Yeah, sorry on the roughness of that particular scene. I've decided that I'm moving Aedon's whole plot-line back to a scene earlier, so you'll catch a lot of your questions in some of those scenes, and this actual scene will come later in the story with much less of an infodump. That should fix many much of the problems.
Reading through, you're right, the power balance is really vague. I do know the answers to your questions, and some of them should have been answered here, I just wrote with some real clarity issues.
OK, so here's the first thing. Aedon has made the other Deviators in the empire swear loyalty to him. I didn't explain the way the oaths work because it's really, really complicated. I'll get into it a little later, but there's enough info dumped in this chapter already without me going into some really complicated Deviation.
I probably ought to delve into the lives of mages more, but in the future there's a viewpoint character from the Battalion, so I won't. In fact, I'll probably go with a little less here. You're right, though, I'm still writing this with the wrong perspective. You see, most of the population dreads becoming a mage because they've only seen a very limited side of the Mage Battalion and the way Deviators are treated. Once they're actually in the Battalion, people tend to like Deviating quite a lot, along with the power it gives them. Aedon should agree with the second viewpoint more than the first. This was a mistake, most likely due to the fact that I've been writing from Khyus' perspective before this, and Khyus doesn't really know anything about the Battalion.
Kreala = another civilization, currently at war with Aedon's empire. Sorry if that was unclear. It's gonna be kind of important in the future, though, so it is kind of important that it be clearer. Sorry for that lack of clarity.
Assassin-mages are in fact mages, just not Deviators (though their magic works in a somewhat similar fashion). And the Kreala do have Deviators too, just not in the same way that the Aedonians have Deviators. So wherever I mentioned the Kreala not having mages was a mistake. Sorry!
Yes, the mages coming to guard Aedon's study materialized without any backlash. Good catch. There is a reason for this, and it's not that they're super amazing or know something that the other characters don't know. It's actually fairly simple, and you'll see it later, so don't worry about this overly much.
Aedon uses Delren as a "glorified phone operator" because he doesn't know who is with Lenalt, while Delren does. Again, sorry for the lack of clarity.
Yeah, Aedon does sound a lot like Quinn. That's a problem. A big one. I'll work on writing him slightly differently so that he doesn't sound exactly the same. And actually, there are a couple of things in this chapter that are completely out of character for Aedon. Like the whole thing with the rebel mages. He wouldn't do that. He'd just execute them and be done with it. He might briefly make an example of Rasheda (I think that was her name), but he wouldn't enjoy it nearly as much as he seemed to in the text. I think he probably wasn't entirely clear in my mind when I wrote this, which resulted in him being this vague hybrid between himself and Quinn.
Again, sorry for the confusion on the Mage Battalion. This is one area that was still a little vague in my head when I wrote this. Most of the magi have a specific "Squad" to which they are assigned, with the ranking system continuing all the way up to Relea, the First Chaosmagi. There are a few who have posts outside the standard heirarchy, though, which is what I was writing all of the magi as. Which really doesn't work. So I'll have to fix this on the rewrite, and in future chapters before I submit.
And once again, I apologize for the really rough writing. We're deep into NaNoWriMo stuff now, and I only did a quick once-over for editing, not really changing any of the content. So hopefully we won't have anything too rough in the future. I'm still 15k away from finishing, so I'll be doing some heavy writing in the next few days, but I won't submit anything this week if I can't get it polished up a bit. Well, a lot. It doesn't do much good anyway to submit something that bad.
Power balance....yes. This is mostly just a result of really really bad writing and me not being clear enough in my really really bad writing. It goes something like this:
Aedon is the most skilled Deviator in the world. He can do basically anything that other Deviators can, and a lot of things that others can't. He's a very good duelist, though, because his reactions are almost always exactly what they should be to stop whatever the other person is doing. He doesn't make very many mistakes. He also has around 300 Deviators at his beck and call, since all have sworn loyalty to him. Most of these Deviators hold no particular loyalties, but will come because of their oath of loyalty.
Relea is a very skillful Deviator. She is mostly happy with her position as First Chaosmage, but if she saw the opportunity to overthrow Aedon, she would. Her oath of loyalty prevents her from directly trying to kill Aedon, but Aedon knows that she will do anything she can to work around her oath if it means she gets the book. It is also important to note (which I didn't in the text, which is a big mistake) that Relea's oath of loyalty was not the same as the other magi. I should have explained this and how it happened that way, but I totally missed it in the text. I'll try to catch it later on. Anyway, once Relea has the book, Aedon thinks she will be powerful enough to break through the Deviation that makes her oath binding, and overthrow him. This is actually supposed to be Aedon being paranoid, guarding against all possibilities, but it came across as him being afraid of Relea. Relea doesn't actually rival him, but she could possibly beat him in a duel if she got lucky (sorry LTU [can I call you that? It's so much easier]), as she's skilled enough to hold her own for a few minutes, and random circumstances sometimes change the outcome of a duel (as will be seen later).
The power balance issue is mostly a clarity issue, and my current problem of not mentioning what characters can't do, making it sound like they are all super-powered.
On the re-write, I'll flesh out the Emperor's rise to power, but I'll probably do so a little more gradually than this "BOOM - 90 pages of backstory" approach.
And I just re-read this. Wow. It's pretty bad. Sorry everybody. If nothing else, the length of this post (all of which is explaining things that should have been clear in the text) is a testament to the quality of work submitted.