"I'm sorry," Vanyel says again, pointlessly. "We - he made a lot of claims. First that he was immortal. He had proof of it which was fairly conclusive at the time - Taver believed it - one of the items was a conversation he'd had with Taver shortly after Valdemar was founded... He also claimed to be doing it to - try to make the world better. Which was, er, a lot harder to prove, obviously, and I didn't believe it at first. We kept talking. He taught me a lot of things including some magic. Seemed to be trying really hard to - cooperate, see if he could talk me into allying with him. I was still very suspicious of it when, um, all of this happened - but I'd been leaning toward wanting to hear more of what he had to say, including the parts he hadn't trusted me with so far..." 

Nobody speaks. Savil is staring at him with an impossible-to-read expression. 

:It's occurring to me: Yfandes sends, privately, to just Vanyel and Fazil, :that - it's possible if we tell them about Leareth's horrible making-a-god plan, we might cause other people to have the same problem with their Companions that Van and I did: 

: - right. I didn't think of that at all. It's - probably not that important, since he's doing other stuff now? And we can explain that Aroden became a god and that Leareth confirmed having originally intended something vaguely similar, would that be - vague enough do you think -:

:I think that'd be enough for it to make sense, sure, and hopefully they'll be curious about all the more recent crazy occurrences instead of that part: 

"Anyway," Vanyel says, "I was - doubtful that Leareth was actually about to invade, when I overheard your meeting about it. Partly because I knew he hadn't kidnapped me, partly because of the background of him trying to ally with me. But it seemed hard to explain that in a way you'd believe, especially via the crystal ball. And, er - the thing I'd been about to say earlier is that I told him, in one of our dreams, about being in another world, I hadn't thought there was much he could do about it even if he believed me, but I realized he could still take the fact of my absence as a reason to invade. So I attempted to spy on him too with the crystal ball, and succeeded, and it didn't look like he was planning an invasion. Although he did seem to be sending spies to Valdemar."

He pauses. No one is saying anything. 

Vanyel looks past Randi's shoulder, fixedly. "And - we had this opportunity, right, to - talk to him, in a place where I had the upper hand, and incidentally interrupt whatever he was up to in the north. That's why we decided to, er, kidnap him. We recruited the help of a very powerful cleric of Nethys, who's - a god of magic and knowledge, or something like that - and she used the same spell that the pharaoh did to get us here. She agreed to help right away, which was already weird, and, um, she said a lot really cryptic things - knowledge she had from Nethys–" helpless glance over, "–Fazil, can you explain that part?" 

"Nefreti Clepati is one of the most powerful people in our world. She does not answer to any government; she answers to her god, I guess, but her god is Nethys, god of magic, famously one of the weirdest and most hands-off, except that he drives his favored people insane with visions occasionally. We went to her because she could safely and straightforwardly take Leareth prisoner if she cared to, and we thought it was less likely to invite geopolitical complications in Golarion, asking her, compared to asking someone else that powerful where the situation could quickly get away from us. 

When we arrived at her temple to petition her aid, she'd already been expecting us, I think, somehow, and agreed to help immediately, saying - without having done any magic that could have let her know that - that Leareth was still asleep, which would make the kidnapping easier - he wouldn't have the opportunity to resist. She kidnapped him. That part went very smoothly. We'd arranged a room with no magic and no gravity - none of the pulling-force that means people walk on the ground rather than drift around like a dust mote - he was, as we'd intended, helpless...

She also said that, uh, that she knew Leareth, that she hadn't seen him in a long time, that she'd loved him when she was a child, that Abadar loved him, though he might not recognize him, and that the same stories repeat over and over across different words. The story of young men who believed themselves immortal, and were right, and lost everything along the way, and - time erodes even the mountains, she said -

- and she said that Leareth would refuse to speak to her, because he turned his back on all the gods and all their servants. And she left. It was fairly disconcerting."

None of the Heralds seem to have any idea how to respond. Katha looks quietly impressed at 'he was, as we'd intended, helpless'; everyone else seems mainly very unsettled. 

Which is so reasonable of them, really! Vanyel had half-forgotten how uncomfortable the interaction with Nefreti had been, and now he's remembering it very clearly. 

"Anyway. We took away Leareth's protective talismans - Nefreti wanted them to study, that was part of the deal we'd made - and talked to him a bit, and then had him come just to the edge of the room so Truth Spell would work - with everyone but a few people up on the surface, including Yfandes, in case he attacked me, but I figured I could take him in a one-on-one fight when he had no shielding artifacts - and I questioned him under the second-level version. He said he'd been sincere and telling the truth in all our conversations. And - some other things came up, this is the part where it gets even weirder... Fazil, can you explain Aroden?" 

"I mentioned a catastrophe that happened in our world eight thousand years ago. The details are mostly lost to history but it involved someone pulling a moon out of the sky, gods died, it sank the continent where it happened beneath the sea and the world was almost uninhabitable for a long time. There was one survivor, a powerful magic-user who had made himself immortal. He was named Aroden. He rebuilt civilization, and eventually left the empire he'd built to go learn more of magic elsewhere, and fought off various notorious ancient enemies, and lived - thousands of years. And after thousands of years of extraordinary deeds and magic research, he discovered a way that a person could become a god. He built an island in the Inner Sea, and at the center of it built a cathedral, and put all kinds of tests and magical traps on it, so that only people who met his criteria - we don't know exactly what they are - could pass it and become a god.

And then he did it himself. Ascended. He was widely worshipped, in the countries he'd founded and where he'd done his most famous and extraordinary works. It was prophecied that in the year 4606 - counted since he became a god, that's the calendar system in my part of the world - he'd return and usher in an Age of Glory. 

He was a lawful neutral god, like Abadar. By most accounts they were closely allied. Abadar took in most of the people from Aroden's realm in the afterlife, once -

- 4606 came and we don't know exactly what happened but people figure that the gods went to war. There were weeks of torrential rain and hurricane-force winds, everywhere in the world, and in some places the winds and rain never stopped, and a hole tore open between our plane and the Abyss and demons poured out, and cities were swallowed by earthquakes, and Aroden's clerics stopped getting miracles from him. He's dead. Prophecy - uh, the thing you call Foresight, the thing gods use to nudge the world - stopped working, for the gods as well as for us."

There are shocked looks around the room. 

"That's - wow," Randi says finally. "How long ago did this happen?" 

"Aroden died a century ago. It's 4707, right now, the 101st year of what people call the Age of Lost Omens."

Vanyel steels himself again. "And - the reason this is relevant is that, once we'd questioned Leareth to our satisfaction under Truth Spell while we had the upper hand and could shove him back into the no-magic room on a whim, we were talking about Nefreti's comments. Trying to figure out what she meant. We think Nethys can see - all the different worlds, including ours. We eventually figured she must know an - alternate version, I guess, of Leareth, local to Golarion. Since she had obviously never met our Leareth." 

:Fazil? I - wasn't actually tracking this part much, do you remember more details of what Leareth said about his past?: 

"We asked Leareth. About the prophecies. He said the part about - young men who thought they were immortal, who were, but didn't know what they'd pay for it - might be a description of his history. That he'd survived a calamity similar to Earthfall - more recent, though - Nefreti couldn't possibly have loved Leareth as a child but she could've loved Aroden, lots of people did and the timing works out, she'd have been eight or nine when he died I think...

- Abadar did love Aroden, insofar as you can apply terms like that to gods - so it made sense of why Nefreti claimed he'd love Leareth if he recognized him -

- and Leareth said that his plans, before we'd kidnapped him, were similar to Aroden's.

Nefreti could be lying. Leareth could be lying, though he'd just promised under Truth Spell he intended to cooperate with us. Or the - similarities - could fail to have many implications that are actually useful to reason from. But our best guess is that she saw the same story playing out, in your world, as did in ours, and that's - why she cooperated with interrupting it, maybe."

It seems to take the Heralds a while to absorb this. 

"So you're saying," Randi says finally, seeming to carefully choose each word, "that - you think Leareth is - our world's version - of Aroden, in your world. Who made himself a god. And then got murdered by the other gods." 

"Leareth thinks he isn't dead. He - we suspect that Aroden might've come back as a human, again, after the gods murdered him. If his immortality method is similar to Leareth's then it's possible. And some other things Nefreti said hinted at it - specifically, that he's in a country called Rahadoum, which had some sort of revolution and expelled all the churches and clerics a few years after Aroden died and Foresight stopped working. Leareth thinks - seems pretty sure, actually, I'm less sure - that his current plans are to invade Cheliax. Um. Fazil, can you explain Cheliax." 

"Cheliax was an empire in the Inner Sea region where Aroden was worshipped, the core seat of his faith in our world, and it was devastated when he died. In our world countries use the church for everything, there are far more of us than Heralds and there's a similar effect of - having been vouched for - Aroden's church did clean water and healing and criminal trials and communications and education. When it collapsed there was a civil war. It lasted a decade and it was - very bloody and very awful and when it ended, the rulers of Cheliax were people who had pledged themselves to the Lawful Evil god Asmodeus. In the ninety years since then they have worked very efficiently to make Cheliax an instrument of Lawful Evil. Almost every single person there is damned and goes to the evil afterlife, where they are tortured and enslaved for all eternity. Hell subsidizes standards of living in Cheliax, education, daycares, all of that stuff, and in exchange they get millions and millions of damned souls. - many of Cheliax's provinces and colonies broke away when this happened, but they're still a military power to be reckoned with even forgetting that Hell will intervene on their behalf, and no one's been able to do anything."

"Gods." 

"It certainly does seem that gods are the problem," Shavri says wryly. 

Vanyel takes a deep breath and lets it out. "Leareth - was at one point working on something similar to Aroden's plan - er, the part from thousands of years ago, of becoming a god, though Leareth might've wanted to just make one instead. That's less relevant now because he's - decided to switch tacks entirely and go try to meet his alternate self in Rahadoum so they can join forces and take back Cheliax from Hell." 

Randi is looking kind of upset! 

"I...see. And - you're really sure of him? That this is a good idea?" 

Vanyel lifts his hands and lets them fall. "I mean, no? Not completely? It's - you can't usually be completely certain in anything, right. But - we did get a lot of information, and - he took a lot of actions that were costly to him and appeared to be in good faith. And it mostly fits, even if it's bizarre. Also Golarion has people more powerful than Leareth in it, so if he does try to get up to anything, I'm more confident they can stop him. And as long as he's there, he's definitely not doing anything in Valdemar, right?" 

"I...suppose...that is an upside." 

Another long silence. 

"Fazil," Randi says finally, turning to him. "You met the man recently, under, er, different circumstances from Vanyel's. You may have a more objective sense of his character, or at least a different one. What do you think of him? Leaving aside the part about him maybe being the same person as Aroden somehow, though I understand that might be hard to disregard."