She appears above a bit of frozen wasteland. She falls, conscious but without making a peep, to the ground, and breaks a few more bones.
She lies there.
She appears above a bit of frozen wasteland. She falls, conscious but without making a peep, to the ground, and breaks a few more bones.
She lies there.
Nayoki puts a hand on Leareth's shoulder, briefly, and then stands up. "I can attempt a Gate there. You seem tired."
It takes Nayoki a lot longer to get the Gate up than it would Leareth; she has to find a sufficiently doorway-like intact shape amidst the rubble.
Eventually a Gate goes up.
Leareth steps through quickly, to minimize exposure in case any of the nearby Tayledras change their minds about the surrender and try to blast Nayoki's Gate.
He hates feeling like he's several steps behind, purely reacting, with hardly any semblance of a plan for the next steps after this.
Some startled, kind of terrified-looking Tayledras stare at her for a few seconds, and then one of them beckons her over to a makeshift tent they've pitched to one side.
She follows them. "I need to examine them before I can do anything," she says. And, because it's kind of close quarters, "Nobody touch me."
They're so scared of her and they take that request very seriously, the Tayledras Healers pinning themselves back against the tent walls. There are five people on cobbled-together stretchers or bedrolls on the floor; none are dying right now, but three are pretty badly hurt and not currently conscious. The other two are in a lot of pain, with multiple broken bones, but awake.
One after another, the injured people are restored to complete health.
Promise ducks out of the tent. "Anyone else?"
There are another handful of walking wounded who seem to be slightly less utterly terrified, now, and willing to approach her.
Leareth waits. He tried to talk to one of the Adepts at first and got a blank wide-eyed stare, so he's giving them time to absorb things.
Well, she's not going to tell people that this is the same amount of staring that will also let her injure them by magic if she ever suddenly wants to do that, so they can keep getting gradually less scared. She just stares at them and heals.
Three of the five people healed in the tent are Leareth's, a cook and two mage-researchers. Nayoki sits with them, trying to be reassuring, and quickly ascertained that, almost certainly, no one else got out alive. She's pretty upset about that, and angry, but it doesn't seem helpful to yell at the Tayledras right now, so she bites her lip and stays silent.
And eventually everyone is Healed, and most of them are standing around in a semicircle, looking at Promise.
One of them, a man in green robes with long white hair steps forward. "What do you want?"
"What do you want? I didn't do anything to you and you showed up and started murdering people."
They seem to have no idea how to respond to that. The man just blinks at her and then looks down at the snow.