- Iomedae will Lay On Hands Kilchas. She should be rationing them, but she doesn't get the sense Valdemar has many Teleport-capable wizards or they wouldn't be sending her teenage girls and elderly people.

And then she'll grow wings, and fly for the border.

....Kilchas stares at her in awe after she casts the spell. It's not that he feels young again, exactly, but - it's almost that, honestly, there's a lightness in his chest that hasn't been there in years and he's no longer tired at all. 

He doesn't ask. Iomedae is clearly in a tearing hurry. He'll just pace, and scry her until the Farseer currently rushing here on Companion-back catches up to them. 

Iomedae won't be able to make it all the way to the border in the spell's duration. Twenty miles is a long way. But she can at least make it past the densest of the forest, and have to land only once she's approaching the tree line and the remaining trees are spindly and not much taller than her, most of them key-shaped with branches pointed away from the prevailing wind. 

Gates are very bad for the weather. The wind picks up almost immediately, blowing in gusts that would knock flat anyone less strong than Iomedae, and anyone less tough than Iomedae and without magic to keep warm would be suffering hypothermia within minutes. By the time she's made her way another mile on foot, there are clouds blowing in from the west, blocking the stars. 

Iomedae doesn't have magic for the cold, just stubbornness. But stubbornness is its own kind of magic, sometimes. She keeps walking. And prays, though she expects Aroden can't hear her, here, or at least can't afford to answer.

She is not afraid; she can't be. But dying here would be uncomplicatedly the second-greatest mistake of her life, and it is a very real possibility, and she checks her reasoning until there's nothing more to learn from checking her reasoning and it still seems worth it, and then lets the cold numb her face so it stops hurting.

It's going to take her a couple of candlemarks to trek the remaining six miles or so to the border. Which is unmarked, distinguished only by the sudden lack of a magical presence around her that Iomedae has no way of detecting herself. 

It's also going to be marked by the fact that Leareth is waiting there. 

He considered waiting somewhere else, instead, once it was clear that it would take her a few minutes to walk that distance. It would be more secure to return to one of his underground facilities, and keep a greater distance from regions that the Star-Eyed can affect. But he can Gate out in less than a second if anything goes wrong, and it cuts down substantially on the energy-cost for continuously scrying Iomedae. And means he can be in easy Mindspeech range, and, once she gets closer, reach out to direct her. 

He has magic to deal with the cold, and by the time she reaches him, he has the air toasty inside his weather-barrier, and he's cut and moved blocks of snow with magic to raise a wall and help shield the wind so he's not doing quite so much of the work with magic. He can cast a bright mage-light so she can see where she's going. 

She stops at a hundred twenty feet, which is what's needed for her aura sight. It is not in his interests to let her get closer than that, and so it'd be impolite, even though there is genuinely no power she's ever heard of that could induce her to attack him here. 

Lawful Evil.

It's - impressive, actually, if he did it in a world that wouldn't even advantage him by it. And it would be hard for him to feign without having ever seen her magic before. 

And it means she's not outside Creation, which is a fairly enormous relief. 

:You are in fact Lawful. It's ...a rare person who is, without an example to work from.: 

He doesn't approach any closer either, though - in fact, at this point, he would be rather surprised if she attacked him here. 

...Less surprised if some discreet godnudging could, perhaps, take the storm that's blowing in anyway after all the recent Gating nearby, and aim a lighting bolt at Iomedae. She'll survive it, if she survived what he thinks must have been a Heartstone destabilizing, but if Leareth is nearby then he at least might be seriously injured. 

He's - hopeful. He hadn't really expected Iomedae to accept his offer, and he's spent the candlemarks of waiting being very concerned about the gods not wanting this meeting to happen. 

He's also very tense. Terrified, on some level, though he's suppressing it very firmly - and surprisingly effectively, for someone who isn't a paladin and feels a normal amount of fear - because it woudln't help. He feels very very exposed, here. But he wants to reserve the ability to relocate Iomedae very quickly, if she agrees to it - or if something goes unexpectedly wrong - and he can cast a Gate-threshold at 120 feet and definitely not from the safety of his closest records cache. 

...If something does go wrong, in the nature of a godintervention and not 'Iomedae tries to kill him', then - honestly that by itself is something he would take as a strong indication that, whether or not he can justifiedly trust her yet, she's someone he wants on his side. 

He's trying less than he usually would to keep all of that tucked away and out of his Mindspeech overtones. It feels like it might matter, to - put as much as he can of himself and what he wants where Iomedae can see it. 

