:It's urgent: Vanyel uses Mindspeech so that Blai will be included as well. :We think someone is - manipulating us into a war. I can explain on the way but - if it's safe to go now then I do think it's that urgent. It's fine if we're uncomfortable.: 

A long pause. Aroon gives Stef a look. 

:- We will take you to Waymeet, but we do want an explanation.: 

That's fine, Vanyel is happy to explain, can they just go. 

:Jisa, I got most of the wards down - here's the instructions Feniss left, I got up until here - if there's a problem and you need to go in, it shouldn't take more than thirty seconds to do the rest. ...I don't know how long I'll be gone but if Yfandes covered the distance one way in a candlemark, probably before morning? Yfandes will stay with you, she won't be able to keep up in all this snow - I think she should be able to reach me with Mindspeech if anything does happen. Or if you need to respond to a message from Leareth.: 

And they'll go. 

Stef hates winter but inside Jisa's White Winds version of a weather-barrier is actually quite nice. He'll keep playing music. 

It's going to be a really long night and Jisa doesn't want to go to sleep while she's the only mage here. And Enara is being...weird...so Jisa doesn't want to talk to her just to give her something to do. 

...She'll ask Blai about the game he's playing? 

The Companions are huddled up a little ways off, having some kind of very intense conversation. 

Once the quinzee is built (in fits and starts so he can re-warm his hands, now that he's no longer got Endure Elements) he'll be more than happy to teach Jisa chess!

Jisa picks it up quickly! 

About a candlemark passes with approximately nothing happening, except for Yfandes reporting a couple of times that she can still reach Vanyel and he's fine. 

(Well. For SOME DEFINITION of fine! He should have done a Gate. A Gate would have been less unpleasant than this probably even if he got blasted. He and Feniss are strapped to a sled - because they would otherwise definitely fall off - being pulled by a team of kyree in an absolutely terrifying manner, dodging trees while being mostly unable to see anything more than a yard or two ahead, and he's never felt this motion-sick in his life.

- everything in the plan so far is going fine, though. Feniss actually seems to be having fun.) 

About ten minutes after the Companions break out of their huddle and Yfandes updates them that Vanyel is two-thirds of the way to Waymeet -

- a lightning bolt (a very unlikely and unlucky one, given that it's a winter snowstorm) implausibly strikes a particularly dry and flammable enormous dead pine tree, which bursts into flame and comes crashing down toward the weather barrier. 

Vanyel is an unreasonably powerful Adept who spent four years on the Karsite border. He could probably have deflected it with a force-barrier in his sleep. 

Jisa is...not. She's good, but her combat experience is limited, she's less used to paying attention to the Web (and in any case this isn't a magical attack, which she did put up wards to detect), and she is Adept-potential but there are gradations of that and she's not even as strong as Savil. And also she was playing a fun game which was, you know, in hindsight maybe a bad idea to get distracted by. 

She has time to shriek and accidentally knock over Blai's chess set and desperately try to reinforce the barrier which is only really meant to keep off wind and snow, and be pretty sure it's not going to be enough. 

The barrier holds up for maybe a quarter of a second - and does lose a lot of its momentum in the process - and then it goes down. 

Quarter of a second is enough to no longer be actively startled at the moment it crashes down. Protection from Energy (Fire), he's the healer if it spreads. Did it land on anyone.

Well, it was on track to land basically on top of him, but with warning he might have had time to dodge? 

Jisa wasn't actually in its path, given the arrangement in which they were sitting, and neither were the Companions; the tree has a lot of branches to gouge at them but Companions are fairly sturdy. 

Stef was also directly in the tree's path, though, and was absorbed in playing music and didn't react nearly in time. He was wearing a shield-talisman, and Jisa frantically tried to shield him as well and also dive in his direction, but the main effect is that now Jisa's arm is stuck – though she's not actually hurt, the snow provided some cushioning – and Stef is completely pinned and not moving. 

The fire is going to take a little while to start spreading, most of the undergrowth is buried under snow and the tree trunks themselves are less flammable, but there's already a lot of it. 

Jisa's closer; he pulls her arm free. If he sets her on her feet does she stay there.

Yeah, she's able to stand. 

What just - oh no - 

:Stef! Stef are you–: She can sense his mind so he's not dead but he's also not answering her. 

Vanyel is instantly aware that something is wrong but he's also motion-sick enough that summoning Farsight is proving difficult. 

:Yfandes, what -: 

:I'll get him.: He bashes branches aside to make his way along the downed tree to reach Stef and pull him out.

:Tree fell on us - lightning strike - Stef's down but he's alive and Blai has Healing, it's going to be all right -: 

Stef is pretty solidly wedged under the tree and Blai will have to be strong enough to actually lift it a little in order to get him out without injuring him even more in the process. 

(Also, Blai's effortfully built quinzee took the brunt of one of the thicker branches and its roof is no longer intact.

Blai isn't that strong. He'll wedge his own leg under the tree beside Stef so he doesn't crush him further when he maces the tree apart so he only has to shift the end of it. It's a magic mace and the tree isn't defending itself and he can hit pretty damn hard with it; he can pry up the tree-top.

In that case he can pull Stef out! 

It takes long enough that a couple of adjacent trees are now also on fire. 

Jisa is trying to do something about this but she can't create water and the only thing she can think of is to scoop up and fling snow at the flames, which does very little, or - trap it in an airtight mage-barrier? But she's never done that before and would have to figure it out on the fly - she could probably summon a water elemental but none of the local ones will know her and also the summoning takes several minutes, and her head already hurts from trying to desperately yank node-energy to reinforce the shield which didn't even work. 

Vanyel has a trick to put out fires using a weather-barrier somehow but she can't remember how it works and it might rely on Vanyel's level of power...

Once Stef is free Blai makes sure everybody's within thirty feet and channels. And then he gets on Creating Water. He can do it over a pretty wide area, thought he's limited by gallons per casting no matter how he distributes it.