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Iomedae in the Eastern Empire!
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...He was thinking about Bastran, earlier, and that little mental flinch. What are his emotions complaining about there? 

Well. Bastran is desperately miserable, for one. He probably has been his whole life, and never admitted it to anyone including himself because it's embarrassing, but it's worse rather than better now that he's Emperor, even though you would think the Emperor is the biggest winner of all. 

Bastran can have anything he wants that power can give him, and it doesn't matter, because he can't have a world where no one is afraid that he has the power to order their death. He has that power, and he doesn't have the leeway not to use it, or else he would be dead, and he cares too much about his duty to be irresponsible to it and so he is, instead, alive, and in power, at the cost of the lives of thousands of others, and the only satisfaction he can take from any of it is that he's probably ordered 10% fewer executions than the next-best candidate in line. 

Iomedae would admire dedication to duty, but - Iomedae would also point out that in this case it's a trap. The Empire might indeed be better off for having Bastran on the throne, but at such a cost, not just to his happiness but to his...fundamental personhood...there's just not enough space for Bastran to exist fully as himself, let alone have everything he would need around him to flourish. 

He would be happier as a peasant with no power, but that's also an enormous waste of a person like Bastran, a - light in the world, brighter than most - 

 

(something hurts very badly) 

 

- the place someone like Bastran could really and truly flourish is Urtho's Tower. 

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Urtho's Tower doesn't exist anymore. 

 

it's what he wanted to rebuild 

 

And Iomedae would say that it's impossible for Urtho's Tower to exist somewhere like the Empire. Because what it needs is - abundance, it needs the metaphorical light that lets green things grow (the same light and the same green things that the faceless self-perpetuating systems of the Empire consume until there's nothing left), but it needs people to feel safe not just physically but - to think freely - and how in the world can anyone have that in the Empire, which runs its entire state apparatus on banning dangerous thoughts. Iomedae might concede that it has good reason to do that, given what happens otherwise, but it still means that they can't have Urtho's Tower and never will. 

 

He can imagine Aritha in Urtho's Tower, thinking of nothing but magic research, inventing new fields from the ground up, and probably being terrifying but - in a good way, and - in many ways not the same person at all, this Aritha has grown in like a sculptured decorative shrub around the pruning and training-wires of the Empire's constraints, but in Urtho's Tower a different Aritha would be happy and fierce and unstoppable and - something - 

 

(everything hurts) 

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He should figure out why it hurts but he keeps bouncing away from looking at it, it feels like - staring too hard into a solar eclipse, whatever that metaphor means - 

 

...what would Iomedae think? 

 

That Altarrin is not a shape that can be pruned, not really, but he is a shape that can be crushed

(What is he even supposed to do with a thought like that?) 

That he's boxed himself into a corner. That he let the gods box him into a corner, really, because wow it's suddenly obvious, it feels trivial, why the gods want the Empire to be predictable, why They are willing to allow canal-Gates and state schools as long as those aren't allowed to come together into the kind of flourishing civilization that, inevitably, treads new ground - can he even blame Them for being afraid, Tantara was beautiful and flourishing and treading entirely new realms of what was possible and look what happened next. 

That he too is desperately miserable and has been for a very long time    

that he hasn't once in this lifetime and body taken the time to go look at the stars, which is proof of something

 

That she doesn't want him dead,

 

and doesn't want to have to be enemies,

 

 

and wants him to be free to follow his fundamental human birthright of choosing something else better than that 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(There's so little space for that thought, even compartmentalized into imaginary Iomedae. It's barely a whisper. But it's there.) 

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And, of course, he doesn't actually know for sure that the hypothetical Iomedae who holds these detailed imaginary opinions matches the real one. Or matched, past tense, because he doesn't know if Iomedae is even alive. (Though he thinks it's more likely than he did half a candlemark ago, for reasons he...can't actually pin down, it seems to be opaquely coming from his model of her as a person, that she might be wrong about local afterlives but wouldn't be that wrong and overconfident in it about her own soul.)

If she is alive and in her own world, he still doesn't know her information state about what happened, or her intentions toward the Empire, or whether she hasn't return because she can't or because she doesn't want to. There is, somehow, space to hold onto that even in the midst of everything. 

