Savil has more years of experience with Gates than just about anyone in else in Valdemar. She's heading for the main threshold in the central courtyard of the Vale - it's not a permanent Gate but it's been used thousands of times and some of the Gate structure is baked into it - and it takes her about a second and a half to realize that her search-spell isn't landing. 

:...Huh. That's odd.: She drops it. :Sorry, I'm - not quite sure what the problem is - maybe they took their threshold down for repairs?: Her mind is halfway on the meeting she's missing right now and she really doesn't need more complications. :I'll contact them with the comms spell, ask where's all right to Gate in.: She had been hoping to avoid the additional casting, she needs to save her energy for tonight, but it's also not a bad idea to give them some warning she's coming. 

Nod nod.

....The comms spell to Starwind doesn't go through. 

Maybe he's busy. Savil shakes her head and tries Moondance. No...? Riverstorm?

By the time she's tried half a dozen people, she's - fairly confident that something is horribly wrong. Her expression goes from irritated to concerned to completely blank. 

:- Something is wrong.: Her mindvoice is toneless. :I don't like this. I'm going to try nearby in case they bloody burned down the Vale or something. ...Step back, just in case it's worse than that - I don't know what kind of Pelagirs monster could take out a Vale -: 

Savil has dozens of Gate-locations outside the Vale proper, from scouting over the years. She picks one a mile out, a cave with a conveniently archlike opening that some scouts reinforced with clay a while back, and - closes her eyes and centers and grounds, briefly, before she starts to raise the Gate. 

Blai has put his armor back on and the backpack over it, since he was about to be moved to a new location, and she's seen him in a fight, but perhaps it will be worse in some exotic magical way he won't understand; he steps back.

Savil has no idea what to expect. She's stepping back too, as far as she can without actually leaving the room - it's shielded, she wouldn't be able to reach the Gate-terminus, but she has practiced holding Gates where she had to be out of the way of people crossing, she can cast it from ten paces - and she has all of her shields raised. 

A mage casting through a permanent Gate-terminus isn't directly in contact with the spell; there's still a link to the search-spell "inside" her shields, but with significant power coming through the Haven Heartstone, it's not a wide link, and it feeds through a beautifully complex work of mage-artifice, years in the making, before contacting the other end of the Gate as she forms it in k'Treva Vale. 

(Something feels off in a way she can't describe even in the fraction of the second before the Gate snaps into place, and Savil doesn't abort but she's definitely holding the spell...gingerly...and ready to slam it down if whatever is on the other side is something they badly need not to get loose in Haven.) 

All of those factors together mean that it doesn't instantly kill her, when the Gate opens onto a scene of devastation. 

Only part of the degree of devastation is visible to Blai with ordinary eyes. 

There's a forest. The trees look...not quite natural, too twisted and sinuous. They're also flattened as though in a violent gale, branches splintered, larger trees listing sideways (all in the same direction) with their roots half pulled from the ground, many smaller trees uprooted entirely. 

One side of every tree is blackened. A few spots are still smoking gently. 

There are a few patches of snow still in the lee side of some particularly large trees, but mostly the dark ground is covered in pools of steaming water. 

The pools are glowing very faintly even to ordinary eyes. 

Something washes through the Gate. (Ambient magic doesn't cross Gate-thresholds, usually. It's possible to direct attacks through them, at the cost of making the Gate significantly more tiring to hold, but it's a nontrivial skill. Whatever ambient mage-energy is on the other side, so 'hot' that it's leaking through into visible light, does not care at all about the fact that this is supposed to be difficult.) 

Savil lets out a startled yell and instinctively wrenches herself free of the spell as though dropping a scorching-hot pan, rather than taking the Gate down properly. She starts to stumble backward, and runs into the wall; she had already backed up as far as she could go. 

Which means the Gate stays up for almost another entire second, wavering and unstable, energy bleeding through it until the strange usually-invisible membrane of the Gate-structure starts to shimmer like an uncanny cross between a soap bubble and a heat-mirage - 

- and then the set-spells built into the threshold finally come apart and the Gate comes down. 

