If you were to try evacuating all of the humans in Rivellon into an extradimensional sanctuary on ten days' notice nearly all of them would die. In the cities, perhaps you could convince the church and the lords, and if the extradimensional sanctuary was a sufficiently pleasant place then people could check it out and determine it adequate, or you could abandon persuasion and round them up at swordspoint and perhaps save most that way. But even if you got everyone in the cities you'd lose nearly everyone. You couldn't even get the word to them in ten days.

There are far more humans than there are elves, and the humans are more geographically dispersed - and more accustomed to other humans trying to round them up at swordspoint for evil reasons -  but that's not the main reason that this isn't completely hopeless. The reason that this isn't completely hopeless is the trees. The trees speak to one another, and to the Mother Tree, and to the elves, and so if she can get to the Mother Tree and persuade the Mother Tree - or, realistically, the elven elders who will decide whether to take her request to the Mother Tree, a process far too sacred for a human to get anywhere near it -

- if the Mother Tree wills it be known through the whole forest, it'll be known through the whole forest. And the Mother Tree commands an authority no human monarch ever has, an authority that even the Divine, who unified the human kingdoms, has never wielded. If she says they should go to the sanctuary, they overwhelmingly will. (And the contrarians will probably at least flee the forest, which is just as good.)

And that makes the task ahead of them merely very, very difficult. 

Imene is not a diplomat. She is mostly a cavalry commander. She is a missionary, sometimes, but this is perhaps surprisingly a mostly distinct skillset. She can speak to people - individually, or in crowds, people who trust the Divine or people who've heard only ill of him, she can make his vision for Rivellon come alive before them, she can absolve them of their errors and advise them of better ways to achieve their goals. They love her. Their lords generally find this threatening. When she has attempted to persuade important people of things they have generally ended up finding her somewhere between an annoyance and a heretic. She is unpolished; she doesn't lie as a matter of principle; she has strongly held opinions on a number of questions where strongly held opinions are inconvenient. Even if the news she were bringing the elven elders was more welcome she is not at all confident she could convey it well. 

 Impressing important people is a valuable skillset, obviously, and she intended to learn it. After the war. 

The war is about to be over, but 'after the war' is no longer thinkable. She feels that in an important sense she won't exist, after this. Which is a price you have to decide to pay, sometimes; the alternatives were all even worse. 

Of the many faint notes of unease and misery jangling in the back of her mind the loudest is that she does not think Lucian would have told her, if she hadn't happened to return from the Sothira front at the right time, if she hadn't been in possession of urgent information and walked right into the war room and recognized the sourcerer he was speaking with. 

She's aware that this is an absurd thing to hold against a commander in wartime; if the operation is not sufficiently secret then it will be for nothing. But - it is the sort of thing that they discussed, often, and he would have known that she would have wanted the chance to try to talk him out of it, or down to a smaller version of it, that it would be important to her to satisfy herself that they were doing the least evil they could do, that they had sought better options as desperately as they would have if it were their own children they were condemning to their deaths and not the children of strangers. 

And he knows, presumably, that if word had reached her while she was in Sothira that the Divine had ended the war by unleashing Deathfog on the elven lands, wiping out the Black Ring and tragically also most of the elves -

- no, probably he doesn't know what would have happened then, because she doesn't either. It is hard to imagine what decisions one might make after having had one's entire justification for making decisions kicked out from under them. 

She does know that even though he hadn't intended to tell her what he was planning, he had intended the evacuation of the elves. The evacuation could not have been a decision made on the fly to appease her once she learned of the plan; the portal to the extradimensional sanctuary is the kind of enormously complex large-scale working that no one could possibly spin up on the fly like that. 

The elven elders are not pleased to see her. She does not blame them. She comes bearing very urgent and very terrible news. Firstly, this is a powerful working of Lucian's and another great sourceror's, a dimensional specialist, and when activated, as so, it will create an extradimensional sanctuary. A very large one, with food and water and shelter for many tens of thousands.

Lucian believes that the Black Ring are close to success in their attempt to release the lord of the demons from the trap in which, for defense of the whole world, the Seven placed him. Rhallic cannot permit this; Tir-Cendalius, she is sure, feels similarly. It was Lucian's duty to prevent this, and in that duty he has failed. It is too late; the sanctuary from where the Black Ring works is well-hidden, and their forces dispersed through the forest, and as the lord of the demons grows stronger he can conceal the workings of his servants.

She is not coming to the elves for help finding the Black Ring. She wishes she was coming to the elves for help finding the Black Ring.

She is coming to tell them that Lucian intends to flood the whole forest with deathfog, to kill them all and stop the ritual and save the world. 

He hopes, and she hopes, that it will be possible to evacuate most of the elves in the remaining time, which is...eight days.

They spend most of the next two hours arguing about whether to kill her on the spot, which is understandable of them and is why she gave them the instructions on how to activate the working first. 

The problem is the trees. They can, in fact, evacuate their people in eight days' time, to the sanctuary if they decide to trust in the hospitality of the Divine and his human empire (they do not), to the borders of the forest if they decide to instead trust in the hospitality of their neighbors (they do not), maybe some of them to their own sanctuaries, if they can imitate the working. But Deathfog ends all living things, and that includes the ancestor trees, and those cannot evacuate, and while they could perhaps shield some of them with magic they cannot shield them all. It is in the trees that all of elven history is written, all their songs and stories and memories and saints; it would be better for all the living elves to die than for all of the trees to be lost, or at least this is an opinion that many present hold. 

The obvious thing to do is go kill Lucian and the agents he's sent to deliver the Deathfog, but he hasn't left them enough time for that, surely by design. It's a valley, and Deathfog flows down; there are a thousand places you could unleash it. And the Divine, of course, can do things that no one else can. 

It is, in any event, a matter important enough to be put to the Mother Tree, so they drag the prisoners to a holding cell and gather the scions for the ritual to commune with the Mother Tree.

"Savages," he mutters quietly once the elves have left, in a northern trade tongue they almost certainly don't speak.

"I will strangle you myself if it seems to be to our diplomatic advantage, so don't make it so," Imene says, which is not at all what she would say ordinarily. There's a miserable dissociation in saying something and knowing it's not what you wished to say, like she's sitting here witnessing her own life instead of living it.

"We paid - everything - to get here, to save them, with absolutely nothing in it for us, risking our own necks at every step, don't think I don't see how you've been torturing yourself, and they have the nerve -"

"I have made my decisions for my reasons and no one here owes me any debt for them; they didn't ask me to set the pace I did. If you came here to be greeted as a hero then I regret that Lucian and I were not clearer about how this was likely to turn out."

"I'm here because I swore a long time ago that anyone who's going to kill you is going to go through me. Doesn't mean I can't call it savagery, when people ask themselves whether to eat you alive because you came here to save their lives."

"They don't eat people alive. They kill them and then eat them, and there are legitimate tactical reasons to do that in this case, though of course I hope they don't."

"But it wouldn't make you go, hmmm, maybe I had the wrong idea about saving these savages -"

"I will only regret this if it fails." If it succeeds but they murder her then she'll be absolved of figuring out how to build things in a world mostly scarred by an evil you yourself did to it, and will instead be safely in the Halls, which sounds very tempting. That's an unworthy thought and she doesn't speak it. 

"We would like you to accompany us to Tiroel. Can you ride?" She looks skeptical.

"I am very grateful for the opportunity. Of course I can ride. ...you may need to tie me to my horse."

"That shouldn't be a problem. 

There was one other request, before we permit you to approach Tiroel. If you are telling the truth, it shouldn't be a problem."

Glare.

"Of course," says Imene, and extends her hand, which is only shaking slightly. The woman's teeth sink into her wrist. It hurts. 

The woman considers her thoughtfully for a while. "Tiroel, then."

"Thank you. And the rest of my staff?"

"They'll remain here."

"We are sworn to protect her."

"If she dies, it will be by the hand of your Divine. Let's go."

The Divine's envoy looks like she's been beaten halfway to death, and then another halfway to death, and then another halfway to death, and so on, as an effort to demonstrate the mathematical principle that this procedure will never actually kill someone.

"I've never known Ehesa to act rashly," the High Priestess says carefully to the escort when they fall in with them, "but certainly in this case there was more cause than usual for anger."