:I can imagine. I do have almost two thousands years of practice. And - mistakes to learn from. I have learned the hard way that - you need to take so many more steps forward than it feels like you should have to, often at very high cost, if you want to cooperate instead of fighting.: 

Anything you really want, you have to take so many more steps towards than it feels like should be necessary.

:If you swear to me that you intend no harm and that I will be permitted to leave and Gated back here should I request it, I will come with you to a secure location of yours.:

Leareth really badly wants to not be here anymore but he - should, in fact, be quite careful about what exactly he's swearing to. 

:I swear to you that I will not be the first to initiate any hostile action, and - even if I believe you to have been the first to react with violence, I will try very hard to avoid harming you in self-defense.: Which means he should arrange not to be where Iomedae is, at least at first, to minimize that coming up. :I swear that you will be permitted to leave, and - that I will provide whatever assistance is feasible, including Gates to any location that I do not anticipate being dangerous to my people. I am reluctant to swear to the behavior of my staff, if they come to believe they were betrayed first, but in general the discipline is very high within my organization and I do not anticipate that anyone will harm you against orders. I swear that I will not attempt, or delegate attempting, any mind-affecting magic on you, and will not try to read your mind without your permission.

I would be grateful if you could take ten seconds to try to think of other edge cases that we should clarify upfront.: 

:My own forces may show up. I would be shocked were they to attack you but they would definitely add a lot of pressure and complexity to this situation, and I'll accept a promise that's only scoped to - while there aren't other people from my world likely acting here. Which would also cover the possibility of my enemies from home showing up. My enemies from home very likely won't show up but would be extremely dangerous if they did.:

:I appreciate the warning, and will make sure all of my people have orders not to initiate violence with any new arrivals until we can confirm that they are your enemies and not your allies. - And I am going to have a number of questions, and - wish to speak to you about precautions to take against your enemies - but I think not here and now. 

My plan is to Gate you to a fortified underground military facility north of the Ice Wall Mountains. I plan to go elsewhere but remain in Mindspeech range for further negotiations. The area is not very passable on foot, but I will leave very clear orders that you are to be allowed to leave and head for the surface if you request it, or immediately Gated back to this side of the mountains if–: 

And they've apparently lingered here too long, and now they've run out of time. 

It's not the storm, actually, though maybe the proximate trigger was a lightning strike further away, lightning in the depths of winter is pretty rare but he's seen some in the distance and heard the thunder. 

The region is not incredibly prone to earthquakes, but apparently there's enough instability to work with, given sufficiently determined nudging. 

The ground heaves under their feet, instantly collapsing Leareth's snowblock wall and flinging him into the nearest snowbank. He's not injured, at least not yet, his shields caught the brunt of it, but with his face smushed into the snow and the breath knocked out of him, he can't see Iomedae's current status. 

He can reach out with Mindspeech, though, at the speed of thought. :Enemy action may I Gate you out now: 

Iomedae was flung considerably harder and farther than that and is not inconvenienced by this in the slightest. :You may:, she responds in the unconcerned fashion of a paladin with fifth circle spells. (She is, to her knowledge, the only paladin with fifth circle spells.)

He can't get them both at once, not without having to raise a Gate first to get himself to Iomedae, and he's not, in fact, absolutely sure yet about putting himself any closer to her. 

(He's not especially confused about her lack of concern. She survived a Heartstone exploding. The earthquake itself is probably not a massive threat – but he doesn't know what else is part of this plan. And even if it's not expected to kill her, just to make him lose track of her at a critical moment...)  

He'll send a brief wordless sense of what he's doing, so it's a little less startling. He's going to raise a horizontal unscaffolded Gate-threshold under her from here, though, in only a little longer than it would take him to drop himself through one. Two seconds, maybe, until the other end is up in a heavily shielded Work Room in a secure underground facility where the gods can barely see them and certainly shouldn't be able to throw earthquakes at him. (That region is very seismically stable, and kept that way with some precautionary spells.) 

Two seconds is long enough for the earth to heave again, this time opening a crevasse with a scream of ripping stone, and Leareth does not quite manage to fling out a force-net to catch himself in time. 

There's a burst of startled pain through the open Mindspeech link, but Leareth keeps holding the spell steady, and the Gate-search connects, and Iomedae will be cut off from the link as gravity suddenly switches and she finds herself, instead of falling, flying sideways from a stone archway embossed on one wall of a stone room lit by permanent mage-lights. 

If that wasn't orchestrated by Leareth to impress her, which she isn't ruling out, she's so unamused by the local gods! 

She hits the wall and then lands on her feet and looks around.

There's not that much else to see! Stone walls, very smooth and well finished, no windows, a muffled sound-deadening feel that a mage would recognize as indicating an absurd quantity of shielding. 

The door is unlocked, if she's going to try it. There's no one in the hallway outside because this entire floor of the facility was hastily evacuated when Leareth was planning earlier. 

And Leareth, meanwhile, is abruptly under a massive weight of snowy debris. His shields didn't get all of it, this time. The pain hasn't had time to hit fully, yet, but he's pretty sure he heard some ribs break, and his head is ringing. 

It's not nearly enough to prevent him from concentrating for the half-a-second it takes to raise a Gate under himself, and - in a split-second reassessment, because he's not sure he can manage Mindspeech at range while injured and it would be a very bad time to be stuck out of contact with Iomedae - he Gates himself to the floor above her, and tumbles through along with kind of a lot of snow and ice and rock fragments. 

Take a moment to catch his breath– ...nevermind, now he's feeling the pain and catching his breath is going to take a lot longer than that. He can feel the vibration of footsteps approaching, and muffled probably-yelling, but his ears aren't entirely working.

He does not technically need to be able to breathe to reach out with Mindspeech, and he's keyed to all of the shields here. He grits his teeth; it does hurt his head. 

:Iomedae. Are you - do you need anything urgently -?: His mindvoice is noticeably less coherent, and he's leaking more overtones than before, this time not on purpose. 

: I'm fine. Are you injured? I have healing. Though I am increasingly wondering if a target of god-intervention here is making me expend my healing while I can't easily get it back.:

It takes Leareth longer to parse that than it really should. :- Because it relies on Aroden, who cannot yet operate here...?: Weird that it still works at all, but a limited number of times - or maybe it's as though she has reserves that won't refill with rest or food the ordinary way and can only be replenished directly by her god. :Not implausible. Should be - harder to intervene while you are here. I - am somewhat injured, yes, I am not sure it is worth your healing if it is in limited supply...: 

He kind of sounds more than 'somewhat' injured, though he's at least managing to hold the Mindspeech link fairly steady and mostly keep his mindvoice level. 

:Does your world have adequate healing or not. If not, it's probably worth healing you.: With enough time she suspects she can sort something out, for healing. Arazni could, and anything that Arazni could do not as an archmage but as Aroden's herald, Iomedae expects she will be able to do too, if she needs to. 

People are pulling debris off him now. Someone is yelling something to him - instructions, he thinks, he can't really make out the words but will infer from context that they want to confirm that he's conscious by asking him to squeeze their hand - which he can do, sort of, at least on the side with the arm that isn't possibly broken and doesn't want to obey any of his requests for it to move - and open his eyes, which he can also do for half a second but would really rather not do for longer than that, Mindspeech already hurts enough. Someone else is trying to Mindspeak him; Leareth doesn't part his shields for their link, shoos them with a brief burst of :busy:

:We have quite good Healing but it is - not instantaneous - I will certainly recover anyway, but in the near term I am - distracted - and it may be a costly time to be distracted. Are you - willing to come close enough for it -? Also how limited, exactly, how much healing would you have left in reserve for yourself...?: 

:I'll have ten left. And I can probably figure out how to get some more, if I have to, if we can't contact my own world. I usually can. I will have to touch you and am willing to do so.:

Is he willing to trust her with it? 

...If she wanted to kill him, Leareth thinks, she could have attempted it before they exchanged a lot of effortful oaths to negotiate bringing her here. She claims her presence on a battlefield would be decisive against an entire army, and she is presumably not missing the fact that armies have mages. Leareth is faster at Gating out than almost anyone, but - he still shouldn't assume he would have been able to do it, and it would have been in Iomedae's interests to try anyway, if she wanted him dead. 

He's still terrified, of course, but - he's also substantially impaired, and it's an objectively terrible time to be impaired, and - he was thinking, just before, that a blatant godintervention was something he would take as evidence that his enemy's enemy was - at least worth trying to cultivate as a friend. 

If she kills him, she still can't do it permanently, and he - learns a lot. If he accepts her offer, and she does heal him, that would be informative as well. 

Also this Mindspeech link is getting pretty difficult to hold steady. 

:You have my permission. I - will send someone down to show you where to go - my staff are likely going to to feel more reassured if you consent to having your mind read to verify you do not intend to harm me, unless you are categorically immune to that as well.: