The Emperor of the Eastern Empire is having a terrible week. The last thing he needs is for it to get even worse, but clearly the universe does not care. 

<What> 

Terse outline of the godpossession currently happening on the battlefield and his prediction of how the next few candlemarks - or, realistically, possibly the next few minutes, things are moving fast - are going to look. 

(Altarrin is distracted. He's still watching through the scry, because more information is also worth having.) 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. 

<What do we. Do.> 

Well. They're going to lose this battle, but they have a lot more information now, and they're going to have to win this war. Which probably means pulling troops from Isk and the borders and might mean reallocating some of the response to Tolmassar and Taymyrr though he'd really rather not. He'll sit down with some maps and some lists after this and figure it out. 

He's pretty sure a dozen Adepts carrying out a massed Final Strike in rapport will take out even someone possessed by a god and granted impossible godpowers. They need the army to deal with everyone else. 

Currently he is busy and needs to go back to focusing on watching. Updates to follow via the usual channels. 

Does Jevan want to Gate them two miles up in the air again?

Sure.

... Honestly, Altarrin's verdict was right on the money. The rebels engage a distracted imperial army; the empire "could win" in some important senses related to troop training and magical firepower and so forth and so on, if it discounted Iomedae or threw a legion's worth of Adepts into Final Striking her, and, instead, it does not, partly because of Iomedae with a big sword, but more because everyone was told they had a brilliant scheme to surround the enemy, abruptly got loaded into boats, then force-marched in a to-them arbitrary direction, paused and marched back the other way looking for a defensive position, and was hit by fleeing refugees from the beaten flanking force prevented from panicking (kind of prevented) by their compulsions.

Compulsions enforce discipline beyond the point where the will breaks, and this fight isn't as completely one-sided as the last two. But the Empire is beaten and beaten badly.

Oh, by the way - at one point in it an imperial Adept Final Strikes half a second before Iomedae hits her. What happens?

Oh. She dodges.

(She throws herself into the air mostly on instinct and is carried farther up on the shockwave of the explosion, her skin failing to burn only because she’s in this form resistant to fire, and she stabilizes only after a terrifying disorienting second of crushing flaming nothingness. She reflexively heals herself and thereby wastes one of her precious remaining Lay on Hands. But as far as any external observer could tell, she rises unscathed from the explosion, wings white as ever.)

All right this is getting ridiculous. 

...They'll want to plan on a different formation than what he had previously been thinking, drop a dozen people through Gates simultaneously but spread out enough that she can't just...jump out of the way, as though this is a normal thing for humans to be able to do...they can steal her idea of Gating into midair, it's a good idea. 

(He's not buying that that didn't cost her or her god anything. Someone currently being possessed by a god is probably not feeling their injuries. It does remain the case that it wasn't enough to kill her, and probably isn't worth trying again given that they're absolutely not going to succeed at getting a formation together right now, though Adepts who are cornered anyway might as well try in case the damage is at least enough to weaken her.) 

Altarrin doesn't try to communicate any of this to the battlefield. It's past the point where it would help. 

It takes significantly more than half an hour, but before the day is over the imperial troops have done their best to withdraw or Gate back to the safety of their provincial capital, maintaining better order than in their previous defeats. The Orisans celebrate, but their pursuit is, again, not nearly as driven; fighting a battle is exhausting.

Still, nobody on either side really thinks there's any possibility for an imperial victory without reinforcements, now, and as soon as the evacuation is complete, Governor Vanaren will write a letter begging for reinforcements and a top general, and start giving orders to withdraw north of the Havau Bar range, which is still in his province but is much more securely imperial and much more lightly-populated than anywhere in the Tozoa Plains region.

Iomedae doesn't leave the fighting early. It'd conceal some capabilities but she's not, at this moment, very worried about the worst the Empire can throw at her, and she hates leaving people to die when she could have saved them. She's still quite deadly unarmored and without resistances to mage-attacks beyond her spell resistance.

When it's over she wants people packed into a forty-foot radius for healing and then she will get under cover from scrying and - rest, actually, because she took a lot of hits in that fight and is down to pretty much a normal-person amount of lifeforce. (She would have healed long before that if not for the fact Hero's Defiance lets her heal when she takes damage that is rendering her unconscious. It's her favorite spell, under normal circumstances. Right now her favorite spell is definitely Greater Angelic Aspect and she has a complicated relationship with Prayer.)

She'd like her magic items back from Jevan. Is he all right? The ring of evasion should've protected him from the Final Strike if he was far enough from the epicenter to shield.

Oh, he's fine. (Her armor would be battered and singed, but it's mithril and magic mithril at that.) He wasn't the center of the blast, "And I'm tougher than I look," with an aggressive baring-of-fangs.

"Hopefully they won't keep trying it. ...hopefully they'll talk, at this point, but people are slow to do that even when they should." She feels better once she's all armored up, and a lot better once she's rested.

She doesn't like killing people any better than she did a few days ago.

:If we dismantle the Gate-thresholds this side of the pass, and I camp out at the pass, do they have another way to send reinforcements?:

:With enough Gates there's really very little you can't do, even without the enchanted thresholds.:

:Annoying. All right. 

Congratulations, Marshal, on some well-fought battles.:

:And congratulations, Knight-Commander, on making them much less bloody than they could have been.:

He does aim to try to retake the rest of the nation; the Havau Bar is rolling hills, not a truly defensible mountain pass. But not until his army has rolled into Tatanka and he's sent detachments to disassemble the rest of the Gates and told some of his more trusted people to start setting up some minimal government administration; the enemy will, unfortunately, have some breathing space, if as little as he can make it.

Iomedae wants to supervise the occupation of Tatanka and yes she is going to be very annoying about it.

... What, exactly, is she asking for, or trying to get?

Minimal slaughtering civilians in the streets! Minimal rape and pillaging and arson and wanton destruction! Minimal chucking of Imperial babies out of fortress windows! 

This is not actually her first campaign with non-paladins!

They were planning on trying very hard to do none of those but the last and they're pretty sure all the babies got evacuated. This is his city, not theirs.

She believes him that he'll try and she is planning to be there, because sometimes when a large number of armed men flood a city which they just conquered things happen that no one in command intended. 

But they have the exact same aim, here: a prosperous, free Oris.

And they're making all the progress they could have dreamed of.

Altarrin doesn't watch through the entire time. Scrying a site a hundred miles away, for candlemarks, is draining even for him, and also takes a lot of focus that he needs to apply to other things. He does watch long enough to notice when the winged woman loses her wings, which is interesting and might mean there's a limited duration to the godpossession – though it doesn't look like the lack of wings impairs her very much in efficiently killing huge numbers of people. 

(And this is supposedly the god of flourishing civilizations...) 

His main priority for right now is giving a full handover of the Taymyrr-related logistics and current state of tactical planning to one of the other top generals of the Empire, because it took Bastran about four seconds to read Governor Vanaren's letter and decide he wanted Altarrin personally on this. Taymyrr might get messy and unpredictable, but Oris is already messy, and 'unpredictable' is a vast understatement of what just happened. 

It is, yet again, incredibly frustrating to try to get anything like an accurate post-battle headcount, but his guess is that the rebels took relatively low casualties in this fight. The Adepts were focused almost entirely on the godpossessed Knights of Ozem, and meanwhile the rebels' Adepts - of which there were much fewer, but still - were able to do whatever they wanted. And the Imperial soldiers were taking the morale hit of being in the middle of a losing battle from almost the beginning, even when their compulsions didn't actually let them just run away. 

He's going to need a serious numerical advantage, both for the obvious reasons and because he very much needs this to be a fight that the Imperial side is confident they're going to win. This is - doable, barely, but annoying. It's going to mean leaving Isk almost bare and hoping that Vkandis isn't going to lean on Iftel to take the opportunity to invade, or at least that if they do it's going to take them a while to be ready to move. 

Most of all he needs Adepts. Who are willing to die. It's a different ask, ordering someone to go into battle knowing from the beginning that their plan is to sacrifice themselves to explode at their enemies. 

It looks like the rebels are planning to spend a while consolidating. Which is good. If they pushed hard to chase the remnants of Governor Vanaren's forces and take Havau Bar, it would actually be pretty hard to get reinforcements over in time. 

He watches in snippets as the rebels move in to occupy Tatanka. 

He's...impressed, honestly. It's a much more disciplined occupation than he would have expected, and - it's hard to tell by scrying from a distance, but he suspects the no-longer-winged woman has a lot to do with it.

Maybe it does mean something, to her, that Aroden claims to be the god of civilization. 

He watches, and plans, and weighs the pros and cons of sending another letter to the Knights of Ozem, who may or may not have received the first one yet, though if they haven't it should be reaching them soon. 

The letter reaches her in Tatanka. She has to have it read to her, of course, but it's -

- really promising, actually. Better than she expected. She'd been planning to flood the Empire with a bunch more letters, explaining the situation, and this - feels like a genuine effort to arrive at the most important disagreements first?

The Knights of Ozem swear to the following representations as true and reflecting the best information available to their Order and their own most reliable estimates of the situation, and pledge that on the honor of their order, their members, and their god.

- Aroden's power base is distant from here. It is reasonable for the Empire to doubt that this order has escaped their notice for its whole history, and it indeed would certainly not have escaped the Empire's notice if it had been closer, but it's really quite far. Perhaps events since the Knights began communication with the Empire are persuasive at least with respect to whether they are divinely empowered. They are happy to present, at peace talks, further proof. 

- Aroden was, originally, a very powerful mage. Human, with human values and a human comprehension of law and good and how they might be pursued. He studied ascension for a long time, and represents that the process preserved His concerns. His interventions since ascension have been aimed at peace, prosperity, law, reducing disease, providing magical healing, combating Evil gods, etcetera; there are some where His purpose was obscure, but none where they would seem obviously lawless, or obviously incompatible with His purported aims. The conduct of the Knights reflects His teachings. In Aroden's power base, conflicts like this one are often settled with letters like these, because everyone knows that an Arodenite order wouldn't lie in this form of communication. His churches are schools; His people are educated. The Knights intend to make Oris a peaceful and wealthy kingdom with good relationships with its neighbors despite its ideological differences with them.

- The founder of the Knights of Ozem spent more than a decade studying the nature of gods and of Aroden, after He chose her, and determined eventually that a god like Him could answer questions and make promises, meaningfully but at significant cost, and obtained his promise, that He understood what she wanted, what she would work towards, and that she would never be used against that purpose. He may well have other purposes. He isn't using the Knights of Ozem for them. If He were, they'd of course disband at once, but they're really very sure.

- The Knights could contemplate sending a senior member into the Empire or into some neutral location to perform on-demand miraculous healing, if that would be persuasive in reflecting that the relationship between Aroden and His mortal allies is that of allies. Nearly all Aroden's miracles work in this fashion, at the need of those who require them rather than at His will, because, again, the Knights are His allies. His powers work through them when the knights ask for them. 

- The Knights are willing to negotiate the wording of a commitment to not participate in some kinds of harm to the Empire even on Aroden's request, though they do not want to be bound to never oppose the Empire for their own human reasons through the avenues permitted to their order, which again don't include peacetime assassinations and peacetime infrastructure attacks. 

- The Knights have not had much specific training regarding a situation where they'd given their word and Aroden told them to break it. If that happened their best guess is that the god-command would be disobeyed as obviously being some kind of confusion or misunderstanding or some other god impersonating Aroden, but this does seem like a notable omission from their training on disobeying improper orders, and they will add it. The endorsed policy of the Knights is that if Aroden would ever so command them, He's not who they thought He was and not worth obeying, though it's possible to imagine a very bizarre circumstance in which, for instance, someone mistakenly believes themselves bound by an oath because of memory modification or something and Aroden communicates to them that they never swore it. The Empire is welcome to provide input into what policies the Knights would need to adopt and train their members in for the Empire to be happy to have them as neighbors.

- Aroden has not, in fact, conveyed specific instructions about Oris. He generally grants people their miracles, if they share His aims, and then gets out of their way. It was their own decision, witnessing what the Empire's tactics in Oris were and how the people of Oris felt about the Empire, to ally with the Orisian rebels. The Knights did try and fail to convince some Imperial units to temporarily halt the executing peasants and bring notice of the situation to their superiors, before the Knights killed anyone, but they understand the difficulty of having commanders on the ground who want to bother their superiors with geopolitics, and regret the attendant impossibility of having met under less adversarial circumstances. 

And as ever it ends with careful clarifications about the provenance of the letter, and a restated sincere desire for Orisan independence and peace.