:…I see: It’s rather obvious that he doesn’t especially see. :I - plan to have someone scrying the area, if that is all right with you? I - imagine there are not very many scenarios where you survive at all but are incapacitated and would benefit from being picked up, but - I can at least retrieve Need before she has sunk very far: Pause. :…If she wishes, that is: This part is addressed to Need as well.

Another peal of mental laughter. :This one knows how to treat powerful ladies who he oughtn’t offend. Yes, young man, I wouldn’t turn that down:

Ma’ar nods, his expression very controlled. He starts to build the Gate.

:Most things that really matter can go very badly as well as very well. If we don't speak again - be careful.:

...Ma'ar is fairly sure that this advice is aimed at a far broader category of 'things that can go very badly' than just the superweapon and the potential Vkandis plot. He is equally sure that he doesn't have even a tenth of the pieces he would need, yet, to actually follow that advice. 

Well. Hopefully - he hates that word, anytime you find yourself having the thought that you're depending on hope, probably something is about to go horribly wrong and you're about to lose - but he has nothing else, right now, so. Hopefully Iomedae is as powerful as he thinks she might be. Hopefully Iomedae survives. Hopefully she...still wants to help, afterward. 

He nods to her, and steps back into Predain, and drops the Gate. 

Need is, for some reason, radiating smugness. 

...The reason becomes clear once the Gate is properly down, when she addresses Iomedae, and in a rather different and more gossipy tone than she's used so far. :Iomedae, you haven't given me the slightest reason to think you're looking for a man, so do tell me to jump in a fire if you don't, but - bloody gods, girl, he's fallen for you hard. You could make him yours with hardly any effort at all. And I'd be the first to point out that most men are terrible, but he might not be. I think you could train him up rather nicely, if you wanted: 

This is - genuinely unexpected! The comment, more than the fact about Ma'ar, though she's also surprised by that. He Gated in, took the ring, and Gated out mostly without comment. Most people who have fallen madly in love do more attempting to spend time around you than that. 

I don't know if I'm staying, she points out. And most people are worse at reasoning when they're in love. She experienced that once and promptly called a halt to it. 

Another dry laugh :Most people are terrible. You'd expect loving someone terrible to make you worse at thinking. He wanted to stay. He couldn't justify it on strategic grounds, he knows he can't protect you better than you can already protect yourself, but he badly wanted to. ...Though, eh, you're right to be careful. He might turn out to be terrible after all: 

She'll change the subject, though. Since they're now alone in a grey featureless ocean of slush and icebergs, rocking gently in the wind but cozy behind a mage-barrier, the light fading out of the sky around then. (It's only late afternoon, but in the polar north, at this time of year, the days are short.) 

:So. You're - honestly I'm not even sure if you're human, and I can't read your thoughts beyond what you're showing me on purpose. Where are you from, how did you get to where you are, who in the name of the Twain is this god of yours?: 

More comfortable territory.

She is a paladin. At home, that would all by itself tell people almost everything they needed to know about her; paladins work hard to make sure that they are accurately understood everywhere they might need to operate. Much of the power of a paladin order is that the gods have vouched for the character of everyone in it, and the order for its members on a finer-grained level than that. People should be able to trust paladins, not just if they are themselves geniuses and clever negotiators but even if they aren't; people should expect to be dealt with justly. And people should frankly be afraid. Paladins are fearless and good at killing things. Iomedae is really, really good at killing things, and has not shaped herself in such a way as to hesitate to resort to it when her evaluation is that it's necessary. 

She's from Golarion, a place that is so strange that none of the strangenesses of this world have struck her as something that couldn't be at home, a place with dozens of different kinds of magics that vary from one another more than Gifts do, and dozens of gods from Aroden, her ally and her friend, to Asmodeus, who she intends to kill someday when she's a grown up god herself. Avistan is ruled by Taldor, a declining empire that is in the background of her life mostly as a source of supplies and immense frustration, a place that feels broken on a very deep level she has no idea how to fix. She founded her own knightly order, partly to test whether everything is always broken like that or if it's possible to avoid, and it is possible to avoid. The Knights of Ozem are good. The thing that she has built to be her Church once she ascends is good. It's possible for things to be better, it's possible to give people guidance that guides them well and not badly. It's very hard, but she doesn't mind that.

