"Just based on what flows best in the sentence. He's got a very mellifluous title, I seldom wind up saying 'Master of the First Vault' or 'Old Deadeye' but 'Midnight Lord' is nearly as fun to say as 'Dawnflower'."

He stares at her like this is completely outside the range of expected answers. "Oh. So it doesn’t mean anything?"

"No, would it in Nidal?"

"Yeah. I’ll call Asmodeus by name because he doesn’t scare me. Or some Chelish so-called god who's literally younger than our mortal rulers."

"People with the greatest of respect for Iomedae also use her name. I imagine if she didn't like it she'd have changed it on ascent if not before."

Shrug. "I guess that makes sense. Well, I guess if I ever want to worship her I'll presumably call her whatever she wants to be called since if I ever want to worship her it'll probably be because I've decided everything in Nidal is worthless."

"I haven't done my deep dive into theology yet, I'm saving that till I'm closer to going for the Starstone, but my guess from my shallow incursions is that the orthodox Iomedaean view is something like 'net negative' and not 'worthless'? The difference being somewhat academic, but - I've spent too much time in Osirion, all my analogies are coming out Abadaran -"

"What do they think is - not worth whichever thing it's - " Varan trips over his tongue a bit and takes a breath and tries again. "Which things are they putting on which side when they sum us all up to 'net negative'?"

"Uh, the suffering is bad, supporting a deity who promulgates suffering - I understand the orthodoxy is that the suffering is incidental to the pain but things would look very different if he strongly preferred the one without the other when by default they mostly come together, and if he were even really interested in getting more pain and less suffering I bet the other gods would foot some of the divine bill - anyway supporting said deity is bad... whereas good things about Nidal are going to be the, like, little micro-scale mortal graces, people who like each other and like parts of their lives such as... rain, and breakfast, and pleasant dreams, all those things that are enjoyable and ineradicable; and also political stability, that's good and maybe tends to be underweighted by everyone except Abadarans."

"...So Iomedae likes good things and hates bad things and just wants to wipe us all out because - is it because she wants to make sure we don't conquer Nirmathas and then go after Lastwall or is it because of the handful of cowards who are afraid of Xovaikain even in Nidal?"

"- I'm not sure I understand most of that question but I wouldn't have rated Nidal highly on political stability if I thought it was going to conquer Nirmathas!"

"I don't think Nidal's going to conquer anywhere this millennium, yeah. So it's the cowards, then. The people who are so afraid of Xovaikain that they wish they'd never been born. Iomedae wants to kill my little sister and my aunt - Iomedae wishes I had never been born, never gotten to see a single festival or read a single poem or anything ever, just because some pathetic people wish they'd never been born, even though those people already had their chance to starve themselves when they were young enough to go to the Boneyard? Is that right?"

"- Iomedae probably wishes you'd never been born, yeah, and more importantly wishes that none of the babies who will be born in Nidal next year were going to be born. If Nidal didn't have the place somebody else would move there, you realize? It's probably perfectly arable by conventional methods if you get Zon-Kuthon out of the weather. This isn't a generic project to prevent poetry-enjoyers from existing."

"Does that matter to her? I haven't heard it said that she's only the goddess of destroying Evil that someone else wants to steal land from."

"I mean, not necessarily, but - I realize now I'm assuming it would be too insane for anybody to believe this and maybe I shouldn't assume that, do you think that everybody should be going around having as many children as they imagine they could see to age eight or something at all times? Lest a poetry-appreciation opportunity go unhad?"

"I mean, the government is better positioned to tell you how many kids you should expect to be able to take care of, they know how many the rest of the country had in the last few years. And the number of kids the whole country can take care of is a lot smaller than what you'd get if everyone had as many kids as possible, so it's not like anyone in particular needs to do it. I... don't see any reason not to have as many kids as you can support if by 'you' you mean your country?"

"...well, most places don't do centralized state childcare. I guess Cheliax does it some."

"I don't know if they do that in the cities? I just mean the state will count people and talk to the druids and they're generally polite about giving you a heads-up about how many children they want to have so you don't bother having extras."

"I guess there are many ways in which that is superior to the drow system."

"What's the drow system?"

"Do you know how the elf fertility convenience works?"

"Nope."

"If you malnourish a human woman long enough my understanding is that she'll stop bleeding and can't get pregnant, but she'll start again when she's not starving any more. With us, we don't start again till we have a great big feast. You can do the same thing quicker by losing a lot of blood and not getting healed till a few days later. So with some inconvenience we can be infertile on demand and fertile again whenever there's enough food to put together a feast. Also, elves don't like babies. We just don't find them cute or appealing or anything, they're kind of gross. So, surface elves are usually infertile and gradually going extinct, but drow have slaves take care of our babies and most of us have lots and lots - and then kill a lot of those, if food related circumstances change during the pregnancy or the baby looks sickly or malformed or it's not the gender you had in mind or, when they're a little older, they didn't catch sorcery or aren't quick enough to be a cleric or a wizard and you had your heart set on a caster. It's really weird that my mom killed only one baby."

"I... guess that would amount to the same thing if you can't plan ahead or do a census or anything."

"Is there secret human birth control Nidal has and isn't exporting? I was figuring you guys just killed babies sometimes like everybody else."