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When Vanyel is ready for the mad science tour, he shows him the monkeys. "They're monkeys," she feels it necessary to clarify. "I know they look very human at this point, because the whole point of them is that I'm going to move into one if I ever die, but they're not people, and I have forbidden the staff to name them. I could move into one now if I had to but I'd like to get one actually looking like me in particular first, and I want to stick more Gifts into them, I got Fetching out of some Changesquirrels but further work is needed." She shows him the mice, too. "Do you suppose Jisa'd like a winged mouse? What's her favorite color?" She shows him all her microbiology eggs. "That's a flu sample from the recent plague! I remembered to take one. Those there are other flus. The white eggs have more-alive microbes and the brown eggs have less-alive kinds - there's a cold one of the staff mages had a few months ago, there's food poisoning, there's the most common kind from healthy intestines - you could get your Sight this fine, you know, I don't do heavy Healing-Gift use apart from Sight for this work."
:Um, we're not sure how She made it go so badly. Could've been just the lightning storm plus all the firefighting efforts running into the worst possible luck. Oh, and there was a big power surge in the Heartstone right before it ended, I think all the mage deaths were from that and nearly all the others are pretty incapacitated. But - all the things that were going wrong stopped going wrong as soon as it was complete, they got the fire under control and there haven't been any gryphons or anything out here. Hopefully they're still busy looking for you up north:
:And your lab will be hard to get to even if they find the rest of the facility, it should've gotten sealed off when we evacuated: Shiver. :This is going to be pretty awful for Leareth's resources in the north, but - I guess it matters less, now, if we've really won the Haven round with Her:
:Yeah, means we can safely operate throughout Valdemar on an economic base that isn't entirely Leareth's personal army and logistics team, that'll be cool:
:I think he's kind of out of it and in pain and at times that's hard to distinguish from 'far away' which is also painful and indistinct but yeah I can tell we're getting closer:
:Well, let's go and get all the way there: Amshalan, finished grazing, waits for Belrun to mount and get comfy in the saddle (as comfy as possible after an entire morning of hard riding, anyway) and then gallops toward the horizon.
They're getting close enough to Haven now that the land is visibly more populated; nearly everything is farms, with only a few brief pockets of untamed forest, and the villages are closer together.
Eventually Belrun starts trying for Mindtouches with Leareth to see if he's in range and aware enough to notice she's closing in.
Leareth is in range! He seems aware enough to notice her proximity and sort of vaguely reach in her direction, but not enough to properly hold his end of a Mindspeech link. She's also getting the backwash from quite a lot of pain, and he feels vaguely anxious and disoriented.
They spend the last candlemark riding through devastation. The road runs along the river, and the accessibility of water nearby seems to have saved most of the farmhouses from the lightning-triggered fires, but many of the fields are burned, and a lot of structures are obviously damaged. The sky is yellowish with a haze of smoke, the sunlight almost pink even though it's early afternoon. Everything is covered with a fine layer of falling ash.
Haven itself, when they reach the outer walls, is in slightly better shape, but they pass an entire neighbourhood mostly burned to the ground.
- Amshalan peels off the road, hooves skidding in the ashes coating the road. :They're camped out this way. Everything inside the Palace walls is pretty much gone. At least no one was there:
:Welp. We can rebuild it with room for Companions:
She can tell which direction to go for Leareth at this point, takes over navigating if Amshalan's not already been directed that way.
They can both navigate together, then, since Amshalan is getting instructions Mindspoken at her by several different nearby Companions.
There are tents ahead.
Savil is standing outside one, looking incredibly relieved and waving both arms at Belrun. "You made it!"
"Yes." Savil steps aside and tugs the tent-flap open for Belrun.
Amshalan kneels for Belrun to dismount, since she's probably pretty sore at this point. :I'll be nearby. Hoping to find someone who'll pamper me at least a little bit:
Leareth is lying on a folding cot with a sheet pulled up to his chest; his arms, resting over the sheet, are both heavily bandaged. He looks terrible, in a way that's hard to describe to anyone who isn't a Healer.
He does react to her arrival, though; he gets his eyes half-open and lifts his head an inch from the pillow before giving up.
"Belrun!" Shavri is sitting with him; her eyes light up, at least for half a second before the obvious exhaustion catches her again. "I'm so sorry we couldn't send anyone to help out - are you all right, we heard there was an earthquake...?"
"There was! And gryphons! I think nobody up north died though my information is no longer current." She drops to her knees beside Leareth and finds some uninjured area to rest her hand on.