"They shouldn't. It's dangerous to the undead -" it's clearly an unfamiliar word - "corpses animated to serve a controlling mage - and it doesn't break curses or restore lost limbs or address poisoning. I can do those things but not for everyone in a thirty foot radius and not until we learn, tomorrow, if my channelling returns normally here. 

It is, of course, sometimes hard on soldiers, to be nearly killed and then restored to perfect health to be thrust out again into the battle. Not because the magic can't sustain them, but because what we risk in war is a thing that the mind never really entirely comes to grips with. When I can, I give people the rest of the day off, at least until they've gotten accustomed.

I had one more question. You mentioned Ma'ar was aggressive in using Final Strikes when he was losing. How - serious of an explosion is that, at what distance does it kill a civilian."

General Judeth nods along. "We won't send anyone whose injuries were serious back out until tomorrow. It's not like we were expecting to have them back on their feet for days or weeks."

And she frowns. "It depends on the Gift-potential of the mage. A Master-level Final Strike will kill anyone unshielded within a radius of - call it a hundred to three hundred yards, depending on the exact grade of potential - and might badly injure un-Gifted civilians up to half a mile away. Close-up - which it usually is - it'll kill even well-shielded mages. A powerful Adept can take out everyone in a mile's radius. If it's on a dry or windy day, and you get really unlucky, the forest fires afterward can take out half your troops."

She says it bitterly. It sounds like it's from experience. 

- she looks genuinely startled, by that.

Then she takes off one of the rings on her finger and puts on a different one from a - inbuilt jewelry-chest in her gauntlet, apparently. 

" - Evasion," she says, as if in explanation. "There is no spell with such power at home. Even with the ring I'd rather not test it, but - if I were your enemies, if they have good intelligence, that's what they'd try."

Judeth blinks and looks startled at the jewelry-chest-gauntlet, then shakes herself a little. "Doubt they know enough about you yet, but - yes, if you agree to help us, I imagine it'll be rather conspicuous." 

It'll take about twenty minutes to get everyone packed into the Healing tent who can possibly fit in a thirty-foot radius. In the meantime, General Judeth is happy to answer any of Iomedae's remaining questions that come up, it's not like there's anything higher value for the war effort she could possibly be doing. 

She has so many questions! Most of them just in the spirit of a fellow professional, how are the units organized and trained and what are the current strategic objectives and what can they do that Predain can't, and if she's probing for inconsistencies with what she heard earlier, well obviously she's doing that, but it's not as if the questions aren't interesting and important in their own right. Iomedae likes her work. It's sad work, not work one should be full of glee about, but a deep abiding joy in a job well done isn't misplaced on a battlefield, and the Shining Crusade has stretched on, at this point, several very educational decades. 

Judeth is clearly very competent, if somewhat harried and overwhelmed (and it does show that she's had only a little over a year of experience with real war and not multiple decades.) But if her strategic thinking isn't as sophisticated as Iomedae might hope for, at least she knows her people and their locations and resources and logistics very very well. 

They have pretty solid logistics and supply chains. Gates are much better for that than Teleports, and even Master-level mages can raise them, if not as far or for as long a duration. Tantara is also possessed of the world's finest permanent Gate network, which you would THINK would be more of an advantage than it is but Ma'ar is very good at plotting forward strikes to capture termini; the network is secured by particular passcodes or keyed to individual mages' signatures, and Urtho can shut the captured Gates down from a distance and make them unusable, but it's still eating away at their supply chain capacity.

Urtho very reluctantly did a destructive shutdown of the permanent Gate-terminus in Jerlag Pass, recently; it's around as big as explosion as an Adept's Final Strike, and might act to dissuade Ma'ar from being quite so cavalier about dropping small strike parties on their Gate-depots, but it still cost them another node in the network. 

And he doesn't sound like the type to necessarily consider that a bad trade for a strike party. "Were you contemplating surrender?"

"I brought it up with Urtho when we last met. He...thinks Ma'ar would want his Tower, and that it's - unacceptable for him to end up holding that much power." She makes a face. "Not that I know what he's planning on instead. It's very well defended, but - he'll still capture it by force sooner or later, whether we surrender or not." 

A powerful archmage probably has a lot of tricks up his sleeve. She does not make this observation. Working with powerful archmages gets fraught if people keep pointing out to you that they could be contributing more. "Predain hasn't proposed terms?"

"Not through formal channels here. If Ma'ar proposed anything to Urtho in private communications, Urtho didn't think enough of it to pass it on. You can ask him, I guess." 

She nods.

It is as a general rule a bad idea, to have your most powerful wizard the commander of your war effort. They're two very different skillsets. She has not actually seen anything to suggest to her that Urtho is the exception, but she's not arriving at any judgments yet, beyond that Tantara's conquest would probably be quite bad; she can live in several possibilities at once. Maybe Urtho's incompetent and the situation is retrievable. Maybe Urtho is incompetent and the situation is not retrievable. Maybe Urtho has some backup plans that aren't a terrible idea. Maybe Urtho has some backup plans that are a stupendously terrible idea. 

She's uncertain in her assessment of the other side, too, but it matters less. Ma'ar is for all she knows well-intentioned; he wouldn't be the first person to put a ruthless expansionist dictator in power and provoke a bloody war with the best conceivable intentions. What matters is whether he'll offer terms she can accept while he's in fact winning the war, and whether it's safe to try to talk with him, and 'aggressively breaking most of the taboos around warfare' is probably the second-worst sign available on that front, behind 'has outright betrayed a parley in the past'. She's not unkillable. The obvious thing for him to do, if she comes to him to talk and says 'I can make this war winnable for Tantara, so let's talk terms' is to, you know, kill her and go back to winning his war.

If not for the explosive attack that kills everyone for a mile around she'd honestly just chance it. He can attack in a parley; she can fight her way out. It's great when you can offer people the benefit of the doubt because the worst-case scenario is that they betray you and the next ten minutes are very bloody and very tedious. 

There's no Resurrection here. She'd asked, though she'd guessed it already from their bafflement at her powers and the circumstances under which Tantara's king had died. The worst case scenario is that she dies - which probably isn't that inconvenient for her personally, her own people will resurrect her back home, if that can be done, and it'd be surprising if a Miracle alongside a True Resurrection couldn't do it -

- but does mean that Tantara loses, in this case to a Predain in the worse half of possible Predains. 

And if she doesn't tip her hand like that, she can probably win it for them. 

She holds out her hands to the assembled crowd and does another channel. 

People are awed and almost pathetically grateful. General Judeth shoos them away from flocking her to thank her; it’s not like she even speaks the language.

She can get some more information from General Judeth on Predain’s known resources and standard tactics and recent victories. They’ve won most engagements so far, and chosen the ground for most of them, because — well, Judeth doesn’t say it explicitly, and clearly has great respect for the man, but Urtho isn’t a military leader. He hates war. Since the King’s incapacitation and the weeks of ambiguous chain of command while it looked like he might still recover, their side of the war has mostly been waged reactively. 

Ma’ar is clearly good at what he does, and apparently a popular leader; his people are very loyal to him.

And a couple of candlemarks later, the scheduled Gate goes up. General Judeth dispatches an escort to take Iomedae from the Gate-depot to Urtho’s Tower. Urtho should be expecting her.

Taking over command of a military front from a wizard who is no good at it is something Iomedae has done four times before! That doesn't bother her at all, and usually makes everyone involved happy. She's not going to announce intent to do that, though, obviously, she'll just ask enough strategy questions that if she were in charge tomorrow she'd be clear on what tradeoffs she was making. 

She isn't bothered by the healed people, at all. She beams at them and asks her translator how to say 'it is my honor' and then repeats it over and over again. There are many many people in the world she is too busy for, but not one she is too important for; it's not a difference you want to lose sight of, and then on top of that one should really try extraordinarily hard not to be too busy for people who you might ask to die for you. 

And then she'll go through the Gate-depot to Urtho's Tower. 

Oh, it's beautiful. 

It IS! They walk from the Gate-station into the gardens, with winding cobblestone paths and gorgeous marble statues. There are children and juvenile gryphons playing together, and members of some third nonhuman species – lizardlike, shorter than humans, with domed foreheads above their snouts and jewel-bright patterned scales – are bustling around tending to the flowerbeds and watching the children. 

There's little sign of the war, here, save for the fact that there are very few (human) adults in young adulthood, and the handful she sees are visibly crippled. There's an open-air market, also manned by the lizardfolk, but it's almost deserted. 

Urtho's Tower rears up over them, an elegant spire in a flowing, almost organic shape, with shorter secondary towers around the base. It must be hundreds of storeys tall. As they approach along one of the winding paths, they fall into its shadow. 

And then in through a door – one that opens almost seamlessly out of the white stone – and into an echoing antechamber. The lizardfolk stationed at doorways and bases of spiral staircases are carrying weapons. They don't seem very happy about this. They call out cheerfully to Iomedae's guards, in whistling voices. 

