"What, all of them?"

"They've never done anything helpful for me, far as I can tell. Jay, any idea where Van is?" 

"Covering some Web-work, I think, he's probably in the Web-focus room. Should we send someone to get him?" 

"I thought he was on vacation. What's he doing Web-work for? - Nevermind, here they come." 

Karis stops in the doorway. 

"The Son of the Sun was possessed directly by Vkandis?"

She sounds...awed. Also suspicious. 

"I mean, I have no way of verifying it, but his eyes glowed and his voice went all weird and he set me on fire."

After a long hesitation, Karis clears her throat. "Did he - did Vkandis - speak to you, say anything...?" 

"I forgot to record so I won't get exact words but it was something like 'leave, you are not from this world and don't belong here, darkness and ruin in the future, go away" and then he set me on fire even though I was going."

Karis goes perfectly still, not even breathing. 

The Heralds exchange confused, worried looks. 

"You...didn't say that part," Tantras says faintly. "That's - well, ominous." He turns to look at Savil. "Foresight, you think?" 

Savil scowls. "It could be like Moondance's visions and feelings he gets, I guess. He doesn't have the Gift of Foresight, but - well, according to him anyway, his Goddess sends warnings sometimes." 

"I really don't like the sound of that." 

"Yes, well, I really don't care! Damned meddling gods." 

The room falls silent. No one is making eye contact with Cam. 

"How well does foresight work in general? I'm not, like, planning on bringing darkness and ruin, I wish he'd been a little more specific so I could go 'okay, the secret Nieman Marcus cookie recipe will really wreck things here, censor that' or something."

More tense looks are exchanged. 

"Well, it's not perfectly reliable. Long-range Foresight can be pretty cryptic. And it can be averted - I mean, that's sort of the point of it, right, as a warning, so you know what you need to do to prevent the bad thing..." 

"Personally I don't feel that 'darkness and ruin' is ambiguous at all." 

Savil turns on the spot and glares at Tantras. "And what do you want us to do about it, huh? Not ask for his help to feed our starving people?" 

"I mean, I don't see how feeding starving people could possibly do it, but - maybe you're ecologically delicate and I shouldn't eradicate malarial mosquitoes? Maybe, uh, magic has some kind of bad interaction with some kinds of power plants or something? I can try to be conservative for the, uh, foreseeable future - is there anybody who has that more reliably on tap who might be able to shed further light -"

"Van's a Foreseer, right?" 

Tantras and Savil exchange a look. 

"I - suppose so. But he...doesn't get visions regularly." 

Jaysen is giving Savil and Tantras a confused, suspicious look. 

Savil flings up both hands, then lets them fall. 

"Look, I don't know what you want, here. We've got other Foreseers we can call on, but long-range Foreseers don't get visions on demand! And short-range Foresight is useless for this purpose."