This has given Carissa a headache. She isn't usually a wimp who stops walking just because she's in pain but she doesn't actually have a reason to walk. She's in some nondescript wilderness. No one should have any way to find her and there's nothing she can usefully do until tomorrow, except burn more of this spellsilver into proper Boots of Teleport. What are the gods going to send after her here, a bear?

...she prepares Magic Missile, in case of bears.

And then she works on her Boots of Teleport and hopes the Empire, to which she is devoted and loyal, hasn't yet realized that the very impressive wizard who ran circles around them this morning is a commoner until dawn. Or that if they have realized that, they still have no idea how or where to find her.

They follow up on every lead they can think of. Now that the official inquiry (under temporary new management) isn't trying to operate without warning Caris, they can do much more thorough interrogations of everyone in the palace. That's going to take a while but might turn up a hint? 

Altarrin was wearing a magic ring and a magic headband and a pin. There are lots of headbands but they've mostly been confiscated and none should be currently outside the capital except Carissa's. The ring is, according to Ellitrea's latest round of interrogation, meant to replace food and sleep and wow they probably almost killed Altarrin by taking it off him when he was unconscious and barely alive already. But probably only Caris has another. They'll put mages on developing search-spells to target a ring, and then try for headbands. Their first attempt fails but it's unclear if it's because Caris is in a pocket dimension in the sky somewhere or shielded or just because their version one isn't very good. 

They'll keep thinking of possible leads. Is Altarrin coherent enough to question, yet? 

Not really but he's not very motivated to be. (They could put some more forceful compulsions on him but it would risk destabilizing the ones keeping him nice and quiet and not at all trying anything, and it might not help that much, he's going to be fine in the longer run but his body is still fighting a serious infection and the Healers are pretty sure at least one of the poisons is contributing to his being so groggy and confused.) 

Arguably he should push for it but...also arguably he shouldn't. It might actually delay getting important information, if Altarrin is too ill for it and the process pushes him to greater exhaustion. 

The Emperor will instead focus on arranging protective measures on the palace. This set of important people confirmed to have never interacted with Caris should probably be relocated to different secure unscryable locations outside the capital. Caris knows his way around the palace and can operate with undetectable invisibility; they should make sure he won't easily find resources or be able to get anyone alone - everyone not important enough to evacuate but important enough to worry about should be set up in a buddy system - probably the temporary lead Mage-Inquisitor can think of other precautions - everyone should obviously have mage-sight open all the time, they sometimes can detect Caris that way - 

- think about what assurances he would need to accept Caris' surrender. What assurances Caris will need, to agree to a particular arrangement. Can they get extra mileage out of good faith offers that aren't actually that costly - access to Altarrin, maybe, if he's mind-controlled it's not something they can see or reverse and Caris had much longer with him, what's another few interactions - 

In the early evening he hears that Altarrin is able to answer the Healers' verbal questions. The Healers think he's still way too out of it to usefully interrogate without Thoughtsensing but the Emperor arranges people and precautions to at least make a brief attempt; if it's clearly not going to work, they'll give him overnight, but he might know where Carissa is and he might be able to shed some light on what exactly happened the first night of their acquaintance, and that could be important and time-sensitive - 

Altarrin can be shaken awake and, once they demand it firmly enough, forced to pay attention to the person standing on the other side of a shield from his sickbed and asking questions. It's a lot harder to force him to think. Most of his compulsions are pointed in the direction of - passivity, not resisting - and he's leaning into that. 

He also doesn't have the slightest idea what they're questioning him about. Presumably Carissa in some capacity? 

---

Does he know where Carissa is right now?

"No," and they're going to have to get specific and prod a lot harder to get him to speculate, speculating takes energy and he's tired. 

Did Carissa inform him of places she might intend to flee?

No. He will additionally force out that she didn't previously seem inclined to make plans for that. They haven't asked him yet if he made a plan for her and he doesn't think they're reading his mind but his thoughts are still not going there. 

Does he know of resources Carissa would have access to?

...Yes. He put some spellsilver in a cave for her. 

Where?

West. Outside the Empire. He genuinely can't remember any more precisely than that, right now.

Well, did he write it down?

Yes. 

Where are those notes.

Not here. 

Then where?

Somewhere else he can't remember. (This is also true; he randomizes records between his caches in case one is destroyed, keeps an updated list of ciphered inventory in every cache so he can look it up. He probably would remember if he could think but they're not asking that.) 

Does he think Carissa mind-controlled him to be this confused?

He has no idea how would he know he just woke up here. 