Some people say that paladin orders make predictable mistakes in the direction of - releasing people who will do evil again, preferring inaction to blood on their own hands, being manipulable because of their desire to appear righteous. People do not in fact say this about the Knights of Ozem. There is an hourglass, in their main training hall, whose every grain of sand - thirty thousand of them - is a person dying. They turn it over ever day. It's their best estimate of the count across all of Golarion. A paladin of the Knights of Ozem repents of every one of those deaths, when they pray before sleep, not just the ones they personally caused. Iomedae has herself made estimates of the numbers across all creation. They're probably a thousand times higher. It's those that she reflects on before sleep. 

You have to be careful, as a human, when you lift a heavy load, to lift it correctly, so you don't wretch your back and have lifelong back problems if you're too poor to afford magical healing. You have to be similarly careful, to take on the responsibility for everything in the universe going correctly without doing yourself an injury magical healing can't fix. You have to possess, already, the compassion of the loving gods, the conviction that you and everyone deserve peace and joy and growth and comfort; you have to love people, really and sincerely, to see their flaws without turning away from them in contempt and disgust. You have to love yourself, to see your own failures clearly enough you can grow out of them. You have to have your own measure, so you don't try things you can't achieve. You have to learn the strength to do things every day that will probably fail, and hurt, because if they were to succeed they would have been worth it. You have to be ready to kill people without ever forgetting that they should have lived, that in a world where you were better and stronger you wouldn't have needed to kill them. It's hard for Iomedae and harder, as far as she can tell, for everyone else. She's watched hundreds of zealous young knights make the same mistakes, try to fling themselves into a self-destructive self-limiting sacrificial desperation that is both the logical consequence of recognizing the stakes and a totally unhelpful attitude to have towards them. She knows now how to talk them through it but not how to protect them from ever getting there in the first place. The teachings of her church, once she has one, will be first and foremost a steady accounting of all the mistakes that brilliant ambitious determined people make when they decide that the world is intolerable and they're going to fix it, and they'll make the mistakes anyway, just maybe recover a little faster.

Ma'ar's mistakes are - not the usual ones, exactly, if she indeed interprets Ma'ar as the kind of person that she is, that her knights are, the kind of person whose stubborn conviction that they need to fix everything in the world crystallizes, on contact with reality, into 'I still need to do that but it's really really hard' instead of into some gentler things. His mistakes certainly remind her of some of the usual ones, but Iomedae is in fact not the kind of person who would conquer a country and provoke a world-risking war. Cooperation is the most powerful tool available to people who want to make things better; they share aims, in a way Evil never can and never will. To want to fix everything for everyone is to have common ground with everyone. 

- mostly.  She has spent the last several decades of her life leading the crusade against Tar-Baphon, an evil necromancer who looked likely to take over the world. They are fairly sure, by now, that they'll be able to push him back and imprison him at Gallowspire, but it's probably years and hundreds of thousands more casualties away, and they don't see good prospects of actually killing him in a way that'll stick. (He's a lich. You have to destroy the phylactery. He's probably done at least three of 'have many phylacteries' 'have a phylactery on a space-ship soaring off into the outer reaches of the universe', 'have a phylactery that is metaphysically indestructible' 'make something that Good really doesn't want to destroy, like the key to Rovagug's vault or whatever, your phylactery' and 'make a random unfindable rock at the bottom of the ocean your phylactery'.) He's smarter than Iomedae, by a large margin, smarter even than the smartest wizards on Taldor's side of the crusade. They're going to beat him out of their world, eventually, at an unfathomable cost, but she does not see prospects of actually ending him. 

She does not have a lot of common ground with him. She would in the abstract prefer that he flourish, both the person he was when he lived and the twisted person he is now, but it is far outside her power to bring about in a way that protects others from him, the others matter more to her, and she would grieve very little, on ending him.

Once he's sealed she means to ascend. She doesn't have the details worked out, but - it does not in truth seem like the hardest thing she's ever done. New gods are weak and powerless, she can infer that that's part of the story, but she'll have a church already fervently praying for her. And Lawful Good's existing pantheon may be kind of frustrating but she doesn't think they're so useless they wouldn't intervene to help make sure she can get there and fix things up.

Wow. 

Iomedae continues to be very impressive. Not a woman Need would choose – at least not now, maybe a much younger Iomedae would have called to her – but a woman after her own heart. Planning to become her own god, because the other gods aren't good enough. Need can respect that. Also paladins are an excellent concept. Bestet should really steal the idea and copy it over here, it'd fit well. 

Most of what Iomedae is saying is very...philosophical...in a way that Need can't quite engage with. Need considers her own goals to be very simple; she helps the vulnerable by giving them the power to help themselves. (Well, vulnerable women, but she can manage that one step of abstraction, to recognize that anyone and everyone can be vulnerable, and deserve the power to help themselves, when seen from the right angle.) But Need is not, actually, the kind of person– or sword-inhabiting spirit, or whatever she is now - that makes plans on the scale of fixing an entire world. 

Need would not especially have thought, before, that "take on the responsibility for everything in the universe going correctly" was....even in the right category of thing that an actual person could point themselves at. It doesn't just sound hard; it sounds like the kind of thing that would drive someone insane. She - all right, she wouldn't exactly have said that Ma'ar mistakes were precisely the ones she would expect from someone trying to bend their mind toward a problem too big for it, but so important it justified absolute ruthlessness, she's never really thought about what mistakes someone trying to do that would make - but it's not not the kind of mistake she expects, for someone to be in such a hurry, and so distracted by world-scale stakes, that they don't take the time to learn and pay attention to basic tactical realities. 

....She doesn't even really believe that gods point themselves at fixing everything in the universe. For one, what does "correct" even mean, surely that's a phrase you could twist to mean anything. Though maybe the gods of Iomedae's world really are different. 

Crusades against evil necromancers, on the other hand, make perfect sense to her! That's very impressive, and - the sort of thing Need could imagine being involved in, if she were in Iomedae's world. As far as she can tell, the very long list of problems in her own world don't include evil necromancers, and she thinks she would have noticed? 

Iomedae still hasn't said much about what Aroden, her own god, is actually like, or about what He's done aside from supporting Iomedae? Presumably He approves of everything she's done, which does narrow it down. But it comes across, that Iomedae respects him deeply, and Need is really very curious about any god that someone like Iomedae, at this point in her illustrious career, can still respect that much. Especially when He is apparently male.

They've talked less than one might expect. It's expensive. They spoke enough when she was a young paladin to persuade her that Aroden was in no cases using her in a way that was not in her interests, and that he wanted her to become powerful enough to fix everything. Now she mostly just organizes her thoughts so as to be plain to him in prophecy, and lets him nudge her;  it's cheaper.

Aroden was human, too, and spent much longer human than she plans to, trying to find something that would change the game. The Starstone is the best thing he found, and it changes the game (she suspects) less than he wanted. None of the gods were formerly-human, when Aroden lived; Aroden and she relatedly differ in how much the strategies that made sense for them could rely on trustworthy deals with gods. Aroden is Lawful Neutral, but not because he thinks it's fine to hurt people sometimes or something; He doesn't feel confident that restraining himself to Good is the best way to achieve the results He wants, whereas Iomedae is quite confident that for her the advantages are much larger than the disadvantages. 

They both want Hell destroyed, obviously. There really aren't that many mortals or former mortals who aren't lying to themselves and don't want Hell destroyed.

She is genuinely looking forward to ascending and being able to really understand Aroden, not the accounts of his activities in life and not the assurances she needed to work for him but the person. She wants to - shape herself a little more than he did to cheaply speak to humans. Her strategy is more based on force of personality than His; she'll lose more if she can no longer speak to people face to face.

That makes sense. To the extent anything as weird and philosophical can make sense, to Need. Aroden sounds all right, probably, or at least she's willing to trust Iomedae's assessment there. It's not clear that it even matters that much in the near term, if Aroden can't reach her here. 

...It looks like they might be here for a while, if Vkandis really does wait until dawn, which Need is not at all confident he would. But in the meantime, they might as well keep each other alert by talking. Does Iomedae have any questions about Velgarth? Or observations about Velgarth that might not have stood out to a local, that sounds intriguing too. 

She wants to hear all about Velgarth! Also if she can teach Need more swordfighting technique, that sounds potentially useful when Need goes back to helping other people.

Need's knowledge of Velgarth is broad and varied but it's a random and eclectic sample. She does not have a very high-fidelity memory for actual events, if they happened more than one bearer ago, and she's only been with Shayeen for six weeks. Also, everything she says is very much colored by her personal opinions, which mostly relate to how something affects women specifically. 

She can tell Iomedae quite a lot about the River Kingdoms, a chaotic collection of small city-states around the sprawling mouth of a large river where it spreads out into a delta and meets the southern ocean. They're kind of awful, mostly; women have few rights and usually aren't educated, and they constantly marry their cousins (Need doesn't actually have a logical argument for why this is bad but she doesn't approve), and they're constantly warring between themselves. 

She has some more vague explanations of other geopolitics, more distant from Tantara and Predain as well as nearby. The Haighlei Empire, on the far western coast of the continent, gets a mixed verdict; it's not a terrible place to live but it has weirdly strict customs on literally everything, and often this is bad for women, though obviously some individual women do very well, and at least they don't ban women from positions of power. The Ceej Empire does that and it's terrible. Also there's a region where the god Atet is heavily worshipped and it's terrible for women. She's pretty sure, at least, that was a couple of bearers ago and she can't recall specifics. 

Need would be delighted to learn swordfighting from Iomedae but she's not, uh. Very good at learning things, anymore. It seems to come of being technically dead and embodied in a sword. 

Huh. That makes Iomedae sad, it feels unacceptable to her, though not necessarily in a way where she ought to try right now to fix it, which she has no idea how to do anyway. Everybody ought to get to learn and grow.

She's curious. About the Heighlei, about Atet and why He's terrible for women, about what sorts of problems Need finds and how they could be made to stop happening.

(Need is a somewhat frustrating conversation partner. It does genuinely seem like there's some key lack of mental flexibility, there.) 

The Haighlei Empire is a set of multiple sub-kingdoms along the far western coast and island chains. Their main traits are, one, a very conservative legal system and culture; they can officially only change any of their very extensive written laws and customs at the time of a solar eclipse every few decades. Perhaps relatedly, their norms around the use of Gifts are very tightly restricted. Children recognized as Gifted are taken from their parents and trained in Empire-run schools, and those who fail to live up to their standards for loyalty and trustworthiness have their Gifts burned out and are sent home in disgrace. Mages are allowed to learn a range of spells, at least, but anyone with other Gifts - which they all refer to as mind-Gifts, even ones like Fetching and Firestarting that are really not especially mind-focused - is regarded with much more suspicion. Even the Mindspeakers (and those with related mind-Gifts like Empathy) who pass the stringent requirements are only allowed to use their Gift for one purpose, a particular technique that lets them use Mindspeech to detect honesty versus lies. 

Need isn't sure if Atet is terrible or if it's just the result of mortals running the temple order being terrible, but it's written in the laws of their faith that all mortals have a place in the world, which can be high or low, and it's religiously correct for those in higher positions to have power and authority over those lower down. And women are always lower than men, which has the predictable consequences. Also they're promised an afterlife that can be more or less pleasant depending on one's social position and how well one fit into it, but Need actually has no idea if that's...true...or just a story. 

It could be true and many ways it could be true are a big problem. She'll look into it, if she survives to stick around in this world. 

She has the spell Keep Watch, which she intends to use instead of sleep, these next few days. She promised to take her rest if she rested during the hours from dawn to noon, though, so she doesn't cast it yet, just stays up late into the night talking to Need. 

They do rehearse the plan. With six seconds' notice Iomedae can be winged, in the air, and a hundred twenty feet away, which might somewhat reduce the force of the explosion. She's not sure if she'll have six seconds' notice. She hasn't seen anyone build a Gate that fast except Ma'ar but the people building Gates in front of her mostly haven't been trying for speed. Presumably they'll do their best to not make the Gate noticeable ahead of time. If she were them she'd actually open it above her and Need, but Need might still be able to detect the signature of a Gate opening at some distance?

Need thinks it takes a lot longer than six seconds to build a Gate, and especially so for a Gate to a random location the caster has never seen before, without a doorway-threshold, with the Gate-search anchored on Iomedae or a magic item she's wearing. Ma'ar could do that, clearly, but Need herself can't. 

