This turns out to be a surprisingly unpleasant exercise in feeling terrible about himself! He had really thought he'd already explored all of the ways he could feel terrible about himself, by now. 

Bastran writes a deeply humiliating report to send back to the northern research center.

(If he were wearing a WIS-enhancing headband, he might perhaps notice that this was mostly only humiliating from his own perspective.) 

...His overall impression is that Altarrin's thoughts, as described to him in the Thoughtsenser's report, seem pretty characteristic of him, and he's not especially concerned about mind-control from the headband. 

(Altarrin would want to have peace instead of...not that. Altarrin has lectured him about the concepts behind that a thousand times. Altarrin has repeatedly forced him to shove his face into looking at the costs of war. Altarrin has repeatedly reminded him to notice his own rationalizations towards solutions that feel simpler and easier but ultimately cost far more lives...) 

They would really much rather have gotten orders than a report they have to interpret themselves but in the absence of orders from the Emperor, Altarrin's ...in charge here ....so they'll let him do whatever it is he's planning...

Right now what he's planning is to sit down and write a very long letter. 

He's...writing it from a very different place than his report to Bastran. He is not actually intending to show a copy to Bastran. It's - not really the right question, which angle is more sincere or more what he really believes, it's just that communication is a two-place function and if he wants Iomedae to come away understanding his intentions, he needs to write it with the person she is in mind.  

(There's another half-formed thought behind that one, and a tangle of emotion, but not one he can take the time to follow right now. There are a lot of urgent priorities that come ahead of figuring out his own feelings.) 

To Iomedae of the Knights of Ozem

I, Archmage-General Altarrin of the Eastern Empire, am personally writing this letter to you, though I speak on behalf of my Empire. 

I wish to begin this letter with several apologies. Given the differences between our worlds, I am not sure how to express it such that you will understand, and I hope you will take into account that my words may be misunderstood because I lack some critical understanding. 

I am sorry that I killed you. The decision is one that made sense given what I knew at the time, but I regret having failed to notice my uncertainty and lack of context, and particularly that I failed to notice a situation where the gods of Velgarth might be manipulating us in an unexpected direction. I would likely have made different decisions had I received your letters in the order they were sent, and particularly if I had known your explanation that Aroden was once human. Given how often the gods' goals seem to be the precise opposite of my own, the fact that They appear to have worked very hard to deny me that information, in itself, evidence to me that negotiating a ceasefire with the Knights of Ozem, which is something I would have been more likely to do had I known more, would have been a path I end up preferring.

I regret deeply that the Empire, seen from the outside, is a place you would so predictably oppose. I regret the lives lost in the war with Oris, and while of course at the time the Empire was very opposed to your work, I do regret that our actions took you away from the people you had committed to help, with the result that they were overextended and lost a war you had asserted to them could be won. I imagine this would have bothered you a great deal. Having now seen the war that your order is fighting in your own world, I also regret having kept you from it for so long, and the cost your people very clearly paid for it. 

And I regret the initial assumptions I made about you and your god. I hope that you may understand better why, if and when you learn more of the gods of our world; I expect you have already made some updates based on the fact that it appears They were steering for your death, and at the highest cost to the Empire that I was willing to pay. While I cannot say, at this point, that I know enough to be certain that Aroden is a god I would approve of, I ought at least update my baseline priors – and when I am starting from uncertainty, rather than the near-certainty that any given god is hostile, the specific evidence you have provided is at least somewhat compelling and I am very motivated to verify your claims and learn more. An allied god would change almost everything for our Empire, and if such an alliance were on the table, it would more than justify making compromises on some of the Empire's currently policies in order to secure it. I imagine is an outcome your order would be pleased about as well. 

I understand that, given the Empire's actions in Oris, we are not starting off on grounds where you or the Knights of Ozem have any reason to trust our motives, and it is on us to prove them. As an initial offer of good faith, I am returning some of your artifacts, so that you may be better equipped in your current war. While I would be grateful if you considered it part of an agreement not to conduct further offensive operations against the Empire, including in Oris, I explicitly do not expect or demand anything in return for this offer, since it would be unreasonable to unilaterally force an agreement that you had no opportunity to negotiate or decline. 

If you wish to speak further, I have a means of scrying your world, and of transporting myself or others there, or retrieving objects or people to Velgarth. I am not yet confident enough in the Knights of Ozem to invite a messenger here or to send one of my own people to you, but if you have a means of translation that lets you write in our tongue, you can write your reply on the back of this letter that I have left blank and leave it in a deserted scryable area, I will take this to mean that you accept the terms of my offer and would like to conduct further talks. 

- Archmage-General Altarrin, Duke of Kavar, representative of Emperor Bastran IV and the Eastern Empire. 

And he'd like the sword to be sheathed and then carefully packaged, the fall won't damage it but the sword might damage other people, which is hardly a friendly opening move. The letter can be rolled up neatly and placed in a leather scroll case and attached, along with the bag containing the mysterious ring and the mysterious head-orbiting stones. 

(He won't refuse to show the letter to the lead researcher, if he's asked directly, but he's not intending to make the offer himself.) 

The Emperor said Altarrin's in charge here, or at least did not countermand Altarrin being in charge here. They are not going to further question him.

