There's really no talking sense into her. He'll let her pack. He is not looking forward to having to report these events but he is in fact under orders to let her leave if she decides to.

Alfirin does not waste time packing at first. She grabs her sending scroll and starts reading.

"Where is Iomedae? Is she okay? What happened?"

Jan is a bit surprised to get a sending from Alfirin. He did not think she could do that. "Vigil keep. Was possessed by goddess Iomedae to perform miracle to save everything. In pain now, will recover. Teleport tomorrow."

Yeah, right. She throws her spellbooks and notebooks and scrolls and a pile of cash into a bag and goes to get Jeres to walk her to the Dome gate.

"Alright, here we are. Outside the Dome, you're free to make your own way. I have no idea how you think this serves you better than waiting a day -"

She flips him off and reads the teleport scroll. (To a scriviner's shop in Absalom, the scroll doesn't have the range to make it straight to Vigil and she needs to buy some more.)

All told it's more than an hour, from the moment Iomedae left, until Alfirin is back at her side.

She is still incoherent and disoriented and in awful pain. She has stopped screaming because screaming hurts more. She has no idea what's happening except that everything hurts too much to hold her thoughts together.

She does seem to recognize Alfirin, and makes a kind of strangled sound and reaches for her.

Oh no oh no oh no. Alfirin takes her hand. "I'm here, I'm here," she whispers. She doesn't say it's okay because it really does not seem okay.

Iomedae squeezes her hand, painfully tightly, and doesn't try to say anything.

Alfirin squeezes back and holds Iomedae with her other arm. She starts crying.

Iomedae spends …the rest of the day insensible, pretty much. She asks for Alfirin a few times, and asks where they are a few times, and at one point looks up at crying Alfirin and attempts to fix her with a Lay On Hands. She does not really seem to be able to understand speech even when she can produce it. She dislikes bright lights and loud noises.

Lastwall does need to look up what to do, here, but on the assumption that this is similar in nature to getting a vision from a god less good at sending visions, they have in fact put her in a dark quiet room. Some clerics do occasionally stop in to check how well Iomedae is improving, but they mostly leave them alone.

Jan exercises the privileges of his rank to assign other people to handle recovery efforts and the after-action reports for events in Almas, Azir, and Cheliax. There's not really a normal incident report to be written about events in Vigil. There's nothing they could have done that would have spared the Goddess Her intervention. Someone else can look into the questions of how they might have had slightly fewer casualties, or how the emergency response could have prioritized better. He and Cansellarion and the rest of Lastwall's leadership are going to focus on the bigger strategic updates.

First: Arazni is active in the world, still Evil, and no longer under Geb's control. And was doing favors for Abrogail Thrune. They suspect She'll have ended that alliance, if only because it was probably approved by Geb and if She's free of his control She almost certainly hates him and won't continue with his plans. They don't want to count on it, but… the Goddess would probably have done more to impair Arazni if She was going to keep causing them problems in the short term.

Second: There was a powerful wizard named Alfirin in the Shining Crusade, which cannot possibly be a coincidence, especially given Cansellarion's reports about what Clepati had said to him. (Witness descriptions of her do seem to plausibly match their Alfirin with another couple decades on her.)  She was powerful enough to have her own demiplane, which should mean powerful enough to be mentioned in the histories, which means either she was deliberately left out of them or thoroughly involved in one of Iomedae's mistakes that got edited out… And still alive. She might've been made into a vampire or something, or she might have become a lich willingly. Based on the guess that she may have been classified as one of Iomedae's imitable mistakes, and on the younger Iomedae's relationship with her Alfirin… he suspects the latter more than the former. But she's still helping them, or at least - neither Clepati nor Lorthact showed up to the fight in Almas. There is enough going on here that it is probably worth Heaven's budget to clarify. They'll put a question in the next commune about whether to call someone for it.

Third: The declaration of war. In some ways, it simplifies their situation enormously. Not quite as much as you might think, though; Cansellarion already took almost everyone who could be spared from Ustalav and the Worldwound. It's a little more strategic flexibility, at the cost of not being able to leave Lastwall unguarded against overt raids.

Fourth: Catherine de Litran was, for some reason, on the scene pretty quickly. And had a frankly bizarre conversation with Iomedae the Goddess…Maybe he's just jumping to conclusions here, but in light of everything else he suspects that maybe Catherine de Litran is the nine-hundred-year-old Alfirin who was probably helping Clepati destroy Lorthact. It explains why she was there and… at least partially explains the conversation. They can check that theory in the commune too.

Fifth and most importantly: They already knew Asmodeus was spending more than they expected to defend Cheliax, but the extent of it today still caught them by surprise. They need to not be surprised at the next enormous escalation, even if they can't really prepare enough to be able to deal with something else as serious as Arazni. And they have another set of questions for the commune, about whether they should invest more in learning why, and about whether they should ask Heaven about why.

In the early evening Iomedae's headache recedes enough that she can stay oriented, once oriented, to where she is (Vigil) and why she feels like a truck drove over her (it's her godself's fault). 

"What…happened?"

"You…left. They say god Iomedae possessed you and brought you here to do a miracle to save everything. They didn't really tell me anything else...I didn't ask, once I was here. Should I send for someone who knows more?"

"...'Save everything'....yes I think I'd like that if it's all right with you? I'd like to know - what I did - I mean I know I didn't, but -"

"Yeah. I'll go get someone." She doesn't want to go far but there are guards at the door and apparently one of them can be sent to get someone else.

Someone is got.

"Arazni was here. She was destroying the city and probably going to release Tar-Baphon, and nobody could stop her. Iomedae appeared and - showed everyone the Shining Crusade. How Arazni died. For Arazni's benefit, obviously… we suspect Geb must have tampered with Her memories. Then She offered to free Arazni from Geb, and Arazni accepted and left. Then someone else showed up, exchanged some vaguely hostile sentences with Iomedae, and left. Iomedae told the nearest person to tell the two of you that She's very sorry, and then She left you and you collapsed. Do you want more detail about any of that?"

"...probably but not right this second." She squeezes Alfirin's hand again. "I'm glad She said She's sorry - I mean, not that I'd have wanted Her to do something else, I guess, if She had to use me for some reason, but -"

Squeeze. "But She's sorry this was her best option…that doesn't seem very much like being sorry, to me, but I think I'm being uncharitable."

"That seems exactly like being sorry, to me! If you have to, I don't know, bomb someone's house, to prevent the end of the world, I wouldn't say you shouldn't bomb their house but it does seem like you - wronged them, and should admit it to them, and shouldn't just go 'well, you didn't want the world to end either, did you' - I don't know. I'm upset that things keep happening that are wildly above my pay grade but I feel a lot better about it if the people doing it agree that it's not very fair."

"I think there's a kind of sorry that there weren't better options where it doesn't seem sincere, to me, if you're not trying to have better options - but that's me being uncharitable, She probably is trying to find better options." But She probably won't succeed because it's obvious, if you think about it, why She chose this one, and it seems like it'd be hard for Her to do better. Alfirin is worried that things are just going to keep happening to her Iomedae until eventually it's something she can't bounce back from.

Iomedae is kind of scared of that too. This is a lot of things happening to her. When she envisioned saving the world she was, even though this is very stupid, envisioning fewer things would happen to her in the course of that. She squeezes Alfirin's hand again and addresses the person who came in to explain everything. "Is everyone else all right?"

"There were also simultaneous attacks on Almas, Azir, Vellumis, Isarn, the army, and Andoran's border forts. We don't have complete casualty lists yet."