Brenda is in heaven Nirvana (she's still not super clued into the subtleties of Law and Chaos but continues to get the sense that they're both things she finds valuable and important) and will remain there, bits of spell diagrams appearing and transforming and disappearing on her arms, until she's induced to stop.

Then soon (from a subjective standpoint) she will have Seelah start with shaking her shoulder and then steadily escalating if that doesn't get her attention.

"Hey, people have started showing up for the attack. They say they're expecting Terendelev in a few minutes."

Shaking her shoulder works; she jumps like she's been electrocuted and then reorients and puts her latest book away. The notes on her arms scoot out of sight up her sleeves. "Thank you." She'll go introduce herself to the arriving soldiers and learn their names, titles, and combat specialties as applicable.

Either Terendelev couldn't shake loose a force from Lastwall or they haven't arrived yet, because the only people not from Kenabres are a mercenary company teleported in from Andoran. In terms of people she's already met, Ramien can be seen conspicuously avoiding Hulrun, which Irabeth and a few of her paladins are trying to facilitate. There's also an old man who introduces himself as Rathimus, priest of Abadar, a dwarf smith who looks markedly similar to Staunton Vhane and who apparently follows Torag, and a girl with a harp and bow standing near Ramien.

She remembers Rathimus, he helped her out with the truth spell yesterday! Very reasonable of him not to recognize her, she says; she looked rather different then. 

She introduces herself to the smith without making any assumptions about relatedness until his surname also proves to be Vhane, at which point she's relieved that it isn't just her brain refusing to process dwarven facial features, and also says hello to the archer-harpist.

“Hello. Are you the one who got them to finally take this seriously? How did you manage it?”

"I can see through illusions and I noticed the Wardstone was visibly damaged, and I have an item that might be able to repair it. Were you investigating the damage before now? I'd love to hear anything you've figured out."

"We didn't get much time to look at it; Hulrun caught us when we were still trying to identify the problem, so we didn't get further on making a solution than figuring out we'd probably need ritual magic if we wanted to pull it off with our level of skill. We're pretty sure it was there before the attack, though. If you've got an item for it that sounds a lot more promising than trying to rush through the the research and just hope it all works out in time without too many side effects."

"I have some reasons to believe the item will work and also some reasons to mistrust its provenance, so I'm hoping to get a bunch of different opinions." Because the more people are involved the more people would have to be in cahoots to trick her into doing the wrong thing. "Would you like to take a look at it?"

“Sure.”

Aranka strums on her harp and sings a short verse.

”Alright, ready. Also wow you have a lot of powerful magic on you.”

She gets out the demon blood crystal knife thing and holds it up for inspection but doesn't actually hand it over.

"Well, it's definitely strong enough that I buy it can do it, question is if it's aimed in the right direction. Let's see... there's an evocation effect, but I'm pretty sure that's built on top of it, not something inherent. Some stuff that's conjuration coded but not really a spellform... I wish Thall was here, he's better at this kind of fiddly detail with arcane sight, but if I look closely enough..."

Her words become less and less audible as she descends into mumbling before pulling out some paper and scribbling. About a minute later, she turns back to Brenda.

"I'm not sure! I can't for the life of me figure out how I'd trigger it if so, I don't think it'd respond to me naively or any of the standard tricks for working with magic items, but if the designer said it would work I assume they're right because they're definitely better at spellcraft than I am. I can say it should power up any evocation spells you cast with it but I'm pretty sure that was just them showing off and not necessary for it to work."

"The person who told me it would work wasn't the designer but they said it would pretty much only work for me. The question is, if I poke the Wardstone with it, is it more likely to solve problems or cause them."

“Figuring out all the details on how this works sounds like a multi month project; all I can tell you now is that my guess would be it’s more likely to work than not, and I would give it better than even odds that it works or does nothing. Do you know who the designer is? It’s probably worth a sending if they’d answer.”

"I have some reason to suspect it was made by Areelu Vorlesh. I also have some reason to suspect that she's had a change of heart and genuinely wants to help. But she went out of her way to give me this thing without giving me a chance to speak to her, which makes me leery of trying a Sending and anyway she could just lie. I'm sorry everything is so complicated."

"I'm not one to say it's impossible for someone to want redemption, and I'm sure you're already aware of all the reasons that sounds really implausible, but just in case; this is probably a trick and this makes me a lot less sure I was on the money. I'm barely good enough at this kind of thing to tell if it's trying the right kind of thing, mostly from where it crosses over with ritual magic, and definitely not qualified to figure out if an archmage is slipping things by me. If it weren't for the fact that this is a crisis she could probably get to the wardstone any time she liked I would be telling you not to bring it anywhere near the thing, and even so the fact that only you can use it isn't exactly reassuring. Are you sure that this isn't just a ploy for her to saddle you with the blame for destroying it?

"Also, er, if she really did change her tune that sounds like it would be the kind of thing that it's dangerous to her to spread around. Unless she didn't and that's why you're saying it, to make her and Deskari fight? And if that's it then maybe I shouldn't have said anything? Sorry, I'm not really good at this whole intrigue thing."

Ah, shit. However bad Aranka is at intrigue, Brenda is worse at it. She just wants to fix the Wardstone and apparently she's in contention for being the best person for the job despite being totally clueless and in over her head.

"I'm afraid I'm going to reward your good sense in warning me not to talk too much by declining to explain my reasoning. By the way, if the spell is still up, I'd like to hear what you're seeing on me. I expect it's all things I know about but given that you've already looked at it I might as well check."

"Uh, I'm seeing a lot of magical item effects; strong transmutation on the headband and belt, which means they're enhancements and good ones, a whole bunch of abjuration effects on the gloves and ring and necklace and cloak so I'm assuming they're mostly better versions of the standard items to keep you safe, and either one divination effect with two parts or two individual but overlapping divination effects on you? Then there's also a bag of holding, that one I definitely recognize, and a whole swathe of dim auras that I'm guessing come from you being effected by some very powerful magic recently. Conjuration for sure, but all the rest of them are muddled enough I can't tell them apart."

The stacked divinations might be Tongues and Omniglot, the Conjuration and other recent stuff is probably all the Dressing Room and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch and possibly the teleports from yesterday. "Thanks!"

In whatever amount of time she has left before Terendelev arrives Brenda wants to attempt to get Jhoran Vhane to infodump at her about blacksmithing. (If this is a sufficiently rapport-building tactic there may turn out to be more time for it than a clock would suggest.)

Well some of the more advanced topics in magical crafting are stuff he would only teach to an apprentice or if there was sufficiently great need, but he can talk her through the basics of smithing, or at least as much of them as you can do without having his forge with him and demonstrating. If you want to hang an enchantment on gear that will last, the armor or weapon needs to be of a high enough quality first to hold it, so there's no way to skip the basics. Given a sufficiently enthusiastic student, he can talk about heating and how to make sure your metal stays workable without getting hot enough that it deforms too much or cold enough that you exhaust yourself hammering and then get dragged into a tangent about fitting together chain links properly that wraps up about when Terendelev makes her landing and transforms again.

"Good, everyone is here. All of you should have heard some of what we're planning, but I'll fill in the rest to make sure nobody is missing important details. We're making an assault on the Grey Garrison today, which is currently held by an unknown number of demons and cultists lead by a Lilitu witch named Minagho. Most of you should already recognize each other, but we're being joined today by Brenda, a capable swordswoman who has been helping us out for the last few days, and the Blazing Eagles adventurers of Andoran. The plan is for me to be the one to primarily engage Minagho, since I can outmatch her regardless of the range, while Jhoran Vhane will be staying in reserve to cover our archers and Aranka from any opportunistic demons and to have a central location for channeling once injuries start to pick up. The rest of you will be using your best judgment for how to engage, but stay cautious; we should have enough strength assembled here to solve this without serious casualties but there's bound to be some kind of trap that's made them confident enough to try this. Does anyone have questions not answered by this that we should go over before making our way over?"

Brenda has SO many questions but part of the point of this expedition is to find the answers. She scans the group to make sure Hulrun is still around; he's kind of horrible and fantasy novel logic says to take the opposite of his advice, but also paranoia is a valuable skill.

Yep, he's still here. He's over on the left side of the group, as far from Ramien as the paladins can keep him without escalating.

The route to the Gray Garrison is as deserted as before, but this time they stop outside.

”It looks like they don’t have enough fliers deployed to stop me, which means we’re skipping whatever traps they laid and going in from the roof. Rathimus, Jhoran, Ramien; buff us now, please.”

As the last people are touched to protect them with communal protection from evil and Jhoran Vhane’s communal resist fire goes up, Terendelev reads off a fancy looking scroll and suddenly Brenda gets the sense that she can now fly. 

And then Terendelev will turn into her dragon shape,  blessing everyone around her in the same breath, and then with a powerful leap take to the skies and head straight for the trio of Vrocks perched circling the garrison from above.