: - If I thought badly of him I would not have given him an irreplaceable strategically important magic item of mine!:

:I’m sure he would remember that if he were thinking more clearly! But when you tell someone straight up that the world would be better off if they’d never tried to accomplish anything of the things they care about most, and they could have noticed that themselves if they’d been less of an idiot, I think it’s not very surprising if they feel like you think badly of them: 

:...yes,: she concedes immediately once she's thought about it. :I suppose I could apologize for saying that.: Not because it's false, which it obviously isn't, but she has an entire kind of practiced apology for 'that was a true thing I should've given you more support in coming to grips with'.

:I don’t think he expects an apology. It is a true thing, that he needed to know: 

A thoughtful pause. 

:I reckon it’s a sore spot for him. That he comes from an awful shithole, that’s the game he had to learn to survive, and I figure Urtho does look on him badly for - everything that comes of not having grown up all innocent and sheltered in a nice safe rich place where the grownups could be trusted. - and the part where you’ve got a god on your side, too, reckon he feels like the gods here have only ever helped people They liked better than Predain:

Mental shrug. :I know you’re not doing that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s why he’s sensitive about it: 

Iomedae tries to imagine thinking of Golarion as a nice sheltered rich place where the grownups could be trusted. It's - false, of course, but it might not be clearly false from the very limited pieces she's chosen to share with Ma'ar so far. It does seem closer to true of Tantara. 

And of course there is a sense in which Good is often a - luxury, a thing many people only try to purchase once they have the things they need today and know they will tomorrow.

Ma'ar may be making the same mistakes that solidly a tenth of her paladins would make if she let them but he's not making them by trying to out-zealous everyone else or getting very singleminded about Hell and taking the ruthlessness a little too far, he's making them in the course of trying to invent the entire concept of Good himself. Similar outcomes, but a different internal generator, and accordingly a different set of lessons and takeaways, probably, at least on a level more nuanced than 'try not to provoke wars with powerful archmages'.

She sits up, scowls at some dizziness. Dizziness is almost as annoying as searing torment, as far as sheer impairment goes, though she acknowledges that most humans have a stronger dispreference for searing torment etcetera etcetera.

The healers offer some water, which she takes even though in principle the ring should just be handling that.

They've carefully removed most of her armor, which is completely reasonable and also nervewracking. It's intact; metal doesn't mind being boiled much. She starts checking over the leather straps to see which ones need replacing.

:I admire Ma'ar, I think he's a deeply unusual person and the best person Predain could possibly have, and I think he needs to grow up very fast if he wants to try to execute things as ambitious as he apparently does. I think he can do it.:

Also he definitely wants to worship Iomedae even though she is not actually technically a god yet, and Need is aware that Iomedae disapproves of some aspects of this but it’s still ADORABLE. And makes for highly entertaining viewing. When you’re a sentient sword relying on your bearer for having senses or being able to move, you learn to find amusement where you can, and Need is smug about this.

Iomedae seems to be continuing to recover at a shocking pace, but the Healers are still kind of stressed about her moving around unaided. They’re going to hover.

Iomedae is not used to this characteristic of Healers. The kind where she's from just scowl at you, slap you with an astonishing amount of magic healing, and then shoo you. She will be politely bemused at the hovering. She's practically recovered! She couldn't specifically take another superweapon but she could handle pretty much anything else! (All of her skin is shiny, raw and red, and some of it is still oozing, but she's confident it'll get over that sooner or later.)

They hover slightly less once it's clear that Iomedae isn't about to collapse. They can get her materials to repair the straps on her armor, if that would be useful?

And they're going to leave at least once person within range to catch her if she does suddenly collapse, but it's been candlemarks and even spread across twenty Healers it was a lot.

...Also Ma'ar is seeming more concerning at this point? He wasn't injured nearly as badly, but he also doesn't have impossible self-healing powers or whatever it even is - he might actually be recovering more slowly than usual, given that he was exhausted going into this and also keeps using magic, and they're now really pushing the limit of just how much Healing they can throw at him before his body can't take any more. They're not worried that his life is in danger, he's young and was healthy going into this, but they are a bit worried that maybe he shouldn't be making important tactical decisions for Predain. 

(They are obviously not going to say this out loud in front of Iomedae, but they're visibly hovering around Ma'ar even more than they are around her.) 

This is still mostly cute and hilarious but it will perhaps at some point become less funny. 

At some point Iomedae clinks one piece of armor into another, and Ma'ar startles awake at the sound and tries to sit up.

...This mostly works, but he's so lightheaded and he starts to topple sideways. One of the Healers catches him before he can actually fall off the bed. 

- where is he, what's happening - 

:- Iomedae?: His mindvoice is surprisingly coherent. 

:I'm here. I ...think you're supposed to be resting, they're worried about you. Nothing's gone wrong.:

Ma'ar is pretty sure that he was trying to rest but things keep happening, including - whatever thing just happened that woke him - maybe it's fine actually, no one except Iomedae is talking in his head. If it were an emergency elsewhere in Predain then probably five people would be hitting him with the communication-spell at once. 

:...Is Urtho all right - is he up to date -?:

:I think so. I wrote a letter; I'll write another if anything changes. Are you all right.:

That is such an unreasonably underspecified question. 

:I am not going to die of this: Probably. It sort of depends on who tries to kill him, with what timing, and how competently they attempt it. 

:...cannot think very well. are we safe here? ...suspect I am too impaired to - make strategic decisions. is someone else doing that: 

:Depends on how good your defaults for you being injured or impaired are. I can't do it, they rightly don't trust me.:

...Mindspeech is hard and thinking is also hard and Ma'ar is going to just open his shields to Iomedae and shove across as much as he can. 

The fallback protocols, for if he were impaired or incapacitated or dead, are ones he worked hard on. He thinks they would have been adequate, in any of the contingencies he actually had reason to predict. Those did not involve anything nearly as weird as Iomedae showing up. 

So. Everything he planned before last week is going to be wildly out of date, because Iomedae did show up and she transformed the strategic landscape. ...He probably delegated thinking about that to some of his people (who he doesn't necessarily trust but who he thinks are clever), to make new contingency-plans - but almost no one can do that quickly, or well, and especially not both - and also they don't understand Iomedae's goals...

- he is pretty sure he had some plans more recent than that, things he delegated in the last few candlemarks, but - he would have to trust his past self to have been making reasonable and non-stupid decisions, because he cannot actually remember any of it very well. And he's not inclined to put a lot of weight, right now, on assuming that his past self wasn't being incredibly stupid. 

- she takes off her headband, and hands it to him. This is not really the ideal solution but it should make up for a fair bit of impairment. :Can you explain to everyone that it's a magic item that should let him momentarily focus better to figure out delegation of responsibilities while he's incapacitated.: And, really, she should give him the belt too; it's not as relevant in the moment but it should dramatically improve his recovery. Her own recovery is at this point not really in question.

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. 

It's possibly taken him an entire five minutes to drag his brain through all of that. Is this whole exercise in unpacking his feelings actually what he should be prioritizing right now? 

...does he have a choice? 

Actually, it feels like the answer to that question is now a yes, it wasn't five minutes ago but he's untangled enough of the emotional pile-ups and internal flinches to have some amount of metaphorical freedom of movement. He could probably, theoretically, manage to use his brain for something more externally focused than 'experiencing all of his emotions'. 

It's still a 'theoretically' because, however well the magic artifact is boosting his ability to think, he continues to be having some kind of baffling and unusual difficulty with motivation. He can clearly introspect on all of the component pieces of what's going wrong, but that does not, in itself, change the fact that he still desperately doesn't want to work on delegating his responsibilities. He wants to curl up and feel sorry for himself. He wants to go to sleep and not wake up until the world stops being terrible. He wants Urtho to apologize and say that he forgives him and say that he's proud of everything Ma'ar has accomplished. He wants Iomedae to hold his hand– what, that's weird and confusing, why in the world does he expect that to help. 

Okay. Sitting here staring at the fact that his ability to want to do things is broken: not productive. Unfortunately he doesn't have an existing mental habit for how to respond to this, because this is...not a problem he usually has. 

He should - figure out why he's having this problem, what's different now - this is hard to think about because his mind is bouncing away from even looking at the details of the thing he's supposed to do but obviously he's not going to succeed at doing it without thinking about it. 

Break it down into smaller pieces. The thing he's supposed to do is figure out whether he's delegated his responsibilities adequately - which he almost certainly hasn't - and then patch the gaps. The reason he should do that is, one, so that he can make it clear who his various commanders should talk to instead of him when they want to make a report, and then they'll stop talking to him and he'll be able to sleep. Which is something he does want. He should...be able to backchain from wanting that to wanting to cause the prerequisites for it to happen. This is how wanting things is supposed to work. 

