"And you're sure these gates definitely go to Elysium and not, say, the first world?"

"My understanding is that Gate always goes to both the plane and the location within the plane you want. Have you heard of it misfiring? It's not through an item, if you're worried I got a cursed one." She'd offer to go off somewhere and make one and go through with her party to scout, but she's pretty sure that impulse comes from the desire to fool around in Elysium DFEWing random Azatas and not from actual caution.

“My understanding is that gates to the fey realm are rather easier than to further planes, and there are many places that could pass for either without detailed examination. The stories are clear that there are some of their kind that would delight in a large group of mortals wandering into their territory thinking it Elysium. An army wielding cold iron rather less so, admittedly, but refraining from examining the mouth of a gift horse is just asking to be bitten.”

"Is that a failure mode that would apply to casting Gate from a scroll, if the scroll was itself trustworthy? Either way, I can take my party through one to scout before we try it with the army." She'll need to make sure can reliably aim for Cayden Cailean's battlefield and not e.g. some other guy with a similar name's turnip patch anyway. She can pick an amount of time to scout for and come back after that time and tell Seelah not to let her get distracted by random Azatas.

“Not by accident. Fey Gate is a full circle simpler and nobody skilled enough to make either would confuse them. My concern was for an item professing to provide such gates at will, not a scroll whose workings can be verified.”

Which doesn’t mean she’s not blindingly curious as to where someone would get that many scrolls of Gate from, much less ones that they were willing to spend so freely here, but she wouldn’t be able to demand that kind of answer even if Brenda was her subordinate rather than the other way around.

Yeah, sorry, Brenda is for real keeping this one under her hat."Then I might still scout just to get all the logistical details figured out, but I trust my source. Does using it to attack the fortifications at the ford make sense to you? I do think we should keep operating under the assumption that we'll need overland or Teleport-based supply lines, not because I expect to lose the Gates option but because I can't share it and don't want to be a single point of failure for too many things."

"Yes. There's the temptation to hit a bunch of the roadblocks at once, or just skip straight to Drezen, but the former risks us getting into a serious fight when our soldiers are exhausted and if the latter goes poorly even a gate might not be enough for everyone to retreat safely. We should have a solid advantage in over the demons for at least the next several months, and I'd rather use a handful of gates to build on that than go for a larger gamble and risk more than we need to."

Nod nod. She looks at the map again. "Does it make sense to go straight from here to the far side of the river, or are there likely enough demons between here and there that we'll need to go overland most of the way to the river to secure our rear and then use Gates to skip the crossing? I also have a Lord's Banner of Swiftness, if that affects the choice either way."

"I'm not familiar with that magic item, but from context I assume it does something about how quickly the army can travel? If so, I don't think so..."

She frowns, and sketches a quick map.

"No, actually, I think we could. Not much further than that, but we could ship goods up to the ford by water, so it wouldn't be totally cut off. It would be better to have the banks cleared to reduce the number of attacks on any supply barges, but we could set the troops we expect to save from not marching through to defend them we could still come out ahead on men and time. That would make the next geographical issue..."

She draws another circle, up north of the one around the ford.

"At Leper's Smile Canyon. That one I'm less sure we can skip across, though, as much as I'd like to. There are paths across without dipping into the ravines, but not enough to pin a supply line to and especially not when every twist and turn is a demonic ambush waiting to happen. We'll need to get there and hold long enough to build bridges for at least the worst of it."

"Apologies, yes, it makes the same effort cover more ground. I've heard of the possibility of supplying the army by teleport, if the funding situation works out for it. I imagine that wouldn't change the tradeoffs very much, because the Wardstones would still need to be moved overland through territory mostly cleared of demons, but is it something worth discussing?"

"I've looked at some of the estimates for what it costs Cheliax, and as long as a normal supply route is possible I'd almost always rather sell the teleports to buy more supplies, or better yet use them for strike teams. Especially when we're operating inside the wound - we can't teleport across the boundary either, so it's paying the full price for 900 miles travel to get things a fifth that distance, half of which has a perfectly good river."

"So, hit the fortifications from their rear as soon as I've done some scouting and the army is ready to move, then overland from there until somewhere on the other side of the canyon? Sounds good. I should be able to get the scouting done tomorrow morning at the latest, or today if tomorrow would be holding everyone else up."

"I'll see about getting some of our veteran units prepared to go first, in case the demons catch on before we have the whole army through and we need to fight with just the vanguard. I think we could be ready by tomorrow if you were, but I wouldn't turn down another day of drilling fast marches through narrow corridors. Inheritor go with you."

"And with you as well."

And then she'll go convene Nenio, Seelah, Ember, Wenduag, and Arueshalae and find out who wants to go scouting with her and when they'll be ready! (After a subjectively leisurely but sidereally brief break to get Alpina caught up on everything and speculate excitedly with her about what Elysium will be like. And maybe get sidetracked into the physics of how Gate works and how the planes are laid out in higher-dimensional space for twenty minutes. Whatever. She has Time Enough For Love.)

Seelah still has most of her spells for today thanks to an absence of emergencies; she's fine going now. There's other stuff she could be doing but there will be other stuff she could be doing tomorrow and this is more important.

Arueshalae has very complicated feelings about going to Elysium but if Brenda thinks she'd be helpful, she owes it to the girl to try.

Nenio is a lot more interested in the gate than Elysium, so she'll probably just be watching it as long as its up, but if Brenda has something in mind for afterwards sure!

And Wenduag, as always, is not one to turn down requests from her mistress even if they're phrased like she could refuse.