nayoki when he's done so, but he says "Ready," anyway. 

Nayoki is very skilled with compulsions! She's not as fast as Leareth - and would have a much harder time casting a complicated compulsion on the fly while distracted - but she can overall match him for finesse. 

She's not even trying to do that. She'll aim for about the level of skill of a mercenary with standard combat training and a few "special tricks", who's also in a hurry and being somewhat sloppy as a result.

The compulsion is roughly "don't move", which is less limiting than "don't take volitional actions" - simple if you're trained in it, but not something that would occur to most random mercenaries - and won't result in Leareth collapsing on the floor. 

It wouldn't actually be hard to resist and snap the thread of magic as she's laying it down - Nayoki can involuntarily get a compulsion on him if she's trying and he's not pre-warned, which is emphatically not true of most people, but she's not currently trying nearly hard enough. Leareth doesn't resist, though; he mentally walks through what he would do where Karal can see it, but lets the compulsion land. 

And now he's unable to move from the spot where he's standing! 

The obvious thing to try is just taking over the body and see if he can move.  (The compulsion doesn't prevent Leareth from letting him, although he wonders if there are common ones that would, and if so how the obvious next step would go.)

... Apparently he cannot?  That's disappointing, he was really hoping this would straightforwardly work.

His immediate next impulse is to argue with the compulsion - not even because he knows you can think around them sometimes, but because he genuinely feels it obviously shouldn't work this way.  They're separate people, just that Leareth isn't allowed to move shouldn't impact Karal that way, any more than it would presumably impact someone reaching over to physically push Leareth or move his arm.  Can he really not?

--Although that isn't really quite what's happening, because the body is his and it's not intuitive to think about it otherwise - but Leareth was, and this is entirely true, using magic to cause Karal's body to move, and there is no sensible reason for an opponent to consider their compulsion as extending to Karal, who is a separate person and who had no ability to do anything when it landed.

(Hmm, if Leareth leaned hard enough into conceptualizing himself as using magic to cause Karal's body to move rather than doing any moving himself, could he do it directly?  Either if he took control back now, or if the compulsion was on Karal to start with?  Karal doesn't think he can move without thinking of it as moving, but it would make sense for Leareth to be able to do that.)

He also wonders whether something about his mental state before the compulsion landed could change the result here, although that would be harder to work with.  Or something about how the control passed between them - if Leareth didn't give it up voluntarily would this more clearly count as Leareth not moving?

Arguing with the compulsion that it shouldn't work like that does not, by itself, cause it to work in a different more polite way! 

(Leareth's thoughts are fond and amused. It's obvious that he's relaxed, and not experiencing the unable-to-move as a threat.) 

Leareth unfortunately doesn't think he could get around it by conceptualizing himself as "using magic to move Karal's body" - it's not really...true...that there's an active mage-work effect involved in him sharing Karal's body on an ongoing basis, though there was magic involved at the moment he turned up. (It might be easier if Leareth were more able to - well, be sloppy in his thinking about it - but he doesn't think it's a tractable avenue to lean into.) 

You can think your way around compulsions, though, it was an ongoing challenge in the Eastern Empire. More "upstream" motivation-affecting compulsions have more wiggle room, as do more complicated compulsions trying to block, for example, the entire category of "committing acts of sabotage"; it's going to be harder to think sideways around this compulsion because of its simplicity. But, for example, it probably wouldn't block a purely-reflexive startle reaction. That doesn't by itself help them but maybe it points at a direction Karal could try things in? 

(...Leareth probably could literally move their body by magic, if he wanted, by using mage-barriers to push their limbs where he wanted and counting on the reflex to keep his balance when pushed being sufficiently involuntary. It would be incredibly awkward and not actually useful in a fight, though, especially when he's in no way impaired from just Gating out and in a real fight that would be the obvious smart move.) 

(That last thing does sound incredibly awkward!)

So the compulsion really just is on both of them (even though he continues to feel like it shouldn't be and it's vaguely insulting that the world works otherwise) and he'd need to find some different approach entirely.  Hmm...  He does have the impulse to immediately do the opposite of what the compulsion is, even if he's not trying to break it, just to properly feel the thing he can't do -- this is interesting, would it not count as moving if he was fully expecting the movement not to happen and just trying it anyway for other reasons?  That would be strange and kind of hilarious, and probably won't work or someone would've figured it out already.  (He might need a new compulsion to try it on, it's harder to lean into an impulse after sitting on it for a few minutes.)

Other ways to lean into startle-like reflexes seem like they would be... bad habits.  Much like Leareth is averse to sloppy thinking, Karal doesn't think it's a good idea to be the sort of person who does things without thinking of them as what they are.  (Unless focusing directly on the end result instead of the method works - "I'm not moving, I'm just over there" - but it can't possibly, too many people would've noticed, although he tries it anyway just in case, since that sort of mental motion is easy enough.)

(Trying to "just be over there" instead of trying to move indeed doesn't work, but it does feel like it less firmly doesn't-work? The compulsion is there, sitting in the way, but the way he's poking around it makes it somehow feel more obvious that it's a thing, a magical object placed on his mind like so, with edges and boundaries - and things it clearly doesn't ban, like breathing, even though his chest is moving in the process...) 

...Leareth, with amusement, is thinking that this might actually be easier if Nayoki had done the most neat and skillful compulsion she's capable of, and targeted Leareth, the person she knows very well. The way it actually landed felt like the way a compulsion would be flung during an actual fight, aimed hastily at "that person right there" - 

There's a moment of alarm when Leareth goes and makes him think about breathing as moving, because now he can't, although obviously neither of them will let him come to harm-- oh, and now he can again, apparently because he did it without thinking about it?  Which gives him a still better feeling for what exactly the edge is between the allowed and disallowed sorts of mental states...

(Trying to think around things this way does not come instinctively to him.  He would do terribly in the Eastern Empire, he expects.  In all honesty he'd probably have given up already if it wasn't for Leareth's encouragement and the way him trying things makes Leareth think fond thoughts.)

This does make it seem like one of his earlier ideas might be useful, from a different angle - this clearly works better if he's trying to do something else, and something absorbing enough that he doesn't think about all the details of what's happening...  Fight me?  He gives up control and immediately tries to take it back.  If he's not trying to move, just trying to get control of his body, which he can do as a pretty reflexive action if he leans into that part of himself, and the process of fighting for it involves attempting to push the body in instinctive-to-him ways, most of which (he doesn't think about it but it's still true) happen to be movement rather than stillness, and mostly useful movement at that...  (For instance maybe the most him-rather-than-Leareth motion, and thus a good angle to push from in the internal fight, is drawing his sword.)

Nayoki does notice him running into the breathing problem - she's watching closely - and readies herself to intervene, but isn't surprised when she doesn't need to, she's never heard of anyone getting in serious trouble from that even with more restrictive compulsions like "no volitional actions." 

She watches intently and curiously with Mindhealing Sight. It's actually nontrivial to correlate the compulsion (visible with mage-sight) to the shadow it leaves on a structure she's perceiving more metaphorically via an entire different sense, but - it seems like there should be an angle there, if maybe a narrow and fiddly one - 

Fighting for control of their body without intending to - or being capable of - doing anything with it, is a slightly non-obvious mental move, but Leareth can manage to offer some resistance; stillness is a fairly instinctive-for-Leareth way to be holding the body anyway. He deliberately aims for more of a token resistance, enough that Karal has something to fight against but not trying all out. 

And - 

- it doesn't work consistently, the first time he takes over he doesn't manage to fold a sufficiently involuntary instinctive movement into it and is left "in control" but still subject to the compulsion. But the second time, he can manage an instinctive drawing-his-sword! 

He grins happily, which also doesn't count as a deliberate action. 

Talking he definitely cannot manage.  I'm not sure what use this would be in most circumstances, but it's interesting that it works at all, and it'd at least be confusing and distracting...  He'll have to keep an eye out for mental habits that could make it more useful.  (Although probably Leareth is going to have more ideas than he will.)

He's looking forward to seeing how Leareth goes about trying this when they do it the other way around, in any case.  And to whatever else Nayoki comes up with.  This isn't natural and pleasant the way Empathy is, but he dislikes compulsions enough to make it satisfying to poke holes in them, and it is an interesting mental puzzle.  (...Since when is that a thing he cares about?  People being like this is infectious, apparently!)

It's definitely useful to know that the fact of there being two of them lets them get around compulsions at all, including in cases where Leareth wouldn't expect he could have just thought his way around it in the past. It would take a much more contrived scenario than a random ambush for it to come up at all, since Leareth can Gate out faster than most mages can cast a compulsion, and if he's conscious and resisting there aren't many people who could land a compulsion on him at all. But if they were unconscious, somehow, and then later had to figure out a way to leave despite precautions... It's still very unlikely but there are cases where it could make a difference, which Leareth is deeply appreciative of. 

Nayoki grins at them, and - once it's clear that this hasn't given Karal a fully general way around it - removes the compulsion. "That was impressive! How did you do it - I was not reading your thoughts or anything -?" 

Well, contrived scenarios are a thing that apparently happens to Leareth with some frequency.  Which is not a happy thought, but Karal is entirely in agreement about wanting to have as many tools as possible to deal with that.

"Had a fight for control of the body - on my side that involves pushing it to move even if I'm not intending it or really thinking about it.  Which doesn't let me do a whole lot of things and I don't think I can extend it very far, but it's something."  He shrugs, still a little pleased.

"Also why weren't you reading my thoughts? You should do that more often."

Nayoki laughs. "I suppose I should! I am just not in the habit of doing it with Leareth without a good reason, I think." 

...Leareth is now vaguely wondering if it would be possible to learn to shield only himself against Thoughtsensing. Obviously if they're leaving the facility they'll want to back that up with a shield-talisman, which would cover both of them, and Leareth suspects he's always going to feel more relaxed when he's shielded even if there's no specific reason for it. But while they're in a secure location and among trusted allies, there's no reason Karal has to be. 

It would be a lot easier to figure out how to do this if they had a Thoughtsensing Gift themselves, but Leareth is still going to start half-involuntarily poking at the problem. 

Oh, what a good idea.  And not unrelated to their current project of figuring out what things and in what ways can apply to just one of them instead of both, really.

Although for this experiment it might be useful if you let her read us both?  I bet there are useful things she could see.

Does Leareth want to keep going with compulsion experiments, or poke at the shielding question for a while?  Either seems a good thing.

They should do some more compulsion-experiments while they have Nayoki here, probably. And, sure, Leareth will unshield entirely for now. You are welcome to remind me in future if you notice I am shielding out of habit and think it might be valuable for some reason if someone were able to read our thoughts, he tells Karal. 

They can try the same compulsion the other way around, with Karal initially in control of the body! Leareth is also not able to brute-force it, but again, Nayoki can see that the compulsion's block on their mind isn't completely thorough. Leareth doesn't get anywhere with Karal's specific method - probably because nothing he does with the body is more instinctive than stillness, at this point - but he's eventually able to find an odd, twisty state of mind where he's not thinking of it as directly 'trying to move', and not exactly 'fighting Karal for control' either, but as something more like 'puppeting the body, which is Karal's'. It's limited in almost the opposite ways that Karal's trick was - he can move in most ways, but only quite clumsily, in order to maintain the right state of mind he has to think of everything on the level of 'tensing this particular muscle' rather than 'trying to reach for something.' 

The 'awkwardly puppeting the body, which is Karal's' process, even more than the first compulsion Leareth put on him (the later ones turned out much easier to deal with, being for a purpose and therefore giving him a thing to do), is something Karal would have found borderline unbearable before he decided to be Leareth's, but can relax into now that he is.  (Although just physically being that awkward is still a bizarre and uncomfortable feeling.)  It does make sense that it'd work, and it seems very useful.  He's glad they're doing this.  It's making Leareth safer, which is reason enough - but more than that, it's something that wouldn't be possible (he thinks) if he was dead.  It's making it tangibly true that his existence is useful for something - yes, he knows, it's very probably useful for a lot more things, and things that are more likely to come up, but this is more direct and incontrovertible than all the questions of different viewpoints and social skills and ability to relax.  He likes it.

Are there any other things people do with magic that might have unusual results on someone with two minds and souls?  Does Thoughtsensing always see both of them, or is it like compulsions in that it might just affect one depending on exactly how it's targeted?  Hmm, they should also probably test a compulsion that does just land on one of them, to see how those work and whether they'll end up as straightforwardly defeated by taking control as he imagines.  (It's just an incredibly satisfying thought, that this might ever happen.)  For that matter, if someone did intend to specifically target Leareth but Karal was in control, would anything even happen?

Nayoki is happy to run more tests! 

Deliberately targeted compulsions: do straightforwardly only affect the one of them she's targeting! This seems to work even if she's not so much actively trying to exclude one of them and is just aiming based on trying to hit "Leareth" or "Karal". 

Action-blocking compulsions of their Gifts: even when thrown carelessly and aiming at 'that person over there' rather than Leareth or Karal, these are a bit easier for the one of them who wasn't in charge at the start to work around. Leareth can reliably access their mage-gift around the compulsion and cast only slightly clumsily by doing a mental motion similar to pretending it's concert-work with another person; Nayoki's theory is that this works better than 'puppeting Karal's body' because concert-work, including in a teaching context where he would go in and walking a student through a particular magical technique, is something Leareth has spent thousands of candlemarks on and has actual reflexes around.

Karal is going to struggle to do anything with the mage-gift while Leareth is compulsioned, just because he doesn't know how to do very much in general, but he could probably manage uncontrolled magic in an emergency, which might be helpful by itself in some scenarios. He can access receptive Empathy very reliably, and instinctive bursts of projective Empathy somewhat less reliably, via a similar strategy to how he was able to move in instinctive ways when "fighting" Leareth for control.  

Thoughtsensing: by default does pick up that there are two of them, though it's actually quite hard to read both of them at once in any detail, in a similar way to how it would be hard to focus your eyes simultaneously on the sill of a window and the distant view of mountains through it; she tends to jump her focus back and forth instead. It's easy to target one of them at a time with Mindspeech, though if she Mindspeaks Karal then Leareth will automatically notice, and vice versa is probably also true now that Leareth is keeping his thoughts open to Karal by default. 

Mindhealing Sight is mostly just very weird. The metaphorical loaves of bread representing their minds are distinct in their metaphorical color, texture, crumb, et cetera, but also quite closely intertwined. If she's looking up close, she has to focus on one of them, but she can't make sense of the gestalt at all unless she's focusing on both. 

She's maybe interested in testing set-commands, but is not going to assume either one of them is okay with that just because the compulsions were fine, they feel quite different and are in some ways a lot more invasive. And of course it's far less likely to ever come up in a fight, Mindhealers are rare. 

Oh that's excellent!  Gifts are more likely to be useful than movement anyway, so that being easier is great news.  (And it means Karal really should learn more magic, just in case. And apparently specifically learn Concert-work, which sounds like the kind of thing he'll like.) 

He does need set-commands explained to him - huh, what a strange and dangerous thing to exist - but doesn't find them more instinctively objectionable than compulsions, and thinks Nayoki should try it just for the potentially interesting information about what their minds are doing on that level.

(Another thing he's curious about is whether he could win a fight for control with Leareth if Leareth were compulsioned to fight him (via one of those thoroughly self-protecting compulsions, which he imagines might end up causing that?) rather than doing it because he wants to and putting all his creativity into it.  But that's a pretty involved and possibly risky test, and he has no idea if it's at all likely that someone would compulsion them that thoroughly without realizing there were two of them.  It's just... something that comes up in his mind because he'd find it very satisfying if it was ever a useful thing to do.  It's a little embarrassing, in the "listened to too many heroic tales as a child" sort of way.  Probably he would win, in any case, and probably there's no good reason to check.) 

(Leareth is having trouble thinking of a scenario where that would come up, and he also doubts whether a self-protecting compulsion not to do something would force him to fight Karal, even if Karal were doing the banned thing. ...A positive compulsion to do something he would normally not endorse doing might force him to try to take over the body in order to accomplish the compelled goal? And it's not theoretically impossible that someone could land one on him selectively while not realizing there were two of them, if Leareth were controlling the body at the time. It's still a risky and involved test, for a scenario that's unlikely to come up, but Leareth would be willing to consider ways to test it at some point, probably.) 

Set-commands! 

...It turns out Nayoki cannot actually set-command only one of them not to move, even if she's aiming for that. It's fairly obvious to her Mindhealing-Sight why – the pathway's she's blocking are at a 'lower' level than intentions, somewhere between the mental and the physical, and both Karal and Leareth are accessing the same pathways. She could probably block only one of them by doing more fine-detail Mindhealing blocks, but it would take half a candlemark and most of the utility of set-commands is that they're fast. 

The set-command not to move is also more thorough, and does result in falling over. Nayoki looks apologetic and, once it's clear that it's definitely affecting both of them in a way they're not going to be able to get around, starts working on unpicking it. Which is a much slower process than placing it was, and involves some weird visual distortions and a feeling a bit like the inside of their head is melting. 

Leareth is staying calm about it, because he trusts Nayoki, but he is not enjoying this at all. 

(The compelled-fight question seems vanishingly unlikely to be decision-relevant, now that he thinks about it that way.  So they probably just shouldn't, and if it ever comes up they'll know then.)

Karal does not quite mentally apologize, since Leareth wouldn't have agreed to this if he didn't endorse it, but his emotions are somewhere in that direction.  He does instinctively try to take on as much perceiving the experience as he can, although he doesn't actually know if that results in Leareth having to deal with any less of it.  It's not pleasant, but he doesn't mind it the way Leareth clearly does.  Possibly just focusing on what it feels like to not mind it will help?  It's a good calm emotional state for Leareth to exist next to, in any case.

Also, Nayoki is terrifying.  Karal does not feel in the least terrified, to be clear - he likes her and Leareth trusts her and so there's no actual worry in his mind at all - but as a matter of objective fact, the ability to do something this thorough this fast, and in a way that's both very uncommon and slow to undo even for someone with the very uncommon ability, is an incredibly scary asset.  Leareth is, well, lucky is almost certainly not the right word, Karal expects this had much more to do with competence and planning than luck, but the result is surprisingly impressive even so.

Nayoki is terrifying! This is an actively reassuring thought, since Nayoki is on his side and it's not just by luck, and it's a good distraction from having Mindhealing done to them. Leareth isn't sure if he finds it this unpleasant because of some specific past experience - which he obviously wouldn't remember in its particulars, but subconscious associations stick better - or if it's just because he knows intellectually that Mindhealing is a lot more terrifying than compulsions.

About five minutes later, Nayoki has the last of it out and Karal will be able to stand up if he wants. (Leareth is letting him have full control, since he's mostly been trying to pull back from all the physical sensations of having a body.) 

Subconscious associations from experiences you can't even remember sound like a uniquely unpleasant problem to have!  He imagines having something like what happened to him earlier today and not knowing why - what an awful thought.

Ah, he meant to talk to Nayoki about that anyway.  She may have noticed it in his thoughts anyway, or not, but either way she's busy and he waits until she's done.  (And until he's had time to stand up and move enough to feel sure that everything's fine.  It is, except that his brain feels tired, which seems fair enough after all the melting.)  Afterward seems like a reasonable enough moment though.  He mentally explains the strange panic earlier.  "I'm not sure if we should do anything about this, or what - I don't think I would react like that in a situation where it would be dangerous," he's pretty sure it only affected him like that because he was relaxed and not expecting sudden pain, "but you might have useful thoughts?"

He feels all right about it now - it was a horribly unpleasant experience, but not a wrong one, given the horrible thing that did in fact happen.  If it's a strange way for his mind to grieve when it can't manage a better way, he'd be inclined to let it - if the main factor was how he felt about it, which it isn't, for multiple reasons.

Nayoki nods. "It sounds unpleasant but - not very surprising as a reaction. It feels risky to bet on it not happening if you were somewhere less safe than here, but - honestly, neither of you should be leaving the north for several weeks anyway, Leareth is also still quite impaired." Fondly. "It seems likely you will run into more things that set it off, but I expect it to get less bad each time, eventually to the point where it would not be a problem even in a dangerous situation. If it keeps happening and seems to be getting worse, tell me and I can try to do a Mindhealing redirect, but that is not really my area of expertise." 

