And a Mass Heal strikes every being in Urgir, orc or mangy stray dog or undead, and it’s rare, actually, for there to be an orc who is wholly unscarred and uninjured, so every one of them feels it; disease and poison and damage and madness, driven away. 

(Not all of the undead die, but there aren’t that many of them who are tough enough to endure that, or who make that save against Pharasma’s High Priest.)

And a roar goes up, not from all of the people of Urgir or from the crusaders outside but from around and among and between them all, a roar that begins to sound more like a melody, and that swells up and carries away - not the desire to commit violence, it doesn’t do anything about the desire to commit violence. Iomedae disapproves of trying to run places on mind control. It takes away the ability. Attacking people just obviously won’t work, and if you try (and a lot of frightened and disoriented orcs are now trying) you’ll find yourself, instead, standing there, not attacking people.

And then a road grows, beneath the crusader’s feet, a paved road, wide enough for three wagons abreast, and it runs up to the walls not at the powerfully defended sky-citadel gates but to the walls where there’s no gate at all, and then through it, into the city.

The walls remain, but in blazing gold upon them there is an archway, and to look at the archway is to know: this wall will no longer bar you, if you carry only what you’ve honestly earned, and come in peace.

(They’re going to want to reopen the normal gates as soon as possible. Abadar’s standards for ‘honestly earned’ are inconveniently high.)

But Iomedae meets them (she left a couple of magic items off just to be absolutely certain; she discussed it with Tilbun at length the night before), and she flies through, apparently alone (unless you have True Seeing in which case obviously flanked by half a dozen people and two summoned solar angels) and some of Tar-Baphon’s surviving undead lieutenants in the city fight her, because whoever was giving them orders from a distance was paying insufficient attention, but most of them flee.

And a carefully selected unit of crusaders (who were property-rights-to-all-owned-items-checked the night beforehand) follow her through the walls, a thousand soldiers, and trumpets sound, and men cheer, and weep, and pray, and gape disbelievingly. 

The banner of the crusaders rises above the city. 

And after about an hour the ordinary gates of the city open.

The rest of the day is actually an enormous logistical nightmare and there are upsettingly many casualties given that only a few hundred orcs in the city are even very occasionally capable of doing violence in it and given that the crusaders have been emphatically told by their commanders that every single grievous injury in the city is going to have Iomedae personally flying over to figure out what happened. But that part isn’t going to make it into the mythology, and that does actually matter, and - 

- when there’s a midday assault from four or five of Tar-Baphon’s deadliest lieutenants and Tar-Baphon himself showing off the ability to cast Wail of the Banshee with unlimited targets within its radius, three times in a round -

- and forty or fifty thousand of the undead under their control, approaching in four separate armies who’d obviously been encircling the crusade as it dawdled outside Urgir -

- presumably testing the hypothesis that the crusade has burned all its resources, or just acting on the obvious fact that the crusaders are mostly still in the field just as a logistical matter and will be much harder to kill once they’re in the city -

 - it transpires that the crusade has not burned all its resources and, in fact, the High Priest of Pharasma has been waiting ready for the perfect moment for a Breath-of-Life-but-Bigger-and-Better Miracle that restores to life all the just-this-last-round dead and leaves fairly little of Tar-Baphon’s army standing, and also Alfirin has yet to use any of her important spells at all.

“You were right,” Iomedae says to Alfirin once they’ve driven the enemy back, healed the wounded, raised some of the dead. “If we’d taken the city with a Miracle when we only had one, he’d have done that and -”

And Iomedae might have survived, if she’d could have been convinced to flee in her moment of utter ruin instead of standing and dying, and Alfirin would have survived, and a handful of others perhaps, but the Crusade would be dead and nearly every crusader something worse. She doesn’t say it.

“I’m really glad we had enough. I wouldn’t have wanted to do that the hard way.

I’m staying, by the way. I expect you know that changed when Altarrin showed up, but I never actually said. Here through the winter and Even Greater Teleport by the spring and - If Tar-Baphon hasn’t figured out where our diamonds are coming from I think we’ll have it next campaign season.”

