...Those sure are some constraints to try to have a conversation under but Seldan is game to attempt it. 

(Confirmation that the Valdemargod is in communication with all three of the Golarion gods known to have picked clerics in Velgarth! Another piece that seems relevant to them to know and non-obvious to the Shadow-Lover! The conversation is effortful enough that Seldasen is inclined to leave it for now and focus on whatever’s going on with Leareth.)

The afterlife planes are not specifically attached to Golarion! Golarion is one of many planets in the material universe and the other planes do not privilege it. Velgarth is weird but to Blai's knowledge there are probably zillions of inhabited planets worshiping Abadar et al (Iomedae probably not that many, considering) and Golarion might be the only one that has broken prophecy.

Sending works on the dead, though he's not actually sure if souls in the River or at their trials can receive them, there might be time dilation or unconsciousness involved. Scries can work too and you can sometimes land a Message through a scry.

"If he can think new thoughts, but not remember them, how will his consent remain after it is obtained, if it is?"

The Shadow-Lover does not seem to have found this problem obvious! She is doing the puzzling-over-it sort of pause again. 

SO dense! How in the world do gods every accomplish anything even slightly complicated that involves mortals– oh right, normally Foresight actually works for Them, except when it doesn't, and it sure does seem like the godbehaviour observed since Blai's arrival in Haven is...indicative of flailing. 

Maybe the Shadow-Lover isn't expecting it to stick and would want them to come back and handhold dead-Leareth through consenting to a resurrection once one is lined up? Or possibly the Shadow-Lover is doing something egregiously terrible in Her attempted conversation-opening (...huh, this isn't important but it's occurring to Seldan that he doesn't have the slightest idea if Leareth would see Her as a man or a woman) and can be given some very basic social skills advice that will solve the problem?  

"...There are state changes that are not memory," the Shadow-Lover says finally. "If We observe a state in which he will talk to Us, We may understand how to arrange it again." 

"So You are seeking not just his consent to resurrection, but his consent to speak to You?"

The Shadow-Lover, once this is parsed, is perhaps giving off the impression of confusion that this wasn't obvious. "Yes. We have wanted to speak to him for a very long time."

Another of the pauses, as though She managed to recognize that more explanation would be helpful but doesn't have it prepared yet.

"...If he is legible to Us, then his actions in the world will not blur Foresight for Us, and will be possible to cooperate," She adds finally. "It would be an advantage that the other gods do not have. It was one of the reasons why this was the best path. We did not expect it to be so difficult." 

On the one hand some of that logic seems reasonable! ...On the other hand, wow, it's...very something...that the Shadow-Lover saw an upside to Leareth dying temporarily and getting the opportunity to poke his soul for a while. Ugh. 

Well, maybe it's like when Blai was dead for a second and that really bothered Seldan but it was useful in the long run. Though Leareth is Rahadoumy. "He may not be interested in advantaging You, depending on what he believes Your goals are."

The Shadow-Lover seems very puzzled by that one!

"...He does not know what Our goals are," She says. "Because he will not speak to Us. In the plan We had before you came to this world, when We could see the end of that path, he would have cooperated." 

...Seldan is trying to remember exactly what context Leareth got on Blai's previous Shadow-Lover conversation. They did successfully send a message to him, right? They knew at that point that the Shadow-Lover was opposing the Star-Eyed Goddess and Vkandis, and the Shadow-Lover had wanted them to convey to Leareth specifically that the larger god was not blocking contact with Golarion and was in fact steering toward it? But that's hardly a complete accounting of the Valdemargod's goals, and Leareth might reasonably have been suspicious that it was a trick, and if he had time to realize what was happening, dying slowly and horribly could well have seemed like evidence that the Valdemargod had never really intended to try to cooperate. 

And also Seldan isn't entirely sure what it means that Leareth will remember the "core experiences" of his life, but if his current access to memories of being Seldasen is anything to go on, there isn't a ton of room to remember individual specific messages received. 

"He may have beliefs about what Your goals are," Blai tells the Shadow-Lover, "without having spoken to You. He may not believe Your statements about your goals, even if he hears them."

The Shadow-Lover seems to find that particularly effortful to make sense of and translate, and then She says, "There is information he should have," in a way that feels a lot more like a scripted Shadow-Lover line than a response to any genuine understanding of the problem.

There definitely seems to be some kind of conceptual gap here. 

