Leareth works on dismantling decades worth of operations, and sending agents to double-check that the contingency plans he's cancelled are, in fact, now inactive. 

...And a couple of nights in, he finds himself in a snowy desolate waste, with an army behind him, facing a man in tattered Heraldic Whites standing at the mouth of a pass sliced through the mountain itself, impossibly deep and straight, carved with blood-magic. (There's no other way to do a working on that scale without leaving ripples in the patterns of mage-energy across half the continent.) 

"Herald Vanyel," he says. 

"Leareth." After a beat, Vanyel starts walking towards him. 

Leareth stays where he is. He's thought about what to say, a lot, he expected this would happen, but he still doesn't have a script. 

"You're quiet today," Vanyel remarks, casting a heat-spell and making himself a snow-stool. 

"I have just received significant new information," Leareth says, his voice tight. "Which prompted a reassessment of all my plans." 

"Oh, really?" 

Leareth takes a deep breath. "It no longer makes sense to invade Valdemar and so I am not going to." 

"What?" Vanyel blinks at him. Rubs his chin. "- I hope you'll forgive me for being very suspicious of that claim." 

"I understand. I will consider what stronger indications I can give you. I am still orienting to the new situation, right now." 

"Er, right. I'll wait on that, I guess." 

"Um. Anyway. I guess we could talk about that book you recommended me, the treatise on trade between nations and how coin circulates..." 

Sure, they can talk about that for the rest of the dream. 

...

In the morning, Leareth fills Nayoki in on this, but doesn't bother Promise with it. It's hardly urgent.

He keeps an eye out for signs of god-interference, but all seems quiet, so he waits for Promise to decide she's had enough of a break and approach him. 

She wanders over to him at breakfast one morning.

"I've been wondering if there's a reasonably safe way to get a cutting of my tree," she says, "and maybe if nobody's staking it out - they probably aren't, but Thorn does know where it is - also some fairy plants I could grow so people don't have to feed me. I could just open a gate to a different continent and grab some forage there if the tree's too risky."

Nod. "If you can open a Gate to the other continent, then likely we can get in range to use Farsight or scrying to check your tree for Thorn's sentries. And with Fetching, we need not even approach it very closely to obtain a cutting, I have Fetchers who can work at several miles' distance for transporting a small object. Unless it needs to be you in particular who takes the cutting - but we could still make that safer, I think..." 

"The sentries would probably be invisible. I think someone else will be able to break off a branch."

"Hmm. Is their kind of invisibility something you can also do with sorcery? If so, I can check if they are still visible to our mage-sight, which can be used with scrying." 

"Yes, I can turn invisible, it's not hard. Now?"

"Sure." Leareth watches with mage-sight. 

She turns invisible.

"I can see you," Leareth confirms. Both her life-force aura, not concealed at all, and the magical signature of the spell itself. 

"Okay, so you'll be able to tell if anyone's there - they might also be inaudible and so on but won't have a reason to expect your specific weird senses."

Nod. "Even in this world, invisibility-illusions that do not leak any magic are very very difficult, it is possible but requires rare skill to cast." 

Nod. "So I can have some of my tree?"

"If you can provide us with transport to your world, and are willing to let me read your memory of the tree's location from your mind so I have it in enough fidelity to scry for it, then yes, I think so."