What's the last interaction with Carissa he remembers?

Before he left for Taymyrr. (Also he can infer that she healed him and then dropped him out of the sky for some reason but they did not, in fact, interact.) 

Where did he go with Carissa on the first night after she appeared? 

Gated to randomly chosen secure location. 

Why? 

To talk. 

About what?

Her world. 

(This most recent line of questioning would be terrifying if Altarrin had any energy whatsoever for that. He's not even managing to think one step ahead, right now, just - letting the compulsions drag him along, dredging up and spitting out whatever answer he lands on first, preference for not very many words.) 

This interrogation is deeply frustrating and feels kind of pointless and the Healers are glaring. The mage running it (not a Mage-Inquisitor, they're not risking even indirect exposure to the mind control until they put together a firmer policy on that) is kind of inclined to give up. 

Sigh. It's some information but not very useful, no, and it's not even especially strong evidence that he's mind-controlled into forgetfulness, the Healers were genuinely worried about pushing him further and the current suite of compulsions is not working in their favor when on a brainfoggy person. Maybe tomorrow, once he's had a night's rest to recover some more, they can drag the location of Caris' spellsilver stash out of him.

(He must have stolen that, without anyone noticing? they would have spotted if he were buying up more of it than can be accounted for. ...The Emperor can admit that this does not exactly look good.) 

Well, the palace is fortified against at least some of the relative less terrifying threat-avenues, and - maybe tomorrow he'll hear from Caris(sa?) about negotiations for a surrender. It'll be information, of some kind, if he does. 

The Mage-Inquisitors will presumably keep working overnight, at least some of them, but the Emperor, in his secure non-palace secret location, is going to bed

Carissa puts up a Rope Trick in the afternoon and crafts until her eyes are drooping and then sleeps for two hours and prepares spells.

Ahahahaha, two fifth circle spells on this scaffold (both of them Teleport), she's a real proper fifth circle caster now!!! (This is a benchmark she should really have been able to perform to as soon as she hit fifth circle, but she's been totally without any magic instruction since then and hadn't, in fact, executed it correctly until this morning. Yesterday she prepped an additional fourth-circle spell in place of the last fifth circle one.)

Today she has two Teleports two scries another Rope Trick and Dispel Magic to look at all Altarrin's presents. 

The satchel contains a loosely bound packet of notes, in Altarrin's hand, again in a dead language that Comprehend Languages will ignore entirely. The paper looks crisp and new, and some of the notes are dated - to five weeks ago, three, two weeks. They are very clearly mage-research notes; Carissa has a passing familiarity with the conventions, at this point, and Altarrin has gone to considerable effort to unpack and define various more obscure shorthand mage-notations. 

There's a note pinned to the front. 

Carissa

If you are reading this, I am most likely dead. I will find you, if you decide you wish to be found and continue working together, but it seems best that you not waste the interim. 

These are my progress notes on immortality methods for you. I have tried where possible to pursue avenues that I think could use your arcane magic, and perhaps in the process be more opaque to our gods. All of this is preliminary work, I anticipate this is a five to ten year project, but you are very clever.

I did not feel comfortable sharing details with you when your mind might still be read, and I apologize for that. Assuming that I was killed, something is badly wrong in the Empire and you are no longer safe there. I am also leaving a chest of my personal records. They are not really designed to be legible to anyone else and I have not at this point had time to address that, but I left a key to my most commonly-used cipher, and you can use it to find the location of my other records caches, and indexes of which notes are stored where, if you wish to pursue a research direction I have explored in the past.

I am likely to end up at a random records cache before I have enough context to find you, so if you have a spell to detect intruders, it might enable you to find me faster. I am not assuming, at this point, that you will want to, and I am sorry that I did not succeed better at building trust between us, but I am entirely on the side of your project, and that is not going to change. 

- Altarrin 

It's dated to a week ago. He must have Gated here to update the file during his work in Taymyrr. 

Carissa is possibly going to forget all of her other responsibilities for the next while while she reads Altarrin's notes on how to MAKE HER IMMORTAL

They are in fact really, really preliminary! 

...Altarrin has a pocket hidden in the Void. (Based on Carissa's knowledge of how the Void works, this should not really be possible.) His soul is tethered to it - it's sort of arguably blood-magic, but using his own life-force. Since the pocket is in the Void, and there is no extant mage-tradition that teaches mages to project their minds to the Void - in fact, he suspects he invented it or taught it to himself in his first lifetime - it's extremely difficult to trace, and the gods haven't succeeded at it yet. 

There's a bloodline spell that links to all of his male descendants. (This wasn't incredibly a deliberate choice because he disliked the thought of being a woman, it was just magically much easier for some reason - he thinks he might have once very confusingly ended up in a female-appearing body but it was during a period where he really doesn't have good records and he didn't survive that long.) When his soul is in the pocket, a ward-type spell watches for the trigger event, which is a mage-gifted male descendent casting a fire spell for the first time, and then - zoom.

He doesn't have to kill them, necessarily, he shared a few times, but it...distorted him, and he didn't like it, and also he wakes up in the body disoriented and usually evicts its previous inhabitant on sheer reflex. He doesn't like the cost but this is the method that survived the Cataclysm, his first few attempts to replicate methods that did not survive the Cataclysm but should have worked were disrupted, and he eventually decided he would rather not keep giving the gods more information on this area of magic. 

- he also can't replicate it now. He's pretty sure gods can intervene in the Void, if they know to look. But Carissa has some tools the gods are still mostly unaware of. 

Other ideas: immortal artifacts. Someone's a sword. That particular case involved a divine intervention as well but he thinks you wouldn't have to have that. Multiple downsides, though – limited cognition, the sword seems less than fully sentient unless piggybacking on the mind of a Gifted bearer. Upside: doesn't kill anyone. 

Inspired by that: sword that partially hosts your soul while you sneak in and 'reincarnate' into a fetus just before the usual time in gestation when souls attach. Downside is occasional long periods of reduced capacity and greater vulnerability. Upside: doesn't kill anyone unless you count a counterfactual baby whose soul would've landed there instead, but Altarrin doesn't. 

Artifact that hosts a soul temporarily while you transfer it to a clone-body prepared in advance with a particular kind of bodyshaping magic. Altarrin created a species before the mage wars, and Urtho created a sentient species (gryphons), and it should be possible to create a one-off body that could hold an intelligent mind and attached soul and just...doesn't, yet. He has never gotten that far on attempting it, though, it's a high-resources project. He's curious if Carissa's Polymorph-type spells could cheat the difficulty entirely. 

There are a few other more vaguely sketched out ideas - adapting the technique that gives summoned elementals construct bodies (but how to make it permanent?) - consensual agreements with carefully selected people to start bearing your immortal soul-artifact at a young age, grow into the 'other half' of your mind (downside: wow that sounds more lossy in terms of values and sense-of-self than Altarrin is even close to willing to tolerate, but it's definitely a continued existence...) 

There's no reason, is the thing. She's valuable now, as the only wizard in the world. She's going to be the best wizard in the world for her entire life, almost certainly. But it's not - not the kind of thing it makes sense for him to have been arranging to his own benefit, it's not that at all, the only conceivable reason to do it is as the largest favor imaginable -

- and why didn't he tell her - 

- probably she shouldn't surrender, now - or, well, this is less than they'll get off Altarrin himself anyway - did she mess up his plans - obviously she messed up his plans -

One week. She wants to go back in time one week, and tell him to come home before he goes from Taymyrr north, and -

- and beg him to hurt her, but that's very selfish, really. The responsible thing to do would be to talk. With her words. About how she's noticed he avoids her as much as possible and is incredibly stressed and busy and wonders if there's anything she should know about going on in his life -

- what even kind of stupid want is that -

He was trying to make her immortal. She was being bored and scared and impatient and - childish, going down her to-do list, prioritizing Merda's Detect Thoughts amulet, pleased with herself for piecing together the hat, whining that he flinched away from her when he was trying to make her immortal. 

Carissa can think of a lot of things she wants to improve about herself but one of them, at this point, is the quality of the internal monologue self-flagellation. It's pathetic and repetitive. She should really get good at insulting herself, if she's going to continue to suck this much and survive it entirely due to the unearned kindness and generosity of people who see - something - something she's not even living up to -

Or she could cut it out entirely and figure out how to be worth that much.

A scry takes an hour, which means she'll be slightly less speechless and entirely done crying by the time she gets one up on Altarrin.

It's pretty easy to get a scry through on Altarrin; he's not mounting much of a Will save. 

He's in a room that is very obviously a prison cell and not the kind that's bothering to be polite and subtle about it.

Apparently the Infernal Healing didn't get everything wrong with him, though, because he looks uninjured, and - not too bad, really, definitely not dying, but - still somewhat ill, pale with dark circles under his eyes. Also he's in a bed - that looks like it was dragged in here, it's awkwardly wedged against one wall taking up most of the floorspace - with a Healer at his side, that's a hint. 

It's still barely dawn - Carissa wakes up much earlier than anyone without a Ring of Sustenance, including sick people whose Rings of Sustenance have been confiscated. Altarrin is asleep. 

He is presumably under an enormous pile of compulsions but Carissa can't see that directly. 

Well, he's not dead, so that's good unless it's not.

She could rescue him. Same routine as yesterday except wearing all of Altarrin's ludicrously good anti-scrying and protective equipment. Take him back here before they noticed what had happened. 

For some reason the first thought that this provokes is of the Emperor's face. He'd be - upset, and then upset at himself for being upset -

- it's stupid, and it doesn't help, she couldn't get his compulsions off and him the Empire really would track with an army if that's what it took - with his help it wouldn't matter what they tried but without his help she's...totally useless, actually, and would have died 24 hours ago.

The scry's not really high quality enough to try to sneak cantrips through anyway. She just....watches him sleep. Yes, she's aware that's stupid and she should be finishing the Boots of Teleport so she can start using her fifth circle slots for other things. Or negotiating her surrender. One of those. 

He was working on making her immortal.

And - this is really stupid, but - it hurts, for the first time or at least in a new way, that he didn't want her, now that she knows that he did care about her. Assuming he in fact didn't want her, but - why pretend -

The scry-sensor is visible to mage-sight. They even got a good enough look at the one yesterday to make some progress on a new ward to detect them, which they're going to lay on key rooms once it's ready. But in the meantime, a rotation of mages have been continuously scrying the room from another building - not because Altarrin is that much of a threat but because this is the obvious place for Caris to show up, invisible or on the wind or something even wilder than that, and try to grab him. They have closer to a prototype on a detection ward for the big flashy spell Caris used to escape earlier, and several mages have direct action-compulsions to, if they see such a signature, Gate-drop into the room and throw every attack spell at the source and Final Strike if that hasn't definitely worked. It would kill Altarrin, of course, but given that Caris agreed not to, the Emperor sighed and approved it. 

This one doesn't get a response in lethal force. The Emperor told them to expect contact, and suspected Caris might want to try for Altarrin first. Their channels of communication are limited; he doesn't want to waste them. 

This does necessitate a brief discussion, but about ten seconds after the scry solidifies, a mage - young, not important - Gates into the room. "Contact. Wake him." 

The current Healer, who is not very briefed on anything except the fact that this patient is a prisoner and might be mind-controlled and has a scary ally who may show up to rescue him, looks confused and worried. "Contact from who?" 

She'll nudge Altarrin until he wakes up, though. 

Oh. They're learning. 

The scry genuinely didn't come out well enough to cast Message through, which is the only way to talk through a scry, so she winces apologetically when they wake Altarrin and ...can't say anything. Just look at him and -

- don't be a fucking idiot, Carissa, they may also have gotten better at tracing them back to the scryer -

- she breaks the spell. An hour of work for thirty seconds of looking at him. Good job. 

It takes him a couple of seconds to wake up and parse what's happening, but he's genuinely much less bleary today.

- Carissa -

He can't speak either, not without someone prompting him with a direct question. He can't use mage-sight to look for whatever they're reacting to. He can't even turn his head, so he'll just - stare at the ceiling and try to convey with his eyes that he's so relieved - also scared and miserable and they're going to try to question him today and this could be a serious problem and he's not, actually, sure this situation is substantially better than the one where Carissa let him die and he'll be waking up in a few months somewhere else. 

He notices when they call off the alarm. The mage looks confused and frustrated; the Healer looks exasperated. ...Might as well go back to sleep until they rudely wake him for questioning, which they might do immediately after this but he's not going to try to stay awake out of politeness for their schedule. 

There is a very rapid debrief. They...are confused. 

(Was the purpose literally just to confirm that Altarrin is alive and they haven't executed them? That's the current best guess.) 

They send someone to wake the Emperor, though; he needs to know this. 

He does!! Bastran will try to get himself to full alertness as fast as possible in case, having done a welfare check on Altarrin, Caris is lining up a negotiation with him next. 

He has his notes on potential conditions. They...don't feel like enough, right now, somehow in both directions at once. Not enough to meaningfully protect against a mind-controller and not enough to convince Caris that he can trust them. 

It went well enough yesterday, though. Maybe they can figure something out. 

He grits his teeth, and waits.

It takes her an hour, of course. A vulnerability she would love to not be advertising, but - they aren't stupid. 

Is the Emperor trying to throw off her scry? 

The Emperor has no idea that throwing off scries is a thing, but he's in fact waiting expectantly for her contact, so probably not?