Savil collapses in a boneless heap. 

It's getting through the Endure Elements, it's not supposed to be able to do that - what the fuck - he expends his Create Food and Water on getting Savil up -

Savil wakes up with an unhappy noise, but she's been knocked out in fights before; she orients quickly, and sits up, a little dizzily. "Ow." Her limbs are working fine, but her mage-channels are very displeased and her reserves are drained to the dregs, she must have expended everything on her shields before they went down - 

- something happened, she's still piecing together what but she was with the visitor from another world, going somewhere - 

- oh good there is is. Ow ow ow Mindspeech is not fun, though the backlash could be a lot worse, she's at least fairly sure it's not causing her additional damage. 

:Blai are you all right - did you -: 

They're in the Gate-terminus room, which brings the rest back. She...doesn't remember seeing anything with her ordinary eyes, all her senses were overwhelmed by the impossibly blazing mage-energies. Her mage-sight is still mostly whited out, like the afterimages if she had stared directly into the sun for half a minute. 

:- did you see anything on the other side?: 

:Ruined trees. Recent explosion, I think, still hot, not all the snow had melted and some of it was steaming.: He'd think it was a Wish gone wrong, but if that's plausible here Savil will know.

Savil tests if standing up will work. It does, though she's not enjoying it. 

:Well. I...don't think k'Treva is there anymore.: She leans on the wall for a moment, closing her eyes. :I think we probably don't have a permanent Gate-threshold anymore, either, but I'm not sure anyone should touch it to check. I think we should maybe get out of this room right now and lock the door, and - I need to, talk to Van, check a theory with him...

...doesn't make sense: she adds, almost peevishly, mostly to herself but she's still holding the Mindspeech link. :If it's - what I think - I don't see how Leareth could possibly have done it...: 

Does she need to be supported walking? He got a faceful and his armor feels a bit heavier now but he's steady enough.

Savil would definitely appreciate an arm to lean on, yes. She's felt worse than this before and kept fighting, she's pretty sure, but she wasn't almost eighty years old at the time, and what she wants to do is fall on her face in a soft bed and sleep for a week. 

:Kellan: she reaches out as soon as there aren't shields between her and Companions' Field; she's keyed to the shields, of course, but it's still more effort to reach through them, and Mindspeaking her own Companion hurts her head less than Mindspeaking Vanyel directly. :Emergency. K'Treva's gone. Get Van - meet us here -:

There are rooms in this building perfectly serviceable to meet in even if they're not technically the Heralds' meeting-rooms, and she's NOT in the mood to trek any further than she absolutely has to. Like that room, for example. There are some clerks working in it but Savil would like to requisition it from them and then sit down in an upholstered chair with enormous relief. 

:They're on their way. - Van's getting Shavri, she might even know what to do about - whatever that was.: 

:I'm amazed I'm still conscious.: Oh there's a water-jug right there. Probably someone else was using that cup earlier but Savil doesn't care. :- oh, that makes sense, probably we've got more reason to be grateful for Select Blai's goddess and his Healing.: 

She manages to make her eyes focus on Blai just long enough to check that he doesn't seem about to keel over - Shavri will be able to assess better if he's going to be all right longer term - and then goes back to staring into space and mostly failing to think. 

Vanyel arrives at a sprint. He has his Othersenses open, reaching ahead of him - and pushes through to read Blai's thoughts directly without really thinking about it, mostly because it's the fastest way to get an answer to what just happened and it's what he would do with Savil if she didn't seem so out of it - 