There's an elevator that must be powered by magic. The elevator chamber is large enough to fit multiple adult gryphons, and feels very empty with just Iomedae and the three human mages sent as her escort. 

The elevator rises, effortlessly carrying them upward. 

She does not communicate with Aroden directly very much; it's expensive for Him, it's temporarily incapacitating for her, and they're on the same page anyway. But she does think, as they're walking through the gardens, as they're floating up into the tower, that this is a place He would really, really like, and that if some power other than Tar-Baphon is responsible for her landing here, if there's anything to be done besides win a war from an unwinnable position, she suspects it'd be worth telling her what that is; and she lays out clearly in her mind what the answers might be, in god-terms, seen through the web of futures, so that it would be relatively inexpensive to gesture at one. 

There's no answer, which is fine. Honestly, if she's out of His reach here, that's also fine; she'll dearly miss the healing, but most of what she is isn't anything Aroden gave her, and in the long run it was always going to be necessary to be a god in her own right.

She marvels at the surroundings, points expressively at beautiful bits of architecture, waves to the children. It's - a nicer place than she expected, honestly. Tantara is a surprisingly nice place - she'd say suspiciously nice, but her gut actually doesn't point that way. Some places are very nice, some powerful wizards are Good. 

She is continually detecting Evil. It's always good to know that kind of thing, imperfect as it is.

(Some of the soldiers on the battlefield read as Evil – not all by any means, somewhere between 10% and 25% – but she's hardly detecting anyone Evil here.) 

They disembark from the elevator on a floor that, per the view from the windows, is at least two hundred feet up. Some of the lizardfolk guards cheerfully escort them down the hallway, knock at a large ornate door, and wait to be acknowledged. 

Urtho's office looks exactly like the stereotype of a brilliant if absentminded wizard's workshop. The walls are set floor-to-ceiling with shelves, full of books. Practically every surface is covered in piles of notes, and there are elaborate half-completed magical projects on various side tables.

His desk, however, is cleared save for a map, held stretched out with some kind of mage-artifact focus as a paperweight on one end and a cup of cold tea pinning down the other. 

Urtho rises. He, too, is the perfect stereotype of a brilliant wizard. Tall and storklike, with long silver hair falling in tangled waves, and intelligent blue eyes, alight with curiosity, set on either side of a beaky nose. 

"Iomedae of the Knights of Ozem," he says. He doesn't bow; he's way too excited for that. "I hear you come from another world and have different magic!" 

(One of his hertasi is a Mindspeaker, and will relay for them.) 

Ah, this kind of interaction. She smiles warmly back at him. "I do! I would demonstrate it for you, but I fear in this world it might be a scarce resource. I do have magic artifacts you can look at, designed by craftsmen who are experts in magic as it is practiced in my homeland."

He wants to see all of her artifacts! He has so many questions about her world's magic!

What are the different kinds? Is crafting-magic a different kind from whatever she can do or just a different educational specialization? Is it something people are born with, like Gifts? What is learning it like? Do people vary in how powerful they are and if so how powerful is she? 

Did she know there were other worlds? How did she get to this one? Has this sort of thing happened before? Does she think there's a way for them to get from here to her world so he can talk to other people there? 

(It's pretty clear from his manner that Urtho has managed to mostly forget about the war, per se, in his excitement about encountering the magic of another world.) 

Iomedae possesses, in the jewelry-box in her gauntlet, an extraordinarily powerful ring of protection and two paired rings which allow her to take half the damage dealt to someone else (or vice versa, but that has rarely been useful) and a ring of freedom of movement and a scarab of protection and eight pearls of power (two first circle, two second circle, two third circle, two fourth circle) and a strand of prayer beads and a stone of good luck.

She makes absolutely no representation that the jewelry-box is where she keeps most of her magic items.

She is additionally wearing boots that allow her to move and react much faster, a ring that makes her need no food and little sleep, a ring that lets her dodge attacks wholly undamaged (she's not sure if it'll work against an Adept's final strike), a headband which enhances her clarity of thought and her force of will, a necklace that makes her more heavily armored, a mantle of spell resistance, a belt that makes her tougher, stronger and faster, the gauntlets which in addition to containing a jewelry box only she can access make it much harder to part her from her sword, and armor which is enhanced to be more durable, resistant to different kinds of magical attacks, capable of shapeshifting to better defend against different kinds of physical attacks, and makes it very difficult for attacks to hit a vital point. 

