Nuria handed over all her spare notes for the previous week when Asmodia left her house that night. The book was--enthralling. It was, it was, the difference between it and the romance novels she had read before was--it was like this was a brilliant wizard and the previous books had been beggars. Like the book she was reading was the finest of desserts and the other romance novels had been the kind of rations you feed slaves you don't expect to live long anyway. 

The next day Nuria asked, sort of idly because she was spending all of her attention that she could tear away from That Book on not letting her grades slip and getting whipped, where Asmodia had gotten the book; Asmodia admitted that she had nicked it from her older sister. Meaning, presumably, that she could get more but only at additional risk of her sister catching her. The possibility of getting more was interesting but Nuria was too absorbed in the book she already had to pursue the point immediately. 

Three days later, Asmodia's older sister was arrested. Five days after that, Asmodia's older sister was maledicted and executed. 

Nuria avoided Asmodia after that, obviously; nobody wanted the taint of heresy anywhere near them. Having a relative executed for heresy and treason isn't in and of itself a death sentence, but it means the inquisition might have noticed you particularly, and that means that the inquisition might notice anyone being friendly with you particularly, and nobody wants that. 

Especially someone who had connected the dots between the box of books like nothing Nuria had ever read before under Asmodia's sister's bed with her execution. 

Nuria lingered near Asmodia long enough to confirm that the inquisitor had taken the books, before cutting ties. 

...The smart thing to do would for Nuria to burn her own book. 

She didn't. 

She couldn't. 

The book made her happy. It made her realize that she hadn't been happy in a long, long time. She loved it. She loved every one of the characters in it. 

The thing that Asmodia hadn't known how to explain, that Nuria herself hadn't bothered to articulate until she realized that the book was forbidden, was that the people in the book were cooperative with one another. 

It wasn't just the main leads, though that would have been bad enough. Nobody in the book subjugated anyone else. Nobody in the book tortured anyone else. Not everybody in the book was personally friendly with everyone else in the book, but even when they weren't, they didn't try to tear down the people they didn't like. 

The book wasn't totally without hierarchies, but parents to their children, and even bosses to their employees just. Completely failed to act tyrannical. 

When you put it like that it was completely obvious that the Church of Asmodeus would maledict you for having it. It was a wonder Asmodia hadn't realized how heretical it was. It was a wonder Nuria hadn't realized how heretical it was before Asmodia's sister was arrested, except that she had been too happy to think about it like that. 

It was the most dangerous thing Nuria had ever touched. 

It was the first time Nuria understood the concept of something so precious you would die to have it. 

Nuria kept her book hidden, except when she took it out to re-read some part of it, which was often. She never removed it from her house, or even her bedroom, and always re-hid it immediately if she was going to do anything else, no matter how short a time she was sure the anything else was going to take. 

She didn't change her behavior at school. Why should she? These were real people, in real life, not precious storybook characters that would be kind to you if you were kind to them. If she was holding the whip for her fellow students, then she was lucky she wasn't on the receiving end of it. 

And she kept her ears open. 

She graduated. She got a job at a seamstress's. She moved out of her parents' house, smuggling the book out amidst her clothing, and found a new hiding place for it in her little apartment as soon as she could. 

And she kept watching. 

It didn't take long, lingering in the right places and paying attention to what you overheard, walking with absolute confidence that you were supposed to be where you were and settling for scraps instead of stopping to loiter suspiciously where you might here longer snatches of conversation, to learn that people smuggling foreign romance novels into the country was an ongoing problem. 

It took significantly longer to find one. 

Anyone who had anything to do with romance novels - good romance novels, not the crap that the priests thought young girls ought to settle for - had to hide from the authorities. It was their souls on the line if they failed. Which meant they had to be very good at hiding. 

But they were also trying to get the novels to people, and Nuria wasn't the authorities; had, in fact, refused to ever touch a position that would give her the slightest bit of legitimate authority, for precisely this very reason. 

Nuria Tosta was fourteen when she came into possession of her first real romance novel. She was twenty-six when she found herself holding her second. 

Part of her itched to tear into it immediately, but she couldn't. She had to act in the moment, or who knew when she would ever get another chance?

Nuria had gotten very good, over the years, at pretending she belonged where she was, that she wasn't paying attention to what she was, and, when relevant, that she didn't exist at all. 

That was how she managed to trace the person she had received the book from back to her contact. 

She got caught, of course. It was one thing to escape the notice of a more or less normal person who was mostly doing this for the money, and another thing to escape the notice of someone who had been around the block enough times to be able to teleport in the first place, let alone how much experience they might've picked up doing this job. 

She didn't understand, at the time, just how lucky she was that these people were Good. She just thought that they were desperate, and that was why the decided to act as though they believed her instead of killing her immediately, when she told them she wanted to help. 

Nuria made a fantastic book distributer. She had been preparing her whole adult life for the job. She wasn't primarily interested in selling the books for money; that could get her killed, and the money wasn't why she was doing it.

Some of the books she sold. She was as careful as she possibly could be about it, but she still expected that, ultimately, it would be how she got caught.

Some of the books she distributed for free. She cut the covers off of ordinary, Chelish romance novels, replaced the covers of the real romance novels with them, and snuck them into bookstores. She hid them in the garbage cans of people she didn't like, where the trash pickers would find them. She went into schools and slid them into desks where girls the age that she had been when her world was overturned would find them. She left them in dusty, out of the way places where only dusty, out of the way people would go. 

The free books were never somewhere someone wealthy or important would find them. Someone like that, unfiltered by the contacts she used for the auctions, would have too much to lose, and too much pride to see how much they had to gain. They would squawk and tell the church immediately, and while Nuria did think the in-person sales would be her downfall, she wasn't so overconfident about that that she was willing to take unnecessary risks. 

She budgeted carefully, how many books she could afford to discreetly disperse versus having to sell. Every book she sold brought in significantly more money than she had paid for it, but she wasn't paying out-of-Cheliax prices to the teleporters, either. She kept her day job, and she had savings, but the job wasn't fantastic and her savings weren't going to last forever. 

And, of course, she read every book that passed through her hands, even if it was only a single copy. They weren't all, quite, as wonderful as that first one, revelation that it had been, but they were wonderful. 

And they were educational. 

The sheer heresy of their fundamental premise--a relationship between two people that was positive and not hierarchical--was more than enough to see the books banned, obviously. 

But she was pretty sure they would have been banned anyway, because they gave a vision of a world that wasn't Cheliax. 

A world where you could just be nice to strangers. A world where people worshipped gods of Good, not just farmers trying to convince their priests that they totally respected Asmodeus over Erastil, but grand temples of Sarenrae and shining knights of Iomedae and entrancing, traveling, joyful followers of Desna. 

She started noticing the way the world around her, outside her precious books, was beautiful, and not just the elegant yet doleful creations of Asmodians, but the pieces of the world they hadn't managed or hadn't bothered to stamp out. Grass grew in the places where sunlight was unimpaired by the ominous facades of buildings, and small weedy flowers in the grass. And little white butterflies would flit from one overlooked flower to another. Birds sang in the mornings. 

The Asmodean priests worked so hard to convince everyone that there was nothing in the world worth turning away from her god for, and it was all so...foolish. 

And then, one day, while coming home from a nearby city that she had gone to in order to sell a novel to a particularly wealthy client that she hoped wasn't an Inquisition plant, she spotted something off to the side of the road. 

The man whose wagon she was traveling on had stopped to rest and water the horses. She slid off the wagon, and approached it. 

She had a habit of paying more attention to the sides of the road than most people would, because there tended to be more wildflowers along the sides of roads than within the actual city where she spent most of her time. She was pretty sure this was not a flower. 

She was right. 

The flash of color that had initially caught her eye was blood. Fresh blood. Someone had whipped a halfling slave very nearly to death, and either thought they had completed the job or thought bleeding out in a ditch was a fitter ending than being finished off more-or-less cleanly. 

And the thought hit her, like a bolt out of a clear blue sky, I want to be Good. 

She glanced at the man whose wagon she was on. Most of his load was cargo; she and he were the only two human beings around. And he wasn't looking in her direction. 

Carefully, she lifted the halfling out of the ditch. He was a lot lighter than a human would have been, and lightened further by the loss of so much blood, but it was still an effort, especially since the meager rags he wore were damp and caked with mud. But she managed not to grunt or make any other noise that would have attracted attention, and the man was busy with his horses, and with an effort she managed to haul him back to the wagon. 

Wincing slightly, she opened her trunk and slid the nearly-dead creature inside. It was a tight fit, and she was probably making his situation worse, but she didn't see any other way to go about this. They were nearly back to Macini, and if he lived long enough for her to get him home, she could try to tend to his wounds. 

Probably this was all for nothing and he would die in her trunk and she would have gotten blood and mud on her things for nothing. 

But it was the Good thing to do. 

She had had a positive opinion of Good for as long as she had been able to clearly associate it with her beloved books. But this was the first time she had had the thought, explicitly, that she could be Good, even in Cheliax. 

She was going to try. 

She was going to try. 

The miles back to the city and then from where she parted ways with the wagoneer back to her apartment were agonizing. But somehow, when she had gotten home, and locked and bolted her door behind her and flung open the trunk, her unwitting passenger was still alive. Still unconscious, still breathing shallowly, still bleeding, but somehow, still alive. 

She didn't know as much about wound care as she liked, and she wasn't a wizard to cast infernal healing, but she washed and bandaged his wounds as best she was able, and put him in her bed on the logic that a more comfortable surface to lie on might or might not help but probably wouldn't hurt. 

And she prayed. 

She prayed to every Good god whose name she knew, Erastil whose worship was tolerated in Cheliax within limits and Iomedae because people talked about "fighting" infection and she had no idea how far Iomedae's remit extended and Shelyn and Caiden Cailean because why not, and Desna because Desna was her favorite. She prayed that the person she was trying to save would live, or that failing that that the priests didn't care enough about the slaves' eternal fate that they hadn't worked too hard on him and he wouldn't go to Hell. 

She got out her spare blanket and made herself as close to comfortable on the floor as she could manage and went to sleep. 

In the morning she had spells. 

The touch of the divine against her soul was unmistakable, and she cried as she prayed: tears of wonder and joy and astonishment that somehow, she could be chosen by Desna. 

She washed his wounds again, this time with cleric-made water that was guaranteed to be clean, and used her single cure light wounds spell on him, and tucked him back into her bed. 

When she got home from work, that day, he was awake. He stared at her suspiciously when she came in the door. 

"...Hi," she said awkwardly. 

He didn't say anything. 

Well, that was fair. He had no reason to trust her, really. 

She fed him anyway. He took the food, even though he didn't look like he mistrusted her any less. Which was still fair. 

She continued to attempt to nurse him back to health, complicated by the fact that his back had gotten infected while he was lying in a ditch, until she manages to fob the guy off on someone she's pretty sure has Bellflower contacts. 

The thing Nuria likes best about being a cleric is the ability to heal people, as theoretical as it mostly is. The thing she likes next best about being a cleric is having clean water on demand and light to work by at night without having to spend money on candles. 

But one thing that comes in really handy is the ability to see through walls. 

That's not the right way to say it. But she discovers that if she leans against a wall and closes her eyes and slides her hand behind her back so she can press it flat against the wall without anyone realizing what's going on, and focuses, she can observe what's happening on the other side. She can't do this very often--if anything on her side of the wall grabs her attention, it breaks her concentration and she loses the vision, and ignoring your personal space isn't the safest thing ever in Cheliax--but there are a few times when it really saves her bacon, and that of her customers when she sells her books. There are places she dares to break into, when she can be absolutely sure nobody is waiting on the other side. And it lets her enjoy the beauty of the outdoors, while safely inside her own apartment where nobody can see what she's doing and wonder why she's staring at weeds. 

By the time the Four-Day War occurs, Nuria has spent enough time sneaking around risking her life for the love of literature and what freedom she can wring from Cheliax like blood from a stone that she can cast second-circle spells. 

Nuria had had hope that someday Cheliax would be freed from Asmodius's iron fist. She'd never seriously considered that it might be in her lifetime. Her highest hope had been that when the end came, she would have enough warning to kill herself before they could maledict her, and she hadn't been relying on that hope too heavily. 

And she had certainly never imagined that it would be over so quickly and at the hands of a team of foreign archmages. That was...if it had been in one of her books she would have called the author a cheap hack. 

In real life, you took your luck where you could find it, and if it was absurd, well, you thanked your gods of choice for it and moved on with your life. 

Nuria began clericing openly. As soon as she was reasonably confident that the new regime had solid enough control over the area she was in that most people wouldn't think it was a good idea to murder her in case the Asmodeans came back, she told everybody in her neighborhood that she could channel and when and where. And that she could make water, which, given the sudden absence of Asmodean priests, was really really relevant to everyone's interests. 

Mostly people showed up, if they did, to mend an injury and collect water and leave without talking to her more than necessary. That was alright. As long as they were getting the healing and the water. 

A few people approached her and asked, quietly, what Good was supposed to be like, if the new regime wanted it. 

Nuria didn't actually have any Desnan scripture, or anyone else's, for that matter. She was pretty sure that if she tried to explain any of her insights re: urban wildflowers, her neighbors would think she was even crazier than they already did, and she would have to start all over with them. 

So she gave them leftover romance novels that she hadn't been auctioning or sneaking into places because probably they were going to be available legally soon anyways. 

When the news about the convention came, Nuria was delighted. 

Yes, please, she would like to go somewhere apropos of The New Regime, AKA Cheliax Not Being Ruled By Hell Anymore. More Good people! People who had been Good longer than she had! 

She hadn't really sought out more experienced Desnans, because, well, the situation where she was was...a way...and she had been busy, alright. 

But things were more-or-less stable, now, and she was being invited to a thing!*

She packs her few remaining books, her best dress,** and her travel necessities, and sets out. 

*Sort of

**Well, the original owner had failed to come back for it for long enough.