 

 

 

 

 

 (From the point of view of the supervising research lead, Altarrin has been holding perfectly still and not saying anything for nearly a quarter of an hour. He doesn't exactly look like someone in the middle of a miserable internal existential crisis, but he doesn't entirely look okay either.) 

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- they're kind of concerned and will initiate a checkin? Is he noticing negative side effects of the headband?

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Oh no someone is talking to him. It feels from Altarrin's perspective like it's taking him at least fifteen seconds to drag his mind back into a configuration where he can answer in a way that isn't incredibly concerning. 

(He's processing a lot faster than anyone else in the room, though, objectively it's more like three seconds, though for Altarrin this is still a noticeable pause.) 

"I am finding the amplified emotions distracting," he admits. "There are a number of things that - went wrong, in the war and in the leadup to it happening at all, that I am unhappy about, and - one of the side effects is definitely making it easier to - ruminate on what I wish I had done better. ...It also enhances - social perception, or something, and I have been using it to try to grasp at a better understanding of Iomedae, since she is a key player here - and she would have many critiques."

This summary...is not false, at least if you count 'the entire history of the Empire and its institutions' as 'in the leadup to the war in Oris' which is technically true. 

 

...Altarrin would probably usually go on to offer a plan but a lot of things aren't working, right now, the headband does not actually give him infinite mental space to navigate around loyalty compulsions and - even though he's reminding himself firmly that the thing he's loyal to is the First Emperor's vision, and true loyalty to the Empire means achieving that, he is still having a pretty hard time. He'll...wait and see if the research leads are going to respond further. 

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- right. They're going to pass that up the chain of command, since it's outside what they were expecting going in, but don't think he needs to remove it, if he doesn't think so.

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He doesn't think so, no. 

(Which is interesting, he notes to himself, because the experience he's having right now is awful and it's taking rather a lot of effort to conceal, and yet - in fact he very badly doesn't want to take it off yet, he's - not done - if he takes it off now he doesn't know what happens, but it's probably even worse than what's happening now. But if he can push through it then...maybe he gets to the point where things make sense again.) 

He appreciates the checkin, and they should probably check in with him every five minutes or so if he seems to be lost in thought again, and definitely they are encouraged to wait until they're reassured about their current concerns - and until he's passed a Thoughtsensing check, which he doesn't want to do yet because most of his actively distressing emotions that he's trying to get under control are about highly sensitive state secrets, sorry - before okaying him to go off and do dangerous magic research alone.

He thinks he can make a lot of progress on the dangerous magic research but he does want to be very sure he's not impaired for it. He thinks another half-candlemark of acclimatization will be more than enough, and the other effects of the headband are going to be excellent for it. However, the supervision is for a reason and they should also run their own reasoning there by the offsite team before making a call. 

 

(This is at the very least a pretty misleading summary. Altarrin does not expect to be all right in half a candlemark, he just...also suspects that there's a path to - not this - and it runs through getting a Gate to Iomedae's world, and learning if Iomedae is there and alive, and if Aroden is who she claimed He was. And so he...had better, somehow, figure out how to pass a Thoughtsensing check so he can go work on making that happen.

He is perhaps, possibly, bringing up his appreciation for their care with the precautions less because he feels appreciative and more because he predicts it will lead them to being less worried about his mental state.) 

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They indeed seem assuaged, and leave him alone.

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All right. How does he get from...wherever he is now...to being able to pass a Thoughtsensing check, and also, you know, actually not being impaired and distracted such that he's liable to drop himself into the Elemental Plane of Fire by mistake if he does weird planar experiments. 

 

 

...He needs to not be having the line of thought he was just having, even though he suspects it was important, if only because having testable predictions around Iomedae's reaction to events in Velgarth is going to be quite relevant once he has a way to Gate to her world, and also for other reasons he can't think about the strategic picture reason is more than enough though.

The headband-self-awareness is flagging that not being able to think about something is worrying, but - it's not surprising, in this case, that modeling in depth what Iomedae thinks of the Empire is going to be an issue with the standard compulsions, Iomedae has no reason whatsoever to be loyal to the Empire or think only orthodox thoughts. It's moderately inconvenient but it's not a mystery. 

