Battle of Rathmore's Gate

The Battle of Rathmore's Gate was a conflict between Abolish's Atreya task force and the allies of Queen Helen.

### Precipitating Events

After they gave up on trying to start an impassioned, long-lasting conflict that they expected to be more bloody in the long run, the servants holding Atreya decided that they would simply create a short war based on confusion and then leave before Helen had time to assemble reinforcements and try to retake Sescoria. To this end, they kidnapped a platoon of Atreyan soldiers and planned to destroy a few small towns in Rendon and blaming it on the soldiers.

Helen got word of the plan through bugs planted in the capitol building by Gina. She, along with Hector, Roman and Harper went to stop them at Rathmore's Gate, knowing that this would put their battle in the middle of the Carthrace nature preserve, where there would be a minimum of civilians.

### Hanjir's Death

Hanjir was flying a plane full of hostage soldiers when Roman intercepted him, convinced him to land the plane and fight on the ground and then easily killed both him and his reaper. This cost the Abolishers a potentially valuable ally and left them with only one destruction user, but it also delayed Roman's arrival to the battle and allowed Karkash to attack without fear of an effective reply.

### First Contact

Despite having the element of surprise, the Atreyan forces were not able to kill any of the Abolishers outright at the start. The battle quickly turned against them because Karkash was able to force Hector to stay on the defensive and Conall could use reflective barriers to protect his allies from Harper's attacks. This forced everyone to multitask to deal with Desmond, Tessa, Andres and Nola while only Helen was free to act. However things seemed to improve after Roman returned to confront Karkash and give Hector more freedom to support his allies.

### Pan-Rozum

Though things seemed to be going well, Harper got distracted for a moment and Nola was able to use integration to fuse one of his feet to the ground. While he dealt with this, Andres and Conall covered his body in a huge block of materialized aluminum and sulfur. Without his aid, Harper knew that his allies would stand no chance.

Despite knowing that he could not fully control it, Harper entered Pan-Rozum. In this state, he was able to move and attack at the speed of light, but only had enough self control to not kill people whose souls he recognized as belonging to allies unless there were no other targets. In this state he quickly escaped his prison and proceeded to destroy the Abolish forces. Karkash, Hoyohte, Ezmortig and possibly Tessa's reaper escaped, but everyone else from the Atreya task force was killed, along with everyone from the Rendon task force which showed up to investigate.

### Stopping Harper

However, once the Abolishers were killed, there was one final problem. Harper was still in Pan-Rozum, with only a limited ability to restrain himself from killing his allies and none at all from killing the hostage soldiers. While the rest of the group left by car, Hector stayed behind to try and delay Harper. He created a large barrier empowered with his soul, and then managed to trap Harper in a series of soul-empowered tunnels when he tried to go through the gap that Hector left. Harper had the power to destroy Hector and escape, but his self-control stopped him from doing so right away and the soul-empowered walls blinded him to the unfamiliar human souls outside. Hector used the time this bought to lead Harper as far as he could in the other direction.

Eventually Harper's self-control failed and he began trying to kill Hector, but even then Hector was able to delay him a little bit longer. He ultimately wound up being torn to pieces but before Harper finished him off he finally managed to terminate his hyperstate and promptly collapsed. At this point it was a simple matter of finding Hector's remains to regenerate.

### Post-Battle

After the battle Desmond and Karkash regrouped and agreed that Atreya was lost. As an apology for wasting his time on what ended up being a fruitless task, Desmond offered to give Karkash a share of a substantial amount of money that he had recently found. This was likely the treasury of Atreya, which was given to Abolish by Prince Luther as a backup plan to ensure that even if they were defeated the country would still be lost. Karkash then killed Desmond to prevent him from slowing them down and asked Ezmortig to lead him to the money.

Meanwhile, Helen began explaining some of the truth of what had happened along with some lies to avoid revealing important secrets or causing major panic. She also created an elaborate story to explain how the Darksteel Soldier had never committed any crimes, was working for her the whole time, and had been framed by her enemies, none of which was true except that he was not responsible for the Calman High Massacre. Hector and Harper got some much-needed rest for a few days before awakening. At this point, Helen told Hector that he was being made a knight and would be given a castle. On urging from Voreese, he asked for Warrenhold and was granted it, along with a promise from Voreese to explain later.