Well, it wouldn’t help anything - where “anything” includes Leareth’s feelings - to instead blame a man who’s been dead for eighteen hundred years. (And the gods genuinely aren’t to blame for this one. It was all the work of mortals.)

Leareth appreciates Karal, and sends quiet gratitude. He would also appreciate if Karal wants to tell at least some of the story. He might do a better job of it, even, he’s not so… Leareth doesn’t know the ending to that sentence, but he does suspect that he has trouble giving an objective recounting. “Because he doesn’t want to speak ill of the dead” isn’t quite an accurate gloss of why, but it’s not not that.

Honestly, Vanyel also appreciates Karal? It’s weird, having this third party to the conversation who he barely knows - and who he suspects knows an uncomfortable amount about him - but he’s not sure it would be any less uncomfortable if it were just him and Leareth, and there would definitely be more long awkward silences.

He ducks his head. I would be honored is way too overwrought to say out loud. “I would like to know,” he says instead. 

Karal doesn't think he is exactly objective either, but he will try.

"This was his first life, a very long time ago.  He's... learned to be much more careful, since then.  He barely remembers any of it.  But he was a child in a primitive and violent place, and left it, when first he possibly could.  He found a great school of magic run by a kind and talented man - Urtho was his name - learned there, saw it as a shining example of the way things should be.  And, being who he was, went back to his home country, to bring as much of that as he could to his own people - and then to everyone else, he thought.  He made things better, although not without paying costs Heralds might disapprove of - because in places like that you have to, if you want the changes to save the children starving this year and not just the ones a hundred years in the future."  (If that.  Children do still starve, he thinks, in Valdemar.)

"He gained influence there, and Urtho didn't approve - didn't think great mages should hold power or try to change the world.  I'm sure you can imagine just how much Leareth - his name was Ma'ar, then - disagreed with that."  A slight fond smile.

He's trying to just tell the story without focusing too much on Leareth's detailed thoughts or on worrying whether he's telling it right - Leareth will tell him, if he isn't, but it won't do the telling any good to fret over it.  But he does pay attention to whether Leareth feels any easier, to have some of the words out.  And, of course, to whether Leareth wants him to keep going.  He has no doubt that Vanyel does.

Leareth does seem to be - relaxing into it, with less flinching away from his pain. 

There's an urge to - "defend Urtho" isn't quite right, and in any case Leareth doesn't actually have anything contentful to say, because the details matter and all of them are lost to time. But he thinks Urtho was - trying to grasp for something real and important, even if his attempt to put words to it wasn't entirely coherent. And they must both have been missing so much - conceptual vocabulary, he supposes, the kind of thing that Herald Seldasen writes in his treatise on ethics. It might have made a very big difference if there had been anyone who could just help Urtho and Ma’ar talk to each other.

He nudges gently to take over. “I do think I made what anyone with a thorough grasp of history would see as serious diplomatic missteps, with Urtho and with the kingdom where he ran his Tower. It was predictable, I think, that my ambitions would have looked alarming to neighboring kingdoms. Urtho was - not skilled at communicating his objections to someone from a very different culture, and - I suppose we had less history to learn from, though if I had tried - if I had taken the time to learn more about other distant kingdoms before I tried to fix my own, I could have found those lessons somewhere. I was - in a hurry. It felt very urgent, when people were still starving every year.”

…And he’ll back off and let Karal continue, because probably a detailed failure analysis isn’t the best order to convey the broad strokes of it to Vanyel.

Vanyel bows his head. “…I can understand that, I think. It’s - hard not to be in a hurry when it feels like there might be something you can do now.”

He hesitates, biting his lip.

“…You burned a candle for Urtho on Sovvan, once,” he says softly. “I remember the name. I’m - I mean, obviously this doesn’t have a happy ending, or you wouldn’t have started out saying it was your greatest mistake…”

That is really not why it doesn't have a happy ending, Karal does not say, but he looks down for a moment.

He entirely agrees that Ma'ar made large and predictable mistakes, but he's not sure that Urtho was trying to grasp at something true-- no, he's being unfair.  If he pauses and imagines him as a man Ma'ar clearly admired rather than as the source of too much of Leareth's pain, he can see some of the the valuable ideas behind his principle.  Don't change or control too much when you might be wrong about the consequences, don't give anyone the impression you might be a threat to them when you don't mean to be, be careful...

... Not that Urtho lived up to any of those ideals very well.

He answers Leareth out loud, to give Vanyel both sides of their conversation.  "Yes, you - Ma'ar - did make mistakes, and ones you could have avoided by taking more time to understand the world.  It just... frustrates me, that Urtho acted as if he knew better, and - really didn't, in the end."

He gives Vanyel a grateful nod, and continues, after a moment.  "Ma'ar took over some of the neighboring regions - not really countries as anyone would call them.  They... Leareth doesn't remember what happened," what a pointless loss among all the other losses, "and I can't believe he would've attacked Urtho's country, why would he... But they ended up at war, somehow, over some awful misunderstanding.  Ma'ar was winning, and... Urtho refused to lose, and he was a very great mage.  ...A much greater mage than strategist.  He had incredibly destructive magical weapons, and only used them at the end, to destroy both his own Tower and his enemy, when he felt like he had no choice but to do everything he could to keep all this magic from falling into Ma'ar's hands."  It makes less sense the more he thinks about it - why would he do that, then, when everything was lost anyway, why not win when he clearly could have-- but people don't think that clearly, especially when they didn't want to fight a war in the first place, and are perhaps trying not to think about what they're doing or why they're doing it. 

"I... cannot believe he meant the destruction to be more than that." 

He watches Vanyel, to see if he understands.

Oh, there's no doubt that Urtho also made what historians would call enormous blunders, if history remembered any but the barest outlines of his life and actions. But he - couldn't meaningfully have done better, Leareth thinks? 

...There is probably a symmetrical argument that Ma'ar couldn't meaningfully have done better, and the only reason that his failure analysis focuses so heavily on his own mistakes is that those are the factors he can control, not the actions of other people, and also he remembers them slightly better. Or at all. It's not like he would have known what Urtho was thinking, even at the time, and of course the weapons and Urtho's choice to use them came as a complete surprise. 

He does think it makes sense that Urtho didn't use his weapons earlier? Wielding them on a battlefield would have entailed an enormous loss of life, almost certainly on both sides, whereas the Tower was almost fully evacuated by the time in went up in fiery destruction. (Leareth knows this, not from fragmentary memories of Ma'ar's life, but because he ran into populations of surviving evacuees later, and that made it into his notes.) Really, the most strategic use might have been as a threat – he's pretty sure Ma'ar would have backed down if he had reason to think he wasn't winning, and for that it would have been enough for Urtho to use a weapon on an unpopulated area and demonstrate that he could have used it on Predain's capital if he felt like it – but that kind of reasoning feels fundamentally alien to how Urtho thought. And Urtho didn't understand Ma'ar that well, and might have expected him to escalate in turn instead... In any case, it's not what happened. 

It takes a few seconds for it to fall into place, even though Vanyel was in fact aware that Leareth was born before the Cataclysm. He's not used to thinking of the Mage Wars as the kind of event that was caused by humans, instead of - some deeply inevitable trait of the world, like the weather. 

"Oh," he manages, very quietly. ".......I'm sorry. I– for what it's worth, I guess I get why it would feel like your biggest mistake, but it really sounds like it wasn't your fault?" 

If only because he knows Leareth, and even a much younger and more impatient Leareth wouldn't have done that. Honestly, even most of the possible people Leareth could have been, before he narrowed that down, wouldn't have knowingly let most of the continent be destroyed by a Cataclysm? It's not like most genuinely evil people would do that on purpose! It destroyed Ma'ar's entire kingdom too! 

Which is an incredibly characteristic thing for Vanyel to say, especially when he's - clearly operating from a place of trying to be kind and sensitive to Leareth's feelings - and yet Leareth did not predict it at all and has no idea what to say. The standard thing to say would be something like 'thank you for saying so' but he feels a lot more pointlessly upset than grateful. 

"It really wasn't."  Yes, Karal knows fault isn't the angle from which Leareth thinks about this, any more than about anything else.  But... it still matters, that it wasn't.

He wants to say more - and to argue with half the things Leareth is thinking, in his thoughts or out loud - but... that really isn't the point, right now.  The point is that Leareth should take their body and... be here, with Vanyel, and find some words that aren't arguing with him either.  Act, with another person who isn't inside his head, like his emotions and not just his results matter.

He doesn't need a lot of words, for that.  'Thank you' might still do, because it's not really about the emotion, it's about... telling Vanyel his opinion matters to Leareth, because Karal isn't sure he knows.  But mostly Leareth should... try to tell him what he feels, whatever it is.

Well, now Leareth is curious about Karal's arguments! Karal is right, though, now isn't the time to be having conversations in their head that leave Vanyel out entirely, and - probably it's also not the time to debate ethics even if they do it out loud and include Vanyel, for all that it's been the topic of so many of their past conversations. 

"I appreciate that," he says quietly, which has the virtue of being true even if he can't entirely truthfully say that he's thankful. "It - does not make it hurt less, to say - that is basically saying I could not have realistically prevented it, with what I knew at the time, with the person I was at the time - but it might be true." 

Vanyel nods. "I know. It's not better, if it wasn't really anyone's fault. ...Or if it was Urtho's fault. You - cared about him a lot, didn't you." 

Nod. "He is - probably the first person I ever met who I really admired? ...I was never inclined to care that much what people thought of me, except for strategic reasons, but - I do remember I wanted him to be proud of me." 

Wow. 

"I think he must have been," he says quietly. "Even if he was scared of you by the end." 

This is a very high density of talking about emotions, could they maybe possibly be done with that soon

Oh good.  Karal is so glad the two of them are having this conversation, and he appreciates Vanyel very much.  (So much has happened in these weeks that he barely remembers how much it used to hurt to have to think about him.)

He cannot help sending Leareth a bit of fond amusement.  Yes, all right, they can be done.  Although it's surprising that he has that little stamina for talking about his emotions, when he's so good at thinking about them on his own, at looking at them unflinchingly and finding ways to arrange them right.  But Karal supposes that for Leareth doing something on his own and doing it with other people are much more separate skills than they are for him.

He can take over, if that's what Leareth needs, and give Vanyel an apologetic look and a soft smile.  "I'm sorry about all the switching.  He's... not good at this, especially now that everything's so hard.  But he cares about you, and - it's good for him, to be able to really talk to you.  I'm..." and suddenly it's hard to say it, with all the death between them, when without noticing it he started talking about his own feelings and not Leareth's - but he does, because it's true despite everything else: "glad you're here."

They're very different skills! And when Leareth does engage in processing emotions with other people - Nayoki does make him do that sometimes - it's usually doing a very different thing than this? He's not actually sure what feels so different about it or why, but it does. 

Vanyel didn't miss that Leareth was - overwhelmed, or something - and he doesn't miss Karal's little hesitation. There's so much history between them, Leareth especially but Karal as well; it almost feels like a physical presence, hovering in the air. Everything is still complicated and awkward, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing Sing can fix, but - maybe it's okay. 

"...l'm glad he has you," he says. "It - must help, having someone," in his head who he can't get away from, "who cares about him - just being okay."

Like with him and Yfandes, maybe, but Leareth would definitely never have accepted being Chosen, and– ....actually Vanyel isn't going to finish that line of thought, something hurts to look at and he doesn't really feel like asking himself what. 

The shift in Vanyel's expression is subtle - Karal probably wouldn't have picked up on it on his own - but to Leareth it's blaringly obvious. Vanyel is deeply not okay and this isn't exactly new information but it's new that Leareth can justify prioritizing it as - something he cares about fixing... 

He's still unsure if there's anything he could say even in principle that would help and not risk making things actively worse. 

Everything is going to be complicated for a very long time, and all Sing can do is give them the time to untangle it.  Time without any new horrors making it worse or entirely destroying their chances at being all right with each other.  It's more than he ever thought he'd have.

Karal isn't sure what to say either.  Vanyel is avoiding something so hard that it's barely possible to see it's there, let alone what it is or what might make it worse.  But... it's usually better to take that risk, to try making a connection instead of keeping a distance.  Even when something goes wrong, at least there's something to hold on to, somewhere to start another conversation that might go better.

Sometimes it's important to know that someone tried, no matter how badly.

"I hope it does.  And... he will be, eventually."  It may take a long time, but Karal doesn't doubt the outcome, at this point.

And, with a touch of hesitation made deliberately obvious, because it's important to acknowledge that he doesn't have the right to ask this question and is doing it anyway:  "Do you think you will?"

(If Leareth thinks of something to say, he definitely should.  He knows more about... all of this, knows Vanyel better, he's obviously important to Vanyel in a way few people are.  But that almost makes it easier for Karal to start the conversation, when his words don't have the weight of all that history behind them.)

Why is this suddenly the conversation they're having it's a perfectly natural continuation when he's just spent the last few minutes being incredibly nosy about Leareth's feelings. It would - probably be rude, to take the easy way out and say he doesn't want to talk about it, when Leareth just clearly pushed himself through a lot of discomfort to talk about feelings. 

"...I don't know." He shrugs awkwardly, not quite meeting Karal's eyes. "I - there's something that happened to me, it was - a long time ago - but it's not. Really the kind of thing that gets better." 

...It's something that the god or gods (who arranged for Vanyel's implausibly powerful Gifts, and the original Foresight dream) did to Vanyel. Leareth is a lot more sure of that than he is about what the thing is. 

He's not sure if Vanyel is capable of speaking about it. It does seem plausible that it's easier for him to talk about it to Karal, a near-stranger who shares less of a complicated history with him. 

"I am sorry."  He leaves it there for a long moment. He doesn't know what it was, and isn't going to ask, but he has no doubt that it was awful. And is awful, still - permanent or ongoing damage of some sort, he has no idea how, but Vanyel isn't the sort of man who would still be like this after something that happened long ago and is over, no matter how terrible.

But - if it's something that's in some sense still happening, then Karal will be surprised if it truly cannot be fixed.  "I think... none of us have any idea what can and can't be made better, now."

Vanyel has to take a few deep breaths before he can manage to answer, but it’s still easier than he expected, somehow. The ice dream helps, with the sense of cold, resigned distance it brings from everything waiting for him out there in the real world, and some of the sense of equanimity he has in the Shadow-Lover’s realm is still lingering a little.

“I lost my lifebonded partner,” he hears himself say. “I - Leareth knows about it. Not about the lifebond but.” He shakes himself slightly. “I’ve. Spent most of the last twelve years not - wanting to be alive. There were things Valdemar needed me for and - now there aren’t anymore - but. I don’t know if Sing lets anyone die anymore.”

…Well that was mortifying, and Vanyel also feels a bit like he’s watching the scene from a hundred miles away, but at least no one can accuse him of not reciprocating in the intimate conversation about feelings they’re suddenly having.