 

His mind doesn't really want to set it aside, it feels...unfinished...but he would expect that, he can't actually come to any final conclusions here by reasoning in a sealed underground room off the letters and eyewitness reports of a woman he's never met. He has testable predictions, he needs to actually test them, and that means he needs contact with her world. 

So - fold it up, encapsulate it with the mental tag of 'testable predictions of what Iomedae thinks of the Eastern Empire and recent events in it' and tuck it aside, for a time when he can actually make further progress on it...? 

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It's hard. There's a lot of internal screaming, coming from multiple different corners of his mind. 

 

...Poke at that. He's already set down a clear line of why there's no point ruminating on how not-knowing-the-answer (he is not really specifying what "the answer" is even in his thoughts) is distressing, given that he has a plan to get the answer and he will be much faster at it if he's not distracted. He knows how to do that mental motion even without a headband. It comes up a lot. 

He - thinks it's working, more or less, and the screaming is about other things. Mostly things he wants that are impossible, or aren't even coherent.

Great. Fine. Stare at those until they're at least organized, it - won't get him to 'okay' but he's mostly given up on that right now and it can at least get him to 'capable of compartmentalizing.' 

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He wants it to be the case that the Empire can work, that he was only missing one or two simple insights, or better yet only missing enough resources - what was it Samien said in his fake pitch for the nonexistent secret agent program... "The key to finding a substitute that they devised was a consistently rising prosperity per person, the Church had figures - I didn't memorize them, I'm afraid - and thought that with rapid enough development you could actually make it work with gratitude as long as no one had to be grateful for what happened three years ago instead of this year." He wants it to turn out that that works, or something like it, that there's - something real and good and beautiful to be built on the skeleton of the Empire he spent centuries building, that they can go from here to a place that can have Urtho's Tower in it without the intervening step where they have to burn it to the ground and start over... 

 

This is a coherent thing to want! It makes a lot of sense that he doesn't want his life's work - his work of many lives - to be, not just a failure, but a waste that should never have been attempted. 

He...isn't sure you can steer the Empire in a different direction, at this point; just like the individuals are pinned in place by a self-perpetuating system of incentives - a faceless wheel that lacks the capability to update on new information and choose to change - that system, too, is narrowly constrained. By the gods, partly, and maybe They can be negotiated with, but also just by...what kinds of equilibrium are stable in practice...and arguing with that feels like arguing with math

 

What else. 

He wishes that Iomedae had arrived before the Cataclysm. No matter what happens from here, there are things that were lost that can't be gotten back, ever, no matter how much magic Iomedae's world has to offer. (Unless they have the magic to travel back in time, but - Altarrin is pretty sure that's differently ethically fraught, would it - erase people - would it create a copy of his world but earlier, and his own past would still be lost - also wow he is going to sit on the temptation to let the headband-enhancement drag him off on an entire tangent about the philosophy of time-traveling magic, it's almost certainly not relevant.) 

...He wants Urtho to be proud of him, which is - probably a thing he's wanted for a long time - and impossible even in theory, now, and it's incredibly pointless to be dwelling on it now

He wishes he didn't have to keep secrets. Altarrin doesn't think this is an entirely useful framing but on an emotional level he feels like - how could he have ever thought he could build a civilization on trust, how could he have believed he understood what trust meant well enough to build anything with it, when he's never trusted anyone in his entire life with the most critical piece of who and what he is. 

He wishes the stupid letters had reached him early enough that it made any goddamned difference. 

He wishes he had been smarter, more careful, known to ask the right questions, and that is approximately asking for a miracle and not the kind gods can repeatedly grant. 

 

He wishes he had space to breathe.

(This thought really wants to unpack further, but...isn't...because he doesn't have space to breathe or air to give it, that's the entire problem.) 

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....And behind that, once he's stared at the sharper and more delineated sources of screaming long enough that they settle down into vague grumbling, there's - a quieter, deeper, darker pain. 

It takes a long time to name, and only partly because his mind is torn on whether it's s safe thought. It also just feels like...something he hasn't tried to pull into the light in a very, very long time. 

 

 

 

 

 

Seven hundred years ago, he looked at the stars and he made a vow. 

He...hasn't fulfilled it. He hasn't even come close to making up what was lost in the Cataclysm, which is at least partly his fault, and - plausibly still his greatest impact on the world. Depending on how you weight different factors, like 'number of starving children' versus 'quantity of mind control', it's unclear if he's made positive progress at all since the moment he woke up in a young Lionstar k'Leshya's body in a ruined world. 

Which would be bad enough! There's a pit of grief and regret and guilt there that he doesn't endorse staring into because it won't help move forward, but he could fall into it forever. 

 

 

But there's also 

(it's so hard to think) 

he can't

(everything hurts) 

he doesn't think he can 

do it

 

ever

 

 

from here 

 

 

 

and he has nowhere else to go

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- and then he's abruptly disoriented, bouncing away from Iomedae would call it the walls of his prison he said he was going to come back to the Iomedae-prediction-checking thing later once he has a Gate

Focus. Maybe literally just focus on his breathing and multiplying numbers in his head for a minute until he feels less of the dizzy-falling emotion.

 

 

A minute does not get him to feeling 'okay', he feels...very much like a thin mask of molded-paper over a bottomless pit. But he stared at - the thing that hurt the most - and it's still there but he can acknowledge it and do things anyway. Nothing else is clamoring for his attention. Mostly he feels numb, like none of his other emotions can even register in contrast to...whatever that one is called. 

He gives it another two minutes, which he spends organizing his thoughts to be mostly about the tactical situation in Oris, the importance of better intelligence on Iomedae's world, and the interesting mathematical problem presented by trying to Gate to another planet by finding a multi-planar routing.

Once he's ready, he calmly and politely tells the Thoughtsenser that he thinks he's accustomed to the headband now and the side effects are no longer actively impairing, and he would like if they did a Thoughtsensing read now to sanity-check his self-assessment. 

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They'll do that! Does the Archmage-General Altarrin seem stable and focused on the priorities he gave them before he went in?

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He's...hard to Thoughtsense, not in the sense of pushing through shields - he is very cooperatively not shielding at all - but in the sense that it feels like there's three times as much thinking going on as what normal people can manage, in layers and spaces that wouldn't even fit into most minds. And it's not just the volume; it's going by so fast, impossible to keep up with. 

 

Altarrin is clearly trying to make himself legible, though, holding some thoughts 'closer to the surface' and making them more explicit. 

He has a lot of concerns about the tactical situation in Oris. The grand simplification of why is 'because it will obviously advantage the gods if the Empire comes out of this weakened rather than strengthened', and a flicker of - places where there's room for the gods to maneuver, places where the Empire is currently leaving outcomes up to chance (which will never be in their favor) rather than pinning them down and overdetermining that they're going to win. 

(A deeper level of thought, at a preverbal level and quite hard to pick up on: that the Empire's entire strategy relies on always overdetermining that they're going to win, and this is...not doomed, necessarily, but certainly a very very big ask, and one that will predictably not always be met.) 

 

He's thinking ahead about how the artifacts they're studying here might be used in the various wars. There's a sprawl of hypothetical plans, weighing the pros and cons of each - this part is just logistics, but even with a fraction of his attention it's clear that he's tracking way more possibilities and risks than most people can hold. 

(The implicit thought below it, that actually he doesn't want to be fighting those wars at all, is barely perceptible, and comes across mainly as an emotional overtone of...weariness, and heaviness, and wanting it to be over.) 

He's thinking about Iomedae's world - a tangle of inferences, there, what can you predict about a society and culture from the handful of facts he knows about their gods and their afterlives and their style of diplomatic letters, what does that mean about how to approach trade with them, or war... 

 

He's thinking about the problem of Gate planar routing. This is actually where most of his attention is, and it's the hardest for him to make legible, because it's nearly all entirely nonverbal mathematical-spatial intuition. He thinks it's solvable, optimistic estimate he could do it in a few days with the headband, pessimistic estimate a week, pessimistic estimate if he decides to remove the headband is...longer but he can still get it, a month maybe. 

The emotions associated with that are also the ones at the forefront. Determination, and anticipation, and uncertainty and fear-of-the-unknown mostly held at bay by the relentless drive to move forward. They need this. 

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- right, well, none of that seems wrong, and it's Archmage General Altarrin, he's the person in the Empire who understands best the importance of fighting the gods, and it doesn't seem like the headband is making him worse at that.

 

They'll write a report but not recommend to the Emperor that the Archmage-General stop using the headband. And they'll check in regularly to make sure things are on a stable track.

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Altarrin's next step here is to do some planar-interaction experiments. There's a Work Room on-site with appropriate shielding for that type of work, but he's the only one here who has the skill to do it safely, and he would prefer to do it alone rather than risk one of the mage-researchers' lives. Do they want to propose a schedule for him to take breaks and check in? 

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Check-in every few hours?

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And Altarrin locks himself in a Work Room to do some hands-on observations of interactions between planes. 

 

 

 

He's making much faster progress than he would without the headband.

(He...does start to get the sense that whatever the headband is doing, exactly, it's not really meant to be used for magic research, and would be much better targeted at, for example, leading armies. Which kind of makes sense. Iomedae was a military leader, not a researcher. It still helps, a lot, but none of that is really coming from the increased emotional awareness or awareness of other people, which is mainly a distraction he has to set aside.) 

 

At the next check-in, he seems calm and also preoccupied, his head nearly entirely full of grim determination and math. 

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(Between the checkins, when he's alone in the shielded Work Room, he is...mostly pretty not okay, and quite often thinking things a lot more concerning than that. The problem is that the work isn't quite complex or all-encompassing enough to use all of his attention, and you would think that "it doesn't achieve anything to be conflicted and miserable right now, there's nothing he can do about the factors prompting it, the highest priority is developing a Gate-technique" would be convincing to his emotions but it...isn't, really.) 

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When he's exhausted at the end of that first day - or, well, closer to the next morning, he was in a good rhythm and the headband makes it a lot easier to push through mental fatigue - he removes the headband, because this just seems like a good idea.

He does it from in the shielded Work Room, which is a very good idea, because a level of background conflicted-misery that was previously entirely possible to box off and work around is suddenly flooding everything, and he loses...several minutes, probably, to some kind of overwhelming misery-panic-attack. He doesn't think he actually cries, because when he finally wrestles himself back to approximate calm his eyes are dry, but he's pretty sure that if he had done it in front of someone it would have been very worrying to the supervising research lead. 

He spends another five minutes getting his head in order, which mostly means ruthlessly folding away every unfinished line of thought and every unprocessed emotion that (he will tell himself very firmly) isn't relevant until he has more information on Iomedae's world, he slips out of the Work Room and updates whoever is on night supervision duty on his progress - even simplified, it's going to be hard to follow - and hands over the headband for safekeeping. He's probably going to sleep late, so they should at their discretion feel free to let Aritha use it again in the morning until he's ready to resume his work. 

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Aritha will delightedly take the headband in the morning and make some progress on identifying as a search target 'this kind of purified metal, laid very heavily with this kind of complicated set-spell', which will hopefully work even if the items here don't have exact duplicates.

 

She has no existential crises. She expects them to be conquered by the other world, because that's how everything works unless they are too distant and poor for the other world to bother with. She hopes instead they conquer the other world but she doesn't really expect it. 

That's not an existential crisis, since she can't contemplate defection. She's a researcher; her odds of surviving the war are not terrible.

 

She can report to Altarrin when he awakens.

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Altarrin, when he wakes up in the late afternoon, is very pleased with her progress! 

(He feels bleary and slow and like he's being slowly yet inexorably pulled apart between the desperate need to move forward and reach - a destination he cannot actually think about - and the crushing weight of something he also can't really think about.

He can think about search-spell techniques, though! Aritha is actually smarter than him right now, but he has more experience, and even without the headband he keeps up fine.) 

 

 

He thanks her for her work, updates her on some of his own progress the day before, and suggests some research directions for tomorrow.

And then he takes the headband, puts it on and needs only five minutes to 'get accustomed to it' and pass a Thoughtsensing check, and heads back to his own research. If he works until he's too exhausted to keep going, that will bring him to nearly dawn, and Aritha can have the headband again for most of the day and then report, it feels like the most efficient way to arrange things. 

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(It also means that by the time he stumbles to his guest bedroom, he's way too tired to lie awake being miserable for very long.) 

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