The ranks of mages before him part, and from them comes forth a man half-feline, twisted like a Changeling but too perfect and beautiful for the changes to be anything but deliberate, self-controlled.  Gold-green slit-pupilled eyes, fanged canine teeth, a huge tawny golden mane; black robes over black armor, showing no skin but the head and hands as magecraft requires.  The man's fingers terminate in claws just a little too long and sharp-curved to be human fingernails cut that way.

A taint of blood-magic flows from him, bespeaking a mage of power, perhaps more powerful than Vanyel himself.

Behind the man and to his right follows a woman, likewise feline, with the same gold-green slitted pupils, and her ears pointed with tufts.  She, too, is wearing black armor, but carries a sword of powerful magic and radiates the power of an Adept.

"I know you," Vanyel's voice speaks inside the dream.  "They call you Mornelithe.  It means hatred-that-returns."

"As I know you," the feline man returns.  "They call you Vanyel Demonsbane.  It means bane-of-demons."  He gestures to the feline woman.  "We call her Nyara.  It means she-who-says 'Nyar'."

"Nyar."

Vanyel doesn’t deign to respond to that. "You were responsible for the ‘accidents’ that took out Kilchas and Sandra.” Dream-Vanyel’s voice is light, almost conversational; the anger is there, simmering in the background, but in the chill almost-peace of the ice and snow, he’s set it aside. “I wasn’t sure, at first, but the attempt you made on Savil made it obvious."

At least he was too late; at least Vanyel had caught on just in time, and their protections were sufficient. Which is the only reason Savil was able to Gate him here – to face a dark mage and his army, alone, but just in time.

(another flicker of confusion – who's Sandra? and Kilchas isn't dead...)

The feline man raises his eyebrows.  "Two deaths.  Around that many people die in your tiny country every day, usually children.  I could give three starving Valdemar children twelve gold coins and come out ahead.  Perhaps I did."

Dream-Vanyel stares back at him, his expression level and implacable. Now isn’t the time to let Mornelithe manipulate his emotions.

"The Karsite war too,” he says flatly. “All the sudden deaths on the border during the Karsite war. You killed them, didn’t you.” It’s not a question. 

"If by 'killed' you mean 'kidnapped them and their Companions, placed them under compulsions not to escape or communicate, and stored them in a prisoner camp inside Hardorn where it would divert the gods' attention away from my real base' then yes, I killed them."

(what???? confusion, sliding past, distant behind the cold resignation that the frozen wasteland brings)

Vanyel glares at him. He doesn’t trust the man, and Mornelithe has plenty of reason to make such a distracting and implausible claim regardless of its truth.

“If it so happens you can offer me an easy way to verify that,” he says lightly, “then I might consider believing you. I assume not, though. You know, I’m not surprised the gods oppose you. Whatever my feelings about Their actions in general, I’m with them on that.” 

"I don't suppose your intelligence service already knows about the mysterious disappearance of a number of Karsite mages and demon-summoners at around the same time?  That was also me.  I didn't want Vkandis to ruin Valdemar before I could conquer it."

“Also unverifiable,” Vanyel says flatly. “Really, I’d have thought it more likely you would try to recruit the Blackrobe demon-summoners.” He gestures at the army. “I’m sure they’d fit right in.” 

"Now hold on just a second.  Those are two completely different color schemes.  They are not the same styles just because they both have a black component."

"I do think there's a more substantive difference of prerequisite morals and regulated ethics, dear."

"Yes, but he's going to say that's unverifiable.  The color schemes are immediately visible."

Vanyel scowls. “If your 'regulated ethics' allow for murdering Herald-Mages, I’m not sure I care about any difference you see.” He glances over at ‘Nyara’. “Who is she, anyway, your military fashion expert?” 

"I am Nyara.  The nyarsayer.  She-who-says-nyar.  Nyar."

"I suppose you could say she's my wife, or my daughter, or, well..."

"I'm his 'It's complicated'."

“You realize that's incredibly weird, right," Vanyel says drily. "And doesn't exactly leave me reassured as to your moral judgement." 

It’s also besides the point; the army and the upcoming invasion are what he needs to focus on. 

He folds his arms. “I don’t expect your answer to be convincing to me, but – why? Why go to all this effort, why spend decades planning to invade our kingdom? What do you want?” 

The feline man speaks more soberly.  "Centuries of planning, over many lives.  You have to work subtly and to long time scales, if you want to oppose the gods; immortality is a necessity for it, not a luxury.  The name cold-determination-that-returns is not lightly taken."

"There are a very few countries in the world that are governed by a god that takes not kindly to intervention by the likes of Vkandis and the Star-Eyed.  Of those, Valdemar is poorest, and most likely to benefit on net from more sophisticated governance even after all the conflict I bring with me.  I need Valdemar as a base for my future operations, and while subversion would usually be cheaper for me than invasion, the Heralds do unfortunately make that impossible."

It’s…a more reasonable explanation than Vanyel had expected. It could hypothetically be convincing, if he were at all in the mood to be convinced. But, of course, he still has no reason to trust Mornelithe, and he had already decided before coming here what he had to do. 

“Whatever your reasons,” he says, levelly, “if you aren’t going to stand down, then we’re going to be enemies, and I’m going to stop you.”

Or at least do his best, and sacrifice his life in a fiery explosion that slags this pass and army to glass and ashes. Buying time for Valdemar's army to make it here from the border with Hardorn, which it turns out is the completely wrong location, because Mornelithe has been fooling him – and everyone – for far too long.

“I’m really not sure what else you expected," he adds. "I'm a Herald, and this is my kingdom, and I'm not going to stand aside." 

"I expected not much else, though I did try very hard.  The tools and pawns of gods, such as yourself, are hard to divert away; the gods Foresee the obvious tries, and set Their own repairs into motion against any progress I make.  Still, there are things that I resolved not to say to you, in any event They could Foresee, until now, at the true end of the invasion, set into motion by me in response to a Foreseen result of an intervention of the Star-Eyed, for the gods cannot so readily foresee the results of Foresight compounded on Their own Foresight."

"There are better lives that the people of Velgarth could be living, Vanyel Ashkevron, not just in Valdemar but everywhere.  There were technologies and sorceries invented before the Mage-Wars eighteen centuries ago, by which every peasant could lead better lives than this; the Eastern Empire has some of those even now - preserved by myself, actually - though the East lives under a repressive dictatorship that I could not undo with all my might even over centuries.  You should have seen some of those wonders; the delegation of the Eastern Empire that I introduced to visit Hardorn, also for purposes of confusing the gods and you, should have brought them with."

"The gods do not want Valdemar's people to have those wonders.  They do not want them to spread beyond the borders of the repressive, predictable, controllable Eastern Empire.  The gods would not let me make the Eastern Empire a freer, less predictable place.  They would not let me make countries outside the Eastern Empire to have better farms, better medicine, printing presses to produce books by the thousands, because that would have made those countries less predictable and controllable.  My people died mysterious deaths, mysteriously turned against those to whom they'd been loyal friends; such is the way of the gods."

"If you defeat me here, Valdemar's present government and poverty will be preserved, babies will go on being born and babies will go on dying, people will be largely hungry and often miserable and very few of them will know how to read or be able to afford books.  Very little will really, really change.  In a few more centuries, certain predictable forces - the ever-expanding Eastern Empire, to name a force you know of, and greater forces of which you know less - will wipe your country off the map.  You aren't fighting me, in this place, for a better world; you're fighting me as the hand of the gods to preserve a status quo where the sapient beings of Velgarth are easily predictable and doing nothing unfamiliar, nothing they find strange."

"If you join with me, here, today, it will be the only significant thing you've ever done in your life, the only significant choice you've ever made."

"It will be the only true act of hope, not just fighting against a slow decay, that you have ever done."

"That's my answer, and now I can only hope that all my defenses against the gods Foreseeing it, have proven true, and that this is not a choice they've selected and fortified you to refuse."

It’s certainly an impressive speech, Vanyel has to admit. If it were true, it might even be convincing.

“I don’t believe you,” he says coolly. “If that’s really what you want, why are you so quick to jump to murder and subterfuge? …Also, I have to say, I don’t know how using what must have been vast amounts of magic to make yourself into some kind of cat-Changecreature is related. Did you use blood-magic for that, too? I can sense it on you. Also doesn’t seem like something that a person who really wanted a better world would resort to.”

"We do execute certain kinds of criminal, and we do so by blood-magic. Not the painful sort." The leonine man sighs. "I won't claim that my long life hasn't changed my views. There's no such thing as choosing whether somebody lives or dies; one only chooses for them to die sooner. Death would be a grave crime, if I inflicted it on one not otherwise to die. Profiting from deaths that are inevitable... is something I've come to accept. I used blood-magic to carve this path, to hide the traces of node-magic. I didn't use blood-magic to make myself a catboy. That would be an ill use of a human life, unless they were really, really into it."