She makes absolutely no representation that this is all that she is wearing. 

Few of the items are hers; they are the Empire's, invested in her for the war's duration, and she is not willing or able to give them away, though she'd lend them at need. 

Most paladins are less powerful than her. Actually, to her knowledge all paladins are less powerful than her. There are people more powerful than her, such as Tar-Baphon, the lich necromancer she's been battling these last few decades. She's going to need some help to seal him away for good. Geb and Nex, the two wizards who famously scarred the world with their thousand-year war, were also more powerful than her. (Of course, she could kill any of them if she could get into range to fight them face to face, but not being idiots, none of them would risk that.)

Her magic is gained through prayer and meditation, learning to communicate with a fragment of Aroden's will and ask it for what she needs to achieve her aims each day. Other magic is gained through study; you have to be clever, for that, cleverer than she was at fourteen when she was contemplating how best to fix all the problems in the world, and though she's now clever enough to learn it (at enough expense, cleverness can be purchased, and it was worth the purchase) she's been very busy, and prefers to work with allies. Likewise she could perhaps have learned to craft, but didn't, because it's time consuming and there was a lot of Evil to defeat.

Yet other magic is inborn, or contracted-for with a powerful entity, or arises spontaneously one day for no reason; there are many powers about Golarion and few see fit to explain themselves. 

Urtho is captivated! He wants to spend the next week inspecting and asking her questions about every single magical artifact she showed him. He's never heard of paladins, and he has so many questions about Aroden – Aroden is her god? Is it common for Aroden to grant magic directly to people who pray to Him, in a way that - neat and predictable? It isn't here, the gods sometimes perform miracles through Their chosen people, or give Their priests and shamans advice, but...it's rare. Certainly none of them, not even the Goddess of his Shin'a'in people, are providing any miracles to help Tantara win this war - 

- he will reluctantly put aside his several thousand questions about her magic and ask if she has other questions about their war, which is a far more tedious topic but also kind of pressing. 

She does, yeah. She wants to confirm what Judeth told her, as diplomatically as possible, and then she wants to humbly suggest that she has run some wars herself and might have advice that could be of aid to Tantara.

Urtho can confirm everything Judeth said. Including that Adept Kiyamvir Ma'ar was his student, decades ago – an unusually brilliant and talented young man, but frighteningly ambitious, and not very moved by other people's scruples. He got...subtler...in showing his ruthlessness, as he grew up, but clearly he never really changed his mind. 

Urtho tried to convince him to stay at the Tower; he worried that returning to Predain, notoriously violent and corrupt, would only encourage the young man in seeking power by force. Ma'ar refused to be convinced. It was his homeland, he said, and the people there needed his help far more than anyone in the already-prosperous and flourishing kingdom of Tantara.  

It's clear that Urtho feels badly about the war. "It blindsided him," he admits. "I don't know how he could have been surprised, after so many years of ignoring my warnings, but - he was."

He will absolutely take the advice of an expert! Advice sounds incredible! 

Great! She thinks he should ask for a three-day ceasefire. 

Predain almost certainly will not grant it. They're winning, and they must suspect Urtho has some resources they don't know about, and giving him time is just strategically unwise from their perspective. But they don't, it sounds like, actually have very good intelligence out of Predain, and sometimes you get lucky and there are events behind the scenes you don't know about, or perhaps Ma'ar still thinks of himself in such a way that an appeal for a temporary peace from Urtho will go over well with him. The fact he keeps writing letters is a little bit of a good sign, though there's also the obvious interpretation where he tried to keep Tantara at ease with all Predain's violations of the local norms of war, and conquests, until Predain was powerful enough that appeasement no longer seemed necessary.

And there is also the possibility that Predain will agree to, and then break, the ceasefire, which would be very informative.

She wants the three days to reorganize and figure out how to make the war winnable, obviously, but she also wants it because if they manage it, then that's a tiny bit of trust, from which perhaps enough further trust could be built that she could go meet this Ma'ar face to face and tell him that Urtho has new allies and he needs to start thinking about peace on terms acceptable to Tantara.

She also wants to figure out the intelligence situation? Who are Ma'ar's spies within Tantara? Can Tantara's spies be asked to take more risks inside Predain? She needs to understand more of the dynamics at court in Predain, and she needs to have a good channel through which to spread information about her arrival back to that court. 

She also wants to talk to some of the prisoners of war Tantara is holding, and maybe try to negotiate a prisoner swap for the same reason - little pieces of trust - as she wants to try the ceasefire. Has that been attempted, how did it go?