"I'm not sure how that would count, but I'm willing to try whichever you'd like."

...He'll Mindspeak Mage-commander Ovada directly to find out which one he would find more useful to speak to. 

It is in fact compelling that Nayoki definitely knew what was going on when she died! Also, she's of course terrifying in her own right, but she's not quite as terrifying as Leareth. 

He comes over to join them. :How does the spell - work? How - oriented - is the person being spoken with, generally? ...Velgarth doesn't have afterlives, we have reason to believe that dead souls are not normally having experiences while dead. Select Artigas and his Companion reported that the Shadow-Lover, which is some kind of specialized-for-interacting-with-mortals avatar of a god we know less about, did seem to be trying to have conversations with Leareth's soul and may have intended to continuing doing so afterward, but also that Leareth's soul did not appear to remember most of his life, let alone all the recent events, and was totally unable to form any new memories of their interactions. If Nayoki is in a similar state, then it's going to be a very confusing conversation for, well, probably everyone but especially her.: 

"...I have no idea if the spell will work at all if she's not currently in the River of Souls nor a proper afterlife experiencing the passage of time. It's possible the spell itself is supportive - people as a rule do not remember their time in the River and I can speak with a soul still in it - but that might just be some more conventional form of amnesia affecting River journeys. It's up to you if you'd rather have it than a marginal Mass Cure Moderate Wounds."

...How badly does Joshel want a marginal Mass Cure Moderate Wounds for the border? 

Honestly not very badly! They have so many channels! They're going to have trouble sorting out the logistics to even use all of those channels before dawn! A lot of them are weaker than a Cure Moderate would be, if he's recalling correctly, but as far as they can tell that matters very little for anyone native to Velgarth. 

Then Ovada, for his part, is willing to take the risk that it won't work and try for Nayoki.

:How does it work to talk to her?: he thinks to clarify. :Is it only you who can, or will I be able to see and hear her?: 

"Only me, which is why I'll need a Tongues to do it from the wizard - what is your name -"

"Rushd."

"From our wizard Rushd here. Of course if you'd like to verify that I'm relaying honestly you can do that by local truth magic or by getting a Truthtelling casting from any of the Abadarans."

Asking Herald Joshel for a Truth Spell to confirm whether the cleric is being honest about this one specific conversation feels like precisely the wrong level of paranoia to be applying here. If Blai's information is roughly accurate, then an Abadaran cleric is not remotely likely to lie about what Nayoki said in a soul conversation. If they're not trusting Blai's information, then there are an awful lot of other things they should be paranoid about! The Heralds have in fact clearly decided to act on the basis that their other-world allies are trustworthy. Anyway, it's not like it would be that easy for them to, what, manipulate him into making decisions that serve their interests rather than being best for the organization? Nayoki isn't in a position to authorize new orders, he's hoping she'll have ideas but anything she brings up will be very thoroughly discussed before they would act on it. 

...Raad is apparently not going to be offended if they want to Truth Spell him about it, so, like, why not. :We can have Joshel confirm that with the Heralds' Truth Spell. Though I was mainly thinking about - planning what we want to ask her, so I can write you a script for which gaps we need to fill in for her.: 

"A sensible approach."

Joshel's impression is indeed that the Abadarans will not be offended by Truth Spells checks and he doesn't mind providing one even if it feels mildly silly. 

:Nayoki died on the...second? day? I want to say?: Joshel had already at that point been freed from his horrible entire day of casting Virtue nonstop in order to go to the border and...well, do things that were objectively also very unpleasant but at least they felt less futile. ...Huh. He supposes it wasn't, actually, not in the end. Four of five made it, and who knows, maybe that entire horrible day made a real difference. It certainly sounds like it was - very close, whether everyone made it or not. :- Anyway, I think that was right after the initial guess of a two-week timeline? So the update is that we got it in, what, eight days, and everyone else made it, and we're getting her and Leareth tomorrow?: 

:And I'll run my plan by her - that we want her first and Healer Sera, who's know him the longest...: 

A few minutes later, Ovada has a list of Key Facts About The Last Eight Days for Raad to convey to Nayoki when he's cast the spell, assuming it actually works. 

