Embers of Artifice
Twenty-First Day of the Eleventh Month 294 AC
Such a bloody waste... You shake your head as you set down the last report. Likely as not, those guilty will be executed, or at the least, if they should find a sympathetic judge, serve long years of prison, and all for what, for fear of a phantasm, a peril which never was. The Heralds are sent out, the messages drafted, one can but hope that they shall spread the truth faster then the lies can spill out to poison the hearts of men. If nothing else, you are at least quite certain they shall suffer no harm from the task.
"Someone'll try something, just you watch," Clegane mutters under his breath, drawing curious looks from the officials present and a snicker from Dany.
"Anyone dumb enough to try something with a huge steel dragon that breathes flame deserves what they get for their trouble," your sister notes, a dark edge to her words. She glances at you, an unspoken question in her eyes.
Can we... should we?
It is a strange thing to have the power to turn back the hand of death and spin again the thread of a life cut too soon. You would not wish yourself parted of it certainly, but with the power comes its own weight. Thus lives are weighed in glasseel, in marks, thus they are tallied in ledgers not once, as risk of death, but twice in hope of return. You nod, it would make for a good precedent for Scholarum mages who travel into far off parts under the command of the throne to know that a heroic death would see a path opened to return.
Others had died unable to look into the eyes of their killers, not knowing why and how as the flames overcame them, not in the midst of some great deed, but in just another day in Everfire Dale. Some had been brought back, the most willing among the most skilled, healers, battle mages, the heads of alchemical production lines, but there are not enough diamonds in the Opaline Vault nor enough arcane reagents in all the groves of the realm to restore all those who lost their lives to the Efreeti.
There came a point sharp as a spear's tip where you would lose more than you would gain by trying to summon more from the beyond, where one could not justify in the long term or in the short weaving the spells of resurrection. So now here you stand. Of the more than thirty thousand people who died, six hundred fifty three have been returned to life, including wyvern pilots, gravjammer engineers, communications officers, sorcerers and artificers.
Most often to return, even one of these people you had to pledge to do the same to their closest kin, for men are not tools or automata, to work and to serve, to live in a world alone for duty of vengeance.
Some of them have kin elsewhere, or at the very least have some notion of where they might go from here, if only 'to the next assignment', but for many of the returned there is no place to go beyond the Dale. And so you are left with a conundrum, what to do with people, with families who have nothing beyond what the throne might give them. Compared to the cost of pulling back the curtain of death, this will cost little, but the question remains, where do you need them most, and where do they need to be?
[] Send them throughout many of the cities of the realm, prioritizing safe quiet postings and access to mind healers
[] Send them to where they are most needed to aid with the reconstruction (will hasten reconstruction)
OOC: So I thought about making this a choice of 'how many do you save', but the problem with that is that the limiting factor is money, something that has been abstracted away and I did not want to unpack the abstraction. I briefly thought about making it cost AP in various forms, but then I would have to unpack that abstraction and and justify it so I want with what seemed like a reasonable number of successful resurrections (300 odd essential personnel and about as many of their close family members) and I made the choice more about how to deal with the aftermath. Not yet edited.
