Altarrin is watching on the scry. (The second round of massed Final Strikes almost took out his scrying artifact. The third definitely will. Whatever happens, he's not going to be on as quick a reaction loop for the aftermath.) 

It doesn't really matter. He's willing to throw fifty Adepts at this threat. (Though, for resource-juggling reasons - and because the formation on this round, with everyone else's scrying disrupted, doesn't need to be and isn't trying to be nearly as tidy or perfectly timed - he is mostly sending Master-potential mages boosted with blood-power. More lives spent. Less of a cost to his other wars. He doesn't like this math but it's math he's been doing for centuries and his orders from Bastran continue to be very clear.)

Either way, though, there's a limit, and it's here. If the miraculously god-empowered priestess of Aroden walks away from this, then...they'll talk. The main army hasn't moved on Oris, yet, and it's partly for this reason; he suspects the woman will be genuinely more willing to cooperate if none of the rebels have died yet. 

If he had time to think, it's possible that some quiet part of him might be hoping for that outcome, because it might be one where he just spent two hundred lives (once you include the blood-magic executions) for no reason at all, but it's at least a world where it's still possible that no one else dies. 

He doesn't have time to think, and he's not really feeling anything at all as he gives the order. 

Can Iomedae take thirty-six Final Strikes, slightly less exactly timed - the Gate-drops and the explosions themselves are spread out over nearly two seconds - and a little more variable in total power output per, but massed on her and then arranged to fill the entire volume of the barrier so she has nowhere to run? (The barrier is also going to explode, but not quite in time to get out of her way.) 

The next one that she doesn't dodge would knock her unconscious, and then she'd be unconscious for the remaining ones, but Hero's Defiance lets her cast Lay on Hands as she's falling unconscious.

She does that. 

Once.

She cannot do that again a second later, the next time she fails to shield herself in time.

And then she's unconscious, and can't do it at all for the last four strikes. 

The magic armor and magic items are totally unscathed but there's not actually that much left of the person who was inside them when the Empire next gets scrying up.

There's also a crater five miles across, the trees and earth inside slagged to a glassy pit, the surrounding forest on fire for quite a ways. 

Altarrin has his scry back up first, of course, within about five seconds after the last of the trailed-out Final Strikes. There's still a lot of ambient mage-energies settling and it's another thirty seconds before he manages to effortfully move it around and find the armor, which is the brightest thing to mage-sight. 

...Oh. 

Well. 

That's...that, then. 

- probably. Altarrin is not yet sold. 

The ground is still half molten and it's an endless five minutes before he can even slightly justify sending in more of his people to check. They're inevitably going to take some moderate injuries just being there, but hopefully they won't have to be there for long; they can Gate to right beside her, and check that she is in fact actually dead. He'll send a Healer with them too, very very very well shielded, to make extra sure. 

She is in fact actually definitely dead. There is no trace of any person's mind or life-force, here. 

Then...it's over. 

(They couldn't reasonably have taken her alive even if she somehow had survived repeated Final Strikes injured but not dead. Not after Arbas' report. Altarrin is...mostly not going to have emotions about already-foreclosed possibility, right now. And it feels cleaner, that his people didn't have to kill a catastrophically injured but still-living priestess up close.) 

- not everything is over, of course. There's still a rebel army, which is still surprisingly well-equipped and well-organized though Altarrin is hoping their morale will take a serious hit when they realize what happened to their defending priestess. But. Aroden has other priests. He might only be able to give one person this level of absurd miraculous power at a time, but still be able to switch. 

Altarrin - mostly doesn't expect that, though, even when he's being pessimistic. At the very least, Aroden from a distant continent now knows far more about the Empire's capabilities, and how far the Empire will go to hold off the influence of gods, and it might be starting to look like a better use of godresources to go run a country somewhere else. 

He orders his people to retrieve the magical artifacts, and drop them - along with the sword - into a shielded underground Work Room on a certain island in the far north, because he wouldn't put it past Aroden to at least try to send a priest to get them back. General Salan is still getting into position for the rest of this (hopefully straightforward, even-more-hopefully-but-less-probably one where the rebels will surrender rather than fight); they'll have plenty of time to study them before armies actually clash on the field. 

And then the delayed shock-reaction hits, and Altarrin is grateful to be in a shielded Work Room in a secure location, because he's apparently going to spend a while shaking before he can, eventually, try to relax enough to get a little more sleep. 

(Updates on Arodenite miracles can interrupt him. Updates on rebel movements can go to General Salan, until Altarrin has actually had enough sleep.)

Then the army will begin rolling south! It isn't moving very fast, because it expects the gods to be screwing with it and because it knows the leading rebel general is competent, but it's not moving very slowly, either; Imperial armies are usually very good, and this is no exception.

The rest of Iomedae's letters will, of course, be delivered shortly.

Jean is worried.

Why is Jean worried? The five-mile crater where Iomedae used to be? Well, that might be part of it, but she's Iomedae. More of it is that she doesn't appear on a scry.

He is not, of course, going to tell everyone she's dead. She's from a world where people regularly die and pop back to life; the effect on morale would be devastating and she might show up tomorrow, ready to win the battle for them even if she was killed. Jean gears up for guerilla warfare if he has to, aims to try to inflict as much attrition on the imperials as possible with raids, but plans to fight a major field battle to protect the capital anyway, watching for opportunities to take the Imperial army by surprise where the terrain makes them vulnerable, and win a fight they don't want to fight. Imperial armies aren't used to Empathy as a tactic, and this won't be the first force he and Samien have panicked out of the fight.

Altarrin sleeps late into the morning, but not well. He has nightmares that he hasn't had in a long time, including the one that isn't based on something he actually remembers at all, and can't have been, because he wasn't at Urtho's Tower at the moment it went up in a fiery explosion that would end up half destroying the world. 

He gets Iomedae's final letter first, because his secretary has it waiting on his desk by the time he hauls himself out of bed and tries to steel himself to face the day - well, the week, maybe month - ahead. Which he may or may not even spend in command, here, if things are going exactly as expected as a week then he's better put to use on one of the other fronts. 

(From here on, things are going to move...less quickly...and largely according to predetermined plans. Unless, of course, something else explodes from nowhere, but his gut - which was previously on high alert about the temple of Aroden - is actually mostly not expecting that. Certainly he has little to go on in terms of what contingencies would help to have prepared if something even more out of context happens, though he has people assigned to scrying all the known temple sites to Aroden in Oris, to alert him immediately if the large-scale miraculous healings or any other visibly divine-intervention events continue to happen. And he'll drop everything if and when something does explode, and improvise, but in the meantime he has at least a small window of space to think.) 

It's...surreal, mostly, to read this letter when he already knows how the confrontation ended. He finds himself trying to guess at what the writer of this letter (was it the woman he just murdered at the cost of nearly two hundred lives, fifty of them precious mages? he isn't sure but he's more and more suspecting it) was thinking. What was her information state? What did she think the Empire was going to do. 

- well, what would the Empire have done, if not for his personal direction? Because that's the obvious missing piece, here, that the rebels wouldn't have known in order to alert the Arodenites, and that perhaps even Aroden the god wouldn't have seen. The part where Archmage-General Altarrin is not, really, a product of the Empire's history and traditions and protocols, but the driver of them. The part where he has centuries of context on exactly how paranoid to be about the gods, that no one else possesses. 

(Not precisely true. Kastil might have been paranoid enough. But Kastil is neither a high-ranking military commander, nor particularly good at politicking; he might have recommended thirty-six Final Strikes as a backup plan, but it's far less likely that Bastran would have agreed to it, coming from him.) 

So maybe it's just a perfectly predictable and understandable pointless tragedy. Both of them sizing up the other, and coming to the prediction that it was a fight they could win. Not a very certain prediction, even Altarrin would only have put eight in ten odds that the amount of overkill he was willing to throw at this would work at all, but two hundred lives for an 80% chance of avoiding an existential threat to the Empire felt worth it. And it seems likely that the priestess of Aroden was thinking the same. 

He can genuinely appreciate their principled commitment not to intervene in the Empire's other civil wars. He doesn't, of course, know for sure if it would have been held to, if this had gone on any longer. He probably won't ever know. He can still admire the fact that maybe that commitment was real. 

...He wonders if it's right, that the gods - either Aroden, or the more local gods, or both working together - were steering for this so that the Empire would burn resources it couldn't afford to lose on neutralizing the threat, and then lose one or both of its other wars. He wonders if that's going to end up happening. Probably not, he thinks, but it still could, if there are further elements to the gods' plans here, further strings of bad luck They can still throw at Taymyrr or Tolmassar or even maybe Oris. Only history will tell if the decision he made was the right one. 

(There are quiet, wistful notes in the back of his mind. It - would be better, if they were in a world where the Empire could have negotiated and made trades with the temple order of Aroden, lenience toward Oris in exchange for miraculous healing on their other fronts. That isn't the world they're in, for a thousand reasons, but it would have been a nicer, friendlier world. He can remember - well, he can't remember, but he can recall the notes - being Arvad, who still hoped that cooperation and peaceful trade with the followers of gods who were their neighbors might be attainable.) 

Iomedae's third letter, the reply to the Empire's official declaration of war, reaches his desk next. 

...He's more surprised, this time, and more - something - now is still not a good time to be processing emotions, but he's making a mental note that there is probably something to be looked at there, later. 

