...That narrows it down to two places it could be. Probably. Ma'ar can scry both of them in the next ten seconds.  

Think. 

Is the situation retrievable. 

- probably not. It doesn't matter what went wrong - though the obvious guess is obvious, he should have put a compulsion on Shaiknam and risked it being detected, the man is not reliable and thinks far better of his own judgement than is warranted and probably thought he was being incredibly clever - but either way it's too late to undo. 

His people are dying over there. 

If he sends in his mages, there's - no way back from this. If he...does nothing...then maybe no one except some defenseless foot soldiers gets hurt, and maybe the Tantaran side and their mysterious terrifyingly powerful ally will be confused enough to hesitate - 

- but General Shaiknam was making a bet, that Ma'ar would see a fait accompli and wouldn't be able to bring himself to watch his people die while he did nothing, and...he cannot, in fact, bring himself to do that. This is his fault, not theirs. 

Can he get them out. 

....Not all of them. He's too slow, too little too late, and fifty of his people are already down, dead or dying, and - 

He can't, actually, bring himself to give up on saving anyone. For strategic reasons, partly, it's going to spook the rest of his people and convincing everyone to go for the ceasefire the first time was hard enough that he doesn't think he can do it twice. But also something more fundamental than that. They're his people. They thought they were following his orders. He can't just...wash his hands of that. 

What are his options. 

He can try to send a messenger clarifying that he didn't intend this and General Shaiknam acted without orders. The problem is that it's too slow; if he sends an un-Gifted messenger to their side of Korbast Pass, the message absolutely won't reach General Judeth fast enough to save any of his people – even if she believed it, which he wouldn't in her place.

(Implicit, not a thought he has time to fully unpack: if the foreign stranger slaughters several units of his infantry, regardless of how much this is obviously their fault, the King is approximately going to consider this proof that the ceasefire was a ruse.) 

He can remain at a distance but try to get orders to his people directly, to stand down. That might work. It probably won't. The monitor on-site probably just knocked herself unconscious, so he's lost his best point of contact. If he were one of those soldiers, and had two conflicting hard-to-verify information sources on what Adept Kiyamvir Ma'ar had ordered, he probably wouldn't believe the one that said 'drop your weapons while under attack in enemy territory.'

He can send in mages in force, and play into General Shaiknam's hands, and destroy any chance of the miraculous ceasefire sticking. And maybe without accomplishing anything at all, it might just mean sending more of his people into a doomed battle; it's not clear fifty mages could hold their own any better against...that, whatever that is...

...he can go in himself, alone, and give the order to surrender directly, in Mindspeech recognizable as coming from him, and - what - Gate out as many people as he can...? And if he only does that, only shields himself and evacuates who he can, if he very clearly doesn't attack, then – well, it's a violation of the ceasefire order, but not much more of one than what's already happened, and it might still preserve enough confusion that, even if he gets himself killed, the situation is still - retrievable from there - 

(He could Gate someone else in, that's the non-stupid thing to do that doesn't involve massive personal risk, but it's nearly as escalatory, and will take much longer because he'll need to actually pick someone and explain it to them, and it's - condemning them to a near-certain ugly death -) 

(The war stopped being winnable as soon as a powerful stranger landed in Tantara. That's - not an option, anymore, and if anything he's relieved to have it off the table.) 

Until now, he would have been confident that he could win any one-on-one fight, or at least flee one he was losing. He's - very much not confident he could win this one. 

Doesn't matter. He has yet to think of any other option that leads to even a chance of something other than escalating back to full-scale war. 

(It depends what the stranger wants. He's not sure. But it seems...plausible, at least...that what she wants is for there to stop being a stupid pointless wasteful war. It's not such an odd thing to want, even if the King was far from sold on that theory.) 

If his soldiers die, it's forever, but that's not true for him

Breathe. 

Gate. He aims for half a mile away, in the forest; he doesn't need to be able to see people to reach them with Mindspeech or magic. 

Gates are rather spectacularly visible to mage-sight. Judeth is alerted within less than a second. 

She needs a Mindspeaker to relay to Iomedae right now that that's Ma'ar. 

Ma'ar is not a powerful enough Mindspeaker to Broadsend to a crowd, and he doesn't know everyone well enough to target individual minds. He could try the powerful stranger directly, but - what reason does she have to believe him, at this point? 