Seldan kind of feels like it's going to take forever to resolve this - confusion, or disagreement, or some mix of both - and while it seems almost certainly worth doing, so far the Valdemargod does seem to do better with more information and clearer understanding, it might be...a long-term project. And possibly one best accomplished by the Good gods that the Valdemargod is apparently already talking to and learning things from. 

It feels like they'll learn a lot more a lot more quickly by just talking to Leareth? Possibly being held prisoner by a god he thinks might have murdered him, while unable to form any new memories to the contrary, is just an intractable situation for Leareth to react cooperatively to and the Shadow-Lover should stop expecting it, in which case they can communicate that and...probably...the Shadow-Lover will take feedback? The Valdemargod does seem capable of that at all! At worst they might learn something and then need to relay it to Joshel or Vanyel or Karis who can pray it over to their respective Golarion gods and have them try to explain to the Valdemargod what They're missing here? 

...Seldan does not feel entirely unconflicted about this. It...has a bit of the feeling that he thinks of as "being a situation one could work into an example of a very interesting and gnarly ethical dilemma to write an entire treatise about", except that he hasn't written that treatise and has not at all reasoned in advance through all of his ethical considerations around talking to the soul of one's dead ally while said ally is arguably-being-held-prisoner by a god who does not seem to have as much of a grasp of things like "mass murder is a bad thing" as one would prefer. 

If nothing else, perhaps Abadar will still be willing to emplace Leareth in Axis at a reduced rate on the assumption that he might take a resurrection after having some time to calm down while forming memories in an orderly fashion and maybe that would suit the Shadowgod fine. But talking to Leareth's soul first seems worthwhile.

"We'll try talking to him," Seldan says to the Shadow-Lover. "...I don't know if this actually works, but if You can put him in here with us and then - back off a bit and give us some space at the start - that might go better." 

It probably won't give them any meaningful privacy, and Seldan expects that if he asks it would turn out that the Shadow-Lover is fundamentally confused by the concept of a private conversation or something. But Leareth might find the scenario less hostile if it's a little less blatant that a god is poking him to try to figure out how he works. 

"We can do that," the Shadow-Lover says. 

There is nothing at all, and then there is...something. It's very unclear what the something is, it's...not, exactly, a place. Nothing is familiar. 

There's a reflex for unfamiliar places and things not making sense. He reaches for...something that proves not to be there. 

- confusion - 

Slow, effortfully: ...he doesn't have a body right now. That would be why he has no experience of being somewhere in particular, and why most of the senses he expects to have are missing, and why he can't shield himself. 

- fear - 

Panicking won't help. That's a reflex that is entirely a thought, so it completes, and...then what? 

Make sense of it. Orient. That's a mental process, too, it doesn't technically require mage-sight.

Does he remember...before...here...? 

He remembers a name. Urtho. He...can't quite remember if he had a name.

He remembers...a tower, and the stars, and something beautiful and important there, and a promise. That's important. Hold onto that.

He remembers that Urtho is dead. A horizon going up in fire. The shattered ruins of a world. He remembers the decision to walk away from something he had spent centuries building, knowing he had followed that path as far as it would go and it wasn't enough. He remembers - the math, a moment of blinding realization that the logic held, the numbers that came together, the final, awful, clarity of the answer. 

(It's difficult, at this point, because there are things he can remember but it's difficult to remember them at the same time, and so he remembers that answer and has to struggle to retrace what it was an answer to.) 

Nothing but hints and fragments and the sense of centuries having passed, and then - clearer. A conversation with a young dark-skinned woman, her eyes worried yet defiant. Dodging an explosion in a city somewhere in the south. Announcing the final calendar to a room of faces: we move in twenty years' time. Carving a passage through the northern mountains, shielding it to keep it hidden until the time came.

...Standing in the snow, the army ready to move, with a silver-haired silver-eyed man clothed as a Herald-Mage of Valdemar, alone, blocking their path. A stumble, because nothing about that image makes any sense whatsoever including the lack of any memory of the intervening twenty years– oh. It - didn't really happen - the conversation did but the scene was window-dressing. A dream. A shared, lucid Foresight dream. Talking to the Herald of Valdemar. Vanyel. That was his name. He still can't remember his own name. Another memory, same visuals, a different conversation. Another conversation. Half a dozen fragments of those conversations, interspersed by a snippet of surviving another godassassination. And then it gets very confusing. He remembers - taking a report? On a prisoner? A single fragment infused with a feeling of searing importance, a critical decision: let him go. Send him back to the Heralds. Cooperate. Whatever it takes. Another conversation with Herald Vanyel of Valdemar, but the place is wrong - a waterfall, a cave - and it's real, and the man is there, the prisoner he sent back, and he's swearing an oath, and everything about the memory screams that this is the most important thing that has happened in two thousand years and he - can't hold onto it properly to understand why... 

He remembers the man saving his life. There's some scenery that doesn't really matter, and some more details that do matter but the complicated pieces are too hard to make sense of. Something about a god. New information. Something that changed everything. ...He remembers not being immortal anymore but that wasn't it, there was something else, something that changed everything even more than that.

He remembers dying, alone. Nobody coming. Realizing he had misjudged something, but no sense of piecing together the specific mistake, and too late for it to matter.

It doesn't normally take nearly that long, when the Shadow-Lover gives a mortal soul the temporary substrate to have experiences, for something to cohere from it. It's normally almost immediate! Leareth's soul is very strange!

They've played this out quite a lot of times, though, and learned some things purely by trial and error, even if none of the setups resulted in Leareth communicating with Them, some were still worse than others. 

They wait for the shape of it to pull together, and only then place Leareth beside Blai and Seldan, and give him access to the additional substrate that imitates having a body's senses and ability to communicate. 

The Shadow-Lover doesn't actually "know" what people look like. Normally, even when a soul is truly dead and no longer linked to a mortal body, it's straightforward to feed in the residual self-image. (Blai looks like himself to Seldan, though there's something dreamlike about it, the clothes he's wearing don't really make sense and the details blur when he looks too close.) 

This particular soul, who doesn't currently remember his own name - he's had a lot of those, too - really does not have a single coherent self-image of what he's supposed to look like, or what it feels like to be in a body. The Shadow-Lover's presence recedes somewhat and there's - someone - in the not-exactly-a-room with them, and there's a dizzying blur of faces like overlapping afterimages. 

Something changed! There are...perceptions. Sensations. The place does not make any physical sense really but it is a place. 

There's a reflex for that. For surprising changes to his surroundings, and places he doesn't recognize, and not understanding what's happening. It...still draws on things that aren't there, and fails to complete. 

- disorientation - 

He knows the core of who he is,

- a vow on the stars - again and again no matter how long it takes -

and he knows that he was fighting the gods, and he remembers surviving and surviving, and not-surviving-but-coming-back-from, a number of god-attempts to destroy him. And then he remembers dying, and knowing that this time he wouldn't survive-to-go-back, and -

- he's dead. 

(Also some of the confusing sensations-and-perceptions include a perception of there being people nearby! But any instinctive-level reaction to that comes several steps ahead of the instinctive-level reflexes to orient and protect himself, which involve actions out of reach and so are failing to ever complete.) 

(slow, effortful) ...a god has him, then. 

Panicking still won't help, because there is almost literally no situation where it ever helps, but there - is not a lot of reasoning capacity available, to hold together the tower and the stars and the promise and knowing who he is, and then also hang onto the other important bits and pieces that he remembers (Urtho died, fighting gods, had a plan, Herald Vanyel, new information new information new information!!! and then he died, and a god has him), and to do anything less automatic than trying to react as he most naturally would to the situation and failing because none of his natural reactions work. 

It's very confusing! Normally when you give a soul a bit of substrate to have experiences, it 'wakes up' and remembers who it is - normally it does that right away - and if it has a body-substrate to "hear" and "speak" with then it can react to the Shadow-Lover communicating with it and respond in the most natural way! Normally that doesn't even take the ability to have any new thoughts, most souls can have entire conversations with only the echoes of thoughts they had as mortals. 

The overlapping distorted faces of dozens of lifetimes eventually cohere somewhat into - a child, maybe fourteen years old, who doesn't look like Leareth at all and does look confused and terrified. 

Oh boy. "......Leareth?"

The Shadow-Lover doesn't seem to be very good at this. 

...Leareth hasn't always gone by that name, Seldan thinks. Knows, actually, because at some point between the years 200 and 250 after founding (in the Valdemaran calendar, obviously the Rethwellani calendar counted differently) he was going by...fuck, what was he going by. Estappen of...Rie-something, maybe Riemar, Seldan is not sure he remembers it. 

They do, however, know Leareth's original birth name. It came up in the Companion gossip. 

"Kiyamvir Ma'ar?" he tries. And adds, just because he might as well: "We aren't going to hurt you." Will Leareth believe him just because he said that: absolutely not. But he might try to think about whether he believes them, it sounded like he should be capable of that with whatever the Shadow-Lover set up to make this conversation possible, and that's at least a fraction of a step toward engaging.