Blai will. Put down his bag because it's heavy. And hover awkwardly - oh good, Vanyel's here, he didn't want to leave Savil alone but now he can probably either sit down here or go somewhere else and sit down. He's going to want Lesser Restorations tomorrow, at least two. DO they even have Wish here though. There are probably other things that can make an explosion like that. He doesn't know them but this is another planet. It has to have been recent, too, or the temperature would have equalized and the snow would all be melted even on the far side of the trees or the hot water would at least be done putting off mist. If they'd been a little quicker about getting him packed off he'd have been blown to smithereens. Axis is supposed to be very nice but what if actually he has done something horrible here, like maybe the little girl was a shapeshifted chromatic dragon wyrmling or something, and the Judge takes one look at him and sends him to Hell. But he doesn't feel like he's dying, he feels like he needs a Lesser Restoration or maybe two of them. Should he be offering to do another channel, he's not sure the Cure Serious was enough, sometimes it comes out pretty weak and she doesn't look all there. He could probably use it himself. He feels weirdly hot and he has Endure Elements up. Unless he forgot how it works and one cast against the cold won't work for - shut UP brain he did NOT forget how Endure Elements works. He wants to take his armor off but if they're going to send him out of the room it's not easier to carry it than to wear it. Was the gate terminus thing very valuable. He doesn't have Detect Magic up because he's never been good at flint and steel, even when he was a kid he'd panic about the stray sparks, so he has Spark instead of Detect Magic and he doesn't know what anything is or does...

Savil is sitting down and drinking water, her eyes out of focus, but she's clearly conscious, and paying enough attention to her surroundings to look up with an expression of relief and - she's really upset, actually, now that the shocked numbness is starting to wear off, k'Treva is gone and - the fact that she couldn't reach any of the people she tried means they almost certainly weren't luckily away on scout-missions at the time, or at least not far enough...

...Well, that tells him more than he knew before, at least. Vanyel drops Thoughtsensing and looks with Healing-Sight instead. ...He's not nearly trained enough with it to tell much except that neither of them is dying and both of them have something wrong with them. 

He'll find the spare chair behind another desk, divest of it a pile of ledgers, swing it over and shove it in Blai's direction. :Sit down. We're going to meet here, I guess, once everyone catches up, and then we'll - think of somewhere else for you to stay that's more secure than the guest rooms. - How many spells do you have left, by the way, I wasn't keeping track.:  

Blai drops into the chair. :I have my orisons, Divine Favor, Burst of Radiance, Delay Poison - it's possible I should try that on one of us, actually, though I don't know if it will work and it only postpones the effects - Hold Person and Qualm. Divine Favor and Qualm can't be exchanged for healings because they're domain spells.:

Vanyel shoves some more papers onto a shelf and perches on the desk, tapping a restless beat on the wood with one hand. :Might be worth trying but let's wait for Shavri, she can have a look with Healing-Sight and check how bad it is and whether it's getting worse over time. Could be quite valuable to get Savil fully functional today rather than tomorrow even if it's temporary, there's a time-sensitive investigative spell we were planning to co-cast - and it's likely our Healers can do something for it in the meantime, our kind of Healing is slow compared to yours: as in, not literally instantaneous, how does that even work, :but it's very flexible. I can't tell from the names what most of those spells...do... Might be important, there are a lot of candlemarks left before tomorrow morning for - things to happen - and I'm a lot more confused than I was ten minutes ago but the situation is definitely looking worse.: 

:Hold Person paralyzes someone. Thirty seconds. Divine Favor's a combat spell, but it doesn't cooperate with Prayer which I used against the monster so I didn't cast it then. Burst of Radiance does a bright flash area effect, dazzles or blinds people, damages Evil targets. Qualm makes a creature distracted with self-doubt and resultantly ineffectual till it takes a moment to center itself and shake it off.:

That's a bizarrely specific spell and not one you can even do with mage-gift. Probably Leareth could figure out how to do it with a compulsion shut up not the time. 

:Honestly, not the worst defense options if, er, our mage in the north does learn about you before tomorrow and sends someone after you.: Though if being in the most protected parts of the Palace in Haven with Herald-Mages around isn't enough, probably that won't be either. :I - don't know how to think about how likely that is, right now, but as long as no one's dying I think you should save your spells rather than turning them into Healing for us– oh, here's Shavri, good -: 

He pulls her into the link. :Savil and Select Blai took a serious blast of some kind of nasty residual mage-energy left after an explosion in k'Treva. Can you have a look?: