:I believe you. I'm not upset about how Predain is governed, just about how I - imagine Predain being governed in five hundred years from a given starting point.:

:...Maybe. Maybe if I - knew the things you know - that would be obvious. Whatever you are reasoning from, it is - not information I have. I suppose you probably think I should not have done anything if I could not do it right, just...: He would shrug but that requires moving. :I think that when someone's highest priority is - not being personally responsible for any bad things - it means they mostly do not try to do good things that are hard. And usually the important things are hard, and might go badly. Maybe it is enough anyway, in your world, it– to me at least it seems clear it was not going to be enough here: 

:If you'd done nothing it would've been better for the world than what you did, I think even in expectation from the information you had. 's not the same thing as saying you should've done nothing, because those weren't your only options.

When someone's highest priority is being personally responsible for all bad things, they make a lot of really really scary mistakes. I don't - recommend it to people, not as a pure thing you'll trade off everything else for, not alone without oversight by wiser more careful people. I usually recommend instead that they be someone who others would, with full information, ally with, and that they try for things that would be considered a good idea by their surrounding society if they succeeded, or things attained by changing peoples' minds, or things attained through technological progress.:

Ma'ar is pretty sure he was trying to do exactly that - and in Predain it worked, people wanted to ally with him there, he was changing people's minds about how their country ought to look and, for example, maybe that ought to include fewer duels and more official legal cases, they were making technological progress, he was trying and it wasn't enough – it feels like the problem is that nobody cared about Predain while it was poor and backward, nobody thought it was their problem when the corrupt city guard could do whatever they wanted to anyone too weak to fight back, they only started caring once Predain was stronger, because they didn't like how Ma'ar had achieved that.

- and of course that doesn't matter, to make plans that work you need to live in reality, and he made a plan that didn't work and obviously he should have done something else instead, he just still doesn't actually know what Iomedae would have done instead, in his place, that would have helped the people of Predain without frightening Urtho. He might be angry about it if he had the energy, which he doesn't, and if it would help which it clearly won't because Iomedae is right, and - wow this is stupid he feels like crying and isn't sure that he can manage to answer even in Mindspeech. 

(He doesn't say anything. He looks abjectly miserable.) 

Iomedae's best guess is that Ma'ar is - trying in an unproductive fashion to add 'Iomedae wins all arguments' to his worldview, and should not be doing that, but she doesn't know how to point out the mistake or if it's in fact the one he's making. 

- she just peels back some of her shields. The only things not public are the disposition of her forces in Golarion and of Tantara's. 

She's still in a lot of pain, but it's obviously getting better every minute, which is satisfying, in a way; she can notice moment by moment what she's newly capable of. Her thoughts are still a little hazy but she's pretty sure if necessary at this point she could fight more or less as normal. She's worried about Ma'ar - not the injuries, those are part of battle, but the ways in which he seems to be trying to orient to everything. Everyone described him as someone who wants to win arguments about everything and he hasn't felt like he has - wanted to win arguments or believed it'd matter, and while she does think he'd ideally keep in mind the limits of argument it was not actually her intent to convey that she was already correct about everything and he had better not argue. Her best guess is that there's a - directional correction, there, obviously, but he's still more correct than anyone he's ever argued with, and the right balance is hard to hold in one's mind.

She's seen so goddamn many terrible mistakes. People grind themselves up in all kinds of ways, looking at the problem in front of them. Provoking a geopolitical disaster is worse than most of those mistakes, in effects, but in some ways it's smaller, it genuinely doesn't seem like Ma'ar did a lot of deceiving himself for his own benefit or making tradeoffs that changed which tradeoffs he was willing to make and made him lose track of what he was doing or adopting his own completely insane philosophy that justified everything he was doing. He wanted peace. He wasn't careful enough, but - she often hasn't been careful enough, and she had more allies, more resources, in many ways an easier job. This assessment here isn't one she wouldn't make of herself, under some circumstances. You learn from it and you do better; you don't stop.

This does not really make Ma'ar any less miserable but there's - more clarity at least, maybe. 

He can't just open his shields to her, in return, she isn't actually a Mindspeaker, but he can push across the unformed thoughts rather than wrestling to get everything into words. 

Ma'ar does not at all think of himself as someone who just wants to win arguments? He's not surprised Urtho saw it that way, but - from his own perspective, he wants to figure out what's true and he wants to figure out what plans will accomplish his goals, and really it's always been more satisfying when other people came up with a new and compelling argument that surprised him or changed his mind, because those are the times that he's learning something new, seeing new paths or at least closing off bad ones. 

He doesn't think he did much deceiving himself, he certainly made mistakes shaped like not making time to step back and try to learn about the unknown unknowns, because he was impatient, because it felt like an ongoing emergency that people were still dying. He doesn't think he's lost track of what he wanted, here, which is for everyone in Predain to be okay, and someday for everyone in the world to be okay, and he - hadn't quite put it in those terms before, it wasn't a concept he had crystallized so clearly, but this world should have afterlives, someday. He isn't going to stop and he isn't going to give up and it - should be hopeful, that Iomedae is here now to advise him, even if it hurts very badly that she wasn't here twenty years ago, and part of him wants to be angry that she's - asking him to have somehow magically already known all of the things she does but it obviously won't help. 

Separately he’s frustrated because the entire way that Iomedae thinks and communicates feels deeply incompatible with Predain, no one is going to believe her claims about what she wants, unless Ma’ar spends endless candlemarks figuring out how to translate it - there’s something so devastatingly lonely in that, and the fact that he doesn’t expect pointing it out to Iomedae will do anything to help…

- he's in agonizing emotional pain and would probably be able to reason about all of this in a more productive way if he could figure out how to stop that, but noticing this fact is not, in itself, enough to prompt him to stop that. 

- she does not remotely expect that he would have figured this out last week. That seems like it would have required an unrealistic and ludicrous degree of caution or good luck. She is trying to explain it to him now because that's the only way he might possibly know.

She doesn't understand him well enough to guess what he needs to hear to not be in agonizing emotional pain. She'd say it, if she did; she doesn't want to hurt him, even more strongly than she doesn't want to hurt anybody. She wants to give him as much context as possible as quickly as possible so next time he'll have it and be able to use it for decisionmaking.

She thinks she can translate for Predain, with time. He can probably help her do it faster, but it's her job, to make herself understood, and if it seems to him like it'd be unpleasant work for him then he is probably better suited for other parts of the enormous work of making Predain safe and rich and good.

He can do the translation, and - probably with more difficulty but it’s worth doing anyway - explain the disconnect so she can cross that gulf herself. Once he's rested some it probably won't even feel like the worst thing in the world.

Mostly he thinks Iomedae is leaning on a shared cultural context that she takes for granted in her world, and he suspects it’s one that he very badly wants this world to have, but it’s not something that exists in Tantara and he’s not sure it exists in Predain either. 

…right now it feels like he needs several impossible or incoherent things in order for anything to be okay, like — like for Urtho to just not have been the sort of person who would build superweapons just to see if it worked, fail to do any kind of advance planning on when it would be justified to use them, and then use them without any kind of sane cost-benefit analysis, on Predain, as soon as he got desperate enough. It doesn’t feel like the world can be okay if that’s a thing that could have happened and was only averted by luck. 

Probably he is just going to be not very okay for a while, and then eventually he’ll figure out how to exist in that world without it hurting all the time, which is after all the only reality he has to interact with and he doesn’t even have a good justification for why it hurts this much.

Well, maybe it'll help when he gets an apology from Urtho and they can talk it through? She knows Urtho is his mentor, a person he trusted, a person whose approval he once very much wanted.

Urtho is the first person he ever met who - seemed to be actually trying to build something better, in a way that wasn't just self-deception, or happening by accident because it was in some other way the path of least resistance. Urtho wanted there to be a Tower where anyone and everyone could go to learn, even if they were poor, even if they were from another country, and so he just went and built it and then it existed. ...It sounds stupid to say this, now, to someone like Iomedae who he can't imagine ever lacked that concept, but even though Ma'ar thinks that had always been the thing that mattered most to him, he couldn't quite name it and thus make it clear enough to aim for, not even in his own head, until he saw that example. 

It shouldn't - undo the value of Urtho's work, make it fail to count, that if a handful of things had gone differently then Urtho's net contribution to the world would have been dominated by wiping out hundreds of thousands of lives, even though Urtho was - trying to be the sort of person who didn't reach too far or try things that were too hard and so should have been safe, or at least safer than Ma'ar, to exist around. But it still hurts. 

It's a beautiful place, the Tower. She hopes it will stand for thousands more years, and teach millions more children. It'll be hard to arrange for things to be stable so that that will happen, but - not impossible.

It would be good. And if the Tower falls then someday they can build another. It feels impossibly hard right now but Ma’ar is not very much trusting any of his emotional reactions right now. 

Possibly he should just sleep.

Iomedae should probably also sleep, actually. It is in fact impairing to be exhausted and in agonizing pain. Her own emotions are mostly not online yet, it doesn't feel safe enough, but she doubts they'd be any more fun than Ma'ar's.

She'll close her eyes again and try to rest. 

The Healers will try very hard to let her rest and avoid doing anything to disturb her. A couple of them are still holding energy-links to her, trading off on it and taking turns resting, but with Need’s ongoing attention she seems to be making a remarkably quick recovery even without any of that.

Ma’ar sleeps less well. He’s running a fever and keeps having confused incomprehensible nightmares, half-aware that he’s dreaming but too foggy-headed to shake himself out of it. Also he’s still getting woken every candlemark or so, on average, with reports on the state of things elsewhere in Predain and from the front, or alternately with the Healers making him drink water, because even though his skin is much more intact than Iomedae’s was, he’s not healing as fast and he‘s quickly getting dehydrated. 

Also he literally did not sleep last night, and does not have a Ring of Sustenance. 

He is, as a result, still going to be sleeping restlessly and looking pretty much just as terrible as he did earlier, whenever Iomedae next wakes.

If she had any healing she could fix this. It's very annoying how she doesn't have any healing.

She is, herself, on track to be wholly recovered within a day, aside from some really impressive burn scars on her arms and chest. She sleeps almost three hours, which is an eternity for her, but wakes feeling much better.

:Hey, sleepy. …If you’re up for drafting a message to Urtho about what happened and how you and Ma’ar are doing, I imagine he’s fretting terribly and Ma’ar hasn’t been up for any communications to him, he’s barely coping with being the point person for getting his people’s updates, which inconveniently I’m not sure any of them trust you to cover for yet: 

:Understood.: She can dictate a message to Urtho, if anyone can write it, confirming that Urtho's healers arrived and that she's recovering swiftly, has confidence in Urtho, and intends to ensure that both Tantara and Predain can have justified confidence in the ceasefire etcetera etcetera. She'd prefer to take the rest of the day off to recover but can return if there are any problems that she needs to stick a sword in.

One of the Tantaran Healers can definitely take down a letter for her, and they have enough mages on-site to arrange for it to be transported, though it’ll still be at least fifteen to thirty minutes for it to actually reach Urtho.

They don’t expect Iomedae to be urgently needed for any fighting today, though of course if that changes it’ll change on very short notice. 

Ma’ar stirs unhappily in his sleep, but doesn’t fully wake.

:Still not sure I know what to make of him: Need sends, conversationally, when it seems like no one is going to make any other urgent demands on Iomedae’s time. :He seems - very confused:

:Yes. It seems incredibly important, to understand him, and I don't feel like he's particularly far off from a kind of person I know and can work well with. And he saved my life. But - I'm frequently confused by which parts of things I say land with him and which don't. I don't know exactly what distressed him so badly. Probably will make more sense when I can think clearly.:

:Predain sounds like a dangerous place. Somewhere you - don’t get far, by claiming you’re trying to help people and do the right thing, and so he - doesn’t do that the way you’d expect. And Urtho is trying, because it’s the right thing to do, but he’s an oblivious idiot who would’ve gotten himself killed within a week in Predain, and Ma’ar knows that. …Dunno, just - feels like he’s trying to build the pieces of - the thing you do - but he hasn’t got the raw materials for it, or anyone to talk to?: 

Pause. Mental chuckle. :Until you. No wonder he’s falling for you so hard:

:I guess I owe more of a debt than I realized, to the Good churches which just do random nice things but do manage to establish for people that that is a common and real human motivation.:

:…I reckon that’s a lot of what was distressing for him. That you had that, and he feels like you think badly of him because he hasn’t, and he— I figure he’s scared you’ll give up on working with him: