"To be fair to him, the last time an Emperor gave a bunch of land to Aroden it went badly."

"Aroden's going to show up for the Age of Glory and Elie's going to have triumphed and everyone will say, well, see, we're a Republic, and you can run for office the same as anyone else, but we've read our history books and know what happened last time so we won't vote for you."

"Won't that be something."

"Oh, come on, that's got to be more or less precisely how you hope the Age of Glory will go."

"More or less! I suppose I'm not yet into the habit of expecting things to go as I hope."

Oh, that is much foo close for comfort.

To Alfirin – please feed me a line that doesn't sound suspicious or else get us out of here. 

I'm trying!

She lets a moment of embarrassment show on her face, and a brief apologetic look, because any more open acknowledgement or apology would be uncharacteristic, and breaks eye contact with Iomedae.

"So how are preparations for Marian Leigh going?"

Are these objections to Lastwall Alfirin has had for years and just not thought Iomedae would care about? ...admittedly they are less persuasive as objections without the future angle, but Iomedae would still have discussed it until they knew what if anything they disagreed on.

- it doesn't matter. If Alfirin doesn't want to talk about it - and actually, now that she thinks about it, Alfirin has never wanted to discuss past her ascension plans, and she always assumed that was about what Alfirin planned to do with herself next but maybe it wasn't, maybe it was about what Alfirin expected Iomedae to leave behind...

"I think we're ready. I'll brief the soldiers in four days with the story where we're doing it by Teleports."

"How many people have to know to handle the real teleport logistics?"

"You two, me, Marit. And a dozen people who will notice their orders don't make sense and be told that I'm aware of that and that no one else needs to be. - Tar-Baphon's espionage in our camp has been, as far as we know, pretty limited since he lost Erum-Hel but one doesn't want to count on that."

"I have preparations I want to make too, then. Tell me if there's anything else you need." 

"I will. Thank you, and be careful."

"I almost always am." 

Plane shift. 

When Elie and Alfirin next return the Marian Leigh preparations are in their final stages.

There's a map of the city, done by magic, with brightly colored flags for various objectives, and an operational timetable, and squad assignments and a schedule for pre-combat spellcasting which starts with contingencies cast days in advance. By the day-of the schedule details who does what each round for four full minutes before they head out. Elie has two paladins assigned to him whose main job is to keep enemies off him and tank spell effects for him with Paladin's Sacrifice; Alfirin does too; they separately each have a cleric and a song-sorcerer assigned to them. 

In case Elie is unfamiliar with the main personally powerful combatants of the Shining Crusade, here they are and here's their deal.

The Mirrorgrave has an artifact cloak into which he directs all hostile spell effects, best to let the people with swords handle him, he can also vanish and leave behind a statue of himself, it is considered worthwhile but not high priority to blow up the statues because it's thought he could also return to them.

Kavasa is an incorporeal banshee fifth-circle song-sorcerer whose screams, as you might expect, kill anyone who hears them, and override Silence though not a sufficiently heightened Silence; in general everyone will have Death Ward up but anyone without Death Ward up should probably deafen themselves.

Taldaris, Saravega, Quarnim Ix, and Magallentis are all eighth circle wizards/sorcerers and are also liches. Taldaris has some fancy magic items and some genuine cleverness as a commander; as a combatant he's not that much scarier than a normal eighth circle caster. Quarnim Ix merits particular note, he's a Blood Lord of Geb and has some weird tricks up his sleeve and casts as a sixth circle cleric as well as an eighth circle wizard. 

Kritasheere is a ghoul and the ninth circle high priest of Urgathoa, insofar as Urgathoa's Church can be correctly characterized like that. He's fond of enchantment effects, and very very skilled with them; if he lands one on a spellcaster he'll have them Teleport or Plane Shift to a dungeon of his to be made undead. She mentions this as it helps some people make a second desperate effort to break the spell. 

Naraga and Istravek are undead ancient black dragons with the abilities you'd expect of undead ancient black dragons.

Malyas is a vampire lord and an antipaladin, sometimes accompanied by paladins of the Shining Crusade who he turned into vampire thralls or graveknights. He is astoundingly deadly in melee but Elie is presumably accustomed to avoiding melee. 

In the same vein, Cosarra and Alamathus are very deadly graveknights, avoid melee, if you kill one don't let anyone Teleport out with the armor, it contains their soul.

Jolanara is a nightwing, which means she travels cloaked by dozens of greater shadows that drain strength at a touch and that if she kills anyone she can use their soul to build a conduit to the Negative Energy Plane, which makes them hard to raise. 

Erum-Hel hopefully won't show but he's a morgh assassin, teleportation is impossible in a radius around him, he's generally invisible and doesn't show up to detections short of True Seeing, and the injuries dealt by his blade are nearly impossible to heal with magic. Also when he kills people they turn to dust, which is a going concern here because Elie might wake up in his clone back home. He doesn't stick around, generally, just ambushes someone stabs them to death and isn't seen again for the rest of the battle. He's been gone for the last five years, but killed a dozen of Iomedae's top people in the space of a week before that, she dislikes the guy immensely. 

And Tar-Baphon's aura of terror paralyzes anyone within 60 feet who isn't immune to fear, he can command arbitrary undead, he has at least twelve ninth circle spells a day, he throws around a lot of empowered disintegrates and mythic fireballs which bypass fire immunity and of course he can do a bunch of things like land a Dominate through Protection from Evil or do a Time Stop that lasts long enough to search the whole battlefield for his targets, examine them closely, and have spells ready to hit them when it ends. If Elie or Alfirin lands a disjunction on the boots of teleport and then counterspell him for a moment then Iomedae or Karlenius can kill him which is always nice because he wears good gear, including some minor artifacts, and it leaves him on the back foot for a week or so.

Elie should yell through his telepathic bond when he needs his paladins to take a hit for him, otherwise they'll use their best judgment, they know about what's deadly to a ninth circle wizard.

Well, shit, maybe these people do have some real problems. 

"I think I'll be most useful against the rank-and-file, but I assume you'll let me know if I'm needed for one of their commanders."

"We'll have a Telepathic Bond up, I'll let you know, but generally, yes, aside from throwing a Disjunction out we don't want our archmages engaging anyone scary on the other side one-to-one. They generally have very powerful resistance to magic, and the fastest way to take them down is with a smite and a sword."

The schedule actually gives Elie three Telepathic Bonds: one with Iomedae Arnisant Marit Karlenius and Alfirin, only for extreme emergencies, one with his bodyguard paladins and songsorcerer and cleric, and one with some people who'll be safely back in Vellumis handling triage for the high command; things he says to them will still get conveyed to Iomedae etc but less urgently. The one with people back in Vellumis will be cast by Iomedae herself so it lasts twenty-four hours; the others of course will run out after about three hours, though if all goes well there'll be a regroup and re-cast before then. 

That reminds him, are there any buffs he personally should be casting on people?

Greater Magic Weapon is the obvious ones for which an archmage is a particularly marked improvement over anyone else and which he can cast out of his night-before spell slots rather than his day-of spell slots, and then of course if he's willing they'll have four extended Mind Blanks from him the day before the fight and an Extended Communal Mind Blank for forty-eight of the weaker casters right before the fight starts if it's better to do that with one of his ninth circle slots than one of Alfirin's. Does he know how to falsely persuade a strand of prayer beads he's a divine caster for the boost to his spells' power? They borrow one from the Church for big fights.

He can't use the prayer beads, he hasn't really spent much time working with clerics, but he's game for everything else. He also doesn't have an enormous amount of experience working with an organized military force so he's really quite happy to just be artillery here. 

"Understood. And if you're feeling like you don't have control of the situation, or if your guards are dead, it is perfectly wise and reasonable to Teleport out. I'm not going to claim you can't do a lot of good on a battlefield, but it's very far from the most important capacity in which you operate, and it's not worth taking significant risks for. Losing a battle is less of a loss than losing you would be, if we can't just easily raise you."

Yes yes he should also eat his vegetables. 

"Understood."

"Do we want to use the demiplane for this - if Elie and I spend the day before mostly in the demiplane we can do ten times as many mind blanks, mage armors, greater magic weapons - but it's a more visible use of it than what we've been doing so far."

" - maybe the Mind Blanks. It'll be hard for him to conclude we cast Mind Blank an implausible number of times instead of just having you do two Extended Communal Mind Blank instead of one. I do want to avoid giving him cause to - pull out all the stops, I think it's far from overdetermined that we win if he tries that. Maybe you can also use the demiplane to take over the Greater Magic Weapons that I'd otherwise have had Heleer and Tanat and Moravi casting, that's another thing he should have a very hard time noticing. But I don't think we should get greedy and use that to cast more than he knows we can."