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pet in the eastern empire
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Altarrin has a problem. 

This is hardly a new state of affairs. At any given time, he tends to be juggling several hundred problems, a dozen of them important or time-sensitive. Operating in the Eastern Empire is a relentless game of triage, of deciding which fires to leave burning because he can't afford to spend the entirety of this lifetime and his decades of accumulated political capital just on putting out fires. 

He leaves Jacona, the capital, much less often than he used to. He has the Emperor's ear, and he knows the officials and the mages and the nobles and the military commanders on the ground in the various outlying provinces, how far he can trust them with what. But he's already tried managing the situation down south in Taymyrr from a distance, and matters are not improving. 

He delegates all of his essential work, and makes plans to travel south by Gate-network. 

 

 

 

He's not intending to head to the current front; he's there for diplomatic meetings in Stormhaven, the former capital city of Taymyrr, now garrisoned by the Empire's troops and in the process of being converted to a provincial administrative center. It's a nice enough city, minimally damaged in the fighting; the palace is beautiful. It's on the main trade road that runs north to Widow's Pass and also south to Oris, though only the southern stretch of the road is paved. Mages are working on the northern arm of it now. 

He meets with the King (compulsioned up to his ears, to the point that he's scarcely able to think his own thoughts, and mostly resigned) and the local ruling Council of noble lords. The mood is...guarded, but it was a relatively bloodless invasion – they took some care to capture rather than kill nobleborn sons in military positions, relatively few of them have lost children or grandchildren to the war – and the promise of keeping their property and a measure of their former political power seems to be mostly enough to keep them cautiously cooperative. 

 

 

 

Taymyrr did not previously have a state religion, and none of the militant temple orders were very popular there. There were several peaceful monastic orders dedicated to minor nature-type gods, and a set of schools run by the temple of Ashuel. The largest and fanciest temple in the city belonged to Anathei of the Purifying Flame, but it was razed to the ground on the day they took the city, and the priests who weren't killed have almost certainly fled. A small traveling- merchant-class ethnic group worships the Sky-Father and Earth-Mother; this is awkward because stamping out the faith of small groups that were already somewhat oppressed before their country was conquered is much, much harder than moving in and converting temples to secular schools and libraries. 

After a few days of meetings and gathering spy-reports, though, Altarrin is fairly sure they aren't the source of the local resistance; they are very sensibly trying to stay out of the way, but there's a lot of prejudice against them and he isn't really worried that other locals are sheltering them. 

 

 

 

The Holy Empire of Ithik worships Atet, sometimes referred to as the God of the Hidden Gardens – their teaching is that all who truly love Atet in their hearts and serve His will according to their place will be granted a place in His Garden, appropriate to their service and their position. (There's a bizarrely detailed listing of Garden privileges in their holy book; a noble lord will be given a mountain, noble second sons will be granted a herd of three hundred cattle, et cetera). Their religion – or maybe mostly Ithik's culture, there are other temples to Atet in other countries with different practices – is obnoxiously hierarchical and patriarchal; Gifts are supposed to be highly valued in His eyes, unless the Gifted person is a woman, in which case her position is restricted to bearing Gifted children. For some reason, women with the Gift of Foresight specifically are condemned as "bringers of bad luck" and, depending on the time period and how conservative the current high priest is leaning, either pushed into a life of solitary contemplation and prayer, blinded or otherwise crippled, or executed by various horrible methods. 

It's considered cowardice, and shameful in the eyes of Atet, to be captured alive by the enemies of their god. There was a small monastic order on the outskirts of the city – marketed to the younger sons of farmers with no land to inherit, to offer them a life according to their place that will please Atet and earn them as much reward in His Garden as a farmer's son can expect – and when the Empire's forces moved in, the priest barred the doors and burned it down with the monks trapped inside. 

