dear joan letter | Glowfic Constellation

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It's not that he thinks he can delay forever. Sooner or later, Joan is going to catch the attention of a priest of Iomedae, or one of their agents, and he'll either be close enough to orthodoxy to get by, or he— won't.

But maybe he can delay long enough that Joan gets distracted with the sort of heresies that aren't quite as dangerous, or gives up the interest in theology to focus entirely on wizardry, or finally manages to understand that sometimes you believe something because Church and Crown says to, even if it doesn't entirely make sense.

...The good news is, Westcrown seems to have an awful lot of pamphlets advocating all kinds of bizarre ideas that he doesn't think the Church actually condemns. He sorts through a stack of them, trying his best to exclude anything that isn't safe for Joan to believe, and packages the rest with a letter to Conesa. Some of them are almost certainly heretical, but there are kinds and kinds of heresy, and he doesn't think Iomedae would command her priests to kill someone for thinking she accomplished more impressive deeds than she's actually managed.

If these pamphlets are the sort of thing that passes for scholarly discussion of politics and theology, he's half-tempted to travel to Westcrown himself and do better. Some of these authors barely even seem to be considering the question of whether what they're saying is true — though, to be fair, he's never managed to explain to anyone else why it matters.

He's halfway through the pile of them when he— stops. It's not that this one's arguments are especially stronger than most of the rest of the pile. It's just—

Even now Learned VVizards confirm that Hell cannot any longer be Scryed, for by the deeds of our glorious ARCHMAGES it has been made empty.

—it was always one of the hardest things about Asmodeanism, how many people were going to be suffering forever because of — acting just like everyone else, only his tutors say now that that was an Asmodean lie, and they might even be telling the truth. But it wasn't the sort of thing that stopped being hard when the Iomedaeans took over; the idea of someone spending all eternity as a screaming paving stone because they killed or stole or raised someone as a skeleton still hurts to think about, as stupid and contemptible as that feeling is, as if there's some sort of great cosmic imbalance to it.

(Antoni has him punished whenever he says anything that could even vaguely imply that he's thinking about this sort of thing, but Antoni isn't here.)

(He used to pray to Asmodeus every night about it, as if someday it would help him understand. He didn't entirely stop when the Iomedaeans took over.)

If Hell is empty, if spending time in Hell is like doing a stint in a torture chamber for a crime that isn't capital, if the purified souls of Hell get to do anything else—

—he can't, actually, make himself believe it's true, just because it would be nice. He wouldn't want to will himself to believe it true even if he could.

But he hopes it is.