"Sounds a lot like Urizen!" The dhomiro appears to think this is an extremely funny joke. Some of the other people at the table laugh politely. Yasmina clearly does not think this is funny.

"I'd better get going soon. Get in the air and get some time to think."

"Let me take you to the map room," says Marilla, hopping down from the carriage and waving Lenora towards a building entrance. "You'll send someone to fetch us when the letters are ready, yes?" she addresses to the table in general; there are several nods and a couple of other people also get down from the table to go about their errands.

She follows Marilla. 

"I'm just so... Foreign here. It's gonna keep hitting me like that," she mutters.

On the wall of the Map Room there is a really serious map.

"So, we are down here, in the region marked Lightsea," Marilla tells her, pointing at the map. "The armies are fighting up here, in Kahraman - ours and the Navarr are all there. The Jotun have come over this little scrap of border here, into Gambit, have cut off that river route and the main road, and are threatening the white granite quarries at the Damatian Cliffs and the Great Mine of Briante, a mithril mine.

Are there any other places you were interested in?"

"I want to see a vallorn - I think it was? Hostile land? We don't... Quite have those, unless antagonist breach points are the same, but I don't think so. Oh, and where are the Urizen on this?"

"Oh, I think there's something interesting going on with the Vallorn!" replies Marilla cheerfully. "I'd have to check with some people, but there's rumours of some kind of grand expedition - an Eternal boon that's made people temporarily immune to the Miasma and all that nastiness, so they're doing a great expedition into the heart of the Vallorn before it runs out! Sound awfully dangerous still, though - nobody really knows what is deep inside there, except that it wants to kill you - and then trap your soul forever... or until we free them all, I guess...

Anyway, the Urizen - they're all the way over here." She taps an area on the other side of the half-circle bay that dominates the southern area of the map. "Here's Redoubt," the nearest coastal territory of that area, "which is pretty much the only bit that's untouched by the war, then you've got Zenith and Morrow," land-locked territories to the north-east, "which have been overrun by the Druj, although they're mostly out of Morrow and surrounded in Zenith, and Spiral," the other coastal territory, "which has been ceded to the Grendel, ugh, just like Feroz. Although the Druj are now invading Spiral too, so hopefully they'll fight a bit and it'll be easier to take it back later."

"All the way south, huh? I was told the Urizen might be interesting to visit, and that the Druj are bad fucking news. Don't know that I want to join a whole expedition, vallorn-wise. Do you know where the, uh, most accessible I guess, one is?"

"Most accessible... hmm. The smallest one is Hercynia? I don't really know about accessible, though - it's cold up there!"

"And the people aren't that friendly," adds a new voice - a young man who has just come through the door, in an elaborate outfit mostly in blues and greys - similar to the others, but an odd choice of colour scheme. "Therunin's probably the friendliest Navarr next door to a Vallorn, but they're in a swamp; you might not mind that, since I hear you can fly?"

She doesn't startle. "Hi. Yeah, that sounds like a good one to check out. Swamps, man. The logistics people always complain about them. Trucks sink right into the muck, and air supply is easy to shoot down. There's hovercraft, but there aren't really that many swamps on a big enough scale that they can't just be avoided one way or another. Therunin, huh?" She peers at the map to find it.

Therunin is also over the other side of the bay, between Highguard and Urizen.

"Oxen are not that fond of it either," replies the mysterious young man. Melia appears to be somewhat afraid of him, but definitely isn't saying anything about it. "I also suspect any kind of hovering craft would become tangled in the mangroves, and set upon by giant spiders.

Not that I wish to discourage anyone from aiding us with the greatest spiritual threat to the Empire, but I do wonder what your general intentions are?"

"-Oh, you're an egregore aint'cha?" Sigh. "Well, like I told the Navvar one, my Loyalty is to the ideals of the place I came from. That's peace, good relations between nations, improving living conditions, and sapient rights."

"Mmm," replies the egregore. "Does peace always come so heavily armed, where you are from?"

"This is heavily armed? Ehe. Well. There's the small matter of our planet being invaded though dimensional breaches. Anyone compatible with a valkyrie core and therefore qualified to screw with the force that got me here is... Encouraged to make best use of it. Selection effects. I'm a soldier- Not even a soldier, a cadet. Not a diplomat."

"If that isn't even heavily armed, it suggests that you have not, in fact, embraced the malign spiritual presence of Peace - you still fight back against those that would seek to - destroy you? Subjugate you? What is it that you fight for?"

"I mean, it's heavily armed for a civilian, but not for a Core holder. Oh, right. It's a Virtue. Is it? Uh... Yeah, not to that extreme. We weren't really fully at peace even before this. I fight the Antagonists. They come through rifts, breach points, and have a death toll above a billion by now. Some of them are intelligent, which is... Not great, but they don't stop and they don't respond to communication attempts. So I fight to keep what we have left of Earth and take back the rest. And if that means killing alien, hostile, uncommunicative people... I don't like it one bit but they're trying to kill us, so fair's fair."

"It is a false Virtue, yes. It sounds as though you fight for survival, then. But what else do you fight for? Unless you fall under the sway of a mind-altering effect, it seems likely there is little to directly threaten you, hereabouts; but I have reports of a violent assault on a Grendel vessel, so there must be more to it than that?"

"They were murdering people who they treated as slaves. For the 'crime' of an entirely unrelated slave acting out. Such dispassionate... Efficiency." Her lip curls up in disgust.

"So there is something you're passionate about," replies the egregore, approvingly. "Normally we'd object to slavery on grounds of Prosperity - you can't enjoy the fruits of your labour if someone's taking everything above bare survival from you, and similarly collective punishment is abhorrent; but Prosperity is quite fond of efficiency, as long as it's not at the expense of people getting what they're due?"

"...God. I wish you'd gotten an engineer. They'd have built a fission pile and a steel mill and who knows what else by now. I don't mind efficiency I mind regarding human - sentient - life as a resource and not a person."

"Excellent," replies the egregore, sincerely. "It sounds like we will get on very well, then, as that is the fundamental basis of Imperial religion and policy, and also something very dear to our hearts as Freeborn.

I suppose I should not dissuade you from seeing if there is anything to be done about the Vallorn - it is, after all, the greatest spiritual threat to the Empire, so the sutannirs tell me - but I should warn you, it is not susceptible to military might alone, and disturbing it can provoke retaliation over a wide area."

"That makes two out of two places that have warned me to be cautious. I will. How does one actually oppose the Vallorn?"

"The slow way," replies the egregore, "is what the Navarr have been working on for centuries - walking the Trods, weakening it region by region, and then reclaiming those regions, once magically weakened - which would benefit from your talents, were there any open at this time.

And now there appears to be perhaps a faster way - a great library of lore is being assembled in Hercynia, perhaps a Singing Stone recovered from the depths of Broceliande, which together may give us the opportunity to strike. But that is not ready yet, and also invites great peril inside the Empire at a time when there are plenty of great perils that crowd us from the outside."