It is, unfortunately, going to be a while before this letter manages to reach what's left of the Imperial government in Oris, let alone land on Altarrin's desk. 

He's writing another letter of his own, though.

It's a formal declaration of war, as the Empire would write to another nation invading it. (This has not happened very much at all in their history, but they have a standard form for it anyway.) Oris is a province in rebellion, not an independent nation-state, but the Knights of Ozem are clearly something entirely different. And they did, in fact, clearly declare their intent and give an opening for peace talks before slaughtering thousands of Imperial soldiers. Altarrin appreciates that. 

The Empire considers Oris part of its sovereign territory, and the Knights of Ozem to be hostile invaders. The gist of his letter is that the Empire has recognized that the Knights of Ozem do, indeed, seem to have the power of a god behind them, and this might reasonably have led them to believe that they could succeed at biting off a corner of the Empire's territory. The Empire would strongly advise that they reconsider this. The Empire is also not, at this time, willing to or interested in considering peace talks with agents of a god, particularly not a god whose only intervention the Empire has ever witnessed involved the deaths of thousands of its people. 

However. It's a situation without precedent, but the Empire recognizes that whatever the traits of their god, the Knights of Ozem as a human institution have shown that they have principles. The Empire is willing to treat with the Knights of Ozem as a foreign state, and to arrange for channels of communication, such that if one side does decide to surrender, or to propose a ceasefire, this message will actually be received rather than lost in the confusion while thousands more people die than necessary. 

(The letter makes it fairly clear that the Empire is negotiating with the Knights of Ozem specifically, and not the peasant rebellion that they've chosen to support.) 

And then he's going to sit down with maps and tables of troop deployments in the entire rest of the Empire, and figure out his options. 

The least costly way to do this would be to assemble an army out of smaller units, taking a legion here and a cohort there - doing a lot of reshuffling where necessary, replacing some of the forces in more iffy provinces with new recruits, but definitely not stripping any of the borders. He could gather an army of fifty thousand that way, and with barely any risk to the Empire's security elsewhere...in two months.

The situation might even keep for that long under normal circumstances; the rebels are likely to take the rest of the province, and would have some time to get dug in, but - well, the Empire conquered Oris in the first place. They can do it the hard way a second time, if they have to. But he'd prefer not; it'll be a lot bloodier. And, in this case, there's a very good reason not to, which is that he has no idea what other miracles the Knights of Ozem will turn out to have on tap, and does not have much reason to trust their assertion that they'll stop with Oris. 

So. If he wants to have an army ready in less than two weeks, it's either going to be a much smaller army than he would ideally prefer - he can get numerical superiority over the rebels, but not five times their numbers, and just double their numbers does not currently feel like a safe margin - or he's going to be stripping border provinces of almost their entire garrisons. 

...He'll do the second one. Isk has been A Problem for nearly its entire existence as part of the Empire. It's the proximity to Iftel, which they genuinely can't do anything about. As a result, Isk - which is very large, though its native population isn't that dense - has tens of thousands of troops permanently stationed there, including throughout the interior, maintaining security on the trade roads and canals and guard the Empire's infrastructure. 

Altarrin can leave a skeleton garrison manning the fortresses along the actual border, and recall nearly everyone else. It's going to cause problems, because obviously the province with a significant ongoing military presence due to its ongoing problematicness is going to have problems if said military presence vanishes. If he takes his eyes off Isk for too long, there's going to be a fourth rebellion on his hands.

Also, Iftel is right there and no one is going to be happy about this. 

But. The thing about Iftel is that they've never, not once in their entire history, expanded their borders. It's entirely possible that Vkandis just literally can't move the shield-wall. Iftel could of course decide to conquer Isk as a colony anyway, but Altarrin would bet at reasonably confident odds that they won't. If they wanted it and felt like administering it, they could easily have just...done that...at any point in the centuries before the Empire absorbed it. 

Isk, then, reinforced by smaller units of Adepts from the Emperor's personal forces. (The Imperial Army of Jacona is mostly in Tolmassar, right now, making up in numbers and training for Altarrin not being there himself, but there are still some mages available.) He can scrape a legion here and a cohort there from Lastun Province and the western border, which isn't currently under threat from anything more organized than bandits, Hardorn isn't that close and also isn't nearly organized enough to take advantage of the opportunity. 

Assuming no slippage in the schedule - normally not a great assumption, even in the Empire, but you can make up a lot of lost ground if Altarrin is personally doing twenty Gates per day - he'll have thirty thousand bodies in a week. A hundred Adepts - Adepts are easy to reshuffle, they're self-portable - closer to four hundred weaker mages mostly on compulsions and recharging talismans and other support work. And with some care, he can even mostly do that without making it easy for the rebels to gather accurate information on his movements. 

...At which point his intention is to send another letter and very firmly suggest that the Knights of Ozem remove themselves from the situation and stay out, in exchange for a number of concessions on how exactly the Empire will act in pacifying Oris. He doesn't expect this to work - he expects that even if the order themselves wanted to, their god will surely have some firm objections - but it's not impossible. 

In the likely event this fails, he needs a plan to kill or capture, at the very least, the woman who sprouts wings when 'Aroden' possesses her. Maybe the armored mystery warrior as well, if they both show up, but their demonstrated abilities seemed less thoroughly out of context. 

A dozen massed Final Strikes in the right formation will probably do it, and more likely so if they wait until after they've kept her busy for a candlemark or so with relentless attacks - which will cost a huge number of lives, but not as many as would be lost if they don't take her out of the picture - until the most obvious godpossession ends. 

Probably isn't good enough. What else...? They can bring in artifacts for an extremely overpowered force-barrier - which Altarrin suspects she could take down in a minute or so anyway, she destroyed the canal-Gate without much apparent effort, but it will at least hold her in one place for a little while, where at least she can't jump out of the way of a literal Adept's Final Strike. ...Maybe try compulsions as well, he can bring in one of the very few people who can cast them from a safe distance. 

And then drop a dozen Final Strikes on her. The blast will take down the barrier, but after it hits her, and they can Gate-drop a new set of artifacts to get it up again immediately, and if she's still moving they can do it again. 

Is that enough? ...Altarrin has no idea. He'll keep thinking. But it's a start. 

He'll try to scry her every so often, while he works on preparing. 

She's often wearing the magical armor that the other possible Knight was wearing in the last battle. She spends most of her time in the training yard, some in the in-progress temple. She's declared times for Aroden's miraculous healing, high noon and sundown, and she wants to not ration it but if there's far too much demand then she'll ration with money, and spend the money on the temple also serving meals and offering classes. 

She seems tireless. She's out and doing things twenty hours a day; the troops she participates in training generally need a rest after an hour, but she doesn't. She's made it known that she'll take, in confidence, complaints about the army or their actions, and see justice done; she hasn't had many takers yet, but those precedents take time to grow. She's made some progress on the language; her sermons are mostly in Mindspeech, but she switches as often as she can into her fairly halting understanding of the local tongue.

She's asked if anyone can duplicate her pearls of power. No one has ideas immediately; it'll probably have to be a post-war thing, and risk one of them getting wrecked while a mage tries to reinvent the crafting of magic items.

She gets his third letter, the declaration of war, evidently sent before her most recent one was received. She replies.

The Knights regret, but understand, the unwillingness of the Empire to engage in peace talks with any people who serve a god. They hope that with sufficiently clear agreements on under what circumstances the Knights of Ozem would act on Aroden's guidance, it might seem more possible to negotiate with them. She has a long list of examples of interventions by Aroden and how the Knights would by default respond to them and how they would be willing to commit to responding in order to reduce the concerns of a neighbor. But all of this as part of peace talks, and impossible if the Empire is categorically opposed to those. 

