Ma'ar is in less pain, but he's on edge enough that he's only dozing in five-minute segments. It's better than no sleep at all, but it's not much better. He sleeps with his Othersenses fully open and - after over a year worth of accumulated combat reflexes - is confident that he'll wake up instantly to any unexpected magic or unexpected minds within his range. 

A candlemark later Ma'ar gets an update via communication-spell. The elderly priest who accompanied Iomedae to General Movat's camp managed to convene the senior priesthood, though they ran into a lot of minor obstacles and he didn't yet have everyone in one place or a consensus on what to do at the point when the weapon went off. 

At this point, though, the Temple of Vkandis in Tantara has reached a verdict on Iomedae, which is that Iomedae is Tantara's ally and they fully disavow the actions of the rogue priest and mages who did this or allowed it to happen, though they recommend being as merciful as possible given how the men thought they were working to save Tantara from a threat, even if they were wrong, and the plan didn't even work.

They plan to ask the aid of Urtho's people to have a contingent of Adepts accompany them to General Movat's camp and apprehend everyone involved. The priest in question has been ambiguously under arrest and definitely very thoroughly under guard at General Movat's orders, and they don't think he's done anything but can't rule out that they failed to detect a communication-spell order he sent out. 

Oh. 

Well, that's a moment when the Vkandis-followers are likely to be especially desperate. He wants them to warn him sixty seconds before the party intends to Gate to the camp, and then - probably Iomedae should be awake at that point? If he gets word that something went wrong with the arrest, he wants to Gate them out probably before anything actually goes wrong. 

If the arrest goes smoothly, then...that seems like another period of danger is over, and maybe both of them can afford to rest more thoroughly? 

A few minutes later, Need will nudge the Healers and then nudge Iomedae awake. :Temple of Vkandis and Urtho's people are arresting that rogue priest you talked to before. Ma'ar wants us on alert: 

Iomedae is doing much better within a candlemark. Her life-force has been growing steadily, from 'this person is barely not dead' to 'this person is in good health' (while she still didn't have much in the way of skin) and then just...kept growing from there? There's already three times as much life-force there as there should be? Her skin is starting to regrow, though it's very very delicate. When she wakes up next she's in a lot of pain but not an amount you could mistake for Hell.

She listens to the update mostly entirely lucidly. :Understood.:

That's so weird! The Healers will bother her later to ask if she has any idea what's going on with that or how it should affect their treatment decisions. Also after this they should (very gently) try to peel her out of the parts of her armor they didn't want to move her to remove before, to avoid her skin healing directly onto the metal or something. 

Ma'ar's condition wasn't nearly as bad to start with, but he's also not improving nearly as fast; the Healers are having to throw in significant work to ward off infection, and running into an expected amount of Healing-strain on his body's resources. He's finding it increasingly hard to stay awake and alert even for short periods. 

He can handle five minutes, though, of near-continuous communication-spell updates. General Movat is ordering shields raised around this region of the camp, so that the Vkandis-followers' units won't be able to sense a Gate outside. Four of the most senior priests in the temple, representing the order, are now Gating into the camp with their mage-escort. They're approaching - 

- the priest must suspect what's happening, and tries to run, but he isn't as skilled as Ma'ar at Gates and Urtho's mages are very tense and easily startled. One of them gets him with a levinbolt before his Gate-threshold is complete. He's unconscious.

...He's probably going to survive but they can worry much less about him Gating anywhere in the next few candlemarks, most people can't pull off the concentration for a Gate while suffering from serious levinbolt-burns. 

Faced with a quartet of senior priests in full regalia and looking very disapproving, the rest of the mages in his units are surrendering. 

It...sounds like it's just over? Maybe? For the moment. 

Maybe. For the moment. 

She opens her eyes, which wouldn't have been possible a few minutes ago. Looks around for Ma'ar.

He's a couple of feet away, on a second temporary folding bed, he asked the Healers to put it close enough that he could get both of them with a reasonably-sized Gate-threshold. He still has most of his skin but he looks pretty terrible. 

- he notices her looking for him, and rolls over toward her, wincing. :Hey:

:Thank you for rescuing me.:

:...Promised I would try. When you gave me the ring. You - would have done the same, for me...: He shivers :I– when I saw the explosion - thought it was too late, no one could survive that:

A very tired smile. :You are hard to kill. I am - very glad: 

:That explosion came a lot closer than most things do.: When she gets back home certain people are going to mock her endlessly for ending up in a situation where it seemed like the best available option was to attempt to tank a planar-rift-tearing superweapon. :I'm - glad the war didn't go on any longer.: Maybe too direct, but if he somehow hasn't had the thought already she really does want him to grapple with it.

He's had that thought. He's not happy about it. 

:...I am not sure if it ever occurred to Urtho that if he had told me that he had sixteen weapons as dangerous as - that - then I would have surrendered. ...If I could persuade the King of it, but I - think I could have: Sigh. :I - am not sure what error in judgement I was making, that I - never imagined Urtho would have done this - I separately did not think to ask myself the question, but that is - a more familiar kind of mistake - just, even if I had I think I would have guessed no. He - always spoke so strongly against violence as a solution - and I would not have built those weapons even if I could, they are the sort of thing I think ought not to exist - why did he do it...?: 

(He's not really expecting Iomedae to have an answer to that.) 

:Because he was curious whether he could.: Iomedae was not in fact surprised and it comes through in her Mindspeech. :Because he wasn't meaning to use them - wouldn't have been meaning to use them right up until he did, I suspect. You would've surrendered? Rather than run away?:

He blinks at her. :- If I had tried to leave it would not have ended the war - I could hardly take all of Predain with me, where would we go? I - am not even sure it would have ended that we were winning it, just - meant that Predain won more slowly and messily with higher casualties, but Urtho would - still have ended up cornered and desperate -: 

And Iomedae's assessment of Urtho seems like a completely insane thought process, both parts of it, but - it doesn't actually ring false. 

:I know some people who would make some of the tradeoffs you've made, if I weren't around to make it really not in their interests, but most of them are - not temperamentally the type to surrender for the benefit of other people.:

Ma'ar looks confused. (He has no idea where Iomedae is going with this line of conversation, and is too bleary to try to figure it out.) 

:I - why would it be worth it to make tradeoffs that hurt people, if it were only for my own benefit? It, the numbers would not add up...: 

He drags a hand up to rub his eyes. :Is it better? Your world? With - someone like you, to make it - not in people's interests to do the things I have done even when they saw no better alternative?: 

:I'm not sure. Depends a lot on your afterlife situation. I think my world is better than it would be if I didn't stop evil people from running mind control empires, or I wouldn't be doing that, but I don't know if it's better than Velgarth.:

He closes his eyes. 

:I am glad you stopped the war. I was already glad of it, even before I knew what Urtho had built. It...would have been better, if I had understood whatever it is I would have needed to understand, to avoid it from happening at all. But.: 

He's struggling to find the right words, and only partly because his head is swimming with exhaustion. It feels important, though. 

:- but if I found out that the children who starve end up - somewhere where they keep existing and will be all right - then I think I would regret that I had been willing to trade the lives of criminals for theirs. I do not think our world has that kind of afterlives and I - do not think I regret having been willing to do that math: 

:When people make mistakes the mistake is almost never making tradeoffs or doing math! It's usually that they were incorrect about the math or forgot half of the tradeoff!:

:I do actually think that most of Urtho's problem is not being willing to think about tradeoffs if he considers them distasteful! Maybe you have a different assessment there: 

:He probably suspects on some level that it's just a way for the best arguer around to get him to make a mistake, and he's probably right: she says immediately.

:And so, what, the alternative is just not allowing debates and logical arguments about the best course of action, and doing what feels the least distasteful?: This is maybe snarkier than Ma'ar intended but he's so tired. 

Iomedae is also tired, so it takes her a while.

:I think of people as having a mix of strategies to - achieve their goals and feel comfortable with themselves and not get tricked into adopting a framework that fails to capture some important parts of what Good is to them and not overstretch themselves, and most of those strategies aren't conscious because most people aren't a shape that could really bear looking itself in the mirror too relentlessly, or bear taking on problems that put one of their priorities sharply at odds with all of the others. - and that's not terrible of them, right, to adequately face the problems in the world they need to change shapes into one that handles it but that's only a little less tragic than the fact they need to learn how to kill people. 

But since people have a mix of strategies, you need to not look like a terrifyingly bad idea from any of the angles they bring to bear on the question of whether to trust you. And trying to make one of those angles - like reasoned debate - really really overwhelmingly inveigh in your favor only does so much if all of the other angles people have to look at the problem say something completely different. And yes, one of the angles they use to think is whether something feels distasteful! They're correct to do that! Some people are in social contexts where that little internal voice of distaste is the best window they have towards Good, towards doing right by other people. In some places everyone is equipped with spectacularly good arguments for the necessity of whipping your slaves and some of them have a little voice inside them that says not to and I am very very glad that sometimes they listen.

You're smarter than me. Wizards at home are a lot smarter than me. And they mostly couldn't cleverly argue me into supporting their mind control empires, though if other smart people I trusted claimed that I was in fact failing to comprehend a specific argument which would persuade me or failing to believe a specific factual claim that they were themselves persuaded of, then I'd consider that quite likely.:

There are a lot of things he could say, things he wants to say, but - it's also the case that, if he takes a mental step back and actually looks at the current situation – well, he is the one causally responsible for frightening Urtho into starting a war, and Iomedae is the one responsible for ending it, and - that means that her words have more weight than his, here. Probably. It feels like it should mean that. 

And maybe Ma'ar is right, that Urtho wasn't reasoning coherently, or living up to his own ideals, that Urtho was fundamentally failing to act in ways that would achieve his goals, but - that was never under Ma'ar's control, and...he knew that you can't make plans that work on the assumption that other people will act in ways convenient to you. 

It still feels like it's incomplete, like Iomedae is taking her own world's history and mapping it to theirs in a way that doesn't quite match, but he can't pin it down and that is probably also a stupid argument anyway. It's not like he had a perfectly accurate understanding. 

:I think you have met different people than I have: he sends, eventually. :I - have never encountered someone who whipped their slaves, and thought it necessary to give logical arguments for why it was correct, instead of just - doing it because they wanted to and nobody had the power to stop them: 

And after another long moment (he's struggling to stay awake, and his mindvoice is sounding less coherent now), :...m'not going to argue for the compulsions. not to you. would have built Tantara, if I - knew how...: