:If the gods are with us, I can dodge twelve Final Strikes unscathed. ...if the gods are against us, I can dodge twelve Final Strikes, but scathed. 

The work of my life is to ensure that everyone trying to build good places for people to live, prosperous and free ones that aren't trapped like the Empire or built off mind-control and mass executions, has powerful allies. I wish they'd hurry up, but they exist, and they will back you as long as you back the cause of human flourishing.:

:Thank you.: An invisible smile. :If the gods were against us, they would not have brought you here. We'll manage.:

The Ministry of Cults takes it seriously when Altarrin says something is important, and even more seriously when it looks like the Office of Inquiry is muscling in on their territory. (The Office of Inquiry does a lot of muscling in on their territory. In principle all investigation of god-conspiracies and god-disasters is their remit!)

They did not want to write Altarrin a report that makes it look like they have no idea who this god is. 

They conducted a stealth operation to take prisoner on suspicion of religious activity half a dozen villagers from a village that the rebel army passed through on the way to Tatanka, people who'd actually met an Arodenite priest. All half dozen of them were, on interrogation, guilty! The woman had gathered everyone around here, grown wings in an obvious divine miracle, and preached of Aroden and His assistance in the fight to free Oris. Two of the prisoners heard her speak directly; the rest only got secondhand accounts.

The Ministry of Cults thinks that Aroden's powers are clearly notable but His teachings as understood by these peasants are mostly perfectly typical of cults. Aroden rewards His followers who serve well in life with an eternity in paradise, a glorious shining place of beauty and abundance and all your dead loved ones etcetera etcetera it's of course known to the Empire that there's no such thing as an afterlife and that religions make it up to impress their followers.

People who do evil things (like Imperials, say these villagers) go to a different place called Hell where they are tortured forever. The villagers had slightly different impressions of the details but the overall picture is, Aroden judges everyone on death, those who serve well get paradise, those who serve badly get eternal torture, winged lady says the Imperials will face eternal torture and that those who die in honorable defense of their country she will entreat Aroden to take into His paradise.

They are vague on Aroden's teachings beyond this, but the Ministry does not want to sound confused or vague so they pushed until they got the answers they were expecting. He is in favor of magical healing and building Him temples and worshipping Him and doing good things and defeating the Empire. 

Their best overall guess is that Aroden is a god from the continent across the sea, that He for some reason saw fit to start muscling in on this continent, that He has a small number of powerful priests charged with evangelizing for Him, and that He is, you know, a typical god, which is to say terrible, but with a church that has put a great deal of effort into specifically mastering evangelism and coming up with things to say that ignorant peasants will find very compelling. The woman is a Thoughtsenser and may also have projective Empathy or some rarer gift; several subjects speak of being in her presence as being a transcendent and magical experience where it's impossible to feel fear.

The Ministry of Cults is, of course, not an entirely trustworthy source of information on religions or gods. Altarrin is fully aware of that. They have their own political agenda. They have incentives to avoid looking incompetent, and to act in ways that maintain their power and influence in the Empire's government. They don't know everything, but are certainly going to be inclined to make it sound like they do. 

(He takes a moment to be sad about the stealth operation and arrest of villagers guilty of nothing other than very understandably listening to a woman with miraculous powers promising to rescue their people from conquest. He doesn't actually think they did anything wrong, and no one deserves to die, even the guilty, but these are people who he might consider as innocent as anyone ever is.) 

Altarrin is also keeping in mind that they don't have an Arodenite priest available for questioning. They have random villagers, from a region closely adjacent to Holy Ithik and its state worship of Atet, who might have heard an explanation of Aroden's teachings and translated it into terms more familiar to them. The information is has is likely biased, and almost certainly incomplete. 

That being said. There is really not that much leeway for misunderstanding in the claim that Aroden's followers will be rewarded in the afterlife with an eternity of paradise, and Aroden's enemies - more complicated than that, of course, and Altarrin is sure the Arodenite priests would put it more thoughtfully, but rounds to 'Aroden's enemies' - will face endless torture in an endless torture realm. This manages to be worse than Atet's supposed afterlife. 

And the incentive there - both from the perspective of the temple order, and through the more distant and alien perception of Aroden the god, nudging His followers in certain directions - is obvious. People will be very motivated to do whatever is asked of them, whether in a direct vision or by a temple elder, if they believe that the reward is paradise and the alternative is torture. A god can get people to die for His goals, that way. And for the priests of the militant order, with their own human goals, it has to be an excellent recruiting strategy as they prepare for a brutal war. 

...He does, briefly, consider questioning the villagers himself. But he would have to carve it out of the time when really he ought to be sleeping. ...He would do it anyway, under other circumstances, it's worth the cost if it might point at ways to do something that kills fewer people. But Aroden has displayed a remarkable willingness to possess people and give them murderous miraculous powers, and Altarrin really, really should not be making himself vulnerable to that right now. 

He doesn't like it. He's not sure. But he's...probably sure enough to move forward with his current plan. 

So Iomedae heads north to sabotage Gates. Before she does, she writes another letter to the Empire, though she's pretty sure at this point that whoever has sent her three Lawful but increasingly unpromising letters about how unwilling the Empire is to engage in peace talks with a representative of a god is not the path to mutual understanding. Probably the path to mutual understanding is surviving a dozen Final Strikes and discrediting that perspective, within the Empire, that this is a problem they can or should solve with force. 

Accordingly this letter is more pointed.

The Knights of Ozem represent that Oris is prosperous and on its way to being well-governed and that they anticipate the people of Oris, presuming Oris remains free, will be better off in five years and in twenty than comparable people in Taymyrr. (They acknowledge that Taymyrr, also currently the site of a bloody war, may not strike the Empire as the fairest comparison, but their sense is that wars like the one besetting Taymyrr are not uncommon and not unrepresentative of what Oris would have had to look forward to had they remained an Imperial possession; indeed it looks likely they'd have been a site of routine conflict between the Empire and the Holy Empire of Ithik.)

They are happy to agree with the Empire on some formalization of this prediction and some treaty provision that rests on it, if the Empire is interested. 

They observe the Empire to be, as according to its own histories it frequently is, beset by multiple internal civil wars. They regret the loss of life and would under some circumstances contemplate offering to help the Empire end those civil wars more swiftly, and under a wider range of circumstances than that they would offer miraculous healing. That can be discussed as part of peace negotiations should the Empire be willing to engage in those; it is sometimes worth engaging in peace negotiations even if it seems unlikely there is any set of agreements appealing to both sides, especially in a situation like this one where the Empire's geopolitical situation may rapidly change. 

The Knights of Ozem have, as the Empire knows, committed to operating for this time only in Oris. Under the present circumstances, were it not for this commitment, the temptation would be fairly extraordinary to send an operative to one of the candidates for Emperor, and ask if he'd contemplate permitting the worship of the Church of Aroden were that church to lead him to triumph in the civil war. They are not doing that. The reason they are not doing that is that they understand that, on the Empire's view of the world, the gods desire only the destruction of the Empire, that they object not to its excesses but to its existence, and that on the Empire's view of the world the gods are incompatible with civilization and a place without them is needed for any hope that civilization might prosper. This perspective is obviously incorrect, to the Knights of Ozem, but they understand that it's possible they are mistaken, and do not wish to act in a manner that would be catastrophic if they were wrong. (It also suggests, whether or not it's correct, that the collateral damage from putting the Empire under existential threat would potentially be ludicrous.) And so the Knights are passing up an opportunity that is very much strategically indicated, because they are not enemies of the Empire, and have no desire to see it destroyed. 

In the Empire's view of the world, as the Knights understand it, the gods have created this entire situation in order to destroy the Empire. This might inspire one to wonder: if the Knights are firmly committed to not being used as the instrument of the Empire's destruction, what are the gods steering for? The obvious answer is that the gods are steering for the Empire to foolishly grind itself to exhaustion trying to destroy the Knights in Oris, expending its most valuable resources on battles that it could easily avoid, and thereby weakening Bastran's reign such that he loses one or both of the civil wars. 

(In the Knights' own view of the world, the Empire is doing this all by itself and no god-intervention is required to explain it; Aroden trusts His people and is letting them do as they see fit, and His people are trying to assist in the development of a functional, prosperous country that does not run on mind control and executions. But they are not sure they are right - no man ever should be, really - and so they have contemplated the Empire's view of the world and taken action to limit the damage they do, should the Empire be correct.)

The Knights of Ozem entreat the Empire to contemplate peace talks, which would reflect no commitment to a peace but make it possible for common ground, if it exists, to be found. 

She'll send it along with copies of all the earlier letters, in case they have been getting lost somewhere.

Altarrin continues to work almost entirely from heavily shielded Work Rooms warded against scrying. There are delays in troop movements of course, but he thinks they can actually make up even more than the delay and have force assembled a day earlier than predicted if he does thirty Gates on the final day, with three of them using canal-Gate-sized thresholds, rapidly assembled but without the permanent enchantments laid, and held long enough to get nearly a thousand people through each. (The issue is that the canal-Gate termini are unusually widely spread in Isk, due to the difficulty in keeping them secured and guarded, and transporting large numbers of people over water is faster and easier than a long-distance march but they're really short on boats for it.) 

He is far from absolutely sure that it's worth it. It's going to matter that he's well rested the next day, which means no more late-night research trips to even more distant records caches. And it means having less time than he'd really hoped for, to sit down and write one final letter urging the Knights of Ozem to stand down, and offering them several unambiguous ways to signal if they've decided to do so. 

(Altarrin would, perhaps, be making different decisions here if not for the compulsions on him, and the formal Imperial order stamped with the Emperor's seal that instructs him to pacify Oris and neutralize the threat of the foreign god. It's mostly a form template, not really a personal communication from Bastran where every word is meaningful, but nonetheless the compulsion to obey authorized Imperial orders lies heavily on him. He might, also, be making different decisions if it hadn't been such an exhausting fifty years. Both of these are relevant facts, but not ones where there's any nearby world in which they look different. The contingent factors here are nearly all based in what information Altarrin received, in what order, and perhaps also in some of the especially frustrating and draining conversations he's had and problems he's troubleshooted in recent days.

Also the fact that the sometimes-winged priestess of Aroden is smashing all the canal-Gates. Altarrin knows exactly how much those cost to build, and some of that cost was measured in lives and not just coin.) 

He writes a letter. It is shorter and more pointed than he really intended. Without revealing anything about their capabilities or plans that the rebels can't very easily have figured out by scrying the staging point where an army of thirty thousand is getting itself organized, he tries to make it clear that this is not a fight Oris can win, with or without a few warrior priests of Aroden able to act as conduits for their god's power. They can, at best, make it cost the Empire tens of thousands of lives, and cause massive infrastructure damage to Oris in the process. 

He doesn't think either of them want this. The Empire is willing to consider opening talks with the Knights of Ozem – after they remove themselves from the Empire's territory, which includes Oris. Continuing to smash the Empire's infrastructure will be taken as a sign that they are, in fact, not interested in said talks, and the Empire will move ahead with its plan of fighting them the hard way.  

He'll delegate having it delivered to his staff, but the ones he definitely trusts. They can make sure it reaches the Temple of Aroden in Tatanka within a candlemark, and it's still only midafternoon. Based on everything they've shown so far, if the temple order of Aroden wants to de-escalate, they'll have a way to alert the woman who is pretty clearly their best combatant and quite possibly their leader. 

He does another dozen Gates and then goes to bed early. 

(Iomedae's most recent letter, though not the earlier one, does manage to reach the war camp that night. Altarrin's staff find it mostly very concerning and extremist. Altarrin is also asleep, after doing thirty Gates today, and while Altarrin's usual orders are to be told immediately about this sort of thing, this really seems like a time to make an exception. It's not like it's going to change how tomorrow goes.) 

Mage-General Salan's strategic plan for this campaign is, really, pretty simple. He wants to keep his army together, not try anything too complicated, and make sure nobody can ambush their force. He is a very good second-in-command and very good at logistics. Once they get into enemy territory, he's going to be very sensible, very practical, and use his superior numbers to beat them to a pulp. This is his war to lose, and he doesn't plan to do that.

His plan for Iomedae is completely different, because it is, in fact, Altarrin's plan. Their scries have confirmed that she's going out to smash Gates with a wizard and a dozen horsemen, and the plan is to Gate-strike her while she and most of her patrol are asleep. If she survives that one, too, they go for the Very Complicated Version.

She seems to sleep for about two hours every night. She keeps the hours unpredictable, but Altarrin knows ways to scry that get around all of the standard antiscrying precautions. 

She sleeps in most of her magic items, including the terrifying clawed gauntlets, but not the full plate or the helmet. 

There are a couple of her men on watch, obviously.

Unfortunately, while they have time to begin shouting a warning, they do not have time to do anything - get a spell off, stab the wizard - before everything within a mile of her is blinding flame.

That's sufficient; she's awake at the beginning of a shout of warning, and diving for the armor so she can use it as cover before the explosion even happens. 

(Can you use a suit of armor, even a suit of magically indestructible armor, as cover against an explosion a mile wide? If you're Iomedae you can.)

No point using a healing spell; there aren't survivors.

She starts the spell to sprout wings and take off into the sky, donning the helmet, carrying the armor in her off hand.

Altarrin is awake, not entirely rested but at least recovered from having pushed himself to the edge of backlash, and watching through scrying. 

Most people would lose their scry-point if a Final Strike went off within a hundred yards of it. Altarrin is not most people. It's pretty hard on his artifact, but he's prepared it specially for the purpose, and so the instant his scry-view whites out in a blaze of fire and mage-energies, he's already directly relaying the order to another dozen of his top mages - who should already be holding the departure threshold stable and the spell ready to connect to its precisely scried destination, a ring about 200 yards outside the outer limits of what they've calculated for this particular Final Strike,  to Gate-drop the incredibly powerful focus-stones and raise a ridiculously overpowered barrier. His next order is waiting on confirmation that the barrier is, in fact, up, and that the woman with the sword is, in fact, inside it, because he's not about to risk the only Fetcher in the Empire with a range of two miles and enough experience in concert-rapport to work off someone else's Farsight, or the only mage in the Empire who can target with Thoughtsensing and distance-cast compulsions at one mile's distance, until he knows that the woman isn't somehow already on the other side of their barrier. 

(If she is, a second set of focus-stones is ready to hit a much larger radius that even she shouldn't be able to escape in the next three seconds, but it will take correspondingly more Final Strikes to fill the internal volume of it adequately, and the barrier will be a little weaker.) 

It takes her three seconds to cast the spell that gives her wings. Even with her boots, which she is using, and a variety of other abilities some of which she got from literal gods, she can only travel about a hundred yards in the first six seconds after she awakens.

The barrier is up in three seconds, but barely, and it's another second before Altarrin receives confirmation and relays the order, and another second after that before the readied Gates for the Fetcher with her Farseer partner and the mage-Thoughtsenser go up. 

(Both are accompanied by Adepts who will get them out the instant they've either done their part or tried and failed. They're too important to put at any more risk than that.) 

It's going to take the Farseer a couple of seconds to actually find Iomedae and share the location-sense and images with his partner, and another second for her to focus enough to attempt - with a lot of power behind it - to Fetch away Iomedae's sword. Call it eight seconds, maybe, since the blast hit her. 

By then she's at the edge of the barrier. 

Fetching the sword away - works. It's much much harder than doing that to anyone else would be, more like Fetching it out of solid steel, but a sufficiently powerful Fetcher can totally do that. 

It disappears from her grasp. She grabs her dagger, which is Returning and therefore not at risk from whatever the fuck that was, but also -

- that was creative. This is perhaps genuinely dangerous, even if the gods are on her side. This is a situation for using nonrenewable resources.

Can the barrier survive a Tree Feather Token turning into a sixty foot tall five foot diameter oak tree right at its base.

Arbas needs about the same length of time to find Iomedae's mind– okay even he can't get through her shields, but she's very obvious to mage-sight, wow she moves fast, and he can throw the most powerful compulsion he's ever cast. 

(This is the best mission of his entire life. Also he's going to be dropping back through a horizontal Gate to get safely out of range a second later whether or not his attempt succeeds, which is too bad, but Bastran was barely willing to agree to send him at all.) 

The Tree Feather Token will very much startle Altarrin watching through his scry!

The barrier is intended to take absurd amounts of physical force. It's modified from an emergency spell meant to protect outposts and such from avalanches or other natural disasters, and he ""did some research"" (retrieved notes and artifact prototypes from a records cache) and overpowered it ten times more.

(Given the lead time, it was not feasible to power it with node-energy. The small barrier took twenty lives; the bigger barrier, which they had to have charged and ready anyway even though it might not be necessary, cost fifty. Altarrin has deeply mixed feelings about this but...well, a lot more soldiers than that are going to die as a result of the Arodenite priestess' work.) 

The Tree Feather Token doesn't expand; it goes instantaneously from tiny to enormous, at which point there is abruptly and very briefly a hole in the barrier. The design is resilient enough to instantly redirect power over the surface, sealing the hole and neatly shearing off the trunk in the process, but - it can't take many more of those, not in quick succession. 

He orders the stones for the larger barrier dropped, just in case. If she pulls out another of those, even if the barrier isn't down yet, he'll order it raised. (An irreversible decision, the barrier can't be taken down until the stones run out of stored power, but he's already planned out all the contingencies here and he doesn't need to actually reason through anything to conclude it's worth it.) 

The compulsion slips off her mind like - like her mind is the wrong kind of thing to cast a compulsion on. Arbas may as well have tried to do it to a castle, or a statue, or the concept of mathematics.

She has two more Tree Feather Tokens, and drops those too. 

That is fucked up. 

(Arbas is considering this fact while already most of the way on the other side of his evacuation Gate. It's really fucked up, though. Even gods shouldn't be able to do that.) 

Gods should also not be able to manifest MULTIPLE TREES from THIN AIR!!!!!! As far as mage-sight can tell they're not even MAGICAL trees! Altarrin has QUESTIONS. 

None of which are relevant to his reaction, which is on pure instinct. Outer barrier goes up, on his order. Also the winged woman has been in the same place for several seconds, now, and they've got an offsight Farseer and a Mindspeaker relay finalizing the formation, he's - 

- the barrier is probably seconds away from coming down, even if it can handle multiple MIRACULOUS SUMMONED TREES she can probably just go at it with her fists for a while. 

The departure Gate-thresholds are ready. 

He gives the order, and sends fourteen Adepts to their deaths. 

So, if the question is, can Iomedae, who has the ability to add her mythic power to her saves after she rolls them, and the ability to reroll a reflex save once per day, and the ability to add five to a failed reflex save and see if it succeeds then, and a cloak of resistance and divine grace and by now also Divine Favor's mythic luck bonus on saves, make an important reflex save, the answer is 'yes'. 

If the question is, 'can she make fourteen reflex saves at once', then - well, then the answer is what she told the Marshal. It depends on whether the gods are with her.

Two of the Final Strikes hit her. Which - well, first off, is very unpleasant in its own right, it doesn't knock her unconscious but it actually comes quite close, but secondly is vastly more important for its strategic implications and yes, she can in fact propagate those in the middle of being violently thrown against the force barrier and lit on fire. 

She gets up, heals herself with Lay On Hands, takes off flying, and Mindspeech shouts :For complicated reasons that was mildly persuasive about the Empire's claims about gods and I wish you'd cut it out so we could talk!:

The most notable thing about her Mindvoice, if anyone is in range to hear it (her range is not great), is that it is...not that of a god-possessed being? She sounds calm, and sad, and unafraid, and human.

The inner barrier, already significantly weakened, shatters as both Iomedae and the combined force of the blast hit it. There'ss no one alive on the inside of the larger barrier to hear her. (There is also no one within a mile of the outer barrier; you really don't want to be near it when it comes down, which it will when the next round goes, if it does, if Iomedae is still moving on Altarrin's scry.) 

It wouldn't have mattered even if anyone on site had heard her. If Altarrin were in range, it might, actually, matter. But Altarrin is the only person who can make sweeping strategic re-evaluations at the speed of reflex, and at this point the pre-decided path is very very clear.