He'd appreciate that. Should he be helping with the clean up?

They may want some Discern Locations on combatants whose bodies can't be found, but it'll be at least half an hour before the relay has a list (and of course Élie can only help for anyone he's met). They will want a lot of Walls of Stone, obviously, given that the fortress was destroyed in the fighting. They'll also need someone to send some water elementals through the river to find bodies and magic items that fell in there.

(Iomedae's in the air supervising fortress reconstruction; they did not go into this with a layout plan if they had to build the place from scratch, because they weren't expecting to do that, but she remembers what they did for Fort Lorrin.)

Well, Élie does happen to be a quite competent structural engineer if the situation calls for it. 

That absolutely sounds like an art that would have advanced dramatically in the intervening centuries, do you want to take over? We don't want anything outrageous, just for the fortress to require lots of Disintegrates to actually collapse and at least two to breach, good lines of effect out but not in from the higher levels, and an underground mostly segregated from whatever's going on aboveground and without routes to sneak in.

That sounds manageable. How many Walls of Stone should I assume I have available? 

He can at least avoid making that mistake twice in one day. 

Forty now - we were only expecting to have to do repair work - but a hundred in an hour and four hundred more tomorrow if you have plans that need them.

....yeah he can work with that. 

She appreciates it and will in that case hop back over to the main force, since an attack at some point later today or at dusk is quite likely, with how Tar-Baphon will know they expended a lot of spells this morning.

If there isn't an attack this evening, Élie's looking forward to an exquisitely painful conversation about his shortcomings with the crusade command. 

....until then, he's gonna build a STAR FORT. 

There's an attack in the evening, but not in full force; it looks more like Tar-Baphon's trying to get a second report on the new archmage. 

Which actually seems like an argument for leaving you out of it, Iomedae has conveyed. Let him think you've got one spell at ninth, used it already.

That sounds right. I've got enough spells left I can make Tar-Baphon regret sending a probe, probably. Anything noteworthy?

Just the usual dragons, some polymorphed dragons - Tar Baphon does this a lot, it's annoying because it makes it harder to tell which dragons are the ones worth murdering - and Kavasa. The banshee; not much of a threat to powerful people, a serious problem for the ordinary soldiers.

Kavasa might have been worth going after with the rod if it still had charges. Oh well. She'll take her escort, to keep the dragons off her.

Dragons are a problem because they can do a lot of damage to an army with their breath weapons, not because they are scary one on one. Iomedae's saving a couple smites for if this isn't the real attack this evening, but even without she can beat some dragons up. 

It doesn't take them very long.

Marit, are you done with the liches yet? Learn anything good?

Are we meeting? I may want to unpetrify Casavel later and follow up on a few things but nothing urgent. - they learned we were going after Marian Leigh through running a lot of prophecies after learning we were redeploying for something from Khevese, fifth-circle Teleport contractor who, anticipating we'd be able to put it together after the fact, defected this morning. Also he was apparently faking being a fifth circle wizard with some boots of Teleport and some very minor illusion magic. Deeply embarrassing, really, even though neither of us ever met him. 

And Marit will join them for the meeting.

Iomedae'll go quickly through casualty figures. They count dead casualties and gone (not recovered) casualties; they don't bother counting injured, for skirmishes where there's no question of sufficient healing. Casualties were substantially higher than hoped, because the enemy was forewarned, but no one important is unrecovered and only about a dozen people overall are unrecovered. The good news from the battle is mostly that Alfirin Dominated two liches and that another three dozen were successfully murdered, which is more magic items stolen than lost to the other side stealing them, on net.

Marit will repeat what he learned from the interrogations and from the investigation into who tipped off Tar-Baphon to run a bunch of prophecies.

Élie can explain what's up with the new fortress design and how it's best defended – 

" – and, of course, apologize for my conduct on the field." 

"You were under a greater heroism and a mind blank the whole time. I have no idea what you're talking about."

"We have people assigned to watch the battle and tell us what they think happened but it's an impossible job. The casualty counts are our best guess of whether things went well or not and - things went pretty well."

The fortress design? Extremely cool.

"I ended up out of communication with my escorts, got at least one of them killed unnecessarily, may have cost the commander the opportunity to kill Malyas for good, and tipped our hand about the fact I exist at all."