The Knights hope that representatives of the Empire, their impression of Aroden unfortunately shaped by their wartime operations, will come to free Tatanka and see what Arodenite governance looks like in peacetime. The Knights can negotiate to arrange the safety of observers, and can provide any statistics of interest to the Empire on the wellbeing of the populace, though they are actually inexperienced with statistics and recordkeeping (there is an Arodenite order for that, it just isn't them) and so they expect it'll take some time to in a useful and precise fashion collect all the information of interest to the Empire. They have specifically been recording the rate of deaths in childbirth, that being easy to measure as there aren't all that many births each day and they mostly happen at the temple now. The risk to both mothers and children looks much decreased as you'd expect given miracle healing, but of course perhaps the mothers at particular risk are unable to reach the temple. Aroden's miracles for forcing the speaking of truths can also be useful to a more efficient justice system but they can't claim the crime statistics look very good, they just occupied this city with a large and inexperienced army. It is their custom, and the teaching of their god, that to study many things and then share only the favorable numbers is nearly as bad as not collecting numbers, and so they'll announce which statistics they intend to track in advance. 

But that, too, is a project for a peace that the Empire declares its intent not to negotiate.

They are grateful for the channels of communication proposed, and will use them at need, and are sending more copies of their last letter, and also this letter, through those channels. But much more will be needed, to avoid further bloodshed, and they hope the Empire might consider it urgent to learn more of Aroden and of their vision for Oris, so that the horrors of this war can cease.

It is unfortunately also going to take that letter a while to reach Altarrin. 

(There are perhaps an unusually high rate of inconvenient coincidences and bad luck specifically affecting letters in that direction, though letters from Altarrin personally tend to reach the rebels promptly.)

Independent from the contents of the letter in transit, though, Altarrin is observing the governance of Tatanka, and the temple of Aroden. It's - something.

It's not the first time a temple order made up of generally very admirable people has done awful things. Or - not even done awful things, but been quietly nudged in a direction where their good intentions accidentally led to awful things. It...probably means Aroden is less opposed to flourishing civilizations than, say, the Star-Eyed Goddess. 

(He doesn't really believe that Aroden is, or even can be, actively in favor. It's a human concept. Centuries of hard-learned lessons have led him to the conclusion that the gods seem to struggle even to see human things.) 

Also independent of the letter, learning more about Aroden is a high priority. Altarrin would like a report from the Ministry of Cults as soon as possible, and he kind of also wants to yank Kastil off the sabotage investigation and put him on this. For all they know it's related, anyway, there's clearly a careful pileup of godinterventions here and the simplest explanation (though not necessarily the true explanation, his impression is that the gods can and do build on each other's interventions, though who knows what that looks like behind the scenes) is that Aroden arranged the sabotage and the rebelling generals, to buy a better opportunity for the rebellion that His militant order has decided to shepherd. If it succeeds they get a country out of it. 

Whatever the quality of the rebels' intelligence, it's going to be somewhat hard for them to learn that Altarrin is in command. He's a favorite target of the gods, for the obvious reasons everyone is aware of and the secret reasons known only to him, and he doubts even the Knights of Ozem could kill him permanently but it would be incredibly inconvenient to die now and come back in a year to find half of his hard-won civilization fallen apart. He's spending most of his time working from shielded Work Rooms, when he's not raising twenty Gates a day to various installations in Isk to bring over a hundred soldiers here, three hundred there, gradually adding to his growing army. 

And he's spending a lot of late nights in distant records caches, searching and searching for anything he's ever written of Aroden, in any of his past lives.

He has yet to find even a mention. 

There is not, actually, a huge amount of time to stop and take a step back and put together all of his quiet notes of confusion into a bigger picture. Altarrin is working very long hours, and casting twenty or thirty Gates a day across nearly a thousand-mile distance where only one of the ends can be on a permanent terminus, and then holding them long enough for a few hundred people who are not always ready to rush through. (Not to mention the supplies. Supplying a force of, at this point, nearly ten thousand, is not feasible with what's available nearby Lastun Province.) He's not sleeping enough. Altarrin is almost 80 years old, even if his age doesn't show due to life-extendings magics. He really doesn't have the stamina for a month of this. 

But it's important.

He hasn't yet made reprioritization decisions that are likely to seriously threaten the stability of the Empire if he gambles wrong. He's managed to avoid siphoning off any of the troops currently fighting in Tolmassar. He is doing some reshuffling that will delay the full army being assembled for Taymyrr, but they already have enough bodies available to secure the areas that the rebelling general might try to push into if he goes on the offensive. It mostly doesn't seem like he will before Altarrin's replacement has all of the setup done; he's less organized than the general in Tolmassar. The most likely disaster that might occur as a consequence of his decision here is the Empire temporarily losing control of Isk, but Isk just doesn't have the population to actually secure their borders against the Empire. 

He is, however, definitely considering paths that would cost the Empire enough to compromise its stability elsewhere. Such as, for example, 'ask two dozen Adepts to Final Strike, after throwing thousands of soldiers and dozens of weaker mages at keeping the woman busy until the wings disappear.' The Empire almost certainly has the resources for him to keep trying things until something sticks.

What is much less clear is at what point in that fight it would be better to stop pouring lives and resources into that pit, retreat, and try for a ceasefire and peace talks with the country puppeted by a foreign god. Because that point does, in fact, exist, and not thinking it through in advance will just ensure that any decision is made on the spot, reflexively, probably by a battlefield commander without the full picture in mind. (Altarrin has no intention of being within sight or combat spell range of the Knights of Ozem. It has not failed to occur to him that one reason the gods might be conspiring toward this is if They think that the Knights of Ozem have a way to kill him permanently.) 

So he needs to figure that out. 

- and the answer depends heavily on his assessment of Aroden the god, separate from the Knights of Ozem as an Arodenite cult and militant order. Even among the known-to-him gods of Velgarth, he would feel very differently about sharing a border with a country run by its state religion and protected by a handful of devoted worshippers with reliable access to miracles, based on whether it was Vkandis or Atet (very bad), versus the Star-Eyed (still bad but less likely to end in things being set on fire), versus Anathei (only moderately bad, probably geopolitically stable for a while though the increased surface area for subtle influence would eventually be an issue) versus the Earth-Father and Sky-Mother (might actually be fine though he would be so confused about the swerve in intervention style and methods.) 

For all of those gods, Altarrin has at least hints of Their direct interventions, separate and in addition to their historical written theology and the teachings and traditions of Their temple orders. It's not entirely uncorrelated; the gods with mostly pacifist temples focused on doing good works and feeding orphans do tend to be, at the very least, subtler in Their interventions. Altarrin really does not have time for an in-depth comparative religion study this week, though he expects the Ministry of Cults to, even if they can't find information on Aroden (which he doubts, if it never came up in 700 years worth of his own records), will provide him with a long treatise to say so.

What does he know? 

Aroden: is not subtle. At all. This is just as unsubtle as the enormous magical shield-wall around Iftel, and might be even weirder. 

Aroden may or may not be involved in the other internal sabotage godplots. Altarrin does, at this point, actually buy that the Knights of Ozem probably weren't and if Aroden was they had no knowledge of it. Aroden might in fact just have decided to jump on an opportunity already set up by other locally powerful gods. 

The Knights of Ozem: are interesting. Very obviously not pacifist, able and willing to spill blood, but...careful. And clearly thinking of themselves as people with principles. If they weren't religious, if they were - hmm - just a secretive mage-school with access to some kind of mostly-forgotten magical lore, he - would in fact probably be trying to resolve this around the negotiating table, with the assumption that it would probably not work, but at least the willingness to attempt it first before the solution that involves throwing huge armies at each other. 

Aroden's miracles apparently include Healing, which - is tempting to take as a positive sign, and is in fact a kind of intervention that Anathei has done more than Vkandis once you control for total number of visibly miraculous divine interventions. 

Aroden's newly constructed temple is one of the closest things Altarrin has ever seen to a holy site where he would feel at home. He has no idea what to make of that. 

This definitely leaves Altarrin feeling overall like a neighboring country puppeted by Aroden through His temple order would be more analogous to a country run by Vkandis than one run by Anathei. (Vkandis feels like a closer analogy than Atet, where the human-run religion and teachings actually seem worse than blatant known interventions by the god.) 

But he has considerable uncertainty. 

He didn't jump straight to assuming the worst of the gods he does know of. He checked. In any circumstances that didn't involve the Empire maybe being under existential threat, he would be inclined to try not assuming Aroden was like every other god, a distant alien entity, opaquely and incomprehensibly nudging the world in directions that achieve some obscure inhuman goal, trampling on everything Altarrin cares about in the process. 

(He's never thought the gods were evil, or deliberately trying to harm people or civilizations. They're just - very powerful, and very alien, and very very hard to communicate with, to the point that he's not sure anyone has ever really succeeded at it.) 

Unfortunately, this very much feels like a situation where the Empire might be under existential threat. 

...It doesn't feel like he has an answer here, does he. He has the negative space where an answer might fit, and no time or energy to keep chasing it.

Which is of course the exact shape of circumstances where not chasing his confusion down to its roots is generally a mistake. But that doesn't actually change the fact that he's utterly exhausted and needs to raise another twenty Gates tomorrow and work on battle plans. 

So - keep going, for now, on his current path. But keep his eyes open, too, and be alert that he might at some point have to reassess and change strategies. It wouldn't be the first time here that's he gotten an utterly unexpected surprise that called for him to re-evaluate everything. 

There are problems, trying to integrate southern Tozoa Province. Free Oris was under Imperial oppression for, overall, something more than a year; Tozoa was under it for about two decades. That's enough for the initially rapacious soldiers to be replaced with government administrators and for the Empire to start building the infrastructure that allows provinces to pay the immense imperial taxes; long enough for Tozoa's formerly-self-sufficient economy to go under under the flood of Gate-canal-delivered imperial exports, and a new economy based on resource extraction (primarily) and exploiting local comparative advantages (secondarily) to provide for the imperial market to form. It's long enough that most of the young men have only vague memories of freedom, and a great many of the richest and noblest of birth of them have received an imperial education intended to transform them into an identical imperial officials just like the ones from each other part of the Empire. Free Oris had universal revolutionary support; South Tozoa has memories of glory that need to be very carefully handled not to have everyone going "screw glory, we want bread" within a month, especially since every conflict between someone who fled south when the empire nationalized their property and whoever bought it recently is in real danger of triggering a riot.

In trying to turn this into something he can trust with his back as fast as possible before chasing the imperials north, he has the advantage of a competent and well-staffed Central Directory to delegate work to, that most of the overt loyalists fled north for fear of retaliation, that Iomedae is working obvious and blatant miracles for the good of the nation, and, frankly, that Governor Vanaren was sufficiently bad at his job that Jean does not have to be much better to still be a clear and visible improvement. If the gods hadn't stacked the starting situation this hard in his favor, it would be much trickier for Jean to get anywhere.

But it is also the case that Jean of Jenona, rogue imperial nobleman and puppetmaster behind the strings of "Marshal Orestan" and his Central Directory, has certain resources that no normal ruler of Oris would. 

The first and most important of these? A spy network that can, actually, feed him news about Imperial troop movements, Real Fast.

It does not take Jean very long to realize that they're organizing a relief army and that they're organizing it now. Under a reasonably competent general, too, one Mage-General Salan, formerly of the Army of Isk, which is going to be Gated down shortly. (For some reason, related, perhaps, to Altarrin's habitual paranoia, Jean does not realize that the person commanding in the field is not actually in charge of the project.) This actually comes as a major surprise to Jean of Jenona, who had previously put around five percent odds that they would do something actually meaningful about this if neither Taymyrr nor Tolmassar collapsed. Most imperial governments throughout the empire's history are best understood as holding-on-to-power-maximizers, and a provincial secession is not actually a threat to the survival of the Emperor or the Empire the way a mutiny is. This is a deeply bizarre surprise, and his non-confident best bet is that it's the gods deliberately making the empire make a suboptimal play so they end up collapsing faster than they otherwise would.

Still, it calls for completely different tactics than a normal situation would; defensive rather than offensive, trying to damage enemy logistics so they lose when they come down instead of racing north into the teeth of a full field army. He would like it if cavalry-and-mage teams raided north into the Havau Bar range, still controlled by Vanaren or else newly controlled by a replacement governor who hasn't gotten his act together yet, to disable or demolish as much of the Gate-canal-architecture as possible to damage the logistical system that would let the Empire send armies much larger than anything he could manage. Can he talk Iomedae into going with them?

: - yes, all right. I have a strong preference for disabling rather than demolishing, obviously. I can tell you what I think of the Empire, if you haven't already guessed, but it seems genuinely tragic to destroy infrastructure like that.:

:I don't want to demolish the canals, not when they're watering my people's fields. But if we just cut the spells, it's not that hard for them to reenchant them, and so that's why I want the enchanted arches destroyed as well as the spells wrecked. If they're limited by the food they bring with them in wagons and the food they collect from people who have already been warned an imperial army is going to be raiding their fields, they can send very many fewer troops than if they can just Gate in supplies on any canal from a depot halfway across the Empire.:

:How hard will it be to replace the Gate enchantments, when there's peace?:

:We can't reactivate them until we can control the ability to set authorizations better than the Empire can so we can lock them out and set up our own system, we can't control the authorizations unless the Empire sells us a military secret or we rederive it, and it's a multiyear research project for my Gate-trained mages to work this out that they can only start when there's peace. But the hard part for a team of trained mages is learning how to cast the spells, not casting them on an already-prepared gate-arch; otherwise I wouldn't care so much about breaking the arches.:

:All right. I'll do it. 

I had hoped that the Empire would - focus on its bigger threats. I'm concerned they think I am a bigger threat than one lost province.:

:I had hoped the same.:

He pauses. :That would be extremely worrying.:

A moment of silence. :You promised in your letter not to leave Oris and invade the Empire.: Or I might suggest you do that to get them out of our hair. :The gods will not assault us worse than we can bear.: We're a valuable asset for them alive, and not so dead.

:You are happy to be used by the gods to destroy the Empire entirely. I am not in fact delighted about that.….

I think I am willing to do it, if they give me no alternatives. 

Do you think either of the pretenders would be better than the current Emperor?:

:I think any emperor who does not completely devote his powers to securing control of the imperial apparatus of state and use it to suppress all dissent will be overthrown by someone more ruthless and paranoid, which is one of the many reasons I'm trying to rescue Oris from the Empire instead of taking over the entire thing myself.

So. No. Not really.:

:A pretty good argument for letting it all burn:, she says dryly. :In my world there’d be the countervailing consideration that Good churches will militarily back rulers in the top third of not being terrible, so there’s some reason to try for it. …Evil mostly doesn’t do the same because it’s mostly not trying to maximize Evil the world over, right, it’s just selfish. The Church of Asmodeus could be meaningfully thought of as trying to maximize Evil the way Good strives to minimize it, but no reasonable or competent person serves the Church of Asmodeus voluntarily.

Good would be winning, if - it was organized, if there was someone in Heaven whose job to make all the good trades and none of the bad ones. The forces that make a place the Eastern Empire don’t stand up to …predictably purchaseable breathing room for people who want things to be better.:

:I really like what I've heard of your world, it sounds like it has advantages. I might imagine that I'd be Good, there, that's just not the world I live in.:

:Any luck getting more clerics of Aroden?:

:No. Which isn’t great. My best guess is that the agreements around god intervention around here strongly disincentivize the thing Aroden does at home, so even though He should have better visibility by now He can’t readily translate it to the aid I’d recognize.

There’s also the possibility He can’t operate here at all, though I’d expect that to go with my Evil-detection not functioning. Once someone figures out how to emulate a pearl of power we’ll have on-demand healing regardless, but it’d be a difficult situation.

I have powerful allies at home who have access to magic that will tell them where I am. They are almost certainly working on a spell to get to me, but that could easily be the work of a year or more. When it’s peacetime I’m going to stop shielding against scrying and they’ll at least be able to contact me and Commune with Aroden on their end to ask what He’s doing here. But it seems like a deeply unwise risk right now. I imagine the Empire is trying to scry me a lot more frequently than my allies are.:

:I think the Empire considers killing you a very high priority, and you should consider maintaining your ability to dodge one to twelve Final Strikes on no notice whatsoever to be very important. I think the pearl of power replication is - one of these priorities for peacetime, or at least Not Actively On Campaign time, though if you want to spend a few hours with one of my Adepts working on it I think we can just in case it turns out to be very easy.: Even if we won't have time soon enough.

:I would really, really like to have powerful allies.: