Asmodia is thirteen the first time the lord's third son, the one who's being tracked for the priesthood, decides to have his way with her. She tries to fight back; her blows are, unsurprisingly, ineffectual against a boy two years her senior. Afterwards he has her whipped with a scourge for having the audacity to lay a hand on him.

It's not that she didn't know, before that, that the lord's family could be petty and cruel. It's not even that she thought she was somehow special. It's just—

—if he'd had her executed for it, if she were cursing at him from Hell with no idea what was happening up here, that would be one thing. But everyone here must know what kind of man he is. It does not take a prodigy to see his black eye and her own bruises and hear the sentence against her pronounced and realize what happened. And she cannot so much as visibly resent him. She's expected to be grateful he only had her whipped.

Asmodeanism has no answers for her. Or rather, Asmodeanism has answers, but they're awful. She doesn't know how she didn't see it before. Asmodeanism says that if the lord's daughter shoves you down a flight of stairs, or the lord's wife has you beaten for looking at her the wrong way, or the lord's son forces you to bed with him, then that is their right as your superior, and someone like you should shut up and take it. Asmodeanism says that if you fight back, and they crush you, it's only what you deserve.

(That is not enough to stop her from trying to find answers in it. She prays to Asmodeus and asks him to strike the lord's third son dead where he stands. She tries Erastil and Pharasma and Dispater when that fails. She is not quite brave enough to try the other gods she's heard of.)

She sits through another service about the obedience we all owe to our betters, and he smirks at her from across the room, and she does not allow her expression to betray her.

There are places in Cheliax where Asmodia would need to prune her thoughts as carefully as her expressions. This estate, with its elderly first-circle priest and her mother the wizard-school drop-out, is not one of them. 

The Asmodians think that if they outlaw the Good gods and force everyone to sit through endless interminable lectures on the intrinsic worthlessness of humanity, that it'll somehow convince everyone to just accept it as right when nobles or priests or soldiers use everyone else how they want. Asmodia knows that the impulse towards Goodness is not so easily silenced. It burns within her, the way she knows it must burn within all those who aren't so weak as to have been ground down into nothing, telling her that this wrong deserves to be repaid. It bites at her, when she sees him eyeing a servant or watching a slave get whipped for stealing food, telling her that every day he goes by unaccosted is a wrong that can never be righted.

Asmodia is not a fool. He has clearly proven that he can beat her in hand-to-hand combat. If she'd done well enough in school to be allowed to learn cantrips, maybe then— but she didn't, so it doesn't matter.

Asmodia is not a fool. Her mother did not keep her so isolated that she missed the warnings about plants that aren't safe to eat, or that aren't safe to eat too much of, and it's not especially difficult to reason backwards about which ones might be usable as poisons.

The lord is not a fool either. Even an elderly first-circle priest can cast Detect Poison on his family's food before every meal. But the priest is not yet so old that he is incapable of making rounds to the surrounding villages, on occasion.

She is fifteen years old when the schedule for one such trip lines up just right. The lord's third son is seventeen years old, and in a month he will be off to the larger temples in the city to complete his training. After that he will be chosen, or won't be, and either way she does not think he is likely to return.

(It is not how she would have liked to take her revenge. When she'd imagined it in her head, she'd pictured herself as taking it slowly, painfully, making absolutely certain that he knew exactly who was responsible. But she was never going to be able to manage that, not before he left. If nothing else she can take comfort in the fact that he'll be burning in Hell.)

(He had not shown nearly enough discretion to make her an obvious suspect. The lord has one of the slips that works in the kitchen tortured to death over it. She breathes a little easier, knowing that he's unlikely to change his mind and go after her for it.)

She is sixteen when the Four-Day War comes.

Some part of her had imagined, foolishly, childishly, that when the Asmodeans fell, she would be a part of it, in her own small way. Ridiculous, really, the kind of thing that happens in stories. In reality, she doesn't hear about it until it's already over.

The stories they get from Egorian are all tangled up. There was an earthquake, that much is clear, but not whether the earthquake was a blessing of Iomedae, come to liberate her people from Asmodeus, or a curse of Asmodeus, punishing his people for their failures, or simply random luck. A group of archmages deposed the Queen and the high priest (priestess?) of Asmodeus in the aftermath, but to hear people tell it the archmages are a faerie (reasonable enough) and a priestess of Sarenrae (Asmodia barely knows who Sarenrae is) and the wizard who invented the Final Blades used in Galt (Asmodia does know what those are, but only from a sermon denouncing them) and a cat (incapable, so far as Asmodia knows, of casting spells). They've installed a new Queen (the direct descendant of Aspex the Even-tongued! the lover of the inventor, or possibly the faerie! the old Queen's long-lost twin!), but that much is harder to get exited about. The best you can hope for, with nobility, is that they mind their own business, and she can't imagine royalty is any better.

