There sure are some exciting Spring sources in the water, but they are not at all Vallorn flavoured. More kind of - blood flavoured? Giving off the distinct impression that they are trying to bite anything looking at them with an impressive number of teeth? If she does send a submersible, then it will find itself being assailed by a variety of creatures, some of which appear to have just coalesced out of the water, some that are basically just a Giant Tooth Vortex in the water, all of which with a considerable number of extremely sharp teeth.

"We haven't even been able to rederive the specific rituals associated with the ones we've recovered - they seem to be attuned to specific rituals, rather than for general use - and we know even less about the standing ones, the only ones we've been able to study are the ones in Seren and they are very much farming ritual focuses.

They... probably don't break the law of magic that requires willing blood, but the extent of the blood involved suggests that the definition of willing might have been considerably stretched.

As an Empire, we mostly do cooperative casting through the egregore bond, which I'm assuming you don't have one of? It's possible to bind covens together in other ways, but the most common other methods are through family bonds, which are rather hard to improvise on the spot. The same basic binding spell is the one we use for artisanry as well, though, it should suffice to bind you to a singing stone - but it only works if you can touch both the object and the subject."

"I don't have an egregore bond in the way you would, no.  Though it's possible I could do...  Well, I think I can improvise something if it turns out to be necessary.  Anyway, this just in, good news, whatever's in the water at Sarvos is probably not a Vallorn - bad news, because none of the Vallorn spontaneously manifest bloody teethy things to try to rip and tear with, and this thing sure is doing that."

She wasn't particularly expecting megafauna, but anything you build for proper deep sea dives has to stand up to worse stresses (What was it, 380kPa?) just to get in the door, so.  That's fine, she'll just...put 'make sure it's not a Vallorn' in the queue for data analysis stuff.  Instead of poking it enough it grows megafauna with legs.  And beam weapons.  No spontaneous kaiju are allowed in her uplift radius.  She'd feel bad.

"Oh, I guess you found Siakha? Well, hopefully not actually Siakha, that would be weird, but some of her minions. She's a bit bitey, yeah, but unlike the Vallorn she has to actually persuade people to do things in order to spread, so... well, I guess the Brass Coast and the League consider her a big problem, but she's not really my priority."

"I see.  Well, that can safely go a few notches down the priority list from whatever new screaming disaster I'm expecting to find after this.  If she just wants to bite things, as long as they're not getting harmed by it that's no skin off my back."  ...is that racist.  ...She is not going to get into contemplating the politics of an aphorism she's presently hundreds of Aarnes away from the axis of.  She isn't.

"Well, I mean, lots of people kind of object to being torn into bloody shreds, but I guess at least she's more straightforward about it than, like, the Druj," he offers.

I think I should yield the floor to someone else now."

He steps back; the queue has shuffled a few times and now has an Urizeni wizard in a gorgeous lilac robe (slightly spoiled by various plant and bodily fluid stains from the fighting) in front. 

"Okay. So you think you can net each of the Hearts.

But the Hearts within the Empire - and Emrys, and Liathaven still if we're lucky - are connected by the Trods, and at any time there will be thousands of people either purposefully walking them or just using them for transport and convenience.

They are specifically designed to carry power - and inevitably its resonances - away from the Hearts. And dissipate it into the people on them, and also they leak into the land around them.

If we cut that connection," and the very statement induces a lot of horrified gasping and angry muttering, "there's no saying we can re-establish it. And we've also destroyed an important transportation network.

And probably the backlash kills everyone nearby anyway - including Navarr, Thorn, and all those that made the sacrifice with them, although I expect that to be something of a relief."

"Yeah I figured.  That goes on my 'to fix' list, then."

And then, the next speaker speaks.

"As far as the transportation network, that I can pretty much just take up myself, if it proves necessary.  I'm not sure it will, because -"

She'll just demonstrate.

"So, observe this water."

It bubbles up through an impromptu fountain of force.

"Let's say that this fountain is kind of like the Vallorn's Spring Springiness.

"Now, cutting the trods, that would be something like -"

She sticks her finger in the flow, causing it to spatter about wildly.

"Messy, disturbing an equilibrium, gets everywhere.

"But what I am proposing to do is more like..."

She stretches out the upwards force acting at the center of the 'fountain', diluting it as she does until it's just sort of rippling.  "Something kind of like this.  I mean.  Not really like that, it's basically the exact opposite in terms of what establishing a temporary event horizon would be - but, stretching out the effective distance between the Trod and the Vallorn hearts such that no matter whether I'm waving my fingers where the water would get interrupted or not, it's moot, because the water isn't able to get there in the first place.

"As far as the backlash - well.  I'm working on the backlash.  It looks like it's going to be a bit of a mess to work out, and it's probably going to need me to spin up some infrastructure to implement the resulting thaumaturgical baffle, but it doesn't look impossible to finesse the job.  And as long as it's not impossible, then I give me some pretty good odds of doing it.  Is there something I wouldn't know about that?  Am I explaining in terms y'all get, too, that's pretty important here."

The Urizeni clearly hates not understanding things, specifically hates being shown up as not understanding things in front of a large group of important people, and has no idea what Myra means by half those words.

"I suppose if you... invoke the Mountain on the pathway... that would delay the propagation, although likely also weaken the Trod, they aren't really meant for variable flow and especially not in the lesser direction, there is a little surge capacity although that generally has side effects..."

Oof, ouch, she's really sorry about that.  "I mean I'm pretty sure I could handle a switchover to less, uh.  Vallorn.  Methods of powering the Trod, especially if I'm able to get away with just spinning up a flywheel or something and tapping that energy for the transition period, if I don't need to figure out how to make it Springy, because then I could just reuse the generators I've already planned for the space-warping..."

"How are you intending to turn - mechanical energy - into vitality? If anything, the resonance of a mechanical contraption is Autumnal... It's certainly possible to get fast travel out of Autumnal forces, but that generally involves good fortune, novel route finding, and organisational aspects of large group travel, rather than the Trod effects of refreshment, avoidance of physical weariness et cetera."

"Well, were I to build a Trod-like thing from scratch, I would likely approach it from the perspective of amplifying the work done by the effort expended in travel; it would be perhaps a slightly different quality of effect, but certainly one similar in quantity.  But the key lesson is that - energy is energy, is energy, is energy, and systems are systems, are systems, are systems.  You, on the smallest scale, are made of components and reactions no different than machines, for all that your - their - the body's - complexity and interdependence is orders of magnitude greater.  Regardless...Keeping a complex system from failing by ill-chance seems quite Autumnal to me."

"I suppose," he replies, somewhat sniffily. "Applying autumn directly to a living creature is rarely a good idea, however - surface treatments yes, causal and even mental effects can work fine, interfering with the - smaller scale - itself, tends to have - deleterious consequences. Unwanted galvanic charge buildup, spontaneous replacement of organs with clockwork, that kind of thing."

Her face goes '...????????' at this, and she mutters 'why is it always fucking SCP-ass shit' in a voice that wasn't intended to be heard.

"I'd have to have more data on that to draw accurate conclusions.  However, what - thematically, if not actually, Autumnal approaches to healing that I have, have not otherwise had side effects - and I don't expect that to change.  Not that I necessarily plan to go about it that way at all; I've better sources of healing.  The question is powering them, and, well, that's safe to do in this way or I would have already exploded just from existing here.

"Realistically, though, if the magic based around order, structure, and the manipulation of chance is having unstructured, unspecified effects at random...Clearly the problem is that you need more control and understanding of it, unless I vastly misunderstand what Autumn's about.  I mean really, you just...use a grounding strip.  The static drains out before it can build beyond that, if it behaves in a predictable manner at all.  Can't immediately figure what's with the spontaneous transmutation or transposition, but - well, while there are going to be occasional conflicts in the underlying blueprints because biology is a lot more tolerant of certain shenanigans, you can still - assert that the blueprints that body was built on should be followed to the letter in its repair, they're in every living cell and some of the dead ones besides!"

"Though, it's quite possible I'm talking out of my ass, so, I wouldn't count on that."

"Day is more of strict order - Autumnal order is more about organisation, which can conflict with biological processes...

In general any exercise of sufficient power will come with side effects, as the nature of the Realm or the material world strives to reassert itself. We do have standard treatments for the better known varieties, but they tend to be unpleasant, costly, or both."

"Mmm.  Thank you.  If anything, that Autumn is about organization seems to lend itself more readily to the use of body-as-machine - backstopping, for lack of a better word.  Certainly it seems like curing any mundane disease would - fit...  But in this we are getting quite into the weeds, and I'm certain there are still pressing questions."

"Curing things is firmly Spring magic, for accelerated natural healing, or Day, for purging poisons and suchlike. Autumn 'healing' has been tried, but will always involve replacing parts with metallic automata rather than the body's original pattern, and is very inefficient besides."

The next person in the queue, a lady in a big off white fur trimmed coat with stylised animal dsisgns that looks far too warm, starts subtly getting into the Urizeni's extensive personal space until he finally notices just before she actually touches him. He harrumphs, but retreats.

"Okay. What are you still uncertain about and what do you need is to do? I'm mostly a scrying specialist, my Day/Night coven can do both of the locationals, and also the military territory level rituals but they tend not to get good results on the Vallorn."

"Mm.  Good to know where that stands.  Still.  We are...rather far from the Vallorn."

...What does she still need to know.  Hmm.

Alright.  There's three categories coming to mind. She's going to get some whiteboards out and start writing them down.

"I would like to invite you all to please grab a marker and write down whatever comes to mind, with an overview like so, and then the same three categories of - time priority.  If anybody's illiterate in this language I can probably work something out, just let me know."

Everyone seems amused or possibly slightly offended by the idea they might be illiterate. A scramble for markers ensues, and settles down into a few groups:

Team Geography produces a beautiful cloth map of the Trods and the historical journeys of the coven of Navarr and Thorn that created them, and starts surrounding it with a wealth of local knowledge about wayhouses, Steadings, Trod conditions, and a few sub groups are working on writeups of what is known about the foreign Vallorn locations.

Most of the internal pieces are within reasonable expectations, apart from a location called Rhonwen's Fall, a waterfall that sometimes turns blood red and provides access to a Winter regio pocket, and is associated with a set of mystics who turn up an unusual amount of directly actionable prophecy - for instance quite recently they predicted an attack from magical forces, which let the heros of Anvil use a conjuction to defend against it. Disruption to this goes on the main risk register.

As for the foreign Vallorn, the Druj one is not well understood except they're fairly sure the Druj have been doing experiments with it to try to weaponise it or use it to rile up the other Vallorn or develop novel poisons and diseases.

The Thule one has actually been connected to the Trod network since the peace, although the Thule are cagey about where their settlements actually are and they're mostly underground so it's hard to tell what's imperiled along that route - it's walked by Stridings on a regular and very regimented basis by treaty provision.

The one in Liathaven has been quieted by Winter magic and the Jotun usually just stay well away, but there are a couple of other groups of people involved, the Feni were exiled from the Marches for banditry and are a bit mysterious, like to make deals with the Eternals and worship them, there are also other ex Marchers who joined the Jotun, remnants of the Navarr in the area who have gone to ground very throughly and nobody can find them, and the Lasambrians who are more orc hill bandits that tend to be a bit less tradition bound than the Jotun - since the Empire converted them to the Virtues - and might be taking risks there.

The one by the Axou is just an abjectly terrible mess, it's entwined with the ruins of their cities that fell to the Druj, which means it's probably absolutely packed with vengeful ghosts, ancient traps, tortured souls and so on. Nobody has been keeping it in check like all the others so it is huge and voracious.

Team Souls is more of an argument than anything else, there seem to be some Urizeni who are on the point of drawing swords to defend their position that nobody has actually proved souls aren't just an information bundle whose duplication is no problem, versus a bunch of very serious Highborn with their hoods up who keep asking if people would like to rephrase that or be prosecuted for heresy. There are a quieter sub group suggesting various therapeutic approaches, although primarily they seem to be 'shared dreams' and 'plaster Virtue auras over it' which might not be up to actual therapy standards. 

Team Politics are much calmer and are preparing a primer on Imperial procedure for territory assignment (the Senate vote which nation or to cede it to an external set of people, which does actually happen sometimes), evaluation for citizenship (the sticking point is usually religion, treaties for foreigners staying as guests of the Empire do sometimes have provision for them to privately practice their religion, but citizens come under the religious laws; the other sticking point is egregores, either new citizens have to be sufficiently aligned with an existing nation to join it or someone's going to have to recreate the egregore ritual because they lost it), land claims and jurisdiction (technically the Imperial territories with Vallorn in are already assigned to Navarr who will probably do a pretty good job of this, Liathaven is a sore point but it's under a horrible Winter curse and so nobody can durably settle it immediately anyway, the Thule will probably absorb Skuld just fine, everything the Druj do is always awful, the Axos area isn't even adjacent to Imperial territory so mostly try not to let the Druj have it all maybe?).

Team Magic spend some time spiritedly debating what actually is entangled with the Vallorn (possibly various Terun artifacts? Maybe language if they're really unlucky? Someone has a crackpot theory about the Labyrinth itself?), are fairly sure there are no end of physicks and magical healers around who would like to feel useful now that the battle is mostly taken care of, can be standing by with Mass Entangle or Paralysis if that would be useful (two minutes notice, can hold the charge for a few hours), are fairly sure people will adopt and train and put in menageries any kind of beast they get access to, someone suggests Solace of Chimes on a big improvised boundary which makes people want to discuss instead of fight. There is also some discussion of prevention of disease spread, especially from Imperials to the Terun because people from the past might be susceptible to modern ordinary diseases, and various speculations on new Trod rituals.

Someone eventually plucks up the courage to ask what a parity error is. 

...Right, she's breaking up that impending fight in the Souls Working Group.  "Inquiry is not best done at swordpoint.  If you can't calm yourselves and admit that what you don't know is still unknown, please task yourselves elsewhere.  Either propose an experiment that disproves existing theory, or work with what we have."  And then she turns to the Highborn.  "Where I'm from, there is a faith with a holy book that claims manifestly false things.  They have a saying, from high authority, that truth cannot contradict truth.  Some several hundred years ago, they did not have that saying, and prosecuted a man for heresy for claiming the Earth moved around the Sun, contrary to the orthodoxy of the Sun traveling around the Earth.

"Further research did not vindicate the faith's orthodoxy in that matter.

"The heresy prosecutions, or threats thereof, are completely antithetical to the task of figuring out what's happening and what will happen.  If it must happen, wait until we're done.  Theology's domain is ought, not is."

To the person asking what parity is, she replies:

"Parity is - So let's just say that there exists a standardized way to represent language as a sequence of numbers.  There is, it's a bit complicated to get into why that works but it's definitely real.

"Parity checking is when, in addition to the equation that spits out numbers when you feed it words, you feed the output of that process through another algorithm that permutes the numbers such that you can do a specific operation on the digits to make sure that if you copy those numbers you don't copy them wrong - and that if those numbers, representing that data, change, you'll know, which is especially relevant when we're dealing with wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff like this."

Other matters...The Druj.  "The Druj are on my to-do list."  Egregore ritual: "...I could take a look at the structure of an egregore and see if I can backform something, though I'm not sure how useful that would be to your casters.  Could also try to peek back in time, if we know where the ritual was at some point.  Since I'm already doing timey-wimey sh-stuff anyway." 

Plan 'throw Virtues at it and see what sticks' from the therapy group: "...How forbidden is Peace, because while I agree that contentment gets in the way of striving, sometimes you do need a moment where you're sure nothing is going to hurt you, when you have been hurt.  Other than that I'm having trouble thinking of ways this can be solved with Virtues of any stripe that I know exist; the treatments my homeworld used for similar things boiled down to wise counsel from trained professionals, some...what I'll call body-over-mind exercises - to stop flashbacks, er, a flashback is when you run into a stimulus your subconscious associated with a Uniquely Bad Thing that you experienced, such as 'a ritual torture timeloop', and it tricks itself into believing you're there and takes otherwise inappropriate actions -, and emotional support from trusted friends."

...Did someone just say language itself might be entangled with the Vallorn.  She's read that book, she doesn't like it.

...She did like it as a work of fiction, but if it's a thing in real life then it is in fact a problem.  Souls, Geography, do you have any useful insights?  The Labyrinth is...very obviously not the same thing as Vallorn, though, or at least not in an environment where its continued existence is predicated thereupon, so that's one worst-case off the table.

One of the Urizeni, who identifies herself as a 'Sword Scholar', insists that inquiry is in fact best done at swordpoint because only those who are willing to put their whole self behind an argument are worthy of debate. She proposes that Whispers Through The Black Gate be used to summon forth a duplicate soul from someone who has had a past life vision. Several others of the group calmly point out that Whispers Through The Black Gate on the non-recently dead generally pulls through dread spectres and similar things they really do not want to be dealing with right now. Having a good argument with them about it seems to calm her down.

The Highborn sniffily declaim that naturally Theology might be the domain of ought, being that it deals with Gods, which don't exist or are malign entities, but Odology, the study of the Way, is the study of the fundamental truths of reality - some of which are that doing things willy-nilly with souls has dangerous lasting repercussions, even talking about it in front of the lay folk tends to lead to widespread, long-lasting and immensely damaging misinformation taking root, and really the past should have the decency to stay in the past where people can tell appropriately Virtuous stories about it rather than barging into the present, warts and all.

This sets off another argument between the Urizeni and the Highborn about the value of absolute historical truth versus Virtuous inspiring retellings of history.