The commanders and lieutenants, then. 

:This is Kiyamvir Ma'ar. General Shaiknam acted without orders. You are in violation of the ceasefire stand down lay down your weapons surrender NOW follow evacuation-Gate protocol: and then the next person and then the next and he's shielding himself as thoroughly as he can. 

- and most mages can't project a Gate-threshold more than twenty yards from themselves, but Ma'ar can distance-cast it at a mile, and he knows exactly where those clusters of minds are. A Gate goes up. It's been about five seconds since his Gate in. 

If Iomedae can't directly detect Gates or minds lurking in the woods, it's going to be more like fifteen seconds before a Tantaran Mindspeaker manages to relay the message to her, though possibly the visible Gate - as far away from her as Ma'ar could manage - is a hint. 

Also she can observe, in the first five seconds, that some people are laying down their weapons, now, even the ones who aren't sprinting toward the Gate. 

Far from the majority, though. 

She can directly notice the extremely powerful spell not with magic but with situational awareness and ludicrously good vision. Gate. That's what Judeth had expected, Gates in with backup, but the backup is very badly timed. Ceasefire definitely broken, then, with the two possibilities that this is a conventional attack (this badly executed? when they had the advantage of surprise? doesn't fit, doesn't make sense) and that this is a suicide attack aimed at destroying her, which fits a whole lot better.

She pauses in killing everyone who still holds a weapon and sprouts angel wings. The spell also gives her truespeech and invulnerability to most insufficiently powerful magic, and she's going to need it. "Get out," she yells at the gryphons in their own language, "I fear a Final Strike -" 

- and is anyone, in fact, coming through the Gate - she'd really rather go through herself and hit them before they can time their attack to crossing the threshold, but for all she knows the other side is in Predain and she's not going to break even what looks like a very thoroughly betrayed ceasefire -

Ma'ar can distance-cast a Gate-threshold but he can't do it from five hundred miles away and he can't hold two Gates at once. His entry Gate is up for less than a second and he dives away from where it landed even as he's casting the new threshold among the troops and Mindspeaking, and the talismans he's wearing shield him against nearly every known form of Velgarth detection magic. 

No one is coming through on the other Gate, the one that's close. No one is even visible on the other side, just trees. (He put it in a random rural location, no point in leading the powerful stranger to somewhere important.) 

Ma'ar himself is, however, going to be on the Tantaran side, in the woods about half a mile away, for however many seconds it takes him to Mindspeak all the commanders and lieutenants, and then for as long as he has before the powerful stranger tries to kill him, in which case he is intending to abandon his evacuation-Gate and drop a horizontal thresholdness Gate under himself and if anything he hopes she'll follow him then at least she wouldn't be here - 

One of Tantara's Mindspeakers reaches for her. 

:Farseer says it's Ma'ar. That way: Vague mental sense-of-direction and distance. :Shielded: 

Ma'ar is here. The one who is holding that Gate, though he isn't at its other end. Its other end hasn't yet been identified. His people are scrambling for it. No one has stepped through in the other direction.

That makes no fucking sense. 

She genuinely has not been this confused in a long time and generally when this confused she would stop killing people but - there is the very likely possibility that this is adversarially orchestrated, the being this confused, and sometimes you have to start trying to win the position you're playing instead of standing there paralyzed by the puzzle of why you're playing this position. 

He is in Tantaran territory he agreed not to enter, Gating troops around, after they attacked on what they said were his orders. 

She casts a spell for additional speed that'll add to what the boots give her. The angel wings propel her off the ground and up towards the griffins. And from there - he can't be far - 

Not that far, no, though he's at least trying to crouch out of sight in the underbrush - the Farseer got a glimpse before he raised more shields, and the gryphons haven't yet gotten word that he's here at all, just Iomedae's shouted warning; they're flying away rather than toward him.

His hiding place and shields are probably not enough to evade Iomedae's situational awareness for very long. 

He's still not doing anything except holding that distant Gate-threshold, and privately Mindspeaking one person after another - 

- she's coming toward him, he can sense the presence of her mind, it's very bright even if her shields are impassible. That's - good in that she's no longer killing his soldiers, bad in that she is presumably here to kill him and he's barely had time to get anyone out yet but he can't hold a Gate and effectively defend himself at the same time, and if she kills him then the Gate goes down anyway, and...probably the Tantaran general won't slaughter his soldiers wholesale if they've surrendered... 

If and when the powerful stranger gets within fifty or a hundred yards of him, depending on how fast she's moving, he'll drop the evacuation Gate and try to raise another Gate here and get out. And then Mindspeak her and surrender, probably - but he would actually rather she follows him through and he can do that far away from here. 

Moving: very fast. Also: calling out an unfamiliar word that causes chains of light to lash up from the ground around him and bind him. 

He's not in fact visibly Evil. Another small note of confusion, though what it adds up to in this cacophany of confusion is just -

"Surrender," she says, in his native language, "I've killed no one who did," and then she's descending sword-first.

He's not, especially, evaluating whether or not he believes that claim, just - whenever or not it's better to die here and probably wake up somewhere else or - find out whatever happens next with a powerful stranger whose motives he knows very little about - 

He can't move and he's not going to have time for a Gate and - he's very well shielded, she might not be able to kill him instantly, he could try to fight, but that would definitely be crossing a line that can't be un-crossed and, besides, he's pretty sure it won't matter to the end result at all - is she even going to give him time to surrender, he's not trying to fight but Mindspeech isn't instantaneous especially when one is distracted and terrified. 

:I surrender: he sends as fast as he can, and is pretty sure he's going to die anyway. If she kills him slowly maybe he can at least say that he didn't intend this to happen. Maybe he can - he's never really thought that begging or pleading helped but he would, for Predain, she - probably wouldn't kill more of his people because he begged her not to - 

The sword is, in fact, already through his magical shields and halfway into his ribcage, which just means she pulls it out and does an immediate Lay on Hands. (It will also dispel all his magic artifacts. She is not sorry.)

"Don't move. Don't use magic." Are they alone, is there anyone else in the woods here -

Ma'ar is intensely confused about whatever extremely fast sequence of events just happened to him and whether he is, in fact, dying right now, and he's not incredibly processing what she's saying but he isn't going to try to move or use magic anyway. 

There does not appear to be anyone else nearby. 

The Tantaran Mindspeaker is trying to reach her. :What's happening -: 

:I have a mage here. He surrendered. I don't know if he's actually Ma'ar. I am really very confused right now. Can you urgently check if there are simultaneous attacks anywhere else including back at the Tower.:

"We've been scrying obvious places. Nothing at Korbast Pass, nothing outwardly obvious at the Tower though a strike team could have Gated into it in theory, the other camps on the front look quiet. No one's alerted us of anything." 

This is relayed. 

...He seems to still not be dead, which at least implies 'dying slowly', he should - there was a thing he was going to do if she gave him time - 

Mindspeaking is very hard right now, for some reason, but speaking out loud sounds harder. Ma'ar is kind of having trouble breathing and he can't tell if it's because he was just stabbed with a magic sword and is too far in shock for it to hurt or if he's just terrified. 

:Did not order this: he manages. :Shaiknam acted unilaterally. Please - do not hurt any more of them - please -: Is that enough begging. 

I cannot actually stop him from Gating out except by stabbing him if I notice a threshold, she advises Judeth. Also, please call off the rest of the gryphons. I do not at this time expect the soldiers to be reinforced, and that means I don't think they're a threat, and if I'm wrong and they are a threat I'll handle it. 

"Are you Kiyamvir Ma'ar."

(The Gate went down when Ma'ar got stabbed with a magic sword and the soldiers are so confused and terrified and also kind of a lot of them are lying on the ground with grievous stab wounds. It...sort of seems like a good idea to surrender whether or not the Mindspeech warning was really Ma'ar.) 

"If you stab him nonlethally or give him a moderate head injury, most mages can't concentrate enough to Gate through that and even if it's Ma'ar it'd at least slow him down." The Mindspeaker can relay that. 

And General Judeth will repeat the order to the gryphons to come inside the barrier-shield and STAY THERE, and every single mage who isn't literally incapacitated with exhaustion or already busy holding said shield is now going to be getting orders to scry this very long list of potentially-at-risk locations which she's reeling off as fast as her tongue can form words.