:They've left themselves open, and we've got the bastards!:

The summary is immediate: The imperials just set up scrying wards near every Gate-terminal on any canal anywhere near Orestan's force and began moving their troops through three of the nearest, their main force through two canals ahead of the Orisan scouts (starting, of course, with a quick screen of elite troops and mages to shield the canals) and a small flanking force of cavalry behind their lines, clearly to launch a surprise attack once they're organized. It's a plan that takes risks to win big; so overwhelmingly dividing your force in the face of the enemy flies in the face of military doctrine, but great generals have won victories before by flying in the face of military doctrine, and if it succeeds Governor Vanaren can surround the Orisans, crush their thin lines, and inflict an absolute wrecking defeat on them.

:Iomedae, change of plans. Drop Jevan when you swoop in; I need you to take out the gate-arch to cut them off from reinforcement.: 

... Assuming, that is, that Orestan can't quickly march to the nearer canal, cut their ability to get reinforcements through it, ambush the tiny flanking force of cavalry, and then defeat the other army as it marches to the rescue.

Which he can.

So that's going to go very badly for the imperial army, really.

Iomedae has been to the best of her ability double-checking Orestan's tactical calls but he has a lot more information than her and a lot more experience with the dynamics of this kind of combat and she defaults to obeying. Do they in fact have time for Jevan to wear her armor and be potentially another suspected Knight or should they just go immediately.

He can get it on fast, he thinks. (Iomedae moves fast, and, frankly, so do Adepts who can afford fast horses.)

He'd be happy to explain the complete military logic to her later but right now he wants to destroy an imperial army in detail.

And so the Orisan army moves through the fields, deploying as it moves, one great wall of shining metal and blue banners and horsed knights with gleaming spears and sabers, rolling onwards -

- Towards the gate, where imperial legionnaires with the same wooden-hafted pikes held in clenched hands, thin metal of the gauntlets that shield their remaining fingers from blades and cuts over scarred flesh, maintain a screen on just the far side of the canal, to where riverboats pull up by the sides unloading more pikemen and crossbowmen and horse-transports unload their cargoes with their riders by their sides - 

The army of the Empire knows, because the armies of the Empire always knows, that they have more fire, that Imperial adepts can outshoot any other adepts because they're better trained and there's more of them, all they need to do is hold out long enough for their mages to blast down the enemy's pike squares and then they can roll over them. 

(And this is more true now than ever, because they have most of the Adepts that would go with twenty thousand men, and there's not much above eleven thousand in the imperial army before the emperor divided it, here.)

There's clear lines of fire, this battle, and the guards around the canal can see just how outnumbered they are as the Orisan army approaches.

And their adepts can see right up to the limits of their range of fire.

She hands over the armor and her cloak of Resistance and her ring of Evasion and her ring of Protection, and her boots which increase the wearer's speed and also can be activated to cast Haste, and she casts Resist Energy (Fire) and Resist Energy (Lightning) on Jevan. She's keeping the gauntlets, which have many of her magic items in them, and her mantle which keeps her in her physical prime, and the robe that grants her spell resistance, and her ring of Sustenance obviously, and the gloves that grant her impossible reach with her sword, and the helmet so she can keep her Telepathy and conceal her face from the enemy. 

:You should be extraordinarily hard to kill. The boots only last ten rounds, use them a round at a time and activate them only as needed when you're in a tight spot. I'll also give you some temporary strength right when we land; use it, it won't last.:

And then she proposes they be Gated two miles up in the air above that Gate-arch, which is 30 seconds of freefall and then four seconds of slowing down for the landing. She's done it plenty of times and never squishes her sack of potatoes. 

:Right.:

He grins the fierce grin of someone who is going to kick so much ass.

- And, as the sheer massed imperial fireballs and lightning bolts tear their deadly holes through the Orisan lines and the Orisan fire is returned in significantly lower quantity (as, less than a mile off, another Imperial army hurriedly forms and comes marching to the rescue - as the cavalry and infantry take their losses and move on - 

Iomedae and Jevan appear two miles in midair above the Gate.

Skydiving is fun. They do it for relaxation, on the Crusade, when the wizards have Teleports remaining at the end of the day. Over the water so that if you fail to cast your flight solution in time and also are sufficiently tough you won't die. Iomedae can, she has determined, survive a dive into water unscathed from an arbitrary height, even from so high there's no air to breathe while you're up there. Other people end up quite scathed, but someone can grab them and put them back to perfect health. 

Her timing is very good. She wants to get the most out of her Greater Angelic Aspect, so she casts it ten seconds from landing. Then she casts Burst of Glory, which will give Jevan three times the life-force of a normal person and supplement Iomedae just as much though on her it's less noticeable, and also infuse them with holy energy that makes them better at fighting, and also make her glow like a torch. She extends the wings - they're magical, they can't break from the strain - in the precise fashion recommended for slowing down from a dive without squishing the civilian you're carrying. 

She drops Jevan onto his feet from a foot in the air and casts Prayer to take out everyone in a forty foot radius who isn't wearing a very good talisman and makes her sword glow and starts smashing the arch.

And Jevan will start providing suppressing fire aimed at all the mages surrounding them -

- Which is necessary because when they see what Iomedae is doing basically every mage present who isn't desperately defending themselves starts throwing fire and lightning and force at her, and using specialized adept-killing weapons, too, like the projectiles that fire fire and force, too, because they know this is key - 

- But, actually, the arch breaks fairly quickly. Iomedae has to actually try, because it's huge and stone and enchanted, but it was not built up to stand up to extremely enchanted swords wielded by people much stronger than the typical elephant.

They actually manage to hurt her pretty substantially, what with how she's occupied with taking down the arch as fast as possible and not at all with defending herself and what with how she's not even armored. Greater Angelic Aspect kills a lot of hostile magic dead before it gets near her, and it gives her very good damage reduction, but she gave the really good energy resistance spells to Jevan and plenty of that fire and lightning is overcoming the weaker resistances Greater Angelic Aspect grants.

Even if only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of things suddenly thrown at her hit, a normal person would be dead ten times over.

She of course doesn't indicate this in any way. She breaks the arch, and then starts killing them.

... Which she can do basically the instant she's in range, no matter how many ordinary soldiers try to get in her way. Meanwhile, all the troops in the boats are trying to scramble out - and of course Jevan is responding by electrifying the entire river - 

Altarrin was not personally watching via scrying, at the moment the two armies first crashed together. Altarrin is busy, and while he's definitely quietly worried about Oris and intending to check up on the situation at regular intervals, at this particular moment he's very busy with his own forces' obnoxious supply chain issues. 

He has people on it, both scrying the main body of the rebels' forces and staying up to date on what Governor Vanaren's remaining forces are up to. He was warned that there was likely going to be a battle, today, and from his very very quick glance he was expecting it to either go quite well or very badly, but there wasn't anything it made sense for him to do, personally, and so he set it aside, because worrying about things he's decided not to prioritize is inefficient.

The mage doing intermittent scrying-checks ups the frequency as the armies approach each other, but doesn't interrupt Altarrin, since so far nothing is happening that wasn't predicted by the information they already had. 

...The mage's scrying-point is quite sensibly about a hundred yards above ground level, to be able to see most of the picture at once while still being close enough to make out any details. The Gate that Iomedae dropped through is two miles up, and the issue with using mage-sight through scrying is that it's directional. He has no idea they're there until, suddenly, a figure in incredibly magical armor - and a woman radiating more unfamiliar magic from half a dozen artifacts - are right there, in midair, falling. He's in the middle of getting a communication-spell up to Altarrin's secretary when the woman sprouts wings - what? - and slows and lands beside the canal-Gate terminus - 

- there's a burst of unfamiliar magic and almost everyone within a forty-foot radius just...collapses...and she starts destroying the canal-Gate terminus with a glowing sword.

Altarrin's staff mages are well trained and disciplined and experienced, and he's nonetheless startled enough that he loses the half-formed spell and nearly loses the scry-link entirely. 

This seems like a matter worth interrupting Altarrin directly for.

He has the communication-spell up within another ten seconds, by which point the Gate is down and the winged sword-carrying woman has survived an appalling quantity of offensive magic being thrown at her, and now both of the new arrivals are moving faster than should be humanly possible, the armored one throwing combat magic and the winged woman swinging her sword, impossibly fast, and cutting through shields and people's bodies like there's nothing there. 

Altarrin is fast. He has his own scrying-spell up within three seconds. It's not in the right place, though, he's targeting approximately based on the map. It's going to take him another fifteen seconds to move the scry-point to where he can get a good view of what's going on. 

(He's not having any particular emotional reaction, yet, emotional reactions are for when you have any idea what's going on and ideally aren't for emergencies at all.) 

There's a winged woman! The wings are bright and white and feathered; her face is covered by a very magic helmet; her clothes look magic too. She has shields, including some elaborate and extensive shields that extend twenty feet out from her and move with her effortlessly. The glowing sword moves too fast to track except if you unfocus your eyes, in which case you can see a sort of glowing afterimage. 

She's killing people. She's very good at it.

The armored guy might just be a strong Adept, except that he's wearing armor much better than the best shields, fire and lightning are just sliding off him (some of his shields are standard imperial work, others are alien even to Altarrin) and he takes hits that ought to kill someone and keeps moving. He's at least not just... letting everything hit him? He makes some mild efforts to defend himself?

The imperial troops here were caught halfway through deploying and are being completely wrecked. They're trying to form into reasonable defensive formations to hold off the advancing Orisan troops and it's not working because Iomedae can just tear through them; the ordinary soldiers have nowhere to run but only compulsions are holding the adepts to the battle, so far, and they aren't suicide-compulsions. They won't last long.

Altarrin had expectations about how this battle was going to go. They were, for the most part, pessimistic expectations. He didn't really expect Governor Vanaren or his staff to be good enough to pull off this kind of bold tactics, and he expected them to lose, and to take heavy casualties and manage to fail to evacuate even larger numbers of scattered troops. Within that possibility, he had a lot of uncertainty about various things, like how long it would take this to become obvious. 

What is actually happening, right now, is not within the realm of his expectations. It's not on the same continent as his expectation. It's not something he expected could happen, anywhere, ever. Gods do sometimes intervene on the battlefield but not like this. 

If he were in command, he - well, he wouldn't be in this situation because he wouldn't have left open a vulnerability like this, not with the information he has, but hypothetically if he'd had different information - he would be trying to coordinate the Adepts for a massed Final Strike. If it seemed infeasible, he would be ordering the Adepts to get out as fast as possible, and the rest of the troops to surrender. The rebels may or may not even be accepting surrenders but it does not currently look like continuing to fight is going to make enough of a difference to be worth it. 

He's not in command, has no active lines of communications with the officers on site, and trying to wade into this is just going to confuse things even further. He'll watch, pushing as much power as he can into the scry, he wants the highest resolution mage-sight impressions he can get of the two godpossessed presumable Knights of Ozem's artifacts. Once this is over, which it doesn't appear will take long at all, and the rebels sensibly get their key people behind anti-scrying wards, he's likely to be the only person who can track them. 

He snaps out a communication-spell order to one of his staff mages; he wants a line of communication with Governor Vanaren now. 

One thing Altarrin does have is a direct line of communication with Emperor Bastran, who should know about this as soon as possible. 

Governor Vanaren is very busy fighting a battle and is not available to be interrupted, even by the technically-second-most-powerful man in the Empire, unless the second-most-powerful man in the empire wants to (a) joggle the elbow of the man fighting his battle and (b) accept all the blame for the defeat if there is a defeat.

... Speaking of which battle, the Adepts are not carrying out a mass Final Strike, they are Gating out, and gating as many other troops as they can out, too, up to half a mile northeast  where the rest of the reinforcing imperial army is now marching to the rescue, very strung out. His cavalry ambush has not visibly been discovered yet, and this battle's not over yet. If Vanaren can gather his troops, he still has an absolutely-overwhelming superiority in firepower, more than enough to beat the rebels without an Iomedae level of god-cheating or extreme mismanagement.

Iomedae really wants to mostly finish this inside thirty minutes so she can leave the field. If she does not do that she'll 1) reveal that the angelic wings have a limited duration and 2) quite possibly take enough damage she's forced to heal herself, and her healing is precious. 

Where are she and her invincible Adept ally needed, once the Adepts have Gated out of here and the rest of the soldiers will be handled by the Orisans?

The Adepts are gating up to join the main enemy force, which is disorganized and is about to have a giant hit of terrible morale from desperate fleeing people. Their next step is to head northeast to beat the empire before it can get properly organized; it still has an overwhelming advantage in firepower if Iomedae doesn't kill them all.

Altarrin is fairly sure he can already see exactly how this is going to go. This is not a fight the Empire wins. This is a fight where a god or gods are meddling more blatantly than he's ever seen or conceived of (why? why here? why now?) and Vanaren's numerical superiority is irrelevant to the conclusion. This is probably, no matter what they do, a fight where the Imperial forces lose catastrophically, and the only part not yet entirely determined is how many of them survive it, and Vanaren's response is nearly the worst possible thing he could do, from that perspective. 

He won't push harder on communications with Vanaren because it's still a 'probably' even if he would assess the probability to be very high, and he isn't actually sure Vanaren or his people still have the coordination to switch to a different plan, and even if they did immediately switch to retreat and evacuation he's not sure how much of a difference it would make. He is at this point resigned to that cost already being paid. 

It doesn't matter. (Well, it does, because every one of those deaths is a tragedy he should have prevented, but it doesn't matter to the eventual outcome.) Even if Vanaren's forces are entirely annihilated, the Empire has twenty times that many troops where they came from. Of course, some of them are occupied elsewhere, and it's not a great idea to withdraw most of the Imperial forces from Isk and the western border, but - this is suddenly not a local provincial peasant rebellion, it's a war against a god, and it's a war the Empire cannot afford to lose. 

(Altarrin is, in fact, considering the letter he received, and the question of whether they should try for peace talks instead. Bastran would go for that, if Altarrin suggested it was even an option on the table. But it's unlikely to be a real option, just one that delays the blood spilled. Trying to maintain peaceful relations with a neighbor ruled by a god who can and does do that is not a situation that will be stable, whatever words are written on the peace treaty.) 

It's not the usual protocol, but he reaches out with the specialized comms spell that only a handful of people in the Empire know, and targets it to the Emperor directly. 

<Bastran. We have a serious problem.>