That was not the thing that was supposed to happen!!! That mortal was supposed to kill the terrible one!!! It might not have worked, but this was a truly bizarre way for it to end up not-working and is definitely the Shadowgod's fault specifically. ...Though that's not a complete answer, is it, She's coming to recognize more that even when there's a lot of nudging happening, it's still meaningful that mortals want their own things and try to get them. 

Well, they're definitely friends now however that happened, so probably they do not want to kill each other. Maybe they were hoping to work out some kind of compromise that wasn't so bad?

......So does that mean that that mortal - who is Shelyn's mortal now? that's so interesting! - is going to be very sad about it? 

It takes some slow and effortful reasoning-through, but - that seems like it would be bad for her mortal. Like, not just "and now the other not-Hers mortals in proximity to it want to stop letting it do any things", which made perfect sense to Her, but - bad for the network-of-family thing? Which they are part of together even though it's only the one mortal who is Hers and that doesn't usually happen. 

Yes, though he will be more sad about his missing soulgluefriend.

And - oh, yes, Shelyn's mortal is also quite close with the Star-Eyed's mortal! How about that. ...which makes it kind of additionally troubling to have set up the Star-Eyed's mortal to kill his family member's friend.

......The Star-Eyed has been reminded about some of the earlier steps in the setup for all of this and is doing some re-evaluation of certain costs that She miiiight not have understood well enough to weigh at the time. 

(It was importantly not Her work unilaterally! She didn't have nearly enough remit in Valdemar for that, the Shadowgod was on board even if in hindsight They were probably planning along to do something insane instead of the simple obvious 'point this mortal at the terrible not-mortal' plan. But it was in some sense Her idea. It was almost never the best path to accomplish anything whatsoever to separate soulgluefriends, but...the Star-Eyed did not, actually, at the time, know how to see the costs that don't appear blatantly in Foresight.) 

(The Star-Eyed is not thinking about this incredibly legibly, but isn't not letting Shelyn see it.) 

...oh no. That was really very miserable for the poor mortal! A lot of these plans seem to work through having a step of a mortal being very miserable! It's not a good feature in a plan! At least the soulgluefriend has been repackaged and they are together again!

It didn't look like– no, that isn't it, the thing is that the Star-Eyed Goddess does not actually have much direct visibility on whether a mortal is miserable, only the effect it has on - results. Some types of results are something She was, in any way at all, tracking as correlated with 'a thing that is bad for mortals happened here' but there was much less of that than one would usually expect if soulgluefriends are separated, the results were very effective, and...She supposes She didn't think about it in more detail than that. 

That seems like something where an apology might be owed as well, but it would be much more expensive to send a message to Shelyn's mortal. She was able to manage it a couple of times, but that was when it was reaching in that direction and in proximity to a Heartstone, She would not be able to do it anymore. 

Shelyn can do this when the mortal is next praying, if the Star-Eyed will front her some of this thing? ...do they have that thing here? If they don't Abdadar can probably finesse something.

The Star-Eyed did notice that the gods in the other world do something that seems different from here. She has - unused steering-power? - but that isn't straightforwardly something that can be traded, it's just the concrete reality of "are You already pulling hard enough to leave no remaining slack for additional Foresight nudges" - and She has, like, all of her Vales, which are a resource that mostly cashes out as anticipated future slack for steering, but She doesn't know – well, if Abadar can do something to...translate it...then She would be willing to spend Her resources on that. 

...She still doesn't know what to tell Her mortal, that would be true and also - fix it? Practicing the message with the others who are dead doesn't seem like it would help, because She thinks the stakes are almost entirely that this mortal is still alive and still in close proximity to Shelyn's mortal who tried very hard not to let the terrible one die and is sad that it happened anyway. 

Shelyn taps Abadar -

In six and a half months that Vale over there is going to receive a visitor who is going to attempt to give them a tip out of gratitude for clearing the area that the visitor will have settled by then. If the Star-Eyed will have this visitor not killed at all, instead have them peacefully received and the payment graciously accepted and the precedent for them to trade with their settled neighbors established, Abadar will call that good for the amount of intervention budget Shelyn wants to talk to Her cleric.

....There are actual reasons why the Vales don't normally welcome visitors but - sure. It's not the first exception made and this is a valuable result to get from it even if it's a weird indirect trade result. 

Does Shelyn, with Her better visibility of mortals and their relationships and also of apologies, think that it would be workable, in an apology, to tell Her mortal that She doesn't know if killing the terrible not-mortal soul was correct to aim for or not? Because that much is true. It seems probably still correct, on the general principle that now it can't murder huge numbers of other mortals to make a new god that would have messed up everything for Everyone, but - She can't actually see the long-term effects now, and already couldn't at the time, since the mortal that belongs to Iomedae showed up in the final setup and made everything extremely confusing. And then Her mortal can...decide whether to think it was an incorrect thing to do if that means that it can do a better apology and fix the problem with its friends? 

Shelyn thinks that will not much diminish the quality of the apology.

...And maybe She should tell Her mortal, who does still want to be Hers, that She does not have any specific mission for it right now - because that's also true, the closest is that She could tell it to go to one of the other Vales but that seems...worse...if the mortals it knows and cares about (who are still alive) are all in Valdemar. She thinks something is better if She does have a mission for it, maybe it's just that this mortal likes having missions from Her? But since She doesn't know, maybe the next best thing is to say that it will probably have more information than She does about what things are correct to do? 

That sounds good to Shelyn. It could conceivably help to let the mortal know specifically that his goddess is having trouble seeing, in case he's not clear on that feature of gods.

That makes sense. 

...How does she actually put souls in Nirvana. Sarenrae brought it up but did not provide instructions. 

Oh you just take the soul and then you go like this -

---

Seldan gets his own Remove Sickness (the first of five) about an hour later. 

And INSTANTLY REMEMBERS what he was forgetting this entire time! Which is that the Shadowgod told him to come back later for an explanation! And since then there've been three new clerics of different gods turning up, and Seldan would love to know if the Shadowgod has...plans...in light of that. That might be a way to resolve sooner rather than later whether there's incoming rescue from Golarion!

...Ugh, he shouldn't do it until after he's spent fifty minutes eating. (Right after is a perfectly good time, really, last time it made him mostly unaware of his body and that's going to be so welcome.) 

Hey Blai are you awake Blai Seldan is boooored. 

Yes. If they are going to play chess while Seldan is Remove Sickness'd and Blai is not there should probably be handicapping to account for that.

Ooh, chess! It's been more than a day since they played any mental chess and Seldan had forgotten to miss it or find it weird but it is. 

...Though first he does want to muse a bit where Blai can see it about talking to the Shadowgod, in case Blai produces thoughtful god-communication advice or productive worrying. He...miiiight have departed the last conversation with a lot of VERY ANGRY YELLING and it...seems unlikely that the Shadowgod would take this personally? But it was probably not entirely fair to be as pissed off as he was and isn't sure if that calls for an apology. 

Blai would not really expect a god to take that personally. Take it as disrespect to be punished, possibly, if they're more in the Asmodean stripe, and it's hard to suss out what their expectations should be for a god who doesn't have an alignment anybody knows about, but not personally. The new clerics seem likely to be coordinated somehow, and "a local god invited them" is a reasonable guess at a possible coordination mechanism, but it may or may not have been Shadowgod. (Why does the Shadowgod have to be called that, he's conjuring up a mental image of Zon-Kuthon every time.) Is Seldan at risk of having a god headache, sometimes people who get visions from gods back on Golarion have dreadful headaches afterwards. Would painblocking even work on one of those? He doesn't want Seldan to have a god headache.

Seldan...is guessing it would be like yesterday, where he did come back feeling worse but the worse-ness wasn't mostly a dreadful headache?  ...He doesn't see why painblocking wouldn't work on a headache just because a god did it, and if it turns out he does get one and painblocking doesn't work then he can ask a Healer to keep him asleep with Healing for a while, that's safer than drugs. But probably he's just going to come back sort of groggy and disoriented and feeling weird about physical embodiment. He doesn't think it's physically risky at all. 

...Honestly, 'Shadowgod' is kind of a placeholder name to begin with, backfilled from "Shadow-Lover" – they're not going to get everyone in Valdemar on board with changing that reference, but it's not like the larger god has an existing organized church that calls Them something. Maybe Blai and Seldan should get to personally come up with a cooler name! He could even check that the Shadow-Lover-god-of-name-to-be-determined is happy with it, if they can think of one in the next forty-seven minutes!