"Aroden was human once. He was a great archmage, kind of like Urtho in some ways, but his home civilization was destroyed in a foolish and unnecessary war, and he had to rebuild from nothing in the ashes. He had learned the secret to never aging, and lived thousands of years, becoming wiser and more powerful, seeing how not just people but civilizations could grow in wisdom and power, destroying the occasional demon lord who reached out from the Abyss to try to damage the human civilizations he was building. Eventually, he learned of the Starstone, a powerful magic that had been formed in the destruction of his home civilization, which would make anyone who touched it into a god. He raised an island from the sea that became a thriving city, and built protections around the Starstone so that only the right people could make their way to it (though it's mysterious what makes someone the right person), and then he became a god. He is understood on Golarion as the god of humanity, civilization, our growing in strength until we are something that can set right the horrors of our world. 

Golarion's gods seem to operate more directly, but I don't know if it's a difference in gods or in worlds. Aroden hasn't gifted her spells or powers since she arrived here, so it seems entirely possible that the god-negotiated-agreements of this world bar Him from doing that, and that here He is like the local gods, and will act in the same ways. It also seems possible that He isn't here at all and it's too far away from Him. Tantara is a place he would rejoice in, I am sure of that, whether or not He can see it."

....They were not previously aware that mortals could become gods! That's - fascinating, and kind of disturbing actually, and they're wondering if there's a way to check if it's possible here. It...sounds like kind of a bad idea, honestly, if it's not yet possible here then they suspect their Goddess would really not want Iomedae to find a way to make a Starstone. 

Other than that, Aroden sounds fairly reasonable, probably. It seems unlikely that their Goddess would object to Iomedae just on the grounds that she served Him. 

- should they ask their Goddess to try to reach Him? It might not work, obviously, or the Star-Eyed might see something they can't that makes it a bad idea to attempt, and it would probably take a long time even if She did try, but it's not obviously impossible. 

Iomedae would be very grateful, if that were possible. She misses Him, of course, and it'd solve a lot of other problems if she knew some things that she'd know for sure if He was here.

Silverhorse will try to petition Her, then, and convey what Iomedae said about Aroden and the request to try to contact Him.

Does she have any other questions, or is there anything else they should talk about right now? 

The superweapons. She's worried about that and would like the Star-Eyed's counsel, if it's available.

They don't personally know anything about the superweapons and will need to include that in their petition to the Star-Eyed Goddess, though it certainly does sound important to know. 

- actually. Silverhorse is not sure if this is related, and even if so, whether it has anything to do with their Goddess' work in Velgarth, but...Urtho did mention. At some point. That he had a 'backup plan', if Ma'ar ever seemed close to capturing the Tower. That...might...be related, though if so it's hopefully obviated now. 

She thinks that's related, yes. Urtho had powerful weapons. One of them has been stolen. The others will be dismantled, probably, now that Ma'ar can be stopped without them. 

She does not say that she was told they could destroy the Kingdom. Some things are better not to spread.

They will alert her as soon as they've learned anything more; Silverhorse needs to travel to the Moonpaths, in the spirit world, and call for the Star-Eyed's attention, and this might take a long time, if She's busy. They wish her the best of luck. Hopefully the Star-Eyed will be able to contact Aroden once She knows to try; being in another world and out of your god's reach sounds terrible, and even moreso if They are a sort of god who can actually communicate with you and give you access to magic. 

Urtho's people have now managed to locate a priest of Vkandis willing to speak to Iomedae! He's a very old man who administers the temple in Ka'venusho – the name for the densely-inhabited region sprawled around Urtho's Tower, which isn't exactly a city but isn't exactly not a city either. He isn't a mage and is not involved in the military chain of command and he's not sure if he's ever met the particular guard who went missing along with a weapon, but he can tell her about Vkandis in general. 

That sounds great and she's absolutely going in with the Protection from Energy up, and using the Pearl of Power to briefly speak the language again.

She is ushered to the temple - the mage-escort Urtho sent to stay with her will do a short range Gate rather than walk, it seems like they might be under some time pressure here.

It feels much more formal. (The shamans just met her in a random room in Urtho's Tower that happened to be available.) The temple itself, though not a large building, is covered both inside and out in kind of a lot of gold, along with elaborate artistic woodcarvings and paintings. The elderly priest, who walks with a cane, meets her at the door wearing an equally elaborate set of gold-embroidered robes and an impressively overwrought hat. 

He welcomes her warmly and suggests that they go sit down and have some tea. And he can tell her about the history of the temple order and Vkandis' historical miraculous interventions - most of which were not in his lifetime - or she can start with any pressing questions she has? He has been told that a mage-soldier who was also a follower of Vkandis is suspected of stealing a powerful magical artifact of Urtho's but doesn't have further context on what Iomedae is worried about. 

Mostly she wants to learn about Vkandis and His faith here so she doesn't inadvertently inconvenience Him in the course of her work on the peace deal, though also she is indeed wondering if there's an explanation for the superweapon theft.

The temple order was founded a long time ago, and has a lot more formal continuity and political remit over all of its followers than, say, the loose agglomerations of clans who follow the Star-Eyed Goddess and each have their own shaman. The priests have a ranking by seniority, though they don't currently have a high priest, he was one of the people who vanished when the capital emptied overnight and they haven't had a chance to convene all of the regional priests and appoint a new leader. 

The people of Vkandis are required to follow certain religious laws, which in some special cases may supercede the secular laws in an area; this is especially true for mages, and is why they negotiated a different arrangement in Urtho's military than the other mages; they're all assigned to the Third Army under General Movat, and are in separate small units led by priests. 

...If the superweapon theft was indeed somehow prompted by a vision from Vkandis – which the old priest does not categorically deny is possible – the fact that he has no inkling of it would be a major historical departure. Priests have received visions, before, that gave them advanced warning of certain dangerous political events, or even prompted them to take sides in military conflicts. But this is something where the temple order would usually operate as a unified body, meaning that there would have been meetings about it. 

- of course, this is also a historically unusual situation. They don't have a high priest to make final decisions, and conditions have been...chaotic, at the front. It might be more analogous to some historical cases where Vkandis intervened on an active battlefield; the most stark of those involved setting most of the enemy side on fire. 

That makes sense, and would work similarly at home; it is better when a church can be unified in acting. Is there anything that can reasonably be done to learn if this was an intervention of Vkandis?

It sounds like possibly he should personally travel out to the front to meet with the priests leading the mage-units of the Third Army? Since they cannot realistically come to him. 

If it was an intervention of Vkandis then he is certain there was a very good reason for it. 

Of course. Given the urgency, perhaps they could go now?

It sounds like maybe they had better. Though he's going to need a few minutes to pack some of his things, in case they end up being there a while, and delegating the various daily temple duties to his apprentices. If Iomedae can arrange someone to Gate them, and an escort because the front is potentially dangerous, he can meet her and leave in half a candlemark? 

That works, though her translation spell will have run out. She'll get a Mindspeaker as well as an escort.

Urtho dictates a letter to Ma'ar. 

It's terse and to the point; he doesn't have a lot of energy to spare. In the past, he had various research projects that he ran in secret, since they were potentially very dangerous and ought not be broadly known. Some of them succeeded. The list of successes includes these sixteen weapons.

One of them is missing and likely in the custody of either the Vkandis-aligned military units of the Third Army, or maybe just a rogue mage, they're not sure. Iomedae is investigating. 

The thing it does is to temporarily create an temporary channel between the high-energy Elemental Plane of Fire and the lower-energy Elemental Plane of Water; the energy gradient results in a powerful flow of mage-energies that could in theory be tapped, except that the channel is unstable and lasts only a fraction of a second, and there's a significant bleedthrough into the Material Plane. Thus: very very large fireball, he estimates about fifty times the energy output of an Adept's Final Strike. (This is a sufficiently big fireball that he decided it didn't even have a real military purpose; he later made smaller prototypes, using a narrower channel or a different planar differential to try to get something stable, though the best he managed is that they produce smaller explosions.)

The weapon looks like this but will unfortunately not be detectable to mage-sight, because like many of his projects, its stored mage-energies are fully contained with no leakage and so it doesn't show any magical signature to be detected. It's small enough to be concealed, though it's also heavy enough that it would need a wagon to move it unobtrusively. 

He urges Ma'ar to be careful and alert for anything suspicious, and promises that - assuming Ma'ar wasn't involved in, say, bribing one of Vkandis' worshippers to betray Tantara and bring the weapon to him, which Iomedae is going to be investigating among their other theories - Predain will not be held at fault if the weapon is detonated and affects Tantara's side of the lines. He wishes he could give better advice. 

This is, of course, absolutely terrifying news. 

In the near term, it's terrifyingly because there are, in Ma'ar's opinion, two obvious goals for an intervention: to kill him, or to kill Iomedae. Neither of those has very good implications for Predain. The second one, of course, also has rather bad implications for Tantara. Unfortunately he's not sure if that makes it any less plausible. It's not at all clear if the gods care. 

He's so tired and this is too many things and he wants it to stop

And there's the dull, sinking realization that, from the beginning, he was making a mistake. It's not exactly that, in the months and years before the war when Urtho was sending increasingly emphatic letters, he ever explicitly had the thought that if Tantara started a war then Predain could finish it. But it...would have altered his priorities substantially. He would have been much more proactively worried about avoiding war, and - well, he would have updated that Tantara was much more likely to see war as a viable path to make Predain stop doing things they didn't like. 

He didn't see it coming. Why not? 

