Alfonso Antoninus Iomedae Thrune i Blanxart, last Count of Egorian without a devil’s blood in his veins, was born, as his name might imply, to parents who were devoted followers of the new goddess, and he grew to share their faith. He almost had to be an Iomedan, to shield himself from his cousins’ reputation, but this did not mean his faith was not genuine. The altar to Iomedae in his family shrine stood in a place of coequal honor with the altar to Aroden Himself, and the cleric he kept on retainer for healing was one of Hers. But Iomedae was still a very young goddess with very, very much to do, and that cleric was far too weak to have cast a Forbiddance that might have stopped his cousin from teleporting into his bedroom and casting Flesh to Stone as he slept.

The Thrunes did not kill their enemies when they could avoid it; that would have just given someone else the opportunity to resurrect them, even if they had to go all the way to Aroden’s high priest in Oppara with a very expensive diamond to do it. Even later, when they ruled with Hell’s full cooperation and nearly everyone they were eliminating was soul-sold and thus unresurrectable without Hell’s permission, and Hell was more than a little bit annoyed about them getting turned to stone instead, they kept doing it. Over the centuries they accumulated quite a collection of statues, first in a vault, then in a series of secure demiplanes. Their last demiplane was very, very secure. Even trying to Discern Location any of its contents would break the minds of most mortals. Abrogail Thrune II could, and frequenly did, look people in the eye and say with perfect sincerity that they would be turned into statues and never found until the ending of the world. Of course, Abrogail Thrune was an excellent liar, and also kind of dumb, but in the end it took the intervention of the High Priestess of Nethys and three archmages working together to rescue the statues, and Abrogail Thrune would probably protest that she couldn’t possibly have expected that.

Seven hundred years later, one of Naima's senior apprentices is sorting through Abrogail's garbage with the help of an only mildly insane kitsune wizard. Frederick is an eighteen year old ex-dung-sweeper who can't cast any spells and has been in, like, half of one real fight in his life, so he really should be terrified of 7th circle wizards like Nenio, but in fact he is not. He's put up with too much of Naima's shit for that. This time the shit is 'oh, Frederick, you wouldn't mind individually questioning the dozens of statues we got from Abrogail Thrune's terrifying secret demiplane, would you? It has absolutely nothing to do with your core skills, but involves handling sensitive and confusing information, and I trust your loyalty more than almost anyone else in my organization. I also don't value your time enough in comparison to mine to find someone better, especially given the current state of my Chelish employees. If any of them try to murder you then Nenio will probably stop them, so it's fine.'

This is a paraphrase, but not as much of one as it sounds. On the other hand she's paying him for it, so. 

Nenio casts stone to flesh on one of the dozens of remaining unlabeled statues, dispassionately observing the results.

"Subject 23 appears stable, unlike the last one. Are you capable of answering questions, former statue?"

Former statue.

It isn't surprising—he knows Roderic has a spell that does that, turns people into statues and traps their souls in them so they're never even seen in an afterlife, and he knows that he's the last thing standing between Roderic and the county of Egorian, and that Roderic is a sixth-circle sorcerer and he's basically powerless to stop him from doing anything and neither the Archduke nor the Emperor seem to care—so it isn't surprising that one night he went to bed and didn't wake up. It is, maybe, a little surprising that he's waking up now. He didn't know the spell was reversible, and he didn't expect anyone to care enough to get the statue back and even try. Well, he has no idea how long he's been a statue. Maybe it's the Age of Glory.

Oh right, he needs to answer the whatever-she-is.

"Yes—uh, what year is it?"

"4714 Absalom Reckoning. What year were you petrified in?"

"3989—so it's the Age of Glory, then." And everyone he's ever loved has been in Axis or Heaven for seven hundred years without him, but he'll—process that later.

"That would make you a contemporary of the Vudran oceanographer Nanakdev Agnihotri, whose most significant works have unfortunately been lost to more recent history. Are you familiar with his work?"

What the fuck? Fucking wizards.

"I'm afraid not," he says. "My name is Alfonso Antoninus Iomedae Thrune, Count of Egorian—or I was. My dear cousins, I don't doubt, have made that name mud, if anyone remembers it at all, but I still have some pride in it."

