Leareth has been hanging back, not interacting too much with any of what’s happening. Interacting is mentally draining, when he’s working around the compulsion, and - Karal clearly has this part under control, for which Leareth is grateful, so he’s saving his energy.

…Is it a good time to have a conversation? He’s not sure, sleep would also be reasonable, but he does notice that their body feels a lot less foggy and headachy than before.

Karal was thinking they could use some of the quiet time to either talk or try mage-sight, yes!  (He was going to poke Leareth about it once the healing things were done with, since yes, there's no point in Leareth having to interact with those when everything's so unpleasant for him.)  They got a good amount of sleep, and will definitely want more in a while, but Karal is feeling pretty awake at the moment (suctioning will do that to you), and generally well enough to deal with something moderately effortful.

They could try to go over mage-sight first? It’s something that could be practically useful - both if there is some kind of unexpected danger, and just for understanding their surroundings better - and it feels like it might be reassuring to Karal? The downside is that even passive mage-sight might be exhausting in their current condition, given how it seems like the receptive Empathy use is. Which isn’t surprising, they were starting from a point of severe backlash and also being badly injured will leave less left over to recover from that.

The argument for having the other conversation first is mostly that it - feels like lying to someone who he’s asking a great deal of and whose life he was already responsible for disrupting and putting in danger, but Leareth knows Karal doesn’t especially think of it that way.

(The other conversation…might be more reassuring to Leareth than Karal knowing how to use mage-sight, but only if it goes well. He isn’t putting that forward in his thoughts; he doesn’t intend to ask Karal to prioritize Leareth feeling reassured over practicalities.)

Mm, mage-sight mostly also felt useful because it would be reassuring to Leareth - well, and just interesting for Karal, he's curious about magic and it felt like something he'd enjoy doing. 

Thinking about it, Karal is leaning toward having the conversation.  The fun task will be more fun when they have more energy, and the troubling one will be worse if put off - that's how these things usually go.  He definitely doesn't think Leareth is doing anything like lying to him - he's been very honest, if not very forthcoming - but having a more stable base for everything they do in the future should be better for them, and Leareth clearly doesn't feel stable without it.

(Karal still doesn't think anything he might find out will change his fundamental decisions about the situation, but it will probably change how he feels about it, and that does matter too.  Yes, better to have it done, then.)

Right.

….Leareth can mostly recall the conversation they had before their ill-fated choice to go to sleep back at the landholding. Karal knows that he’s immortal, via - doing this - and usually not via sharing. Karal knows that he sees himself as broadly opposed to the gods of Velgarth, or at least those of Them that have visibly done things. And that he had been planning to go north to resume his current work.

Everything since then is very foggy. What else, if anything, did come up such that Karal has more context than that as a starting point? 

Well.  The main change is that Karal has now seen that it's true that the gods oppose Leareth, for all that it seemed like a baffling claim for any mortal to be large enough for the gods to care this much.  ...Not that Leareth is mortal, and perhaps that's enough to make the difference, somehow.

He's seen that Leareth is very, very paranoid and focused on survival - and that he's right about it and couldn't have survived long otherwise.  And that he knows an amazing amount about basically everything, not that this provides very much context to any specific claims.

... Really most of what's happened is that Karal has been seeing more of Leareth's thoughts, including while he was probably too incapacitated to pretend, and so feels like he knows him better as a person.  Which seems like the most important thing to Karal, and - he thinks it'll let him make more sense of whatever Leareth tells him than he could otherwise?  He doesn't do well with confusing information that doesn't have personal context to anchor it and make it feel real.  When Leareth first told him about his large-scale goals and his conflict with the gods, it didn't feel like information he could do anything meaningful with, and now it might.

He seems like an honest and reasonable man, with a lot of ability to see what's important and do whatever is necessary for it, and with a strong sense of fairness even under incredibly difficult circumstances.  He has been surprisingly easy to share a body with, unfortunate survival instincts aside - maybe it's just that first he was letting Karal have it nearly all the time and then he stopped having much of a choice about it, but Karal suspects it's not.  He expects the worst of people, but given what his life has been like Karal can see why, and it makes it even more meaningful that he's still trying.

(Karal likes him, although this is not what Leareth asked about so it stays as a visible-but-background thought.)

…Leareth hadn’t explicitly realized to what extent he wasn’t just or even mostly asking for a list of facts Karal knows about him, so much as - where he stands with Karal, going into this conversation. It’s a more helpful answer than the question as he has framed it; he feels much less…reaching into a void…about it.

