"Vanyel. Is he..." 

Brightstar is fairly sure that he already knows the answer. 

Dara is a coward. She can't seem to open her mouth to speak. 

"I'm sorry, ke'chara." 

"Why are you sorry." Brighstar's silver eyes blaze. "Do you know who did this." 

The Heralds look around at each other. 

Her chest aches. There's no solid ground left to stand on. 

"Well, I don't see the point in secrecy now," Dara says, quietly. "Brightstar, Vanyel was - destined to fight an immortal mage in the north. Leareth. But I don't think this was Leareth." A pause. "K'Treva, did you - how many...?" 

"Half." 

Featherfire knows a lot less Valdemaran than her brother. She hovers behind him in silence. 

"Us too." 

All Dara wants is for this to not be happening. 

"Well, have a seat," she hears herself say, finally, as though from a great distance. "We're...going to sort this out. It's going to be all right." 

Which is a lie. It's not going to be all right. How could it be. 

But she pushes out the words anyway, and maybe by the time she's finished with that, she'll have thought of the next step forward. 

It's been a a candlemark since the event. 

Leareth rises from trance, belatedly and unpleasantly returning to awareness of his body, including the exhaustion weighting his limbs and the molten pain in his head. 

:- Nayoki?: 

:Still here. It - we stopped losing people. It was over in five minutes: 

Less, maybe. It's hard to know, because so many of their people died alone in locked rooms, only checked later. 

:Do we have numbers: 

:Nine thousand seven hundred and twenty-three confirmed dead. ...But I think the total is more. It - in every larger base, it was almost exactly half. The distribution you would expect if it were...a coin-flip. For each person: 

Why. 

How. 

It doesn't make sense and he doesn't understand. And Leareth hates being confused. 

:Valdemar?: 

:Limited intelligence on them. We are - very short on personnel. It sounds as though it happened to them as well:  

Unsurprisingly. Leareth saw Vanyel crumble to nothing in front of his eyes. 

:Did you find -: 

:Nothing. The wards detected nothing at all - except that the shield-wall in Iftel is down. I think that is...the result of something upstream, though: 

It takes Nayoki a few seconds to parse that, and then her heart double-thumps in her chest.

:You think - the coin-flip hit the gods as well?: 

:I am not sure I think anything yet: 

Leareth's mindvoice is more tired than Nayoki has ever heard it, and she doesn't think it's just because of the gruelling magic he's spent a candlemark doing. 

:...Do you have orders for us: 

:Finish surveying our casualties and get final numbers. Obtain more intelligence on the situation in Valdemar - find out if this happened in Rethwellan and Hardorn and Karse as well:

Leareth is silent for a moment. He's tired, and in pain, and doesn't even have guesses about what happened or who was responsible. Which means that, for all he knows, it could happen again at any moment and there's nothing he would be able to do. 

:Also, I would like painkillers. I am going to draft a message to the Heralds and I need to concentrate: 

The Heralds in Haven are not, themselves, concentrating very well. Scattered reports are coming in from the surviving Mindspeech relays, being discussed in panicky bursts interspersed with painful silences. 

Shavri gets the patient stable. Does some Healing on the woman next door as well. 

It's not enough to drown out the echoing void where the other half of her should be. 

Eventually, though, she can't help having thoughts as well. 

She's so angry. Pointlessly, stupidly. 

Well, who cares about stupid, now. What does she have left to lose. 

She leaves the House of Healing at a brisk walk. Nobody stops her. The grounds are deserted. The halls of the core Palace building are too empty; there are huddles of people here and there, servants, nobles, all of them alike now. Confused, scared, grieving. 

Shavri lets it wash over her. It doesn't hurt, not in comparison to the rest. 

She reaches the Web-room unopposed. 

The quartz ball of the Web-focus - the physical manifestation of the Heartstone in Haven - feels warm to her touch. Alive. It hums faintly, in a way that isn't quite sound. 

Shavri rests her hands on it and closes her eyes. She isn't afraid. There's no room for fear anymore. 

:You owe me an explanation: she tells it. 

And suddenly she's - somewhere else. Standing on a path of moonbeams, dusty purple nebulas hanging in the infinite blackness all around her, golden mist swirling around her ankles. 

And a woman, small and clad head to toe in black robes. Kneeling, as though in prayer, or supplication. Or despair.