Annisa has no idea how to relate to this information. She's sort of leaning towards treating it as...this god's Bible? You gotta know your god's Bible. Ideally by heart. So she'll be very attentive.

"The gods wanted him dead. They - made me Their pawn, when I was human. Twisted my entire life around it. I was destined to die fighting Leareth. They made me the only person in the world powerful enough to defeat him - or, well, supposedly." A crooked smile. "He's...very good at what he does. I'm still not sure I could ever have managed it." 

Ideally one would write the Bible down but there are no writing materials here. She'll just try to throw a lot of mnemonic techniques at it.

"And....it's a really long story, but we spent twenty years sharing a magical Foresight lucid dream where we could talk to each other. He was my enemy at the start. By the end, he....was my friend. And then - something happened. People died. We - thought it could have been him, that he had been lying all along, that he was betraying us..." 

Vanyel closes his eyes. 

"It wasn't him. It was two of the gods, trying to...set up exactly the right series of events that would end in him dying. Forever, this time." 

Annisa APPROVES of how her god seems to think people should not die forever. 

People shouldn't die forever. 

"The Star-Eyed Goddess...turned one of our allies to Her side. He's the one who tried to destroy the entire city just to kill Leareth, after he'd disabled his immortality magic. I...stopped him. The method of stopping him was, er, how...this...happened." Vague handwavy gesture at himself, the forest, all of it. 

Annisa thinks Bibles go into more detail than this but she's mentally taking it down faithfully anyway. 

"Anyway. So now he's alive but incapacitated in Haven, which is - apparently also where your teammates are? Meaning I can't see anything and it's starting to scare me. And also most of our government is up north arguably still fighting a war which should never have happened in the first place. Or dead. Way too many people are dead and I - I wasn't, I couldn't -" 

He shrugs, helplessly. "I'm....sorry to complain to you about my problems. That's not very fair of me." 

"Allies are supposed to know about each others' problems. Do you want problem-solving or do you just want someone to listen."

That is such a helpful thing for her to try to offer, and the way she's putting it, and framing it in her mind, is...not familiar, exactly, but it reminds Vanyel of something. Of Leareth, a tiny bit. Of Stef, slightly moreso, though in a weird sideways way. 

Stef. 

I'm sorry, ashke. I never meant it to end this way. 

"...I want to figure this out, but, er, we don't need to be in a rush for that. Time works differently here. And - er, I think that if you're going to have helpful advice, you probably need to know a lot more context, but I honestly don't know where to start." 

"What....are gods. Magically, I mean. Are they....sentient mana-consuming entities."

Vanyel frowns, then sighs and sits down cross-legged on the carpet of leaves. 

"I have a feeling I'm not quite following everything you mean by that. They're - intelligent, yes, arguably a lot moreso than people, but...not in the same way. They - need resources, to act in the world? I don't think exactly in a way where it makes sense to say they eat mage-energies, though. And I sort of suspect you don't mean mage-energies the way I know them. Can you - tell me more about what 'mana' is and how it works, in your world?" 

"Mana is present in people and animals and living things and things that were once living, but only a little bit of it; wizards are unusual in that they can hold and generate through effort quite a lot of it. Mals are creatures that eat mana. There used to be an ecosystem of them - occasional big dangerous ones, but mostly little harmless ones you just had to look out for - but people kept breeding new ones and...things broke down. Now most mals feed on wizards and they're very dangerous to young wizards, ones between the age when their mana starts coming in and the age when they learn how to use it. If we have any gods they're usually thought of as different things from big sentient insubstantial maleficaria but I don't know how to think about - do people have souls, is that how you found me?"

"Er, yes, people have souls. Which god has remit over a person's soul is...complicated? But you died in Haven, or close enough, and the Shadowgod didn't contest me for you, They seem kind of busy right now." 

Shiver. "Do all the gods give afterlives, or just you?"

"It's kind of complicated? Most of the other gods keep the dead souls, but - er, right now I'm putting a lot of effort into keeping you intact - er, souls don't have all the bits that make a person, usually most of the specific memories of your life would get lost or blurred. I can't do this forever and I can't, er, keep you...conscious and experiencing things, all the time? It's taking too much of my attention and I have a lot less of that than the big gods." 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHHAHAHAHAHAAAHA

that's not an afterlife, you shouldn't say you have an afterlife if you don't -

The boy gives her an anguished look. 

"I'm sorry! I think we can fix it! Leareth - had a plan - I just, I don't know all the components, after the initial stage, and I can't do it on my own - he put all sorts of safeguards in, which is smart, right, I could've come out wrong, but I need him to undo them before I can do anything outside Haven or try to get more resources. I...and he was going to get the power for it by killing ten million people for blood-magic and I obviously don't want to do that! So we need to figure out something else and I have to talk to him only he's still in really bad shape..." 

"Boston'll - have healing - killing ten million people to give all people an afterlife is a perfectly reasonable trade anyway -"

.....Wow. 

"You know," Vanyel says quietly, "I think you'll get along with him. And, hmm - he's the one person I'm confident I can speak with safely, without seriously messing up his mind, he knows what he's doing. I - can try to pull you into the conversation? And then you'll be able to relay messages directly to him, and he can talk to your team." 

"Sure." She's back to being extremely scared and sad, though.

"Possibly the best thing I'll be able to figure out is, er, sending you back in some sort of body? I can keep most of your memories intact for a little while and then if you have a physical form to tie your soul to, I think that shouldn't take ongoing effort. ....Er, I don't think I can give you a human body though. I - could make you a Companion, maybe? They, um, have horse bodies. Magical horse bodies. It's a long story." 

Why would that be easier than a human. "Uh, whatever...works, I guess? I...have a body, can you not use that one because it has a hole in it?"

"Probably that's the issue? I...think it's mostly that I don't have, er, any internal protocols - that's not quite the right word, sorry, trying to translate something from god-concepts - er, anyway, it seems like I don't obviously have the ability to repair damage from your body, um, having been dead for a bit. I might've missed some sort of window where it would've been possible to pull a miracle or something, seems like the Shadowgod did that with Shavri - er, a friend of mine, she was involved in the mess that just happened, she carried a message back from the Shadow-Lover to Leareth."

Yet another long story and he should really stop going off on digressions.

"But, um, Valdemar's government runs on a system where magical intelligent horses bond to people - setting it up was a one-off miracle that several gods were involved in, but I think the Shadowgod was most involved in the Companions. And the standard method just reuses human souls because that takes - fewer god-resources? The Groveborn are created souls, constructed from scratch, but the others aren't. ....Er, I can maybe figure out how to use that protocol but not automatically give you the mind control. Normally Companions have a sort of - internal block added - that makes it impossible for them to think about fighting the gods. But I don't want to do that to you because a lot of the other gods really need fighting, and having to break through the block is messy and painful." 

"Also Boston won't trust me or listen to me at all if I am obviously mind controlled!"