Ma'ar stares blankly at the headband. …After a few moments, he concludes that he’s not going to get anything useful off mage-sight, and he’s already trusting Iomedae with so much more than this, it would be silly to worry that she’s lending him her powerful magical artifacts in order to harm him.
He puts it on.
….Wow.
This is one of the strangest experiences of Ma’ar’s life. He is not really any less tired; if anything, he's more aware of his body yelling at him very loudly that he should not be trying to do any things, including thinking. Trying to think anyway feels like dragging himself over sharp rocks while partly underwater. Staying awake at all continues to take an ongoing deliberate effort of will.
But somehow there's space to think anyway, or at least a lot more of it. He can hold onto a coherent thread of thought, and even manage to juggle more than one concept at a time. His situational awareness is back – he hadn’t realized the extent to which it hadn’t been working, before, he had mage-sight open and he would have noticed and reacted to, say, an unexpected Gate, but he wasn't really processing anything. Which says some not-very-reassuring things about his physical condition; it takes a lot to leave him that unable to orient to his surroundings.
...he can suddenly notice, much more clearly, the extent to which he hasn't been thinking, not just since the injury but since Iomedae arrived, and in some ways not since the start of the war. He's been reactive, running on learned patterns, never feeling like he could afford to step back and reassess those habitual decision-making processes, except that it's suddenly very clear that he couldn't afford not to. Whatever magic this is, it's definitely making him - smarter? - and it seems very unfair that the result is feeling this stupid.
His emotions are...not exactly louder, but he's suddenly vastly more aware of what they are, including the ones that are piled-up towers of internal reactions to other emotions. Which in a way feels like them taking up more mental space even though, in hindsight, before this nearly all of his mental capacity was allocated to intense misery and pointless flailing attempts to avoid looking at the misery, with the half-formed justification that it's not safe and he can't afford to be having emotions. Under normal circumstances, 'noticing that it's not a good time to be having emotions' is a mental habit that works, because he's reasonably in control of his own mind and where his attention goes, but it's now very obvious that he hasn't been. One of the layers of emotional unpleasantness is intense frustration with himself about this, he hates being out of control and he hates it even more when the thing he's out of control of is himself.
- ugh, right, that is not helpful, can he - decide to stop being frustrated - no he apparently cannot do that, which is ALSO FRUSTRATING - can he look at and acknowledge and let go of that reaction...? Wow he really does not want to be self-aware about his own feelings right now, it feels like the entirety of his mind is made up of mental flinches and thoughts that hurt to notice. This is incredibly stupid not helpful, notice and let go, and then also notice and let go of the part where it feels incredibly unfair that he has to be emotionally mature about this. He doesn't WANT to have to be emotionally mature about this. There is a very intense unattached-floating desire to run away, to hide, to be left alone, to never take any actions again.
Even with more space in his head it feels overwhelming, too big and tangled to face head-on, but...he can notice the flinch and lean toward it rather than away, he can acknowledge that he desperately wants to stop being responsible for any of these problems, and - that's okay, it makes sense to feel that way right now because he is not in very good shape to be solving problems, his mind isn't wrong to be pointing that out.
...He wants to beg Iomedae to make the problems go away but she cannot actually do that, she was right to point out that his people don't trust her. Which is so frustrating, because Ma'ar trusts her, and he thinks he's right to– catch onto that thought, look at it some more, okay no he actually does mean it and he thinks he's justified in believing it, Iomedae may or may not be very angry with him but she's not going to take it out on his country, and she keeps lending him her powerful magical artifacts which is quite a strong signal of friendliness. He still can't magically make all of his subordinates trust her– ...it's really tempting to try to do exactly that with mind control but compulsions don't even do that.
No running away. He's struggling to find a mental motion that isn't running away inside his own head, but - okay. One thought at a time. "Fix all the problems in the world" feels like an impossible mental motion because it is, that is not just a thing he can do, the things he can do are - specific things, one at a time. It feels absolutely ridiculous how much he's needing to walk his brain through all of that explicitly, as though leading a small child by the hand, but - repeatedly yelling at himself in his own head is also not helping, is it. It's okay. He doesn't have to do that. It's...not actually true that if he fails to be sufficiently angry with himself then Iomedae will be angrier with him, why does it feel like that's true -
- he's really scared of Iomedae and it's so strange for that feeling to coexist in his head with the part where he very firmly trusts her with his life and his kingdom -
He feels like crying, and trying this hard not to cry may or may not be a good use of his very limited mental resources, but he doesn't actually want the predictable consequences of crying in front of the Healers and his guards, which is that they'll be very worried about him.