That being said, most of the time required to raise a Gate is building the departure threshold and running the search for the destination, and won't be visible to Need even given the range to which she can boost her mage-sight while drawing on Iomedae's spectacular reserves (which is a lot, it might even be enough to detect a Gate at fifty miles, but they won't be starting from fifty miles away.) 

Need does not really expect them to have more than a second or two of notice, if the attackers are at all competent at timing when they set off the weapon – and especially if they're willing to die in the process, which would simplify the timing a lot from their perspective.

But if she and Iomedae have even half a second of notice, that's enough for Need to raise maximum-strength shields. Which can be very powerful, given the strength of Iomedae's life-force, but which she doesn't want to hold all night since even Iomedae might start to get tired. 

In that case, probably they should not particularly plan to flee; Need can put up maximum-strength shields when she senses a Gate, and Iomedae will cast Protection from Energy but plausibly not finish in time, and either that with all of Urtho's best protective equipment will be sufficient, or it won't. She isn't really sure how to guess. If Tar Baphon cast an Intensified Maximized Empowered Fireball at her, for some reason, and she had none of her energy protection up, for some reason, and she didn't dodge it, for some reason, that would not even come very close to killing her; if he did it three times, that would probably do it. Is Urtho's unfathomable superweapon, mitigated however much Need and Urtho himself can mitigate it, more like a single Intensified Maximized Empowered Fireball, or more like three of them? It's a question for a wizard, if it's a question anyone at all can answer.

Her guess is that she'll survive because Bestet's actions here don't make a lot of sense otherwise, but it could be Bestet wanted Need to meet her for reasons other than to save her. 

She'll think about it for a solid hour, in case there's some other consideration to think of. But if there isn't, then there isn't; something being very high stakes does not always mean it's productive to keep puzzling over.

Need will do her best to help Iomedae think about other considerations! ....She is not that good at it and she gets impatient with it well before Iomedae does. 

And the night passes. The sky remains overcast; unless Iomedae has a very good internal clock, it's going to be hard to tell how close it is to dawn. 

- and then, at some point when there is not yet any indication that dawn is approaching - 

:GATE: 

(And Need will, of course, instantly raise every shield she can – drawing on Iomedae's reserves, which are plentiful but for this it's still enough for Iomedae to notice.) 

She activates the Boots of Speed instantly, even though she's not planning to run anywhere unless Need happens to give her a bearing; she's used to combat with speed enhancement, and it adds some pleasant clarity. She starts to cast Protection from Energy. They could not in fact think of anything better for her to do with the time (and figured it would be possible to interpret as a violation of the collateral-damage agreement that she genuinely appreciates Vkandis for making if they were to make use of the fact His servants told her dawn and have Protection from Energy and Resist Energy up already.) They debated jumping into the water, but she'll sink if unconscious, and the more rapidly she's done that the more inconvenience she presents potential rescuers; they debated taking off the armor, but it gives her damage reduction. 

So she just pulls her cloak of resistance over her head and shields it with a magic gauntlet and with the other hand casts Protection from Energy, on the principle that if she finishes the spell in time it'd be convenient. 

If she were pulling off this assassination attempt, and knew her enemy to have limited expendable resources that endure a short duration only, the first Gate would be a false alarm. However, she has as it happens never found herself in a situation where her counterparty was lawful enough they could negotiate a venue for an assassination attempt but could not negotiate anything better than that. Well, there's a first time for everythin -

That's when the weapon's blast hits her.

(Need is pretty distracted with raising every shield she can, and does not have a lot of mental flexibility especially in emergencies, and cannot actually give Iomedae a direction to run within the couple of seconds it takes before the blast reaches them.) 

Ma'ar has had someone personally watching Iomedae's location with scrying since ten minutes after he left. 

- for the last candlemark, he's been doing it himself. He can't sleep anyway - he spent a while trying - and it's close enough to dawn in Tantara that, if his guess is right that Vkandis' priests are the ones who gave the deadline and will base it on their own location (and if his lower-confidence guess is right and they care about the terms they gave at all, but he's increased the odds on that, if they were to break the agreement they should have done it sooner) the attack will probably happen within this window. 

What does he see?