Also, they might not be safe right now. That would be very bad. Usually, not being safe is very motivating, but instead he's just...scared, and feeling helpless, and still observing himself not managing to think about responsibility-delegation and contingency plans that would result in being safer. 

- being safe feels like it isn't a real thing. It definitely feels like something he can't achieve by his own actions. What if he takes the wrong actions and actually it makes them less safe. His brain seems to be assigning very high odds to any actions he takes being the wrong ones. 

...yeah, all right, that does seem like a belief that would result in having trouble convincing himself to do things. 

(Ma'ar has, at this point, been lying perfectly still for almost ten minutes.) 

:...Iomedae?: he sends, privately. :I think I - need your advice - I am having trouble trusting my judgement enough to make decisions based on it, and I– there must be a different way I could think about it where I would not be - stuck - but I am having trouble figuring it out on my own and I - need help -: 

:You are by all accounts a tactical genius, you currently have tactical problems, I see no reason to doubt that you can handle them perfectly well with the approaches you've already been employing. You don't have to rethink everything right now, I can lend you the headband again later for that.:

How can he be a genius at anything when he's such an idiot still not helpful. He mentally stares at the feeling until it goes away and then has to effortfully replay Iomedae's answer in his head again. 

:Oh: 

It seems really obvious, put like that! He feels even stupider, now, for having completely failed to figure that out on his own– ...it continues to be deeply unhelpful to keep yelling at himself for being stupid. He should stop that. Ugh. It's really irritating that stopping that is not an atomic mental motion and he has to handhold himself through it every time. 

...It still feels too big to think about. He's - pretty sure he's making the same mistake as before, pointlessly mentally flailing at trying to - decide to already have a plan as a single motion - instead of doing the actual process of planning, which involves thinking about specific things like "I should pass orders for this commander to take this precaution." 

He feels way too disoriented to think about specifics; it feels like his entire mental map is unrecoverably contaminated with unknown unknowns. But - he's pretty sure that is actually just a feeling, and that he does know some specific things, like - ugh, retrieving facts from memory is effortful - but he can, pushing himself through it one grinding step at a time, generate a mental list of all his major troop deployment locations and who is in command of each. Is that even the thing he wanted to make a list of. He's not sure. It would be really nice if Iomedae's artifact could do twice as much of the thing where it gives him more working memory, and much less of the thing where it makes him intensely self-aware of everything his mind is doing and all the ways that the thing it's doing is incorrect, but presumably it's not actually something you can pick and choose like that. 

It takes him a while, during which a really obnoxiously high fraction of his total cognitive capacity is going toward being aware of all of his emotions at all times and also flagging the various fascinating and horrifying failure modes his brain is falling into. (Does Iomedae feel like this all the time? Maybe it's less - like this - if you're not also massively exhausted and in pain and upset about having made terrible mistakes. Maybe Iomedae makes fewer terrible mistakes and thus has fewer regrets to end up dwelling on. Maybe you just eventually stop being insane in various ways if you spend long enough being this self-aware about it.) 

...also he should really not be using the communication-spell, he was able to push through before without paying attention to how it felt to use his Gifts, but the way it feels is 'very awful' and there is apparently a limit to how many awful things he can cope with at the same time. He should...do a different thing instead...it takes him a frustratingly long time to walk himself through noticing that he should ask someone else to do it, and then actually asking them, and then managing to tell them specific, coherent sentences that he would like passed along, and who he would like them passed along to. 

He asks Iomedae for advice about every thirty seconds, usually in the form of 'does this make sense?' and then an extremely reasonable proposal, which is nonetheless tagged with terrifying uncertainty and feelings of doom because everything is right now and the ratio of cognitive enhancements that the headband provides is overall intensifying this rather than easing it. Ma'ar can work around it and account for it but it's hard and slow and it's way faster to just use Iomedae as a reassurance-provider. Hopefully she isn't too annoyed about it. 

She doesn't mind at all. She's not going to touch him, she doesn't know what the local cultural norms are around that and the last thing they need are bizarre rumors, but she is happy to be close and tell him every thirty seconds that his ideas seem reasonable.