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. 

Leareth.......isn't coping, if he's honest with himself about it.

He's taking sane actions about the situation. It's not complicated, doing that, it doesn't call for more than a fraction of his full reasoning ability, and he can do it. 

Leareth has grieved for many things, over centuries and millennia. It's a critical component of taking the world as it is, in all its tragedy, and making a plan from that which might work. He would have said, before, that he's skilled at grieving. Practiced. 

He doesn't know how to grieve for this. 

When he asks his mind why not, mostly he gets wordless incoherent gibbering horror, and the closest thing to words he can extract is that it's against the rules. Reality was lawful, before, events happened with causes, and this violates everything he thought he understood. The gods Themselves didn't see it coming. 

It shouldn't be allowed, for some alien hand to reach into their universe from the outside, flip a coin for each and every life, and snuff out the ones whose coins landed wrong. 

Leareth tries over and over to remind himself that 'allowed' is the wrong concept to apply here, and it doesn't work at all.

If he understood - if he knew who or how or why - then it feels like maybe he could move on to the real grief. Maybe he could feel anger at the pointless stupid WASTE of it. More than ten million lives, and nothing at all gained from their deaths.

But, right now, that line of thought is only empty words, and the only emotion he can summon is a child's frustrated incomprehension, at reality breaking its own rules and not even telling him why. 

And pain. Not grief, yet, it's too raw and unformed for that, but there's no shortage of pain here. If pain were a power source, he could make a god right here and now. 

Leareth can't tell if his complete inability to process the event is affecting his ability to make reasonable decisions. If it was, it's not clear what he could do about it anyway, it's not like he isn't trying to do the processing here.

As best as he can tell, though, he's - fine, most of the time? His ability to do math isn't at all impaired; he checked that first. He can run meetings and afterward his people have no concerns or qualms about his sanity; he checked that too. 

The only time where he's really definitely not fine is when he tries to sleep. In the short run he can intensely abuse various workarounds, including the fact that both Healers and Mindhealers can force people to sleep, and if he alternates that with various different drugs, this seems likely to minimize the risk of messing up his sanity even more. 

It's AGAINST THE RULES and NOT ALLOWED and Leareth is, on a deep emotional level, suddenly unsure that causality is real, and this means that all of his emotions are useless for strategic planning purposes, because mostly they want him to give up and stop trying. 

Three weeks after the event, a woman glowing with golden light drops from the sky and lands in the middle of Haven.

Of all the (much reduced) Palace population, Lady Treesa happens to be among the first to notice the woman! She's currently hosting a ladies' needlepoint salon in the Palace gardens. 

Startled, she leaps up. "I - hello? Welcome? You're, er, welcome to join us - would you like tea and biscuits...?" 

Okay, these people are, or look, human. That's...not what she expected, but convergent evolution is a thing and she's seen a lot stranger.

"Hi. I don't speak your language," she says in English. "I'm a visitor from another world—uh, every star in the sky is another sun, really really far away, and some of them have other worlds around them—and I have information on the recent attack that killed half of your population." Then she repeats the message in Kree and Asgardian and six other galactic-standard languages. She doesn't expect them to understand any of them, but she needs to get them to talk long enough for her translator earpiece to pick up their language.

Lady Treesa bobs her head and smiles to be polite even though she doesn’t understand any of that at all! 

“I’m going to go fetch a Herald!” she offers brightly as soon as the strange woman seems to be done. "Reesa, Talli, why don't you get this nice lady some biscuits and tea?" 

She hitches up her skirts and bustles off. 

They offer the nice lady tea and biscuits! 

And, within five minutes, Lady Treesa is back with a very young woman - a teenager, really, she looks about nineteen.

Except for her eyes, which are older than any human being's eyes ought to be. 

She frowns, and then - 

:Can you understand me?: 

Well, this planet just went up several spots on her priority list.

Yes. Do many of your people have this...ability? To speak without words? Do you have other forms of magic as well?

I need to speak to whoever is in charge. Does the ruler of this country live here? It looked like the capital, from space. I have information that may help you to contextualize the recent attack.

She accepts the tea and biscuits but nibbles cautiously at them. These people look human, but who knows if their biology is remotely compatible.

The tea doesn't taste exactly like Earth tea, and the biscuits have odd spices, but other than that it all seems as expected! 

:We've got, er, thirty-nine Heralds with Mindspeech range of a mile or more?: Dara answers, half on rote. :And, you mean capital of Valdemar? Ruler is - me. I guess: 

She sounds very, very tired about this. 

:Um, if you're here with information, though, you probably want Leareth? He's not ruling a country or anything but he, er, knows the most things:

This person is not old enough to be ruling a country but she's definitely seen people ruling in the aftermath of the Snap who seemed less prepared. And more happy about it, which is probably worse.

I intend to carry this message to all political entities and other factions on this planet who might be tempted to interpret recent events as the wrath of their gods or some other excuse for violence against their enemies. It is not.

Uh...I don't know what your scientific knowledge is like, but I saw a decent-looking observatory coming in so I'm going to assume that you know that planets go around suns and such. Well, every star in the sky is a sun, and many of them have their own planets around them, a small fraction with their own life, and a small fraction of those with intelligent species. But the universe is big. There are millions of inhabited worlds known to us—a few thousand with the tech level necessary to participate in the galactic community. We do not generally initiate contact with worlds as early in their development as yours, but I think that these circumstances warrant it.

The being who did this is named Thanos, and he does not even know that your world in particular exists. He...believes that life is doomed to destroy itself by multiplying until it consumes all available resources. He believes that this could only be prevented by the murder of one-half of all sentient beings, at random. He has acquired a set of extremely powerful magical artifacts, more powerful than anything your world has ever encountered, and used them to do this, on every world, everywhere. You are not alone in your suffering, and there are people with special abilities like mine working tirelessly to defeat him and undo his work.

(She doesn't mention the part where the entire solar system in which he was believed to be hiding was destroyed by a supernova that shouldn't have happened, and the Infinity Stones were nowhere to be found in the rubble.)

Normally I would end the speech there. However, because you seem to be magic-users of some kind, I will make the offer. There is a group of such specially powered people assembled on another world. If you would like to send some of your own to join the fight, I can transport you to them.

If there is anything you think I need to know about other political factions here, please tell me now. I will be verifying anything negative you tell me and will not be taking a side in any local conflict, so do not attempt to recruit me to do so. Also, tell me more about this 'Leareth'.

Dara's mind halfheartedly follows half a dozen thoughts and trails off, as the woman speaks. 

She wonders about the observatory. Leareth's, she's sort of assuming, less because she has any particular reason to believe that and more because her prior, at this point, is that any impressive project that she's never heard of was probably him. For all she knows, he was even the scholar who originally discovered that planets go around suns - though, honestly, it could have been Urtho. 

(Thinking of Urtho reminds her of the Tower, and thus of Vanyel, and she flinches away from the pointless stab of loss.) 

She thinks 'Thanos' is a stupid-sounding name and his plan sounds even stupider. 

Leareth would want to know about his absurdly powerful artifacts, though, she's pretty sure of that. 

Oh, right, she's probably supposed to answer or something. Being ruler of a country is terrible. 

:...Um, we know it wasn't the gods. Someone, er, talked to one of Them and we confirmed that. They have Foresight and didn't see it coming. Said it came from the outside: 

Which fits if it was someone from another world. Dara would normally be a lot more skeptical of that claim, she thinks distantly, but - it explains an awful lot, really. 

:And Leareth is -: 

Dara is suddenly wishing that she'd spent more time coming up with a short but accurate summary of Leareth as a person. Though maybe that's stupid too, it's not like she saw this coming. 

Whatever. 

:Leareth is an immortal mage, he's about two thousand years old and before this was, er, fighting the gods. He was going to conquer our kingdom as part of his plan to make a new nicer god that would fix everything: She will maybe leave out the part about all the murder, it's not like that's relevant anymore. :He had a prophetic dream with - one of our people: (another stab of grief), :who died when, um, when the thing happened. Anyway. We were expecting to end up at war with Leareth, but after the - thing happened - he opened communications and offered help instead. Which is the only reason things aren't a lot worse. He's - very smart - and very good at magic - I bet he'd want to help you: