There's an enormous explosion on a battlefield already full of them, and it flings an armored figure in unfamiliar burning livery forty feet into the air; she crashes to the ground and does not move.

For a few seconds; then she stands up, taking in who surrounds her and what's presently on fire and which undead need decapitating. She's lost her helmet - it's lying on the ground forty feet away, thoroughly crushed and soaked in blood - which is inconvenient, she hasn't died twice in a single battle since she was thirty but fighting without a helmet is really courting it. 

This battlefield...doesn't look even slightly familiar, though some bits of it are certainly on fire. Not very persistent fires. The fighting is in a cleared pass between two mountains, and it's rocky and high-altitude and there is at this point rather little left to burn. 

No undead. No dragons. No familiar uniforms or banners. There aren't actually that many people visible nearby, though there's a lot of damage visible, scorched glassy rocks and a pall of smoke over everything.  

- not a dragon, but something swooping overhead? Several somethings, large, winged, but not dragons. Mammalian, maybe, though the wings are feathered. 

Also: these Tantaran mages who've been throwing combat spells back and forth with the Predain mages, trying to hold the pass long enough for reinforcements to be available to Gate in, are really alarmed by the apparently weirdly indestructible armored stranger who just fell out of a giant explosion that as far as they know wasn't their side or the other side's work! They're going to circle – rapid Mindspeech coordination, several of them Gate-hop fifty yards over – and raise a shield-perimeter. And then...see what the stranger does???

- wow, she has no idea where she is! Are they Evil, do they look hostile, are they presently endangered by having been distracted from the war they were fighting to grab her?

They are, for the most part, not Evil! There's a grab-bag of nearly every alignment, with Neutral - mostly Lawful Neutral - overrepresented. They're not not hostile, but they look, mostly, really confused. 

They're...raising an enormous hemispherical barrier over her. It's visible, shimmering slightly like a soap bubble. It does not look like any arcane spell she recognizes. 

After a few moments, when it looks like she isn't trying to attack, someone is going to shout to her, magically amplified, in a language she doesn't recognize at all. 

She speaks a lot of languages, but this is clearly - another continent? Another planet? A demiplane someone neglected for centuries? She shouts back in Taldane, just in case they have Comprehend Languages but not Tongues. "I am Iomedae, paladin of Aroden; I have no context; it is not my intent to engage any party in these hostilities; I have healing but do not claim the protection due a healer."

They do not understand her at all! It's unclear whether this makes the situation more or less concerning! Incredibly baffling things happening on a battlefield are not, generally, a good sign. 

...Also they should really not be standing around here, not being behind cover is a terrible idea right now, and this is definitely an unfortunately timed distraction, which would perhaps make it more likely to be enemy action if it made any sense. 

They've got a long-range Mindspeaker, whose first priority is to send a message to the nearest command camp asking if anyone knows anything that might possibly explain this, but whose second priority, on getting a preliminary response that no they have no idea either, will be trying to read the armored stranger - woman's? - mind. 

This woman has the weirdest Thoughtsensing shields ever but they are very very good and no one is going to read her mind. (There are a lot of important military secrets in there! Being confused doesn't mean being incautious!)

Well, can they Mindspeak her? Given the apparent language barrier it’s not clear how else to quickly resolve the confusion.

:Can you understand this: the Mindspeaker tries.

"I have now received telepathic communication to which I intend to reply," she says aloud in Taldane, even though they've shown no signs of understanding her. 

:I understand you.: 

She's answering like an un-Gifted person who is familiar with Mindspeakers but doing it in a kind of weird way. 

:Who do you work for and what are you doing here?: he asks. 

:I am Iomedae, paladin of Aroden, Knight-Commander of the Knights of Ozem and of the Shining Crusade. I do not know how I arrived here and do not possess the means to return independently. I have no context; it is not my intent to engage any party in these hostilities; I have healing but do not claim the protection due a healer.:

....It's very unclear how to respond to this. 

Also, it's actually a bad idea to pause on a battlefield and put up a visible mage-barrier and leave it there without moving. The mages on the other side are also not sure what's going on but the barrier is presumably protecting something and thus seems like a good prospective target for a dozen massed levinbolts at once. 

- even a concert-work barrier is not really specced to hold off a coordinated attack like that. It goes down in a crackle of mage-energies, knocking out a couple of the casters in the process. 

Levinbolts and mage-energies are not really her primary concern here, especially not if she's the target. She moves shockingly fast and gets clear of the concert-work barrier, not stopping to pick up the downed casters in case they'll take that as hostile, healing herself as she does (which shows up as an incredibly bright blaze of some unusual mage-energy).

:Do you want to make an argument for any particular location where we could continue this conversation. Is there a neutral temple nearby.:

This is way above the Mindspeaker's pay grade and he's not at all sure whether it's a good idea to evacuate a powerful stranger of unknown allegiance to the base camp, but there's going to be a Gate up any minute and they really can't continue the conversation here. If the stranger – Iomedae, apparently, which doesn't even sound like a real name – really isn't affiliated with Predain, and so far she's showing no sign of it, then it's not exactly fair to leave her standing around in danger while they consult their superiors. 

(And she's got Healing, apparently, and they're rather desperately short on Healers right now, the war is not going well...) 

:Evacuate with the casualties: he tells her. :Gate should be up in less than a minute–: And he switches to Broadsending. :- SHIELDS COVER:–: 

A very large fireball smashes into, not Iomedae, but the three mages who seconds ago were making up the part of the barrier-circle that didn't involve hiding behind rocks. 

She unfortunately cannot very usefully intercept Fireballs, and should not try to draw fire if she’s supposed to evacuate with the casualties - is someone visibly gathering them in one place -

Behind that tall rock, under lots of additional shielding! A group of the uninjured mages are moving forward, either to draw fire or counterattack, and covering some of the support personnel (shielded with talismans but not themselves mage-gifted) in hauling the casualties back to a location that's slightly safer for someone to be raising a Gate. 

The Gate goes up thirty seconds later. 

...It's fairly obviously not a Golarion-style Gate. For one, it's apparently being mounted on a hastily-assembled temporary doorway-like threshold, with two crystal-inlaid carved wooden pieces each held by several personnel. For another, it's not instantaneous; the glow appears, brightens, and it takes nearly five seconds before the spell is fully in place and the interior of the makeshift doorway flashes white and shows someplace entirely different and much less recently on fire. Recently rained on, though; the canvas tents are sitting in a sea of mud. 

There are soldiers lined up on the other side. Some of them are dressed like the people around her right now, who are wearing cloaks and jewelry, minimal armor, and not even carrying weapons save for belt-daggers; most are armored and armed with swords. There are banners, which are completely unfamiliar. 

:Go go go: the Mindspeakers sends to everyone. :Hurry - clear the way for reinforcements: 

A lot of these people are in horrible pain and possibly dying, which she disprefers and can fix, so while she makes her way over to them she considers whether she’ll plausibly need the healing for anything even higher priority and whether she’s causing any problems she would let some people die to prevent.

Probably if she channels energy once everyone is within a thirty foot radius of her it will get them back on their feet for the evacuation. Her channels are in fact powerful enough that it’ll probably restore many of them to perfect health, if they are mostly down just from damage, which is what’s consistent with how she’s seen these people take casualties so far. That’s ….not a neutral act, in this war she doesn’t know anything about, and just as importantly it communicates her capabilities very unambiguously, which she disprefers on general instinct and specifically because how these people react to a random presumably not very powerful paladin of an unfamiliar god is more useful information than how they respond to one who only doesn’t make a habit of dragon-slaying because she can usually talk the dragons down.

She does it anyway. Her magic items will likely betray her anyway and secrecy is always a consideration but rarely on consideration her preferred way to operate. And channeling energy when there are dozens of badly wounded people around is just usually better than not doing that if they aren’t actively trying to kill you.

This will in fact restore everyone to perfect health, including the two mages who took the brunt of the fire-blast and were previously unlikely to survive long enough to reach the Healers' tent at all, though they were of course being retrieved anyway because Urtho's army doesn't just leave people behind to die. 

Everyone is also SO SO SO INCREDIBLY STARTLED, and kind of alarmed! The Mindspeaker on this side doesn't ask her what that was, but only because it really would be bad to delay the reinforcements, though they're suddenly much less short on uninjured mages. 

(The previously-badly-injured and now incredibly confused people are going to be rushed through the Gate anyway because they have no idea what just happened and whether the not-Healing will stick or is some kind of ruse.) 

It takes thirty seconds or so on the other side for one of the non-Mindspeaker mages to get the attention of one of the camp Mindspeakers. The woman immediately heads over at a run. 

:What Gift was that?: The overtones in her mindvoice are of shock and awe. 

:I am a fairly senior paladin of Aroden.: she says dryly. :I am willing to do more of them, on your word that those restored won’t return to the battlefield sooner than they would have otherwise or once I have more knowledge of the war.

It's fairly obvious from the woman's face that that does not answer her question at ALL. 

:We do have a lot of injured people: she sends, somewhat faintly. :I– you should talk to someone in command, probably, General Judeth can...tell you more about the war... Er, follow me: 

The camp continues to look deeply unfamiliar, not just in the banners but in the layout. Also the fact that quite a lot of people are walking around with visible injuries. The mood is...not a happy one. 

She can make them all impervious to fear, full of righteous conviction, but that's not exactly something you throw around randomly when you don't even know if they should be full of righteous conviction. A lot of people are full of righteous conviction and shouldn't be.

Visibly injured people aren't that surprising, if it's been a hard few days of fighting, but it's information. Guesses: maybe the army, or the continent, or this entire plane, doesn't have any clerics. Maybe all the gods are Evil, or like the Evil ones at home don't offer flexible healing. She was surprised by the channel; maybe they simply don't have it. Maybe they don't have the Positive Energy plane nearby so channeling doesn't work - would hers still work, in that case? Maybe today's but not tomorrow's? - reason to conserve the channels just in case. 

They are not doing well in their war, that's obvious. But they're - not guarded around a powerful newcomer, honestly quite unsuspicious - so they do have the concept of a paladin and can verify that she is one, or otherwise don't expect their enemies - maybe the war is between different species? - to be able to imitate a friend. 

She follows. One might expect that the fifty pounds of metal she appears to be wearing would slow her down, but it doesn't.

(It's mithril, and also if it were fifty pounds it still wouldn't slow her down.)

They've noticed her impossible apparent strength and fitness, among her several other impossible traits, including having survived whatever explosion flung her forty feet in the air (despite the fact that, while she's wearing some items that show up to mage-sight, none of it looks like standard physical shielding and she is not visibly herself a mage.) 

They wind through various muddy tents to a larger, also-muddy tent, with guards at the entrance. The guards are somewhat more suspicious of Iomedae, but mostly just inspect what she's wearing and conclude that she really doesn't look like she's from Predain. (The workmanship on her armor is better than anything they've seen, and Predain's industry is almost universally worse. Besides, if Predain had someone impossibly tough with impossibly powerful not-Healing, they would have heard about it by now.) They are allowed in. 

The Mindspeaker, whose name is Calli, bows addresses the General in Mindspeech so that she can include the stranger as well. :General Judeth. This is Iomedae. She appeared from nowhere at Korbast Pass. Claims to work for, um, someone called 'Aroden': ('paladin' is not in fact a word in Tantaran and the Mindspeech concept didn't really translate) :and to be Commander-General of the Knights of Ozem. has some kind of Healing...not-Gift...and offered to Heal our people either if we promise not to send them back to the battlefield sooner or if she learns more about the war. I think we should tell her about the war, if she - might be willing to help -: 

General Judeth is a tall, hawk-nosed woman with short blonde hair. (And neither a mage nor a Mindspeaker.) 

She nods to Iomedae. "Welcome, Iomedae of the, er, Knights of Ozem. I confess I have no idea where Ozem is, or how far you hail from, but - you must have heard of Archmage Urtho?" 

(Calli will relay.) 

"I have not heard of Archmage Urtho. At this point, I suspect I may be from one of the stars in your sky. It would have been a powerful spell, to have sent me that distance, but I think my people would have been in touch by now, were I anywhere on the world I started on, or anywhere accessible from there by a Plane Shift."

"You - what - where– ...nevermind, later. What questions would you need answered, to be willing to help us? I realize you don't have any context, and - it's easy for anyone to say their side is in the right, but..." Shrug. "Predain needs to be stopped, and the fact that we're less willing to commit atrocities means we're losing ground." 

"I have a spell that ensures that no one within its reach can speak a lie. It doesn't change one's answer, or oblige one, but it stills the tongue from speaking one they knew was wrong. It can be subverted, but not trivially. Would I have your permission to cast it?"

General Judeth looks at her for a long moment, hard and level. 

"You may," she says finally (and gestures for her guards to be watching with mage-sight, if they aren't already, which they should be.) 

Zone of Truth. 

Iomedae can throw off the Whispering Tyrant's spells more often than not; throwing off her own is utterly trivial. She doesn't, though, as a courtesy, and watches everyone else closely; she can usually see if they throw it off or not, and even better they usually assume she can.

Neither General Judeth nor Calli even know they're supposed to be trying to throw something off! The mage-guards are on alert for a spell, and will notice something unexpected happening and try to resist it, but they're not particularly advantaged at this. 

General Judeth has failed to notice anything happening, and waits politely for Iomedae. 

"The spell is in effect. Please tell me about your war, your aims, your enemy."

General Judeth will do that! 

Predain is Tantara's neighbor, to the north. While Tantara is one of the more prosperous kingdoms in the region – and certainly one of the most magically advanced, home to Archmage Urtho – they've historically been a peaceful country. They aren't used to waging war with their neighbors. 

Predain was, until recently, poorer and more backward - and more violent, with frequent internal conflicts and succession crises, but they had never been organized enough to fight Tantara until Adept Kiyamvir Ma'ar rose to become one of the King's top advisors, and rapidly advanced Predain's industry and mage-education as well as pushing expansionism. 

They started off conquering the smaller city-states and landholdings to the north and east, and Urtho was initially hesitant to advise any response to the King of Tantara. Adept Ma'ar had been among his best students, once, decades ago now. Urtho never wanted to end up at war. But Predain kept gobbling up territory, and sooner or later they were going to run out of room, or tire of conquering the cold rocky land to their north and look for richer pastures. And whatever Ma'ar wanted - the man did claim in his letters to Urtho, which were friendly on the surface, that he was interested in an alliance with Tantara - the King of Predain clearly had his own ideas for their country's future. 

Also, under Adept Ma'ar's guidance, Predain was making some very concerning policy changes. The country had fewer mages trained well enough to do the massive concert-melds required to raise bridges and towers, but Ma'ar was too impatient to wait for that to change in its own time, and so they legalized blood-magic and began a program of executing convicted criminals for power in order to do infrastructure projects. They instituted standard mage-compulsions, made them part of the oath of loyalty and service for their Guard. They started breeding mages, paying Gifted women to bear children with Gifted men who often weren't even their husbands. 

Diplomatic communications failed to persuade Predain to stop conquering its neighbors - which at this point had included an actual kingdom, if a small one - or turn away from their various horrible policies. The the King of Tantara was alarmed, and eventually Urtho had no more reassurances to offer. Tantara's intentions weren't to fully conquer and annex Predain, just to secure their own border and find a more persuasive route to getting Predain to stop conquering everything in reach, because clearly polite letters from a former teacher and mentor weren't convincing. 

It went wrong almost from the beginning. For all his flaws, no one could argue that Adept Ma'ar wasn't a brilliant strategist, and he was far more willing to be ruthless than Urtho could countenance in his own army. Even with more, better trained, and better-shielded mages, in many battles Tantara ended up overwhelmed by weaker mages bloated with blood-magic. Adept Ma'ar was apparently even willing, in some circumstances, to order his own people to Final Strike in order to turn battles around. Urtho had gryphons, but Adept Ma'ar carried out his own frantic Great Working and made his own flying species, the makaar, less intelligent but far more violent and bloodthirsty. 

And then he conquered the capital. It happened in a single night. He used an artifact of dark magic, called a dyrstaff – smuggled into the Palace, the spell it bore wove its way into the minds of everyone within range, and overnight while they slept, cast a spell of escalating fear and panic. Nearly everyone fled in incoherent terror, and in the morning, Adept Ma'ar was able to Gate his own forces in, nearly unopposed. The King was evacuated in time, barely, but the frantic rescuing force had found him cowering in his own wardrobe, and he wasn't a young man. He never recovered his wits after the shock, and died a few months later. 

Urtho - a peaceful man, who spent his life teaching students - was left as their only remaining leader, and he's starting to run out of ideas. 

- that does sound like a serious problem! She's correcting, mentally, for the obvious ways that a people tell their own story, but several of the concepts being passed along through Telepathy here are in fact quite bad. Running your government on mind control: quite bad. Executing prisoners for magical power you can use for infrastructure projects: quite bad. ...she can think of her allies of hers who'd venture a full-throated defense of it, of course, but they wouldn't actually do it, because down that slippery slope lies -

"Do I understand correctly that using, uh, blood magic, in combat, is very useful, a substantial strategic advantage, but that a taboo on it existed prior to Predain's rise?"

"Yes." General Judeth ducks her head. "They - don't use captured prisoners from our side, for it. Apparently the mage-soldiers have compulsions against doing that, and against - mistreating them - Adept Ma'ar seems to think it's quite humane of him. But they'll use their own criminals, or - ask for volunteers, and of course you wonder how voluntary it can really be..." 

" - that's actually promising, though, if there are laws of war they are still abiding by - do you know which ones -"

"Is it? Urtho says that Adept Ma'ar has always done whatever he wants - whatever he can justify to achieve his aims - and when you're lucky, the thing he wants isn't the most horrible thing you can imagine. ...There were debates, when he was a child, there's a story that he tried to convince the other pupils you could prevent the city guard from raping helpless women by compulsioning them against that – to be clear, we don't even have a problem with that, Predain did. But he's never respected any of our laws just because they were the law, only if someone could - win an argument using logic." 

“The question is whether he’ll respect a parley so we can talk, or peace terms if he signs them.”

Shrug. "He might. He's certainly kept offering parleys to Urtho, he's still writing to him even now. I've asked Urtho, Urtho...doesn't really expect him to keep his word. He would probably keep to peace terms if he agreed to them at all, I'm sure he'd rather be spending all those dead convicts on bridges and not explosions, but - he'd only accept if they were favorable enough to Predain - they're winning -" 

“Yep, that’s how that goes. We probably first have to change that they are winning. But the aim has to be a negotiated peace, eventually - does the King have a more moderate candidate successor -“

"We think he wants to appoint Ma'ar as his successor. I don't know that we'd be better off with any of his sons. Though it - might be that he wouldn't be a problem, if Ma'ar were no longer in power." 

This has occurred to her too. A lot of things have occurred to her, actually, but that's certainly one of them. "Is there some respected neutral party that could guarantee everyone's safety for a parley - some other kingdom, a temple order -"

"There isn't really another kingdom with enough military force to step in and guarantee anyone's safety, that cares to intervene in this or that both sides have pre-existing relations with. And - I think temple orders must be one of those customs that Adept Ma'ar doesn't care about because no one ever brought up a sufficiently logical argument in debate class for why it matters. Urtho said he never liked religions or saw why anyone would worship gods. He's - he doesn't slaughter the people or anything, he's given the peaceful monastic orders in cities he conquered safe passage to evacuate, but we know for a fact that he's gone on and taken over the temples to turn into barracks. So I'm not hopeful." 

"Do you have a secure avenue to talk with him remotely."

"Urtho has a communication-spell. It's not secure - worse, it's theoretically trackable and could be used to target an attack, not easily but he's - very very good at magic. Urtho's been blocking it. Ma'ar - has been sending letters - but we certainly don't trust we have a way to reply that would only reach him." 

"Can you tell me about Tantara. How it's governed, who it educates, how its soldiers are conscripted, which persons can travel if they choose -"

She can tell Iomedae about Tantara! 

It sounds like a reasonably Lawful place. Fairly standard hereditary monarchy, though King Leodhan had no heirs, he would have appointed someone if his death had been any less unexpected. Major kingdom-wide decisions and new laws are passed with the approval of a council of nobles - most of them currently vanished, either dead or in hiding, after the incident in the capital - and an appointed set of ministers, not necessarily of noble birth. A court system run mostly independently from the Crown, with regional judges elected by the local populace. 

Urtho's Tower educates any and all Gifted children who come to it - not just mage-gift, but other Gifts like Healing and Mindspeech and rarer ones like Fetching or Farsight or Mindhealing. There are even classes for the un-Gifted, and merit scholarships. Kiyamvir Ma'ar arrived as a penniless illiterate orphan and was offered a place in the Tower with no questions asked. 

(Iomedae can read between the lines that away from Urtho's Tower, education is far more haphazard; some lessons are offered at temples, but a more thorough education is mostly only available via private tutors to children of wealthy or noble families. And not everyone Gifted, has the resources or the wherewithal to make it to Urtho's Tower in the first place.) 

They started out with a volunteer army. Conscription for mages and for Mindspeakers, anyone between age fifteen and forty-five with at least a Master-potential Gift or a Mindspeech range of at least a mile, was phased in only a month into the war. Conscription for Healers started six months later (early on they had plenty of volunteers, and casualties have been much lower among noncombatants.) They've now started conscripting un-Gifted troops as well but...probably too little too late. 

...When it's not wartime, anyone can travel anywhere they like? Unless you count convicted criminals, maybe, who usually serve sentences doing agricultural labor, the death penalty was used very rarely. You couldn't, like, wander into the Palace or into Urtho's Tower without being stopped and asked to state your business, but would rarely be refused if your errand was innocent. Towns can and do vote to evict troublemakers, but it has to be really quite a lot of trouble caused before it's worth the hassle. 

Slavery, serfdom, subpopulations where things are a bit more complicated (the bird-soldiers?), any of the other wide range of things societies sometimes turn out to be doing and not thinking of as a bad thing necessarily? The Zone of Truth runs out, which she doesn't indicate and also doesn't much worry about; her current assessment is that if Tantara is founded on lies, this woman doesn't know them, and that she believes herself to be spending the lives of her people in desperate defense of the most prosperous, Lawful and Good place in her world.

Slavery is illegal, and being caught dealing in slaves - which does sometimes happen - is one of the few capital crimes. It seems like they probably have de facto serfdom, though not of an incredibly oppressive variety. 

The gryphons are Urtho's project. He loves them like a father, and ensures that they're provided for, and breeds them as part of his continuing work on perfecting the species. The gryphons weren't made for war, Urtho wouldn't have done that, but maybe because the base species used were predators, they're well suited to it, psychologically. Nearly every adult volunteered in the first weeks of the war, and plenty of juveniles tried and were turned away. 

General Judeth does indeed seem very sincere in her defense of Tantara's virtues, and genuine in her terror for their future. 

"I'll do another channelled healing. It's a thirty foot radius, you can really pack people in, it'll work so long as they're not actually dead yet and unless they're very experienced soldiers it should restore them to full health. - maybe even if they are very experienced soldiers, I don't know how that'd work in another world. In the long run you'll want a specialized building built with multiple floors, if you only have me to channel, but first we should find out if I even get my channels back tomorrow, I'm uncertain. 

After that I would like to meet Urtho. I do not want to see Tantara conquered; I do not know yet how best I can avoid that."

General Judeth smiles at her, tiredly but with deep gratitude. "We can probably get everyone in the Healing tent into a thirty-foot radius, and some of the walking wounded. And there's going to be a message-Gate at sunset, we can send you through to the Tower with an escort. ...Is there anything we need to be careful of, about the healing? If you're really - from another world," which is something she's barely interacted with, it's too strange and too abstract and everything further away than tomorrow morning's deployments and supply-missions feels too unreal to matter, "then is it possible it'd have strange side effects for us? Do people need to rest afterward?" 

"They shouldn't. It's dangerous to the undead -" it's clearly an unfamiliar word - "corpses animated to serve a controlling mage - and it doesn't break curses or restore lost limbs or address poisoning. I can do those things but not for everyone in a thirty foot radius and not until we learn, tomorrow, if my channelling returns normally here. 

It is, of course, sometimes hard on soldiers, to be nearly killed and then restored to perfect health to be thrust out again into the battle. Not because the magic can't sustain them, but because what we risk in war is a thing that the mind never really entirely comes to grips with. When I can, I give people the rest of the day off, at least until they've gotten accustomed.

I had one more question. You mentioned Ma'ar was aggressive in using Final Strikes when he was losing. How - serious of an explosion is that, at what distance does it kill a civilian."

General Judeth nods along. "We won't send anyone whose injuries were serious back out until tomorrow. It's not like we were expecting to have them back on their feet for days or weeks."

And she frowns. "It depends on the Gift-potential of the mage. A Master-level Final Strike will kill anyone unshielded within a radius of - call it a hundred to three hundred yards, depending on the exact grade of potential - and might badly injure un-Gifted civilians up to half a mile away. Close-up - which it usually is - it'll kill even well-shielded mages. A powerful Adept can take out everyone in a mile's radius. If it's on a dry or windy day, and you get really unlucky, the forest fires afterward can take out half your troops."

She says it bitterly. It sounds like it's from experience. 

- she looks genuinely startled, by that.

Then she takes off one of the rings on her finger and puts on a different one from a - inbuilt jewelry-chest in her gauntlet, apparently. 

" - Evasion," she says, as if in explanation. "There is no spell with such power at home. Even with the ring I'd rather not test it, but - if I were your enemies, if they have good intelligence, that's what they'd try."

Judeth blinks and looks startled at the jewelry-chest-gauntlet, then shakes herself a little. "Doubt they know enough about you yet, but - yes, if you agree to help us, I imagine it'll be rather conspicuous." 

It'll take about twenty minutes to get everyone packed into the Healing tent who can possibly fit in a thirty-foot radius. In the meantime, General Judeth is happy to answer any of Iomedae's remaining questions that come up, it's not like there's anything higher value for the war effort she could possibly be doing. 

She has so many questions! Most of them just in the spirit of a fellow professional, how are the units organized and trained and what are the current strategic objectives and what can they do that Predain can't, and if she's probing for inconsistencies with what she heard earlier, well obviously she's doing that, but it's not as if the questions aren't interesting and important in their own right. Iomedae likes her work. It's sad work, not work one should be full of glee about, but a deep abiding joy in a job well done isn't misplaced on a battlefield, and the Shining Crusade has stretched on, at this point, several very educational decades. 

Judeth is clearly very competent, if somewhat harried and overwhelmed (and it does show that she's had only a little over a year of experience with real war and not multiple decades.) But if her strategic thinking isn't as sophisticated as Iomedae might hope for, at least she knows her people and their locations and resources and logistics very very well. 

They have pretty solid logistics and supply chains. Gates are much better for that than Teleports, and even Master-level mages can raise them, if not as far or for as long a duration. Tantara is also possessed of the world's finest permanent Gate network, which you would THINK would be more of an advantage than it is but Ma'ar is very good at plotting forward strikes to capture termini; the network is secured by particular passcodes or keyed to individual mages' signatures, and Urtho can shut the captured Gates down from a distance and make them unusable, but it's still eating away at their supply chain capacity.

Urtho very reluctantly did a destructive shutdown of the permanent Gate-terminus in Jerlag Pass, recently; it's around as big as explosion as an Adept's Final Strike, and might act to dissuade Ma'ar from being quite so cavalier about dropping small strike parties on their Gate-depots, but it still cost them another node in the network. 

And he doesn't sound like the type to necessarily consider that a bad trade for a strike party. "Were you contemplating surrender?"

"I brought it up with Urtho when we last met. He...thinks Ma'ar would want his Tower, and that it's - unacceptable for him to end up holding that much power." She makes a face. "Not that I know what he's planning on instead. It's very well defended, but - he'll still capture it by force sooner or later, whether we surrender or not." 

A powerful archmage probably has a lot of tricks up his sleeve. She does not make this observation. Working with powerful archmages gets fraught if people keep pointing out to you that they could be contributing more. "Predain hasn't proposed terms?"

"Not through formal channels here. If Ma'ar proposed anything to Urtho in private communications, Urtho didn't think enough of it to pass it on. You can ask him, I guess." 

She nods.

It is as a general rule a bad idea, to have your most powerful wizard the commander of your war effort. They're two very different skillsets. She has not actually seen anything to suggest to her that Urtho is the exception, but she's not arriving at any judgments yet, beyond that Tantara's conquest would probably be quite bad; she can live in several possibilities at once. Maybe Urtho's incompetent and the situation is retrievable. Maybe Urtho is incompetent and the situation is not retrievable. Maybe Urtho has some backup plans that aren't a terrible idea. Maybe Urtho has some backup plans that are a stupendously terrible idea. 

She's uncertain in her assessment of the other side, too, but it matters less. Ma'ar is for all she knows well-intentioned; he wouldn't be the first person to put a ruthless expansionist dictator in power and provoke a bloody war with the best conceivable intentions. What matters is whether he'll offer terms she can accept while he's in fact winning the war, and whether it's safe to try to talk with him, and 'aggressively breaking most of the taboos around warfare' is probably the second-worst sign available on that front, behind 'has outright betrayed a parley in the past'. She's not unkillable. The obvious thing for him to do, if she comes to him to talk and says 'I can make this war winnable for Tantara, so let's talk terms' is to, you know, kill her and go back to winning his war.

If not for the explosive attack that kills everyone for a mile around she'd honestly just chance it. He can attack in a parley; she can fight her way out. It's great when you can offer people the benefit of the doubt because the worst-case scenario is that they betray you and the next ten minutes are very bloody and very tedious. 

There's no Resurrection here. She'd asked, though she'd guessed it already from their bafflement at her powers and the circumstances under which Tantara's king had died. The worst case scenario is that she dies - which probably isn't that inconvenient for her personally, her own people will resurrect her back home, if that can be done, and it'd be surprising if a Miracle alongside a True Resurrection couldn't do it -

- but does mean that Tantara loses, in this case to a Predain in the worse half of possible Predains. 

And if she doesn't tip her hand like that, she can probably win it for them. 

She holds out her hands to the assembled crowd and does another channel. 

People are awed and almost pathetically grateful. General Judeth shoos them away from flocking her to thank her; it’s not like she even speaks the language.

She can get some more information from General Judeth on Predain’s known resources and standard tactics and recent victories. They’ve won most engagements so far, and chosen the ground for most of them, because — well, Judeth doesn’t say it explicitly, and clearly has great respect for the man, but Urtho isn’t a military leader. He hates war. Since the King’s incapacitation and the weeks of ambiguous chain of command while it looked like he might still recover, their side of the war has mostly been waged reactively. 

Ma’ar is clearly good at what he does, and apparently a popular leader; his people are very loyal to him.

And a couple of candlemarks later, the scheduled Gate goes up. General Judeth dispatches an escort to take Iomedae from the Gate-depot to Urtho’s Tower. Urtho should be expecting her.

Taking over command of a military front from a wizard who is no good at it is something Iomedae has done four times before! That doesn't bother her at all, and usually makes everyone involved happy. She's not going to announce intent to do that, though, obviously, she'll just ask enough strategy questions that if she were in charge tomorrow she'd be clear on what tradeoffs she was making. 

She isn't bothered by the healed people, at all. She beams at them and asks her translator how to say 'it is my honor' and then repeats it over and over again. There are many many people in the world she is too busy for, but not one she is too important for; it's not a difference you want to lose sight of, and then on top of that one should really try extraordinarily hard not to be too busy for people who you might ask to die for you. 

And then she'll go through the Gate-depot to Urtho's Tower. 

Oh, it's beautiful. 

It IS! They walk from the Gate-station into the gardens, with winding cobblestone paths and gorgeous marble statues. There are children and juvenile gryphons playing together, and members of some third nonhuman species – lizardlike, shorter than humans, with domed foreheads above their snouts and jewel-bright patterned scales – are bustling around tending to the flowerbeds and watching the children. 

There's little sign of the war, here, save for the fact that there are very few (human) adults in young adulthood, and the handful she sees are visibly crippled. There's an open-air market, also manned by the lizardfolk, but it's almost deserted. 

Urtho's Tower rears up over them, an elegant spire in a flowing, almost organic shape, with shorter secondary towers around the base. It must be hundreds of storeys tall. As they approach along one of the winding paths, they fall into its shadow. 

And then in through a door – one that opens almost seamlessly out of the white stone – and into an echoing antechamber. The lizardfolk stationed at doorways and bases of spiral staircases are carrying weapons. They don't seem very happy about this. They call out cheerfully to Iomedae's guards, in whistling voices. 

There's an elevator that must be powered by magic. The elevator chamber is large enough to fit multiple adult gryphons, and feels very empty with just Iomedae and the three human mages sent as her escort. 

The elevator rises, effortlessly carrying them upward. 

She does not communicate with Aroden directly very much; it's expensive for Him, it's temporarily incapacitating for her, and they're on the same page anyway. But she does think, as they're walking through the gardens, as they're floating up into the tower, that this is a place He would really, really like, and that if some power other than Tar-Baphon is responsible for her landing here, if there's anything to be done besides win a war from an unwinnable position, she suspects it'd be worth telling her what that is; and she lays out clearly in her mind what the answers might be, in god-terms, seen through the web of futures, so that it would be relatively inexpensive to gesture at one. 

There's no answer, which is fine. Honestly, if she's out of His reach here, that's also fine; she'll dearly miss the healing, but most of what she is isn't anything Aroden gave her, and in the long run it was always going to be necessary to be a god in her own right.

She marvels at the surroundings, points expressively at beautiful bits of architecture, waves to the children. It's - a nicer place than she expected, honestly. Tantara is a surprisingly nice place - she'd say suspiciously nice, but her gut actually doesn't point that way. Some places are very nice, some powerful wizards are Good. 

She is continually detecting Evil. It's always good to know that kind of thing, imperfect as it is.

(Some of the soldiers on the battlefield read as Evil – not all by any means, somewhere between 10% and 25% – but she's hardly detecting anyone Evil here.) 

They disembark from the elevator on a floor that, per the view from the windows, is at least two hundred feet up. Some of the lizardfolk guards cheerfully escort them down the hallway, knock at a large ornate door, and wait to be acknowledged. 

Urtho's office looks exactly like the stereotype of a brilliant if absentminded wizard's workshop. The walls are set floor-to-ceiling with shelves, full of books. Practically every surface is covered in piles of notes, and there are elaborate half-completed magical projects on various side tables.

His desk, however, is cleared save for a map, held stretched out with some kind of mage-artifact focus as a paperweight on one end and a cup of cold tea pinning down the other. 

Urtho rises. He, too, is the perfect stereotype of a brilliant wizard. Tall and storklike, with long silver hair falling in tangled waves, and intelligent blue eyes, alight with curiosity, set on either side of a beaky nose. 

"Iomedae of the Knights of Ozem," he says. He doesn't bow; he's way too excited for that. "I hear you come from another world and have different magic!" 

(One of his hertasi is a Mindspeaker, and will relay for them.) 

Ah, this kind of interaction. She smiles warmly back at him. "I do! I would demonstrate it for you, but I fear in this world it might be a scarce resource. I do have magic artifacts you can look at, designed by craftsmen who are experts in magic as it is practiced in my homeland."

He wants to see all of her artifacts! He has so many questions about her world's magic!

What are the different kinds? Is crafting-magic a different kind from whatever she can do or just a different educational specialization? Is it something people are born with, like Gifts? What is learning it like? Do people vary in how powerful they are and if so how powerful is she? 

Did she know there were other worlds? How did she get to this one? Has this sort of thing happened before? Does she think there's a way for them to get from here to her world so he can talk to other people there? 

(It's pretty clear from his manner that Urtho has managed to mostly forget about the war, per se, in his excitement about encountering the magic of another world.) 

Iomedae possesses, in the jewelry-box in her gauntlet, an extraordinarily powerful ring of protection and two paired rings which allow her to take half the damage dealt to someone else (or vice versa, but that has rarely been useful) and a ring of freedom of movement and a scarab of protection and eight pearls of power (two first circle, two second circle, two third circle, two fourth circle) and a strand of prayer beads and a stone of good luck.

She makes absolutely no representation that the jewelry-box is where she keeps most of her magic items.

She is additionally wearing boots that allow her to move and react much faster, a ring that makes her need no food and little sleep, a ring that lets her dodge attacks wholly undamaged (she's not sure if it'll work against an Adept's final strike), a headband which enhances her clarity of thought and her force of will, a necklace that makes her more heavily armored, a mantle of spell resistance, a belt that makes her tougher, stronger and faster, the gauntlets which in addition to containing a jewelry box only she can access make it much harder to part her from her sword, and armor which is enhanced to be more durable, resistant to different kinds of magical attacks, capable of shapeshifting to better defend against different kinds of physical attacks, and makes it very difficult for attacks to hit a vital point. 

She makes absolutely no representation that this is all that she is wearing. 

Few of the items are hers; they are the Empire's, invested in her for the war's duration, and she is not willing or able to give them away, though she'd lend them at need. 

Most paladins are less powerful than her. Actually, to her knowledge all paladins are less powerful than her. There are people more powerful than her, such as Tar-Baphon, the lich necromancer she's been battling these last few decades. She's going to need some help to seal him away for good. Geb and Nex, the two wizards who famously scarred the world with their thousand-year war, were also more powerful than her. (Of course, she could kill any of them if she could get into range to fight them face to face, but not being idiots, none of them would risk that.)

Her magic is gained through prayer and meditation, learning to communicate with a fragment of Aroden's will and ask it for what she needs to achieve her aims each day. Other magic is gained through study; you have to be clever, for that, cleverer than she was at fourteen when she was contemplating how best to fix all the problems in the world, and though she's now clever enough to learn it (at enough expense, cleverness can be purchased, and it was worth the purchase) she's been very busy, and prefers to work with allies. Likewise she could perhaps have learned to craft, but didn't, because it's time consuming and there was a lot of Evil to defeat.

Yet other magic is inborn, or contracted-for with a powerful entity, or arises spontaneously one day for no reason; there are many powers about Golarion and few see fit to explain themselves. 