"I think so!"

"I’ve been mostly not thinking how to use Altarrin, since Aroden asked me not to, but -

- I don’t think this, specifically, will blur up the future much -

- Altarrin found our world, from a very different one, by studying the signature of our magic items and then looking not for those specific items, but for similar ones.”

Alfirin is smarter than her. She won’t have to spell out the rest.

“Might work, we can have him try it once in case it just works but I think it's not worth a long research project. I wouldn’t naively expect it to work past a mind blank - I know you can’t classically put one up on an object, but you can on intelligent magic items and I think a phylactery is - it’s linked to his soul. I’m pretty sure he can mind blank them, and if he couldn’t when he first became a lich he’s had six hundred years to figure it out.”

“I want him dead and gone, not just sealed away. I am aware this might just be - me being high on too many Miracles, thinking anything is possible -

I assume one cannot scry for, specifically, the spell structure Mind Blank, even if one has Velgarth scrying and can scry for spell structures in general?

“Normally I would say ‘definitely not,’ but Velgarth magic is a sufficiently large unknown that - Almost certainly not, but we should try anyways. Tomorrow he can watch me prepare it and cast it and maybe that will make it easier to find.”

There’s more to say, and - it’s not going to go well, or at least it’s at risk of not going well, but there’s not going to be a better time. 

“Once we get the next batch you should enhance yourself. I’m - not actually looking forward to not being able to keep up, but. I’ll live. And it’s the sort of thing that might actually really matter. I - want to ask you to get Wisdom as well.”

“...You are asking me, as a favor to you, to enhance my Wisdom. Where are you going with this.”

“ - I am more excited about all of the many amazing things you are going to do after the crusade if you have more Wisdom. You’re going to do sufficiently many, sufficiently amazing things that being better at them is a really significant multiplier on the world.

Ending the sentence there would be dishonest. Continuing it will merely be unpleasant.

- and I’ll feel less anticipation-of-something-terrible-happening. I don’t experience it as subjectively aversive like the rest of you all but I do still have some anticipation-of-something-terrible-happening, you know.”

“I was going to enhance Wisdom anyways. I told you that, when we first got the diamonds. I cannot help but think there’s something else going on here and I don’t actually know what it is - “

“...Are you anticipating me becoming a lich?”

“Not as your first resort,” Iomedae says. Talking is suddenly not just unpleasant but also difficult, but she does lots of difficult things. “I expect you have lots of other ideas. And it is possible. Aroden managed it. But - but almost no one else, right. And. If you’re two hundred, and it’s catching up with you, and you haven’t figured it out, and it’s that or you die of old age -

“I understand what you’re saying.”

“I’m afraid, right now, and not sure that I’m wrong to be afraid but it’s not actually helping so please - thank you.”

“Can we talk about this somewhere else. I’ll bring you back, after, even if it - goes badly. And can you promise to keep this conversation a secret - I won’t ask for your promise not to use it against me.”

It's not among the sentences one would be most excited to hear, from a - very close friend - who may or may not be pursuing lichdom. And under many plausible accounts of what Alfirin - wants, what's in her interests, it would be very, very foolish to go with her.

- Iomedae has good instincts, actually, and they’re not saying that Alfirin is going to soul-trap her now that she can win the crusade without her.

And she’s not, actually, sure of that, because Alfirin can lie to her sometimes, and there’s the argument it’s an indefensible risk to take, a risk she’s taking with the entire future of the world out of what Alfirin would call sentimentality, but to refuse would be - to rip up everything she extended two days ago in a bag of diamonds - and she saw, what that meant -

- and it’s not as if ‘the entire future of the world’ ever appears on only one side of an equation, it’s always woven in with everything on both sides -

“I promise.” And she extends her hand for the Plane Shift.

(Alfirin can and will definitely interpret the hesitation, but Iomedae is not ashamed of the fact she needed to think to make a promise like that.)