She probably won't get much sleep. Luckily she doesn't need much sleep. Maybe this will afford her the opportunity to give Ma'ar a hug at least.

Ma'ar does not seek out a hug with her; he takes the very edge of the skin, curls up against the tent wall, but he lets Carissa crawl in next to him and it's very crowded, and once he's asleep, which doesn't take long - he's done a lot of magic today and he's tired - he relaxes and uncurls a little. 

She holds him. He's little and he's - going to grow up into Leareth, hopefully without most of his world getting destroyed in the process, hopefully with them getting found, soon so it's irrelevant. 

But if they don't get found - they can prevent the Cataclysm, maybe just by convincing Urtho that it could have happened, and - and maybe she can figure out immortality in some better way than Ma'ar's, before she's old. It wouldn't have to be the end of the world. It just feels like it would be.

She sleeps for significantly longer than she usually does these days and is still up long before anyone else. She prepares spells for their escape to the nearest town. She tries to pray. There's no one there. This is - also not very surprising, but she spends a while staring miserably into the pre-dawn sky about it anyway.

The toddler wakes up first, and shortly later wakes everyone else by crying. Ma'ar holds very still for a bit, then sits up. Looks at Carissa, as though to reassure himself that she's real. 

The old woman rubs her eyes. "You're going, then." Her dark eyes flick to Ma'ar, shadowed in the dim light seeping through the tent-flap. "Boy, you - don't be stupid." It's the closest thing she gives to a goodbye, and she doesn't touch him, just tugs the tent-flap open for them and waits. 

Her eyes follow them, though, as they walk away. 

She taps Ma'ar and gives him Mage Armor and Protection from Arrows. "Do you know how to ride a horse?"

He can tell that she's doing something with magic; his eyes get big, and he examines himself, clearly making uses of some sense other than his eyes.

"I can figure it out." He's heard of horses, at least. 

"All right." And she makes two ghostly horses, a little larger than normal ones, almost entirely mist at the hooves and almost entirely solid at the saddle, which looks to be of ordinary leather. "They can go very fast, fast enough it'd kill a person to fall off them, so we're going to go slower than that unless the neighboring clan bothers us, all right? But if they do, we're going to go fast, and you're going to hold on very tightly." Arguably she should give him some of her protective artifacts but it seems much less likely Leareth'll eventually be able to design a search spell that finds this world if she's dead. 

"All right," he says, very seriously, and he holds on. Stiffly at first, but he watches her, and it takes only a few minutes before his riding posture is more natural. 

The plains stretch out ahead of them, flat and dusty. There's maybe a dust plume off in the distance but it's hard to tell from here if it represents the other clan. 

She's not spectacularly good at horseback riding either but she's done it before and knows the principle, and phantom horses don't spook like real ones. She watches him, and wishes that Nefreti Clepati were less like this, and wishes she'd asked Leareth more questions about when the gods started trying to kill him, and hopes Ma'ar is right about the direction to the city.

A Phantom Steed by a caster of her level is untiring and can travel almost a mile a minute, but they're not pushing the horses nearly that hard. Still, it shouldn't take all day to reach the city.

The other clan doesn't bother them, and after an hour or so the land starts to change, flat dry grass shifting to scrubby heather and small trees. Eventually they bump up against a river, which has a dirt track running beside it; they catch up to a farmer walking alongside his donkey, which has some baskets slung on either side of a sort of carrier on its back with various vegetables in them, scrawny green beans and peas and blotchy tomatoes and bunched carrots still with dirt on them.   

Ma'ar is staring around at everything, awed. 

"Let's take a lunch break."

The concepts of 'lunch' and 'break' both seem to be surprising ones to him, but he nods and figures out how to slide down from the phantom steed's saddle without needing Carissa's help. 

And she hands him all of the food she bartered his people for. "You probably want to stay standing or you'll be very sore and it'll make it unpleasant to get back on the horse."

He also seems surprised at the quantity of food! He eats it, though, and stays standing for that, still looking in amazement at the river. He's never seen so much water in one place before. 

And now that they're getting close to the city she casts Disguise Self. Aims to look like the older woman in Ma'ar's village. They're still going to be riding in on a phantom steed but it's not doing her any favors to look rich on top of looking powerful. "We can keep going, if you're ready."

He nods, and hauls himself back into the saddle, cheating a bit with magic, he seems to know how to shape it into a rope of force which he can loop over the pommel of the saddle and grab onto. 

They pass some more signs of habitation. A fishing-raft on the river; a cultivated field on the opposite side, half-visible between the screen of trees; a hut built on the other side of the path from the river, with a somewhat sad-looking vegetable garden, the leaves of the tomato plant blighted and spotty; another family, also with a donkey carrying some sacks. The river here is clearly riding lower in its banks than usual, leaving stretches of exposed mud and wilted plants, but the middle is still deep, and then they reach a point where it's narrower and faster, the banks rocky rather than sandy and mud. The path is very narrow here, winding next to an apple orchard and some blackberry bushes. 

- and then, with no warning, half a dozen men armed with daggers explode out of the bushes and swarm them. They go for Ma'ar first, he's a horse-body-length behind her now because the path is too skinny for them to ride side by side; he screams and kicks and flails as two of the men seize his leg and drag him bodily out of the saddle. 

- well, fuck. If she catches Ma'ar in a fireball he'll die because he's a commoner - she should've given him her artifacts just so she'd feel freer to use lethal force -

- she tugs them up to full power and casts a Fireball centered a bit in front of her so he's hopefully out of the radius and then everything around her is intensely aflame which is satisfying but means she can't see, for a second, until she can get off the horse and to the edge of the fiery explosion -

She gets three of the men and now they're very on fire and screaming although not for very long! One of the others was about to catch up with her horse and he tumbles back, yelling in shock. 

Ma'ar is out of the radius, although the heat of it still scorches his face and singes his eyebrows a bit, and he's still shrieking but mostly because two men much much bigger than him are trying to get him in a chokehold - one of them smashes him over the head with a wooden club and is baffled when this does absolutely nothing to stop him from kicking and biting and clawing for their eyes - 

- and he manages to twist his head around so he can sink his teeth as hard as he can into his captor's forearm, which gets another startled yelp and the man lets go of him and he lashes out as hard as he can with feet and elbows - 

This gets him dropped. Over the edge of the steep rocky bank. He lands hard and approximately on his head although the Mage Armor means that this mostly just knocks the breath out of him; he rolls, tumbles, and splashes into the fast-moving water. 

Carissa was going to try to take the other ones alive but this is more urgent so she casts Fly on herself and races through the air towards Ma'ar, fumbling for a Pearl of Power to recall Fly as she does.

Ma'ar has never seen water deeper than the watering-hole, which even in spring only comes to his waist, in his entire life. He has no idea how to swim and he's flailing wildly, trying to get his face to the surface, and also slamming into and bouncing off some rocks, which also don't really hurt him but are very distracting to his attempts to think of magic that'll help, and knock the breath out of him a moment after he manages to actually get some air. 

She reaches him and tries to tug him up out of the water and casts Fly on him, too, while she does that, she's not totally sure how it'll work but it seems like it ought to make it easier to pull him straight into the air -

He's at this point too panicked and disoriented to even realize that she's cast a spell on him, but it does seem to make it easier to haul him out of the water. He splutters, coughing up a lungful of water, and instinctively wriggles and kicks at her until he recognizes her, at which point he instead starts trying to grab onto and cling to her. 

Hughughughug floating ten feet above the water - "I need you to stay here flying," she says after only a few seconds. "Just fly over some nice patch of grass, not too high, and you'll float to the ground when the spell ends, if I'm not back by then. I'm going to go stop the bandits from getting away. I need to know whether they went after us by coincidence or whether anyone" any god "told them to do it."

He's still coughing and wheezing and trying to catch his breath, and it takes him a few moments to parse the words, but eventually he nods and forces himself to let go of her. One limb at a time, and it's clearly taking an incredible effort of will, but he hangs onto her clothes with one hand and notices that he's still floating, and then lets go of her and zooms away. 

The remaining three men, perhaps seeing the path of wisdom here, have abandoned any attempt to steal the horses - which they've at this point noticed are half made of mist anyway - and are fleeing as fast as they can into the orchard.