Then he'll go to the Work Room again. Alone, because he's not entirely sure the other side won't have some kind of instantaneous-effect contingency up and blast his Gate. He can probably survive it, he is possibly the only person ever to have survived a Master-potential mage final striking his Gate destination terminus as it went up (...it was not fun but he recovered), but this is much less true of the researchers. 

He puts up a lot of wards, including to trigger an alarm and summon help if there's a powerful magical discharge or if he collapses unconscious. (He's probably not going to lose consciousness just from the power-drain of the Gate on top of the scry, but it's more of a possibility than he would like, and a scenario where he would want prompt Healing attention.) 

He tries again to scry for Iomedae. It's been nearly a candlemark, longer than he had wanted to wait. Is she still at the camp, or is she back on the battlefield already? 

Unscryable, actually. 

Huh. 

(He drops it immediately, without having fully gotten the spell up at all, he doesn't know if they have a way to detect it, or if whatever anti-scrying wards her world uses also have teeth.)  

Can he get the sword-wielding mage who was with her before? 

He is in the field, leading the defense of the army's rear as it masses outside Urgir, fighting deadly already-dead things with only slightly less terrifying ability than Iomedae.

He doesn't especially want to drop the sword there, it might end up with the animated corpse army rather than Iomedae's side. He watches for ten seconds anyway, getting the scry up at all is a lot of the energy cost and any additional context is still useful, but then drops it to conserve his strength. 

Can he target a scry on the camp location where Iomedae was previously? He would rather have gotten it to Iomedae herself, but - it's clear her people are loyal to her, and they'll presumably recognize her sword. 

(He basically expects this to work unless, in fact, Iomedae is still there and they just got around to putting up wards between his last try and now, which seems unlikely unless they had a way of detecting his last scry, and he would have expected someone to react visibly if so.)

He's also getting a bit tired, at this point, but he can eke out another couple of scries and probably still have enough for the Gate.

He can do that. Her people are cooking, digging, repairing armor and weapons, etcetera.

...He sits down on the floor, because he's feeling drained enough already that losing consciousness after this is starting to feel like a real possibility. 

No point in hesitating, and he can't afford to hold the scry longer anyway. He drops it. 

Casts the Gate search-spell, spooling it out and out and out, his vision starting to grey out around the edges - 

- and there, and Gate-threshold up, about a hundred yards in the air, though it takes an entire two seconds to stabilize it. He's casting his end horizontal on the floor in front of him under the sword so it'll fall through directly...

Does anyone manage to attack his midair Gate-threshold during the four seconds or so before the sword is through and the Gate is down? 

They do have aerial scouts who can notice it, actually, but what they do is call out a warning about a probable-Teleport of an invisible person, not attack the site of the magic signature.

The Gate goes down uneventfully.

It's not an invisible person! It's a visible package of some kind, long and thin and rather sword-shaped, which is now falling! 

Also Altarrin is now sprawled on the floor with his cheek against the stone and his vision swimming. He didn't quite black out enough to trigger the contingencies, which is...sort of unfortunate...because now he has to push through his pounding reaction-headache and scrape something out of his nearly-empty reserves in order to get a communication-spell up and (not especially coherently) summon help. 

It'll be apparent to whoever responds that he's uninjured and the wards didn't flag any unexpected magic, he's just too drained to move. Which he did warn them was moderately likely. 

- they will come get him medical attention and only moderately panic that this is enemy action.

:Contact from Velgarth, come back: she alerts Alfirin sixty seconds later.

Lamashtu's tits.

"...I have to go, I don't know when I'll be able to return - sending me when you've made up your mind."

And she'll teleport back to the camp.

:What is the news and should we plane shift to discuss it - I've only got one we'd need to bring a cleric:

:They sent a letter. And my sword. And the ioun stones. Detena thinks no traps - I had Kalaris put up an antimagic field and unwrap the package but without magic he can't read the note. I think it's worth the plane shift, honestly - I'm very surprised -:

:Mm. I'll be right there, I want to look at them first - Detena's good but I'm better, with unfamiliar or hidden magic - and grab someone for the return plane shift.:

:Acknowledged.: She's going to pray for guidance in the meantime, though from their current best understanding the gods' foresight is blurry when tracking interworld interactions and probably Aroden has no idea what's going on here.

If the gods' foresight would be blurry here, so would her own, probably. Nobody's verified that the wizard versions of the prophecy spells actually use the same mechanisms as the gods' prophecy, but it seems likely. It would be worth it to try, anyways, under more normal circumstances, but as it stands she can't spare the spell slots.

Kalaris backs away and Alfirin inspects the items with the antimagic field gone. :They haven't been modified and don't have any active spells on them. If it's a trick it's - something to make it easier for them to scry or teleport to, maybe some kind of object that's easy to uniquely identify - or their magic is much much better at hiding spell effects than ours - or their magic simply doesn't show up on standard divinations. Either of the latter would be surprising; pending reading the letter I'd guess - actually let me save that for when we're less observable. To be on the safe side if this was all to smuggle a teleport targeting beacon on to your person, I recommend copying the letter and then destroying it and the scabbard and - everything else that wasn't one of your magic items.:

:Sure.: Copying the letter can be done with magic and shouldn't take long; the rest can be destroyed; the magic items can go with them on the Plane Shift, with Jala along for the return Plane Shift and also a commune if they're needed.

The magic items get a communal nondetection and go in a bag of holding, because if the Velgarth empire is spying, she would like this to be difficult for them. And then to the gardens.