Where to go from there.

It's not going to be - the way he would have wanted to explain this, if he had gone north with Karal, retrieved his records, been oriented and in control of the situation. There are going to be a lot of followup questions where he doesn't know the answers, only that answers almost certainly exist, somewhere in his almost two thousand years of notes. 

- he doesn't have notes from the beginning, though, only the memories he's carried with him ever since. He can start there. 

In his first life, his name was Kiyamvir Ma'ar. (Presumably this won't mean anything to Karal. Even fewer places remember that name than remember Urtho.) 

Ma'ar was born in a clan of illiterate nomadic herders, somewhere in the plains of Predain - a poor and unstable kingdom. Urtho was a powerful mage who ran a great academy of magic in Tantara, its more prosperous neighbor.

(A fragment of actual memory in image form - a tower, rising to a spire taller than anything Karal has seen, the windows shining with mage-lights - a view from some high balcony of all the lights in the surrounding city spread out below, under the stars...) 

Ma'ar managed to leave the plains of Predain and travel to study there. He learned that things could be different and better than the Predain of his childhood. (This part isn't quite a visual memory, but the emotion of it is very strong, and tied to that glimpse of a tower, a city, the stars...) 

He grew up, and went back, and rose to power there as the King's advisor, and tried to fix Predain's problems.

He was - very impatient. People were starving every year, it felt so burningly urgent, and he had always been - willing to be ruthless - and of course he was very young, and less aware of where certain policies could end up leading. Predain executed convicted criminals for blood-magic to build their infrastructure faster. They used compulsions as a sort of oath of office to ensure that city guards and other authorities would follow the rules they were supposed to. 

It scared Urtho, whose philosophy was that magical power and political power shouldn't be combined. 

Predain and Tantara ended up at war. Leareth isn't sure exactly what led up to it. He's fairly sure he hadn't wanted it, but there are so many ways to end up at war anyway, and of course he wasn't the King of Predain, it wouldn't have been his final say. 

Ma'ar was winning the war. Ruthlessness helped, it turned out, more than just having more loyal mages. 

He doesn't know the details of how it ended. Maybe no one will ever know, if everyone involved was a casualty of it. But Urtho destroyed his own tower when Ma'ar's army drew near, and - Leareth thinks he deployed some kind of powerful magical weapon he must have built, without anyone's - certainly without Ma'ar's - knowledge, in a final attempt to stop him. 

Urtho almost certainly hadn't intended the Cataclysm. Ma'ar - almost certainly hadn't known that was even an outcome on the table. 

But it's what happened. Ma'ar was one of the survivors, waking up in a new body halfway across the world. 

It's - it was a wasteful tragedy and it was a long time ago and - it's also the biggest mistake he ever made, that he spent a very long time trying to learn from - but "not being ruthless in pursuit of what matters" wasn't the lesson he took away from it.

(It's what Urtho would have tried to teach him, he thinks.)

Oh, that's a good way to start.  A story of a life that makes a lot more sense to Karal than all the strangeness going on with Leareth now.  He can let himself feel it, instead of trying to hunt through it for facts and connections and sense.  (Implicit in this: he believes Leareth is telling him the truth.  It wouldn't make any emotional sense for him to lie here.)

It's easy to feel the yearning, not quite the same one Karal feels but close enough to resonate - the boy wanting so badly for something to be better, and finding it... It is wonderful, the great tower and the city both filled with lights, prosperity and safety and peace, a place where people could work on what was important to them instead of struggling to survive...

And Leareth wasn't satisfied with finding this better place and contributing to it, he wanted to give it to everyone.  That slots him into a clear space in Karal's view of the world - nobility the way they're supposed to be, people whose obvious role in life is to lead and who find that no matter where they started.  Not all of them are good men, or right - Karal knows that - but it makes many things clearer.  (He wonders if any of it is still true, if that is still the reason behind what Leareth is doing and still the right way to look at him, but he should finish the story first...)

What did Leareth do, then, and how...  Oh, gods.  Karal has no objection to ruthlessness - his own country is more Predain than Tantara, and he loves it and sees that one couldn't be kind in fixing all the wrongs in it.  But-- the blood magic, the compulsions-- Karse makes it so very obvious, where that can lead.  How easy it is, when you do that, to forget the difference between a law and a compulsion, between a criminal and a useful sacrifice.  (The Sunpriests would have given Karal to the fire.  And then used the power, if they used it at all, to keep up the pointless war, not to build roads.  It does make a difference, but not enough of one.)  He believes that Leareth wanted something better than that.  He doesn't know-- how hard he tried, how well he succeeded, what prices he considered acceptable.  He wonders if he would have listened to someone trying to warn him.

...Perhaps Leareth doesn't know those things either.  He knows little enough about the war, too - of course there was a war, that is just what happens unless people try very hard to prevent it, and Karal grieves for it but he's not surprised.

And then-- what, how, why--

He had known, vaguely, about the Cataclysm, but he had no idea that it was something people did, no idea it was possible for human magic to destroy the world--

Of course the gods oppose Leareth, when this is what They're afraid of - but it wasn't his fault, he hadn't wanted it to happen, nobody would and certainly not him, and surely not Urtho either...

... Oh.  That only makes it worse, doesn't it.  If people will do that when they aren't even trying - of course the gods want, not just Leareth trapped, but all people to be busy struggling to survive, to not have the peace and freedom that would let them work on what they really want.  If Urtho's tower, the one place closest to that ideal, was what nearly destroyed the world.

He doesn't know where to go from here.  Cannot bring himself to consider the question of whether They're right in this - but cannot just tell himself They must be, either.

(Karse does make it obvious, and so have - a lot of places, in the centuries since then. It was less obvious at the time, Leareth thinks, though of course it also speaks poorly of Ma'ar that he didn't ask the right questions, to notice the predictable-in-hindsight problems even without specific demonstrations.)

Leareth...thinks it took a long time, for him to recognize what Karal just now saw.

(Predain, he thinks, wasn't a deeply religious country. In some sense neither was Tantara, compared to Karse, but - in a different way. It had multiple peoples who trusted their own gods, whereas - and, again, this is a vague guess of events he mostly doesn't remember, based solely on the intuitions he ended up with - whereas Predain's people had not generally been in the habit of trusting any outside authority, including the gods, to care about them?)

- anyway. He tried things.

They mostly didn't work. Leareth doesn't think it makes sense to get into the history of the Eastern Empire right now, especially given how he remembers very little about it actually, but - he does think he would have tried, very hard, to recreate the vision he had seen in Tantara.

He did, eventually, conclude - more or less the same conclusion that Karal just arrived at.

(and this is the part where Leareth really does wish he had access to his records, before having to explain it) 

The gods of Velgarth weren't going to change. Leareth thinks he - had been patient and gathered enough information to be pretty sure of this. 

So the only way anything would ever change for the better was - if he made a new god, who - cared about the same things he did. 

???

what does that even... mean...

No, Leareth probably shouldn't answer that, Karal doesn't expect the answer to make any sense to him. 

Could Leareth possibly try telling him... some more things that make sense... first...?

Unless it's important for Leareth to tell Karal the entire outline of his plans before he's too exhausted to keep talking, in which case maybe it makes sense to do that, but... they will not be anything but bizarre claims suspended in the void, to Karal, until they manage to have a conversation that connects them to something he's capable of understanding and judging on his own.

(Right now he mostly feels like one or both of them have gone mad, and - he thinks this is probably not true, there's some explanation Leareth can give him that will make it make some sense, but it's not something he can just make himself believe on the level of his mind that matters, even if he tried.)

…Does Karal have any sense of what sort of things would…count…? 

(Leareth feels a little like his entire existence, right now, is suspended in a void. He doesn’t like it either. Normally he would be able to consult his records of the last thousand years, which presumably contain a lot of concrete details.)

The records would definitely help!

In the absence of those... What does Leareth actually remember, in his strange void-suspended existence?  (Which Karal believes him is very uncomfortable, but Leareth is the one who decided it was worthwhile to cause it to happen.)  How sure is he that his memories are even right?  What was he planning on doing, before... all this... happened, and how does he know it would have worked?

... It does, actually, seem uncomfortably plausible, that Leareth is - not lying, and not wrong about his life, but subtly mad in some way, probably caused by this strange and disorienting thing he apparently keeps doing to himself.  Karal has no idea how he could tell, if Leareth was a brilliant and otherwise reasonable mage with an irrational conviction that he could do something impossible.  (He's sorry for the thought, if that's false.  And also sorry if it's true.  And he hates this, and he's sure Leareth does too, but now that he's had the thought he can't see a good way to convince himself out of it.)

This is such a reasonable concern for Karal to have! 

Leareth - doesn't share that exact concern. He did the usual checks, when he tried to rebuild his core memories (the tower, the stars, the relentless never-walk-away desire for things to be better somehow.) But it - is, in fact, a downside of his immortality setup, that he comes back missing most of his episodic memory, and relies very heavily on being able to re-derive the locations of his records caches and check against an objective written record that he's still the person he was trying to be. And he can't do that right now, since they're in another world. 

...Inconveniently, a significant fraction of what he remembers, from his last lifetime - and the most legible memories, given how many of the other memories are just math - is conversations with Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron, who they call the Butcher in White in Karse. The conversations took place in a shared lucid Foresight dream.

(Leareth doesn't have the Gift of Foresight himself. Vanyel's entire existence and absurdly powerful Gifts are pretty clearly a godintervention, and given the initial non-lucid Foresight dream, probably one aimed at preventing Leareth from accomplishing his current plan, but - the shared part of the Foresight dream might be a separate intervention with separate goals?) 

They talked about ethics, in the abstract. They danced carefully around specifics. They were enemies, and Leareth had never wanted to indicate otherwise. 

Karal actually curls up a little in the bed and puts his hands over his face.  He does not have the emotional strength to think about-- the Butcher in White, of all people--  (What, why--  bizarre god-things, apparently, and he doesn't want more of those either but he clearly can't avoid it-- 

He is not really going to decide to stay here and try to have a normal life with no bizarre god-things in it, but he is, at the moment, so very tempted.)

--Not thinking about it, because the poor healer does not deserve to come in here and find him crying for no reason.  If it was Marian he might feel it was all right. 

Back to things that make sense, and that might help.

It's reassuring that Leareth thinks his concern is reasonable, and a relief that he has methods of dealing with it, even if they're inaccessible now.  Karal doesn't actually need to be sure about all of Leareth's claims right now, if Leareth doesn't want him to act on them until he's had the opportunity to check his records (which seems like a very reasonable thing to try to do, assuming they have any chance at all of managing it).

When Leareth says he did the usual checks, what does that mean?  How did he... wake up?... knowing what checks to make, what to look for and what it meant?  This is what Karal wants to know, not more... confusing dreams and confusing plans... he wants some sort of traceable connection between who Leareth was before and who he is now and who he intends to be if he can go back to his planned life - he wants to know how he even knew who he was or what to do, when he first appeared in Karal's head, and what, specifically, physically, he was planning on doing and how he expected it to go.  Can he please walk him through it like he was a confused ten-year-old who doesn't know any long words?  He near enough feels like it.  (It's clear from his thoughts, what he wants: something he can imagine doing, something that tells him what it would feel like, because that is most of how he thinks, and most of Leareth's thinking is too abstract to feel real on the right level.)

Leareth isn’t sure how to answer the first question, though it’s absolutely a reasonable one for Karal to ask. He just - knows? It’s on the level of intuition, impossible to put into words, but he can try to push across the feeling of it, of - knowing who is is, what shape he's supposed to be -

- it’s a very simple shape, in a way, folded around a promise he made to no one specific, witnessed only by the stars - never to die never to walk away not until everything was fixed - 

(The other question also has a simple concrete answer, but Leareth…isn’t going there just yet.)

Oh...

That makes perfect sense to Karal, the wordless feeling of it, the obvious force of the promise.  Yes, that would be enough to know who you are - to know everything that's truly important, even without memories and in an unfamiliar place.

And... that's who Leareth is - a clearer answer than Karal could have gotten any other way, he thinks.  Enough, certainly, to make him feel grounded in this conversation again.  Enough to make him believe that Leareth tried all the right things, tried to build a better country and only failed because the gods wouldn't let him succeed - and that he left enough resources for his new incarnation to find, somehow (and he doesn't want Karal to know how, which... hurts, a little, but is not unreasonable).  That there really is a single great project spanning multiple lifetimes pointed at this single goal.

It's not even that surprising, from this strange new angle, that a man like that would want to make a new god.  How else could you make sure everything was fixed forever?

Well.  He still wants to see Leareth's records, to make sure of the truth of all this, if they ever get that far.  But he does fundamentally believe him.  Was there more you needed me to know?

…There's one more important thing, and Leareth is faintly apologetic, because it is strange and confusing again. Leareth doesn't want to hide it, he just - didn’t want to throw it at him when Karal was begging for something that made sense to him. 

But it’s important; it’s maybe the most important piece for - whether Karal can actually choose to ally with Leareth and support Leareth’s goals.

He had a specific plan, for building a god. 

It involved invading Valdemar, and - unless he found some other option in the meantime - raising an empire with a large enough population that he could sacrifice ten million of its people for blood-power to create a new god.