Pause. "- I am quite sure it would be safe to give you control of the body, assuming you are somewhere in this facility and not in a dangerous situation, and it seems like that would help. Leareth might find it unpleasant but he should be considerate of your feelings too." 

He gives her a wry smile at that last idea.  "Leareth should be as considerate of my feelings as it suits him.  But in any case I hate unpleasant things happening to him and will feel better if I can avoid it."  And it might be better if one of them isn't having the experience of being viscerally upset?  Well, they can figure that out between them. 

"If you think it'll get better, that sounds right to me too - and you're right that we have time."  That's really the important part.  "Hopefully we won't need you to do strange Mindhealing things."  It doesn't sound like something that would let him heal, whatever it is - although of course sometimes other things are more important.

"I think you would disprefer it. It is a less thorough solution than working through the problem yourself, and it does have drawbacks, it can distort your emotional reactions in general and sometimes affect reflexes that you want to have in working order. Leareth did ask me to do something similar once - he was jumpy after a particular mission went badly, and needed to be present for an unrelated time-sensitive diplomatic meeting where it was more important not to set anything on fire if startled. But he wanted it undone again as soon as he was back from the meeting." 

Wow. Leareth doesn't remember that at all. It sounds perfectly plausible though. 

(He's glad that Nayoki is thinking about Karal's feelings, and even being a little indignant at the prospect that Leareth might not be considerate enough. He doesn't think they should do anything differently in this case - though if it does happen again, it might be worth trying once, on the off chance that maybe Leareth won't actually find it unpleasant. But mostly he's appreciative that Nayoki is - running a process that would catch if Leareth was making a mistake in some other case, since he's not entirely confident that Karal would even notice, let alone make a fuss, if Leareth were making the wrong tradeoff in some other situation.) 

Again there's a flash of instinctive protectiveness at the thought of something that awful happening to Leareth.  He is... not going to be able to protect him from from all awful things... (He couldn't before, and oh, there's the looming sea of grief, but this is not the moment for thinking about it and it will wait...) but of course he feels this way. 

...And more so given what happened before, he realizes.  Ah, hell.  That, too, he will need to stop feeling so sharply.  Leareth's main goal isn't not being hurt, and so Karal will sometimes need to watch it happen.

And given that, yes, of course something like that happened, and of course Leareth took the quick solution and wanted it gone afterward because it made his reflexes worse.  Although Karal wonders what sort of sensitive diplomatic talks Leareth has been having.  Presumably they'll get to that, catching up on everything in order.

(Ah - yes, of course Leareth likes his people arguing with him.  He's a very strange person, but the ways in which he's strange are starting to make sense to Karal, and he's immensely fond of that particular one.  He can... try to be like that, but yes, he's not sure he'll be very good at it.)

...Well, all of that is their internal conversation, which Nayoki can probably still see, but it still doesn't seem polite or a good use of her time. 

"I think that's all we wanted for now, then."  He manages a smile, rather sad, but friendly - he does value her input and just her entire existence, that's obvious enough.  "Is there anything else you want to talk about, while we're here?"  She'd have said something already if there was anything important, he knows, but sometimes it's worth asking, in case of things less clear than that.

Karal is very sweet and very correct about all his Leareth-related feelings, and gets a warm smile. 

"I have nothing urgent. Though I do enjoy speaking with both of you even about non-urgent things. Now would be a reasonable time for me to take a break for supper, if you are hungry?" 

That gets her a proper smile back.  "That sounds great."  He likes talking to her too.  She seems like she must be Leareth levels of busy, so he didn't think he should be taking up her time with idle conversation, but he's glad she's taking meal breaks that aren't at her desk.  She does seem like the sort of person who would, unlike Leareth, not have trouble remembering to take proper breaks.

Also, if they're going to eat in the dining hall, presumably Leareth is going to start shielding again, so if she wants to talk to both of them they'll have to alternate and Karal can watch people's reactions to that.  It seems like a good way to get everyone used to the two of them being one person, by letting them watch a conversation with Nayoki who's already used to it and friendly with them both.

"Mm, what am I curious about that isn't going to make overly serious dinner conversation...  Were you already with Leareth when all these northern bases were getting set up? How long has all this been here?"

They can go to the dining hall. 

"I was here when this base was built! The one you saw before is a little older. About half of all the facilities we have in the north are from the last ten years, and nine-tenths are from the last fifty years, but some are significantly older. - I would ask Leareth how far back the oldest go, except I am not sure he remembers either." 

Leareth is amused. I think the longest-standing active research base has been running for about a century. Though there might have been records caches here before that which I repurposed. 

(He's been shielding - both of them, since he hasn't figured out the trick to shield only himself yet - but not very hard, and even without actual projective Mindspeech, he can sort of push that particular thought out where Nayoki can see it if she's looking.) 

Huh, can Karal push thoughts outside the shields too, now that he's realized it's possible?  Or is it a more technical skill than he can pick up just from seeing it done?  Of course he might as well talk to Nayoki out loud, since he's the one who can right now, but if he wants to say something to Leareth that's part of the conversation with Nayoki rather than private, it'd feel odd to talk out loud.

That's so long.  (People must have lived out their entire lives at this work and died here.  He wonders where they bury them.)  Was all of that your previous life, or more than one?

He realizes he doesn't know what previous Leareth looked like, which is oddly disorienting.  Of course neither of them know what Ma'ar looked like, which is a different and deeper sort of wrongness - but he feels odd about not knowing what the person everyone here was used to looked like. 

... Oh, Mindspeech can share images, can't it?  He thinks it can.  "Also, I know there's no real point, but can you show me what Leareth used to look like?"  He could have just asked Leareth, but on second thought he's not at all sure Leareth remembers, and even if he does, Nayoki's view of him feels more real, somehow.

The current round of build-up in the north, which has been accelerating over the last fifteen years or so as he started to ramp up for the invasion plan but which began more like fifty years ago, was all a single lifetime, Leareth thinks. (He should have had at least another fifty years in that body, enough to see everything through to the next stage of the plan, but, well.) He's fairly sure that some of the research facilities were ones he started in the incarnation before that one, but he definitely can't remember any details right now. 

(He's confident Karal will be able to learn how to selectively shield some thoughts but not others, in time, but it's much less intuitive to do when they don't have native Thoughtsensing and are using mage-gift for shields. They can practice later tonight, maybe.

Leareth indeed does not remember what he looked like before, though he thinks he was dark-haired.) 

That's a very reasonable request and Nayoki can push a reasonably clear visual across to Karal - Leareth as she remembers him from a conversation a few months ago, intently focused on explaining some of the god-alignment work to her and several researchers... 

A burst of fondness at the memory.  "Thank you!"  It's good to have some face to imagine for Leareth that isn't his own.  "It does really suit him."

And yes, he should practice thought-unshielding later, he'd love to have that down.  ...Well, if Leareth likes.  They could also do other things that are more important than that.  (But at least he's apparently doing decently well at wanting things for himself, which he was just told was a good thing.)

"Ah, it's confusing, trying to talk between the three of us half out loud and half over thoughts."  He's amused, not complaining.  "I suppose we'll get used to it."

He looks to see who's around in the dining hall, and nods a greeting to any familiar faces, but it's probably better not to add even more people to this already complicated conversation. 

Leareth isn't even sure if he normally schedules all of his time that tightly! Certainly for right now, he's apparently still recovering his usual stamina and is feeling tired enough that he's not expecting to use the evening for anything that intellectually productive. Poking around with shielding seems like as reasonable a "rest" activity as anything else. 

Nayoki is amused. "Leareth and I were in the habit of conversations half in Mindspeech, it is not that weird. Mindspeech can be convenient when you are eating."

She can talk a bit more about the history of the northern operations. She knows that Leareth had started recruiting a small number of magical researchers over a century ago, in order to start checking the mostly-complete plans for his god and then, more recently, start planning the implementation. The military side of things is more recent than that, but Leareth had also been stockpiling resources - nonperishable food in particular, but magical artifacts as well - for the past century. This was never going to be a self-sustaining operation. 

Ah, he was somehow under the impression that Leareth normally spent all his time doing things.  It's probably for the best that he doesn't. 

He happily spends the mealtime chatting with Nayoki and filling in some more of his understanding of everything they're doing in the north.  It's such a large and strange operation, unlike anything he's encountered or heard of before - it'll be a while before he feels like he has a grasp of the whole thing, but it's starting to make sense or at least feel familiar.  And Nayoki clearly has everything well under control - not that he had any real doubt of that, but it feels more secure to have some actual knowledge underlying the conclusion.

(Leareth suspects he does spend quite a lot of time "doing things", but that not all of it is formally scheduled doing-things, unless he's traveling or has a time-sensitive project or something. It's important for your ability to think freely about things and notice when you're missing something, to have downtime, even if one spends a lot of that downtime doing unplanned math or magical experiments instead of planned ones.) 

He ends up nudging to take control for part of the conversation, when something Nayoki says offhand prompts a vague half-formed memory of there having been some sort of problem with setup for one of the military training bases, which is going to bother him until he's up to speed. Fortunately it doesn't take very long to get up to speed and it turns out the problem is now under control. 

Nayoki enjoys talking to both of them! She can spare three-quarters of a candlemark for dinner and conversation, though after that she does need to go back and finish some things before the day is over. 

"You, though, need to rest," she admonishes Leareth. (It's somehow pretty clear that it's aimed at Leareth, even though she had been talking to Karal fifteen seconds earlier.) 

...That's probably a good idea. It's not that late and Leareth isn't exactly sleepy, yet, but he definitely feels something like exhaustion at the prospect of trying to sit down and make focused progress on any of the main priorities. 

They can head back to their room and then spend a while poking around at shielding, though! Leareth can start by teaching Karal how to use mage-energies to shield, so that he has a starting point for manipulating their existing shielding in order to shield partially while putting some thoughts "outside", and it seems likely that watching Karal trying things will also help Leareth sort out what he needs to do to selectively shield himself.

(It's clear from Leareth's thoughts that he likes teaching magic - it's not that he dislikes his other work, for the most part, but there's an obvious intrinsic satisfaction he takes in demonstrating something for Karal and watching him try it and pointing out things he notices. Which is a lot of things! He's picking up that Karal learns better by observing and then experimenting himself, rather than following explicit step-by-step instructions, and Karal probably benefits less than Leareth does himself from explanations of the theory behind how shielding works. Sharing a mage-gift is very convenient for this, though, since it means Leareth can trivially demonstrate things "up close" for Karal, or try to push across the intuitions he has directly rather than having to put them into words.) 

Nayoki admonishing Leareth makes Karal laugh and nod - and think for a moment about how different her relationship with Leareth is from anything he's used to, and what he likes about it.

Magic, though!  Magic is lovely, and satisfying to learn.  He picks up shielding well enough - it's not his favorite skill, but he's had time to get used to the pattern of it and to how it feels to have it up or down.  The moment he gets it right, he starts experimenting with putting some thoughts outside, since he's seen that done as well.  Of course his first few attempts unravel the shields entirely, or do other more confusing things to them, but with some more demonstrations he gets that to work too.  In the end it turns out to be easier to put thoughts outside shields Leareth put up - he's not sure if it's because Leareth's shields are cleaner, or just because of something about his own mental framing of the process.

The theory mostly doesn't make much sense to him until he can manage to actually do the thing, but then the explanations match up with the mental motions in a way that helps him understand what he's doing and sometimes improve it.  Demonstrations are very helpful, and Leareth pushing across wordless intuitions works surprisingly well - the way they think of things doesn't always match, but it usually does.  Karal's nearly first experience of magic was Leareth doing it, and since then they've grown together enough that the way Leareth thinks about it just feels right.

He enjoys the process, and the feeling of Leareth's satisfaction in the shared work.  He spends some time practicing and incorporating more of Leareth's pointers, until he starts feeling like he might be able to do this and hold a conversation at the same time.  But he does tire our much faster than Leareth, since all this is new and effortful for him, and they still have a chunk of the evening left.

Thank you.  That was very enjoyable, and I think I should stop before I give us a headache.

He closes his eyes and relaxes for a moment.  If Leareth doesn't immediately propose moving on to another activity... there is something they should talk about, at some point.  His thoughts soften - it's not a conversation he would normally consider it his place to start at all, and even now he's careful and a touch uncertain about it, but it is increasingly obvious that Leareth wants his people to bring up their concerns.

You said - it was only yesterday, wasn't it - that you shouldn't be making long-term decisions yet.  Do you think you're recovered enough, now?  Or if not, we might still talk about what the questions are.

(None of his mental words directly name the topic, but it's clear enough in his thoughts.  He said, yesterday, that he would be Leareth's - and he already is, in truth, but they should make the decision clearly, and he'd like to know how to do it right.)

...That's a good idea, and now seems like a very reasonable time to go through what the questions are. Leareth wouldn't say that he's fully recovered - Nayoki had a point, when she brought up that he's still significantly impaired - but he thinks he feels basically oriented enough to make decisions. And it seems important for Karal - for both of them - to have clarity on what exactly they're doing here. 

He's not sure what the important open questions are? It seems important to agree on...something like "what commitments are they making to each other" and "under what conditions would they need to reassess that"...but he's not sure how to put it more specifically than that in his thoughts. 

Karal is even less able to put his instinctive ideas in specific words, but he was definitely right that they needed to have some conversation about it.  The concept of this going two ways was, while not unfamiliar, not something he actually expected here (why is that?), and the idea of reassessment would have never occurred to him at all.  Or, that's not quite true - of course one can modify oaths or be released from them, or swear a term of service rather than an entire life, but he gets an unclear impression the Leareth means... something different from those things?...  Or possibly he means the same things but phrases them so differently that Karal can't be sure about it.

... If they start thinking about all the possible options, of which there must be nearly infinitely many of now that he's left his home and isn't dealing only with the traditions he grew up with, they'll never get to the end of it.  And there's no real reason to do it that way, is there.

What does he want?  It feels utterly clear, a bright instinct he's had nearly all his life, but he finds he cannot describe the underlying idea in useful words.  He tries to push it across as it is in his mind - a driving emotion, but one clearly directed, aligned with most of his soul toward something outside himself, and for reasons that feel real even though he can explain them even less than the emotion itself.  It's about... not even quite being trusted - that too, but more than that, about being relied on, about being someone his lord can use without the slightest doubt about his service or worry about its limits.  He thinks people, or at least the people he would offer his service to in the first place, will just be better if he gives them everything he can and trusts them to decide what to do with it, than if he tries to bargain and draw lines.  It feels important to him, that the people who are trying to do great things in the world should have someone fundamentally on their side, someone they can trust to be theirs no matter what choices they make.  It's less clear, even in the wordless intuitions only half coming across, why it's so important - something about trust and the way it shapes people.  It's not as if it's wrong to have limits in your service, but it's... not the same thing, then, not the thing Karal wants his life to be, not the thing he's shaped for.

I'm very bad at explaining this.  He sends a wry smile.  Please ask me questions, if that seems like it might help.  Or just tell me what you want, because whatever it is, I want you to have it.  It's possible that the way Karal naturally is is not quite the right shape to make Leareth feel-- safe in relying on him, yes, he thinks that's the closest he can come to it in words-- and he can do something different, at least to some extent, as long as it's in service of that goal.

Leareth also finds a lot of this hard to think about it words; he's neither surprised nor bothered that Karal is struggling a bit to convey what he means. 

He does think it's important to him that there's something here that goes both ways, even if their situation is fundamentally not symmetrical. It's - important to him to do right by Karal, or at least avoid wronging Karal by accident because he wasn't aware of a tradeoff or didn't think it through. He doesn't think that he'll feel comfortable unless he knows that he understands what would be wronging Karal, and can thus be confident that he's not doing it. 

And - he thinks it would be easier, from his side, to feel fully safe in relying on Karal, if there was some limit beyond which both of them agreed it would no longer be fair of him to demand Karal's loyalty and help. Maybe that line is somewhere absurdly far from reality - maybe the only things that would make Karal regret offering that loyalty in the first place are things that Leareth wouldn't do in the first place, like "torturing someone for no strategic gain" - but it feels important that pretty much everyone has some limit on how they're willing or able to act. 

It seems like maybe Karal is - doing the checking upfront, and deciding that he already knows enough about who Leareth is and what his goals are to commit his loyalty fully? But in that case, it feels important to Leareth to understand better what the decision-relevant factors were, and what would have hypothetically had to be different - about Leareth, about his plan - before Karal would have made a different choice. 

Everything Leareth is thinking is at the same time entirely reasonable and completely different from the way Karal is used to thinking about these things.  But it's good to try thinking in different ways, and learn something new about each other in the process.

Is what he's doing checking upfront that no order would ever cross a line?  No, it's not, that's obvious the moment he thinks about it.  He served Kadrich, and not because he was certain Kadrich could not conceivably have ordered pointless torture or some similarly awful thing - he didn't, but Karal can imagine it, and he would have done it.  He would have argued against it first, but... it feels important for some reason, that he'd do it anyway...  (Is it just that he wants that badly to completely belong to someone, that he'll agree to do evil in the service because it on some level gives him what he wants?  ...No, he doesn't think that's it, but it's increasingly difficult to try to pull out the loops of his instincts and inspect them in this sort of specific detail.  He does think there's something there that makes sense, but what is it...)

He wouldn't serve someone who wasn't worth it, is the obvious thought that comes back to him when he asks the question of himself.  And what does that mean, in words that carry some sort of logic instead of just the emotion?  He wouldn't serve someone if he didn't think this would make things better.  He would serve someone who might do awful things or might do great things, if he thought that by his service he would be making the awful things less and the great things more likely, and not otherwise - but having this influence, in the way in which he knows how to do it, requires the sort of commitment that will participate in the awful things, if they do still happen.

He does think many people are that way - perhaps the sort of people he's drawn to, especially.  That they respond to this sort of trust and commitment - that having someone like Karal, who would do awful things on their orders, and argue against it and suffer in the doing, makes them better.  But it's difficult to think through where that impression comes from.  Maybe it's just that otherwise the awful things will naturally be done by people who won't argue against them?  He feels that's not all of it, but he's not sure.  Some of it, he thinks, is that some people will not listen the same way to the arguments of anyone who isn't fully loyal to them (he knows Leareth isn't like that - Leareth would listen to an argument from anyone, and take it seriously), but that doesn't seem all of it either.  Mostly it's just that most people do, he thinks, feel safer if they have someone who is entirely loyal to them, and people who feel safe make better choices (not all of them, but many of them), and if their choices are important enough, this is worth it.

But if Leareth is not someone who will feel safer that way - and it makes sense that he isn't, Karal half-suspected it already from how he wanted Nayoki to argue with him, and that was part of what made him think it was important to have this conversation - then Karal can and will do things differently.  They can come up with lines, and he can commit to not crossing them.  (...That does bring up a practical concern.  Given the sorts of bizarre and convoluted things that happen in Leareth's life, how sure is he that Karal will be right about whether something is crossing a line rather than just looking like it?  He can ask for proof, and he knows Leareth wouldn't mind that, but what if there's no time or no way to prove something?  But that's probably a conversation to have later, once they've figured out the more fundamental level of where the lines are.)

Why he thinks Leareth is worth his loyalty is an even harder question - another single bright impulse that is going to be so difficult to untangle and put in any sort of logical order.  But it's increasingly clear that serving Leareth requires being able to find the logic underlying his instincts, and Karal does think the logic is there to be found.

First, Leareth is not lying to him.  He is just about fully confident of it, or as confident as he can be of anything in a situation as confusing as this - perhaps he's wrong about how Empathy works or about how human minds work or about whether what he saw in Leareth's mind wasn't a hallucination, but if he worries about things like this he will never be able to make any decisions at all.  But even if he hadn't had that strange Empathy-glimpse of the clarity of Leareth's mind and motivation, he would still be sure enough - not completely, and he cannot put numbers on it the way Leareth instinctively does, but much more sure than not - enough for a decision, even one as significant as this.  (Holding back, when you're sure enough, also carries a price - most of the time you cannot be entirely sure of anything, or cannot be sure quickly enough for the added certainty to outweigh the lost time.  And people value being seen and trusted, and will-- grow in a better direction?-- if you show them trust.  Although Leareth instead values meticulous verification, Karal did notice that, he adds fondly.)

