And then it's time to go; the troops march through the hills and woods with their banners flying and drums beating, deploying from massive marching columns into near-battle formations; they move in loose squares, infantrymen carrying pikes in large blocks with crossbowmen at the corners, robed mages covered in talismans with their focus-stones on their breasts, knights on horseback behind them with steel breastplates and visored helms and lances in their steel gauntlets, field artillery taken from imperial stores looking for mages to fire on. The areas are not, really, all that clear; the squares will tighten when the battle begins, bearing the cost of taking far greater sorcerous firepower for the gain of being impossible for imperial knights to ride down. They know the enemy is ahead, even if they don't exactly know how far. There's more formations left and right and behind of her, seemingly endless lines of troops - but there are other lines ahead, somewhere over the next hill.

Iomedae is to go a bit ahead of the leading square; she isn't trained in formation with them, and, also, she can kill everyone within arm's reach of her in about six seconds, so having those people be allies might slow her down a bit.

She runs, which she can do despite the armor. She makes the sword glow. 

Aroden, she pleads, make this unnecessary, but that's almost never in His power. 

So she'll run at the mages of the Imperial army, and try to kill most of them and distract the others with trying to kill her.

Aroden does not make it unneccessary.

But it is not, actually, all that hard to kill people. When the imperial lines are seen they're hastily-formed, east - and, yes, a bit north - of the rebels. The imperials have the high ground, but they're tired, and they just retreated from a very defensive position into ground they don't know and don't like. Iomedae has a little trouble killing imperial adepts the way she can everyone else, but not much; their talismans are stronger, but she is Iomedae, and there are not, actually, paladins stronger than her. A well-prepared and well-disciplined group of adepts prepared to concentrate fire at her might be able to kill her, or they might not; adepts who are trained in providing fire support and see their job as breaking infantry squares with sheer firepower, no. Most of them don't even realize what they're dealing with until it's too late.

War is a lot more fun when your enemies are mindless undead. 

The enhanced Prayer spell works. Gets her own people back on their feet, fully healed, and -

- at least sometimes it appears to just take the enemy down instantly. Their hearts stop, and they fold, and they die.

She hates it. It feels like blasphemy, to speak Aroden's name and Arazni's prayer and watch confused men on the wrong side of this mess clutch at their chests and then die. 

She doesn't dwell on it. She's busy stabbing people. There are a lot of people to stab. Forty thousand, she calculated, that first night in that first village, was a price she would pay, and the number has gone up since then as she's gotten more confident she can get what she wants out of victory. 

The Imperial troops really do not have a good response to her. Their discipline is good; often they'll keep fighting when a more sensible person would run. But they can't win.

Eventually, an adept who gets sufficiently desperate when fire and lightning and force don't work will go for summoning up a vast horde of abyssal demons practically on top of her, horrible masses of claws and fangs and teeth with no real intelligence, just the order to KILL IOMEDAE.

This is a pretty clever thing to do! She only has the one area-effect damage spell (and should really have zero), and if they're tough enough it won't help her. 

On the other hand. How fast can her sword move? Somehow, impossibly, the answer to that is 'it depends how many things in range to kill there are'. As long as she doesn't miss -- and she really, really doesn't miss -- her sword will move fast enough to go through all of them. 

In three seconds. 

- that part actually was fun. 

Okay back to the part that sucks which is finding the genuinely clever and inventive and strategic person who came up with that solution and sending him to quite-possibly-Hell.

That is very easy for her to do.

It doesn't take long to win the battle. Before day's end the remaining adepts begin gating the troops near them and themselves out, and that's around when the stranded imperials without gate-capable casters near them start streaming north in what begins as a fighting retreat and ends in rout; the Orisan cavalry is mostly disciplined enough to actually pursue, instead of plundering the baggage train. Not very many imperials will get away, and most of them will be ones who could swear themselves blind they never carried a sword.

Who needs healing? She saved one pulse of healing. 

Many people. Many people need healing.

Yeah. She doesn't have enough, obviously, but a forty foot radius is a pretty big space, five thousand square feet, and they can pack nearly a thousand badly wounded people in it, though some of them will probably die while they're getting that set up. 

Then she'll - she doesn't know. There's no one here she can grieve with. Even she can't dig a grave for a thing like this.

She'll walk the battlefield and offer a swifter death to any imperials down and dying slowly who they don't intend to save.  Mindread some people to estimate degree of compliance with her request they not kill the noncombatants. 

Pray to Anathei, for their immortal souls.

Be findable, if the Marshal wants anything.

They're doing all right.

And - nothing in particular.

The report lands on Altarrin's desk the next day, about sixteen hours after the gated-out remnants of Moris's army arrived in Tatanka. Overwhelming numbers of rebels attacked them in the eastern hills and, after a long battle, they barely withdrew, but in good order; communications are somewhat loose with the troops who didn't make the gates and so they haven't finished accounting for casualties, but though they inflicted overwhelming losses on the attacks, the causalties were still dreadful significant. Governor Vanaren insists that the situation is under control, but the numerical advantage he had over the rebels has still abruptly shrunk.

Oh, and there was an invincible magic warrior wielding a blazing sword that killed everything in very long arm's reach. That too. (Governor Vanaren is SKEPTICAL.)

(A letter arrives at about the same time, incidentally - not passed by the governor in his immediate report, who just summarized it as 'they claim to have the support of the god Aroden' and said he'd include all the petty details once he had finished assembling sources, but by one of Altarrin's eyes-on-the-scene who thought that in spite of whatever Vanaren wanted, this was important enough for Altarrin to have personal eyes on.)

Well. The timing could be worse; Altarrin is not currently literally in the middle of commanding a different battle in Taymyrr, they're still assembling forces that this is harder to screw up disastrously. 

First critical question, because at this point he is rather quickly downgrading his trust in Governor Vanaren's reports, and also information reported by soldiers withdrawing or rather fleeing from a battle going badly is never reliable: what were the actual casualties inflicted on the rebels? This...is going to be inconveniently harder to figure out via scrying-coverage than it would have been at the time the battle was happening, but he didn't have that, did he, because he can't afford the resource for continuous scrying-coverage everywhere and he tried delegating the allocation of it back to Vanaren's forces and did this go well, no, no it did not. 

He'll put some of his own people on it, here - they can afford a couple of candlemarks of eyes off Taymyrr - and he'll probably have to do it on his own, later, because if the rebels are smart then their leadership will already be mostly back behind anti-scrying shields. 

...He has no idea what god Aroden refers to. It's not a transliteration of Atet, he knows all the standard ones. He is irritated with Vanaren for not immediately passing the letter on, even if in this case it's not going to delay his information loop because he already took measures about it. He has tried to make it abundantly clear that he will never, ever react badly to being told of something, even if it's brought to his as a critical alert with a lot of alarm and it turns out to be trivial. He will, if he finds out that certain information was left out of reports, react rather worse, even if it turned out in the end that the information wasn't that important, as long as it should have been plausible from what was known at the time that it might be relevant. Altarrin is vastly better than anyone else at judging what's going to end up being relevant, and people still leave things out, for political reasons or to look more in control of the situation et cetera et cetera. Altarrin is not, however, irritated enough with Vanaren to respond strongly to it, not right now when he has a rebellion to crush in the province over.

Well. He'll read the letter.

This letter constitutes notice that the Knights of Ozem, a paladin order of the god Aroden, have entered into the war for control of Oris and are participating in hostilities alongside the armies fighting for Orisian independence.

The Knights of Ozem make the following representations about the war and our present state of knowledge, and swears to these representations on the honor of the order and the honor of its members, and in the name of our god, Aroden.

It is our present assessment that those forces the Knights of Ozem have lent to the Orisian independence forces are sufficient for the Orisian independence forces to win the war for Oris decisively. We expect this assessment to be unshared primarily because the capabilities of those forces the Knights of Ozem have lent to the Orisian independence forces are unknown to the Empire and (we believe) substantially underestimated.

We expect that Imperial assessors with accurate information about the Knights of Ozem and those forces the Knights have deployed in Oris would concur in our assessment that the war will be decisively won by the Orisian independence forces.

It is our desire to arrive at a peace agreement in which Oris is independent of the Empire, Imperial subjects can depart Oris in safely if they so choose, loss of life on both sides is minimized, and Oris and the Empire can subsequently enjoy sustained peace and shared prosperity. It is our belief that the war in which we presently engage offers the best prospects of that peace, and we would (to a degree limited by preexisting commitments) change course if we saw another route to that peace.

It is our comprehension that those forces fighting for Orisian independence demand a sovereign nation with the borders it possessed before the Imperial war of conquest, and it is our intent to fight alongside them until that demand is met.

In our comprehension of Aroden's will, He is no enemy of the Empire. If He were, this would not easily move us to war, which is generally contrary to the prosperity and flourishing of human civilization everywhere, and even less so to peacetime assassinations and engineered infrastructure accidents, which are contrary to the principles by which we operate. We believe it is the case that Aroden has never carried out or authorized operations inside the territory of the Eastern Empire outside of Oris.

We are willing to, as a gesture of goodwill and a step towards future cooperation, refrain from operations in the Eastern Empire outside of Oris, except for sending these letters, which we sincerely hope will reach someone who sees a route to peace on the basis of the information herein, and which we send with primarily that intent and the intent of establishing a reputation that will fortify future negotiations.

Our present anticipation is that the truth of this letter will be proven to the Empire only through the total destruction of its forces inside Oris. But that would be a tragedy, and we would sincerely and strongly prefer a negotiated peace as soon as possible.

In raising to the Empire's attention the fact that the Orisian forces are stronger than they would otherwise have been presumed to be, and that the Knights of Ozem are participating in the war, and that the Knights of Ozem believe our contribution to the war to be of substantial importance, we believe that we incur some real (though small) risk to the members of our order and to our prospects of success. The overwhelmingly most important consideration in favor of our decision to incur that risk was the desire to reduce deaths and evils committed in the course of war, either by increasing the probability of a negotiated peace before the destruction of the Imperial army in Oris or by establishing a precedent such that on the next occasion it is necessary for the order to write a letter like this one, the claims in it are more credible.

The Knights of Ozem do not represent any of the following:

- that the claims in this document about the capabilities of that detachment of Knights in Oris are comprehensive or non-misleading. We do represent that in our estimation this letter will cause you to inaccurately underestimate, rather than inaccurately overestimate, our capabilities, and further represent that we think a person having read this letter will overall have more accurate information, and predict us better, than a person who has not read it, and that the benefits we intend to derive from this letter come primarily from it creating a better understanding, within the Empire, of how and why to negotiate with us.

- that other communications claimed to be from the Knights of Ozem are created by us, or are subject to the commitments herein

- that this message has not been modified within the Empire after its transmission in a manner that would make the commitments to its truth inaccurate (though we intended no such modifications, know of none as of this writing, and will circulate many copies of this letter in an effort to, among other objectives, make it easy to determine the original and unmodified form)

He's never heard of a religious military order Knights of Ozem either; there are certainly plenty of religious military orders but this isn't obviously flagging as a transliteration for any he's heard of. 

It is our present assessment that those forces the Knights of Ozem have lent to the Orisian independence forces are sufficient for the Orisian independence forces to win the war for Oris decisively. We expect this assessment to be unshared primarily because the capabilities of those forces the Knights of Ozem have lent to the Orisian independence forces are unknown to the Empire and (we believe) substantially underestimated. 

That's - intriguing. He's not sure where it's going yet but the format is interesting. It gives the feeling of following some kind of known convention of diplomatic communications but it's not one he recognizes, and he's read a lot of examples, in a lot of languages, from as far away as the Haighlei Empire. ...He approves of it, he thinks, certainly more than he does of Court Haighlei diplomatic language, which is intensely frustrating. 

They're claiming powerful capabilities. Obviously. They expect that if the Empire had more information about their order, they would agree that the Oris rebellion was likely to succeed. Which is, well, obviously they would say that, it's not (yet) particularly new information. 

They want a peace agreement for an independent Oris, which is an INCREDIBLY BOLD proposal. He's not sure he's ever seen such a bold proposal presented in such measured, straightforward language. 

It is our belief that the war in which we presently engage offers the best prospects of that peace, and we would (to a degree limited by preexisting commitments) change course if we saw another route to that peace. It is our comprehension that those forces fighting for Orisian independence demand a sovereign nation with the borders it possessed before the Imperial war of conquest, and it is our intent to fight alongside them until that demand is met.

It's...the same kind of carefulness of format, a style that - resonates, in some way, though it's certainly not how he writes diplomatic letters. He's finding himself expecting with much higher odds than usual, not that he would get along with this militant order of 'Aroden', it's basically guaranteed he won't, but that they would at least be unusually possible to communicate with, as religious orders go. Assuming he wants to exchange letters with them. It's far from obvious it would be a good idea, just - it doesn't normally feel nearly this much like it would be a live option, even when they get written proclamations. 

In our comprehension of Aroden's will, He is no enemy of the Empire. If He were, this would not easily move us to war, which is generally contrary to the prosperity and flourishing of human civilization everywhere, and even less so to assassinations and engineered infrastructure accidents, which are contrary to the principles by which we operate. We believe it is the case that Aroden has never carried out or authorized operations inside the territory of the Eastern Empire outside of Oris. 

What. 

Altarrin has questions. 

...Altarrin is mostly wondering if someone got their hand on some Imperial treatises and decided to invent an entire religious order designed to sound maximally sympathetic to the Empire. But for...what? Altarrin probably would take an opening to try the path of talking instead of fighting, but almost no one else would. Altarrin is not in fact in command in Oris, wasn't the intended recipient of this letter, and is only reading it at all because he arranged to have spies. He would maybe consider their 'gesture of goodwill' offer not to conduct any operations outside of Oris to be worth something if he believed it. Which he doesn't. He's...not sure gods even can deliberately limit Their nudges based on the borders of human countries, and even if They did he does not at all expect Them to accurately communicate this to Their followers. 

In raising to the Empire's attention the fact that the Orisian forces are stronger than they would otherwise have been presumed to be, and that the Knights of Ozem are participating in the war, and that the Knights of Ozem believe our contribution to the war to be of substantial importance, we believe that we incur some real (though small) risk to the members of our order and to our prospects of success. The overwhelmingly most important consideration in favor of our decision to incur that risk was the desire to reduce deaths and evils committed in the course of war, either by increasing the probability of a negotiated peace before the destruction of the Imperial army in Oris or by establishing a precedent such that on the next occasion it is necessary for the order to write a letter like this one, the claims in it are more credible.

...

This particular framing, of the letter itself as an act of good faith with some cost to the order, reads like something that was very much written to appeal to Altarrin personally. Or maybe to Bastran, which is...at all more plausible? Bastran doesn't normally override his commanders' tactical decisions, for the very good reason that he would be tempted to be as generous as possible and in the long run more people would die, but a peasant rebellion in a recently conquered province might not know that. Though in that case they probably also wouldn't know enough about the Emperor to guess that he would be moved at all by humanitarian concerns period, let alone by this careful analysis of incentives and pointing out that the Knights of Ozem paid a small penalty in order to give the Empire more of an opening to choose cooperation. 

...Not really plausible, he's just spectacularly confused.

We do represent that in our estimation this letter will cause you to inaccurately underestimate, rather than inaccurately overestimate, our capabilities,

Who even says that?

and further represent that we think a person having read this letter will overall have more accurate information, and predict us better, than a person who has not read it, and that the benefits we intend to derive from this letter come primarily from it creating a better understanding, within the Empire, of how and why to negotiate with us.

And some additional careful caveats, helpfully pointing out where Altarrin shouldn't trust this letter (and helpfully emphasizing ways that this isn't their fault, such as faked additional letters or modifications by disloyal subordinates.) 

Altarrin...has questions. 

He wants to know where whoever wrote this went to school. This is by far not the most important question but he's so curious. Where exactly in the world do they teach people to write things like this and can he find them and hire some of their students.

He wants, obviously, to know what game they're playing here. And whether they would see it as a game at all. Regardless of their actual capabilities - which he isn't worried about yet, but certainly wants to know more concrete information about the situation there. A battle did just go badly. He...isn't shocked that it went badly, General Moris was being an idiot and maybe if Altarrin had been micromanaging Oris he could have averted that but he wasn't, was he, he was instead micromanaging a different crisis. 

(He's not actually tired, he slept fine, it's just - kind of a mental habit, at this point, to lift his head a little from what's in front of him and notice the smoldering metaphorical fires in all directions and feel very tired about all of it.) 

He wants to know who this god is. If 'Aroden' corresponds to a real deity at all, and not a story invented by someone very clever with a surprising amount of access to Imperial texts that aren't even commonly taught anymore, but - he's noticing the feeling of stretching facts into an ill-fitted frame, of "invented to be convincing" not actually feeling like it leaves him with fewer questions than before. 

He wants to know why Oris. Assuming the Knights of Ozem actually exist, and actually are roughly what they claim themselves to be, and actually serve or see themselves as serving a god called Aroden - assuming any of that, why did they pick this peasant rebellion to back? He has a feeling there's going to turn out to be something relevant there. 

...Actually he's going to go back and read the sketchy report on the battle in a lot more detail, and cross-reference the numbers given in it with the numbers he has on file, from scrying checks. 

An invincible magic warrior wielding a blazing sword that killed everything in very long arm's reach, was the claim. 

Tentative casualty reports that he's pretty sure are pushed, on both sides, in the direction that makes the situation look favorable to Governor Vanaren. You get a sixth sense, after a while, for fudged numbers that are going to turn out to be a lot less favorable once everything is tallied up. And the estimate on the total size of the rebel force is - well, he doesn't buy it. The army he saw at Manahau was substantial, sure, but with inconsistent training, and numbers filled out by new recruits, even with a two-to-one or three-to-one numerical advantage - even with some serious fumbles on General Moris' part - it shouldn't have gone as badly as he suspects it actually did. 

So.

A battle went worse than known information would predict. How surprised Altarrin actually is will depend on how heavily the numbers were actually fudged, but suspicion leads him toward the case where the final report is very different, especially when they finally manage to track down the rebel army on scrying and count what's left. In which case: a battle that went a lot worse than predicted, claims of a mysterious warrior with a blazing sword - which doesn't not sound like godpossession - and a letter claiming to be an answer to the question of why the rebels are winning. 

...or maybe it's less mysterious than that, casualty figures will turn out to make sense, the rebels' forces will turn out to be substantially reduced, and this will be an unfortunate update but mostly on Governor Vanaren's competence. This is mostly what Altarrin is expecting to end up observing; you don't see genuinely shocking, genuinely model-breaking surprises very often, and if you did it would mostly say you were bad at having accurate predictions in the first place, which Altarrin is not. 

He is, nonetheless, going to invest a few candlemarks of today, for some of his people who aren't urgently busy on logistics, to find out what actually happened. And he'll do the really advanced scrying legwork himself, in a shielded Work Room he set up on the first day at his staging location, where he can do impossible magic and learn things he should have no way to know without anyone observing how. 

(He's not passing on in reports to the Governor that he's doing this. Vanaren will get antsy if he feels like his toes are being stepped on, and maybe the situation is still tolerable.) 

It's been a day since the battle, and reports are not, alas, that easy to piece together. He can scry everyone he saw in the fortress earlier, and confirm they're mostly alive; he can scry the area around them, and observe that the rebel army is moving along roads through forest and farm somewhere he doesn't recognize, and that it's very hard to get accurate headcounts when you can't get see most of the army at any one time, which, to be fair, he already knew. General Moris is clearly lying about his performance to look better, but this is not the first time that's happened; it could be he adjusted the numbers slightly, or it could be he was defeated against the odds through divine intervention and his own incompetence.

(It is clear, though, that the casualty numbers do not include those missing; scrying on him and his top lieutenants and looking over Vanaren's metaphorical shoulder, he pretty clearly does not have most of his army with him, Adepts aside. Just how many men they lost mostly seems to depend on how many of them they can find again.)