After spending nearly two weeks in a secret bunker somewhere in Iran during his country's war with Israel, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, might want to use the opportunity of the ceasefire to venture out.
He is believed to be holed up, incommunicado, for the fear of being assassinated by Israel. Even top government officials apparently have had no contact with him.
He would be well advised to be cautious, despite the fragile ceasefire that the US President Donald Trump and the Emir of Qatar brokered. Though President Trump reportedly told Israel not to kill Iran's supreme leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not rule it out.
When – or indeed if – he does emerge from hiding, he will see a landscape of death and destruction. He will no doubt still appear on state TV claiming victory in the conflict. He will plot to restore his image. But he will face new realities – even a new era.
The war has left the country significantly weakened and him a diminished man.
Murmurs of dissent at the top
During the war, Israel quickly took control of much of Iran's airspace, and attacked its military infrastructure. Top commanders of the Revolutionary Guard and the army were swiftly killed.
The extent of the damage to the military is still unclear and disputed, but the repeated bombings of the army and revolutionary guard bases and installations suggests substantial degradation of Iran's military power. Militarisation had long consumed a vast amount of the nation's resources.
Iran's known nuclear facilities that earned the country nearly two decades of US and international sanctions, with an estimated cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, are now damaged from the air strikes, although the full extent of this has been hard to assess.
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