Honored delegates,
I arrived here quite recently, from Pezzack, which by the grace of Iomedae rebelled against the Thrunes before the Queen and her allies arrived. We paid a terrible price, of course. My whole family is dead; when Hell's forces learned that I was among those coordinating the rebellion they took specific care to go up the coast and murder my grandparents and my cousins who lived there. In Pezzack the dead rotted in the streets, as the Asmodeans would kill anyone who tried to reach the bodies to bury them. In Pezzack homes burned with whole families inside; in Pezzack fathers returned home from fishing trips to find that the Asmodeans had reduced all they cared for in this world to ash while they were gone.
But there are worse fates than death. Hell is one of them. And there are worse fates than that of Pezzack. The fate of every other city on Cheliax's face is one of them. Because, you see, with the wrath of the Thrunes came the proof of their lies; their torches in the end only gave light to their own weakness.
The Church of Asmodeus liked to say that we were all of us Evil, all of us damned, all of us Asmodeus's possessions. It is not true. They knew it was not true, because when they heard two dozen voices in Pezzack cry out for rebellion, they proceeded to kill most of the city. They knew that given a choice between Good and Evil the people would choose Good; they knew that they were outnumbered; they looked out at the people of Cheliax and saw only enemies, as they always had; enemies temporarily cowed into submission, maybe, but enemies.
I do not believe the people of Pezzack are different in character from the people of Westcrown, or Kintargo, or Corentyn, or Ostenso, or the thousand villages to which Hell laid its false and terrible claim. But I believe that the people of Pezzack know something that the people of those other places have not realized, not yet. The people of Pezzack know that we were never Hell's. Hell feared us, Hell hated us, and Hell knew that when the moment came we would choose resistance over damnation. You, too, would have chosen that, if you'd had the chance. You may not know this about yourself. But Hell knew it, and I know it.
Why do I say this, when reporting on the activities of the committee to combat diabolism? Because here is the lesson of the first day of the committee to combat diabolism: when the people of the rest of Cheliax hear that there will be no place for Evil in our country any longer, they do not, like the people of Pezzack, rejoice that those who tortured their children and humiliated their wives and tormented them over minor slights will not have the power to do that any longer. They hear the echo of Asmodeus's lie, and they believe that they are what we speak of when we speak of evil, and they believe that we are out to see them destroyed.