In that scenario, Breden’s following and yours would be very distinct from each other. You wouldn’t learn that Breden has in your absence acquired significant influence over “your” rebels. But the Rim’s a big place, and xhe’s very charismatic. You can’t really keep xhim from attracting a following.
Messages of state are written, sealed, and couriered by flying Theurge; others go by riders or boat, often paying to use the Syntechnia network. There is no equivalent of heliography or other primitive telecommunication. Theurges can make their voices loud enough to be heard over long distances, but thankfully for the otherwised deafened populace that’s not standard practice.
Hera probably looked fairly young, as she’d have kept renewing her body from about the age of thirty onward. Theurges in the post-Ward era, however, usually wait as long as possible to extend their life through Theurgy… since once they’ve done that, their Changed flesh will no longer traverse a Ward, and they’ll have to live with much more bureaucracy when they want to go in and out of a major city through a Wardgate.
Outright reversing the visible signs of age is difficult by that point, and thus a sign of excessive vanity, so most well-preserved Theurges look old but spry. If you were to see a very old Theurge who looked twenty, they’d be politically powerful enough that they didn’t have to care about (a) the vast amount of blood they’d used and (b) what others would think of their shallow self-regard. Even the Ennearchs don’t usually get to that level.
No known gameworld drugs could reliably knock someone unconscious without a meaningful risk of killing them pre-Harrowing (e.g. hemlock) and thus wasting their blood. Of course there are various drugs used by surgeons to sedate people, but not to a level of unconsciousness that would stop people screaming in agony through a Harrowing…so there’s not much humanitarian justification to waste them on the vast number of helots who are Harrowed every year.
Nor has any Theurge yet figured out pain well enough to stop it entirely, even using lots of blood (which would of course in any case be counter-productive for Harrowing). Theurgy is great for freezing muscles in place, so Theurgic surgery tends to involve getting someone really drunk/high and then immobilizing them while you do the cutting; that, combined with good post-surgery healing, produces good enough results that Theurges haven’t poured massive research into making the process genuinely painless.
All the real-world parallels for truly effective anaesthesia/hypnosis are 19th-century developments, so I think it’s reasonable not to write them into the gameworld.
And will be defined by Breden’s–unless you’ve come to realize in Game 2 Ch 1 that you’re cetero, in which case the heir will be nonbinary. (One of three planned nonbinary ROs, along with Jevahir and Laj-jas.)