She claws her way to more lucidity than that. 

Godheadache. 

She thinks - not Aroden. Or not just Aroden, she remembers scraps of Aroden but she doesn't think he'd have done this to her and she thinks there was someone - Someone - else. 

That means -

- there's a protocol for if she suspects she's compromised. It's to kill her and consult with Heaven from there.

She is attempting to instruct - her staff, the people she'd expect to be around her, all names Ma'ar does not recognize - to do it.

So it was Aroden. And...probably the Star-Eyed Goddess, given whose shamans Iomedae was with when this happened - he doesn't have more guesses than that but it's a start. 

Does the Mindhealer think Mindspeaking her - not much, just enough to tell her that she's in Velgarth - will cause actual damage, especially irreversible damage, or just be painful? Iomedae...can probably take the pain, and his sense of her is that she would prefer to be in more pain and also getting a situation report. 

(Of course there's a protocol. ...Possibly there is an argument that they should worry she's compromised, but - Aroden clearly tried very hard to keep her from dying, so probably it's a good thing that she isn't dead?) 

It probably won't cause new irreversible damage. If he tells Ma'ar to stop then he should do that right away, though. 

All right. 

Very very gentle mindtouch. :Iomedae?: He'll give her a moment to see if she can actually recognize his mindvoice, in which case he can skip the additional words of telling her 'this is Ma'ar.' 

She does recognize it. Ma'ar. That suggests a bunch of important questions none of which she can successfully think of right now, and she's straining herself trying.

She shouldn't be doing that! Shakat would put in a block but he's not actually sure her mind-substrate is stable enough yet for that not to be more trouble than it's worth. 

What can he actually tell her which is true and reassuring and also the absolute bare minimum number of words. 

:In Predain. Secure here. Ceasefire holding: Pause. Give her some time to absorb that. :You met with shamans. Star-Eyed attacked you: Pause. :Dead and captured, respectively: He will leave out the weird blood-magic ritual, it's important but if he can't make any sense of it than he doubts Iomedae can. :Interrogation happening. Not - over - but no immediate emergency: 

He'll wait a while to see if she seems to be able to work with that, and also if gauge the Mindtouch is actually bearable for her or if the additional pain is pushing her back to not being able to think at all. 

She can think through pain, slowly, but she also knows that with a godheadache one really shouldn't, and this is a godheadache from a different god's meddling. 

take the headband

There's something more but she can't think of it. 

Effortfully: you'll do a good job.

Ma'ar desperately wants to know what the other thing is, and also does not need the Mindhealer to tell him that he absolutely shouldn't push Iomedae any harder right now. 

He...is also not sure if taking the headband will be a terrible idea! Iomedae does at least seem to have substantially more context on the problem happening to her, though, and she was the one who suggested it. 

What does the Mindhealer think? 

It's a powerful magical artifact he's never seen before, how is he supposed to have a professional opinion lined up here. 

...if the thing it does is make her smarter (wow) it probably won't rip her head apart to remove it now. It might actually ease some of the pressure, if she's having fewer thoughts. 

He will very carefully take the headband. 

The Mindhealer is hovering, ready to ask him to put it back immediately if it looks like it's setting off a destructive cascade. 

What does it in fact look like? 

- a lot less strain, a lot less stubbornly trying to weave thoughts through all the acetone and emptiness.

But also quite evidently some thought-patterns that don't complete any longer, that were relying on something that's no longer there.

She's settled down anyway, to some very simple thought-patterns that work just fine. Endure. Endure. Endure. Endure so you can fight another day.

...This seems fine. It's one of the weirdest things he's ever seen but it does easier on her overall, more restful for her mind, better for her recover.

Also the Mindhealer is not sure what else he can do right now, and like with normal Healing, there's sort of a maximum limit for how much Mindhealing you really want to throw at someone in one day and he's arguably exceeded it already. (And is definitely exceeding his own limits for heavy Gift-use. He has a headache. Not nearly as bad as his poor patient's headache but he's still cranky about it.) 

He wants to ask her more about this 'godheadache' condition and if there are known treatments for it or at least predictions of how long it lasts and how complete a recovery she can expect without extra help, but that's a very stupid thing to ask her about right now. She should rest, and do as little as possible, and if they're lucky then by tomorrow morning she'll be better off enough that they can have a conversation. 

He's going to put the headband on after he's sure Iomedae is settled and won't urgently need anything in the next few minutes. What if the explosion of feelings happens again.

:Keeping you safe: he promises her. :Rest. ...Can put you to sleep?: Healers always complain that Healing-enforced sleep is less restful than natural sleep but it's got to be more restful than lying there enduring horrible agony. 

(He's so angry with the Star-Eyed Goddess, and - probably unfairly - kind of angry with Aroden for letting this happen.) 

:Sleep.: she agrees.

Then the Healers can nudge her back to a deeper-than-natural sleep, where her mind is still and quiet and nothing is putting strain on any of the still-damaged areas. 

Ma'ar only lets go of her hand once Thoughtsensing tells him that she's not experiencing much at all. 

...He is definitely going to put on the headband, but. In a moment. They should send the Mindhealer off-duty to rest until tomorrow morning, at which point there will probably be more to do, but first he wants as complete a report as possible. 

Shakat is not just going to tell Adept Kiyamvir Ma'ar to go away, however tempting it is. He's still going to be grumpy about it. 

Iomedae seems to recognize what's happening to her, and seems to expect to recover, or at least doesn't seem to expect to be in permanent agonizing pain. It...sounds like in this case, possibly a god deliberately tried to break her mind; before, he was struggling to think what could cause such catastrophic mental damage, but actually if a god tried to break her, they're probably lucky it's not worse. She's capable of speaking and of at least very basic reasoning, which is a good sign. Various things are improving even without intervention, albeit very very slowly; that's also a good sign. 

What's less of a good sign is that - he's pretty sure some of the damage is going to be irreversible. With her mind barely working and without having known her before this, it's hard to tell what the long term consequences will be. It might just be memory loss, but it might be the loss of other more critical faculties. He would be worried about it hitting emotional regulation, that's particularly easy to disrupt, but she...actually seems to be coping with this with remarkable grace and composure, so that's also a good sign. And whatever the damage turns out to be, it's probably something that she'll be able to learn to work around, especially given her POWERFUL MAGICAL ARTIFACT THAT MAKES YOU SMARTER; people can be remarkably good at learning to work around impairments. 

He does think they're looking at weeks of recovery time. Maybe months. 

...Instead of having pointless emotions about this, Ma'ar is going to grit his teeth and put on the stupid headband and hopefully have emotions that are at least more productive. 

It feels pretty different from the last time. Possibly because he was substantially less impaired without it, and it's a different kind of impairment, it's not that he was foggy-headed or forgetful, it's just that everything felt fake. 

Everything abruptly feels very very real and up-close. It's jarring, and he has to spend a few moments focusing on not crying in front of a Mindhealer who will be really annoying about it. It's not actually impairing. Everything that felt distant and hard to care about is suddenly sharp, in-focus, and it once again viscerally feels like the world is a thing he can affect and not just a story playing out somewhere else with a plot that he doesn't like. The awareness-of-his-own-thoughts is there, but it's much less spiraling off into random emotional pits. There are probably a lot of emotional pits he has yet to walk into but right now he has more urgent priorities. 

Priorities:

Maintaining the ceasefire. And pushing ahead with peace talks is a high priority, actually, though it's frustrating that Iomedae won't be available for it. He thinks they were close, though; Iomedae had a draft. He can build on her work. If he needs her counsel, he can try having conversations with imaginary Iomedae in his head, rather than bothering actual Iomedae, whose highest priority right now needs to be resting and not hurting herself any more. And he feels like he's starting to grasp at a much better understanding of what Iomedae would say and how she would reason about various situations... 

Peace talks, then. And unravelling the plot with the shamans, if it turns out there was any additional plot, and not just a couple of people receiving a direct revelation and trying their best to fulfill Their goddess' will. 

....he's upset about that. He's pretty angry about it, actually, even separately from being angry about Iomedae's injuries. The people of the Star-Eyed  deserved a better goddess. 

They'll find a way to build one, then. 

The dead shaman is an unanswered question. ...With the headband's enhancement, he is at least managing to produce guesses - he really knows very little about the various temple orders, that's an issue and also it was clearly a mistake, even if he's right - because he's right - that the gods of his world seem to mostly be the enemies of people who want a flourishing civilization. 

It was probably some way of increasing his goddess' power, whether by literally gifting Her with the blood-magic release of his death or something more complex. She might be planning something else to throw at Iomedae, or She might just have been very badly weakened or exhausted by whatever happened with Iomedae. Since apparently Aroden showed up and, among other things, provided Ma'ar with the warning that may well have saved Iomedae's life. 

- ohhhhhh, and Aroden gave Iomedae access to Healing again, that explains it. Ma'ar had somehow at no point considered explicitly what happened, in the jumbled gap between when he scooped Iomedae out of Urtho's Tower and when he woke up on the floor and panic-Gated out, he didn't have time for the Healers being incredibly worried at him, but they thought he was dying. Presumably he was dying, up until the point when Iomedae healed him - he must have gotten unlucky about how hard Urtho's countermeasures hit, but of course he was unlucky, this entire operation was orchestrated by a goddess with Foresight. 

What were the goals of the Star-Eyed Goddess, in doing this at all, and did She achieve them. 

It...looks like not, mostly? Unless Iomedae is permanently and irrecoverably damaged, but she's Iomedae. She might need weeks, is all, and that's okay, because the headband might make it deeply annoying to be a human mortal who experiences emotions, but he...does, actually, feel like he can regain control of the situation. 

Is the plan incomplete, with some final step looming in their future? Or was it just...miscalculated? It doesn't seem impossible it was a straight-up unforced error, by a goddess trying to combat someone She didn't understand. Maybe She hadn't known that Aroden could or would intervene? 

This is a question where he probably just lacks the information to confidently come to a conclusion. Can he...get that information and if so how. He should probably arrange to be in contact with the religious officials who Iomedae did get along with, which he thinks are at this point the temple orders of Bestet and of the Nameless God of Eternal Flame. He's not looking forward to it but they've probably earned an update on Iomedae's condition. ...And the church of the Nameless God was involved in the prisoner exchange efforts, though not openly, but - it's still evidence that they aren't necessarily enemies and might even be friends. 

Other loose ends include Conn Levas, who may or may not even have been a godplot. Probably was, but the man clearly doesn't consider himself a servant of any gods, or of anyone at all save himself. He's free right now. Urtho's people probably were trying to keep an eye on him but...things are chaotic. 

- he needs to make sure the fourteen-year-old girl with the sword attached to her is all right. That entire situation is very confusing but the magic sword has been a surprisingly key player, recently, and - seems both aligned with at least some of the gods, and also aligned with the mission of Iomedae's survival and a successful peace treaty. 

Understanding what happened and why, and dealing with the aftermath, is an important step to cover here. It's not a first step; it will be a lot easier to negotiate something around Tantara's handling of the rogue shamans once they're more officially and stably not at war. 

...If 'rogue shamans' is even the story they're going to go with. If instead the temple order of the Star-Eyed Goddess backs them, which doesn't seem impossible after their Goddess committed to the strategy She apparently did, then that's a new and exciting mess and he doesn't know what happens next. 

Not useful to speculate now. Stay on top of communication channels, get more information, get peace talks scheduled, and the thing he wants to work up to is for he and Urtho to meet face to face. It'll be so much easier to resolve some of these pieces, then. He desperately wishes Iomedae could be there too, but it can't wait weeks. And he shouldn't in fact conduct sensitive negotiations while under a mind-altering magical effect that shuts down fear. 

One thing he definitely can't afford to do is to stay in this room at Iomedae's side for the next week. This is - actually pretty upsetting, it turns out! He wants to be closeby enough at all times that he can on an instant's notice Gate her somewhere else. 

But, realistically, other people can guard her almost as well as Ma'ar can, and other people cannot run diplomatic talks anywhere near as effectively on his behalf, and it makes sense for him to focus on the things that only he can do. And getting Tantara and Predain to a state of peace will, actually, make Iomedae safer in expectation, probably by a much greater margin than the difference between a guard who can Gate her out in one second versus half a second. 

'She might be lonely' is also not a compelling reason to stay. Iomedae knows other people, here, and many of them are also going to be very busy, but he can leave a note with the Healers to, when she's next awake, ask her who if anyone she would like to stay with her.

...He sort of doesn't expect her to ask for it, not if it comes at any cost whatsoever to the peace efforts, which it would, since nearly everyone Iomedae knows is themselves an important player in the war and the prospective peace. 

Ma'ar lingers for a few more minutes, watching Iomedae sleep and turning over all the pieces in his mind. 

And then he leaves, to arrange to obtain a copy of Iomedae's draft proposal on peace talk and discuss it with his King.