"Then you are most likely of no academic value to me," she says, solemnly. "Assistant, you may conduct the less interesting parts of this interview."

She walks three yards off, and then sits down to read a book.

Frederick is dutifully scribbling down the name, after the year. He squints at it, once it's on his paper.

" - yeah, anyway. Iomedae, huh?"

He can guess the meaning of that look.

"Yes, my parents were devotees, as am I. I take it, from your expression, that my diabolist cousins have maintained their infamy. Did Aroden finally depose them, when he returned?"

Frederick opens his mouth, and then is not entirely sure what ought to come out.

"...sort of. Do you, uh, want seven hundred years of bad news all at once, or do you want to pace yourself."

It is, now that he thinks about it, more than a hundred years after the prophesized day of Aroden's return. It shouldn't have taken that long to depose the diabolists abusing his family's name and dig him out of their basement. 

"Is it the Age of Glory or not?" he asks, with the sudden sinking feeling that it's probably not.

"Not as advertised. Aroden's dead, my man. Mind you, he died a hundred years ago, and we've just about cleaned up his mess."

"Dead?"

He does know, in the abstract, that gods can die. Every temple of Aroden has its shrine to Amaznen and Acavna, dead gods of ancient Azlant. But for Aroden himself to be gone feels as impossible as for the moon to fall from the sky—okay, bad metaphor. Still.

"—what mess." Not as bad as Earthfall, at least, if it was cleaned up in a little over a century.

"You don't know the half of it. Anyway, I am cleaning up after your recently deposed diabolist cousins. I didn't know there were ever any Iomedan Thrunes."

"Yes, I suppose if all you've known is Roderic's side of the family—but the name is older than the taint of Hell on us, and not even all the tieflings were bad, in my day. Antoninus, also my namesake, was the first of them, and he made Heaven—though the Crusade definitely helped, there. My parents picked up the devotion to Iomedae—probably mostly to emphasize how they weren't diabolists, but they were sincere in it."

"Anyway, what have my dear cousins been up to while I've been gone?"

Frederick sighs. "Let's see, you're - Aspex is four thousand something, I forget when, but you'd be from before an independent Cheliax?"

"The emperor's writ was not strong in the west, else he would have stopped Roderic, but I was still formally a vassal of the Taldane Empire, yes."

"Well, your cousins have been ruling independent Cheliax for the last seventy-odd years. Diabolically. My employer and her companions kicked them out last year, and now they have to fix the - " don't say stupid, he can be lazy without being outright mean "- place. It's in bad shape, though."

Gods damn that whore Porphyria and her whole tainted line—no, he reminds himself a moment later, in fact they would have, and that's bad. 

"Sorry," he says, his jaw still slack with disbelief, "did Iomedae die too? How the Hell did they conquer the whole Western Empire?" He's actually kind of angry at Iomedae, if she isn't dead. She promised that, by their efforts, one day Hell would cease. Not that their servants would conquer half the fucking Empire.

"—actually, you know what, I don't want to know," he says a moment later. "Tell me more about the people who got rid of them."

"Yeah, sure. So there's my employer - not her," he says, waving almost dismissively at Nenio, "I mean my actual employer, Naima Cotonnet. She's not Nex, or Geb, or Aroden when he lived, either, but she's close, and closer than any of them were at twenty-six, I can tell you that. She's a witch, specializing in healing, currently heading the effort to resurrect enough non-infernal nobles to run the place. There's her husband, Elie, a wizard about as powerful as she is. Inquisitor Shawil of Abadar, and the sorcerer Ione Dujardin. And their friend, Catherine Marianne Euphemia Aspexia de Litran, heir to the Chelish crown through Aspex - he's the guy who broke Cheliax away from Taldor however many centuries ago. De Litran is on the throne, now. The Thrunes tried to take them out before they got too powerful, and they responded by declaring war. It was over in four days. Not to say that they weren't meaning to declare war before that."

Hold on.

One, two—

"Three archmages? Working together?" he says, his jaw even slacker than before but in an entirely different way. And non-caster companions of presumably comparable power, though he's not entirely sure what an archmage-equivalent Abadaran inquisitor would even do.

"It's great, isn't it?" he says, smiling broadly. "Hell didn't know what hit it."

"I wouldn't have thought the gods would permit it," he says, and then a thought occurs to him. If Aroden could, somehow, have given his life for a world in which mortals were actually permitted to surpass him—well, he obviously would have done it, so it doesn't really matter whether he did it on purpose. Maybe there is some glory to this age after all.

Frederick shrugs. He doesn't know what the gods permit. Or care, really, when it concerns his business and not theirs. The important thing on his end is -

"So, besides being Count of Egorian, hypothetically, if every other Chelish noble were to drop dead tomorrow, what else do you have a plausible claim to?"

... probably that did not literally happen, right? But it's unfortunately plausible that after this long, enough of them are diabolists that it's worth using that as a simplified gloss of the situation. Oh no.

"Frankly, it has been seven hundred years," he says. "I'm not sure that even my claim on Egorian would be 'plausible' anymore, nor wise to grant me regardless. I am a foreigner now, even in the county of my birth, and Her Majesty would likely be wiser to grant my titles to some Good adventurer for his service—what has become of my former holdings?"

" - well Egorian was made capital of Infernal Cheliax, then flattened by an earthquake, and then given to Inquisitor Shawil, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you're not getting that specific one back, no."

'Shawil' doesn't sound like a Chelish name, which isn't ideal, but aside from that—and the earthquake—it's exactly what he proposed. "I see," he says. "If it's relevant to you, my mother was the granddaughter of the Archduke of Cheliax—the title may have a different name these days, if the whole country is called Cheliax*—and I am descended, more or less distantly, from a few other comital families," along with everyone else in the duchy, after seven hundred years. "I will need time to—consider what role I ought to play in this world. I would like to speak to your employer, if she is willing to find time for me, and to a priest of Iomedae regardless."

(*) The modern name is the Archduchy of the Heartlands.

Frederick is grinning again as he scribbles this. "Oh, she'll make time for this. Not until late tonight, but she will. I'll see about the Iomedan, they're a bit strapped these days. Anything you need urgently? Scale of hours?"

"I don't think so—uh, where am I?"

Visibly, in a relatively bare and quiet stone room, with one wall of books and a large number of other statues. Most of them don't look like they were petrified in their sleep. There's a window on one side that looks out on the sea, and on a decent-sized settlement beyond some of the water.

"Hospital Island, Alexandria, Osirion. Near enough the homeland of our resident lady archmage, and where she does most of her healing research. You won't be stuck here any length of time, it's just the most convenient place to stash statues that might have a seizure upon waking up. That, or it was six months ago, and Varanthe can't be bothered to move the things again. The library's a bit bare, but you're welcome to it."

"Thank you. I suppose I'll do some reading while I await your lady, then."

What's in the library? He's mostly interested in recent history, naturally.

The focus of the library is very obviously the healing arts, and anything tangentially related to them - medicine, anatomy, botany, zoology, chemistry, magic, Sarenite and Pharasmin theological texts. But there is a smaller section devoted to other books, including some history. There are no Chelish histories of Cheliax; no reputable ones have been written recently. Frederick can get him an overview of the last century written by a gnomish author from Absalom, though, and some time later can get him some dinner.

Sure, what does a gnome think are the most important events of the last century?

(That there are no Chelish histories of Cheliax is unsurprising; obviously a diabolist government wouldn't have permitted anyone to write one worth reading.)

Oh, you know, regular stuff. Aroden died. Prophecy broke. Cheliax was plunged into civil war for thirty years. A long chapter about orc theological disputes. A very short chapter about the giant hole to the Abyss at the top of the world that's been spewing out demons for ninety years. A reasonably sized chapter about the development of Rahadoum as an entirely atheist society. A two-sentence aside about Osirion becoming an Abadaran theocracy, in the middle of a long discussion of the waning power of the Keleshite Empire.

Prophecy what?

He's actually pretty sure, now, that Aroden didn't arrange that on purpose, even if it's arguably a good thing and certainly makes some sense of how there are three Good archmages on the planet at the same time.

A giant hole to the Abyss might explain why Iomedae's church was completely useless in preventing the diabolists from winning the thirty year (what the fuck, that's not how civil wars work) civil war in Cheliax.

An atheist society seems like a worthwhile experiment (we are after all commanded to surpass our gods) but he's glad he doesn't live there.

Operating a theocracy seems like a very weird thing for the Church of Abadar to do, geopolitical neutrality being one of their main selling points.

Eventually he decides that recent history is too depressing, and eats his dinner while he waits for Naima to arrive.

And eventually - long after sunset, hours after Frederick brought in a lantern and Nenio left to return her book - Naima does arrive. She wears loud, brightly colored clothes, and looks a bit like she would rather be sleeping. He will probably not notice that she begins mind reading him immediately.

"Alfonso Antoninus Iomedae Thrune?"

"I am he," he answers. "Though I shall have to replace my surname, given what my cousins have done to it."

His thoughts show no sign of intent to deceive anyone. He's thinking that she looks astonishingly young for an archmage, and is also dressed like she's from some place where women aren't considered people, which makes it even more surprising, but really you would expect an archmage to be a surprising sort of person. He's also, underneath all this, quietly but blazingly angry at everything that could possibly be considered responsible for the albeit short-lived Infernal Empire.

"If you wish. You'll certainly find many people with strong reactions to it. My name is Naima. I am, among other things, in charge of the effort to resurrect nobles who will be better suited to rule of Cheliax than the existing set. Our current lack of personnel is worst in the region that you have the best claim to, so I expect to give you something, passage of seven hundred years notwithstanding. But I would like to talk to you for a bit before determining exactly what level of responsibility is appropriate to ask of you."

"I understand. I am not—unwilling to take up my previous responsibilities, if that is what is required of me, I just—I'm still a bit in shock, really. I had actually expected for some time that I would eventually be petrified in my sleep, but I thought that I would wake again either not at all or in the Age of Glory."

He's privately wondering how to address her—this is always something of an issue with powerful wizards, who don't typically have titles but are obviously as important as most people who do, and 'adventuring companion of the Queen' adds an additional dimension of complication.

"Understandable. That is, actually, some of my first question, more out of curiosity than anything else. What exactly have you lost, in the last twelve hours, more specifically than the entire world? Did you have a family?"

"No wife nor children, no; I would only have condemned them to a fate far worse than mine," and also his—preferences—run the other way, though there's no need to bring that up here. "My brother died adventuring, a few years—well, a few years ago from my own perspective; it was only Roderic's fault in that we wouldn't have been doing it if he hadn't made us desperate to be stronger. My sister—I hope they killed her, but—"

He stops speaking there; it feels unwise to finish that thought. "And, of course, I've lost my family name," he continues instead, "though—in actuality—that damage was mostly done well before I was turned to stone."

He has a brief inclination to ask the lady archmage to call his sister from Heaven before realizing that, if Roderic—kept her—he doesn't know if she's there and doesn't want to find out.

"Could be worse, then, although of course I'm sorry for your loss either way. I understand you've asked to speak to an Iomedan. I'm curious about the sense in which you consider yourself a devotee, and what your current understanding of her teachings is. And what exactly you want to talk to them about; it may tell me where to drop you after this."

Ah, he's being tested to see if he's actually a diabolist. If he were, he obviously wouldn't have given his actual surname, but fine, that's fair.

"Aroden was our god, but Iomedae was his chosen, and our shield against the works of Hell, which—well, you know. As for her teachings, my understanding of them is that one should do the most good that one possibly can, at the least possible cost. It always seemed a shame to me that the most efficient way to do good seemed to involve so much killing, but that, I suppose, is the fault of the things that need killing." But she could at least have sent someone to kill Roderic back when it would have been easy actually, the archmage is reading his mind if she has any sense, so there's no reason to leave things unsaid. "In truth, I was angry with her, when I learned what had become of my country, because she would have prevented it at so much less cost if she had only answered my prayers—though I did learn, later, that she could not possibly have foreseen the catastrophe because foresight itself has been shattered."

"The advice I meant to seek was on how I might follow her teachings, in a world I never meant to see and do not belong in. It is not urgent, though if you mean to offer me a duchy, that's the sort of thing about which I would ordinarily have sought counsel before accepting, even without the—special circumstances."

"Reasonable. I do encourage you to seek their counsel. The church of Iomedae is - badly overstretched, at present, but I believe we can find someone to advise you. I doubt I'll like the answer, but I ought to at least ask. Around how good are you in a fight, would you say?"

"Understandable; I have no desire to impose on a badly overstretched Iomedan church—I suppose with Aroden gone she must be busy. I'm a wizard of third circle; I spent a while trying to get stronger, but after my brother died the benefits of more strength traded off poorly with the risk of dying of something other than my cousins."

"Well, it could be worse." She's terrible at assessing administrative capabilities, but she can try. The bar is really 'has any intent to administrate anything', for counties, but an Archduke should have some skill, and that's what she's sizing him up to be. "Can you talk for a bit about some problems your lands were experiencing seven hundred years ago, and what if anything you were doing about them? What projects were you most recently occupied with?"

"The problem, aside from the diabolists," he says, after thinking a moment, "is that we were both too poor and too rich. Poor, because we were still a frontier province, then, and every farmer with a mind to be in the frontier had instead gone to Lastwall, which promised lower taxes and conscription only in wars that wouldn't damn them. I would have offered the same, but—no Emperor would have accepted an oath of fealty 'in peace or in war guaranteed by the Goddess Iomedae not to be Evil'—maybe we could institute something like that now, but not then. And we were too rich; with Ustalav once more ruled by the living, the northern trade was booming, and Egorian, being on the Lake of Sorrows, was where goods came in overland to be shipped down the river. It was no Westcrown, but it was all of a sudden four times the size of the Archduke's seat at Longacre, and it was an Abyss of a city. So my great challenges were in having a city watch that was meaningfully distinct from another gang of criminals, and an institution for collecting tarrifs at the docks that would only steal half of what it collected. I don't know that I succeeded, but I think I left the city better than I found it."

He doesn't doubt that today Egorian is among the cleanest, most Lawful cities in the world, or was before it was destroyed by an earthquake. You can get a lot of Law out of a place with enough fire and lash. It's doing without, or even with only a reasonable amount, that's hard.

Naima has no idea whether any of this remotely describes the situation seven hundred years ago. She does know that she's talked to far too many distant candidates for archduke who, if not detestable people, are not capable of answering the question lucidly, or can speak only of political rivals and military threats.

"I see. I'm sorry to be so brief, but I unfortunately still need some sleep. I do know what Iomedan to send you to, now. May I teleport you?"

"Of course."

Naima teleports them to the house of Alexeara Cansellarion, recently Count of Lladó. She would quite like to speak to him privately for a moment - without Alfonso - before she leaves.

"Archmage. What brings you to Lladó?" He makes no comment on the hour.

"I'm sorry to call at this late hour." She doesn't sound it. "But this is important. The man in the next room was found in Abrogail's statue collection this morning. He claims to be seven hundred years old, a Thrune who was once the Count of Egorian, and an Iomedan. He claims to have, among other things, a weak, seven-hundred-year-old claim on the archduchy of the Heartlands. I have spoken to him for ten minutes and believe him to be sincere and a reasonable human being, if relatively weak and off balance. I am seriously considering recommending him to the Queen for the position of archduke of the Heartlands. I have not told him this. He would also badly like Iomedan counsel about what to do in the new world he finds himself in."

"I am asking you to assess him for the position of your boss, and to provide or find for him some of the Iomedan counsel he's requested. I will investigate records of the claim separately. If he is who he says he is, and you feel that he would be a good archduke, I will recommend him to the Queen, at which point I will also ask you to support and advise him in his new responsibilities."

"Don't mind the hour," he says idly while he digests that. "I don't sleep."

"I'll speak with the man. Seven hundred years... that's going to be much more of an adjustment than any of the other raised nobles."

"It is. I like him better than the other raised nobles, so far, but even if this extraordinarily cursory assessment of his character is reliable, that doesn't mean that the challenges he faces won't be significant. Can you house him here, for the moment? I can return for him in - three days, say, and get your assessment then?"

"Yes of course. I'll go introduce myself." No need to take up more of the archmage's time.

She nods. She ought to say goodbye to Alfonso, but she's tired. She teleports home and leaves it to Alex.

"Lord Thrune," he says, realizing he forgot to get the man's name before Naima left. "I'm Alexeara Cansellarion, newly count of Lladó and paladin of Iomedae."

And a powerful paladin, judging from the look of his magic items.

"Alfonso, please," he says. "I'm not lord of anything currently, and I'm recently a bit uncomfortable with my surname. My mother's surname was Blanxart; I'll likely end up using it." Her family is also the source of his claim to the Archduchy, which they apparently might give him, something he's a bit uncomfortable with for different reasons. "I'm honored to meet such a distinguished servant of our Goddess."

"Alfonso. I understand you probably have a lot of questions, do you want to sit down and ask those now or do you need to sleep first?"

"If it's no trouble for you, I'll sleep. It feels rather as if I haven't slept in seven hundred years."

"Of course." He rings a bell for a servant; most of them are asleep, but one sleeps days and works nights to account for Cansellarion's habits. "Please prepare one of the guest rooms for Senyor Blanxart, he'll be staying with us a few days. And then a pot of tea for myself, thank you."

He follows a servant to the bedroom they've appointed for him, and falls asleep soon thereafter; he awakes feeling physically much better if no less unmoored. He takes a brief breakfast and then seeks out Lord Cansellarion again.

Cansellarion has finished his morning prayers and is back in his study.

"I imagine the Archmage gave you only a brief summary of the last seven centuries, she is very busy. She also mentioned that you were seeking advice from another Iomedan. Did you have particular questions, about either subject? I can also just - start at the beginning, as far as the history is concerned; I'm less sure where to start on religious matters, as I have much less of an idea what might be new to you."

"I think you should probably start at the beginning; I'm hardly oriented enough to know what questions to ask. Among the things I've heard is that Aroden is dead, that prophecy is shattered, and that my ignoble cousins had managed to lead the whole of the Western Empire into the service of Hell, from which it has only recently been liberated. And also that there are three Good archmages alive on the planet at the same time, so I can't actually consider the past century to be one of unmixed bad news."

"Not unmixed, no." Though he's not intending to say much about the recent good news. And he gives a somewhat more detailed overview of the last century. (He's not a historian and can't say much of the other six centuries Alfonso missed) The famines and disasters after Aroden died; The worldwound; thirty years of civil war in Cheliax; (Briefly jumping back to describe Aspex' even-tongued conquest) the end of the civil war and the retreat of the antidiabolist coalition to Molthune; The rebellion in Rahadoum; The revolutions in Galt and then Andoran. Cyprian and his wars. The House of Oblivion being sealed. The intercontinental portal connecting Osirion to Tian Xia. The four-day war and the raids on Hell and the closing of the worldwound. The worldwide Spawn of Rovagug Event a few months ago.

"And that brings us to today, more or less."

None of that is surprising, given what he knew, except—"Hell seemed, from your account, extraordinarily invested in its hold on Cheliax. I wouldn't actually expect to fathom their reasoning, in any case, but—how certain are you that they aren't going to try to take it back?" He's not even going to ask about the Spawn of Rovagug incident; leave that to the archmages.

"Hell exhausted a great deal of real power and likely nearly all of their permission to operate on Golarion in the near-term. The Goddess confirms this, and also believes that Hell will not make another such attempt in the forseeable - predictable - future. I will not speculate to you as to Her reasons for believing that."

"Well, that's good. The reason I originally wanted to speak to you was—well, the archmage Naima, whom I gather to be a friend of the new Queen, suggested that I would probably be offered a title, if not the one I used to have. Obviously you don't yet know me well enough to tell me whether I'm qualified to accept one, in spite of my, frankly, somewhat foreign origin, but I was hoping for—advice on the challenges I would face, if I did accept such an offer. I have far more experience dealing with diabolists than anyone would like, but none dealing with a whole country of them."

"I have found that many of the challenges of a county in Cheliax are simply the challenges of a title or county anywhere else, magnified. One must manage knights and barons, more attentively for them all being partially-reformed diabolists. One must deal with bandits - and there are many, because of the war and all the officers and clerics of the old regime who turned to banditry to escape justice. One must deal with monsters - I suppose the monsters are not that much worse, barring the occasional neglect.

But there are also challenges unique to modern Cheliax. Half the villages, if you visit them, will be full of terrified farmers who think you're here to execute some of them for being insufficiently devout Iomedans. The harvests are bad, because priests of Erastil are scarce and the druids have spent the last seventy years equating civilization with Asmodeanism. Many places there is not enough clean water and certainly not enough healing, because clerics generally are scarce."

"Is the Goddess—and the Good gods more generally—acting to alleviate that shortage? I suppose there might be a lack of sufficiently aligned people, after seventy years of diabolism. What fraction of the population, do you think, are—I won't say sincere Asmodeans, I'm not sure there is such a thing—but the sort of people who would oppose Iomedae even if they understood her? Among commoners, that is."

"Most of the Good gods seem to be picking clerics where they can find them. Iomedae has picked very few clerics since the war. We infer that She spent a great deal of Her ability to act on the material in order to achieve some of the good results we've seen lately. It's not going to be a permanent state of affairs, but we should expect few new Select of the Inheritor for a generation, barring some new crisis." He smiles a tired half-smile and adds drily, "Pray Her absence is prolonged."

"Among the common folk... there are very few who are sincerely philosophically opposed to Iomedae. Most of them are former priests of Asmodeus. Apart from those... one in fifty, maybe? More if you count those that aren't against Iomedae, per se, but would rather no-one have anything to say about the fact that he beats his wife, or whatever else his particular petty evils might be. It's higher in the cities, they worked harder to diabolize the people of the cities. But - they're not the majority of people who hate or fear us. That's going to be people who have nothing against Iomedae's teachings, but resent Iomedans for killing their son or brother or daughter or father or cousin, for destroying their homes or their business, for - fighting a war that they had the misfortune to be caught up in."

"An inevitable part of the tragedy of war in all cases, I think. Hopefully this war has actually left them enough better-off in the long run that their resentment will not last."

"I gather there's an effort ongoing to replace as much as possible of the realm's nobility." He doesn't actually know what question to ask about that, so he'll just leave it there and let Cansellarion say whatever he thinks is most relevant.

"There is. Your cousins did their best to replace everyone who wasn't loyal to them seventy years ago, and the queen and her companions are trying to reverse that as much as possible. A lot of the descendants of nobility who retreated to Molthune are having their family titles restored, and the archmagess Cotonnet is resurrecting people who are willing to come back from before the diabolist victory and have claims on lands that don't have another decent claimant. I think they must not have found enough candidates to replace all the barons and certainly not the manor lords and minor gentry. Or, at least, they haven't replaced any of those in Lladó."

"It's a good idea. I don't know that it won't create problems of its own—it's better than replacing them with foreigners, as many a conquering emperor has done, but it might have some of the same issues. Maybe less if the old nobility were universally hated."

"I keep thinking that they ought to resurrect some commoners, too, even if it's only a handful per county; that there should be at least a few people in the fields, as well as the castles, who remember what living in a normal country is like. I suppose even an archmage's supply of diamonds can't be that unlimited. Perhaps we should be encouraging immigration from places that are—culturally similar—but were never under diabolist rule. Molthune Province, like you mentioned, or even the East*. As I've gathered, we still don't have anything near the population we had before Aroden died."

(*) Taldor.

"Oh, I think she doesn't need diamonds."

"What? I know every archmage can do two impossible things, but not even Arazni—" There's impossible things and impossible things, is where he was going with that, but plenty in the latter category has already happened, actually.

He's not really sure where to take that line of conversation, so he picks a new one. "Have you met the new Queen? What do you think of her? I imagine I'll be asked to swear fealty to her, at some point, and I'd like to trust her well enough to mean it." Or else avoid swearing an oath the keeping of which will damn him, though he's not actually worried about that. She's at least the sort of person who would stand up to the diabolists running her country.

Ah. What to say. He really should have anticipated and prepared for this question - if he tells Blanxart everything that would probably just needlessly imperil him. But he cannot in good conscience encourage him to swear an oath he'll regret.

"I have not myself been asked to swear fealty. I am unsure what would happen if you were to decline, or signal to her that you intended to do so... I am acquainted with the queen, we have fought together in the past. She has done a great deal to oppose Hell's rule of Cheliax, much of it at great personal risk and cost. She has also done a great deal to ensure that she, and no other, ruled Cheliax when the dust settled. Much of that had terrible costs for other people, and the examples I know of which are not public like the cities sacked in the war - I do not know her to have made any effort to reverse those harms or provide restitution. I know her to have detected as evil in the past. I have it on reasonably good authority that she detects as true neutral now, when not mind-blanked, but -" If she's not Evil it's only on a technicality. She's best predicted as evil, even if overthrowing the Thrunes and killing some archdevils changed the way she reads. " - Most people who have done all the good that she has would detect accordingly."

That was really not the answer he was hoping for! It still makes her probably better than the reigning Emperor at the time he was turned to stone. 

"You're a paladin," he says. "No man can serve two masters, and she knows that. It's promising that she wanted you to be a count anyway, but I don't have your excuse not to swear, and frankly, I now have reservations that I wasn't particularly expecting to have! How much do the people of Cheliax, or the other nobles, know of what you just told me?"

"Little of it. Iomedae does not think I should act to attempt to overthrow her, and - telling all her subjects that I distrust her, at this point in time, would be as good as making that attempt.

...Though, to give you more complete information, her companions know as much as I do and more, and they trust her. And are themselves genuinely good, apart from Shawil who is an inquisitor of Abadar. It's only me that doesn't."

What are the Queen's Good companions not telling Cansellarion, then? He probably shouldn't know, but the thing is, he trusts the character assessments of a paladin of Iomedae just fine, even if they're based on information he doesn't have; those of random Good adventurers he doesn't know, not so much, even if they did save Cheliax from Hell (only to hand it over to a probably-Evil queen).

"Is the Queen—actively pretending to be Good? Or just—acting as if her alignment and her past are none of anyone's business?"

"She acts good. Possibly to appease her allies, possibly to better fit the role of benevolent savior that she's made for herself."

"It might be worse that you told me, then, because I think many reasonable and Lawful people would regard an oath of allegiance as void if it later turned out that the vassal had been substantially and deliberately deceived about his liege's character, but now I know, and I can only offer my allegiance to the Queen as she actually is—is there a Lawful way, in your conception of Law, to offer my oath conditional on her continuing to govern in a Good manner, without revealing to her that I know she's actually Evil?—as would seem unwise, especially if I'm one of only a few that know."

He's heard of that attitude but does not hold to it himself; it seems to allow and even encourage carelessness with one's sacred word and honor. "I apologize if I have made your situation more difficult. I don't know the traditional forms of fealty oaths in pre-infernal Cheliax, but I suspect you could insert language like 'to the benefit of the realm' somewhere and that would - not stand out, especially in light of your family history."

(Obviously paladins should be more careful with their honor, but paladins, notably and for precisely this reason, don't typically swear oaths of fealty to the Emperor.)

"Thank you for the advice; I suppose I'll wait and see what's asked of me. I think we've covered everything I wanted to consult you about. Is there anything else you'd like to discuss?"

"Nothing particular, but the Archmagess did ask me for a judgment as to your character and a longer acquaintance will help with that. Perhaps you can tell me about Egorian as it was in your time..."

In three days, she returns. It's late at night again. A lot of stuff has been happening to Naima lately.

"Hello. Thoughts on the ex-statue?"

"He's a good man, and not - selected for being the sort of person who'd spend seventy years in Axis or Heaven obsessing over their lost worldly titles. As an administrator I think he'd be in over his head with an Archduchy but no more than anyone else."

"Well, there's no one who won't be, or at least no one who isn't separately a terrible person. Men can be given advice, and can gain experience, if they're trying. But I don't think they can be expected to grow towards the good, under these conditions."