Second, what Leareth wants is fundamentally a good thing.  That's... they agree on it, and it's obvious enough, once you let yourself think about it at all - the shining world of canal-Gates and cooperation and ingenuity and nobody starving.  Everything Karal has seen Leareth tried to build, for its own sake instead of as a tool for that greater goal, has been good, and where it failed, they agree on what the failure was and whether it was worth it.  They can read more records and be more sure, but Karal doesn't think it's at all likely that they'll find a major disagreement - and if they do find one, Leareth will welcome arguments about it, and in the end he expects one or the other of them will be convinced.

Third, yes, Leareth is doing awful things and planning worse ones in the service of his goal, but it's blindingly obvious that he doesn't want to - that if given better options he would take them, if given any scrap of hope of a better option he will spend decades investigating it.  Karal wants to serve someone who will do better things if he has more resources - the entire point of being the kind of person Karal is is to be a tool for someone who will do better for having him - and he doesn't think he's ever met anyone more like that than Leareth, who has almost completely shaped himself to transform resources into good outcomes as effectively as humanly possible, and then more effectively than that.

... Did all this answer at least some of Leareth's important questions?  He knows there were more of them, but there's only so much he can keep in his head at once.  He's starting to understand Leareth's note-taking habit, if all of his important decisions are endless branching questions like this.

And all of that makes sense, laid out - they definitely approach this from different angles, natively, and Leareth appreciates the effort Karal is putting in to make everything legible to him anyway. 

He should try to address all of that, but - first Leareth finds himself musing on the general concept of people doing better with more resources, and...how "feeling safe" is itself a kind of resource. People do do better - not just at achieving their goals, but at making the choices their best selves would endorse - when they feel safe. And he can see how for many people, having someone like Karal fully committed and loyal would give them a foundation of feeling-safe, from which they could grow in a better direction.  

...Leareth had never really considered that with regards to himself? He's poking at that thought, now, and - it's not that he doesn't think he would have space to grow into a better version of himself if he were safer. He absolutely would. Just - maybe he's just too deeply aware of all the ways the world isn't safe for one person's unconditional loyalty to help much. Maybe he's reluctant to put too much weight on it because two thousand years has taught him to be reluctant to put too much weight on anything. 

- also it's definitely true that the thing he would want from unconditional loyalty isn't a commitment to follow any order he gives? Nayoki hasn't committed to that. He's trying to do something very difficult, he's not immune to making mistakes. He feels better, not worse, to the extent that Nayoki is loyal to the goal he wants to achieve and not to him as a person. She is to a significant extent loyal to him personally, that's a normal way for people to work, but she uses her own judgement. Leareth knows that this is in some sense asking for something much bigger than just personal loyalty, but - that's what this project needs, and if it came down to a conflict between the project and Leareth, he knows where Nayoki would land. 

(There's a very quiet thought, in the background, that what would really make Leareth feel safer in an emotional sense, is if someone else existed who both shared his goals and had the power and skill to achieve them without him. He would feel so much less alone, and like he had so much more space to - just not do awful things - if it felt like he could afford to try and fail, because someone somewhere would eventually succeed. But - he's never, really, felt like that's what would happen.) 

Karal knows that he cannot make Leareth safe, or even help him very much, with his single lifetime.  Leareth is right not to put too much weight on his loyalty - it hurts to acknowledge, but it's obviously true - the entire world is too wrong to let Leareth put much weight on anything.  Karal wishes so much that Leareth could have more - more safety, more cooperation or even just communication, fewer senseless deaths, less being forced into the worst options - and he cannot give him any of these things, can barely give him anything at all.  Cannot be the person who could do all this on his own, he's quite sure, no matter how hard he might try.  (Although he will inevitably think, later, about what it would be like to really try - and that is a terrifying thought of a kind he had never contemplated before, like an infinite chasm opening up under his feet and demanding he learn how to fly.)

Of course nobody is really fundamentally safe, either in their own life or in their goals, but - most people can feel safe and benefit from the feeling even if it's not entirely true, and everything about Leareth as a person means that he cannot.  Karal knows how much his instincts aren't suited for all the ways Leareth is so unlike most people.  Some of those things he can fix, and some he can't.  He can't give him safety or even the feeling of it, but he can give him the loyalty he wants, to his project rather than to himself.  It's much easier for Karal to be loyal to a person than an idea, but... Leareth-right-now is a person, and if that loyalty might require fighting against him later, that is something Karal can commit to and keep his word on, no matter how much it would hurt.

Though, again, he should be very careful, because he can already imagine ways for the gods to manipulate him into only thinking this is what he needs to do.  It seems so unlikely that he could ever actually be right and Leareth be wrong.  But... he has already had the thought that he knew better than the gods about at least one thing, didn't he.  Surely there might be situations clear enough for him to think the same about Leareth, no matter how unlikely that seems.  He should talk to Nayoki about how she thinks about this, and what she'd need to be sure.  (Perhaps he can learn to fly at least a little.)

Is that what you want?  Not just lines not to cross, but for me to decide, myself, the right thing to do to fix the world, if I think I have to?  It feels ridiculous even to say.  But he remembers Leareth telling Nayoki it wasn't arrogance for her to think something not entirely unlike this.

...Yes. Pause. If that is something you can do without damaging yourself.

Honestly, Leareth thinks that a significant fraction of why he's worried about wronging Karal is that - it feels like the things he would ask for, if offered unconditional loyalty and commitment, are incredibly hard, and not at all the natural shape for most humans to be. It's hard for him to - be himself - and he's had eighteen hundred years to practice. And Nayoki gets to take breaks, in a way that feels hard to offer Karal even in principle. (Though another thing they should maybe talk about is whether Karal needs certain kinds of downtime or rejuvenating activities that Leareth wouldn't necessarily think of on his own.) 

Anyway. Leareth knows that he tends to have very high expectations of his people, and - he thinks he does reasonably well at not punishing anyone for being human, but - he's a little worried that Karal is trying to commit to being whatever Leareth needs, even if it turns out that this would require twisting himself into a shape that's actually bad for him? And he's not sure that he trusts himself to notice something like that in real time. 

I... don't know.  (The abyss, and trying to fly.)  He has never in his life felt so much like he was falling.

It doesn't feel right the way simple loyalty would, but... it doesn't feel wrong, either.  Just weightless and strange, and terrifying in the distant way of something utterly unexpected and only half understood.  Like being told the world might end.  (It did, once.)  But unexpected, incomprehensible, terrifying things do happen, and people deal with them, all the time.

I can try, I think, and... stop trying, if I shouldn't keep going.  Not because he would have the impulse to protect himself that way, but because Leareth wants him to.  If it worries Leareth, that he might harm him, then Karal will try not to let himself come to harm, and he thinks he can manage.  (If he trusts Leareth to catch him and let him rest, when he says he's fallen too far.  He does.)  He does understand how knowing someone else will protect himself is a kind of safety too, the way he feels safe knowing that Leareth will ignore him if he has something important to do.

Yes, it's going to be incredibly hard, and a strange shape to be, and he doesn't know whether he can, but - at the same time it's already obvious that he will. 

As long as you realize that I barely know what I'm doing.  He smiles a little, not truly worried.  He hasn't at all felt punished for being human, or gotten the impression that Leareth related to his other people that way.  And so far he's felt perfectly happy with the breaks he's gotten - although Leareth is of course right that it's been all of two days and he might turn out to have more needs than the occasional hour of talking to someone friendly about unimportant things.  Leareth has had eighteen hundred years to practice, and Karal should pay attention.  (Leareth might find it reassuring that Karal is paying attention, more than he would have before - this is a strange and hard thing, and it makes sense to be careful about trying it and to take care of himself in a way that he would have no inclination toward if he was doing something more familiar.)

(Leareth does appreciate and find it reassuring that Karal is paying attention! ...And, yes, part of why he's worried is that the thing he's doing, that his whole organization is doing, is - very different from the kind of world where Karal grew up, and the habits he learned there around living honorably without grinding himself down to nothing in the process might not be enough.) 

Leareth thinks that he's also going much more slowly and taking more breaks than he normally would, and has in general been much more - approaching everything with an unhurried attitude, because rushing won't help when he's still impaired and off-balance. He thinks he might have been a lot more impatient with Karal otherwise, though he's not sure exactly which things would have triggered impatience. 

...Also it's true that, so far, he's been careful with Karal. At first because things were fraught and he didn't want to damage their prospects for cooperation, and he's no longer worried about that, but he's still been putting substantial effort into being considerate, and - does think that, long term, he would prefer if that felt less necessary. Just knowing and being able to predict each other better will help by itself, but - for example, Leareth would like if he had more of an affordance to grab control if he wanted to interject something out loud in a conversation. He's been avoiding it because it's never seemed very important, so far, and because he remembered Karal finding it jarring before when he seized control without negotiating it first.

That's a small thing by itself, it's not very important and they could probably just get it down to a fraction-of-a-second wordless negotiation that didn't feel frictiony, but it does feel like an example of a wider category of things? That they should maybe talk about in general. 

That's easy, at least.  Karal smiles.  Yes, you've been surprisingly careful with me - it made sense to start with, but yes, please stop.  It's all right for me to find things jarring.  Though he doesn't remember what Leareth is talking about-- oh, in the dream.  That was a particularly difficult moment - he wouldn't act that way if Leareth grabbed control in a normal conversation, and even so it didn't do him harm.  They should practice that sort of thing more - he'll get used to it, and he's confident it'll be fine.

Leareth being impatient with him sounds potentially more painful, but... having it keep being painful would require the two of them to have a long-term disagreement about what is good or feasible, and he doesn't really expect that to happen?  And if he expected it to happen it'd seem like a less painful perspective in the first place.  Well, nothing to do but to find out.  I think you should be less careful, and I should err on the side of arguing with you when I don't like something, unless you tell me not to.  We'll get used to each other and sort out what works.

He wants Leareth to... just have him, and not feel like he has to worry about being careful with him, the way he doesn't worry about his cooperation any more.  (That feels entirely right, and Karal is glad.)  They'll have to see to what extent it's possible without making something worse, but he straightforwardly approves of the idea, and that mindset should help make it work.

