Shavri's expression clearly says that she thinks this is a stupid question. "Outside the world, I guess? They - didn't see it coming. It took out Vkandis. She...didn't know. What or how or anything." 

"You spoke to our Goddess." 

Brightstar isn't being very subtle about the envy in his voice at all. 

"I bet She'd talk to you too if you had a go. Don't think there's more to learn that way though. What's our plan." 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. Why is everyone LOOKING AT HER. Oh right they don't have a monarch right now. She is literally in charge of this kingdom right now. 

Well. 

Half of it. The half that's left. 

"...Leareth sent a letter," Dara says faintly, after a long pause. "Swearing it wasn't him. He - lost half his people as well. He, er, wants our census-numbers, if we can get them, for...I guess to help come up with theories of what caused this? He doesn't know any more than we do, though. No detectable magic at the time." 

Odd, how in a way it's easier to think when you've already lost everything that matters. 

"We're going to have a lot of chaos," Shavri says flatly. "People will starve - there'll be littles who lost their parents... Can he offer any help. We should ask for it. Tell him he owes it to us, if he wants us - to make nice with him, to work together here. Which he must. Given everything." 

Everyone is staring at Shavri. 

No, wait, they're back to staring at her again now, goddamnit. (Or, more accurately, damn whoever and whatever did this to them, because it clearly wasn't any god Valdemar knows.) 

"He says he wants peace." 

"And so do we, right? Can't see we've got much choice." 

"I do not trust him." 

Dara wishes, desperately, that this job were on LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE.

To add insult to injury, Rolan isn't even being helpful. The loss of somewhat over half the Companion herd - they're overrepresented, since approximately no Companions survived their Heralds' deaths even if they weren't themselves turned to dust - is hitting him hard. 

"We don't need to trust him, and we shouldn't. Just, I agree we'd better ask if he can spare some aid. That, we do need." 

One fortunate thing in this whole disaster, is that the mysterious scourge of death that fell across all of Velgarth - Leareth is pretty sure of that point, now, though he hasn't personally checked the other continent - is that it didn't do anything to the crops already in the fields, or livestock, or the vast stores of grain and other preserved foodstuffs that Leareth has stored in various caches up north. He thought it prudent to store enough to feed his entire force for a year, if necessary. 

Now he has half as many mouths to feed. 

Of course, he also has half the number of Gate-capable mages. And the dice fell especially badly for Valdemar's Herald-Mages; they are absolutely not capable of distributing food aid to their own kingdom, let alone others. 

Leareth's own foreign operations are in shambles. But he built a lot of redundancy into his various spy-networks. He can, albeit at considerable cost, get communications through, and dispatch agents to approach the various governments in the region and open talks. 

Leareth has the resources, in coin and in a dozen more nebulous kinds of capital; he can pay that cost. It doesn't, right now, feel as though it's worth saving anything at all for the future. It's hard to imagine a better time to burn everything he has as fuel to keep a few more people alive through the next winter. 

Messages go back and forth, carried by Leareth's creepy semi-sentient bird creatures. 

Sure, they'll accept aid in the form of excess army rations. And mages, if Leareth is offering, though they need long-range Mindspeakers even more. And Farseers if possible, to help the Heralds triage which towns are in the most desperate straits. Sure, if he has spies with Gate-locations in Haven he's welcome to send them supplies and personnel that way. What other choice can Dara possibly make.

Leareth personally and a few of his people can Gate from a map, too. He has several dozen mages who've mastered Gating from Farsight or scrying images. Rethwellan and Hardorn and Karse all need help as well but he can divide things up as well as possible.

Per Leareth's agents, the government of Valdemar actually seems to be holding together pretty well, relative to Hardorn or Rethwellan, both of which are now in the middle of active succession crises. (Rethwellan lost its elderly king and the sword that chooses the monarch went missing in the chaos; Hardorn didn't lose King Festil but did lose several members of his Council, who were apparently loadbearing in holding together Festil's not-exactly-popular kingship.)

That's good to know. 

(It would be flattering, if Dara had any emotions to spare for that. Melody keeps trying to get her to TALK about her FEELINGS and Dara is pretty sure that if she tries to do that she won't stop crying for a week, and given that she's the de facto Queen right now and holding onto law and order by her fingernails, she would rather just not.) 

- oh, sure, they'll take thousands of un-Gifted soldiers as peacekeepers and medics and extra hands in the fields, if that's on offer. Wait, what, no, they don't need the safeguard of voluntary compulsions not to rape or pillage or otherwise harm civilians, that's pretty messed up as a concept actually. 

- if Leareth has lots of magical artifacts on hand then...sure, they'd love to receive a crateful of talismans that do mage-lights or heat-spells or weather-barriers and a dozen other useful spells, and hand those out to villages in need. Wow. Dara didn't know you could do that. ...Let alone that they can be re-powered by distance casting, that's insanely useful. 

News trickles in from the wider world. 

The Eastern Empire fell apart in the first day. It's now a mess of several dozen petty warlords grabbing territories and squabbling with each other. Compulsioned child soldiers are involved. Lots of starving people, lots of open murder and local gang fighting in the streets, but they're...not very safe to try to interact with, right now. 

The Shin'a'in got off surprisingly lightly, luck of the draw. They've left the Plains and are helping keep the peace in Jkatha. 

Karse is doing okay. Well, as okay as any country can be, when it's lost half its entire population. Karis isn't sure if there's a single family, anywhere in the kingdom, that isn't grieving the pointless death of someone precious to them. 

Karse is holding together because Karis is MAKING IT, by sheer force of will. 

Her god is gone. That shouldn't be the kind of thing that can happen. Her daughter is gone and that feels just as against-the-laws-of-reality. She's lost too much to ever be whole again, but it's not like that ever mattered. 

She works from dawn until late in the night, every day, and she shouts at people in meetings whenever it seems like this might help, and by the time she lies down at night her throat is raw and her entire body hurts from the tension she can't seem to set aside. 

Most nights she needs valerian to sleep. 

Nothing is ever going to be all right. Not ever again. 

...It's distantly fascinating, Savil muses sometimes, how losing everything can heal some other wounds, or at least make them irrelevant. She joins her brother in his private study almost every night, now, or he comes to her quarters, and they drink wine until the world goes soft and blurred and it's not exactly that it hurts less but it's easier to look at and sometimes they cry together. 

She's even, in some weird sideways fashion, friends with Lady Treesa now? 

Lady Treesa is coping! Her two eldest children are DEAD and the Court is in SHAMBLES and she is coping the only way she knows how, which is by keeping the Court social scene alive entirely by her own efforts. 

She hosts PARTIES, where people can sip drinks with flowers floating in them. She redecorates their suite. She has flower bouquets sent to all her (surviving) friends. She writes party invitations on pink stationary and draws flowers in the margins. 

She drinks wine with her husband and sister-in-law, and fills the silence with chatter about how lord such-and-such is sleeping with his chambermaid after his wife crumbled to dust, isn't it such a SCANDAL. 

She makes a new gown for Dara, who's working so hard and deserves a party to celebrate how she's basically queen now and it's not a real celebratory party unless you have a new gown that has flowers embroidered everywhere. 

Bard Breda is coping. She encourages her bereaved students to write songs about it. The best songs, the ones remembered for centuries, are always born of pain. 

Herald Keiran is coping. 

She's pregnant again, according to Gemma - who is VERY DISAPPROVING about this, it took two days and two six-person Healing Melds to get her womb back in working order and it's not really a great time to push things. 

Keiran honestly has no idea who the father is. Leareth sent a dozen men from his military force to help with logistics, and she slept with six of them in the course of three days. (And with one of them three women, which she's never done before, but when it feels like the end of the world has come and gone and left you still standing, none of the ordinary rules apply.) 

Joshel is coping. Sort of. He would really rather not, but someone has to manage the treasury. 

Stef is halfway back down the North Trade Road to Haven when he gets confirmation that Herald-Mage Vanyel is dead. It's not a surprise. He already knew. 

(It doesn't stop him from dreaming about Vanyel most nights, and waking inexplicably in tears.)  

He was rushing at first, but Randi's gone as well. So is Jisa. So is Medren. There's hardly anything left for him in Haven. He might as well take his time, and hear people's stories, because - because someone has to remember, right.

He hears garbled rumours about a man in the north named Leareth, and he puts together some pieces, but it's not like that matters anymore. 

Brightstar does weather-magic, and holds his sister when she wakes up sobbing in the night, and bides his time. Someday. Someday they'll know who did this, and he'll be waiting. 

Shavri, most nights, finds herself in the stables with Yfandes.

They don't talk, usually. Yfandes mostly doesn't talk to anyone these days. 

It takes her a while to pin down why, every time she notices that, oh, right there is a high place to jump from, a quiet voice in her whispers not yet. 

It's because her pain is all that's left of them - of Randi, of Vanyel, of Jisa, of so many others - and so it feels like blasphemy, to want to stop hurting. 

Every time Yfandes wakes up, the first motion in her mind is reaching for her Chosen, and the first thought to form after the pain is why.

Why is she still here.

Why is anything still here. 

It stops feeling like a coherent question, after a while. Might as well ask why two plus two equals four.

It starts to feel like a tautology, she's still here because she's still here and that's all there is to it. 

Melody is coping. Mostly by helping other people cope. When she's seeing patients, she can abstract away her own personhood, be nothing but a vessel, and that's...easier is the wrong word but it's something. 

Sometimes she locks herself in one of the Heralds' meeting-rooms, there are lots of them going unused these days. And they're shielded against sound. She can scream until her voice gives out without bothering anyone.