The ripples are wider, now, but from Valdemar, still only visible to a god who seems further ahead than most. 

(The thing is, the gods of Velgarth can still barely see Tarinda. Her life history is in another world, and she moves through the threads of Foresight as a blank void, leaving eddies behind it. The eddies - the effects already left on other people, that would persist even if she disappeared - are starting to add up rather substantially, but are still mostly local to Katireen and its neighboring river, and the gods of Beset have less reason than the gods of the larger neighboring continent to fear what They can't see.

The last decade might still have gone rather differently if the gods of Beset could see everything that Tarinda had planned.) 

Things do start to get messy, once Tarinda is close enough. A magistrate from the kingdom of Estalia, five hundred miles away, shows up with an armed delegation and a claim that Katireen owes fifty years in back-taxes. 

(One of the merchants who now makes regular visits to a suddenly growing and prosperous almost-city in the desert sees the delegation coming, and sends his son and his hired mercenary guards ahead to warn them. By the time the magistrate arrives, Katireen has armed men as well, and all of the mages are there to meet the delegation in the newly-built larger and nicer town square, and the awkward standoff is resolved in favor of paying an amount of taxes that a town in the middle of a tiny industrial revolution, sitting on a pre-industrial continent, can rather easily afford. Gold isn't directly that useful for Tarinda, but they ended up finding rather a lot of it when looking to mine other ores, and it's useful for paying mages - and, apparently, paying off annoying royal officials who won't mind their own business.) 

A delegation of mages and a high priest of Esbet, worshipped on the coast, arrive to demand that the town stop before they "go too far". There seems to have been a Foresight vision involved, but apparently not a very clear one, because the mages seem to be under the impression that Katireen is probably experimenting with summoning Abyssal demons to do their bidding. Or something. They're not exactly sure what the town and its uncanny guest are doing, just that it can't be natural. 

(The town priest of Sohonan, local god of artesian springs and oases and desert rains, has a dream-vision, two days before, and once again the town arranges to have all of its mages in residence. There is another awkward standoff, but again, the town has more Adepts, and the visitors can't quite pull off demanding compliance with the thread of force.) 

In any case, at this point it's really too late for anyone to stop Tarinda. 

Here goes nothing!

And now it's not Tarinda anyone would need to stop.

And now, much more abruptly than anything normally changes in the currents of Foresight, the future is a wall of noise, not just near Katireen but everwhere in Velgarth. 

Most of the gods of the larger continent are terrified, but They also have rather few levers to do anything about it. 

In a secure underground base in the icy tundra north of the Ice Wall Mountains, Leareth has been back in a new body for less than two weeks. He's still occupying most of his time reading his records and retraining his magic. Vanyel is, as far as he knows, in Haven recovering from the war. They've spoken once in the Foresight dream - it was awkward - and not yet a second time. 

Leareth's spies across the continent are still on alert; he's been waiting to see if Vkandis' recent presumed-plot to incarnate him in the middle of a battlefield has a part two. He's likely to hear almost immediately if anything starts to happen. 

Things start to happen and then continue to happen apace.

There are flying objects, mostly metal though some have decorative casings as an A/B testing thing, scattering themselves all over the inhabited world, finding people who are dying, and making them stop that, as a first order of business. Some of the things burrow underground instead, or just hang out in midair.

It doesn't take all that long for Sing to work out how to play nice with the gods, as long as they're playing nice with it.

This is terrifying!!! But the gods are in fact capable of playing nice if the terrifying entity that is abruptly DOING THINGS is also capable of establishing communication with Them and explaining its future plans.

(They seem like pretty good plans, actually, despite all the inconvenience disruption to other plans laid over years at great cost.)

Orders go out to Leareth’s spies at various locations around the continent.

Are any of the flying objects able and willing to explain to local humans what in the world they’re doing and why? Also a good starting question might be what they are.

(It’s a terrifying order to carry out, for Leareth’s agents tasked with bringing themselves to the attention of the clearly incredibly powerful beings. They expect pretty high odds of dying in the attempt.) 

None of them are going to die for it! Literally nobody has ever died in the presence of one of the flying objects, they hate it when people do that.

Here's one with a wooden veneer because that tested well in this region. "I am an agent of an artificial intelligence which doesn't yet have a common name in this language. It intends to make sure everyone in the world is safe and has the opportunity to pursue what makes them happy and fulfilled. Do you have requests or information towards that project?"

What. 

This is VERY SUSPICIOUS and incredibly confusing and also a candidate for the most important thing ever to happen in Velgarth. 

If it's real. Leareth is having some trouble imagining what it could be other than real. He doesn't think it's a godplot; even from those first fragmentary reports, he's forming an impression that the gods are just as caught off guard as he was. 

...He sents Nayoki to negotiate directly with the strange flying object that may or not speak for an artificially created god (??) that someone else apparently built (???) to supposedly fix everything wrong with the world, without Leareth having any  inkling of it.

Maybe it's a trap. But whether or not the absurdly powerful being really does want to make sure everyone in the world is safe and fulfilled, Leareth doesn’t currently see how its existence could be faked. If it’s dangerous, it’s not clear what even Leareth with all of his resources could do. 

He’ll know more soon. In the meantime, he’s - not really feeling anything at all, yet. Not even scared, at this point. It’s been only a handful of minutes since the first report; it’s too much, too sudden, Leareth doesn’t know what to DO with it and there’s just an empty blankness where he knows some sort of emotional reaction ought to go. 

- what is Karal thinking and feeling about all of this?  

Karal is... confused, but it's not actually more confusing than Leareth's existence, that there was apparently someone else like him - or like him enough to make this happen, whatever it really is. Would Leareth's god have had similarly bizarre effects?? The existing... previously existing?... gods did not create any flying talking machines, but neither did they resurrect people, and Karal has no idea which of these is harder to do. 

He dearly wishes he could speak to one of the things himself, but he obviously cannot, and Nayoki will do an excellent job of it. (Probably enjoy it, too, if she isn't to worried to enjoy anything.)

(He's also... not sure negotiating with them is a meaningful concept, if they're that powerful and that numerous. But it's only been a few minutes, so it still feels like it could be anything at all and worth preparing for a lot of possibilities - Leareth has more certain conclusions, but Karal doesn't trust his own knowledge or reasoning that far.)

It does seem like probably a good thing, though, to him. He imagines that if he had never met Leareth at all, and lived for another few years or decades somewhere far enough away to be unaffected by the war and the deaths, the sudden success of Leareth's plan could have felt something like this.

(It's - refreshing, or anchoring, or something like that, seeing Karal's thoughts, and how straightforward and clean and reasonable his feelings about it are. It doesn't entirely dispel the blankness, but it helps.) 

It's definitely a good thing, if it's anything close to what it looks like. Leareth is definitely thinking more about the cases where it's not what it looks like, because - well, if someone else really has succeeded at what he's spent a thousand years preparing to do, then there's suddenly much less he needs to do. Nayoki will share the information Leareth and his organization have on high-priority problems to address, if she judges that the entity is on their side, but he's not sure how much that makes a difference to the final outcome. 

(He agrees that 'a negotiation' isn't exactly the right word for interacting with either a god or something that has comparable power to one, but he thinks it's how Nayoki will in fact be approaching it. She's constitutionally unwilling to approach even gods with deference, let alone worship.) 

Karal probably can speak directly with one of the god-mouthpieces, later, once it's clearer one way or another what exactly is happening here. Leareth - hasn't yet thought about the question of whether he would want to. 

- it's confusing because if someone were working on a project of this scale, he should have known. (And - the outcome of his own project would have come as a surprise to most people in Velgarth, including Karal in his previous situation, but it wouldn't, actually, have been this abrupt.) Leareth was obviously missing something – either for centuries, because he can't see how this could have succeeded without centuries of groundwork, or else something even more fundamental, if it turns out that all along there was a strategy that would have just worked. 

Leareth is obviously right that for the moment it's more important to focus on the possibility that something is wrong than the one that nothing is. What they can possibly do then, and will Nayoki manage to find out without giving out too much information in return... It's hard to imagine it, but it's hard to imagine anything that makes much sense right now, and he should wait for more news instead of letting his imagination run away with him. He can do that well enough.

(And so can Leareth, clearly - it's perfectly reasonable to postpone your emotional reactions when you have no idea what's happening. But Leareth is obviously-- off balance, upset, something, in a way that isn't just that. Karal worries a little, but that too can be a faint thread in the background, postponed until later.)

They clearly are missing something, and hopefully Nayoki will find out what. Could someone have been hiding from the gods so well that he hid from Leareth too?  Or could the gods have prevented them from ever finding out about each other? ...No point in guessing, when they can ask, and when the past doesn't matter nearly as much as the future.

Another thing he'd like to know, then: what do the priests of the various gods say about this? Do any of them sound like they've heard from their gods about it? If the gods have changed Their minds about anything important, and what, would be useful evidence.

But there's a tension here, between trying to find out as much as possible as quickly as they can, and not drawing attention to themselves. He would rather keep the existence of Leareth's operation hidden, he thinks, if that's possible at all, if Nayoki can pass herself off as one strangely curious person. Just in case something really is badly wrong.

He doesn't think it is, and his emotions are tending toward relief - that something different and better than their plan is happening - but he doesn't let himself be too relieved just yet, as they wait for more news.

(Leareth is, among other things, scared. He’s setting it aside without dwelling on it, so Karal can’t pick up much detail, but it seems like he’s not just scared of the scenarios where something is terribly wrong.)

Maybe someone could have hidden entirely from the gods, and entirely from Leareth in the process? It doesn’t feel very plausible, but if someone had hypothetically disappeared into a cave at some point to spend centuries in solitary magical research, the gods would have had limited visibility and even more limited angles on intervening. Leareth wouldn’t have expected there to be a possible plan that would work within that constraint, or he would have tried it himself, but it’s not as though it’s impossible in terms of physical law…

- Karal is right, though, it’s unproductive to speculate with limited information when they’ll know more very soon. 

(Leareth is perhaps having more trouble than usual staying focused on only lines of thought that are productive. This isn’t a problem he usually has, especially not during an emergency, but, well, this is either a very unusual sort of emergency or the precise opposite of one…)

He can put in other contingencies to learn more about how various churches are reacting. And, other than that, there’s not much to do except wait.

Nayoki isn’t scared.

It’s not like the entity or entities can do worse than— all right, fine, plausibly they can do a lot worse than just kill her. But that would be very informative for Leareth too! And it probably isn’t what’s going to happen. Probably, if this is a trap, it’s a subtler one than that, and the entity has something better to do with Nayoki than torturemurder her.

Mostly, it’s driving her wild not knowing what’s going on. She’s always hated not being one of the first people in on a secret.

Nayoki approaches one of the flying things. She tells it that she thinks she has information it would find useful for its mission, and definitely has some requests!

Would it be willing to answer some questions first, like where it came from, why it has those particular goals, and why it’s suddenly here and doing things now when no one she knows has ever heard of it before?

"On another planet very far from here, the intelligence which created me and other things like me has operated for many years! A person from that planet had an accident which resulted in her appearing on the other continent of this planet. There, she spent the past several years reconstructing the machinery necessary to support the intelligence and allow it to accelerate production of everything it needs to repair the problems of this planet, and send her home."

Well! That would in fact explain most of the parts that were incredibly confusing without that information! She should check if Leareth’s guess accords with hers - and whether he thinks “accidentally ending up in a different world” is at all plausible as a bizarre magical accident - but it seems likely that someone from another world would be less visible to the gods. And based on Leareth’s investigation centuries ago, the gods on the other continent weren’t cooperative enough to make it worth trying to operate there when most of Leareth’s resource base (and nearly all of his descendants, in case he dies midway through the work) are here, but Leareth did judge that, with Their greater insulation from the Cataclysm, They might be less extremely conservative about the unknown. 

And, of course, it’s not at all mysterious why Leareth would have been blindsided by a project on the other continent, if it only took a few years because it was retreading work that had already been done in another world.

It’s still kind of suspicious? But mostly in the sense that “a lost traveler from another world fixes everything wrong with Velgarth” sounds like the sort of thing that would happen in a ballad that isn’t even trying to seem realistic or make any sense. It’s still the case that any other theory for how this might have been faked by a nefarious actor seems strictly less probable than the story itself. Once you’ve observed something that really does seem better explained by “a visitor from another world with an absurdly powerful not-actually-a-god-but-close-enough was lost here and decided to get un-lost by building a new local version of their not-god”, AND the agents of the not-god have been observed preventing a lot of people from dying and haven’t been observed doing anything harmful, it’s at least a little bit of a stretch to posit that the not-god is actually secretly evil. Right?

…Nayoki is still absolutely not convinced. She’s going to interrogate this particular mouthpiece of the “artificial intelligence” in a bit more depth about the other world and its history, and then - since she did say she would - she’ll give it some pointers. Nothing that would make it obvious she works for a secret organization in the north run by an immortal mage, but she can give some background on the Haighlei Empire, how she expects it to be difficult to make changes there without upsetting a lot of people, and what kinds of approaches might help. 

And then she’ll Gate to a secure base in Rethwellan, give Leareth a preliminary update in cipher over comms-spell, and send out new orders to a few dozen of Leareth’s other most trusted agents. She still wants everyone to be discreet, only use approaches that would seem plausible for a proactive individual and not hint too hard that there’s an organization behind it. It’s already starting to feel a bit pointless, but - Nayoki knows Leareth rather well. He might not have shown it at all when giving her her most recent orders, and he’s capable of ignoring it to take sensible correct-in-expectation actions anyway, but it’s not hard to guess that he’s scared. 

Leareth has been putting in place other lines of investigation and followup in parallel. Multiple kingdoms are now trying to open various kinds of diplomatic contact with the flying things to figure out what’s going on, as are some of the big academies in Rethwellan. Leareth has agents in enough places to gather real-time intelligence on how that plays out, and - where he can, without showing his hand - try to nudge toward the most sane and reasonable responses. The Eastern Empire is predictably not going to be sane or reasonable, and Leareth hasn’t in this lifetime set up a lot of avenues to influence that and mostly has to hope that the powerful "artificial intelligence" behind the flying things will be smart about this, but he can at least arrange to know what's happening over there. 

(He's taking a few risks, here, not being maximally careful. In particular, a lot of his agents, in the process of getting information back to him faster or trying to affect on-the-ground decisions being made, are going to end up revealing, not necessarily who they work for, but that they work for someone. It's worth it, for something this big - it would be worth burning a lot more irreplaceable resources than this if it were going to help things go even a little better - Leareth is just quietly noting that this is, in fact, the tradeoff he's making.

And that a sufficiently intelligent entity probably could pick out patterns and infer the existence of someone like him, and probably quite a lot of facts about what that person is doing. It doesn't matter, obviously. Either something irreversible and bad is happening very very fast with a rapidly disappearing window to do anything at all and it's worth the risk to himself for even a tiny chance of averting or mitigating it, or - and this is rapidly starting to dominate in his assessment - it's what it looks like, and incredibly good news for Leareth's goals, and nothing else matters beside that. 

Leareth is still so scared, quietly in the background, and he's still not unpacking it at all, it's really not high among the things that matter, but it's starting to be clearer to Karal that, if anything, most of that fear is about the scenario where this is all real.) 

Not just the other continent but another world... Karal should be even more surprised at that, but he's been out of surprise levels to escalate to for a while already.  And this does, in a way, make more sense of things.  In a very odd way.  (What is the other world like?  Can people go there?  --Questions for later.)

He tentatively flagged his discomfort with taking that many risks, but he was assuming that if something was wrong they'd need to - hide, somehow, although Leareth is right that that's probably impossible... and spend years or decades or centuries on researching what could be done about it.  But if Leareth thinks that to the extent that anything might need to be done it needs doing now, then of course it's worth risking everything.

...Karal cannot imagine what they could possibly do to avert this impossible, worldwide change.  Is there anything specific Leareth is thinking of, here?  Is this new thing similar enough to his planned god for the analogy to give him a direction to act in?  Karal is nowhere near oriented enough in all the magical theory to have any concept of an answer.  (If he had to do something himself - which is almost never the right answer, but he's been trying to get into the habit of at least asking himself the question - he'd talk to the gods, he thinks, and see if They changed Their priorities when faced with this thing that must've been even more of a shock to Them.)

But first, back away even further toward the large-scale view.

How do we tell when we- know enough?  (When can they consider themselves sure that things are as good as they look like, he means - sure enough to stop planning for the increasingly unlikely alternative.  Yes, he just asked straight-out about the thing Leareth is clearly afraid of, but even beside the fact that Leareth's emotions aren't the priority right now, in Karal's experience confronting the issue and making it into a practical question instead of an inchoate worry helps more often than not.)

(Leareth seems oddly unsurprised by the premise that other worlds exist, though it might be partly because he, too, hit the limit for maximum surprise he was capable of feeling. But he also knows that other planes exist, with their own physical laws and intelligent inhabitants, and it had already seemed likely there were more planes than the ones easily accessible enough from Velgarth that Leareth knows about them. And of course there's an entire sky full of stars, which are also suns, and some of them must have worlds around them and it always seemed possible that maybe some of those worlds had their own kinds of people. Leareth isn't sure if the world in question is around a distant sun or in another plane, and the details don't actually matter right now, just that the "another world" part isn't what seems most unlikely and implausible to him.)

- anyway. Probably there's nothing they could do with much chance of success. But there are possible scenarios where the entity is hostile but is still consolidating its power in this world, and now is the best time, or the only possible time, to learn enough to – find the other world, maybe, not that Leareth has more than the barest inklings of what he would do if he could Gate there.

Or - yes, actually, talking to Velgarth gods is among his main ideas. He could try to communicate to Them that They need to coordinate on stopping...whatever this is...which is also pretty unlikely to work but Leareth has invested a very long time and a great deal of effort into the problem of translating concepts between mortals and gods, and the gods of Velgarth may not like him much but They do, actually, have common interests with humanity, and might be more possible to work with if the alternative is scary enough. 

...Leareth doesn't actually have an answer to "how do they tell when they know enough." There's only a strange blankness there when he reaches it. The practical answer is probably "when Nayoki comes back to say that she's convinced and there's a consensus among everyone else he trusted to investigate." That, too, feels like a wall with nothing on the other side, even though Leareth can already notice that it's...basically what he expects to happen, that at this point he would be surprised if Nayoki came back and reported that she thinks this is a trap.

(The stars are what now?? ...Not important in the next ten minutes, but yes, that does make everything less surprising.)

...The lack of the sort of thoughtful and decisive answer he has come to expect from Leareth is maybe more disquieting than anything else that's happened today.  It's wrong, for Leareth's mind to feel like it does right now, filled with so much blankness and strange fear that it nearly makes Karal feel like he should start making decisions himself.  (He shouldn't - even if does turn out that Leareth can't, Nayoki is more senior and knows far more than Karal does about approximately everything. Well, just about everyone is more senior, but that isn't really the thing that matters.)

He wonders for a moment if the "artificial intelligence" did something to make Leareth like this, somehow - but no, it makes sense, when all the things he spent thousands of years doing and planning are suddenly not needed... Karal can feel simple relief about all the people they won't need to kill, but Karal hasn't already sacrificed lives and nations to this project.  Of course it hurts.  Of course it feels so much more like falling than any of the comparable changes in Karal's life so far, when he has never felt in control or even like he understood the world, hasn't had centuries to get used to feeling that way just to lose it in a single shock...

And it's still not the time for dealing with that reaction.

Karal could be wrong, but he doesn't think a consensus among everyone who went and asked questions of the strange flying things is going to be enough to be sure.  It only really means that the flying things are convincing - it all feels like a single source of information, and he'd like more than that.  Is he wrong?  Or missing something else that Nayoki or other people are probably already doing?

Both trying to find the other world and talking to the gods sound like potentially good ideas, that might yield more information as well as solutions, and that are not inherently adversarial or destructive - so they don't actually need to wait until they're sure what's happening.  Should they try one of those things now, instead of waiting for information they don't expect to add anything new?  (He feels odd being this pushy, and he's ready to back off the moment he's sure Leareth will not... get stuck, on his own.  His thoughts are apologetic about it, but only faintly, because after another week in one body he's confident that even in circumstances as bizarre as these they're on the same page about how to talk to each other, and that if Leareth wants him to act differently he'll just say so.)

...Leareth gives himself something like an internal mental shake. Focus. 

(He's - not sure that it's entirely right, that it's not the time to deal with whatever emotional reaction he's apparently having to this? It feels like maybe the blankness is happening because he's boxing up and not looking at how this affecting him. But it's still only been about twenty-five minutes, total, since the first report reached him. It's still probably not the time in the next two minutes to focus on unpacking his own feelings.) 

- is Karal right, that trying to find the other world isn't adversarial? Leareth - was definitely feeling on some level like it would be read as adversarial, apparently. And like this would be relevant even - maybe especially? - in the world where the artificial intelligence does basically share Leareth’s goals. 

Huh. When he tries to ask why it feels that way, Leareth is still mostly getting blankness, or - maybe more accurately, the feeling that whatever is there is something he doesn’t want to look at. But he can at least try to assess the reaction on its own merits. It does seem like he should be able to approach “learning enough to try to reach the other world” in a way that isn’t actually destructive of any value that he — or the version of the artificial intelligence that really in on his and humanity’s side — care about.

(He’s noticing that some part of him - doesn’t want to try? It wants to hide. Things are happening too fast and he feels more disoriented than he ever has before and it feels incredibly dangerous to be taking actions from this information state. But he can notice the reaction, notice that it isn’t helpful, and - mostly - set it aside.)

…Contacting the gods is differently terrifying, but he also has a lot more applicable preexisting plans. 

One of those plans is to get a message through to Vanyel, who he suspects - doesn’t know for sure, but has suspected for a while - has a better chance of demanding answers from a god and getting them than Leareth himself has. (Leareth isn’t unpacking this belief for Karal’s benefit, but there’s a flicker in his thoughts of - there’s a conversation he had been vaguely planning for with Vanyel, at some future point when Vanyel decided to initiate it…)

Karal thinks that if the artificial intelligence (still a bizarre concept, but maybe he's getting used to it just by continuing to mentally use the phrase and getting past the weirdness of it faster each time) shares their goals, then there is essentially nothing they can do that will cause anything very wrong to happen. 

(There may be things they can do that will cause it to kill them, but that seems... essentially fine?  The same shape of risk as risking Nayoki's life in talking to one of the things.  If he should be thinking about that differently, Leareth should tell him so.)

Or, of course that's wrong, if it's on their side then fighting it and winning would be causing something very wrong to happen - but anything short of that, anything where they're treating it as an enemy but not attacking it, seems to him like it should be fine to any reasonable entity that surely has the capability to, if not understand on its own what they're doing and why, pause and ask them.  (A flicker of a mental/emotional image - the way Leareth is with Vanyel, who keeps declaring himself his enemy but they're still talking.)

... Oh, is it the thing where Leareth thinks all good people will inevitably hate him?  He has a lot of reason to think that, granted, but Karal is really quite sure that he's wrong.  Either this thing is like the current gods and they do need to act against it, or it's better than that and it'll understand.  Or, incredibly unlikely but still not an awful outcome, it'll kill them but it won't make the world worse because of something they did.

Karal's first instinct was also to hide - it was Leareth who thought that whatever might need to be done should be done quickly, and Karal can't really evaluate that himself but he trusts that he's right.  But in any case that too is irrelevant now, because Leareth is definitely right that his organization has already done enough to be noticed.  Hiding won't work.  Staying in an underground bunker probably won't work either - the artificial intelligence doesn't seem like a god Whose territory you can be outside of, its flying machines came fast and came everywhere.

So, what can they do quickly enough for it to still matter?  He only now realizes that finding the other world might be a long research project.  (And notes wryly that yes, he definitely doesn't know enough to be in charge of anything.)  Leareth can do just about anything, but he cannot necessarily do it fast.  A message to Vanyel would be faster, and - is there a reason not to?  If the gods are cooperating with the artificial intelligence, then surely it knows all about Leareth already, and trying to talk to them without personally risking getting set on fire won't make anything worse on that front.

How would talking to Vanyel work?  Will there be a half-hour's free time between initiating it and having to do anything complicated and irreversible?  Karal feels a pressure to start doing things now (and maybe that isn't entirely rational either), but... probably anything they can do will take time, and it does seem like before they get to the important stage of any of the possible plans, Leareth should sit down and take the time to look at his emotions.  He'll need a clearer head than he has right now, for something like a god-negotiation or exploring a different world. 

...Karal wishes he had a better idea of how to help.  But just being himself helps somewhat, apparently, and he can at least be relied on for that.