- They got the Gate-routing! Brightstar was in fact instrumental and did not sabotage their work in any way.

- They got FOURTEEN entire clerics in the first Gate (!!!) and the other four who were still alive when she died are going to be fine. 

- Five - it is five, right? - of the fourteen clerics are powerful enough to cast Raise Dead at all, though not all of them can get the people who died more-or-less instantly; it's been 10 days, they were getting awfully close to the time limit.

- They'll work very hard on getting Gentle Repose on everyone they can as soon as possible, and anyone they can't cover in time can be raised in Golarion, more slowly, at the same price and probably not worth trying to convey the details. 

- Yfandes is back, which also serves as proof-of-concept that Raise Dead definitely works in Velgarth. 

- The plan is to get Nayoki, Leareth, and at least one of the Healers tomorrow. The tentative plan is to get Nayoki and Sera first so they can Mindspeak at Leareth and hopefully orient him enough that he doesn't GATE OUT TO A RECORDS CACHE in the first half a second after being Raised. 

Questions for Nayoki, if she seems oriented enough to be up for answering them: 

- Only 5 of their own casualties died more recently than 10 days ago, but it seems plausible that the affected towns on the Valdemaran border continued to lose people for days, they were...a lot less prepared for a disaster of this scale...and some of those people, town mayors or experienced village Healers and such, might from Valdemar's perspective be worth a diamond to get back? Given that their organization won't be able to use the shorter-time-limit spells anyway once they clear their five people, is it reasonable to loan Valdemar some diamonds to allocate as they wish? 

- Adding a part 2: if it's worth it at all, should it even be a loan? It's deeply unclear when Valdemar would be able to pay it back, and it certainly seems plausible that Leareth would want to authorize just - directly allocating the diamonds toward the shared goal of "fewer people dying in refugee camps before spring" for which this would be helpful, but Ovad doesn't really feel comfortable making that call on his own. It does need to be made today, as soon as possible, so that the Heralds can scramble to find bodies that need to be tapped with a Gentle Repose. 

- Does she have any, any other advice on Raising Leareth without spooking him into Gating off somewhere! (There is, perhaps, a degree of organizational trauma about the most recent occasion of Leareth doing exactly that.) 

It's news to Joshel that Leareth's organization is apparently considering loaning or outright gifting more diamonds to Valdemar so they can Raise the mayors of some border towns!!!! He would absolutely never have asked for that. 

....It would help. It would really, really help. He knows they've lost Healers, and Healers are among the most likely people to survive a day or two until they exhausted their reserves and couldn't hold themselves together with self-Healing anymore. He's aware of three specific camps where certain deaths left a leadership vacuum that they're worried will cause problems with maintaining law and order under truly spectacularly awful circumstances. 

Cicerone writes all this down in his own language (Tongues won't make him read Valdemaran), confirms it, and then goes to the place of Nayoki's death to cast the spell.

Nayoki is really pretty sure that she died. 

She was expecting to be resurrected! That wouldn't be surprising!

She...thinks that she's still dead? Which makes it very confusing that something seems to be happening? 

Where - is she. 

"Hello, Nayoki, this is Cicerone Raad, a cleric of Abadar from Golarion. We expect to be able to Raise you tomorrow. Can you understand me?"

They can - she didn't think they could - 

- there's a hazy...something...it feels like not exactly a memory but - something that happened. Not this. Before. It's effortful to tug at it, in a way that isn't true of remembering that she died or that, at the time that she died, they were working on a Gate-routing to Golarion. 

"...I understand you," she says, unsure until she tries it whether forming an intention to speak will even work. "Where am I?" 

"You may be in the remit of the Shadow-Lover; but we were able to successfully Raise another Velgarth native today, so the spell does not fail automatically in such cases. Is there anything else you need to know before I read off the remarks Ovada prepared for me to relay?"

She...knew that, she thinks. How did she - did they know that Leareth - okay, her memories from before her death are not, in fact, perfectly clear, though it's entirely possible that she was just that foggy. But there's the strange not-memory, that is unclear in a completely different way, what does she - 

- it takes a moment to pinpoint who Ovada is but, yeah, she remembers him. Not...who she would have picked to leave in charge? Did she sign off on it? Gods, she doesn't remember, she - how many people did they lose, she's not sure she knew that either before she died though maybe it just failed to register because she was dying of progressive damage and very very tired - 

Focus. "No." No point asking questions until she's heard what he thinks she should know. 

Raad sets about reading everything on his piece of paper, translating as closely as Tongues allows.

That's all...very good news, she thinks, though it's hard to trust her sense of whether or not it's better news than she expected. ...It's definitely better than she expected that anyone survived even eight days, let alone everyone but her. Shavri must have pulled out all the stops, getting them a little past the one-week mark. She - thinks she made the right call, even leaving aside the selfish consideration that being alive was really unpleasant. 

Fourteen clerics. That feels - too abstract to engage with, from wherever she is and whatever this state is, but - they're going to Raise her. Tomorrow. And Leareth. 

...That was a good idea and a good question, though. She thinks she's pleased although it isn't very much like being pleased while alive. 

"Leareth will authorize sharing our diamond supply with Valdemar," she says. "As long as it does not delay Raising any of our key personnel but it sounds like it will not. Leave it to him to figure out balancing the favors exchanged, if their King is concerned about that." She dredges at fragmentary memory. "Avirot, Nosstha, Rameera, Talia, Shamal, those are the highest priorities after myself and Leareth. Please do not bring us back without immediate plans to heal the damage, we would be useless in that state," not to mention it was horrible to experience. 

What else...no, there is something important, something...what was she...

Leareth. 

Oh. Right. That. That was a thing. 

"You should not raise me before Leareth," she says firmly. And quickly, because sometimes Golarion spells don't last very long. "Have Vanyel there. You can Raise Sera first too, if that is not costly. ...The Shadow-Lover has been - putting us together, when They want to speak to Leareth. I have been telling him to expect resurrection, but without me there he is very disoriented, he has no memory of how he died or what happened to the alliance afterward and he assumes the worst. I am not sure the Shadow-Lover is trustworthy to - give him the ability to remember anything if real-world time passes without me there - they are really very bad at this, whatever you are doing is much better." She can think! It doesn't feel like being alive but it also doesn't feel like most of her is missing. "If I leave him alone there, I worry he would interpret a Raise Dead as hostile and fight it." 

Raad writes this all down dutifully. "We should be able to get all three of of you in the suggested order tomorrow," he tells her. "There is another minute and a half on this spell; is there anything else you would like to say?"

She wants to double check every single thing Ovada did in the last week but she can't say that, the poor man still has to keep doing it until tomorrow. Is there anything that might make the slightest practical difference to hear a day sooner, other than the answer to his really quite good question about Raising some of Valdemar's dead with the spells they can't use anyway? 

Diamonds. That has to be the priority now. Diamonds and currency to pay clerics in, whether money or - whatever else they want that Velgarth has and Golarion doesn't - that part is too hard to think about right now. 

"- I am not sure how many diamonds Ovada has procured at this point but if we are not already checking the markets in the Haighlei Empire we should be," she says. "It might be worth trying the other continent, we have no safe repeatable low cost way to reach it with our current magical capabilities but it is worth substantially more to Raise the dead, right, and I would expect there is some way to combine our magic and yours to make it safer or cheaper. If it is not obvious to them they can wait for Leareth, though, one day will make little difference." 

He writes all that down. "I've got that. Is there anything else?"

"....Thank you. For coming and helping our world."