He failed to see a lot of things coming, and in hindsight, his diagnosis is that he was mostly just moving too fast. It felt like an emergency, and of course he took the time to make contingency-plans for all the risks he was tracking, but he just...wasn't, really, tracking what the combined picture of Predain's activities would look like to Tantara, even when it was far away from them and affecting other people. He hadn't seen them care much about problems outside their country before. And so when they did express displeasure, he - wasn't really sure what to do about it. It was a confusing observation that didn't fit his model of the world, rather than predictable observation that indicated the start of a very bad trend. If he had read different history books – if he had made time to travel more, to learn the history of other countries with unhappier and more tumultuous pasts than Tantara – he might have been able to extrapolate that trend out to its conclusion, and react accordingly. But he was young and stupid and moving too fast and he didn't stop to ask the right questions. 

...He thinks this was a different problem, though. It's not that he didn't think to ask the question "if Urtho has superweapons, what does that imply for Tantara's relations with Predain." It's that, even if he had, he would have confidently predicted that Urtho, one of the most pacifist people he's ever encountered, wouldn't have superweapons in his basement. 

In some ways it's an even more frightening realization, that he would have misjudged the man's character so deeply. What else is he missing?

It means, obviously, that maintaining the ceasefire now has even higher stakes, which is the last thing he needed. 

...it means that even if the Vkandis-worshippers do choose to violate the ceasefire and use their weapon on Predain, the actual contingency-plan he made for a very badly damaging attack – an immediate all-out offensive on the Tower – is the last thing Predain can afford to do. Probably what they ought to do is unconditionally surrender. 

He might be able to make that happen, if he's alive. ...Realistically the way he would make it happen would be via so much mind control, which is also not a great option because Iomedae would be very unhappy, but it's not she should prefer if the King overrides Ma'ar, possibly by having him arrested for treason, and tries to advance on the Tower anyway. It's just that both of them are bad options. 

If he's dead, then his people will move on the Tower, which still contains Urtho, and another fifteen weapons, and - he doesn't know where that path ends. But he's pretty sure it's an ending that burns down most of both his and Urtho's life's work, and leaves two countries in ruins. If not worse than that. 

If Iomedae is still alive, maybe she could respond by – well, at that point the only realistic way for even her to stop it would be to assassinate his commanders, or outright slaughter all of his forces. 

If Iomedae dies, then....he doesn't, at that point, especially see any way to steer aside. 

They're not there yet. Iomedae is investigating. They might still be able to get the situation back under control.

But he has the unsteady, falling-into-quicksand sense that most of the moving pieces are no longer under his control, and they're pieces he didn't see coming and so he doesn't even have contingency plans, and he hates it so much, he wants to - go back, do it over, be in a different version of the world that makes more sense than this one. What a stupid unhelpful feeling to be having. 

What can he actually do. 

Tell his people to be on alert, for all the good that does. (It might make things worse, if it results in a lower threshold for assuming enemy action, the ceasefire spiraling out of control, a pointless war and Urtho, cornered, with fifteen weapons to resort to in sufficient desperation - and he would be that desperate...) 

He wants to be notified instantly if any unauthorized Gate is detected behind Predain's side of the lines, and he wants a strike team ready to instantly scry the site and Gate in. Actually, he also wants a pause on most non-urgent authorized Gates. They can live without supply deliveries and personnel movement until the crisis is over, and he doesn't want any confusion. 

If they detect a Gate on the Tantaran side of the lines, but within (brief mental calculations) twenty miles of Predain's territory - which means more or less "within the range of Adept-sensitivity mage-sight at all" - he doesn't want any kind of offensive response but he does want the site scried, and the monitors ready to urgently relay warnings to the Tantaran monitors if it looks like the mage Gating in is a priest of Vkandis, or has an object meeting the weapon's description, or if anyone has a wagon with them even if it's an otherwise nondescript and unsuspicious wagon. 

It's all he can do. It's probably not going to be enough. Ma'ar isn't sure he trusts the deep awful sinking feeling that he's still missing something, still stumbling in the dark (and isn't that a new emotional experience, he doesn't like it at all) – that things are spiraling further and further out of control, that if the situation is still salvageable at all it certainly won't be by his doing... 

He doesn't have time to sit down with pen and paper and think through all of the things he's missed so far, and he definitely doesn't have time to have emotions about it. Later. Survival first. His thoughts feel like they're trapped in a tunnel, like he's lost in the fog with no direction-finding spell and can only see what's metaphorically within a foot of his face and if he was about to walk off a cliff he wouldn't even know. ...That's an emotion and he still doesn't have time for it. 

Focus. Relay orders. Survive, first, and eventually the crisis will be over, one way or another, and if one way or another he's still around, he can pick up the pieces then. 

Urtho's people can provide an escort of a dozen Adepts for Iomedae, unless she wants fewer than that. And a Mindspeaker, of course. Maybe two Mindspeakers, just in case. 

The elderly priest hurries. He's leaving the temple and his junior apprentices in some chaos, but he's ready to go within twenty minutes. 

Iomedae wants the escort to understand that she thinks this might be a plan to assassinate her, but if they want to come given that, she's happy to have them. She appreciates the priest's haste.