Barik listens carefully at the start, and gets visibly uncomfortable - pleased, but uncomfortable - at the praise. When Ashe says he won't give an order, Barik - sags a little. He has to make his own choice, and as useful as it may be, he hates this outfit.

"How quickly would you expect to see - useful changes, sir? Assuming I commit to this."

"Span, at least. Battles would do more than this interminable maneuver and siege. Maric didn't seek it, and I think it was a full campaigning season" (i.e from spring to fall) "before the stories they told about him feeling the pain of every scout he commanded began to bear truth. Though by that measure I think you have already begun."

He nods. "I doubt it will bear fruit before we resolve the current campaign. So though it is perhaps not virtuous of me, I will dither a while, and wait to speak to Maric."

Ophelia reënters the scene, then, now that her presence is required.  "...Perhaps, if it is not too settled, we can change the story Maric bears, as well, or at least turn a boon of it.  I would be remiss to not offer, since I'll be working on tempering such things for my own purposes; there is something rather similar that I would waylay before it settles upon someone I know.  My thanks for your wisdom, and your time, Archon General Ashe - and my thanks to you as well, Barikonen, for - asserting yourself, in this matter.  I would not have dared to broach the subject, on my own, and this has been...

"Profound, and profoundly needed."

"Maric's story is to his taste, I think. A corps elite but apart, under my aegis but also under his watch. It is enough in my own mold that pursuing it too far might create conflict between us, and so I do not believe he seeks it. I have hopes that in future centuries of the Disfavored, other commanders beneath me will grow in the same way he has, reflections of our mutual loyalty and shared legend; Maric is in that world the first of many, and I believe he wants this also."

"Oh, yes, I wasn't thinking - some total shift in the nature of the thing, I'd have no idea where to begin - I just think that if someone feels every wound their men take, they at least ought to be able to make something helpful happen in the - relevantly opposite direction, and it would behoove me to bring such about, for everyone's sake.  ...I wish you luck, in this endeavor - and many centuries indeed to see it done."

He nods. "Good fortune to you as well. I shall see you at the parley."

"Til then."  And she is off.

...He's carrying a heavy burden, isn't he.  The way he reacted to the thought of centuries more of standing tall...

That his face is aged, even.  He is weary, bone-deeply so, and still he soldiers on.

She hadn't been quite sure what led her to the impulse to say what she said in the way that she said it, as the words drifted through her lips.  She thinks she knows, now, why she did.

She wonders if there's something she can do to help, and in her diptych, writes:

Can something help with Ashe's burden?

It didn't take all that long to get the bird and send it on vigorous wings.

So Lantry was watching from a distance, and it really struck him how Ashe looks as old as he is. Which makes him well-preserved, really, Ashe had two children full-grown before he surrendered a century ago and is therefore probably twice Lantry's age (and it's said Sages age slowly when they love their work, which he does), but most Archons barely age at all, the triplets of Frost are in the middle of their third century and they are said to look roughly twenty, twenty-five, and thirty, respectively. He decides any inferences from this fact are not getting written down except in his strongest personal cipher. If that, he doubts he's going to forget it.

"So?," he asks the two returning.

"Barik is going to think on it a little while longer; that plan wouldn't be ready for tomorrow anyway.  About a span or so, if it happens.  The bird's off?"

"I imagine it's not a quick journey he'd be embarking on. The bird's away. Won't get there as fast as Constant Caw or Tern of Phrase would have, but I couldn't flee an impending Edict with a dovecote on my back."

"Mm-hmm.  It wouldn't be, I suppose.  Also, may I just say, your birds have lovely names?  Or...ah, well...had, in which case please allow me to once more offer my condolences."

"I let all my best ones fly free, days before Fatebinder Rhogalus arrived. Most of us did, I'd guess the dovecotes were down to about a third capacity by the time the Edict was read. All the apprentice dove-tenders competed to amuse each other with the best names, and we kept it up even after we moved on to fieldwork or magic. My favorite was Dropped Claws - he wasn't that good a messenger bird, but a clever little asshole. I doubt they'll ever find their trainers again, but they're out there."

Pfft.  "Luck to them, then."

"It's been pretty good for them so far. Nunoval arrived in Stalwart before Rhogalus did at the Citadel, after all. And when this settles down, I'll start another flock. Well. If."

"When."  There's no - heat to it.  Just sheer confidence that it will be a when, and not an if.  She's got a plan, and she's got a story, and she has a convenient punching bag.  She can turn this around.

"...Anyway, considering that I'm not going to have any other miracles to pull out of my unmentionables...You did mention that teaching the bird-bolstering ritual would take a few hours, and I want a distraction, honestly."

"By all means. So, you know Vigor's standard uses, I'm sure - we called them 'Titan's Touch' for the general physical boost and 'Surge of Glory' for the one that boosts a handful of people's mental resilience and eye for where to hit. This ritual focuses on the defensive aspects of each of those..."

He will cheerfully walk her through enough theory to be sure they're on the same page (and, okay, a bit more than that), and then the visualization exercises for putting it into practice. After an hour or two, he'll pause to get some actual birds ("You've got it well enough you won't hurt them.") and they can practice it a few times. She seems like a good student, she'll probably have it before the sun goes behind the mountains.

She's got an impressive knack for the visualizations, good fine motor control, and is pretty decent with the theory!  Say, has he ever thought about - something like mixing in an accent or two of Preservation, not that she knows much about it but if it does rhyme with the Orphan Midwife she's seen some success in staving off the worst of the exhaustion that comes from Vigor with Life's ancillary effects, and if anything the name of the Sigil being Preservation makes her think it could be better targeted to pull back against whatever's going on when her muscles start to burn from exertion.  Bolstering them to peak condition, as was, instead of letting them go slack like a cut rope.  And birds have muscles, too!  She checked!

Preservation is tricky on living things that you want to continue living, as opposed to lock in a shell of unmoving time where they neither perceive nor change until the shell starts to fail. Though you can do that, no one's yet made it a freestanding spell as far as he knows but you can graft it onto Force or, oddly, Illusion. (Lantry has managed that a grand total of once in his life, not that he's had many occasions to try.)

Breeding birds to have some Preservation affecting them is one of the main ways the Sage dovecote bloodlines are better than mundane birds, but that's nearly as long an endeavor as the Chronicle itself. (He really hopes he can buy chicks from other Sages who'd been in the field with their best birds, rather than starting over.) Some parts of that no one's sure how it worked; there's a common theory that Sages get some bleed-through from all the Preservation spells they use and are around the use of, and are Preserved partially - a lot like how the School of Wild Wrath were mostly murderous, angry firebugs who could hold hot coals in their hand with no discomfort - and this might apply to the pigeons as well.

Bleed-through of long-term magic use is a sadly underexplored subject, mostly because no school or guild wants to let outsiders study them lest they steal all their secrets. ...To be fair, the Sages would absolutely have stolen their secrets every time they thought they could get away with it. And some times they couldn't.

Oh, she's actually found that one herself!  It saved the people who manned the catapult that hurt Cairn from getting pulverized, when he started throwing a tantrum and also, you know, rocks, in their general direction.  It's oddly easy for her to approach from an Illusionary direction, according to everyone else she's talked shop with.

...She'd write down what she knows of her own experiences, but boy is her data going to be shite, given the sheer weirdness her life is.

Impressive! (He will mentally upgrade his estimate of how good she is at magic.) From what he's heard, Fatebinders are highly eclectic mages, not focusing on anything particular; common theories suggests this should make any effects fairly subtle, and possibly not present at all. Also, she's young, there's just not that much time for whatever it is to build up large changes. Sages may age slowly, but you'll note that Lantry looks like an old man, not someone who's been aging at half speed since he was twenty.

Now, if Fatebinders could collect information on the various guilds, schools, and occasional cults they find and judge - before they're executed or distributed to the authorized guilds, that could be a really interesting set of monographs. Or, for all he knows, the Fatebinders of Lore have those records and just haven't assembled it systematically. Something to ask if he meets Rhogalus.

Anyway, this part seems to be trained properly, they can hand back the birds.

She almost imagines that it's something of a reflection of the weight of the Archons behind the Sigils in question.  Steeping yourself in their lore 'feels like' something that should - rub off; therefore, because of the collective expectations of everybody, it does.  At least when she thinks like a bard.  And - yes, actually, she at the very least took note of Wild Wrath's...being very wrathful...during her attempts at diplomacy, and expects that there are other Fatebinders who did similar things with different groups, though she's unaware of systemic efforts to compile them.  Something to start the Sages on when she restores Ink and Quill under the Fatebinders' ambit, perhaps.

"A noble endeavor, but better not to reuse the name. We had many good qualities, but we were resented for the bad ones, and I admit in the main, quite fairly. You might just call them the Chroniclers, I don't think anyone resented the Chronicle... maybe the Tidecasters, but they aren't around to complain."

"Really, I want to - do something bigger than just the Chronicle.  Make - a place that shares knowledge - well, the sort that doesn't have Bleden Mark breathing down your neck, at least - rather than hoarding it.  A place where everyone can learn the rules and precedents by which we bind Fate, if they've a knack for it - or if they don't.

"There's still a Tidecaster."