Iomedae beams at her. "I wish I could have met him. …we should probably try to be the wisest of men, though, while we're here."

"Second wisest, the Pharaoh is legally the wisest."

They never did get absolute confirmation that Osirion does not object to people being gay, which is unfortunate, because Iomedae is feeling very very gay right now. She contemplates going out to ask Jeres and then decides she would rather not do that, and would maybe rather do literally anything that isn't that.

"You look horribly conflicted."

"You are the cleverest thoughtfulest most inventive second wisest of men and I was just realizing that we asked the secretary to check if Osirion objected to homosexuality, and that I for one didn't hear the answer, and then I was imagining marching back out there having just been scolded for my association with you to ask Jeres -"

"Oh, well if it's just that," Alfirin kisses her "I got the answer while you were out talking to the defector. It's fine. Encouraged, even. Keeps us from getting involved with boys."

Then they can spend the rest of the day or at least a while of it on activities formally sanctioned by the government of Osirion.

The attack comes Oathday morning. Well-coordinated, well-timed, eight locations within a few moments of one another. Monsters rush through Gates into the streets of Almas, while everything flammable in the city goes up in flames; a seething impenetrable darkness spreads like oil through the sky above the army and then turns out at the last second to be concealing a great red dragon, which sets itself to incinerating the soldiers by the hundreds; Azir burns, as does Isarn; some sea monstrosities surface to devour the Rahadoumi navy; someone lets out a pack of ravenous greater shadows in Vellumis; some Disintegrates punch through the walls of Andoran's border fortresses. 

(Cheliax sends Lastwall and Andoran a declaration of war.)

(Morgethai, and Cansellarion, and Catherine de Litran, and a number of other people, feel the insistent tug of an effort to Wish them somewhere.)

Lastwall's elite response teams who were notified in advance that something might happen this day are, honestly, kind of relieved. They're all experts in fighting the undead. Shadow attacks are not the worst of the things they were preparing for.

Cansellarion's army in the field is thrown into disarray. Few can endure the presence of an ancient dragon. The bulk of the troops panic and run every which way.

The most powerful fighters left behind at the camp don't, though. Sure, there's a dragon, and sure, Cansellarion doesn't seem to be here to fight it, but just like they have crates of silver-plated ammunition for devils and cold-iron-plated ammunition for demons, they have crates of ammunition that they've been told to save for heavily-armored enemies, like hellknights in adamantine plate or, yes, dragons.

Catherine's not hiding, this time, and not sitting next to Morgethai. She catches the wish and uses it to conjure up a diamond for later. "I guess that's the signal," she says to Clepati, and smashes the last of the paper shreds in the mortar.

Lorthact's false realm is just a demiplane; he was kicked out of Hell. It's a good demiplane, trapped against outsiders and hostile both physically and magically, its valuables elaborately hidden, the souls in its custody carefully rigged to be difficult to rescue. It tries simultaneously to shred their souls, trap their souls, devour them, burn them, dissolve them in acid, turn them to stone, and turn them to ghouls.

The thing about a demiplane is that you can't actually put a disjunction trap in it, or any trespass would risk ruining the whole thing. Catherine and Nefreti are under death wards, warded against fire, immune to acid and petrification thanks to greater angelic aspect, and, in Catherine's case at least, already a ghoul.

It's still slow work - identifying wards, picking them apart, figuring out what's worth taking - but Nefreti doesn't seem to be in a hurry. "Ah," she says, a moment before Lorthact arrives, and that's all the warning they really need. Lorthact is, in fact, prepared to find an archmage in his sanctum, but he's not really prepared to find two of them.

Also, they don't mind so much if the whole place gets torn apart and its contents spilled out into the Academae, and can say "hello" properly.

Felandriel Morgethai is immune to soul-trapping when she is awakened from her very brief nap, and she's honestly looking forward to the opportunity to murder Razmir with Cansellarion and Codwin helping. With the forewarning, she has set up some contingencies that should trigger a Disjunction if he tries to show up in a Time Stop.

They kill him twice, and he's probably not very persistently gone but he stops showing up after that. 

"Do we need to clear out this place now or will it keep if we go help out in Almas now?" Nothing related to either Iomedae has happened yet today, that she knows of. She's kind of dreading finding out what it is. (Also, fuck you Nethys.)

"We don't need to clear out this place now," says Nefreti, "but we are not particularly needed in Almas, either; Razmir has fled."

"Anywhere where the fight's not already won?"

"Vigil," says Nefreti. "But there, there's nothing you or I could do."

The first thing that comes to Vigil is magical silence, immediate and extensive, covering the whole city and the countryside a while past it. There are a few people in the world - none present in the city - who could recognize that the caster figured out how to do the same thing with silence that she could famously do with sleep.

The second thing that comes to Vigil is a series of Disintegrates that topple the walls that Arazni laid, that were specifically supposed to be impossible to Disintegrate.

Lastwall's emergency responders did not actually prepare for this one. They're coordinating with telepathic bonds, which is good because none of the ones still in Vigil would have been able to talk to each other normally - They split up. Some go to hold the keep, some go to guard the seal, some go to evacuate the leadership and the engineering staff. The efforts of the first two groups are almost certainly futile, but they are not the sorts of people who flee when all is lost. (They also pray, all of them, even though that's almost certainly futile too, because Iomedae surely has seen this already -)

She pauses in her work in the halfway reassembled new workshop and turns around and leaves, not speaking to anyone. The security is primarily designed for keeping people out, not keeping them in, but as she reaches four hundred paces from the doors of the Black Dome someone says, "you're not authorized to leave".

"Mm," she says, and then moves faster than should be possible and is outside the doors by the time they've drawn their weapons, and gone by the time they've called for help.

"I'm going to go and watch," says Nefreti, and extends her hand to invite Alfirin to share the Plane Shift.