Urtho is captivated! He wants to spend the next week inspecting and asking her questions about every single magical artifact she showed him. He's never heard of paladins, and he has so many questions about Aroden – Aroden is her god? Is it common for Aroden to grant magic directly to people who pray to Him, in a way that - neat and predictable? It isn't here, the gods sometimes perform miracles through Their chosen people, or give Their priests and shamans advice, but...it's rare. Certainly none of them, not even the Goddess of his Shin'a'in people, are providing any miracles to help Tantara win this war - 

- he will reluctantly put aside his several thousand questions about her magic and ask if she has other questions about their war, which is a far more tedious topic but also kind of pressing. 

She does, yeah. She wants to confirm what Judeth told her, as diplomatically as possible, and then she wants to humbly suggest that she has run some wars herself and might have advice that could be of aid to Tantara.

Urtho can confirm everything Judeth said. Including that Adept Kiyamvir Ma'ar was his student, decades ago – an unusually brilliant and talented young man, but frighteningly ambitious, and not very moved by other people's scruples. He got...subtler...in showing his ruthlessness, as he grew up, but clearly he never really changed his mind. 

Urtho tried to convince him to stay at the Tower; he worried that returning to Predain, notoriously violent and corrupt, would only encourage the young man in seeking power by force. Ma'ar refused to be convinced. It was his homeland, he said, and the people there needed his help far more than anyone in the already-prosperous and flourishing kingdom of Tantara.  

It's clear that Urtho feels badly about the war. "It blindsided him," he admits. "I don't know how he could have been surprised, after so many years of ignoring my warnings, but - he was."

He will absolutely take the advice of an expert! Advice sounds incredible! 

Great! She thinks he should ask for a three-day ceasefire. 

Predain almost certainly will not grant it. They're winning, and they must suspect Urtho has some resources they don't know about, and giving him time is just strategically unwise from their perspective. But they don't, it sounds like, actually have very good intelligence out of Predain, and sometimes you get lucky and there are events behind the scenes you don't know about, or perhaps Ma'ar still thinks of himself in such a way that an appeal for a temporary peace from Urtho will go over well with him. The fact he keeps writing letters is a little bit of a good sign, though there's also the obvious interpretation where he tried to keep Tantara at ease with all Predain's violations of the local norms of war, and conquests, until Predain was powerful enough that appeasement no longer seemed necessary.

And there is also the possibility that Predain will agree to, and then break, the ceasefire, which would be very informative.

She wants the three days to reorganize and figure out how to make the war winnable, obviously, but she also wants it because if they manage it, then that's a tiny bit of trust, from which perhaps enough further trust could be built that she could go meet this Ma'ar face to face and tell him that Urtho has new allies and he needs to start thinking about peace on terms acceptable to Tantara.

She also wants to figure out the intelligence situation? Who are Ma'ar's spies within Tantara? Can Tantara's spies be asked to take more risks inside Predain? She needs to understand more of the dynamics at court in Predain, and she needs to have a good channel through which to spread information about her arrival back to that court. 

She also wants to talk to some of the prisoners of war Tantara is holding, and maybe try to negotiate a prisoner swap for the same reason - little pieces of trust - as she wants to try the ceasefire. Has that been attempted, how did it go?

...Ma'ar might grant a ceasefire. If he does, Urtho thinks it would be evidence that he thinks he can make the extra time work to his benefit as much as theirs. He seems to have very good intelligence on Tantara – not surprisingly, maybe, because he studied at Urtho's Tower, and for all that he was a prickly, troubled young man who made himself hard to befriend, he clearly did find some allies there. While Iomedae hasn't revealed many of her powers visibly in public, Ma'ar is very clever, and might be able to learn more and prepare better in that time than Iomedae is expecting. 

On Tantara's end of things, they didn't even have a diplomatic representative in Predain in the leadup to the war, and they had relatively little merchant trade; up until the last few years, when Ma'ar finally succeeded at clamping down on local banditry, Predain's trade roads were very unsafe. And Predain is...ethnically culturally different. Urtho will admit, with a faint flicker of embarrassment, that many of his own people are prejudiced against their northern neighbor. It is, relatedly, difficult for Tantaran spies to pass unobserved in Predain. Their best intelligence came from gryphon flyovers, but Ma'ar must have figured out some kind of ward-system to detect them even when Urtho provides the scout parties with covering illusions and shields. Right now they have a few low-level spies in Predain war camps, working as cooks or whatnot, but none of them are Mindspeakers and that means reports back and forth are costly and dangerous to pass along. 

He does know that many Predain citizens, including the captured prisoners - who Iomedae is welcome to try speaking to, though he thinks she'll be lucky to get any cooperation - see the war as an entirely unprovoked and unjustifiable threat to their kingdom's survival, and Tantara as an untrustworthy negotiating partner. 

Not surprising. 

She thinks the ceasefire is worth it even though Predain will presumably only accept it if it's to their advantage. You can't build trust without risking anything. It does seem very likely that Ma'ar will use the purchased time for spying, but that too doesn't have to be a bad thing; she wants Predain to believe that Tantara has some game-changing new options, though ideally they wouldn't know her exact location or that she's the full extent of the new options. They're going to have to believe something has changed for a negotiated peace. 

Is mindreading routine enough around here that it's unworkable to turn some of the prisoners and send them back as spies?

Urtho seems dubious of this plan but...sure, he's not willing to risk the communication-spell but he can try to send a messenger with a letter. Ma'ar probably won't have an envoy murdered. It's not the...kind of person he wants to see himself as...and, well, he probably genuinely doesn't want there to be a war. It's just that he probably isn't going to accept peace terms that include, say, Tantara getting to have any say over his country's laws on using blood-magic to build aqueducts, and Tantara is kind of not okay with them continuing to do that. 

Predain has fewer Mindspeakers than Tantara, but Urtho suspects that Ma'ar is quietly recruiting them as mercenaries from elsewhere, and making very efficient use of whatever number he has. Spies who can pass, ethnically and culturally, as Predain natives might not garner enough suspicion to warrant a routine Thoughtsensing check, if they're in low-level positions, but he wouldn't want to confidently bet on it. He would be very impressed if Iomedae can manage to turn anyone; everyone they've captured so far seems to think the sun rises and sets with Adept Ma'ar. 

Well, Tantara's not going to get terms where they can ban blood-magic in Predain, realistically. Tantara should try for pre-war borders, and then she'll go over to Predain and see what can be done to get them to cut it out with the blood-magic. It does seem like a horrendously bad idea to her, and a situation well worth addressing, but it does not seem likely to work out as part of the peace terms for this war which Tantara isn't winning. They can throw it into their demands but she wants Urtho to have realistic expectations here, and those are that pre-war borders would be very good news. 

Sigh. Urtho doesn't look happy about it, but she is clearly the expert on this and he's not going to argue. 

What are her spying abilities. Do any of her incredible magic artifacts give her some abilities to get better intelligence on what Predain is doing and how their King - who presumably is the one who has final say, not Ma'ar - is thinking about the war? 

Not really. She can send someone with the ring that splits injuries between them and they can communicate that way, but the rest of the tools she'd use for espionage she unfortunately does not carry on her person during combat, and paladins don't generally get spells for deception or illusion. Deception and illusion are very useful but so are knowingly not dealing in them.

She thinks that the thing to do is turn some of the prisoners, which she really expects to be possible; it seems like Tantara might be at a disadvantage at it, what with having started the war and what with the history of mistrust and discrimination. She is hoping that she can offer, instead, a perspective where a war of conquest in Tantara serves Predain's people not at all and it's in their interests to help her get a peace that leaves Predain strong and independent but inside its pre-war borders and done with all the conquering. She'll know more once she's spoken to them, though.

Urtho can arrange it, then. It's going to be another Gate; the prisoners aren't kept anywhere near his Tower.

They don't have any mages, at least not above very weak Master-potential; mages are difficult to capture alive at all and even more difficult to hold securely. Ma'ar, of course, does it with compulsions. 

Then she will go and meet Tantara's prisoners of war. She'll need an interpreter, which is seriously inconvenient for something like this, but it seems worth attempting anyway.

It's going to take another couple of candlemarks for Urtho's people to make this happen, by which point it's getting dark; it seems like they don't have to take important visitors to see the prisoners very often. 

The Predain prisoners are put up in what looks like hastily erected and equally hastily converted troop barracks, guarded with permanent mage-barriers. The conditions aren't amazing – it's further north and much colder than the region around Urtho's Tower, and the building is not perfectly airtight and is heated only by wood fires – but it looks like they're trying their best to provide amenities. 

The prisoners are clearly a different ethnicity from anyone else she's met so far; they look much closer to Chelish, actually, with dark hair and eyes and olive-tanned skin tones. Most of them are young. They all seem terrified of their captors, and of her. 

Iomedae's escort asks if she would prefer to speak to someone high ranking? 

How about they tell the prisoners that she is a powerful agent of a distant god, here to try to negotiate an end to the war, and wants to talk to them to understand what the people of Predain would desire from a peace, and then ask if anyone is willing to speak to her. 

The prisoners are SO SUSPICIOUS. That doesn’t make any sense and is almost certainly some kind of trick to get them to give away information about Predain’s strategy and what if she’s a Thoughtsenser.

It’s not like any of them know very much about Predain’s strategy, especially not current information. It’s also the only even slightly interesting thing to happen in months. And…if it’s real, somehow, then it’s not like the war is one they chose, and (since the prisoners are given approximately no updates) for all they know they’re homeland is losing it.

They confer among themselves in the Predain tongue and eventually send forward a representative. She is young and sharp and quick-tongued, and so so suspicious, and not intending to volunteer any information including in her thoughts until she’s gotten some better idea of who the powerful stranger is and who her god is and what she WANTS.

Iomedae likes her immediately. "First off, tell her that since I'm relying on the interpreter she should not assume you are not lying to me about what she's saying, though I don't think you are, and I also will find it difficult to substantively protect her if you don't like what she says to me, though if she thinks we'd have a significantly more interesting conversation were she to be subsequently released to her own people I will figure out how to get that done. Because of those constraints I am not going to bother asking about anything sensitive or especially related to the war. But I have never been to Predain, I can't safely go right now, and if I'm going to arrange a peace I need to know what I'm trying to protect. So I just want to know - what no one here would have told me, that everyone knows back home."

This is not at all what she was suspecting. She blinks suspiciously at Iomedae. 

"Ask her why some foreigners' god even cares," she says tightly. "None of the gods ever did anything for us before." 

This is relayed. 

"Well, Aroden used to be human Himself before He ascended, so He's a bit less useless about confusing things. Though to be clear with you, while He empowered me, I don't think He's paying any attention here and I don't think He can, it's too far away. I am doing this because I want the war to stop, and I'm using Aroden's magic because He gave it to me to use as I saw fit."

She is pretty sure that gods that used to be human are not a thing and that story is some additional layer of baffling ruse. It doesn't really matter, though. 

"Why do you care?" she spits back. "If you're from so far away." Most people want to suck up to Urtho. She's not quite bold enough to say that part out loud. 

"Mostly I find as many people I like when I'm travelling as I do if I stay at home. I wouldn't say that it's all of them but it's enough."

It's just words, of course. It's probably still some kind of trick. But - how dangerous a trick can it possibly be, if she's careful not to even think about what little she knows of their strategic resources? ...And there's something that feels oddly nourishing, about being asked just to talk about her homeland and why it's worthy of protection. 

Predain was always poor. While Tantara was lucky, in its climate and its terrain and its gods and of course in having Urtho, Predain was always a country too hilly and dry for good farmland, with a corrupt nobility, and warlords and bandits on three out of four borders. They had little to offer in trade and so the caravans passed them over. Some of their best and brightest had gone to Tantara before and trained under Urtho, Ma'ar was hardly the first, but - no one ever came back. Why would they, when they had found such greener pastures. 

But the people of Predain were always tough, and determined, and ready to work hard as soon as anyone offered them a way for hard work to actually build a better future. And Ma'ar was the one who offered that, when he left behind the wonders of Urtho's Tower and came back to found mage-schools and train engineers and soon they had aqueducts to bring water to their crops, and soon enough after that Ma'ar was advisor to the new young King, who was certainly better than their last King, and had the strength of will to actually enforce their laws and make their roads safe rather than trade bribes with the rest of the nobility. 

And Ma'ar brought them, not wealth - not yet - but stability. Ma'ar bought them a country where none of their children would starve, and if some of that price was paid in blood, well, who is Tantara to talk. They have thousands of mages, and did they ever offer their aid to help Predain build aqueducts to water their crops, or roads to transport their goods, or even just their weather-magic, no they did not.

Urtho is one of the most powerful, and wealthiest, men in the world. He could have chosen to help. He thought that Predain wasn't his country and wasn't his problem, and he even tried to convince Ma'ar not to go back, because Predain was backward and he would be unhappy there, which when you think about it really sounds like believing Predain doesn't deserve to be helped. And then Ma'ar came back to his people anyway, and she remembers it, remembers when he came into power and she learned that there would be a scholarship for her to go to school, because Ma'ar knew that if they were to be strong as a country, all of their best people would need to be educated, even if they had grown up as farmers. She went to the capital, and she didn't need to fear being raped or having all her coin stolen by the corrupt city guard because now in order to sign up they needed to agree to compulsions not to do that, and she learned to read and figure and keep a merchant's books and for a few brief years she thought her children would have a future that was better than the childhood she had known. 

And for that Urtho started a war. 

Predain was conquering many other countries, its neighbors. That has left her worried that part of what made Predain great, to its people, was that its borders were expanding, that it will not seem satisfactory if it is obliged by a peace deal to stay within them.

They weren't conquering countries! All right, fine, the tiny Kingdom of Avalle might arguably be counted as a country, but they'd been through three different Kings in a decade and were constantly having civil wars and they didn't do anything to stop the bandits who would fling around blood-magic, which even if it wasn't technically in Predain territory was plenty capable of wrecking their weather. And everywhere else was stateless territory, or landholdings ruled by bandit warlords, and their children were starving too and their people were dying of pointless violence.

She knows people from the recently-'conquered' lands. Half of them were more or less voluntary annexations though of course it's complicated when there's no one leader who speaks for the people in a region, or when their closest thing to a leader was someone everyone would be happier to see dead. But certainly everyone she's met is glad to be a citizen of Predain, even if it was very frightening at the time and they might wish some of the details had gone down differently. 

She has no idea if the King would be willing to sign a treaty that they can't expand. Mostly they just want secure borders and she has little context on the strategic situation there (and is carefully not thinking about the few pieces she does know that might still be relevant a year later.) 

Iomedae would make a lot of inferences from that, if she were thinking through what attitudes about conquest in Predain are and how much they reflect the attitudes of its leadership versus what they found it convenient for their soldiers to believe, but she's not doing that right now. People can tell when you're carrying their words off to sweeping conclusions, unless you dissemble, and she can but generally doesn't. She's just trying to make sense of this woman, her world, what she'd want from a peace. 

"Have you met Ma'ar? Do you know people who have worked closely with him?"

She hasn’t met Ma’ar.

She knows people who've met him. They say he’s brilliant, of course, and he’s very cautious and very competent, and sometimes it's frightening to work with him, not because he ever punishes his subordinates for innocent mistakes but because - they say - he's always ten steps ahead of everyone else, and he holds his people to very high standards (even if they say he holds himself to even higher standards) and he's not shy about clearly informing you of all the mistakes that he thinks you made. 

He cares, though. Even people who haven't met him believe that, and the friends of hers who have met him came away believing it even more strongly. He believes that Predain deserves everything that Tantara already has, and no one was going to swoop in from outside and give it to them out of the kindness of their hearts, and so if they were ever going to have that, someone would have to fight for it. And lots of people could have fought for it but Ma'ar is the person who did. 

- not alone, of course, he's surrounded himself with competent dedicated allies, but - she's pretty sure no one would have had enough hope to really try to change anything, if not for him. 

How do people in Predain feel about Tantara? It was suggested to her that people in Tantara don't think much of their northern neighbors.

Well, Tantara seems like a nice place to live, for the people lucky enough to have been born there? ...Or lucky enough to study there. Ma'ar apparently thought very highly of Urtho right up until Urtho started a war. 

She's not sure about the gryphons. They say Urtho is a peaceful man but the gryphons are bloodthirsty and seem to take joy in murdering Predain's people and they're terrifying. But the gryphons aren't anyone else's fault except Urtho's. 

(Mostly she hasn't really thought about it. Tantara was a distant fantasy that didn't matter to anyone's real life, and then they were an existential threat, and there was never really anything in between. She doesn't say that, though.) 

Then they can talk about other, lower-stakes things. What was the school she went to like? What would she buy if she were very rich, after the war? What foods should Iomedae try when there's peace and she can visit Predain? What songs do they sing? What gods do people pray to?

She liked her school! She doesn't really have any points of comparison, but her teachers were clever and seemed like they cared and they didn't treat her worse because she was a girl. 

She would buy...land by one of the rivers, probably. Not for herself, she never wants to be a farmer again, but she has younger brothers and cousins, and it would make her grandparents happy. She would buy a pile of those shield-talismans, the cheaper low-powered ones that won't hold off an attack with a sword but will save your life if a tree falls on you, she'd buy fifty and make sure her whole family had them. If she had anything left she'd buy - nice clothes, probably, she's never really thought about it before. 

She doesn't have strong opinions about food, but her favorite dish is catfish wrapped in burdock leaves with blackberries for flavor and baked in a ground-oven. 

...She's never prayed to any god. She can't think of anyone she knows who has. 

Is there anyone else here she should talk to? Is there anyone the guards treat particularly badly?

...The guards treat them fine? It's not comfortable, here, but they don't seem to single anyone out for especially bad (or good) treatment.

Probably no one else is going to want to talk to Iomedae. She can try, if she wants.

If they don't want to, she's not going to make them. 

"Thank you for speaking to me. I'll try to come back within two weeks. I hope I'll have news for you then." It's a good habit, to limit the odds of retaliation against anyone who spoke to her, and (if they set this all up in a hurry when she asked) to force them to keep it this way. She doesn't expect either, in this case, but it's not the kind of thing to only be careful of when you expect it to be a problem.

The next thing she'd like to see is the writings of Kiyamvir Ma'ar, if Urtho has them.

Urtho (or more accurately, Urtho's hertasi secretary) keeps a file of all the letters that Kiyamvir has sent him since departing the Tower, and is happy to provide them to Iomedae if she has a way of...reading...them, given the language barrier. If necessary she can have a Thoughtsenser to "read them out loud" in Mindspeech? 

It's very inconvenient, but she would like them just read to her in Mindspeech. The man's character is just very important to what kind of peace talks and ultimate settlement will be possible and will be lasting, and she has...mixed impressions, so far, to put it mildly. 

(It seems implausible to her that Ma'ar did not realize he was racing to the brink of war with Tantara. Not impossible; little is impossible. But by all accounts the man is a military and strategic genius, and those tend to be people who track the threats to them and the people they pose a threat to; it is a stretch, to imagine he did not contemplate the risk of angering his larger and much more powerful southern neighbor whose archmage was sending him letters forcefully condemning his behavior. And there's an obvious explanation for why he'd put about that he had been shocked by the invasion; Predain can then be unified in terror of the unprovoked aggressor, and in their own righteous grievance at being invaded. (Their own invasions don't count; those countries were poor and volatile, and their residents grateful. Sure. Iomedae, again, is uncertain - but she doubts it. She has not met that many grateful conquered peoples, no matter how dramatically the conquerers improved on the previous rulers. She has met many more conquered people who will anxiously profess their gratitude.)

His intelligence on Tantara is reportedly excellent. And yet he missed their growing dismay at him, their plans for a war? Possible, of course, that his intelligence is excellent now after having been incredibly deficient before the war; or that the now-dead king successfully sowed misinformation about his intent. But more likely, he knew how frightening his actions looked, and knew when Tantara began preparing for war.

He wanted his country to be prosperous. Entirely reasonable; she has no reason to suspect it of being a pretense. ...it's hard to extend as charitable a lens for the conquests. If your country is desperately poor and your only concern for its prosperity, why spend its gold on toppling its neighbors? Why repeatedly aggravate your only candidate trading partner with blatant violations of all their taboos on the use of human sacrifices?

He seems genuinely popular. He also runs a lot of his military on mind control. Efficient and ruthless, fitting her previous impressions; advantageous for his personal power, obviously; an ugly precedent, absolutely. Plenty of those being set. And when someone openly uses a lot of mind control you should often assume they subtly use a lot more mind control than that. 

The King wants to appoint Ma'ar as his successor, rather than his own sons. Sure. (Again, it could be. Nothing is impossible. Some things are better explained by extensive use of known mind control powers than by other things.)

He is probably not Lawful. The blood-magic is a bad sign; it's obviously one of those bright lines nations maintain because the alternative is to maintain much, much larger standing armies in anticipation of the other side's ability to convert conquest into more military power into more conquest into more military power, depopulating areas as they go. She's glad magic doesn't work that way in her home world; it'd be a fucking nightmare. Expropriating temples is a much worse sign; that's not the behavior of someone who anticipates doing any international diplomacy, or attracting external investment. (Though it might, actually, mean much less than it would at home; the gods seem less interventionist, and their churches less crucial as institutions.)

Urtho doesn't think they can trust a parley and Iomedae, if she closes her eyes and tries to see the world the way a god would, all the possible futures ahead of her... doesn't think she can trust it either. The man evidently has the places where he draws a line; everyone agrees he treats prisoners well, everyone agrees he keeps his soldiers on an unusually tight leash when sacking cities. But she has no idea which are the places where he draws a line, and whether a parley would be on the right side of it.)

They’ll provide a hertasi Mindspeaker to translate letters for her.

There are several hundred of them, over a period of almost twenty years. It’s pretty clear that they make up half of an ongoing conversation, referencing content presumably in Urtho’s letters, which he didn’t keep spare copies of. 

The tone of the early letters, when Ma’ar would have been a young man, are serious and earnest and clearly seeking Urtho’s advice and approval. Ma’ar talks mostly about his magical research rather than his politicking, though reading between the lines, it’s clear that he was already advancing rapidly in Predain’s government. When he mentions the political side at all,  he mostly seems to find it tedious, a necessary price for accomplishing the things that actually excite him.

Later on, his letters are full of statistics, as he introduces various social programs in Predain. They’re training mages in weather-working; he has a table of figures estimating lives saved, a cost-benefit analysis comparing it to other efforts he’s considering. Again, he asks Urtho’s advice.

There are sections that must be following up on arguments or criticisms brought up from Urtho’s side; it’s pretty hard to follow, with the amount of context he’s missing, but overall the tone on Ma’ar’s side is one of friendly debate rather than genuine deep conflict. It continues to be clear that he respects Urtho and looks to him and also does not at all take any of his claims on faith.

He has tables of figures about the blood-magic, too, upper and lower bound estimates on how many children didn’t starve because their region had aqueducts and canals and roads for transporting goods, how much the life of each criminal bought for their country’s future. He goes into the compulsions less, but mentions the safety improvements in major cities, and how bandits convicted of non-capital crimes can be released safely with much lower risk of repeat crimes.

In the letters leading up to the starting date of the war, he does, in fact, in almost every letter, provide repeated earnest reassurances of Predain’s friendly and non-aggressive intent toward Tantara, and that he considers it in no ways in their interests to try to invade. The actual arguments he makes are oddly, well, non-political. Tantara is a beautiful and prosperous place, he writes. We have no desire to see that compromised, and are grateful to be so lucky as to have Tantara as our neighbor.

In his first letters after the war, he doesn’t seem angry. I understand why Tantara has acted as you have, he writes, but I think both of our kingdoms are paying a high price for outcomes that are not even what we wanted. 

He does, indeed, suggest parleys, offers locations they could meet on neutral ground, precautions they could take. From Iomedae’s perspective the offers are oddly underspecified, as though there doesn’t exist any standard language for negotiating those terms. He acknowledges, a little, the constraints both of them are under, in their respective positions as advisors and not themselves rulers, but he seems to mostly see this as a question for him and Urtho to resolve to their own satisfaction before presenting a solution to their respective Kings.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Urtho didn’t feel reassured. But it certainly seems like Ma’ar is trying. 

And even in those final recent letters, he still addresses Urtho as ‘teacher’ and ‘friend’.

She stays up very late into the night, listening. (Trying to learn the language, trying to check that the hertasi isn't editing on the fly.)

There are still lots of possibilities, of course, but fewer, with twenty years of letters to hand. Not all that many people can successfully maintain a pretense for twenty years; the ability to speak like you hold values you no longer care about at all degrades, for most people, in time.

A very long game, or, more likely, a man who earnestly believes he's doing the right thing.

Which is not not a dangerous kind of man, especially if it goes hand in hand with being not persuadable that he is doing the wrong thing.

And war changes people, makes them more ruthless and more dangerous, often makes them start inventing rationalizations for breaking the rules that once meant a great deal to them.

But -

- a man she'd be willing to risk meeting face to face, she thinks, if the ceasefire is granted and sticks. 

She sleeps.

She wakes before anyone else and prays to Aroden and finds nothing in response. Which is not the biggest problem in the world - the pearls of power mean that she should be able to keep her existing spells indefinitely - but there's no similar convenient mechanism to get more healing.

And no advice, which she could genuinely use. 

It's not surprising. Aroden is, in the scheme of things, a new god with small reach. (She tries Abadar and Erastil and Sarenrae, in case either of them are present here, but if they are they don't think it's worth responding, which would be unsurprising even if they're here.)

Urtho will make himself available to meet her whenever she wants. He spent most of the evening repeatedly drafting and discarding letters to Ma’ar requesting a ceasefire. He would appreciate Iomedae’s counsel, now that she’s had a chance to learn more about the situation.

(He’s also very curious to hear how the conversations with the Predain prisoners went, and whether she’s still optimistic about turning any of them to send back into Predain as spies.)

They mostly don't want to talk to her, which makes some sense; Predain seems suspicious of the gods. She thinks she can get there in time, if they have the time, but plausibly too slowly to be at all useful. She was going to go back today or tomorrow with some gifts for the woman who talked to her, which should get some more of them to consider talking to her. 

She is happy to help draft a request for a ceasefire. She doesn't know the local conventions but apparently there are fewer of those here than in places where you sometimes need an airtight same-day treaty with the fucking church of Asmodeus.

…Yeah, it kind of hasn’t come up. Tantara hasn’t had a war in living memory, certainly not in Urtho’s own lifetime. Urtho would deeply appreciate Iomedae’s help in drafting a letter.

Tantara requests a ceasefire, beginning in two days' time at sunrise ("do they have the same calendar system?") and lasting three days, until sunrise again,  unless further communications should extend it ("normally I'd aim for much longer up front, but we're calling a ceasefire with your country half-occupied and so we're going to need to push the lines back and I don't want to give them much chance to settle into them.")

The proposed lines of disengagement are such and such and such and such ("are all of those absolutely unambiguous?") ("you want to include a map on which they are brightly labelled?") ("the likeliest way this fails if they agree to it and are trying to keep it is that you do not have the same maps") ("can it be a river? even if it's a river well into territory Tantara controls, no one can pretend they accidentally wandered across a river") ("you can mention that this is where we think the front is, but it's not the line of disengagement because it's where we think the front is, it's the line of disengagement even if we're entirely wrong and the front's somewhere else"). Both sides will withdraw their troops five hundred paces from the line, where it's not a river, and restrict aerial activities within six thousand paces of the line ("people will pull so much shit about where in the air they were".)

Neither side will engage in forward movement into areas on their side of the disengagement lines, where they're in fact drawn wrongly and not at the front. 

The proposed prohibited activities are such and such and such and such ("can you think of other things they might do that would be easy to misinterpret as a prohibited activity? you don't want to forbid them Gating their soldiers out, bored hungry soldiers on your territory are going to be a problem.")

The provisions for monitoring of the ceasefire are as follows. Tantara puts these names forward for their side and Predain can have as many. Monitors will be here, and here, and here, and possessed with lines of communication to both sides. Uses of magic permitted to the monitors are as follows. Civilians can make reports to the monitors of unauthorized activity of which they were the target. ("All of the proposed lines of disengagement are in Tantaran territory, does that mean all the locals will speak your language?")

Tantara represents that there are no military forces operating under Tantaran banners with which the Tantaran government is out of contact ("really? are you sure?") and no mercenaries employed by the Tantaran government etcetera etcetera etcetera ("anyone else who works for you who could kill any of them?")

That's so detailed and specific! Urtho is really impressed! He has a lot of questions about why she wants to bring up particular points or phrase things carefully in particular ways. 

He's going to have to look up answers to specific questions, and in many cases fail to find them in his piles of notes and have to dispatch one of his hertasi staff to go track down the relevant map or the reports from his commanders. It's also pretty clear that paranoia and contingency-planning in case of unlucky miscommunications is not a skill that comes naturally to Urtho. 

He can confirm that they don't employ any mercenaries. All military units should have either Mindspeakers or mages powerful enough to use the long range communication-spell, so they really should be in contact. ...He can order more frequent reports in, if Iomedae thinks that's a good idea? Obviously he needs to have updates passed to all units anyway, to communicate that the ceasefire is being considered. 

(He does express, a couple of times, that Ma'ar will probably find all of this - carefulness and specificity - quite reassuring.) 

Ma'ar should, because it's necessary to make sure they only end up slaughtering each other if someone actually expects to gain by it and not just because it's the tragic default. (And if it also communicates that someone careful and competent has picked up the war on Tantara's side, she's fine with that at this point.) She is happy to explain every single clarification and specific wording in her proposal, though nothing in it rests on specific wordings, so long as there is no interpretation of the wording that means something completely different, and everything important in it is said three different ways at least.

More frequent updates are a very good idea while there's a ceasefire under consideration. If there's an accidental or small-scale breach of it, learning about it sooner makes it more likely it doesn't explode into a full-fledged collapse of the temporary peace.

And if there's a large-scale breach of it, she wants to be immediately ready to take Tantara on the offensive. She will be mindful that mistakes and miscommunications and breakdowns of the chain of command are very common, but she is also acutely aware that Ma'ar, recalculating as he inevitably will be, may well breach the ceasefire to try to mount an attack decisive enough even she can't win from there, and she is committed to not letting him. She would much much rather avoid this fight and has, if that fails, no intention of losing it.

And, yes, it makes a lot of sense that they want far more regular updates; they can't maintain that indefinitely, it wears out the Mindspeakers and the mages, but he can order hourly communications including overnight for the next...five days, it sounds like? Or until something else changes, one way or another. 

She should talk to his generals about making sure Tantara is ready for an offensive. Urtho can arrange a meeting for later today. 

He's - a little worried that Ma'ar isn't going to be the first person in Predain to learn of their ceasefire offer, and while obviously Ma'ar has most of his army mind controlled to be loyal, Urtho...still isn't sure if all of Ma'ar's subordinates actually want to end the war. 

Probably not. They should send the message through many different channels. If the communication they get is that Ma'ar wants to offer the ceasefire but is countermanded by his King, or that Ma'ar offers the ceasefire but does not control the units in a certain area, Iomedae will.....assess how tactically convenient that is for Ma'ar and then figure things out from there.

Her plan, if the ceasefire is betrayed or not agreed to, is an offensive, which she doesn't think would possibly win except that its first element is Ma'ar's assassination.

In those societies where assassination of military generals isn't against local custom (and it often is, since nobles set local custom), it's a very efficient way to solve a war. You kill one person, instead of tens of thousands; it doesn't depend a whole lot on the character of the one person whether that's a good trade (though for various other reasons you generally want to do it only to people who are unusually terrible, or a little terrible and unusually good at it). And this mess is clearly the product of the decisions of one specific person much more than most wars are. Both his supporters and detractors seem to agree that Predain is unified because of Ma'ar, that it began its expansionist phase because of Ma'ar, that the neighboring fiefdoms fell so quickly because of Ma'ar, that the loyalties of its soldiers are substantially to the person of Ma'ar. Urtho's efforts to communicate Tantara's growing hostility were entirely through private communication with Ma'ar; she suspects, based on what she has seen of the man and read of the letters he has, that they were somewhat incompetent, as efforts at diplomatic communication go, but they were also the letters of a mentor to his student, begging him to change course, and seem to have moved Ma'ar not at all on either level.

"Ma'ar is a strategic genius and a geopolitical complete idiot" is among her hypotheses, but far more likely is "Ma'ar knows what he's doing". He soothed Tantara for long enough to build his forces, then provoked them into war by conquering all his other neighbors and conveying only the least credible of reassurances. Tantara invaded, his people unified against their (racist, domineering) enemy, he killed the King and seized the capital, and now he's winning. Urtho said Ma'ar had impressively good intelligence in Tantara; Ma'ar probably has even better intelligence than Urtho knows, because that's not an area in which one shows one's full hand while winning comfortably. So he knows that she is here, she should assume, that the call for a ceasefire is from her. If he's smart and ruthless and possessed with only his own idiosyncratic scruples, he will probably try to kill her, and it probably won't work. 

And she should probably try to kill him, and it probably will work. 

It's not a perfect solution. There will probably continue to be a war, afterwards, with trust between Predain and Tantara even lower; she'll win that war, she's sure of it, but it'd be much much better to avoid fighting it. And the people of Predain, whose self-conception does seem substantially caught up in being the people of Kiyamvir Ma'ar, will be bitter in a fashion that will persist long into the peace. Killing people rarely discredits them.

(She could descend on him from the sky with a spectacular light show and angel's wings, kill him with a fiercely glowing holy sword, and then give a speech about precisely which elements of his behavior Heaven does and does not approve of. She does not hesitate to speak for Heaven, not when she knows full well what they'd say if they bothered being more interventionist.

But they're not a god-trusting people, the people of Predain, and she fears they'll interpret it as the rich and indifferent powers that always neglected them coming once again to kick the ladder away...)

The alternative is to beat him on the battlefield. That...might work or might not. She doesn't know how to effectively make use of the local kind of mage. She'll have to learn very fast, but she has a lot of flexibility this world hasn't yet witnessed and she can plausibly win most fights singlehandedly. Maybe they'll figure out fast how to counter her; maybe they'll figure out fast how to actually successfully assassinate her, but she's not easy to counter and she's not easy to assassinate. (She wishes she were more sure whether a Final Strike would do it.) Ma'ar is, probably, not an idiot; he won't make concessions while he's winning, but he might well make concessions once he's losing. Or he might get more desperate; he hasn't started using prisoners and civilians in captured territory for blood power yet, but he could. He knows that Tantara's grievance is with him particularly, he can't expect to survive defeat; he can do a great deal of damage in the course of slowly losing. 

Yeah, she doesn't like that plan. 'Push the extremely smart extremely ruthless mage with a spectacular number of options for atrocities when he's desperate, to the point of desperation, by beating him on the battlefield' does not sound like a plan that ends with a negotiated peace. It sounds like a plan that ends with her assassinating Ma'ar in a month when the costs are far higher, or being killed herself. It could go well. Iomedae does not, for the most part, make plans that could go well but whose default trajectory is to go spectacularly badly.

She is - has been from the second she arrived here - looking for ways to get that negotiated peace. Maybe they'll agree to the ceasefire; maybe they'll agree to extend it in three days. Maybe they'll agree to a prisoner exchange. Maybe she'll be able to build enough trust fast enough to meet the man face to face. 

But the default plan - as it has been since about twenty minutes after she arrived here - is to assassinate Kiyamvir Ma'ar, or die trying. (And presumably get raised back on her usual battlefield. She does not at all believe herself to be outside Creation, not when there are completely normal looking humans going around slinging Fireballs and Lightning Bolts. Her death would be a major loss to Tantara, to this world, but not to her.) 

She thinks she can do it, if Urtho has some way to stop the man from simply fleeing. Tar Baphon himself couldn't beat her in melee, and Kiyamvir Ma'ar does not have Time Stop. 

....Urtho doesn't like this plan.

He's pretty unhappy about it, actually! He thinks assassinating people is generally an awful thing to do and also, well, he...still cares about Ma'ar, and - feels sort of responsible, for Ma'ar having lost his way. 

He's not going to argue with her conclusion, though. It seems pretty clear that Iomedae is an expert in war, and Urtho isn't, and never wanted to be, and has been incredibly out of his depth for the last year. 

...He can't exactly prevent Ma'ar from Gating himself out of a situation he doesn't want to be in? You could probably do that with compulsions, theoretically, but as previously noted, Predain is comfortable using compulsions and Tantara isn't. 

She commends their taboo on mind control and does not intend to violate it, but there's in fact no other way to stop people from Gating? At home you could Dimension Lock and locally bar interplanar transit.

(It might be worth trying anyway, depending how long Gates take.)

.....There is not a known method to block Gating out of a particular area, no, that doesn't even seem like the sort of thing that could work in principle. At best you could maybe block Gating in via particular Gate-techniques, but even that is mostly theoretical, not a known kind of wards. 

Most mages need at least five seconds of uninterrupted focus to Gate. Ma'ar is....unusually good at Gates and unusually fast at casting in general. 

She is absolutely unsurprised by that; it was obvious already Ma'ar was by far Predain's most powerful mage, obvious since it was explained to her that it was an artifact of his personal make that took the palace in an instant. 

It might not be worth trying, if he's too likely to just leave, and certainly raises the threshold at which it's worth trying, though if he betrays the ceasefire with an attack in full force she's in fact not sure she can win a war against him from there without hundreds of thousands of deaths. A war with a desperate blood-power using mage does not sound fun.

Hopefully he will agree to the ceasefire. If he does, and it holds, then she'll go and speak with him, and end this whole thing peacefully. 

...Yes. Hopefully. 

Urtho will finalize a draft letter - it's much longer than most of his previous attempts, and doesn't end up sounding much like him at all - and dispatch it for one of his mages to carry to the nearest Predain camp. 

Ma'ar probably won't receive it until late tonight, if not tomorrow morning. What are Iomedae's priorities in the meantime? 

Getting ready for if the ceasefire is refused, or fails. Where are Tantara's forces, and where are the most promising locations for an offensive? What are their numbers like? Where do they have the most information about the movements of their enemy?

...Urtho feels very unsure about promising locations for an offensive, but he can get her some maps and logistics reports and spy-reports (and another hertasi Mindspeaker to translate them to her), and arrange meetings with some of his other top generals. 

Tantara's troops outnumber Predain's, and Tantara's mages even moreso outnumber Predain's mages– or at least they did, at the start of the war, but Tantara's casualties were much higher, he'll need to track down more recent reports if Iomedae wants exact details. 

In terms of Predain's movements, they have a lot more information about the un-Gifted troops - Predain doesn't have a permanent Gate-network, and so large-scale people transport is much more costly - but small strike teams of mages can be wherever they want to be on very short notice, and can often shield their movements against scrying.

Then Iomedae will sit down with whoever is willing to consult with her and start asking a lot of questions about what would go wrong if she did an offensive like this, an offensive like this, an offensive like this....

Urtho's generals - at least the specific ones Urtho put her in touch with - are, overall, more cautious and paranoid than Urtho, and better at taking into account the sort of strategic considerations Iomedae takes for granted. They have lots of specific information and counterarguments to her suggested plans. 

(They do, for the most part, come across as very young, and very inexperienced, in a way where if they were in Golarion, they would probably have gotten themselves killed or at least run into serious problems much earlier.) 

She is delighted to work with them! She will workshop the plans for the invasion, and also hear them out about how they assess the odds of turning things around, if Ma'ar lives and if he dies.

....They don't trust Ma'ar. He's scary and has no scruples and - well - it's not that he's smarter than Urtho, who is the most brilliant mage in the world, but he's - sneakier and more ruthless and willing to take advantage of any opportunity. Urtho likes him, because Urtho likes everyone, especially his students. But Ma'ar isn't his student anymore, and hasn't been for decades, and they're pretty sure Ma'ar doesn't hold to nearly the same level of - scruples based on loyalty and friendship - that Urtho wants to. 

(They don't outright say that they think the odds are better if Ma'ar dies. It's pretty strongly implied, though.) 

Hopefully they will reach a peace agreement. 

They're not very hopeful. They're happier about workshopping lots of potential invasion plans with her, taking advantage of capabilities she hasn't yet demonstrated in front of a lot of people, and thus might still have a chance of catching Ma'ar by surprise. 

Ma'ar's reply reaches them early the next morning, via an unarmed, un-Gifted messenger arriving on foot at one of Urtho's outlying camps. (And additional copies trickle into other camps with additional messengers over the ensuing candlemark; Ma'ar, too, wanted to make very sure that Urtho received this message.) 

He agrees to the ceasefire at the specified time and date. He's attached his own copy of the map they've been referring to, with a few differences marked boldly; the main difference is that, for a particular river suggested as a front, Predain actually has a concentration of troops on the far side of the river already. 

He cannot promise that there aren't other smaller units in pockets deeper in Tantara, probably in these general regions, and he promises to make very sure that word of the ceasefire reaches them by the time it's in action but he cannot promise they will still be where he thinks they were last. It's not impossible that he'll fail to reach one of the parties, if they lost their comms-mage or Mindspeaker at some point more recent than their last report in. 

Also, for this other section of river, while he's content to consider it the dividing line for ceasefire purposes, Urtho should perhaps be made aware that it is currently a dry riverbed and not going to present much of an obstacle to anyone crossing it, though it's still probably hard to do by accident. 

Of the list of prohibited activities, he rejects Urtho's proposal that camps at the front should only be able to set up passive wards and not ones that bite. His people are going to be feeling very nervous and paranoid and anything that makes them more nervous is going to drastically increase the odds of a miscommunication leading to a breakdown in the ceasefire. He agrees that magic for communication and scouting purposes, like the communication-spell and scrying, should be allowed. 

He would like to specify that camps on rivers will be cleared to use magic to fish in said rivers, which is going to be important because in a few cases their re-supply plans involved foraging on land on the other side of said river, and an army holding still is going to have a much harder time feeding itself. Predain relies less on Gates for supply logistics than Tantara does; they don't have enough mages with the range or the power to hold a Gate open long enough. 

Predain does have some hired mercenaries. Reputable companies, this list, and it shouldn't be a problem but he does want to note that they're not integrated with the main army chain of command. 

He proposes his own list of monitors. He promises that all of them speak very good Tantaran. These three are also Mindspeakers – and powerful enough to reach the un-Gifted, if Urtho is willing to agree to that, which Ma'ar is not taking for granted. 

He is deeply grateful that Urtho is willing to consider this de-escalation, and hopes that they'll be able to negotiate further from here. 

"- promising, I think. I don't think we need to pick a fight about the camp wards. I suppose you'd rather have them fishing than living even more off your locals. I want to separately contact the mercenary companies, actually, that's a good source of information on whether the man can keep an agreement, can you write in the response that we'll be in touch with them? And then let's review the lines very very carefully and imagine at each spot what, if a fight starts, it'd start over - a ceasefire is a very difficult command situation to navigate, your men evidently trust you and I believe we can achieve this but it's going to be tough on them and we want to set them up to succeed."

...Urtho had not really thought to be worried about that! Should he be worried about that? He maybe actually wants to send Iomedae back to meet with his generals directly, at this point he trusts her sense of who's likely to start fights over what much more than his own sense (which, though he doesn't admit this out loud, is mostly internal flailing right now.) He can arrange Gates for her, and send her with a hertasi Mindspeaker escort and translator. 

General Korad is in charge of the First Army, or more accurately the rear camp near the Tower, which isn't anywhere near the front but is heavily involved in organizing the Gates for supplies and replacement mages or Mindspeakers or Healers for units that suffer casualties.

General Micherone commands the Second Army, here on the map, near the river which is apparently not a river after all. Urtho has a very high opinion of her, and she keeps good troop discipline.

General Polden commands the Fourth Army and...apparently completely failed to notice a bunch of Predain troops on the near side of the relevant section of river, which seems like it might indicate a problem? 

General Shaiknam commands the Sixth Army, which previously had the largest concentration of nonhumans, especially gryphons, but the gryphons had a grievance with General Shaiknam and are now their own separate unit under the command of Snowstar, a Kaled'a'in mage, and assigned to the Second Army under General Judeth. He additionally has the unfortunate trait that he doesn't respect mages very much and, relatedly, most of the mages under his command dislike him strongly and Urtho probably needs to make provisions to have them reassigned between the other armies, except that it's a terrible idea to leave them without mages in their current strategic position. The Sixth was recently able to retake Stelvi Pass, here on the map, when under the command of a different general who is unfortunately now dead, so they're also near the front, though at least Ma'ar hasn't informed them of any irregularities related to that. They are in an unusually awkward position in terms of supplies because the Stelvi Gate was shut down when the pass was initially taken by Predain, and have also just lost their gryphon wings and have limited access to mages. 

General Judeth commands the Fifth Army and Iomedae has met her already. She's here on the map. They're on the front, still just barely hanging onto Korbast Pass, and they're currently rather desperately short on Mindspeakers to stay in communication. The remaining gryphon wings formerly allocated to the Sixth will be catching up with her soon, though in light of the ceasefire, possibly they should reconsider major gryphon movements? It spooks the Predain army. 

General Movat commands the Third Army, is...fine, if not brilliant, and is apparently some distance back from where Ma'ar thinks his closest units are. However, the Third Army has the complication of containing all the worshippers of Vkandis Sunlord, who especially hate irreligious Predain and one gets the sense this feeling is mutual. 

Iomedae is going to spend the day introducing herself to these people, hearing them out, admiring their work, humbly suggesting advice, problem-solving where it's welcome, emphasizing relentlessly that keeping the ceasefire is a necessary element of Tantara retaking its territory which she intends to help it do, and emphasizing just as relentlessly that while actual betrayal by Ma'ar will be met with his immediate destruction, a few idiots from Predain causing trouble in violation of the ceasefire is leverage for further negotiations not grounds to immediately start shooting back. She cannot solve literally all command problems today but she can try to make sure they won't explode during the crucial three day window and she can try to lay some groundwork to work with these people in the long run (she might instead replace them but you don't start diminishing your effort on someone you have not actually already replaced.)

They are, for the most part, happy to talk to her!

General Micherone makes a very good first impression. General Movat also does, actually, despite Urtho having apparently been less impressed; he's an intensely thorough, diligent, careful-thinking man, and has the best documentation of any of Urtho's generals on his forces and their logistics. He's on good terms with his Vkandis-worshipping mage units and doesn't expect trouble from that side. 

General Korad seems more optimistic about Tantara's situation than is really warranted and is thus unhappy about some of the conditions of the ceasefire seeming unnecessarily favorable to Predain - he has a bit of a snit about the fishing thing, those are Tantara's fish! - but he's not going to be near the front, and he's definitely very much on top of the work he actually needs to be doing, of making sure Tantaran forces are fed and supplied. 

General Polden seems overwhelmed and harried, and doesn't actually make a lot of time to talk to Iomedae, despite the fact that the unexpected presence of troops much closer than he was apparently aware of does seem like a major source of potential complications. 

General Shaiknam, on the other hand, is very polite and helpful, and immediately sets aside a full candlemark to speak with her. He assures her that after the separation of some of his 'problematic' units, he's confident in his troops' discipline, and they also shouldn't have to worry as much about hotheaded young gryphons daring each other to flout the aerial activity restrictions. Gryphons are awful. 

The day passes. Nothing else explodes. 

Luckily she can also work nights. Time to start drafting the proposals for peace talks. Not face to face at first, they can both send some representatives and see how that goes, but there should at least be people in the same room authorized to sign a sufficiently favorable deal. 

Also, time to meet some gryphons? And any representatives of the lizardfolk, actually, if they have an independent command structure. And she'd like to scrounge up some gifts she can bring with her when she returns north - blankets, food, that kind of thing - and write a very simple-language guide-to-deescalating-less-than-full-scale-incursions for each of the generals, recapitulating what she said in person.

And then she'll sleep.

The gryphon leader who everyone agrees she should talk to is currently leading a scouting party and will need to sleep after that but can meet her tomorrow morning. 

The hertasi will send a representative immediately! They're so helpful! The lizardfolk are entirely in noncombatant roles – they cook and do laundry and provide a lot of the non-magical medical care and are involved in caring for the gryphons, who need considerable help with their grooming and other personal hygiene since they lack hands.

Iomedae will also quickly learn that the hertasi, too, are a created race, though not by Urtho. A mage shortly before Urtho's time wanted a servant race. Whether creating one was ethical is not something the hertasi really address, but they seem very happy with their situation. They're also incredibly gossipy and can tell her so so much about the various generals if she likes, though it'll be overweighted toward their romantic lives. 

Iomedae wouldn't herself create a servitor race but she's hardly going to feel distaste around them. She's so happy for their help! She'd be delighted to learn about the generals, though not as much about anything they might've thought was between them and a lover; in her culture, that's private. She is more interested in what sorts of things they like and are good at, who on their staff really likes them and who just puts up with them, whatever happened between Shaiknam and his gryphons if the gryphons gossip about that, etcetera. Are they interested in things of Golarion? Dishes? Hairstyles? Fashions?

....They will reluctantly restrain themselves on the romance gossip, just, see, people's love lives are usually the most interesting thing about them. 

General Micherone is from a wealthy noble family and well-liked by nearly everyone. General Judeth is well-liked by everyone competent and diligent, and has also left behind a string of people with grievances; she holds her people to high standards and isn't shy about dressing them down if they fail to live up to her expectations. General Polden is discussed with fond exasperation; the hertasi are clearly covering for many weaknesses in his organization and thoroughness. General Movat, on the other hand, is adored by his hertasi, if not necessarily all of his human staff. General Shaiknam is, approximately, liked by everyone whose regard he cares about and disliked by literally everyone else; he's also highborn and, in the hertasi's honest opinion, much better at the politicking side of things than the military strategy side, and more concerned about his future career and promotions than about the people under his command. 

He seems to...not fully think of gryphons as intelligent people? Which, unsurprisingly, the gryphons hate. Gryphons are also not, well, particularly subtle or sophisticated in their politics, and so General Shaiknam's charm is wasted on them. 

They would like to hear EVERYTHING about Golarion! But especially the fashion! They love fashion! (From the way they talk about it, it sort of seems like they enjoy dressing up their favorite humans as though playing dolls.) 

In the morning, a messenger from Ma'ar arrives, alone and unarmed, and waits five hundred paces back on the far side of the dry stretch of river. She's a Mindspeaker, and can relay that she has instructions on how Urtho's people can contact the commanders of these several mercenary units, if they still want to do that. 

They do. Everyone who has ever worked with Ma'ar in any capacity, really. It's not as if he'd have stopped paying his mercenaries midway if he still had gold for them, but there are other signs, sometimes, of a person's character. 

She'll try to get those conversations set up, and she'll bring her gifts back north to the prison and explain that the ceasefire has been arranged and should go ahead in the morning.

A couple of the mercenary captains are willing to exchange letters. One is willing to send a delegate in person; one is willing to hold a conversation at range via a Mindspeaker relay. 

The Predain prisoners are so suspicious and do not really believe her about the ceasefire being a real thing. They're also pretty hesitant about touching the gifts. This is probably some kind of very confusing trick. 

It is not a high-trust culture, she's getting the sense. She won't dwell too much on it; she doesn't need them to believe her. Everyone is alive and well and there are no obvious indicators they've been mistreated since she left?

They seem fine, yeah, including the woman who spoke to her earlier, and who currently seemed to be focused on reassuring the other prisoners. She does, eventually, seem to decide that the blankets are probably safe, and gets one. 

Conversations with mercenaries can be arranged for later in the morning. For now, does she want to meet with Skandranon, the lead spokesperson for the gryphons? 

(The ceasefire should now be in effect. She has yet to hear of anything going terribly wrong.) 

She'd like to talk to the representative for the gryphons, then, yeah. Though she'd like Urtho to interrupt her if anything even slightly weird happens.

She can get a Gate to his location, then! 

Most of the gryphons are brown with various markings, but Skandranon's feathers are glossy jet black. On his hind legs, he towers over her, and his beak is as wide across as her entire torso. 

He speaks perfectly comprehensible Tantaran, albeit with a sibilant accent. The hertasi will translate for him without difficulty. 

He says that he is honored to meet such a skilled warrior as he understands Iomedae is, and would like to someday hear tales of her exploits in battle, but will (reluctantly) put that aside until after they've crushed Predain. What does she want to know? 

What the gryphons are like, what they have contributed to the war, what they want from the peace, how they like Tantara, whether they're appreciated, whether they understand why there's a ceasefire and will respect it, and then they can absolutely talk about exploits in battle, it's good to get to know the people you're working with, though she's concealing most of her capabilities from Predain's no-doubt-numerous spies.

Gryphons love flying and love fighting (and, if Skandranon is a typical example, definitely love bragging and showing off.) He comes across as brash and impulsive and very high on bravado, compared to the humans she's met. 

Gryphons like Tantara! They especially like Urtho, their creator, who is brilliant and always treated them well except for that one thing where he kept it secret from them how females could become fertile to breed, because he wanted executive control over all their breeding choices. Skan stole the spell from him, though! And he apologized! So they're all friends again now. Some people don't appreciate gryphons. Those people are idiots. Everyone who's not an idiot thinks gryphons are great, since they are. 

Skandranon is...honestly very dubious about the ceasefire, because Ma'ar is a horrible person and is probably going to break it in the first candlemark, and he's really annoyed about the restrictions on flight, but he has been given clear orders and General Judeth is not an idiot and does adequately appreciate gryphons and so he's willing to listen to her. 

And then he'll brag about his exploits in battle! Gryphons do, in fact, seem to be unusually bloodyminded and violence-seeking, if Skandranon's rather gruesome and gory stories are a good example to go on. He's so excited about it, though. He bounces. 

Well, it's not like she can't match him for stories, warning him in advance that she's changing some details so it's harder to guess things about her. 

(If some of her soldiers are gryphons, she will learn to be a good commander to gryphons; people aren't all the same, but they all matter, and there would be a place in a good world for all of them. And it's not as if there aren't some terrifyingly bloodthirsty people of any race you care to name.)

The gryphons are definitely going to get along with her, if she appreciates them like that! Skandranon warms to her very quickly. 

And then it's time to talk to the mercenaries. The relayed-Mindspeech conversation is the most useful, but they all give the same general impression. 

They like Ma'ar. He's not perfect, but he's straightforward – Predain folk are in general, no tricky diplomacy, they'll just talk straight with you – and he tried hard, at the beginning, to be scrupulously honest about what he would be asking of them and what he could realistically offer in return. They haven't always been paid on time, and sometimes were paid in-kind when they were expecting coin, but he warned them this was likely to come up, and offered to pay more upfront such that they would still be happy about the deal. The contracts don't pay as well as they would usually look for, Predain is poor, but Ma'ar is a genius with magic, and offered to kit them out with specialized shield-talismans and camp wards and other protective artifacts. Not just as loans for the duration of the war, either, they can keep the stuff. 

He has very good situational awareness and 'street smarts', but he's in some ways inexperienced in large-scale inter-state war, facing a well-organized army. He's certainly inexperienced in diplomacy and not very sophisticated at it, and one could argue that his decisiveness occasionally verges on rashness. The implication is that he's leaning rather hard on being a genius at magic, and while he's certainly not as good as Urtho, he's better at coming up with creatively ruthless approaches to win battles with clever use of obscure spells or artifacts rather than with numerical superiority. He hates killing people if he could put compulsions on them instead, which is...nonstandard, to say the least. 

But he doesn't give them stupid missions, and he does respect their expertise and seek their advice. He's not careless with their lives; a lot of kings and generals would rather put mercenaries in the most dangerous positions rather than their own people, but if anything Ma'ar does the opposite. He always listens to their disputes with his decisionmaking and to their grievances, and he even demoted one of his commanders after they registered complaints that the man was impossible to work with. 

(And meanwhile, reports from Urtho on 'any weirdness': General Polden was late on a scheduled report, but Urtho had his people follow up and it seems like everything is fine and their timekeeping was just unreliable. General Micherone's people found some apparently-starving Predain civilians in the woods and are honestly very confused about how they got there and why and would like advice. Some young gryphons were giving each other dares and kiiiiind of violated the 'six thousand paces' rule but were ordered back before they actually got close to the dividing line. Nothing else unexpected has happened; Ma'ar's side is being very very scrupulous about the aerial restrictions.) 

Yeah that's a unsurprising amount of complexity. She really does not like the idea Predain is ....putting....civilians in the woods in Tantara? How does that happen by accident?? They should feed them and write a letter communicating displeasure and the desire that this kind of conduct by Predain be addressed in the eventual peace settlement, but not saying anything that might be interpreted as 'deal's off' or even 'we're on edge more than you'd expect'.

Do gryphons want gory stories about the unnecessary breakdowns of ceasefires and the innocent people who died horribly as a result.

She revises the draft letter proposing peace talks, in a location of little strategic utility that both sides can Gate to.

Yeah the random civilians in the woods are utterly terrified and don't speak any Tantaran and even once they found an interpreter who speaks (terrible) Predaini, they're not being very forthcoming about how exactly they ended up there. It could at-all-plausibly have been on foot, maybe because something happened to their farm – which is plausible, the gryphons have, uh, sometimes diverted their scouting missions to go terrorize random farmers in Predain's territory, they're not supposed to but what can you do about gryphons. And it's the region where the river isn't actually a river – it sounds like it was diverted upstream for some kind of war-related tactical reason six months ago, with the result that the main channel dried up and stopped being a water source for everyone relying on it – so they could theoretically have wandered the whole distance from Predain territory without a Gate or a military escort. Though it's certainly weird and worrying. 

Gryphons loooooooooooove gory stories! They are (especially the very young ones, who come across as maybe equivalent to a human fourteen or fifteen-year old in maturity) perhaps less sold on the goriness being a bad thing than one might hope. 

She can get lots of advice from Urtho's generals on the peace talks draft letters. Morning turns to early afternoon. Nothing explodes. 

She will work on both the plans for the attack and the plans for the peace, then.

Nothing explodes. 

Until around sunset, at which point one of the Mindspeakers will very very urgently contact Iomedae – at this point, actually before she alerts Urtho.

General Judeth's camp is, uh, apparently...surrounded...by Predaini troops? Including several hundred of them, a couple of infantry units, who were definitely approaching them from behind and must have cut through quite a lot of Tantaran territory, presumably on foot because no one detected any Gates at any point, but it's pretty unclear how they possibly got past the line without being seen, it's been very closely monitored via scrying and nobody reported anything suspicious and it seems pretty hard to miss several hundred people marching. 

Can Iomedae please advise???? 

Well. Fuck. 

Iomedae's advice is that they Gate her in immediately.

They will do that! 

General Judeth is CONCERNED! Half of her mages aren't even here, they're at Korbast Pass, and a lot of the mages she does have here are the ones rotating off because they're exhausted! 

She is, however, already organizing everyone she does have who has enough in their reserves to scry - not a high-powered spell - and the gryphons are in the air. 

She's really confused! As far as she can tell the Predain troops don't include mages; their structure is somewhat different, mages operate in smaller specialized units rather than being integrated into the main army like Tantara mostly does things. Maybe the plan was to Gate the mages in on top of them but you'd have expected them to time that for before her scouts noticed the problem.

Maybe the plan here is just to engage them here so that they won't be able to send reinforcements to the pass, and they're doing a more conventional approach there? But they were definitely respecting the ceasefire lines on that side, and - still are? As far as scrying can tell? 

They are at this point almost certain that Ma'ar isn't personally here. 

It seems quite plausible to Iomedae that she is the target, here, either because Ma'ar means to kill her or because he means to see her capabilities in more detail before he decides whether to keep playing by the ceasefire rules or not. Though of course it's also possible that Predain is in internal disarray, or some truly stupendous misunderstanding has happened.

"Get the monitors here as well, from both sides. Tell them there has been a ceasefire, they are in violation of it, and that they are commanded to immediately surrender."

General Judeth will send that order immediately although she is kind of worried that their position here is not very defensible if the mages do join in the fight, which is the only plan that makes any sense on Predain's side - maybe they just mistimed something, coordinating the exact timing when the infantry units had a long march and may not have Mindspeakers with them is the kind of thing that can get fumbled, though in that case presumably Ma'ar is watching via scrying and will rectify the mistake quickly. 

Exhausted Tantaran mages are holding a massive barrier-shield around the camp while a lot of people who were interrupted in the middle of eating supper or napping very hurriedly don armor and organize themselves. There's an awkward standoff. 

The first of the Predain monitors can be contacted and transported in within three minutes. She's very sure that these units are NOT supposed to be here and in fact does not have the slightest idea how they could have GOTTEN here or under whose orders and they should, in fact, have known perfectly well about the ceasefire. She's a strong Mindspeaker and can find the minds of the unit commanders and demand to know what in the world they think they're doing, without actually having to venture outside the barrier-shield. 

....Uhhhh. They're claiming they had orders from Ma'ar to march through Stelvi Pass and surround this camp? 

(She's very confused, and she is so incredibly scared and mostly not showing it.) 

- the obvious implication there being that General Shaiknam was turned and works for Ma'ar and wow Judeth is FURIOUS about that and - this is not good this is very very not good, his units were the closest reinforcements and it sounds like she cannot expect help from that direction -

- what does Iomedae advise that they do. 

"Tell them to lay down their weapons immediately."

The terrified Predaini monitor will relay that in Mindspeech. Maybe Broadsending that to everyone, she's going to give herself backlash really quickly trying to hit several hundred people but this seems IMPORTANT. 

Scrying-report over the next thirty seconds: there is definitely some confusion out there but for the most part weapons are not being laid down. 

(There is an angry gryphon scout party circling above their heads, which perhaps makes letting go of one's weapons seem significantly less appealing.) 

"Order to gryphon wing, they're to stand down get back inside the barrier–" 

...someone just shot down one of the gryphons. 

The rest of the gryphon wing is very angry about this and they are super not going to stand down. 

The Predaini monitor is still repeatedly Mindspeaking everyone she can reach telling them over and over to lay down her weapons and her head is pounding and she is pretty sure that she's going to die here.

She could have prevented that, if she'd done this sooner, but she's thinking. 

She can wait. Try to negotiate some more, try to herd them back towards their own border, try to get a direct line of communication with Ma'ar. 

That goes well, if this is really some unfathomable misunderstanding.

That goes badly, if this is an intentional provocation, or  -- and this is what she fears more -- a distraction. Ma'ar wants Urtho's Tower, Urtho said, and must never get it. She has no trouble believing that. She has some trouble believing that the betrayal of one of Urtho's generals, the sudden presence of hundreds of troops advancing on Tantara's positions, is unlucky.

Shaiknam. Acting in confused self-interest, or mind-controlled?

The cost of erring in one direction is hundreds of thousands of lives. In the other - 

"I am going to disable or kill every soldier holding a weapon outside this camp," she says to the monitors, her voice very precise, and to Judeth, "keep the monitors alive."

And then she draws a sword that glows terrifyingly brightly and moves too fast to see -

- except in that the light (dancing across the woods outside the camp) leaves a confused afterimage on the eyes -

- which insist that some of those strokes of light must've been there at the same time as some of the other ones. 

None of the injuries would be lethal in a place with Golarion healing. She's not even sure that's a kindness, but it's an option. 

It's not a fight; none of them can scratch her. 

......Wow. That's - actually the most terrifying thing General Judeth has ever seen. 

(WHY isn't Ma'ar Gating mages in? This doesn't make any sense -) 

This is the worst thing that could possibly be happening and the Predain monitor does not for one second believe that they're going to keep her alive. 

:I'm going to: she manages to squeeze out to General Judeth, :try, to contact, Ma'ar, if he's, in range -: And probably be useless after that, she's already verging on backlash, but - 

- reach - 

He's not close. He must be several hundred miles away. It's maybe the furthest she's ever Mindspoken anyone and it hurts and it feels like stretching out her arm until the bones and ligaments threaten to come apart, and her fingertips just, barely, brushing her goal without finding purchase - 

It's been less than five minutes since General Judeth's warning went out. The troops on-site do not, in fact, have Mindspeakers, and a certain other message was still making its way to Ma'ar. 

He feels the feather-light brush on his shields, and reaches back, flinging his own strength in to stabilize the connection - how far is that...? 

:What: 

The monitor is, at this point, barely clinging to consciousness as well as barely hanging onto the Mindspeech link. She isn't especially coherent.

:Did you - order - this...?: 

:Did I order what. Where.: 

She can't remember the placename of where they're supposed to be. What's the general's name, she can't remember that either...

:Camp. Woman. Blonde: 

...the connection fades out and the monitor collapses in a heap. 

It's been about twenty seconds since Iomedae headed out with a sword. She's disabling people at a rate of about one per second. The gryphons are going after some of the rest. 

...That narrows it down to two places it could be. Probably. Ma'ar can scry both of them in the next ten seconds.  

Think. 

Is the situation retrievable. 

- probably not. It doesn't matter what went wrong - though the obvious guess is obvious, he should have put a compulsion on Shaiknam and risked it being detected, the man is not reliable and thinks far better of his own judgement than is warranted and probably thought he was being incredibly clever - but either way it's too late to undo. 

His people are dying over there. 

If he sends in his mages, there's - no way back from this. If he...does nothing...then maybe no one except some defenseless foot soldiers gets hurt, and maybe the Tantaran side and their mysterious terrifyingly powerful ally will be confused enough to hesitate - 

- but General Shaiknam was making a bet, that Ma'ar would see a fait accompli and wouldn't be able to bring himself to watch his people die while he did nothing, and...he cannot, in fact, bring himself to do that. This is his fault, not theirs. 

Can he get them out. 

....Not all of them. He's too slow, too little too late, and fifty of his people are already down, dead or dying, and - 

He can't, actually, bring himself to give up on saving anyone. For strategic reasons, partly, it's going to spook the rest of his people and convincing everyone to go for the ceasefire the first time was hard enough that he doesn't think he can do it twice. But also something more fundamental than that. They're his people. They thought they were following his orders. He can't just...wash his hands of that. 

What are his options. 

He can try to send a messenger clarifying that he didn't intend this and General Shaiknam acted without orders. The problem is that it's too slow; if he sends an un-Gifted messenger to their side of Korbast Pass, the message absolutely won't reach General Judeth fast enough to save any of his people – even if she believed it, which he wouldn't in her place.

(Implicit, not a thought he has time to fully unpack: if the foreign stranger slaughters several units of his infantry, regardless of how much this is obviously their fault, the King is approximately going to consider this proof that the ceasefire was a ruse.) 

He can remain at a distance but try to get orders to his people directly, to stand down. That might work. It probably won't. The monitor on-site probably just knocked herself unconscious, so he's lost his best point of contact. If he were one of those soldiers, and had two conflicting hard-to-verify information sources on what Adept Kiyamvir Ma'ar had ordered, he probably wouldn't believe the one that said 'drop your weapons while under attack in enemy territory.'

He can send in mages in force, and play into General Shaiknam's hands, and destroy any chance of the miraculous ceasefire sticking. And maybe without accomplishing anything at all, it might just mean sending more of his people into a doomed battle; it's not clear fifty mages could hold their own any better against...that, whatever that is...

...he can go in himself, alone, and give the order to surrender directly, in Mindspeech recognizable as coming from him, and - what - Gate out as many people as he can...? And if he only does that, only shields himself and evacuates who he can, if he very clearly doesn't attack, then – well, it's a violation of the ceasefire order, but not much more of one than what's already happened, and it might still preserve enough confusion that, even if he gets himself killed, the situation is still - retrievable from there - 

(He could Gate someone else in, that's the non-stupid thing to do that doesn't involve massive personal risk, but it's nearly as escalatory, and will take much longer because he'll need to actually pick someone and explain it to them, and it's - condemning them to a near-certain ugly death -) 

(The war stopped being winnable as soon as a powerful stranger landed in Tantara. That's - not an option, anymore, and if anything he's relieved to have it off the table.) 

Until now, he would have been confident that he could win any one-on-one fight, or at least flee one he was losing. He's - very much not confident he could win this one. 

Doesn't matter. He has yet to think of any other option that leads to even a chance of something other than escalating back to full-scale war. 

(It depends what the stranger wants. He's not sure. But it seems...plausible, at least...that what she wants is for there to stop being a stupid pointless wasteful war. It's not such an odd thing to want, even if the King was far from sold on that theory.) 

If his soldiers die, it's forever, but that's not true for him

Breathe. 

Gate. He aims for half a mile away, in the forest; he doesn't need to be able to see people to reach them with Mindspeech or magic. 

Gates are rather spectacularly visible to mage-sight. Judeth is alerted within less than a second. 

She needs a Mindspeaker to relay to Iomedae right now that that's Ma'ar. 

Ma'ar is not a powerful enough Mindspeaker to Broadsend to a crowd, and he doesn't know everyone well enough to target individual minds. He could try the powerful stranger directly, but - what reason does she have to believe him, at this point? 

The commanders and lieutenants, then. 

:This is Kiyamvir Ma'ar. General Shaiknam acted without orders. You are in violation of the ceasefire stand down lay down your weapons surrender NOW follow evacuation-Gate protocol: and then the next person and then the next and he's shielding himself as thoroughly as he can. 

- and most mages can't project a Gate-threshold more than twenty yards from themselves, but Ma'ar can distance-cast it at a mile, and he knows exactly where those clusters of minds are. A Gate goes up. It's been about five seconds since his Gate in. 

If Iomedae can't directly detect Gates or minds lurking in the woods, it's going to be more like fifteen seconds before a Tantaran Mindspeaker manages to relay the message to her, though possibly the visible Gate - as far away from her as Ma'ar could manage - is a hint. 

Also she can observe, in the first five seconds, that some people are laying down their weapons, now, even the ones who aren't sprinting toward the Gate. 

Far from the majority, though. 

She can directly notice the extremely powerful spell not with magic but with situational awareness and ludicrously good vision. Gate. That's what Judeth had expected, Gates in with backup, but the backup is very badly timed. Ceasefire definitely broken, then, with the two possibilities that this is a conventional attack (this badly executed? when they had the advantage of surprise? doesn't fit, doesn't make sense) and that this is a suicide attack aimed at destroying her, which fits a whole lot better.

She pauses in killing everyone who still holds a weapon and sprouts angel wings. The spell also gives her truespeech and invulnerability to most insufficiently powerful magic, and she's going to need it. "Get out," she yells at the gryphons in their own language, "I fear a Final Strike -" 

- and is anyone, in fact, coming through the Gate - she'd really rather go through herself and hit them before they can time their attack to crossing the threshold, but for all she knows the other side is in Predain and she's not going to break even what looks like a very thoroughly betrayed ceasefire -

Ma'ar can distance-cast a Gate-threshold but he can't do it from five hundred miles away and he can't hold two Gates at once. His entry Gate is up for less than a second and he dives away from where it landed even as he's casting the new threshold among the troops and Mindspeaking, and the talismans he's wearing shield him against nearly every known form of Velgarth detection magic. 

No one is coming through on the other Gate, the one that's close. No one is even visible on the other side, just trees. (He put it in a random rural location, no point in leading the powerful stranger to somewhere important.) 

Ma'ar himself is, however, going to be on the Tantaran side, in the woods about half a mile away, for however many seconds it takes him to Mindspeak all the commanders and lieutenants, and then for as long as he has before the powerful stranger tries to kill him, in which case he is intending to abandon his evacuation-Gate and drop a horizontal thresholdness Gate under himself and if anything he hopes she'll follow him then at least she wouldn't be here - 

One of Tantara's Mindspeakers reaches for her. 

:Farseer says it's Ma'ar. That way: Vague mental sense-of-direction and distance. :Shielded: 

Ma'ar is here. The one who is holding that Gate, though he isn't at its other end. Its other end hasn't yet been identified. His people are scrambling for it. No one has stepped through in the other direction.

That makes no fucking sense. 

She genuinely has not been this confused in a long time and generally when this confused she would stop killing people but - there is the very likely possibility that this is adversarially orchestrated, the being this confused, and sometimes you have to start trying to win the position you're playing instead of standing there paralyzed by the puzzle of why you're playing this position. 

He is in Tantaran territory he agreed not to enter, Gating troops around, after they attacked on what they said were his orders. 

She casts a spell for additional speed that'll add to what the boots give her. The angel wings propel her off the ground and up towards the griffins. And from there - he can't be far - 

Not that far, no, though he's at least trying to crouch out of sight in the underbrush - the Farseer got a glimpse before he raised more shields, and the gryphons haven't yet gotten word that he's here at all, just Iomedae's shouted warning; they're flying away rather than toward him.

His hiding place and shields are probably not enough to evade Iomedae's situational awareness for very long. 

He's still not doing anything except holding that distant Gate-threshold, and privately Mindspeaking one person after another - 

- she's coming toward him, he can sense the presence of her mind, it's very bright even if her shields are impassible. That's - good in that she's no longer killing his soldiers, bad in that she is presumably here to kill him and he's barely had time to get anyone out yet but he can't hold a Gate and effectively defend himself at the same time, and if she kills him then the Gate goes down anyway, and...probably the Tantaran general won't slaughter his soldiers wholesale if they've surrendered... 

If and when the powerful stranger gets within fifty or a hundred yards of him, depending on how fast she's moving, he'll drop the evacuation Gate and try to raise another Gate here and get out. And then Mindspeak her and surrender, probably - but he would actually rather she follows him through and he can do that far away from here. 

Moving: very fast. Also: calling out an unfamiliar word that causes chains of light to lash up from the ground around him and bind him. 

He's not in fact visibly Evil. Another small note of confusion, though what it adds up to in this cacophany of confusion is just -

"Surrender," she says, in his native language, "I've killed no one who did," and then she's descending sword-first.

He's not, especially, evaluating whether or not he believes that claim, just - whenever or not it's better to die here and probably wake up somewhere else or - find out whatever happens next with a powerful stranger whose motives he knows very little about - 

He can't move and he's not going to have time for a Gate and - he's very well shielded, she might not be able to kill him instantly, he could try to fight, but that would definitely be crossing a line that can't be un-crossed and, besides, he's pretty sure it won't matter to the end result at all - is she even going to give him time to surrender, he's not trying to fight but Mindspeech isn't instantaneous especially when one is distracted and terrified. 

:I surrender: he sends as fast as he can, and is pretty sure he's going to die anyway. If she kills him slowly maybe he can at least say that he didn't intend this to happen. Maybe he can - he's never really thought that begging or pleading helped but he would, for Predain, she - probably wouldn't kill more of his people because he begged her not to - 

The sword is, in fact, already through his magical shields and halfway into his ribcage, which just means she pulls it out and does an immediate Lay on Hands. (It will also dispel all his magic artifacts. She is not sorry.)

"Don't move. Don't use magic." Are they alone, is there anyone else in the woods here -

Ma'ar is intensely confused about whatever extremely fast sequence of events just happened to him and whether he is, in fact, dying right now, and he's not incredibly processing what she's saying but he isn't going to try to move or use magic anyway. 

There does not appear to be anyone else nearby. 

The Tantaran Mindspeaker is trying to reach her. :What's happening -: 

:I have a mage here. He surrendered. I don't know if he's actually Ma'ar. I am really very confused right now. Can you urgently check if there are simultaneous attacks anywhere else including back at the Tower.:

"We've been scrying obvious places. Nothing at Korbast Pass, nothing outwardly obvious at the Tower though a strike team could have Gated into it in theory, the other camps on the front look quiet. No one's alerted us of anything." 

This is relayed. 

...He seems to still not be dead, which at least implies 'dying slowly', he should - there was a thing he was going to do if she gave him time - 

Mindspeaking is very hard right now, for some reason, but speaking out loud sounds harder. Ma'ar is kind of having trouble breathing and he can't tell if it's because he was just stabbed with a magic sword and is too far in shock for it to hurt or if he's just terrified. 

:Did not order this: he manages. :Shaiknam acted unilaterally. Please - do not hurt any more of them - please -: Is that enough begging. 

I cannot actually stop him from Gating out except by stabbing him if I notice a threshold, she advises Judeth. Also, please call off the rest of the gryphons. I do not at this time expect the soldiers to be reinforced, and that means I don't think they're a threat, and if I'm wrong and they are a threat I'll handle it. 

"Are you Kiyamvir Ma'ar."

(The Gate went down when Ma'ar got stabbed with a magic sword and the soldiers are so confused and terrified and also kind of a lot of them are lying on the ground with grievous stab wounds. It...sort of seems like a good idea to surrender whether or not the Mindspeech warning was really Ma'ar.) 

"If you stab him nonlethally or give him a moderate head injury, most mages can't concentrate enough to Gate through that and even if it's Ma'ar it'd at least slow him down." The Mindspeaker can relay that. 

And General Judeth will repeat the order to the gryphons to come inside the barrier-shield and STAY THERE, and every single mage who isn't literally incapacitated with exhaustion or already busy holding said shield is now going to be getting orders to scry this very long list of potentially-at-risk locations which she's reeling off as fast as her tongue can form words. 

Still not dead. This is distantly surprising. 

:Yes: 

"Are there simultaneous attacks anywhere else." The glowing chains have vanished by now, they're a short term thing. It's just her sword at his throat and his own apparent conviction that she can do anything.

All of his shields are down - and it's not like they presented any obstacle to the sword before, either - and she can move faster than he can form thoughts. He really wants to Gate out, actually, but this is clearly doomed. 

(He probably could Final Strike - there's no visible cue for that until it's happening - but why. It's just a way to die anyway and incidentally murder the rest of the soldiers he came here to try to save - he wonders about the stranger's healing, if it's too late for everyone she injured...) 

:No: 

He needs to think, orient, and he should probably try to communicate something about how he very badly wanted the ceasefire to work and just also couldn't actually watch from a distance as Shaiknam's absurd stupid decision got several hundred of his people killed, and coming alone was - clearly - a terrible idea but seemed like the best option out of spectacularly awful set of options. Words are still hard, though. 

"Are any of Urtho's other generals actually working for you." She doesn't have a Zone of Truth up, and it wouldn't work on Mindspeech anyway. She's just trying to - even if he's lying - arrive at one account of why recent events occurred which isn't mostly made up of observations that don't go together.

:Not - fully, like Shaiknam. Have an agent in Polden's camp, can slip false information or orders, he - usually falls for that. Shaiknam's second-in-command and - one of their top mages - are also working for me. That is all. ...Discussed this plan with Shaiknam, letting our units through on foot to circle behind the Fifth, he was supposed to wait on my order and I - very clearly countermanded it. When the ceasefire letter came: 

"What were you expecting would happen, here, when you raised the Gate?"

The honest answer is that he had about three seconds to think and very large swathes of missing context on her abilities and was mostly choosing from a limited set of options based on instinct. 

:Thought you would probably kill me: And that he would probably come back, somewhere else, almost certainly very inconveniently and too late to turn the war around, but. :Hoped if I - came alone - you would be uncertain enough of our intentions not to mount an immediate offensive, to - investigate first. ...Hoped I would have time to order my people to surrender. So you would not slaughter everyone. So it would - maybe still be recoverable. ...Wanted Urtho to end the war. Most important thing. Thought you - might be a ruse - but worth gambling. To end the war: 

He signed a ceasefire agreement and then Gated into Tantara's territory in the middle of it because someone else had ordered an attack he hadn't authorized and he could only order his people to stand down at close range?

It's absurd, but she's not actually sure it's more absurd than any other explanation of events she tried to piece together. 

"Right," she says. "Well, Kiyamvir Ma'ar, I am Iomedae, paladin of Aroden, Commander of the Knights of Ozem, and I'm holding you on suspicion of" being a terrifying baffling disaster "Gating into Tantara's territory in violation of a ceasefire agreement which I have been charged with negotiating and maintaining. To whom in Predain should I communicate your capture or begin negotiations surrounding your release?"

He...is kind of failing to be able to think about that right now. This was supposed to be the part where she killed him and he woke up somewhere else. 

Come on. Focus. There has to be an obvious answer to that question that does not actually involve needing to complete any thoughts... 

:The King: he manages, uncertainly and nearly ten whole seconds of silence later. 

(Which is going to go disastrously but this was - basically guaranteed to be a disaster from the moment the idiot Shaiknam decided to– no, in fact he did just straight-up disobey Ma'ar's orders, though in fairness he thinks of himself as a mercenary agent and not actually loyal to Predain. At least it might not be a disaster that ends in the powerful god-worshipping stranger - Iomedae, paladin of Aroden, whatever that's supposed to mean - flattening his country and undoing decades of work. 

...It's bothering him that he still isn't sure if he should have just let a few hundred people die and sent a letter. It feels like it wouldn't have worked but the situation he's in now is ridiculous.) 

Does he seem to have anything wrong with him (he really shouldn't, after the Lay on Hands) or is he just in shock because he's terrified?

Seems like the second thing. He is pretty clearly not at all trusting her claim that she's never killed someone who surrendered to her, is expecting to be stabbed to death any minute now, and is perhaps kind of disoriented by the fact that she hasn't done this yet. 

It makes sense that you wouldn't really have that institution, at all, in a world where you can't prevent a mage from Gating. It's deeply inconvenient how he's definitely going to escape on her the second she is no longer standing over him with a sword. But -

- it's a chance to talk face to face. That's what she was building towards.

"I'm interested in Predain withdrawing its troops from Tantara's borders."

Ma'ar is having to put in enormous willpower, ongoingly, to suppress the reflex to panic-Gate out. If he does that then she will stab him and he will die and that would be an even more ridiculous way for this to go. 

It's very unfair of her to try to have a strategic conversation with him while she has a sword at his throat, but - this is, in fact, what he wanted. He...will try. 

:I want credible assurances that Tantara will stay out of our borders. And - compensation of some kind for the farms they destroyed in their initial attack and later gryphon raids. We - have a much harder time feeding our population with the land and growing season we have, and it has cost us far more than it cost them: 

Thaaaaat sounds - far better than Tantara could reasonably have gotten if she wasn't here, and she can of course conquer countries on her own but in this specific case that doesn't seem like a reason to push too hard for a peace Tantara likes better. For a more lasting one, maybe. 

"I, too, want Tantara to stay out of Predain," she offers. "They want you to stop using human sacrifices for infrastructure projects and mind control to run the military."

:We have a great deal of infrastructure we need to rebuild, or thousands of people are going to starve this winter: Flatly. :Does Tantara have a better idea for how to supply the power for that. They are welcome to send mages if they want us to have alternatives.:

He takes a couple of careful, even breaths. 

:And - you are welcome to talk to as many soldiers as you like, but - I am confident that eight in ten of them prefer the situation where they and their fellows agree to the oath of service compulsions – and you can check that they are action-affecting compulsions only and not volition-affecting It improves unit cohesion and trust, and I am not very willing to weaken our military capabilities until I have more trust that Tantara is not going to invade us again as soon as they think they have the upper hand: 

"I don't want anyone to starve this winter. It seems to me - if this war is indeed unintended by Predain - that no one in Predain has the diplomatic skill to make it credible to anyone else that they will only violate important taboos of enormous military relevance for infrastructure projects that save thousands of lives and not for conquests."

'While pinned on the ground with a sword at his throat' is perhaps not the time to debate the extent to which blood-magic is or is not actually taboo in all of the many, many places in the world which are not Tantara. 

It doesn't matter, anyway. This isn't a discussion where they will trade logical arguments; he's being held prisoner by a woman who serves a powerful foreign god, who carries a sword that can apparently pierce any kind of magical shielding, who can move fast enough to kill fifty trained soldiers in seconds. She can dictate whatever terms she feels like. 

Who, from all his spy-reports to date, seems to actually want the war to be over? And he continues not to be dead. She is apparently willing to negotiate with the King for his release. Whether he could have talked the King around on the ceasefire with logical arguments is unclear, but backed by the threat of a foreigner who could singlehandedly annihilate them, it's...simpler. A lot of things are simpler that way. 

:I think we could commit to using no blood-magic for the duration of peace talks: he allows. :Use that time to negotiate a more permanent agreement: 

"Thank you. It is not my desire, at all, to leave Predain impoverished, or unable to defend itself. But building a durable peace is very difficult and it will require both sides to give up things that are very important to them, things that will be very possible to arrange for when more trust exists."

He's so tired. 

:I am impressed that you talked Urtho into this: he sends. 

(Urtho isn't someone who will respond to arguments of the form 'the foreign stranger will flatten you if you don't do what she wants.' He's - principled - and usually that's a good thing.) 

"Urtho wants peace too. Do you have any questions for me?" She's really hoping for Mindspeech contact again soon to get another clarification of the situation everywhere else; she misses having Telepathic Bonds with all her key people.

Urtho could have indicated at literally any earlier point that he wanted peace, Ma'ar doesn't say. 

:Do you actually have a line of communication with our King: 

The Tantaran Mindspeakers on site are extremely busy and overwhelmed trying to get long-range communications out to other sites and ground all of the gryphon scout-parties that were further out when this happened and relay orders that General Judeth is barking out as fast as she can. They're kind of assuming that if Iomedae needs to talk to them urgently then she will in some way indicate this. 

One of them will contact her another ten seconds later, though. 

:What's happening? Is it Ma'ar?: 

:Yes, it seems to be. He says that he didn't authorize this and Gated in to tell his people to stand down. We're still trying to salvage the ceasefire. Updates from elsewhere?:

"We do not have a line of communication with your King at this time. I am planning to send the monitor and some of your captured troops once things have calmed down, but if you have a better suggestion I'm listening."

There are in fact no signs of attacks elsewhere. They are having some trouble convincing gryphon scout parties to land and stay there while this is sorted out. They've been in touch with Urtho, who was initially very panicked at the suggestion that she might be about to kill Ma'ar and wants her to try to avoid doing this?? Also he wants to know if there's anything he should be doing, right now. 

Is the Predain monitor okay? She tried to reach him at what must have been a really absurd Mindspeech range, and managed a couple of brief exchanges and then dropped out of contact, which usually indicates a Mindspeaker pushing themselves past the point of backlash into actual unconsciousness. 

"I don't know. I'll ask, and we'll get her medical attention if she needs it."

She would like Urtho to stay in communication with his people and assure them that Tantara still respects the ceasefire and peace talks are planned. She is not going to kill Ma'ar; he surrendered, he's her responsibility now, she won't let anything happen to him. They'll probably have to let him go in the next few hours, but she wants to make sure there isn't another surprise coming, first, and to get a better sense of the man. He's been circumspect so far.

Urtho will do his best.

...His people want assurances that Iomedae can come and protect them if they do end up under attack. Is that going to be in conflict with Ma'ar being her responsibility? If he's not badly injured, and maybe even if he is, he can probably Gate out given a couple of seconds to do it in. 

(The Predain monitor is in fact unconscious and is now being transported to the Healers' tent. The Healer who briefly looked at her in Judeth's command tent thinks that she'll be all right and will probably regain consciousness soon – it's harder for non-mages to cause themselves serious backlash damage – but she's certainly not going to be any use for sending Mindspeech communications for probably the rest of the day.) 

Yep, if there's an incident anywhere on Tantara's side of the line she'll either let Ma'ar go or render him unconscious and then go defend Tantara.

"The monitor who contacted you is unconscious, on her way to Healing, the Healer who looked at her thinks she'll be all right," she reports to Ma'ar.

He relaxes. Slightly. 

:I want to contact the nearest camp on the Predain side with Mindspeech: he sends. :To verify that Tantara intends to keep the ceasefire and to make sure someone is dealing with General Shaiknam. Do I have your permission to do that: 

"Dealing with him how."

:I am not sure because I have no idea where he is right now or whether he has faked other orders from me. I would rather manage this myself but I do not expect you to trust me if I give my word to go and come back. By default I would spread the message that no one is to obey orders from him, and then send a team of mages to hold him until things have calmed down. ...They are not going to kill him: 

Right, because Ma'ar's people can hold mages prisoner, with compulsions. 

"I think it would be good to tell everyone not to obey him, but I do not want you to authorize an operation to get him while he remains on Tantara's side of the lines unless there's reason to think his next move will be immediate and much more dangerous. I will probably release you in the next few hours, but I don't want to ask an oath of you that I indeed don't expect you to keep."

Ma'ar does not believe for a second that she actually intends to release him in a few hours. Why would she do that. 

He thinks. 

:...I think that he wanted to corner me into sending in our mages in force. I am not actually sure why or what he was thinking. Ten percent chance his next move, when he realizes what happened instead, is to panic and do something incredibly stupid. If you have a channel of communication with the other Tantaran camps then you will likely learn of it before I do and - be able to respond as you see fit. Maybe a...thirty percent chance? that his plan had a second half but it is not immediate or catastrophic. If I have your permission I am going to try to reach my nearest camp with an update now: 

Pause. 

:Do I have your permission to tell my people that they can capture and hold him if he crosses onto our side of the lines?: 

"Yes, absolutely." Probably Urtho's people should be going to take the man down now but Urtho's side can't capture mages - ugh - well, everyone's alerted, sometimes it's better to wait on high alert than to rush into a fight -

He'll use the communication-spell. It's detectable and it's not secure, but he has Iomedae's permission and, in this particular case, isn't conveying anything that he needs to keep secret from Urtho's side. And he's a much stronger mage than Mindspeaker; using Mindspeech at that range for a lengthy conversation will wear him out, and he might need that Gift functional later. 

...His commander at the nearest point behind the Predain lines is so freaked out! Does Ma'ar need a rescue team??? 

No! Absolutely not! They should stay exactly where they are and not make any unexpected moves and try very very hard not to spook Tantara any further. That's the most important thing by far. Ma'ar will be fine. 

(Ma'ar is not at all sure he'll be fine, actually. But Iomedae is clearly - experienced at navigating this kind of thing - and probably doesn't want the war to re-escalate, and so all he can do for now is trust that she isn't going to do anything that will inevitably cause that, such as killing him and then not communicating anything to his people about why.) 

Iomedae is doing another round of communication with Tantara's people about where everyone is and what is going on and how to react if anything concerning happens and what should be done about Shaiknam, to whom they have not yet communicated that the assault failed or indeed has yet started. The man should be limited in spies who can report on that to him, what with how they'd have to know he's a double agent. 

She nods curtly at Ma'ar when he's done with the communication spell. "Is there any other context you think it's important for us to have from you, or for you to have from us?"

She apparently has a way to speak his language now (?????) and Ma'ar has finally managed to get his physical terror under control enough that he can speak normally. He'll save his Mindspeech energy. 

"...I am not sure what context you already have on - this region more broadly and the recent history. Urtho's telling of it may not include everything that I think is relevant. You are from elsewhere but I am not sure how far away, or how - different - it is there. ...I have never heard of your god or your religious order and I think I would find it easier to know what to tell you if I knew more of your...goals...in intervening here."

"I want a stable peace with prewar borders. It doesn't sound like either Predain or Tantara can capably administer the other and it doesn't sound like the prewar borders were the product of or cause of recent previous conflicts. I want, if it's possible, to maintain the geopolitical equilibrium that is low on mind control, mile-wide suicide explosions, and human sacrifice, because I can imagine the geopolitical equilibrium that is high on those and I don't like it much. I want everyone fed and clothed and safe and with many routes by which they can serve those things they believe in or care about or are indebted to. I want to try to set up political relations so that if there has to be a next war it won't immediately turn into an existential threat to both countries and everyone involved will know how to deescalate it."

"...It might be useful context - which I am not sure whether Urtho would have mentioned - that the strength of Tantara's taboo on compulsions is actually quite unusual and possibly unique on this continent. And the extent to which their use in Predain is governed by laws which are actually enforced, and they are restricted to official, voluntary oaths of service or criminal penalties, is also somewhat unusual. In the Ceej Empire, for example, it is commonplace for nobles to have their house mages place compulsions on all of their servants - or sometimes secretly on their rivals' servants. I...am not necessarily opposed to making compulsions illegal except in very rare and specific circumstances - like, for example, preventing mages from Final Striking, there is not really another way to do that - but if you are used to a culture where that is already the case, that is not actually the balance we are in right now. Even if Urtho sometimes forgets to - clarify that not everywhere in the world is Tantara." 

Sigh. "I think I would be in agreement on everything else." 

"It makes sense that it is commonplace in many countries for people to be placing compulsions on all their servants and all their rivals' servants, but I disapprove of it, and would work quite hard to avoid it becoming the case in any place where it is not so at present. And to bring it to an end in places where that is how things work, though that's often much harder."

"Mmm." 

He's not really sure what else to say. He still doesn't really understand Iomedae as a person, why she's doing any of this, but he tried asking and he's not sure how to ask differently to get a more useful answer. He would obviously like to know a lot more about her capabilities and her resources and whether she has allies who will be joining her soon, but equally obviously, she has no reason to tell him those things. 

He'll...wait, and hope nothing else explodes. 

"I spoke to some people from Predain, prisoners of war, about what they wanted from the peace. They spoke very highly of you."

...He's not really sure what to say to that, either. It's - a good sign, probably, that Iomedae sought to hear out both sides? 

"Do they have any of our mages alive, that you know of?" he says, dully. "We do not have - lists of names - not for the last six months." He's been sending reports with lists of prisoners, very diligently. 

"I'm sorry; I should have ensured that was done." It's not really about the specific thing but about reciprocating whatever effort-at-not-being-as-terrible-as-possible you see the other side putting in, where you can. "I'll get you a list, probably within two days. I don't think they have any mages strong enough to Gate; they don't have a way to hold them."

Ma'ar closes his eyes for a moment. Strange, how he already knew exactly what her answer was going to be, and yet somehow it still hurts.

He knows exactly how many of his mages didn't make it back from battles. It's...a lot fewer, at least, than the number of Tantaran mages currently held on the Predain side, but given their lower population and much lower number of trained Adept-strength mages, proportionally it's probably a much greater loss even before you take into account that the Tantaran mages are mostly still alive, and will be rejoining the country's productive capacity as soon as the war is over. 

...the war is going to end. It seems nearly certain, now, and the only question is how messily, and at what cost to Predain. 

It's...still sinking in. But it's still a better outcome than he could have imagined, three days ago. 

"Are you going to wish to speak to the prisoners we are holding?" he says, quietly. "We have more of them." Thousands, in total, it's been a serious drain on their supplies but you can't exactly decide to stop feeding prisoners of war once you've committed to holding them alive, even if your own peasantfolk are starving. "...I would actually like to arrange a prisoner exchange for the gryphons as soon as possible, holding them is - fraught." And they eat SO MUCH FOOD. He's been trying hard not to mistreat any of the prisoners including by underfeeding them but they don't have an unlimited number of large livestock to slaughter. 

"I'm not sure it's a good idea for me to travel within Predain right now. One of the things I have been working on is a prisoner exchange, and I'll speak to them once they return. No one has alleged that you mistreat your prisoners." She's mostly trying to keep her voice calm, steady, hard to read, but she sounds approving, at that.

Nod. Ma'ar, too, has been keeping his voice very level, his expression flat and his body language controlled. "What would you need to change, or be demonstrated, to feel safe traveling within Predain?" 

"Mostly I think I'd need it to not be overwhelmingly in your interests as you might reasonably perceive them to try to kill me. You probably couldn't, but you could cause a lot of death and destruction trying."

"....I really do not think it is at all in my interests to kill you. Even if I expected it to work, which I do not. You convinced Urtho to offer a ceasefire." 

"...in a war you were winning."

"In a war I did not choose and have wanted to end since the day Tantara invaded." He says it very quietly. "And even winning it was - costing us more than we could afford. More than it would have cost Tantara in the long run, in many ways - at least if you look at material resources only, I am aware that war causes...other kinds of damages that are harder to measure." 

He closes his eyes. "I am aware you think I am either very evil or very stupid, and I cannot even deny the latter, so much of this war was stupid. Just. You are not from Predain, or Tantara. I am getting the sense that wherever you are from is...better...and that you have much to teach us, but..." He doesn't know the words to say it. "But I think maybe you are assuming - common knowledge, shared history - that your homeland takes for granted, and ours...does not." 

"I almost certainly am. I can think of specific things, I can try to correct the right amount for all the unseeable things in between the specific things, I can try to correct too much about as often as I correct too little, but if you suspect me of being wrong I suspect you are right. ...it is very hard for me to make sense of Tantara's account of events in Predain if you didn't want a war."

"...We made mistakes. I made mistakes."

Pause.

"I think there are other aspects, where - our cultures are very different, right, even in addition to the language barrier, and so words or actions are interpreted differently. I think we should have set up more channels of communication, and sooner. If I - knew what I know now - I would have realized this was going to be a problem worth heading off. I should have tried harder to establish a diplomatic presence in Tantara, and encouraged them to send their own diplomats as well – the issue is that we do not really have diplomats as an institution, historically..." 

He lets out his breath, a little. 

"- If you have specific confusions I can maybe tell you what I think was misread." 

"Why invade a neighboring kingdom?"

"I am guessing you mean Avulle? Nowhere else that we expanded into was really under an existing state. Avulle does count, they had a king, even if their total population was well under a hundred thousand. ...I could justify it on humanitarian grounds but I do not expect you to find that convincing. They were an ongoing threat to our border security and a slave-trade hub where some problematic bandit gangs would sell children they had captured from our farms and their use of blood-magic was not regulated in any way and was causing droughts on our side of the border." 

"I am curious what makes you say I probably won't find the humanitarian grounds convincing."

Because no one ever does. 

"...Words are cheap, right? People can say whatever they want about their motives, and I know that I - consider it important to be honest - but how would you know and trust that? Whereas for purely strategic incentives, the same considerations apply whether or not you personally care about children starving and being sold into slavery." 

She nods. "Many people say their conquests are for the good of the conquered. - they admittedly do not usually send child mortality statistics."

"I can say quite confidently that conquering Avulle reduced child mortality even within the first year, and probably improved literacy within three years though this is hard to judge since they did not have records of that before."

He shrugs, insofar as he can while still lying on the ground with a sword at his throat; he's considered trying to promise that he isn't actually going to Gate out if she lets him sit up but it didn't seem like the highest priority.

"Of course, that is a different question from whether they are happy to be part of Predain now - I think that is mixed - or consider their own lives to be better off. And also a different question than - whether something of great value was lost, regardless of who mourned for it. Probably something– probably very many things were lost that are impossible to measure but were precious to someone. I...personally think it was almost certainly something that I would weigh less heavily than dead babies, but - still." 

"I'm not going to tell you I would never do that. I'd be more careful, I'd have more allies, I'd be much clearer with all my neighbors about what the provocation was, but I might also have done it, if I didn't see a better way."

It must be nice to consider 'just having more allies' to be among your options This is not a helpful line of thought. 

He's so tired. That is also not a helpful thing to keep noticing. 

"I can certainly in hindsight recognize many times when I could and should have been more careful. ....I think that being clear with our neighbors about the provocation would have been - harder - because of the communication issues I mentioned and. I think Tantara– no, I think Urtho specifically, is...not very good at recognizing the problems that happen outside his country's borders, and–" 

He stops, because, one, this is probably not at all a useful tangent to go down, and two, it's very hard to talk about and he doesn't actually feel like he knows the right words.

"He seems very oblivious," she agrees cheerfully. "A lot of this is his fault as well. - I think he cares about you and wishes you well, for what that's worth, though there are some failures of execution in his efforts at that."

The cheerfulness is so confusing! Ma'ar has no idea how to parse this interaction now and he's trying very hard not to react to it with panic, or to show any of his reaction, but he visibly tenses. 

(And if anything it makes it worse, or at least makes it hurt more, that Urtho cares about Ma'ar personally, when he doesn't understand and doesn't care about the rest of Predain's people, the ones who weren't his students, who weren't brilliant and articulate in his presence once, and he never considered their struggles to be his problem -) 

He takes a deep breath. 

"I think he has a...particular philosophy. About mages, I doubt he would extend it to you. But he believes - that power is inherently bad, that it corrupts, and we already have one kind of power and should not seek other kinds. Political power, obviously, but also just - trying to affect the world in too many ways, or with too broad a scope. 

...I disagree with that." 

"Hmmm. I think the claim I would make which sounds sort of like Urtho's, which is maybe built off the same things Urtho noticed in himself and the people around him which made him say that, would be -

There are many people who are deeply motivated by doing the right thing, and who are sincere in their intent to get in power so that they can do the right thing. They don't all agree on the right thing, but many of them are pointing at fragments of what I, myself, seek for the world. Peace and safety. Good harvests. No more dead children. No more dead adults, unless they're ready to go on to Heaven or wherever else they choose. Love and compassion and generosity and strength and determination and hard work. The destruction of evil and the redemption of evildoers. 

So with all these well-meaning people around, the question is, why aren't things better? And you could give a thousand answers, but certainly one of them is that humans are not made of stone, are not angels and are not archons. We have bad days. We make mistakes and then it hurts to think about the mistake so we never think about it carefully enough to learn how to not make it again. We lose things that in a better world no one would ever have to lose, and those wounds heal, but they don't heal back to the way they were originally. We learn habits that permit us to keep going in the world we've made for ourselves. Habits like killing people. Habits like not thinking too much about people. This is not inevitable, but it takes great skill to avoid, and moderate skill even to notice if you're not successfully avoiding it. 

And we are, in significant part, the people who surround us. When we are not very diligent to do otherwise, we believe their flattery and crave their approval. We want to be liked. We want to believe in our own importance. And all of this is much worse if you are, in fact, important, if the words people have to say to convince you you're far more important than anyone else can be completely true. When you're in power, you're busy, there are immense demands on your time, it's hard to know who to trust and it's unhealthy and exhausting to be alone. And the people who surround the powerful have their own agendas, and the more power you have the more people have tried or are trying to be in your inner circle, and the more likely they are to be deeply unusual, deeply manipulative, and fairly dangerous.

So, if you could, you might distribute power; you might give no one the authority of an Emperor or a King. In practice I haven't seen anyone get that working very well. You might try for weak Kings who answer to many factions; in practice that doesn't work very well either. Or you might just try to find a King of exceptional virtue, and surround him with advisors of exceptional virtue, so he can think clearly despite all the pressures against it and get things right more often than not. In my experience that one works only if the gods are doing a lot of the work. It's a difficult problem, if you're building a nation. If you are, as an individual, deciding whether to seek power, you have a different difficult problem, and it's not as if everyone who says 'I'm better than the other guy' is wrong.

But if a country's most gifted mage and strategist came to me and said 'should I also seek to rule my country?' I would, in fact, counsel him not to, even if he was very virtuous, maybe especially if he was very virtuous, unless he was also very very careful, and had friends and allies ready to embark on this journey with him, and had already thought about how much damage he could do if power changed him, or changed how people reacted to the way he'd always been."

All of this seems very very important, both in terms of actual information and advice that he badly needs and, separately, wanting to make a good impression on the powerful stranger -

- and it's inconveniently difficult to focus. because of the handful of notes of confusion near the beginning, that aren't quite serious enough for him to interrupt the person holding a sword to his throat but that's a high bar and he is maybe mostly not coming to that decision because he's very tired and decisions are hard. 

(other faint side-notes of disagreement - he doesn't think that he craves the approval of the people he works with, actually, it's– he's not natively good at noticing that kind of thing, and it feels like such safer and more solid ground to focus on tables of numbers you can measure, though he's aware that this is not how everyone works, if it were then he would have much better numbers on so many different things...)

...and then there's the second note of confusion, around the concept where "the gods are doing a lot of the work" and - where is Iomedae from, it seems so incredibly alien - 

Calm. Focus. 

"- I appreciate your counsel," he says, mostly on reflex. "I - there were some words you used there that I am not familiar with and it seems important. What is Heaven, and what are angels and archons?" 

"In my world, souls, on the death of their body, go on to judgment, and from judgment to a next life that reflects the way they lived this one. This is totally unsatisfactory, obviously, since some people get bad next lives, and I do mean to fix it, but there are a lot of gods who like the current system. 

I don't know if this is true here. I have been presuming it might be false. I doubt that we are outside the Creation in which souls are called to judgment, because I have the ability to see a glimpse of that judgment when I look at people and that part is working fine. But your local gods might be doing something unusual; it's a wizard who'd be able to tell the difference, and I'm not one, and I've prayed without response to the gods I am familiar with. 

Angels and archons are beings that humans can grow into, in the next world, and they possess a sort of internal clarity such that it's not true of them that a lot of sad things happening would permanently change their outlook and values, and such that they would never betray their word or their aims. I speak to them frequently; seeking their counsel solves some kinds of problems with being a mortal surrounded by equally confused mortals, though also mortals shouldn't actually try to approximate being an angel or an archon except under very unusual circumstances."

“- As far as I am aware, souls in our world do not go anywhere in particular or continue to - have experiences - after death.”

Ma’ar is pretty sure he has emotions about this. He is also definitely going to put off figuring out what exact emotions those are until some later point when he has pen and paper and doesn’t have a sword at his throat.

"That is possible, but it'd be a bit surprising given that I can still see how they'll do at judgment. If souls here are meant to go to judgment and the local gods are interfering with that, we'll have a bunch of difficult choices ahead of us, but it also seems quite likely to me that souls here do go on. I'm sorry I can't yet provide you with either more certainty or a better arrangement."

Ma’ar so confused and so tired and those continue to be unhelpful thoughts to keep noticing. 

- he still has no idea how to respond to it. 

“I suppose you should find a way to - test your theories about what the situation is here,” he says faintly.

" - yes, definitely. After the war we can sit down and talk about the options."

….Ma’ar is, again, running into the problem where he is failing at finishing any thoughts or producing any response he can put into words. 

He’ll just - lie on the ground and wait. He’s starting to distantly notice that he’s cold.

He's probably scared. She doesn't actually know what that's like but she can make the inference. She'd - like to give him a slightly better understanding of who she is, but you can't do that by starting conversations people don't want to have. She will think about approaches to the traitorous general, and leave him be. 

"The spell I'm using to understand you is going to wear off in a few minutes," she says after a while. "It's all right if you want to save further questions for later - I expect there will be plenty of time - but if there is anything else you wanted to know, it will have to be Mindspeech."

...Ma'ar would very much like to better understand Iomedae. He's been trying and bouncing off thinking of specific questions to ask. 

(He's also scared. This mostly doesn't seem like one of the more important aspects of the situation.) 

"- Noted," he says, when she addresses him. "I - think I have very many questions but they are mostly - abstract." Hard to talk about. "And not necessarily urgent." 

"They're urgent insofar as I would like you to feel comfortable sitting down for peace talks in which I am participating."

"...I would have said that I am more motivated than you to show up for peace talks, because– because Predain is my country, and Urtho was my teacher, and - I am still not entirely sure why you...care...what happens here, when I am sure none of it can possibly harm you or your god's interests. Whether I am comfortable seems - beside the point - it seems more relevant whether you are comfortable." 

"Every person starving or dying or killing or suffering, anywhere, is a place where my interests are threatened."

"....If you actually mean that, then I - I want to be your ally - but I suppose this runs into the same difficulty where it is easy to say you want something and if you were clever and had good intelligence on my past work then you would know exactly what to say to cause me to feel that way." 

" - I would not, actually, have predicted that that was specifically the right thing to say to you. It's not - even a thought original to me, back home, though I am generally regarded as unusually serious about it."

“I already had very many questions about your homeland and now I have more of them.”

(Probably. He isn’t sure what the questions are, exactly, he needs more mental space to unpack all of that and it continues to be hard to think, in this situation. He’s less filled with the constant desperate urge to Gate out but he’s still scared.)

"Many things here remind me of it. Politics isn't the same everywhere but it has distinct similarities everywhere. Your mages aren't precisely like any spellcaster I've seen but the underlying magic they're using might well be similar. You don't have - paladins, the specific kind of god-intervention that enables the work I do in my world - and I claim you're worse off for it, but of course one might argue that I would think so."

“- The last part might be the important difference? I - am not sure I have ever heard of god-interventions here that were actually - helpful on net.” 

"Huh. Not all of Golarion's gods are helpful, and I need to murder some of them, but there are some who run - banks, soup kitchens, orphanages, hospitals, and there should be some actually useful ones coordinating the defeat of Evil, but the one who used to be doing that is incapacitated. ...I am planning to replace Her."

Ma'ar wants– well, several thousand things, at this point, but most urgently pen and paper so he can try to keep better track of this conversation, which seems like plausibly the most important conversation he's ever had (though he is of course instinctively suspicious, but - halfheartedly, at this point...) 

Also he's going to have to switch back to Mindspeech soon, probably, when the spell runs out, and also that's a reminder that time is still passing and he has a hundred other responsibilities and very little idea what's going on in Predain with his commanders - probably he would have heard from Iomedae directly if anything were on fire - 

"I - was not aware gods were the kind of entity that could meaningfully run banks," he says, faintly. "Or that - mortals could replace gods - I am not even sure what that would mean." Though the concept of wanting to do it is perhaps one of the most impressively audacious things he's ever heard. 

"Some of our gods are formerly mortal. It changes you, and many of the details of how it works are secret, but I'm reasonably sure I'll be able to get the end result I want, presuming I return to Golarion at some point or am able to redevelop the method here." And the spell drops out on her; the wings vanish. Her sword stops glowing.

.....Which would be the ideal moment to try to Gate out, if he were going to do that. 

Ma'ar still doesn't anticipate very high odds of success at Gating out. Probably even without the spell, Iomedae can still move very fast, and even the non-glowing sword can kill him given his complete lack of any magical shielding. Also he surrendered to her, which is in some sense an implicit agreement not to try to escape. 

Maybe more to the point, he doesn't want to Gate out. Everything he's spent decades working toward is back in Predain, but - it's not, quite, true, that everything he cares about is there. 

Every person starving or dying or killing or suffering, anywhere, is a place where my interests are threatened, Iomedae said. 

He still doesn't really believe it but mostly because it seems too good to be true. 

He closes his eyes again. 

:Do I have your permission to contact my people again and obtain an update on what is happening: 

It hasn't escaped her that he could now try fleeing. She wouldn't kill him if he did, but she's - definitely taking it as a promising sign, if he doesn't. :Go ahead.:

He'll do that. Since he's using the communication-spell, this mostly involves lying still with his eyes closed. 

A few minutes later, his eyes fly open. He doesn't sit up, or otherwise move, but it's taking a lot of restraint. 

:- General Shaiknam is not where we expected. Apparently he is much further into Tantara at one of the Gate-stations. I am not sure what he is planning but I am confused and that is worrying: 

That does sound like a more urgent problem.

She - doesn't know what she makes of this man, but if he's lying, about wanting peace and good things for all people, it's more adeptness at lying than either his enemies or his friends have ever attributed to him.

:All right. I'm releasing you. Gate back to Predain, don't cross the lines again. Which Gate-station is Shaiknam at.:

...That is not how he was expecting her to respond but it - doesn't seem like a bad sign, at least? 

:Jerfast: He can send her a mental image of a map, and an approximate direction and bearing, though after a moment he remembers that she probably doesn't use Gates and he doesn't actually know what her plan is for getting there. 

He wants to - offer to help - but that is probably not, actually, going to be reassuring to her right now. So he'll sit up, very carefully with no sudden movements, and start raising a Gate-threshold – unscaffolded, but otherwise a normal, doorway-shaped one, maximally unsurprising. 

(The other terminus is in a deserted forest. It's in Predain, but he really shouldn't trust Iomedae far enough, yet, to lead her directly to a place that matters.) 

If she doesn't object he's going to, also very carefully, stand up and walk through. 

She's going to head back in the other direction to pass this along to General Judeth. She doesn't look back.

The mage-barrier around the camp is down; it eventually seemed redundant, when no mages were Gating in to attack, and the Predaini soldiers, weapons abandoned, are huddled up in a tight circle around their injured and dying fellows. They're trying their best to provide field first aid but they don't have any Healers with them and General Judeth has not felt quite secure or generous enough to send any of theirs over. 

She has two more Lay on Hands or one more channel and no way to get them back. She's not going to use them on this.

It does hurt. Always will, hopefully. 

She flags down the first Tantaran Mindspeaker with Ma'ar's news. 

They don't know what to make of that or whether it's supposed to be bad but they'll direct her toward General Judeth while immediately relaying the news ahead to her! 

Judeth is also not really sure what to make of it. Within the new Gate-network security restrictions imposed since the war, the Jerfast Gate is one hop from Urtho's Tower - whereas most of the Gates anywhere near the front aren't - but it's otherwise not important. She can send word to block Shaiknam's access to the Gate-network, if Iomedae is worried, but she's genuinely not sure what to be worried about? 

...a scrying-check thirty seconds later confirms that Shaiknam seems to be there with a relatively small party. Apparently no one at this minor local Gate-station was warned about his betrayal; his presence there seems to have gone unremarked. Judeth can also have a message passed to change that, but - he's by far the highest-ranking military commander at the site, and his mage-retinue outpowers the on-site guards by an order of magnitude. 

Does Iomedae want to be Gated there herself to figure out what's going on. 

Yes, she does. She is in fact worried about Urtho's Tower; is there a way to make those gates not one hop away while she''s figuring this out?

Possibly Urtho knows how to do that? Judeth certainly doesn't. She can add that as an urgent message to be sent to Urtho personally, though.

And she can very quickly organize an escort of a dozen Adept mages to accompany Iomedae there. All of them have Gate-locations within the Towert itself; that way, even if there's a fight at Jerfast, if Iomedae learns the Tower is in danger then probably someone will be able to transport her there instantly. 

They'll be ready to go within thirty seconds, which is not long enough to receive any response to the frantic messages now being dispatched to the Gate-station guards. 

:I would consider it a personal favor if you got some Healing to the soldiers from Predain: she says, and then off she'll go.

They'll Gate her to Jerfast. 

General Shaiknam has apparently not been warned yet that anything is wrong, and also was very clearly not expecting Iomedae to suddenly arrive. And apparently gave some kind of contingency-orders to his people, because one of his mages immediately starts raising a Gate (unscaffolded, not on the permanent terminus.) 

Angel wings, glowing sword, "No," she says to the mage raising the Gate, in the language she definitely didn't speak when they spoke yesterday.

Is she actually magically preventing him from completing this Gate, because having the terrifying otherworldly stranger threatening brandishing a glowing sword at you does not seem like a reason to want to stay where you currently are. 

She will kill him if he doesn't stop. She does not have a bunch of clever non-sword ways of stopping people, here.

In that case he is not going to complete the Gate because he’s very rapidly dead.

General Shaiknam…is apparently going to try to run away, on foot, which is possibly an even stupider response here.