"Nobody ever warned me that Gozreh would be demanding repayment and even if they did, if I tried to stop breathing I'd just start again. It wouldn't be fair."

"And the alternative to eternal servitude to Zon-Kuthon is definitely starving to death, and not leaving? I'd actually feel very differently about this if a lot of eight year olds were offered the chance to get on a boat and go to a faraway land where there are games that don't hurt."

"I guess if I'd tried to walk to Nisroch it's not impossible I would have made it alive? And then it's not impossible I could have gotten on a ship? I could have tried to make it over the mountains but that seems even less likely to work. It wouldn't have been illegal to or anything, though. I don't think I would've been very likely to make it."

"...would it be illegal for foreign parties to establish routes within Nidal that people could use to leave? I had always had the impression that coyote operations to get people out were on the downlow out of necessity and not because they were avoiding some relatively trivial hurdle like needing to bring their own food or something."

Varan laughs. It is simultaneously a genuinely amused laugh and a very unamused one.

"I think it's legal to hunt them for sport and obviously if you can maledict meddling foreigners to Xovaikain you're allowed. Uh, I think that's one of the things that confuses foreigners? There are a lot of totally legal things you can do that make it totally legal to torture you to death."

"Are there conditions under which it is not legal in Nidal to torture you to death?"

"Yeah, absolutely. It's not legal to torture ambassadors all the way to death unless it's an accident and you raise them, for instance. It's not always okay to hunt foreigners for sport. - And there plenty of times it's illegal to torture natives to death."

"...gotcha. I am struggling to come up with an analogy illustrating what's despicable about this arrangement that is neither condescending nor abstruse but I'll mull on it, I suppose."

"I can try not to get mad about being condescended to. Honestly, the more I explain it the more I wish it were different."

"If you already wish it were different the analogy may be unnecessary! Let me just make sure I understand all the - steps, here? So we're in agreement that after Earthfall, some people who lived in the area that is now Nidal made a deal with Zon-Kuthon that they'd be able to grow food there in exchange for the eternal service of all of their descendants, I think that's relatively uncontested history, yes?"

"That’s not a completely horrible summary."

"Whereupon they formed Nidal, and orchestrated its culture and way of life to involve an exceptionally high concentration of pain, without particular regard for whether anybody involved liked it, though by apparent happy accident some of them do some of the time?"

"It's not an accident, I for one worked hard on learning to like it."

"By happy accident it transpires that it is possible for people to do that, and moreover possible to do that under the conditions Nidal enjoys."

"Yeah."

"And although Nidal is now not notably more fertile or verdant than its neighbors - is it? - modern Nidalese, presuming themselves to be descended from the founders who made this arrangement, are construed by themselves and each other to all be beholden to their ancestral pact, in - gratitude that they exist, instead of whoever would have eventually moved into the area if those ancestors had told the Midnight Lord to fuck off."

"It's definitely richer. It's - more richer than it looks like, because it's paying for people to, you know, take time off work a lot, and it's paying for the Joyful Things - but I think a random village in Nidal is richer than a random village in Osirion in terms of, uh, things besides pain. And we don't go to Hell or Nirvana when we die - I know people here aren't scared of Nirvana and are scared of Xovaikain so I guess maybe you can teach yourself to cope with being a fucking songbird but I'd rather be scared of being a songbird than scared of being tortured."

"I can turn into - well, not a tiny songbird, I can't get much smaller than an eagle, but a bird, and I like it! Flying is amazing! Songbird's not a bad draw at all if one goes to Nirvana, I'd be worried about being a snail or something."

"...I guess that's one way it's less bad than being a snail."

"I haven't the circles to let you desensitize to being a bird but I can cast Fly on you if you like... what, would you rather snail over bird?"

"I don't care. And being a bird sounds fun. Being Nirvana's trophy sounds awful. What is the point of being a songbird in Nirvana, just looking pretty?"

"You know, I actually have a trip to Nirvana not-quite-planned, a cleric friend of mine recommended it and said he'd ask around for colleagues who could do the Plane Shift. Do you want me to find somebody there and ask that? Anything else you'd want me to ask?"

Varan takes a second to breathe evenly. "I don't know. I can't offer to resurrect them."

"- well, it's a very sweet impulse, but I was imagining more, uh, informational questions."

"Do you often find it easy to come up with things to ask of people who are being horribly misused - is that the only reason you're even talking to me? There's nothing I can do for them and I can't really think about it past that. Maybe if they have requests or something, for things they wish someone could get done now that they're... helpless..." It is really noticeably effortful for him to finish that sentence.