         "Hmm? - no, Ehesa didn't do this. She arrived like that."

Well, in that case it's safe to say to the envoy - "You look unwell."

"Noble priestess. It was a difficult journey. I regret arriving at such a sacred place in such a condition."

"It is not appropriate. But I understand that the Divine claims that there is very little time, and no delays can be afforded."

"The last assessment of the situation of which I was apprised was that the enemy was suspected to be only months, perhaps weeks, from success. I believe we have seven remaining days before the planned offensive, but I cannot guarantee them, and would strongly recommend that evacuation begin as quickly as possible."

"The timing is also convenient should your Divine have wished to ensure we'd have no time to protect ourselves, or explore any alternatives to the solution he sent us."

"Please explore alternatives to the solution we sent you. It's not going to save everyone and the more things you think of the better, assuming it doesn't amount to a distraction from ordering the evacuation."

"The solution that has garnered the most support in our councils is stopping your Divine."

"I would not blame you for trying but I do not expect you to succeed, and if you do succeed I expect all to be lost anyway a few weeks later.

...all Seven choose the Divine. I - don't intend any discourtesy, I know that your custom is that one does not speak of the will of the gods, but -"

"But you do it anyway?"

"I don't know their will. I just know that, to empower Lucien, each of the gods granted him some of their nature. It is conventionally assumed where the Divine Order governs that this is because the Black Ring's plans pose a threat to all the world, but you're not wrong that we know little of the will of the gods. But we know what they did."

"Do they say, where the Divine Order governs, that this is what the gods intended?"

They probably will, is the terrible thing, once it happens. People like to see the will of the gods in what happened; then they can believe the world is governed by justice and not by madness. "Lucian failed," she says. "It was his duty to stop the Black Ring before it got to this point, and he failed, and allowed the army to be distracted winning battles on fronts that did not matter. Where it is the custom to guess the will of the gods, I would guess that the gods did not intend this at all, and will be angry. But if there is something that they would have us do instead, it is beyond me to guess it."

"Lucian sends a well-spoken champion."

"He doesn't want you to die. I have no right to tell you what to do, here. But I hope that you act knowing - that I have known Lucian since before I was fully grown, and I trust that he does not want you to die, and that - while he is doing evil here, while we are doing evil here - he is trying to find something half as awful. Not because you'll hate us less, if it is half as awful, but  because more people will make it to safety."

They cross the threshold into Tiroel and then things all happen very quickly. There's a flash of magic, and then darkness; she holds her breath instinctively, but it doesn't matter, because deathfog can do its damage through the skin. 

No, she has time to think, dumbly, and then she dies.

As do eighty thousand other people. 

Hattie, of course, is already dead. She stands there impatiently for about ten minutes, enjoying the sudden absence of carrion flies and maggots, and then she trots off, her rider still bound to her back.

Two weeks after the end of the war, Imene's favorite horse turns up at the stables outside Arx. It is dead, though animate. Tied to the saddle, and even more thoroughly dead, is Imene. The bodies are remarkably well-preserved, almost certainly related to the fact they both still reek of deathfog. 

This is not in fact things going worse than he expected; he mostly expected that the last-ditch effort would fail and the war would be lost and the world consumed by demons. 

Most people would tell the Divine. Matten shoos the horse away with a burst of electricity the second he sees it on the horizon, and chases it down once he's made his excuses. Searches Imene's body, both for notes she might have thought to leave him and for signs that something other than the deathfog killed her.

He attends her funeral. The Divine speaks. Weeps. Asks people to remember and live by her animating impulse, her conviction, her determination to make things better no matter how bad they were. Nearly all of her closest associates accompanied her on the last mission, and died with her, but the Divine knows that Matten remained behind, and seeks him out at the funeral, to offer his condolences, to hold him close and remember together the best person either of them ever knew. 

In general, you can't raise people from the dead after very long. Their souls depart for the halls, and their bodies cease to be suitable to host them. 

It seems likely that Imene, having failed spectacularly at her most important mission, would have stuck around. 

He returns home from her funeral and raises her. 

She is not in the Halls, because Lucian has been to and returned from the Halls and he would have mentioned if they were a place of horrible torment. In some of her more lucid moments she considers the possibility that she is, like Hattie, undead, as it seems consistent with the fact that she has a body, cannot control it, and can feel its agonies, and that things keep happening around her but she cannot remember towards what end. She forms the firm impression that undeath is, in fact, even more evil than advertised. She forms this firm impression ten or twenty times; she keeps forgetting everything. 

And then eventually the fever subsides, and the healer figures out how to let her properly sleep, and she awakes lucid enough to know that she failed. 

It has been three months. If she were anyone else he'd have put her out of her misery a week in, when it became clear that healing magic could not touch whatever had gone wrong with her body despite the deathfog suppressing its decay, but he does not believe that she would have commanded that.

And then, of course, everything else happened, and he needed her back no matter what they had to pay for it. 

"You're awake, sir."

She would agree with that claim but she's out of practice at moving her mouth. "Mmm," she says, instead. And then, more urgently, "mmm mmmm mmmm hmmmhmhmmmrgh?"

"There were no survivors. The Divine claimed that the team with the deathfog had orders to delay as long as they could without endangering the world, and that while they were of course lost in the attack he had no reason to believe they would have disobeyed those orders."

She whimpers. 

Matten says that like he doesn't believe it, but Matten also says 'the sky is reportedly blue' like he doesn't believe it. "Mmmmrgh mmrrgh?"

"We are also not aware of any Black Ring survivors. Lucian believed that the ritual had been disrupted."

There's something he keeps doing, keeps saying, and a tiny part of her brain keeps noticing it but then losing track of it while she tries to find a way to put it into words. She struggles with it for a while. He doesn't try to preempt her. 

Eventually - "believed?"

"Lucian is dead.

A month after the war ended, things from the Void started arriving, popping up all over the human lands, reportedly farther. He said it was because we hadn't stopped the ritual sooner, that it'd gotten far enough to weaken the fabric of the world. He did some ritual to try to fix it. He said it was dangerous, and they should raise him if it failed. 

They reportedly tried many times. ...I tried once."

It's too many things. There is not enough space in her heart to grieve that many people; adding one more hardly makes it worse, even if he's the person who has been the center of her world for her whole adult life. She can feel herself grieving and reaching the edges of her grief and pulling back where there's nothing left but wallowing in it. The more suffocating thing is the impossibility of figuring out what to learn from this. 

She could figure out, in time, how to reorient to having failed, having let eighty thousand people die because she didn't arrive fast enough. She could figure out how to live with not knowing if Lucian had ever believed in the mission or if he'd been trying to get her out of the way. She could figure out, in time, how to orient to an invasion of things from the Void because Lucian waited too long with the deathfog. She could figure out how to live in a world without the Divine. She has no idea how to stack them on top of each other. The question that has always mattered the most is how to make decisions that make things better, instead of worse, and it feels like an avalanche of evidence crumbling down on her that none of her previous answers worked at all. 

And she can't just walk away. There is an invasion of things from the Void, apparently, and Lucian is dead. More work to do than ever, and fewer hands with which to do it - because of her, because she was wrong, because she tried to save everyone and ended up perhaps damning everyone -

"Mmm," she says, after a long moment, just so Matten can tell she is still conscious and still listening. 

"The Order's in complete disarray. Palavar declared independence. The paladins are favoring Kemm as Lucian's successor. The Magisters are Alexandar's, of course. There was very nearly fighting in the streets of Arx over custody of Lucian's body. Alexandar talked everybody down but it was a near thing. He's planning to attempt the trials, see if the gods will appoint a new Divine. We're going to need one. 

The healers thought you'd make a full recovery eventually, your problem at this point is just disuse of all your muscles. 

I think that's everything urgent. ...oh. Don't use Source. At the university they have a theory that it's what is attracting the Void creatures. They can smell it, they feed on it, they appear nearby whenever someone uses it."

She knows what she wants to answer to that, knows what she would have answered to that back when the world made sense. Her mouth is very slow to obey her commands, but she wants it very badly. "So....better...than...you....expected," she gets out, eventually. 

He is not an expressive person but at that he laughs, or at least hiccups. "Going about as well as I expected. Maybe a bit better. It's good to have you back, sir."

It's not good to be back. It is hard to imagine it ever will be. "Tell ...me...Void...invasion."