Meanwhile, an Imperial Orc shaman (with a considerable quantity of bone jewellery and accessories, much of which looks distinctly like it came from a humanoid of some description) informs Myra that the last Egregore ritual would have been cast at Anvil, late in the year 324, probably at the Autumn Equinox or Winter Solstice.

A Varushkan in a coat of many clashing colours, with a big stick sporting many jingly bells, informs her that Peace is really quite forbidden, and possibly she might want to consider Courage for that use case, or the Prosperity auras that encourage celebration and enjoyment, or the Pride consecration that restores self-esteem. A Urizeni mage chips in that if you just want to stop people for a bit then that's what Solace of Chimes or the Chamber of Delights are for - which makes the Varushkan sniff meaningfully and mutter something about how all this magical spiritual influence nonsense should be interdicted.

A Navarr Guide notes that they have, in fact, ever heard of therapy; they're not sure any of the other nations of the Empire have, but actually they do quite a lot of rehabilitating people who have had all their friends eaten by the Vallorn and mostly use things that sound a lot like what Myra is suggesting - grounding exercises to pay attention to your senses, name things in your vicinity to calm down, thinking about it in a very nice calm environment where it is clear nothing bad is happening while being directed to look at specific things, repeating mantras for sleep, that kind of thing. It often takes a long time and only really works if the person wants to engage with it, though.

A rather young looking Vate is eager to explain the magic language thing! You see, there's one language that everyone on this continent speaks, and that is really weird. Other continents in the world don't work like that. Many of the people on this continent really hate each other, or have had no particular contact with each other, even the utter isolationists who live on a big heavily fortified mountain and have offered to pay the Empire large sums to never talk to them again speak the same language. So someone must have done this, and the Terun are the obvious culprits, because we know there were people who spoke at least one other language - the Gwyn Morfa - before they rose to the height of their power. So maybe it is all tied in with their other huge magical workings?

A couple of nearby Urizeni note that this is only a theory, and that unifying language is not at all Spring-like behaviour - Spring doesn't even really like language at all - and is much more Day-aligned.

The Highborn can stuff it.  They represent the Imperial state religion's position, no matter that it is not worship of a god - therefore their study is theology as she knows it, though her definition of the word was informed by a world in which things like Eternals didn't exist.  The study of Eternals should be differentiated, but the semantic argument they're trying to bring against the is-ought distinction is fundamentally moot.  They are declaring what must be done from the result of a decisionmaking process that has inputs other than "what is physically happening and what is the intended result of the ongoing course of action".  Unless, of course, they have data on the results of odological strictures, such that it could be independently reviewed for validity from such a perspective.  A hypothesis left dogmatically untested is a strike against both Courage and Prosperity, in her book, in addition to the obvious Wisdom.  Certainly against Reason, not that that is a known Virtue.

...The language scholar gets "Well, honestly, I think the way you're all speaking my native tongue, which developed independently of yours, means that someone's up to some shit on - a higher level than would be affected by any ritual.  Mark that as tentatively dismissed as a concern; I think that if this has any ties to the Terun they're completely incidental.  I can't rule out that the language was rendered diegetic this way - but I don't think it's going to suddenly implode should the hypothetical source of the initial organizing impulse be removed.  Still - good catch."

Re: the Guides knowing therapy: Oh thank goodness, she really was not of a mind to build the field from scratch and it really does need people involved in ways a lot of her other interventions don't, would they like some data on the subject?  Here, have a DSM That Is Neither Shit Nor Ableist, for all that it covers mostly only humans - unfortunately, cultures like orcs are often a minority if at all extant and this affects the availability of psychological data.  (It's entitled "Variations of the Mind: Charting the Extremes of Human Thought, and Appropriate Strategies for Managing Distressful Patterns Within Them, from both Internal and External Perspectives").  They'll want the section on Traumatic Stress Responses.

To the Varushkan: "I rather think none of those would suit the intended purpose of - promotion of calm and reasoned action, rather than instinctual response.  That said, I might actually consider an aura of Wisdom usefully palliative, if I understand its nature correctly.  It would require the co-occurring use of traditional therapeutics to properly work against - if I say 'spontaneous autodedication to Fear' that's vastly wrong but it's a way to understand the sort of thing a trigger is -, but especially with such practices available, cues to introspect and use them are very helpful.  Solace of Chimes would also be fit for purpose; I don't think Chamber of Delights would necessarily work as-written."

...Anvil, 324, autumnal equinox or winter solstice...Authorize one use of temporal runes, filed under "historical pastwatching" and "data recovery"...

And let's see what happened.

Anvil, 324, Autumn Equinox:

A crowd of maybe fifty orcs, most in ragged, patched leather armour with the odd scrap of chain here and there, mostly clutching repurposed farm implements or roughly cast weapons, crammed awkwardly into a circle of towering standing stones. They are nervous, wondering if the surrounding crowd - because there are hundreds of people in Anvil, and it seems fully half of them have turned out to watch - are going to simply end the Orc Rebellion by falling upon them in their vulnerability, out in the open, here at the heart of the Empire which enslaved them.

Attempting to impose some kind of order on the situation, an Emperor - Emperor Ahraz of the Freeborn - with the hakima of the Guerra tribe. Resplendent in all the colours of flame, some standing impatiently with flaming torches at the ready, some glittering under the sun in their sequinned, gilded, mirrored ritual outfits.

The Guerra lay and light a circle of flames around the stones and around the orcs, and begin to direct the magic of Autumn. One of them is waving a surprisingly undecorated scrap of paper, which nevertheless shines with power to those who can see magic; the Arcane Projection they have meticulously recreated to perform this feat of magic.

They are joined by the Erigo Hakima, who push through the crowd, singing and playing woodwind instruments; the Erigo are bearing the Belt of the Archmage of Autumn, which they use to join with the Guerra to lend their power to the ritual.

And finally the Riqueza Hakima melt out of the crowd in a synchronised dance step, swirling around to touch the belt themselves and attune to the building crescendo.

Ahraz bids one of the orcs stand forth - the one who will be the first egregore host. He asks her what oaths the orcs will swear to their egregore; he asks her to swear Loyalty to the Empire, not just its current Emperor, for so long as none are legally enslaved within its boundaries.

The magic builds and pulses into a white-hot ball of power; the Riqueza and Erigo wend their way amongst the tightly packed crowd of orcs and cast Create Bond on the Imperial Orc Shamans, bedecked in bone trophies from human and orc alike, binding them to their nascent egregore spirit - and the Shamans in turn cast Create Bond on the other orcs present.

And the egregore takes form, and enters into Brightsash Gruda, and the ritual is done.

...She awakens from the solemn moment, and locks eyes with the shaman.

"...I thank you, honored ancestor, for sharing with me your knowledge and wisdom, and regret any offense my lacking knowledge of the appropriate forms may have caused.  ...If you wish to observe the moment yourself, as I have done --"

She passes him a crystal, drawing a copy of her memories into it as she does.  "Hold it and - focus, is the best way I have to explain how any of that is supposed to work.  And you'll see what I saw."

To the group at large, "I believe we have recovered the egregore ritual in sufficient detail as to recreate it, or, failing that, rederive its structure with much more ease."

Let's see.  If she does...this and this and that...then ties it off with this...caaaarefully, carefully copies the spellform into its ultimate receptacle, from its place fixed brightly in her memory (and records) as it is...

"I need a second opinion on this, though, because fucking it up could easily be catastrophic, and I don't normally develop in this field, certainly not to this degree.  I may want a third opinion before I consider casting it to at all be an option.  But I have what should be an exact record of the magic performed in the formation of the Imperial Orcs' egregore, and it seems reasonable to surmise that nothing is going to prevent similar observation of further-past egregore rituals should that be necessary."

The shaman goes still for a few moments as he follows Myra's instructions, then immediately runs off to fetch an increasing crowd of orcs and pass the crystal around. There is also some measure of hugging each other, crying unashamed tears of joy, and a (relatively polite) argument about whether they should immediately share this with the Freeborn or not.

Myra, meanwhile, is inundated with ritual theorists, mostly 'people who did an arcane projection once' (including one orc of the Skywise legion), but half a dozen people (two Freeborn, one Urizeni, two Varushkans and one Navarri) who claim to have spent time codifying rituals at a college of magic, a dozen Urizeni who claim to contribute to the distributed codification projects on the Heliopticon, and one Leaguish Proxy Grandmaster of the Unfettered Mind.

...It's good, that she can bring them this joy.

The businesslike mask over her face cracks, for a moment, into a small smile.  And then...there are rituals to discuss.

"...I don't know what that accreditation means.  And aren't the Heliopticons mechanical?"

"...Y'know what, sod it, if any of you think you have any idea how to reverse-engineer what this actually does, you're welcome to take a look.  Why did it have to be telepathy."

"...Hm.  Actually I should probably make a call...No point in having the network if I don't ever use the darn thing, after all."

Imperial Civil Service?  It's Administrator Myra.  She has a rather important question.