"Pretty badly, I suspect. And the more senior people we chew through, the weaker the newer patrols are, and the more likely they are to die. Regill's numbers have us at sixty-seven people dead on patrol in the last three weeks, and with a few rare exceptions, they weren't new."

"...I don't suppose we've been gentle reposing any of them."

"We have not. We lack the resources to raise any more than a handful of elite units, and preserving the bodies would leave us with fewer castings of endure elements."

"What's the Church of Iomedae's present threshold for raising combat losses?" 

"Great question I don't know the answer to. But we've only got one third-circle paladin and - what, four second-circles? So unless someone killed Ciar while I wasn't looking, I'm not optimistic."

The Shining Crusade raises wizards and sorcerers and clerics at fourth circle, and paladins at second, with lower thresholds for officers. Or they did a week ago; now they've presumably equalized thresholds with Lastwall and he has a sneaking suspicion that Lastwall is doing worse than that. 

"...so it sounds like there are a few different challenges. One is that we will shortly be in catastrophically bad shape if the current rate of losses keeps up - maybe already are - and the losses will compound because we now only have weaker and less experienced soldiers, or your adventuring companions who I assume you need with you to investigate the enhanced demons, or myself and Tanat, and assigning us out to patrol is to some degree eating the Crusade's seed corn." Tanat is presently tutoring weaker wizards and spending all her spell slots on Control Weather and Mansions and supply-run Teleports and shoring up Drezen's defenses with Transmute Mud to Rock. "Solving this is going to require a way to make our patrols stronger now."

"Another is that the demons are getting harder to contain in general, so even if we possessed our usual resources we'd be suffering unsustainable losses. You can maybe solve that one by finding who is responsible for the crystal ritual, but this doesn't solve our first challenge. Solving this is going to require a way to track down the responsible ritualist or identify a weakness introduced by the crystal ritual - most rituals that enhance the power of a creature do also introduce weaknesses."

"Another is that the crusade is so resource-starved that Good isn't making consistent and principled tradeoffs about things like resurrections or coordinated action against crystal-demons, and fixing that might help solve some of the first two. In principle the Hellknights and Lastwall both ought to be able to send you some veterans so you don't have to personally hold Drezen and can go look into the ritualist, if looking into the ritualist is indicated."

"All of that sounds right."

"Ugh."

"Okay. One. We're going to need either first-circle wizards or a bunch of wands, basically immediately. I say we tell your former commander about the need for wands as soon as we can, so they have a chance to gather those supplies together. Then we can send more patrols and more people in each patrol group, and we'll lose fewer people and strengthen the weaker ones a little more safely."

"Two. I think we do have to find and track down the new ritualist; we can send a commune if you think it's a good idea, but I'm having trouble imagining the circumstances under which the winning move is not to look into the problem and see how it can be solved. It's not going to solve the problem permanently, of course, they're going to teach more people the ritual, and in a few months we'll have the same problem again. But then we'll kill those people, too. This is what we have elite units for. Even if we have to do it again next month, it's still a better use of our time than sending us out to do normal patrols, if it takes pressure off of us and off of all of the other forts for the next several weeks."

"Three. We probably are going to need more help from this side, if we want to hold the barrier under these conditions. I suspect that Cheliax and Lastwall are not actually the right people to ask about that. Cheliax and Lastwall have already sent all of the resources they feel they can spare, and if they're seeing stronger demons on their patrols, too, the number of units they feel able to spare goes down, not up. We can certainly write argumentative letters to them in the meantime, but I don't think we can afford to sit around and wait for those arguments to resolve. If they didn't send more units the last three times we asked, I seriously doubt they're going to send them now."

"Four, we messed up in losing this many senior people, and we don't have the diamonds to raise them, or at least don't want to spend the money to pay Arsinoe for hers."

"...what we need is a druid. Ideally a bunch of druids. Someone who can bring fallen units back without using a diamond."

Marit did not know druids to be able to do this but he doesn't really know things about druids. "Someone who can bring fallen soldiers back without using a diamond does sound spectacularly valuable. I don't have the slightest idea where to find that, I'm not sure it's a thing where I'm from."

The way things are supposed to work is that even if Lastwall is overstretched, if Lastwall wants Korva and company to have the duty of routine elite-team assassinations inside the Wound in order to stop superdemons from overrunning everyone, then Lastwall sends Korva some men so her forts can hold while she's doing that, until everyone's the same degree of overstretched. He doesn't have a lot of trouble believing that things don't, in fact, work in this manner which is how they are really really supposed to work. And while he thinks he could probably shame Lastwall into it eventually, it might in fact take a while. (And he has no expectation the Chelish forces are meaningfully Lawful at all, beyond obeying the letter of a treaty.) "I'd expect my former commander can send us through wands of Endure Elements and maybe wands of Sending for emergencies, though you need to separately train an elite strike force to respond to those Sendings if you want them to help."

" - oh, maybe. ...no, there's no way we'll be able to get enough of them to keep one with every patrol party. I don't think. I guess strictly speaking it depends on what your former commander is willing to give us. It would certainly help a lot if we could, then we could have a few top people cover fights along the entire barrier. We should figure out how sending wands trade off against endure elements wands, and we should think about whether there are any ways to get that effect without sending wands. Ember does telepathic bond, but it won't last long enough for a full patrol, even if I extend it, it won't be enough to cover everyone, and it trades off against her teleports. But - something in that space. We should see if Setsuna Shy and some of the other experienced spellcasters can think of several solutions that allow the elite units to respond to fights along the entire barrier, and then determine which ones work best and are most accessible to us, maybe."

"The spell Status works for this in many contexts; it only sends notice of injury or other forms of harm, but you can teach people to mildly injure themselves in order to call for backup if responding to actual in-combat injury isn't fast enough. It lasts more than a day extended. 

We can also, if we just need surveillance of the borders and plan to call in more support to actually engage demons, summon the forces of Heaven and have them scout for us, as I'm doing in Drezen proper."

"Status with deliberate injuries sounds possibly workable. And - maybe the outsiders. I am not actually very experienced with outsiders, despite the fact that they keep showing up here."

"The spell is an expensive one and I dislike using it in contexts where I have a poor grasp of the situation, as outsiders Called here, when they die here, are destroyed forever. But for scouting I wouldn't expect them to be in significant danger, and I do have experience working with them."

"I would like to return to the plan to recruit druids. The support of a powerful druid would be strategically invaluable, but there is a reason we have none of them among us. They are disinterested in military matters, notoriously reclusive, and exist in fundamental opposition to the forces of civilization."

"They exist in fundamental support of the forces of nature. Which usually pits them against civilization, or at least means they expect civilization to stay inside its fences and not bother everyone else. We, however, have a fence with almost no nature and no civilization inside it, and we possess the means to revitalize it, if we can take it back from the demons."

"Have you ever spoken to a druid before."

"...no. Well, there was that one lady with the undead bear, I'm kind of unclear on what she was. Mostly no. But I have heard unreliable rumors about where to find one to petition. People say that there's an archdruid living in the woods north of Corentyn, in Cheliax."

"It seems plausible that you would have significant advantages over Regill or I in persuading a druid that you have shared interests," says Marit dryly. "I wouldn't expect it, but - I do think a diplomatic press is a reasonable thing to be trying right now. You are doing a lot of people a lot of favors they don't know of or appreciate and you only need to persuade a few to help."

"Yeah. Okay. And the bodies aren't getting any fresher, so if we're going to get some of these people back, we need to move."

"Marit, are you okay going across again tonight, I would like to put in a request for the wands as soon as possible. Then I need to catch Nenio before she goes to sleep and tell her to prep a couple of greater teleports tomorrow, and I can see if we can pick up some druid friends. We will also have to come up with some kind of plan to determine where the new ritualist is and what to do about them, but I have fewer immediate ideas about how to do that, and I'd rather get something done."

"Take some modified demons prisoner? - this may be a plan much more easily achieved while this situation has an archmage assisting it, which should be the case shortly. I can lay out some spell requests for her and their approximate prioritization, which is what I assume the other parties she'll be visiting will be doing."

Marit tries not to assume too much about the competence of institutions of any kind or people he doesn't know personally, but Lastwall and Cansellarion, if they are not idiots, will both have a wishlist of ninth circle spells, a wishlist of eighth circle spells, a wishlist of seventh circle spells, a wishlist of sixth circle spells, and a way to let Alfirin combine the two lists most usefully by prioritization (plus a list of things they wish were possible but do not know to be at any level of skill, which she, being an archmage, might be able to tell them is in fact possible).

"I'd appreciate it. Would you like to go across now, or - I guess it'll be now or later tonight."

"If you're all right with later tonight, they'll have had more time to collect the items they're transferring to the forces of Good here."

"All right. I'll talk to Nenio first, then, and then we can go across in a few hours."

        "Alfirin should be able to go back with about a quarter of the initial list," Karlenius says. "We're looking at a couple of weeks for delivery of the rest, even if you want me and Pereza on nothing else. Did Aroden have anything to say?"

   "His visibility is very poor wherever we're causally entangled with the world without prophecy, which is unsurprising. That means he'll have a harder time setting up careful advance-laid miraculous fortune like, I suspect, the incident in the other timeline in which the Shield shattered and destroyed Tar-Baphon to end the war. That confirms, to me, that rather than try to win this first and then fully redeploy to the other world, we should focus on not losing here, take Cheliax now, and then try to cut down on noise for Aroden so He can be helpful here.

He said He'll commit to pushing Narthoc to ninth and may be able to offer us more of the things I asked for than that, but doesn't commit presently. - I asked for the ability to call Miracles in my own right rather than from Him, and for pointers to diamonds and spell-development help. And for Arazni back. I'm not really expecting those, He's - in fact backed us to most of His permitted capacity as is. 

He said He trusts Alfirin. - I didn't even ask that, but I suppose it was on my mind."

          "Huh," says Karlenius, though it's not as if they haven't done Communes on this topic.

Alfirin had inferred that Aroden must have trusted her - or at least not distrusted her. Someone would have asked, when she returned, and she would have had a colder welcome if He didn't. And she never really expected that He wouldn’t. Still, it’s surprisingly warming to hear.

Certain other parties present already know that their god trusts Alfirin, and learning that their god's god trusts her too isn't very much news. It's a little surprising that He would actively volunteer that information without being asked, though. Iomedae (the god) almost never does that. Aroden has a bigger budget and is worse at prioritization has broader interests, but it's still quite remarkable. The Crusade doesn't seem to be taking it as the rather sharp rebuke like Lastwall would.

"Does Aroden often volunteer information like that?"