:Word from Nayoki. Vanyel and Blai went north. I think we ought leave to join them.: A lot of the justification for staying on this side of the mountains was that it cuts the distance to Haven and makes the communication-spell less expensive, but Leareth was already on the edge of calling to evacuate, and this is confirmation. 

:Um. I'm coming! Two minutes?: 

The mages on scrying duty haven't seen anything happening in Waymeet. 

:Two minutes.: 

They have a wing of gryphons staged in Iftel - not that far away - and ready to fly through a Gate. And a mage who can cast one in midair if given a location. And they have a weapon that should discharge as much energy as Vanyel's Final Strike. 

The problem is that Leareth is not in the pass, which would be easier to target, and is behind very good shields. And they won't have long, once Leareth has the additional warning from Brightstar plucking at the immortality-spell to narrow down his exact location. The only way Leareth might not notice it is if it coincides with something very distracting.  

His Goddess is with him, but She can't do the work for him. Only give them better chances. 

There's a spell in Highjorune that holds together a fault-line in the earth, preventing an earthquake that could easily destroy that entire side of Valdemar. Brightstar spent quite a long time studying it, trying to understand it well enough to figure out if anything needed to be fixed; it was left behind by a Healing-Adept a long time ago, and hadn't been maintained since. 

It didn't particularly need to be fixed, but Brightstar learned a lot about spells that prevent earthquakes. The principle behind a spell to cause an earthquake isn't that different. All it needs is a remarkable amount of power, and knowing where to put it. 

Brightstar is a Healing-Adept with Earthsense, and as of recently, a White Winds Adept as well. He has the power and the Sight to pull this off. An earthquake won't kill Leareth unless he gets absurdly lucky, but it should damage an underground base badly enough to take down its shields, and it should definitely be very very distracting. 

:Now: he sends, and triggers the spell that he's spent the last candlemark building. 

The ground heaves and flings Jisa over and into a wall.

She tries to scramble up, but her trews are still down around her ankles and she thinks she bumped her head; her physical shields were enough that she's not injured, but her head is ringing and it's taking her a few seconds to regain her focus. 

Enara is in a different section of the cave, with Leareth. 

:Jisa! - Leareth, she–: 

Leareth isn't panicking because it wouldn't help. 

This is actually quite predictable as godinterference goes. Standard repertoire. But it would only show up as a useful nudge in Foresight if something bad were going to happen, and Leareth isn't that easy to kill. 

- Jisa. 

(She can probably get out. She's able to cast unscaffolded Gates. But she doesn't have Leareth's reflexes, or the decades of combat experience it takes to focus instantly under pressure.

And - one way this could look worth it as an intervention is if the King's daughter, lifebonded to the heir, dies in a way that looks plausibly like Leareth's fault. There are a lot more ways the peace with Valdemar could fall apart, in that scenario.)

There isn't time for that line of thought to unpack itself explicitly; the thought is Jisa! and then Leareth is in motion. 

:Get the Companion out: he snaps to the mages he brought here. :Split up, cover me–: And he's sprinting toward Jisa's mind, just barely managing to keep his balance. The ceiling and floor are flexing, but for the moment, the shields are holding, and nothing comes crashing down on his head. Yet. 

He tries to reach for Nayoki with the communication-spell and it doesn't work and he doesn't have time to unpack that either - 

Brightstar is twenty miles away and the ground is still shaking hard enough to knock him over. 

But not enough to distract him from diving into the Void and - pluck - 

The shields Leareth is hiding under aren't down, but they are damaged. 

:- Here. 

- go now go go go–: 

Enara tumbles through a Gate into a facility that Nayoki departed literally fifteen seconds ago. 

She immediately starts Broadsending to whoever is in range. :Earthquake - godplot - Leareth and Jisa are still there -: 

Enara can't reach out through the shields, but the mage who Gated Nayoki out is among the fifty or so people in range, and her alert reaches them some number of seconds ahead of when the scrying-mages would have noticed the earthquake and flagged it. 

That seems really important! Nayoki should know that right away! 

Nayoki is with Vanyel and Blai and Seldan and was already trying to reach Leareth. Vanyel's warning about Brightstar, and Blai's presence here, were in her mind plenty of reason to push them to "immediately evacuating back north." 

She can't get through. 

She could with no trouble several minutes ago and she can't now and that cannot possibly be good–

- oh.

Earthquake. 

Earthquakes don't block comms spells. Also, an earthquake would only inconvenience Leareth, with the number of shield-talismans he's wearing. So that can't be the whole plot, which means - something else is probably about to happen, and she was too slow to warn Leareth that more is afoot than just a bad-luck natural disaster - 

Leareth is not stupid and will almost certainly notice from his end that he can't reach her. He's apparently delayed by getting Jisa out as well, but will probably be able to Gate both of them north in the next ten seconds, and so it would be stupid of her to leap in there now. 

She updates Vanyel and Blai and Seldan in a rapid-fire burst of Mindspeech. Enara was just evacuated from the kyree caves, which is where Leareth still was; there's an earthquake; her communication-spell was working and now it isn't; Leareth and Jisa are still over there but will probably make it out -

Blai is acutely feeling the lack of having ever looked at a map of this place. What you need to do is you send somebody up with a Fly and have them sketch and then you have a visual that you can consult, move mental tokens around on - it's like trying to play chess on the beach, pieces swept here and there by the tide and the shapes on the sand impersistent, to think about strategy without having ever seen a map, trying to dead-reckon by vague notions like that they are "north" and certain numbers of miles away from other things.

He needs to be sitting on Seldan in case they have to run suddenly, and to have both of them - and Nayoki if she'll take one - Guidanced, and to be ready to cast something so he can only have one hand tangled in mane - Qualm if they find a culprit, Prayer if they find a battle -

Blai is excellent and Seldan is so pleased with himself about having a Herald who isn't an inexperienced teenager. 

Seldan is also feeling pretty disoriented and wishing he'd had more than a handful of candlemarks to learn his way around. Nayoki at least probably has a mental map of where they are relative to Leareth and Jisa right now, but - it sounds like she doesn't know much more than they do about where exactly other things are happening or how narrowly targeted the communications-blocking effect is on Leareth - 

Being ready to fight or run is almost always a good idea, though, and he'll take a Guidance and ask Nayoki if she wants one - Vanyel, too, if there's going to be time for that before they hear one way or another whether Leareth successfully got himself and Jisa out. 

She'll take a Guidance. She's also taking comms-spell reports from several different mages on scrying duty and should know almost instantly if they see any discharge of magic in the region, or anything other than an earthquake. 

He has line of sight to Jisa now. He's still ten yards away and it's very difficult to move in a straight line, but he can get a Gate up under her, and either make his way there or drop it once she's through and do his own - 

A little less than fifteen seconds is a very impressive interval to go from Brightstar's alert to a Gate five hundred meters in the air above the location he gave them. 

It still shouldn't have been nearly fast enough, if they hadn't also gotten very very lucky. 

Jisa tumbles out of the air beside Enara and immediately scrambles up to look back through the Gate. 

"Leareth–" 

The shielding on the caves still isn't entirely down. Everything fancy was disrupted in the last ten seconds, shielding against search-spells of various kinds is delicate enough that the configuration of the stone changing by that much was enough to break it, but the kyree of Hot Springs Clan have been here for centuries, they are aware that earthquakes happen, and the physical shielding and force-nets are holding up. 

If the shielding had been totally undamaged, they probably could have held off the white-hot fireball that goes off less than twenty yards above the ground. 

As it is, though, they absorb less than half the force of it before going down. 

Leareth is almost to the Gate and Jisa is not stupid enough to go back over and try to help him when he just put himself at significant risk to get her out because she sucks and couldn't get together an unscaffolded Gate on ten seconds' notice just because she had a bonk on the head

She sees the light of something awful shining through the stone and then - debris flying - and then the Gate isn't there anymore. 

Where are they? Doesn't matter - there are some mages here who presumably work for Leareth - and Enara has been here for longer than five seconds and should know who to talk to - 

:Enara he's still back there: 

The full wing of gryphons who followed the weapon through the Gate immediately flew up rather than down, and are still knocked around quite a bit, a bit but they're the most elite flyers in all of Iftel, they can handle some heat and turbulence. 

They wait ten seconds for the blaze of fire to peak and subside, and then descend toward the wreckage. 

Void, again. 

Pluck. 

And back. :He is still alive. Same location.:

But he must be trapped and incapacitated, or he would surely have fled. Brightstar can't pin down his location more precisely than a hundred-yard radius or so, but that just isn't that much rubble to search. 

They're so close. 

Goddess, be with me now. And he starts working on his own Gate. 

Nayoki gets several communication-spells at the exact same moment, and might have had more trouble untangling who was saying what if not for the Guidance. 

:- Leareth did not make it out - there was an explosion, maybe a Final Strike, and the site is under attack by gryphons.: She doesn't actually have any way of knowing if Leareth is even alive, but she has to assume he is.

:I am going in.: Nayoki can do unscaffolded Gates and has a Farseer's relayed image to target it off (aiming for just far enough away that they don't have to wait for the ground to cool down). She's not actually going to wait to see if the others are following her through. 

Vanyel tries for his own Gate without thinking, can't land the search-spell at all, remembers that it's unlikely anything door-shaped in the caves is going to be very intact, and starts putting shields on Blai and Seldan instead. 

Blai will drop the Comprehend Languages if he needs to do a heal and there are enemies in his radius. He's mostly focused enough on the immediate situation to not have the problem he sometimes has where as soon as he's identified a spell as acceptable to lose in favor of a Cure he starts berating himself for having prepped that spell and not something that would have hurt more to drop. Are he and Seldan going to follow, it seems like it might be reasonable either way depending on how surefooted Companions are in rubble. Is it going to be dark there - he Lights his holy symbol -

They should go through. Companions can handle difficult terrain just fine (a lot better than horses) and if they don't it sounds like they'll be cut off from communications entirely by the stupid shield that is SOMEHOW STILL UP, it must be covering a really huge area to have been far enough away from the explosion to stay intact.