Well. Leareth can try that, and if they run into problems, which problems come up will be informative. 

...Does Karal have anything else that he's apprehensive about, or would want to be different if it wasn't costly or inconvenient? 

Exactly - no doubt something will come up, and they'll learn from it once it does.  Karal expects it'll be fine.  He knows how to be someone's, and this is different but it's not that different.

He'd like to spend time outside at some point - he's not sure if the issue is sunlight as Leareth thought earlier, or just being outdoors, or both, but a walk in the tundra sometime this week would be good.  Everything else has been fine, but if Leareth is planning on being more busy and impatient then he should maybe think about what else might come up...  He does like talking to people about their lives and would like to get to do that most days if possible, but it doesn't need to be for candlemarks.  He's probably not going to like spending entire days on record-reading or math (and maybe particularly confusing magic, although most magic seems great) but he doesn't know whether that'll be the sort of dislike he can just deal with or something to be careful about.  He should get enough physical exercise to keep feeling like himself, but probably Leareth also thinks being in good shape is important.

They wanted to talk about what to do if that strange panic hits him again, at some point?  They dealt with well enough, he thinks, but he got the impression it might be something Leareth would be inclined to be impatient about, and he expects there are ways to make it go better.  And also ways it might have gone worse, if they were less lucky in their reactions.

(They can absolutely go for a walk out in the tundra tomorrow! Leareth would like to do it after he's had a chance to throw some magic around in a Work Room and make sure his reflexes for defending himself are in good shape, but he wants to do that soon anyway.) 

...And, yes, it's a good idea to think a bit about how to respond if the panic phenomenon happens again. Maybe even worth separately strategizing about what to do if they're somewhere safe - which is likely to be true for several weeks, and where Leareth mostly wants to focus on what responses will be most helpful for Karal, in hopes that this results in the panic getting less bad over time and ceasing to be a problem - and, also, what to do if it happens in a high-stakes context where they can't afford to just stop everything, and where Leareth probably couldn't spare too much thought to be attentive to Karal's needs. This - seems likely to mean that Leareth will respond by taking over, if he wasn't already in control, and dealing with the urgent situation before worrying about Karal's wellbeing. Does Karal have any ideas for what might make this less bad for him to experience? 

Yes, if they're in danger - or just doing something important that can't wait - Leareth should obviously do that, and Karal will live, he just might need more time afterward.  He's not sure what... sorts of things... could relevantly vary, in the situation where Leareth does whatever is necessary and doesn't think about him?  More sensory input of nearly any sort is better than less, definitely don't cut him off from anything, but he wouldn't expect that anyway.  Talk to him, if there's any attention to spare for that?  If there's something he could usefully do, try ordering him to do it - that seems like it might well work to snap him out of it, even if it's just 'be quiet and pay attention'.

Unless Leareth means after the high-stakes situation is over.  Then... It'll be about the same as what to do if they were safe in the first place, he's guessing, although he could be wrong?  The worst thing was that he didn't know where he was or what was happening - well, the worst thing was the moment when he thought he was back on the battlefield, but it seems unlikely for that to last long - either way, the thing to do about those is probably for Leareth to... make himself very obvious somehow?  Karal is not sure about the best way to accomplish that.

Leareth can definitely try (mentally) talking to Karal - he's not sure he can ad-lib helpfully reassuring things to say unless he has a script in advance, but he can at least talk through what he's doing, which might help Karal remember where he is. He - definitely would have been reluctant to try ordering Karal to do anything if he didn't have advance permission, but if Karal thinks it might actually help to be ordered to pay attention to something, he can try that? 

Does Karal think it would be worse if he were cut off from seeing some of Leareth's thoughts, separate from experiencing physical sensory input from their body and Othersenses? Does it depend much on whether the content of Leareth's thoughts is closely related to whatever set off a panic reaction in the first place? If Leareth were guessing without Karal's input, he probably would be inclined to tuck away thoughts that were closely related to something that had set off a very bad reaction, but given that he can ask for input ahead of time, he does want to check. ...And, come to think of it, whether there are any contexts where Karal might want to be cut off from some of their senses - for example, if Leareth has no choice but to keep engaging with someone or something that he's fairly sure is responsible for causing the panic in the first place? 

Karal doesn't think they need to be particularly reassuring thoughts!  If they succeed in making Karal remember that Leareth exists, that'll be reassuring enough on its own, and he can probably put himself together from there.  Yes, telling him what's happening or what might happen next or what the important tactical considerations are seems likely to be helpful and low-effort, but he really thinks most things would do.

... Of course Leareth can order him to do things without advance permission, how could that possibly not be the case...  Ah, they still have an unfinished larger conversation about oaths.  Hopefully that will help, because that was such a deeply confusing statement Karal barely knows where to start.

Leareth's thoughts are very likely to be helpful - he remembers noticing them last time, even faint as they were.  If the thoughts or an ongoing conversation are related to whatever went wrong in the first place...  He's not sure, really, so probably Leareth should do whatever seems best to him and if that doesn't go well he can do the other thing next time.

...Leareth doesn't think that Karal has a problem in general with being unexpectedly ordered to do something, he does feel like they've been over that, it's just - without thinking it through, he genuinely wouldn't have predicted that it would either help or work? For himself, the ability to orient to his environment and what's happening around him feels a lot more basic and fundamental than the ability to usefully follow instructions, and "be quiet" (he assumes Karal means mentally quiet, since Leareth can just prevent him from literally making noise) seems like a particularly hard instruction for someone to follow while already very upset and disoriented. It sounds like Karal maybe expects something different, though? 

(Ah, good, that makes more sense. It was Leareth thinking of it in terms of permission that confused him.)

Yes, for Karal loyalty is more basic than orientation (in something like the way for Leareth safety is, he thinks) - he will follow orders in the right voice if he's too asleep or feverish to know what's happening around him, he knows that.  (A flash of half-embarrassed half-pleased memory, when he caught a bad winter sickness and ended up trying to fight the healers so much that Balthin had to come himself to tell him to be still... He remembered nothing of it except his voice, once his fever broke.)  He isn't sure it'll work in the panicked disorientation, but he won't be surprised if it will, and if it works it'll almost certainly help.  Give his mind a connection, to follow back to reality and find its balance against.

Being quiet is probably not the easiest task, but it's the easiest he can think of that's still possible to do without control of his body and without knowing where he is.  If Leareth can think of other orders like that, he can try them - again, this isn't something that could make anything worse, he doesn't think.

That makes sense. Leareth can definitely see how it's a convenient basic reflex to have, arguably a lot more convenient than his own reflex of "Gate to a place he knows is safe." He'll make a mental note to try it. 

It's such a strange and interesting state, being this close with someone while still only half knowing them.  Karal is sure there are more surprising things about both of them that will come up at some point - half of him would rather skip to the comfort of full familiarity, but half of him appreciates needing all this explicit thinking about each other and noticing disconnects.  It seems like he needs the practice.

That seems enough to be going on with, for that.  Unless Leareth had more thoughts about circumstances under which he should or should not be careful with Karal?

Otherwise, they should go back to the original question - what oaths he should make to clarify and anchor his commitment.  And what oaths Leareth should make, if he wishes to, but that still feels difficult to think about.

It seems so far that Karal should swear... loyalty and service to Leareth's goal of fixing the world, as the most central thing, but he thinks it will be better if he does it through service to Leareth-as-he-is-now - it'll have a much better hold on his mind, make him stronger and more able to do what he needs to, if there's a person in his oath somewhere. 

What else might be worth saying?  Leareth wants not to damage him, so he should swear at least to tell him when that might happen - or not to let it happen unless they both agree it's worth it? - something in that direction.  And Leareth wants not to wrong him, which seems more complicated - Karal doesn't think he can generate a full description of what that would mean, but he can commit to saying so when something makes him likely to regret his oath.  (That will be important to say out loud and remember, because on his own he probably wouldn't think about it - it feels like another one of the things that are fundamentally not his place to decide.  But they just declared there are no such things, and in any case Leareth can't rely on a shared upbringing to know how to avoid it.)

He can't generate a full description, but he can gesture at at least a large part of it.  Torturing someone for no reason would be awful and he agrees Leareth shouldn't do it (and in any case wouldn't, basically by definition, because Leareth doesn't do things for no reason), but it wouldn't... feel like a fundamental misuse of who Karal is.  Making him break his word would, or making him pretend at... not necessarily friendliness even, but honest cooperation... and then go against it, or take someone else's genuine attempt to do something better and use it against their interests.  It's all right to duel a man and kill him; it's not necessarily all right but not the awful kind of wrong to ambush and murder him on the road, or to steal into his house as an assassin, or to disguise yourself as an invited guest and use the opportunity to poison him; it's wrong to accept an offered invitation in your own name and then poison him.  Does Leareth know what Karal means, when he gestures at everything else that's a mirror of that difference?  It feels like there's a clear common thread between all these things, but he doesn't know the word for it.

(Karal gets the impression that Leareth draws his own line somewhere close to that, in any case.  This is part of what his early arguments with Vanyel were about - whether you can murder innocent people and still be trusted not to do other worse things, whether there are any meaningful lines past what Valdemar's Heralds would call dishonorable.)

And he would like to not be used against - not his country, that will hurt but his country is an awful place in an untenable situation right now, and in any case given what they're planning on doing to Valdemar he cannot in good conscience demand an exception - but against Balthin, who let him go in the trust that it was right and safe, and should not be made to regret that trust.  (He would like not just not to personally be used against him, but to know that nobody else will be - but that seems too much to ask.  Is it?  He feels lost, trying to think about it, and his instinct is to see what Leareth thinks and trust that he's right.)

It continues to be bizarre and fascinating to Leareth that, to Karal, swearing service to the person that Leareth is now feels more specific and concrete and real than aiming directly at the things Leareth cares about. It's not like that for Leareth at all. It's - starting to make sense to him, though, and he's comfortable with Karal swearing that kind of loyalty to him. 

He definitely wants Karal to tell him if something Leareth is doing or planning is likely to make him regret that loyalty, and if committing to that will make Karal more likely to notice it at all, then yes, he would feel more secure with that commitment. 

Leareth thinks...well, he's not sure he thinks about it as "drawing lines" at all, as opposed to tradeoffs and costs that are or aren't worth paying, but he thinks he sees what Karal is gesturing at. Hurting one's acknowledged enemies is a cost. Harming innocent people, or using deceptive tactics to hurt people who had no reason to see an attack coming, are different costs, and in many ways worse - Leareth understands why the Heralds would draw a line and call that dishonorable but be fine with killing enemy soldiers - but they are, in fact, costs that Leareth is frequently willing to pay. And he does think there's quite a big difference between that and plans that - how to put it - that use friendliness and earnest cooperation against someone, that weaken the entire concept of friendship and alliance. Honest cooperation is precious, and the odds are already stacked against it, and - Leareth isn't sure he would never choose to pay that cost, but he certainly has a strong heuristic that it's almost never going to be worth it. 

He...feels nervous about making a hard commitment never to use Karal to work against Balthin. Mostly because his deeply-engrained paranoia is generating the thought that, if this showed up to the gods in Foresight, it would make it very tempting for Them to steer Balthin into doing something destructive to Leareth's plans. He doesn't think that's likely, it would require such a string of implausible coincidences to set up, and almost certainly it would be possible to deal with the threat in some way that didn't bring Karal into it? But. Leareth still feels afraid to commit to more than "weighing the cost of betraying Karal in that way as very, very high." 

Karal closes his eyes, a drawn-out moment's pain, then bows his head.  I don't mean to make demands of you.  He would've served him with no assurances at all, if Leareth didn't want their commitment to be mutual, so he's not going to push for something Leareth is worried about.  Karal doesn't really understand the idea of an oath that isn't a hard line, but if Leareth can count costs that way and have it mean something, that will be enough. 

And... it may be right, that a full commitment would turn out worse for Balthin, by tempting the gods to misuse him. What an awful tangle the world is... Karal doesn't know how to think about things that way - he'll have to learn, but not all at once, and he trusts Leareth's decisions where he cannot think through them himself. He will trust this one, too.

(He does wonder if Leareth would betray Vanyel, if he judged the cost worth it.  Or perhaps the right question is what cost it would have to be.  He already knows there are higher costs in the world than he would have ever imagined - he still thinks there are things he would not do for any of them, but he will need to think about all his lines much more carefully than he's done before.)

...Leareth has been very, very careful about the intentions he's expressed to Vanyel, and especially about the (very few) commitments he's made. The default path here is still one where they are enemies. Leareth very much doesn't want that to mean that he ends up having to kill Vanyel, but he doesn't think either of them would see that as a betrayal, exactly. He's not sure if there's anything Vanyel would consider definitely a betrayal; he's pretty sure Vanyel is still holding onto the possibility that Leareth has been lying to him about his goals in every conversation they've had. 

It would hurt, if he ends up killing Vanyel in order to proceed with his plans. It would be another item to add to the list of things that will never be all right, even if someday they win and everything else can be repaired. Leareth...doesn't think Vanyel knows that, but it's not like knowing it would necessarily give him more accurate predictions, since Leareth is in fact willing to pay costs that can't be recouped later no matter how well his plans succeed. 

That he would kill him, Karal knows well enough.  (And something of how much it would hurt, although not nearly all of it, he suspects.)  He meant... Not whether Leareth would break one of the commitments he has in fact made - he assumes not, or else what would a commitment mean? Unless this is another confusing thing he'll need explained to him - but whether he would lie to him, maybe, or some similar thing that would feel like a betrayal rather than simple enmity.

He doesn't think Vanyel considering it a betrayal is the important distinction - if you're trying to convince someone to trust you, then you're bound to act trustworthy even if you haven't yet succeeded.

... He is sorry, for asking those questions. But if he's supposed to learn how to weigh such costs himself, he needs something to learn from.

Right - there are definitely things that Leareth would consider a betrayal of what he's been trying to do with Vanyel, and lying to him while representing himself as still wanting to cooperate would count.

There are definitely situations where Leareth would tell Vanyel that he had concluded cooperation was probably not going to work, and if he had done that, it wouldn't feel like a further betrayal to, for example, give a false answer to a direct question, in cases where just being evasive or refusing to answer would give too much away. (That doesn't necessarily mean he would also actively try to persuade Vanyel of a false story, which - Leareth isn't sure if he thinks that's worse, or just less likely to come up as the only option he can afford.) 

There...might also be situations where he would actively betray the trust he's been trying to build, without signposting it first. It's not a line he would never cross. It's not even quite in the category of "things that will never be fixed", but...in a different sense, it feels bigger than killing Vanyel. Leareth thinks that changing his approach in that way would require realizing he had been wrong about something critical, and making an update significant enough to re-evaluate a higher-level strategy he's been following for centuries. 

Which might happen! He's been enormously wrong about things before! But it would be surprising, in a way that the prospect of killing Vanyel, at the end of whatever road this is that they're on together, wouldn't be, just sad. 

Karal can hope killing Vanyel will not be necessary, though it's not a very likely hope.  It feels odd, hoping that and knowing who he is and what he's done, but - especially now that they've met, it's painfully clear that nothing would be better just because he was dead.  No justice, no relief, just a waste of another good person who could've been an ally if the world weren't such an awful tangle.  Another good person who maybe, somewhere very different, could've been happy.

But they have to live in the world as it is, and weigh the costs. 

Their intuitions match pretty well on the immediate level - Karal agrees that telling Vanyel they're plain enemies now would make lying no longer a betrayal.  The other level, where you realize you've been enormously wrong about something important and have to rethink everything you're doing... Halfway through thinking he's never done it he catches himself in the realization that obviously he's been doing exactly that all week - but not in a deliberate way like Leareth clearly can.

Well.  He will learn, to the extent he can, and he definitely doesn't need to do most of that now.

It's - a little like falling, again - to swear his loyalty and service while knowing there's so much more he still needs to understand about how to think about the world, but-- that's how it's always going to be, isn't it.  Leareth doesn't know everything either, and that doesn't mean he can wait for full understanding before making decisions.  Karal knows the things he needs to know, and - nearly the entire reason he's rethinking so much is that Leareth asked it of him, so he should ground that before he gets even further ahead of his properly made commitment.

Should he make his oath, or are there more considerations left?  (He does need to speak it in words rather than just think about it, for it to feel like it fully counts.)

Leareth isn't thinking of any obvious other considerations that they should go into right now? It seems probable that more things will come up where Karal will want to rethink something, or where they'll need to spend some time checking if they're sufficiently on the same page, but it doesn't seem, from Leareth's perspective, like there's anything that hasn't come up so far that would drastically change Karal's feelings on whether cooperating with Leareth is a good idea. And however strange it is to Leareth, it does seem like having made his oath will be helpful for Karal in navigating all of this? 

It will be.  And yes, he will not change his mind about the core of this, and nothing is stopping them from rethinking something later as long as they agree on it (and he will be very surprised if Leareth is ever against that).

He still feels something of an urge to apologize about how... himself... he's going to be about this, when Leareth clearly doesn't find the same things meaningful, but... it really will help, when things get hard to bear, to have this moment to remember, and to have done it right.

He kneels, no matter that it's a little ridiculous when physically he's in a room by himself.  Feels wrong with his eyes open, wrong with them closed too - oh, he knows what to do to make this part right - he reaches for Empathy and does the odd looking-inward motion that lets him see Leareth's mind, focuses on the deep calm purposefulness of it.

The words, too, he'll have to change - he cannot swear by the gods, so he has to find something else that feels as close as he can come to the truth.  The rest cannot be the usual form either, and he's not sure any of his choices are quite right - but the words are an anchor, not a contract: he knows what he means, and Leareth knows what he means, and that's what he will be held to.

"On my soul and honor and by all the light in the world, I swear my loyalty and my life's service to you - and by your will, to your goal of fixing the wrongness in the world, even over your person, should I ever need to choose between them. I swear not to let you wrong or damage me unknowingly. I swear not just to serve, but to make my own decisions about the way to make the world right - as far as I can, and no further." 

The standard ending is "until the gates of death", but that doesn't seem right, with Leareth being what he is, and with all the things Karal still doesn't know about souls.  So he simply leaves it off, and lets the oath have no endpoint except that it will last as long as it needs to.

... He's not sure what the right way to finish this is.  Some words of acceptance, which cannot be the usual ones either, and some gesture of acknowledgment, but Leareth has no hands to put around his.  He lets go of the voice, and holds the body lightly, to let Leareth take what control he needs to do whatever might feel right to him.

"I accept your oath," Leareth says out loud in their voice, because he's sure that that feels right, and - 

- he needs to think about it for thirty seconds or so, actually, and (with a faint note of apology) to do that where Karal can't see it. He pulls his surface thoughts away, and mostly Karal will pick up on a sense that Leareth is holding himself very still, though he's not actually reaching for any more control of their body. 

...It still feels right, after thirty seconds of deliberation, for this to be something that changes both of them in an enduring way, even if from another angle it's not changing anything at all. 

Leareth shifts all of his thoughts back to where Karal can see, and reaches into the part of himself that he doesn't, actually, directly turn his attention to that often. The memory-of-a-memory of a tower and stars, and the promise he made - to the world, to the future, to himself - 

And the memory of this moment can live alongside that. Leareth mostly isn't focused on the exact wording of Karal's oath; he knows what Karal means, and that's what he wants to set down in the place where he remembers Urtho's Tower. That no matter what else happens, Karal will always be someone who, however unwillingly he was dragged into Leareth's life and plans, saw all of it and chose to be allies. 

Fixing it fully in place, making this moment enough a part of himself for it to be one of the few clear episodic memories he carries between lives, is going to take a while. Leareth will do all of it where Karal can watch.

The spoken acceptance is enough for Karal, and the calm of full commitment spreads over his mind, settling his thoughts into the new shape, giving them a proper foundation to grow from.  He doesn't and very nearly couldn't mind Leareth taking some time to think through something on his own, just now.

And then, Oh...

In the first moment he cannot breathe. 

It feels like there isn't enough of him to really process this, to have emotions about it that aren't too much to contain--

(He doesn't lose hold of the Empathy, because paying attention to Leareth is something he can do entirely on instinct, and so much more so now than before.)

It's a good thing that the process takes a while, so he can get to the point of having a coherent reaction that isn't too overwhelming to be felt. 

So that he can comprehend it, and remember it, and feel-- not just awed, though this is surely as close to being immortal as anyone besides Leareth has ever been, and not just honored, although it is with no doubt the greatest honor of his life, but-- confirmed in every choice he made.  If it led to this then no matter what else happens, his life's service will have been worth it. 

That Leareth will stop feeling so awfully alone, not just now, but forever...  That Karal's existence and loyalty were important enough that Leareth thinks he should change the way he sees the world, should make himself remember that this is something that can happen...  He would have never in the world expected to make this much difference, and he has no words to describe how much it matters to him.

He has no words the whole time it happens, and still has no words once it's done - but Leareth can see him anyway, and his mind is filled with light.

There's a new strength to his thoughts - some of it from the oath, everything centered and grounded and aligned with itself, and some of it from this, as if the connection to Leareth's enduring core lent Karal some of the same stability.

I am so glad I met you.

Yeah. It - feels like an important update. Leareth's entire life experience has trained him to prepare for the worst, but there's definitely such thing as being too paranoid, or - paranoid in the wrong directions, maybe, thoughtlessly closing off options that would actually be more than worth the risk because habit makes him assume it never works. Leareth tries not to make any major decisions thoughtlessly or on reflex or habit, of course, and he thinks he succeeds more often than most people can expect to, but - not all decisions feel like decisions in the moment. 

(On an instinctive level, Leareth definitely feels like he can't take for granted that this will last - that he should, has to, assume there's still a godplot here, and maybe the gods will drop the ceiling on their head as soon as they're asleep and that will be the end of that. But he's fairly sure this is just his emotions being ridiculous - it would be actually deeply surprising if the gods could arrange anything like that, here, in the north! and besides he could usually Gate out fast enough even woken from a sound sleep - and, anyway, part of the point is that whatever happens tomorrow, he doesn't think it makes this less - a real thing that actually happened.) 

...Also it's late and Leareth at least is pretty exhausted. Now might be a reasonable time to sleep? 

Very much a real thing that happened.

It might take Karal a while to fall asleep, after that, but trying still seems like the thing to do.  (It does not actually take long, once he remembers that Leareth can't sleep until he does.)  He sleeps better than he has at any point in the past month, or possibly year.

What does Leareth want to do in the morning?

Leareth also sleeps well, and wakes up feeling a lot more - solidly anchored - than he would usually expect to be possible this few days after dying and coming back. 

He wants to look over more of the notes on Vanyel conversations. But maybe they can save that for last? Some exercise would also be good - maybe a walk out in the tundra? - and practicing magic. Also there's a note at the door from one of the researchers that they want to run some of their recent progress on checking god-alignment-math by him, so Leareth should block that in at some point. 

Leareth wanted to practice magic before going outside the base, right?  Which seems very reasonable, and Karal would enjoy both of those things.  They could do math first and have a things-Karal-will-enjoy break in the middle of the day, maybe, and then notes?

(Or Leareth could just do whatever he likes and do less worrying about Karal, but he knows that, so presumably if he's asking it's because it's a very low cost.)

That sounds like a very reasonable ordering! Breakfast first, though Leareth wants to keep it to less than fifteen minutes in the dining hall, and he'll send a note to schedule a meeting time with the researcher in question for late morning, and spend the time until then reviewing notes to make sure he actually remembers enough of the context to give sensible responses. 

The technical detail is going to be hard for Karal to follow even with Leareth leaving his thoughts fully open - he's not trying to slow down for Karal's sake, or unpack all the concepts that flash by very quickly - but it's quickly clear, and then even more obvious during the actual meeting, that this is one part of his work Leareth actually, deeply, intrinsically enjoys. 

Most of it makes no sense to Karal and quite probably never will, and trying to change that wouldn't be a good use of time at all.

But he expected to find the incomprehensibility unpleasant, and that turns out to be impossible when Leareth is enjoying it so much.  Karal is happy to fade into the background and watch, and expects he'd be happy to do it for much longer, if it's usually like this.

Well. Sometimes it's frustrating, if the thing he's dealing with is "someone is stuck on a problem and it's not obvious to him either how to proceed", though - even then Leareth mostly finds this kind of work energizing rather than draining, in the same way that he imagines Karal might find combat training energizing even if he's struggling to master a particularly difficult maneuver. 

Leareth gets up to speed, corrects some possible issues he spots with the work, suggests some next directions, and then excuses himself for lunch, where he's mostly happy to let Karal take the lead on having conversations but does want to interrupt and take over a few times when specific people approach him wanting to schedule meetings (one logistical and related to the military facilities' supply situation, one related to a potential research mage recruit who one of his agents was feeling out in Rethwellan, one about the feasibility of developing a particular magical technique - that one Leareth thinks he could normally answer off the top of his head, but he's not sure right now and wants to set aside dedicated time for it.) Anyway, all of them can have meetings tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow for the magical development question, which isn't very urgent. 

After lunch: time to go throw some defensive magic around in a Work Room (if Karal has no objections, which Leareth does float explicitly as a thought, though also with the note that he's likely to stop explicitly checking soon if Karal seems fine with his schedule and also thinks he would notice and flag if he wasn't fine with it.) Leareth might invite one of the combat mages to spar with him for the second half of it, but wants to just test himself solo first. He expects this to be fairly enjoyable, though perhaps a little bit frustrating or disorienting if it turns out some skills are less accessible than he's used to.

Karal has some friendly conversations over lunch, and does fine with Leareth taking over to talk to people - although it isn't exactly unexpected, since there were people coming up to them who seemed likely to want to speak to Leareth rather than him, so they should still at some point see how he does when it's more sudden.  It looks like people are doing pretty all right at adjusting to the two of them being the same person, too - he was worried that it might be strange and hard to get used to, but he supposes mage-researchers at secret bases are used to strangeness.

He has no objections at all to magic practice and is very much looking forward to it!  And yes, Leareth can definitely stop the explicit schedule confirmations, and Karal can... err on the side of bringing up any complaints he might develop, he supposes, even if they feel unimportant, since whatever the correct balance is they'll get to it faster by having Leareth confirm that things are unimportant than by missing something that isn't.  (Does that sound right?  He could also just not mention anything until he thinks it's an important problem, but he's guessing that will result in Nayoki complaining on his behalf and plausibly in Leareth thinking she's right, so it seems better to skip that part.)  Today he's actively happy with most things they're doing - he doesn't expect most days to be like this, and that will also be fine, but it's nice that this one is.  (He's also pretty obviously just in an unusually good mood regardless of what they're doing.)

He's rather excited about combat magic.  Feeling Leareth quickly and skillfully do incredibly complicated and obviously useful things is one of his favorite new experiences, and sparring will probably make it even better.  Magic in general is lovely.  (And maybe he'll learn something from watching, although he knows that's not the point.)

(Leareth would indeed prefer a few iterations of Karal erring on the side of bringing up things that they decide aren't important, and if both of them conclude this is tedious, Karal can just successively increase his threshold for counting something as important enough.) 

Combat magic! Leareth is being careful about how much power he throws around, since he wants to save lots of energy for both sparring and for not being exhausted when they later do a tundra walk; he's focusing on speed of casting, and he's very, very fast.

...Slower than he used to be or should be, on the more complex techniques like paralysis-spells, which is a lot of the nonlethal self-defense in his repertoire. It won't help to be upset about this, and Leareth mostly isn't. It's taking some amount of ongoing gentle reframing-the-situation to himself to avoid it. 

After a candlemark or so of practice, he at least feels pretty calibrated on his current capabilities, if not entirely happy with where things are. And also ready for a short break, which he's inclined to use walking around the facility to see if anyone is available for sparring, since he didn't think to make plans in advance and cannot actually just Mindspeak all the obvious candidates. 

It still feels amazingly fast and skillful to Karal, of course - he wonders if it's just that most trained mages would feel that way to him, but he suspects not.  It's... he usually feels like he can tell, when he sees someone very good at some skill he doesn't himself have, whether he could have it if he had spent his life on that instead.  Some things feel too alien to have this intuition about, but magic isn't one of them.  And his intuition about magic is that if he had spent his life on it, he could have been very good - could have been the sort of person who ended up here on his own merits, maybe - but he could not be on Leareth's level, and very likely nobody alive could.

Of course "be better than anyone else alive" is not remotely the bar Leareth is aiming for here, nor should he, so this opinion of Karal's is not very relevant and he doesn't try to bring it to Leareth's attention.  He does, maybe more helpfully, think that this still seems much better, and likely to result in getting his full abilities back faster, than being thirteen.  (He briefly wonders how upset and frustrated Leareth usually ends up, when being thirteen.  It seems like it would be awful - and if Karal's emotional reactions were unpleasant for Leareth, a teenage boy's ones are probably much worse.  Not that any of that is the most upsetting aspect of the situation...  But it's not what happened, this time, and he can be glad of that and stop thinking about it without trying to minimize what an awful thing it is, since thinking about it is not helping anything.)

Also he very much thinks they should at some point try sparring with both of them actively doing things.  Not yet - he should get a better feeling for what Leareth can do on his own, and likely the reverse, and they should practice coordinating in easier conditions - but he thinks it will be both a useful skill and a deeply satisfying experience.

In the meantime, yes, they should go look for a sparring-partner.  ...His first thought is that Leareth would presumably know better than him who might be good for this and where they could be found, but that's not true - Leareth-now doesn't know most of these people either, does he.  Well, then, he'll head to the common area and see if anyone there is interested or knows where else to ask.  (Or Leareth can do the walking around and talking to people, of course, if he likes - but Karal's impression has been that he doesn't particularly, and it seems sensible to default to having Karal do this sort of simple thing, given that most of their time will for obvious reasons be spent with Leareth in control.)

And he'll practice putting his thoughts outside of Leareth's shields, in case anyone's routinely reading passersby and might be interested in sparring.  (His instinct is to put all his thoughts out, but he only does this once he's done thinking about Leareth being thirteen.  Remembers a moment later that everyone here is cleared to know about that anyway, but it's still useful to maintain the habit of considering whether he's thinking about something it's a bad idea to broadcast.  He doesn't like it, but that's beside the point-- or, no, he said he would flag probably-unimportant things he doesn't like. Well, here's one of them.)