The priest is not a complete idiot. If he thought he could flee, he would. But a man his age is too old to travel far, and it's not like there's really anywhere else to go, unless he wants to hope that somewhere in the area hasn't heard the news yet. Besides, he still has Hellish magic to protect him, at least until the archmages come to clean up their kingdom.

...They don't come to clear up their kingdom. Or rather, there are scattered rumors of them deposing counts and dukes for insufficient loyalty, but they don't come to deal with her village's priest. It would be like lifting a finger for them, if any of the rumors are true, but—

—well, it's obvious once she thinks about it. The archmages may not like House Thrune, but that doesn't mean they care about everyday people, about the ordinary cruelties of nobles, about priests who do not actively stand in their way. It certainly doesn't mean they have any interest in making sure they pay for what they've done, if they aren't bothering them.

Anything she wants done to them, she'll need to do herself.

And then one day, he doesn't have Hellish magic to protect him.

He doesn't announce it. He's not stupid. But one day, he reads at by cantrip-light at evening services, the next by torch-light; one day, there's water aplenty, the next it's scarce; one day, he has the confidence of a man whom no one would dare disobey, the next he— doesn't.

The slips watch the kitchens more closely than they did a year ago. But without his magic he's just a man, and an old one at that. The kind she could beat with just a knife, without even needing to get particularly lucky.

Probably if she were a few years older she'd have hesitated. Probably if she were a few years older she'd have decided it wasn't worth the risk. But more than anyone else here, he is the one who ground them all down under the crushing weight of Asmodeanism, and he needs to pay for it.

What are they going to do, execute her? She's the best person here, the only person willing to hurt people who deserve it. She's not worried about where she's going.

She wakes up the next morning with some kind of — presence isn't the right word, not exactly, but she doesn't know what else to call it — nestled inside her head. It feels like—

—like there's something she's been reaching for, this whole time, never quite managing to touch.

In the cities, people say Calistria is the goddess of whores and sybarites. This is not entirely wrong, but it is not entirely complete either. When a priest orders a child whipped, when a noble forces himself upon a young woman, when a punter decides he can treat the whores how he likes and no one can stop him, Calistria is there. When the law and the priests and the archmages who have taken over your country see your suffering as beneath their notice, Calistria is there. When the priest who would make all your lives a living Hell has lost his god's blessing, when the easy thing to do would be to simply let him live out his life and pretend as if none of the past decade and a half ever happened, Calistria is there, and Calistria says — no, that isn't justice.

The priest, when he bothered to mention her at all,  says (or rather, said) that Calistria is the goddess of the weak. This is not entirely false. Calistria is the goddess who arms the weak; Calistria is the goddess who teaches battered women how to mix poisons; Calistria is the goddess who looks at the tiniest wasp, and gives it a stinger powerful enough to fell a man.

Asmodia does not, yet, know much about Calistria. But she does know that, for the first time in her life, there's someone on her side. 

In the cold light of morning, as she faces the sun and prays, clutching a clumsily handmade holy symbol to her chest, she realizes that she's been going about this all wrong. She waited until the priest was as weak as she was before she tried anything — and she probably would have died, if she hadn't, but if she'd died killing him he'd still have been dead. You cannot wait until it's safe to take vengeance, if you want to be Good. You don't have to be stupid about it, but you need to be willing to stand up to the evil that is stronger than you, even if it puts you at risk.

She finishes her prayers and reaches for the magic she knows must be there. She can surround herself with lethal energy, though as a new priestess it probably won't be very lethal, from what little she remembers of such matters. She can make water or set objects alight or give someone a bit of skill. She can summon a viper to fight by her side, twice, and cloak an area in illusion, once — or she can turn that same power towards harming another.

The message couldn't be clearer. Take your vengeance, my child. There are those here who have done you wrong, and now you will repay it.

She doesn't do it alone. She is far from the only person in this manor who has been done wrong by the lord and his surviving family, and it is not her place to seek revenge on her own.

(If circumstances were different, this would not have ended nearly so well for her. But their priest is dead, and she stands before them the priestess of a goddess who is not Asmodeus, able to create water from nothing, and that is enough.)

(If circumstances were different, this is the sort of thing that would bring down punishment from the baron himself. But the baron himself has long since fled with his men, and the archmages have not yet deigned to replace him.)

She sets up in the old priest's quarters. Covers the pentagram with her best attempt at a painting of a wasp. Gives sermons in the evenings about the virtue of repaying wrongs against you, and against the Evil that is acting like you should just live with them to keep the peace. Teaches self-defense to the younger girls, to the best of her admittedly limited ability, and teaches them how to conceal daggers in their clothing in case someone tries to take advantage of them. 

She chooses the name Victòria for herself, as a symbol of how righteousness will be victorious over Asmodeanism. People just need to have the courage to try.

The convention is announced a few months later, and she realizes — this is why her goddess chose her. Not just so that she can take vengeance against a family of nobles, when there must be countless like them, but so that she can stand up to all those priests and nobles and soldiers who hurt people when they thought they could get away with it, who sold innocent people to Asmodeus for their own gain. 

So that she can put things right.