He's surprised mostly by the very long and detailed list provided, of interventions Aroden might make and how the Knights of Ozem would respond and what concessions they might be willing to make. It's so...concrete. It's not at all how he expects a priest, or even a warrior monk of a militant order, to engage. It might even have been useful and decision-relevant, if he had received it earlier; he's not sure whether or not it would have changed the final conclusion, but he would have replied, and...maybe. 

...The letter does include the date it was sent. Altarrin is not failing to notice that it arrived after the previous letter, sent days later. He is also not failing to remark that time delays on exchanging messages, through still-disorganized communication channels during wartime, is exactly the sort of thing that gods can nudge. It certainly looks like the local gods (presumably not Aroden, it would be confusing if it were Aroden, it's not impossible but presumably Aroden preferred not to lose His most experienced and empowered priestess) were trying to make sure he didn't see this letter in time for it to make a difference. He's - not sure what that means, yet, but in his past experience it usually ends up meaning something. 

He is differently and maybe even more surprised by the digression into statistics. His first thought is that the temple order found some of the older treatises from the era of the Empire's founding, ones that point more directly at what impresses him personally than later works, but - that doesn't feel quite right, surely if they had that kind of intelligence then their other communications would have felt more optimized to get the Empire to work with them. 

(The wistfulness is closer to the surface, now. He...probably would actually have tried stalling and exchanging more letters, if he'd seen this one in time. He still doesn't think it would have made a difference in the end, but it nonetheless bothers him that the path wasn't even tried. He's so tired of war.) 

The third letter (the second that Iomedae sent) reaches Altarrin’s desk while he’s still sort of midway through considering the response to the Empire’s declaration of war.

Altarrin quickly discerns, based on the date given and the first few lines, that this is the response to his first letter. Apparently he's been receiving them in reverse order. 

(Which means something in itself, in terms of the gods' goals here. Altarrin doesn't know what, but - from the start he's assigning higher importance to the content of this letter, because the fact that it was worth the gods' effort to nudge things so that he didn't see it sooner is informative.) 

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.

...Yes. These are both updates he ended up making, later, based on mostly-uncorrelated reasons and evidence. 

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.

That - doesn't seem like it should be a thing - but Altarrin is abruptly assigning the contexts of this letter even higher priority. 

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.

This...is genuinely new information.

Altarrin mostly doesn't know how to react to it or incorporate it, yet - and it's not a good time for enormous re-evaluations of his entire worldview, there is in fact still a war going on - but he is mentally tagging it as very very important. 

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.

Altarrin's usual reaction would be distant and non-urgent wistfulness, for a hypothetical world that would be nicer than the one he's currently in, but clearly isn't the one he's currently in. 

But. This is describing a god who was formerly mortal, and who had - at least according to his temple's teachings - some actual justified reasoning behind why He would continue to hold the human values he had held, himself, as a mortal human.... 

If any of this is real, then - maybe Aroden does, actually, understand what He was doing in Oris. Maybe He was weighing the benefits and costs on dimensions that would be recognizable to mortals. 

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. 

....

It's the sort of caution that Altarrin - or even a younger Altarrin, lifetimes ago, back when he was Arvad, back when he was Lionstar, back and back to when he was Ma'ar - might have applied, to trusting a god who wanted to offer him miraculous powers. 

(No gods ever offered him miraculous powers. He had assumed that no gods wanted to. He - is maybe going to end up feeling very stupid about taking that observation and concluding too much from it, though he has far too little information to decide anything just yet.)

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.

It's so - thoughtful, and careful, and - 

And there's more to the letter, that he hasn't even processed yet, but he keeps coming back to the first part, because - 

Aroden was originally a mortal human mage. Who became a god. Because He thought that mortal values were underrepresented among the gods (or at least this is the obvious inferenced), and so He just...did that, and ascended...and... 

- and apparently this is, not only possible, but something that at least one person has done before -

- the question is how - 

In some sense the question foremost on his mind isn't even the interesting part of this problem.

(The interesting part is mostly around the fact that Aroden - or at least Aroden's temple order's teachings - believe that Aroden knew the considerations and risks around turning Himself into a god while maintaining the same goals and values. That seems...genuinely extremely difficult, at least based on his gut sense of it, and Altarrin trusts his gut sense on the difficulty of mostly-theoretical-math problems a lot more than he used to, now that he's 700 years old.) 

...presumably Aroden took all of that into account. (Or maybe He didn't, Altarrin doesn't have enough information to judge just yet.) 

But. The much less interesting, much more obvious, easy-to-calculate part of the problem here is: how much mage-energy input would it take, to turn a mortal into a god? 

...He doesn't like that math. 

And maybe he's asking questions in the wrong direction entirely. Maybe he's completely missing the point. Altarrin knows that he's lacking in context, here, because if he had all of the relevant context then he wouldn't have been repeatedly surprised by recent events. 

But. 

If Aroden is, in fact, a former human, native to the other continent, then – He probably spent somewhere between 5 and 500 million lives in pursuit of godhood.