"This life isn't easy for anyone. And, well, there's very few of them I'd trade with. Though I look forward to retirement."

"Is 'retirement', in this case, just when you die and go to Axis." 

"Yes."

"...Your world is so different from mine." Leareth lifts his head, looks Khemet in the eye. "I - am glad, that you are the pharaoh now. You are someone I can work well with." A shape of person he knows how to cooperate with, even have calibrated and actually-quite-extensive trust in maybe, but he doesn't say that out loud. 

"I am glad I am the pharaoh now too. I would be so annoyed to have missed this." 

And he heads out.

Leareth takes notes for a while longer and then, when he seems to feel fine, risks practicing his new cantrips a bit, and then does in fact nap until someone knocks with supper, at which point he blearily eats it and decides he might as well go to bed properly, apparently god-backlash is tiring as well as painful and he might not get much sleep after the point when Delay Pain wears off. 

He in fact does not get much sleep after the point when Delay Pain wears off.

The second day in the Tower, they can finish copying all of the relevant passages and some additional ones Karna found in the meantime (she also obtained more paper).

There are a couple more hidden rooms behind secret doors or trapdoors, in the other hallways. Vanyel asks them, again, to not touch anything unless a Velgarth mage says it's non-magical. Mostly they don't touch anything. Vanyel draws out diagrams of magical constructs, working from his mage-sight, to potentially remake later (he's sure Leareth has the skills to do it.)

At the end of a long day, Vanyel Gates them back to the surface. "...Hmm, so we could camp another night or we could just head out. Er, Fazil can Plane Shift us home, right? Or do we have to get a message to the pharaoh asking for a lift - I could also Gate us back to Haven but I don't think they'd be ready to leave yet..." 

"I can take us back. Well, I can take myself and six other people back if one of them is Yfandes."

"Karna is staying here," Starwind points out. "If you have capacity to bring Moondance and I, we will come, otherwise we can Gate ourselves back to Haven and rejoin our Wingsister there." 

"Nah, I can make that work. Do we have two copies of everything we want to bring the pharaoh?"

"Think so. We were doing supplementary material that Karna wants just for their histories and those we only have one copy of." 

Then they can make sure everything is appropriately divvied up and hold hands for a Plane Shift home.

Vanyel is really glad to get out of the Plains, honestly.

They land on a sharp slope in some mountains; there are peaks towering above them in three directions, and a hazy yellow horizon in the fourth.

"Do we know where we are? Should I just Gate us right back now?" 

Yfandes scrabbles a bit to keep her footing on the slope. 

"Probably in the Barrier Mountains somewhere and yeah - if it's too far that doesn't fail in some incredibly deadly way, right -"

"No, I'll just notice the spell is too hard and abort it, and I should have a lot of Gate-range now that I'm, er, it turns out I don't have a stupid Gate problem anymore."

He finds a rock-arrangement that is sort of vaguely doorway like and convinces his mind it's good enough to stick a Gate on, and puts the other end back in the winter Palace. 

And then they can all head back. It's late at night by this point, but maybe the pharaoh wants to be made aware that they have all these journals on Ma'ar - "did anyone notice anything particularly incriminating or illuminating, I didn't have Tongues up for most of the copying -"

"We can maybe put the entries from the war on top."

"I skimmed some from the student time period and they were interesting too, he - seemed pretty fond of Ma'ar at the start." 

"Honestly I cannot fathom what he was thinking, with the war. 

I guess we're starting a war unprovoked, now."

Nod. "We should read through more of this. I still feel like I'm missing a lot of context."