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."

Vanyel…is maybe just not going to acknowledge that last part in any way. What are you supposed to say to that.

“I don’t think it’s the same at all,” he says. “Even if someone’s eventually going to die of old age in their bed, I - it’s not like that makes killing them not murder.”

"Valdemar does have the death penalty. Among those they merely exile, over half die; no small number of whom become bandits in Rethwellan and are executed by that government. Your soldiers kill in war. I'm just doing the equivalent of eating the bodies afterwards. It isn't pretty, but it's not the main problem."

“....Um.” All right, Vanyel doesn’t have any more of an idea how to respond to that and possibly ignoring it is the best route.

He’s tempted to say ‘well, they could just not become bandits’ but that feels like…the wrong answer, somehow, he isn’t sure why.

“Fine. I’m not convinced blood-magic isn’t much worse than just - killing soldiers in war - but even if we say it is, I still think most people don’t want to be murdered? And if you’re so immortal and smart, I don’t know why you haven’t found a better way to solve people starving than by murdering a lot of them.”

"I don't know what mortals could make of themselves without the gods in their way, but while the gods live they will not permit us to build the technologies and tools we'd need to end starvation. My long-term plans to fight the gods involve rearranging countries and building empires. If there is a clever way to rearrange countries and build empires without murdering a lot of people, it takes more cleverness than I have. I did try -"

"Well, I think I tried. My memories of myself from a thousand years earlier are admittedly vague. But I think I vaguely remember trying a couple of times and the gods stomping me flat. And it doesn't seem in character for myself to have become a Dark Lord without spending a couple of lifetimes trying the path of an Ethical Lord first. I admit, I don't actually remember it, at this point, but I'm sure I must have."

"Personally I'd buy that he just went Dark Lord straight out.  But if that didn't work after a couple of centuries, he would give the Ethical Lord thing a fair shot before going back Dark again."

…Is Mornelithe going to argue with that? Or acknowledge it at all? Apparently not! Vanyel scowls at him. “Is it true that in the north they call you ‘Falconsbane’? Because that kind of sounds like a Dark Lord sort of name.”

"Oh my gods do not get him started. He heard about the 'Demonsbane' thing and magebolted some poor falcon off a tree, then spent the next week bragging about how he had defeated it in glorious single combat, and made us change his name to 'Mornelithe Falconsbane' on all the documents and hired bards to -"

"And I, for one, would claim that this is evidence against my being truly evil. A truly evil man would call himself Soulmuncher. Per my general theme, 'falcons fear him' isn't really all that bad if you spend a few seconds thinking about it."

…Well, Vanyel cannot in fact argue with that, he had been about to say that it sounds sort of pathetic.

He takes a deep breath. “So, er, I think the problem here is that - most people who straight-up call themselves Dark Lords, and then say they’re doing it for the greater good, are lying? …I think, I haven’t exactly met a lot of Dark Lords, but - you’re obviously going to want to convince me not to kill you or die trying, you can say whatever you want, and if you’re really immortal then you must have a lot of practice at being convincing.” He folds his arms. “Words are cheap. Actions speak louder.”

"I do have a lot of practice, and I expected you'd ask that. But before I give my answer, I want you to appreciate the difficulty of what you're predictably asking of me, Vanyel Demonsbane. You want me to have spoken through my actions, in a way that you can verify right here and now, while I was covertly running an empire-building operation. I could tell you about the job benefits among my Dark Servants, but it would just be words. I could tell you how kingdoms I've meddled in are better-off for having their tariffs and guild monopolies repealed by somebody with the tiniest understanding of economics. It would be just words. You want it to be the case that I've already acted, in a way that's informative about my personality and what sort of person I am, in a way that you've already observed, even as I was trying to avoid coming to Haven's notice; you want that to already be the case, as of the time of your arriving at this pass carved of ice."

Vanyel glares at him. “I think if you want to invade my kingdom and you also want to convince me you’re right, that’s on you.”

"But if I am right, then convincing you of that is worth something to you; I can have already put you to a little inconvenience, over it, and it would in the end have been a favor to you."

The logic is…twisty but actually kind of holds together? Vanyel is pretty displeased about this fact. It seems like a bad idea to let himself be convinced by anything Mornelithe says to him, but…at the same time, surely it’s also wrong to decide from the start what he thinks and refuse to listen? He’s confused, and frustrated about it, and still has no idea what to actually say.

“Hmm,” he says noncommittally.

"And so, Vanyel, I now confess that I've been manipulating you for nearly your entire life.  Just so you can have had some experience of what sort of person I am, see.  Virtually everything inexplicable that has ever happened to you has been my doing.  Well, or the doing of the gods.  In some cases both.  I do apologize about the incident where your family priest seduced your own mother, that was a plan I'd meant to call off but the gods caused my messenger to end up marrying a Rethwellan countess instead.  And that whole plan with the Linneas family being brought down by being caught in an embarrassing public orgy with Abyssal tentacles was not supposed to happen until later, I had really thought Vedric Mavelan was a more reliable person than that.  But Karse sending that team of shaych priests to seduce you?  That fleeing team of sexy schoolteachers that formed the backbone of Haven's new educational system?  The erotic ritual you uncovered for expanding the Web?  You thought it was the work of the gods, but it was really me, Mornelithe!"

Vanyel stares at him.

That’s - for one man to have done all of those things, involving operations in multiple countries… Well, on the one hand it’s completely terrifying. If Mornelithe did that much preparation over that many years then there’s no way Vanyel can win here.

Or, of course, it could just be a lie, it’s not very meaningful that Mornelithe knows about those events. They were rather, well, dramatic. (Though on reflection, it kind of does feel like the kind of thing that would be…out of character…for the gods to engage in. He apparently hadn’t noticed that before.)

“And what kind of person were you trying to demonstrate being, exactly?" he says. "Taking down Linneas with a tentacle orgy isn’t exactly honorable. Do you just - enjoy manipulating people’s lives from a distance in ways you think are funny?”

"For the first three hundred years I knew this man, I would ask him, now and then, to consider what kind of impression he was making on people. And every time without fail, he would answer -"

"An honest one."

"Yes. That."

"But it is an honest one, and what it says is that I enjoy making people's lives more surreal, but always in ways intended to leave them ultimately better off.  Linneas could not actually be permitted to remain in control of the Heartstone buried far beneath their territory; had it not been drained, some, it would have been a resource for the Star-Eyed to use, or simply detonate.  The same holds true if you'd needed a Heartstone to expand your own Web; the Star-Eyed could then have destroyed Haven at will."

Vanyel frowns thoughtfully (and then tries to look less thoughtful, he doesn’t want Mournelithe to get the impression that he’s seriously listening to this, even if…well, he is kind of doing that.)

“And having the priest seduce my mother? What was that possibly meant to accomplish, aside from amusing you?”

"Getting your father to stop listening to priests as much, particularly that kind of priest; I had a replacement lined up with a more reasonable attitude towards shay'a'chern. I also pointed Melena at Jervis instead of at you, right after you returned from Haven. And arranged for you to run across Orthillin. If you line up the first dozen or so strange things that happened to you, by people and places, the first seven ones I was responsible for spell out M.O.R.NE.L.I.THE."

Vanyel finds himself counting on his fingers. Looks uncertain for a moment, and is about to raise his head in triumph when he realizes that no, actually, you definitely could describe the incident in question as about Randi rather than Kilchas.

He lifts his head and…has no idea what to say because he does not want Mornelithe to have the satisfaction of Vanyel being impressed.

“You have a juvenile sense of humor,” he manages after a moment, which isn’t even a very good comeback but he’s said it now.

"Oh, come on.  Is that all I get?  I worked for twenty years on this."

“I feel like you could have spent a lot of energy on helping people have better lives instead of scheming to make my life surreal in ways that would spell out your name.”

"Tried that sort of thing earlier in my life.  It all fades.  It all goes away.  The only thing that actually does matter is somehow breaking the hold that gods and Foresight have over Velgarth.  And the weapon I've chosen for that, this time... is trust."

“You’re going about that in a fascinating way,” Vanyel says dryly.

Pauses.

“All right, fine, I’m provisionally convinced that you’ve been messing with my life for twenty years in ways that - uh, mostly helped, or were meant to.” This feels like giving away a point he didn’t really want to hand Mornelithe; he has no idea where the man is about to go with it now. “Look, what are you trying to convince me of, here? To stand aside and let you march on Valdemar, or something less stupid than that?”

"No, it's essentially that.  Your country has stayed poor for a very long time, compared to the likes of Rethwellan or Baires.  Why fight to preserve that, if you're not fighting against a worse evil than already prevails in Valdemar?"

Vanyel scowls at him. “We’re better off than Hardorn, and it’s at least hard to judge for Karse. And Baires isn’t a fair comparison, they’re tiny and still have ten times the number of mages we do.”

"Yes, because your mages and even your Gifted get Chosen and then die before they have a replacement-number of children.  You'd think that would be easy to fix, with some sensible policy changes, and have a country with many Gifts and also highly reliable governance.  But then the other gods' pet countries would move against you, and Valdemar would cease to exist before its future iterations could become wealthy and complicated and noisy in Foresight.  You've already had a taste of that with the Karsite war, Vkandis shutting down your potential."

“What, are you claiming that’s the entire reason the war started? That doesn’t make any sense. Vkandis did an entire miracle with Queen Karis to end the war, are you claiming He just went and changed His mind?”

"Playing against the gods is not easy, Vanyel Demonsbane.  Karse moved against Valdemar when it became visible that Valdemar had a prosperous future destiny.  But the gods prioritize stopping me above all else, as a force of Progress.  Since I felt some responsibility for that prosperous future destiny that Vkandis was moving to abort, I changed my plans in a way predicated on Vkandis's moves and other observed divine moves and the Foresight of one of my minions, and became a threat that, Vkandis might imagine, Valdemar would need to be strong to resist.  I committed myself, if I saw no other divine moves based on Foresight, to conquer Valdemar with the sort of mere military force that an unruined country could successfully fight off.  I made that decision on your birthday, and Karis was empowered to stop the war within the day; the obvious timing to let you know it was me, later."

Vanyel makes a face. “Does it not make you insane to - try thinking that way against the gods? …I guess if you did go insane by trying to scheme against the gods, that might, er, explain a lot.”

"I agree it's an obvious possibility, but I'd put 85% probability that he's just like that and always has been."

"Any sufficiently advanced sanity will seem like insanity to the insane.  Of course, so will sufficiently advanced insanity."

Vanyel takes a deep breath.

“Right. So, your claim here is that you’re immortal with a centuries-long scheme to fight the gods. Who are keeping Valdemar poor. That you were justified in killing a couple of Herald-Mages and kidnapping a lot more, not that I can verify you only kidnapped them, because more people than that die anyway because Valdemar is poor. You knew I wasn’t going to take your word on any of this, so you - spent decades meddling in my life, just so that at this point you could be more convincing about - who you are and why you’re doing this. Your argument is that - it’s not worth defending Valdemar, my kingdom, that I’m sworn to serve, because in the end all I’m doing is defending the way things are, and you think that’s not good enough.

“And, you’re saying, you want me to stand aside.” He makes a face again. “I have no idea how you thought this was a plan that could work. Have you ever considered, yourself, that you might actually be insane?”

"Not really, no.  Or rather, I thought about that topic exactly long enough to be pretty sure there was no point in considering it further, which didn't take long."

"Hallucination doesn't actually create a detailed apparent external world indistinguishable from not hallucinating.  It's just that when your mind is damaged in a certain way, it's incapable of detecting what's actually a fairly blatant difference.  Similarly, insanity doesn't actually create a detailed introspective world that's impossible to distinguish from sanity.  If your mind isn't damaged, you can check for the place where those differences should exist, and see no such difference, and know you're sane."

"Or to put it more metaphorically:  When you're dreaming you don't know that you dream, but when you wake you know that you're awake.  A lot of people, when they're asleep, don't know when they're asleep and dreaming.  But that's not because there's no detectable difference, it's because they're asleep and therefore not looking in the internal directions they'd need to look to notice that they're asleep, and become lucid..."

"Oh fucking gods damned gold-plated Abyssal elephant shit."

"Can I turn Nyara into a fishgirl.  No I can't.  So this isn't even a normal lucid dream, not that it could be, it's a Foresight dream, and I don't have that Gift in this body - Nyara, if you secretly had Foresight this time around, and this is your dream, now would be a very good time to say so -"

"I don't."

"Great.  Just wonderful."

"Also, you spend twenty years doing WHAT to some innocent kid?  How exactly did you talk me into that?"

"I wouldn't have thought I'd have done that either!"

"Regardless.  Well.  It looks like that theory of how to evade Foresight is a complete bust."

"Time to toss all that right off the parapets."

"NEW PLAN."

Which is when Vanyel wakes up.