Altarrin doesn't approve of most religious practices, but he dislikes Ithik in particular, and he is pretty sure they're up to something. Twice in the course of a five-day investigation, likely devotees in hiding are captured, and both of them take fast-acting poison and die before they can be questioned. There have also been a few assassinations of bureaucratic functionaries who are being especially cooperative with the occupying force, which needless to say is not incentivizing the remainder to be easy to work with. 

 

 

 

On the sixth day, when Altarrin is meeting with the most cooperative lords on the Council to negotiate positions in the new provincial administration, a mage-gifted devotee manages to tunnel into the cellar under the building, and calls a Final Strike, killing all but two of the lords instantly and collapsing a burning building on the survivors. 

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Altarrin tries his best to shield everyone, and manages to keep the worst of the debris off the two survivors.

 

But the blast takes out all of his protective shield-amulets, and at that point he is (rather unsurprisingly) very unlucky. A massive falling timber smashes into his head; his remaining personal shields catch some of the force, but far from all of it, and the world is red-black and hazy as the floor collapses under him.

Barely clinging to consciousness, he can't manage to concentrate enough to cast an air-filter spell, and his lungs are burning from the smoke as he struggles, flinging magic clumsily to try to force the flaming debris aside. He can't see, can't breathe, and the pain hasn't hit yet, but this is almost a bad sign - he's in shock, and the world feels increasingly far away. 

But he keeps working, methodically, to free himself, and he doesn't collapse until after other magic is joining his and hands are reaching in to pull him from the wreckage. 

 

 

It's not safe here. Taking out the nobles who had shamed Atet by working with their oppressors was probably the goal of the devotee who sacrificed his life for this, but Altarrin is very sure who their god was trying to kill. (Stupid, stupid, he shouldn't have been so careless, should have taken more precautions - he's alive, but defenseless against any further attacks...) 

It's very hard to breathe. His head is throbbing and he can't even make his mage-sight work. Someone is trying to offer him water but he can't stop coughing. Someone is calling for a Healer. 

...He can't stay here. 

Jacona, the capital, is three hundred miles away; he can't Gate that far in this condition, assuming he can Gate at all, and also it won't, actually, be entirely good for his political position if he shows up visibly half-dead. 

But Tahahau, the current administrative center in the newly-annexed Tozoa Province, should be secure. (Tau, further south on the trade road, is - was - a larger city, but it had temple orders and less-than-cooperative locals with loyalties and connections to the nobility in the unconquered body of the kingdom of Oris further south, and the general in charge of that invasion chose to raze it to the ground and build a new city from the ground up in the previously-stateless-in-practice plains land.) 

 

...Of course, even once he manages to communicate that they should evacuate him, his luck is hardly going to stretch as far as there being a mage anywhere nearby with a Gate-location in Tahahau, and Stormhaven isn't, yet, on the permanent Gate network. 

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Can 
he Gate? 

Well, if he doesn't manage it, there's a fairly high chance that he dies here, which is very motivating. And the Gate itself isn't going to kill him, though doing that much magic with what he's fairly sure is a serious head injury isn't going to do his health any good. 

Even with all the motivation in the world, it takes him nearly three entire minutes to weave the spell together – a thresholdless Gate directly under himself, because he definitely can't walk

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Seventy miles away, in a high-ceilinged marble atrium lit by glittering permanent mage-lights set in crystallized chandaliers, in the newly built administrative building in Tahahau, a Gate appears in midair and dumps an unconscious, bleeding, badly singed man on the floor. 

 

(Even scorched, his uniform is recognizably that of a high-ranking mage-General. If one looks closer, the insignia on his breast identifies him as Archmage-General Altarrin, Duke of Kavar, one of the most powerful men in the Empire.) 

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Petra has never actually treated anyone with wounds from combat, but she has the advantage of being just down the hall of the administrative building he gated into. 

She gets to work on stabilizing him while someone with more experience is being fetched from the House of Healing.

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He's pretty badly messed up! The most urgent problems to address are that his breathing is very labored - a glance with Healing-Sight shows severe smoke-inhalation damage - and he's bleeding slowly inside his skull. He also has a broken leg, multiple broken ribs which cannot be helping with his breathing, a cracked collarbone, a dislocated shoulder, and various less immediately-life-threatening sources of internal bleeding. His forearms are badly burned - the pattern is recognizable, mages tend to get burns like that when they try to shield against a fireball and don't quite get all of it. 

(She's not a mage, but even without mage-sight, it's fairly obvious that all of the talismans he's wearing – and there are a lot of them – are not just drained but broken, the quartz foci visibly cracked and darkened.) 

He's deep in shock, his pulse unsteady and his life-force dim and faltering, but like a lot of powerful mages, he's tough; his heartbeat steadies out almost as soon as she has the energy-link to him, before she's done anything else. 

 

He's still not conscious, but within a handful of minutes - well before anyone has made it over from the House of Healing - he's moaning and trying to move, not very purposefully but he seems to be trying to push her hands away. He should probably not be doing that. 

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Petra keeps her hands on him as she starts to address the damage to his lungs and the bleeding in his skull, pushing calm at him so he'll stop trying to move her hands away. 

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He relaxes, lapsing back into unconsciousness.

 

The lung damage is stubborn, but she can at least tamp down the swelling in his upper airways. By the time a team of Healers arrive from the House of Healing, about ten minutes after his unexpected arrival, he's breathing a little easier and she has the bleeding in his skull entirely stopped. 

He's not a young man - he looks fifty or so, which for a powerful mage means he's probably actually in his seventies - but he's in good shape, his heartbeat now strong and regular even with the moderate infusion of Healing-energy that she can manage alone. A closer examination with Healing-Sight shows, in addition to his current wounds, numerous traces of well-healed older injuries. He's been stabbed on at least three separate occasions, judging by the different ages of scar - presumably with magic weapons, to get through his shielding - and this isn't the first time he's been badly burned, either. 

 

Even with the calm, he's drifting closer to consciousness, his eyelids moving. 

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The Healers run in. There are four, and they've brought two un-Gifted medics as well, strong young men with a litter to transport the injured man. 

...They seem kind of intimidated by the uniform, but the leader of the team kneels beside Petra. "We can take over. Is he stable enough to move?" 

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(It's not going to be comfortable for him, and it might be better to wait until the internal bleeding is completely under control, but at this point it's probably safe and won't cause his condition to worsen, and "the floor of the administrative building atrium" is not the ideal place for treating a critically injured patient.) 

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"Yes, I believe so,"

She lets go of him as soon as someone with more experience can take over. It was exciting to be useful here but she's not the right person for this.

(It doesn't particularly occur to her to be intimidated by the uniform. Curious, yes, but not intimidated.) 

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When the lead Healer places her hands on his forehead, the patient squirms and groans, his face scrunching in distress, but doesn't struggle. 

 

- when Petra stops touching him, he is very suddenly thrashing on the floor! And trying to scream, though his throat is raw from the smoke and the sound that actually comes out is...not very human-sounding. 

He's clearly trying to use magic, too, which he really shouldn't be doing with a head injury; the ground is shaking and there's a sudden static-electricity taste in the air. 

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This Healer is intimidated by mages and especially ones with decades of combat experience before they ended up in politically powerful roles in the capital! She startles and loses the energy-link to him. 

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He kind of needed that. 

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Petra drops back down to her knees and grabs at one of his flailing arms, re-establishing a link to stabilize him and pushing calm hard so he doesn't injure himself or push her away.

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Calm. Ish. It's taking some effort to keep him that way. (He is probably not incredibly comfortable lying on a stone floor, still in his singed uniform with patches of cloth half-burned onto his skin - and judging by how he's scrunching his eyes shut, the bright lighting is bothering him.) 

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The Healers look unhappy. And confused.

"We can't move him if he's fighting us," the leader says, a bit plaintively. "Was he like that before - what are you doing -?" 

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"Keeping him calm? It seemed prudent when he started trying to move earlier. He wasn't that violent before."

She continues pushing while she says this. She can't actually do much to Heal him while pushing this hard but at least she can keep her link up.

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That is...not something you can normally do with Healing...? 

"I don't think we should be keeping him unconscious," one of the other Healers says, even though it doesn't actually look like that's what Petra is doing. "He's already not breathing well." 

     "I'm not sure what else we can do," the lead Healer snaps, "we can't just leave him here and if he won't let us touch us if he's awake–" 

"I'm not touching him at all until we have another mage here to shield us," one of the un-Gifted medics tosses in. 

     Sigh. The lead Healer turns to Petra. "I don't know my way around this building, are there - guest suites - I'd rather not haul him to the House of Healing until he's more lucid but we can't leave him on the floor -" 

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The patient is calm calm calm but his eyes are still trying to open. 

 

(Altarrin has no idea where he is and he can't think and his head hurts an unbelievable amount - there are sounds that he's not really managing to parse as human voices at all let alone as words - he's operating on pure instinct and even instinct is only half working, and he shouldn't be relaxed, he isn't safe and he shouldn't feel safe, but for some reason he does - or at least his mind is acting like it...) 

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"I'm not keeping him unconscious, just keeping him calm."

She'd expect more experienced Healers would know this - it seems pretty important for treating traumatic injuries.

"He might wake up soon anyways. I know an empty suite closer then the House of Healing if that's better?"

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The Healers do not know this!

...They're not going to keep bringing it up, none of them are entirely comfortable around Petra - not that they have anything against her (mostly), but she has the attention of the governor and one does not, generally, want more of the attention of the governor in a place like Tozoa Province. Especially not this particular governor. 

 

They'll get the patient blanketed - he's shivering by now - and loaded onto the litter for transport, while touching him directly as little as possible. 

(Is Petra even trained in concert-melds? If so they can share energy with her, so she's at least not feeding her link to the patient entirely from her own reserves. They're still kind of scared to touch him though.) 

 

Once he's loaded up, they can follow Petra as directed to the empty suite. (Several of them are curious about why she has access to a random empty suite, but no one is about to ask.) 

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She's not entirely certain why they still aren't touching the patient, but they'll probably need to soon considering that she is definitely not trained in concert-melds. She can direct them to the empty suite (technically hers, even if she rarely sleeps there) without exhausting herself but she can't keep this up by herself forever.

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Altarrin drifts. He's still not really managing to track his surroundings at all; he can't especially parse sensory input yet, it's all a vague tangle of misery, sometimes abruptly worse in ways he can't even make sense of enough to recognize something like "being jostled as they descend to the shielded transit tunnel in a mage-powered elevator, and the mage responsible for keeping it powered has been slacking on the job." 

(If he were parsing his surroundings enough to notice this, he would have some questions for the regional governor.) 

He continues to be non-violent and mostly calm. 

 

...It's much better once they've gotten him to the spare suite and into the bed. There's less light and much less ambient awfulness and he can start to take inventory of his body, or at least attempt it. 

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....he feels really terrible actually! It's still requiring a distressing amount of effort just to breathe (and breathing hurts), and his arms aren't working, and his head isn't working and he still can't piece together any memory of what's happening or what happened before or where he is or why or how. He mostly can't string together thoughts at all. 

 

He's still calm about this! For some inexplicable reason! He is definitely not happy about it, though. 

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...At some point one of the Healers is going to ask Petra explicitly if they can try to show her how to set up a Healing meld - it seems like she's not trained in it? - or if they should....call in a mage-guard to make sure their patient doesn't accidentally murder them as soon as they touch him again, so they can focus on treating his injuries while she...does whatever she's doing right now...? 

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