"Actually, we did. We asked a lot of people. My wife did most of this work, not me, but that was something I insisted on. We asked openly – we asked in disguise, because we knew people would want to tell us what we most wanted to hear – we asked while reading their minds, which I'm not proud of but do think was necessary."  

"And they wanted the Thrune's appointed lords?"

"Overwhelmingly, yes. If I were you I wouldn't actually lean on this too much: they see it as a choice between the people they know can protect them, or something uncertain, or no protection at all, and I don't think any of them have much of an idea of how things might be better. But with that choice in front of them – yes, they want their lords. 

The important thing to understand about Menador is that it is the most dangerous place in Cheliax. Bulettes are native to the mountains there and they can and will eat whole villages if they're not stopped.There are undead and kuthite cultists constantly spilling over the border with Nidal, and even more constant raids by the mountain orc clans. It isn't like the Hellcoast, where a village can be safe at the cost of half its men. Without very serious military investment, nobody could live there at all. 

Again, I didn't do most of the talking to these people, my wife did. But what she found, over and over again, is that when something swept down from the mountains and tried to eat their whole family the nobles did something about it. They also burned heretics to death, of course, but they did their jobs. Most Menadorian noble boys do die in battle. By and large, they want their people to be safe. We kept them in power for the exact same reason Abrogial Thrune the first kept Archduke Narikopolus's ancestor in power, instead of deposing and replacing him like she did almost all the pre-Infernal nobility: the work they do is necessary, and for the moment, we have no one else who can do it for them." 

Archmages are less cool than myth had led Valia to expect. She'd think you could just put up a wall of fire or something to keep the monsters out. 

"I'm glad you checked," she says, because that's less rude. "...you should...tell people...any of this."

Élie doesn't feel like an archmage most of the time. His personal demiplane has three rooms and not even close to two billion people in it. 

"You're right. I should have. 

We did try to explain the process in Menador, and in the the other archduchies where we actually did replace the old nobility. It wasn't a priority along the Hellcoast, because you'd gotten rid of your nobles and seemed to be doing fine without them. But I should have tried to create some common knowledge for the delegates before the convention. What do you think would have been most valuable for you to know, three days ago?"

Valia closes her eyes, and considers. 

"That in Westcrown people are afraid and resent the Queen and if you tell them that they can resist there'll be riots that very night. That all of the nobles still in power are there because they fight monsters and we've got to find a better way to do that if we want to be rid of all of them. That you don't think there are any diabolist nobles, but there are lots of Evil ones, but that as far as you know they aren't actively going around doing lots of new Evils and if they are it'd be worth telling you so. That anything you say, people will think your god means it, and they are scared not to listen to Iomedae because they think She's like Asmodeus. That everywhere's very different from everywhere else and if you've only been to one place you should figure the rest might as well be a foreign country.

That - we're not safe at all - the convention still follows the normal rules of how powerful people work - and you'll die if you do anything stupid and that half the things that seem like they'd help are treason. I know I should've known that one. That it's smarter not to talk unless you can read, because everything that matters is in writing and you'll miss too much of it to have a chance of doing anything helpful instead of awful and disastrous, and that having been summoned by the Queen to the convention does not mean you have good ideas or that you'll make anything better. That you won't go home again."

Well, Lucien she's not. That's going to make this conversation easier. He was expecting the kind of horror that calcified into self-assurance and a burning eagerness for martyrdom – not sour resignation.

"I'm sure a lot of people have told you today that you're not really responsible for what happened today because you are a child and didn't know any better. I would like to be frank: that's bullshit, and we both know it. You are an adult women. You have rallied mobs before, and those mobs have killed innocents before. You knew enough to understand that you were right to do so then, and if you had tried, you could have learned enough to know that you were wrong to do so now. I don't think you're the person most responsible for what happened last night – the better part of the blame there falls on me for putting you in this situation – but it was well within your power to make different choices. This is fatalism, and it's beneath you. 

I don't want to make promises, but I think it's very unlikely that you'll die. In the first place, you haven't broken the law, and in the second place, Alex Cansellarion wants you to live and so do I. You have just had the opportunity to learn one of the most valuable lessons there is in this world, and as one of the very few people alive today who has had the same privilege I can say with some authority that killing you would be a waste." 

"No one's told me that. That would be obvious nonsense. I've only talked to you and Feliu and Alex and they just said - that I got it wrong and hundreds of people died, because they can't lie and they're not stupid. I don't think last night was your fault. I don't think it was anyone's fault but mine. But if you're asking what you could tell Valia of three days ago that would actually be useful, the answer is "shut up and do not participate in this convention". That is the short advice I'd give myself, if I could wake up yesterday morning. There are all kinds of more complicated things I think work differently than I thought three days ago but the very obvious takeaway from that is that I should not have done things. I should have spent the convention in the back corner learning to read."

"Certainly you should have learned to read. Separately, your superiors in the church should have made teaching you to read a priority as soon as they realized that they had two empowered clerics in all of Cheliax and one of them was illiterate, which is part of a much longer conversation I will be having with them. 

Do you think it would have been best for the convention, and for Cheliax, if you had stayed home in Pezzack?"

"...obviously yes. Hundreds of people wouldn't be dead and some of them damned!"

"Oh, certainly your actual involvement in the convention made everything significantly worse. I think you could have been a great asset, if you'd approached this a little bit differently, and acting like you only had one course of action available to you is neither helpful nor accurate."

"I arrived here the evening before the convention started. I wandered the city until I found my way to the temple, introduced myself, and got introduced to Blai. I learned that there's sermons in the morning, and started attending them, and asked Blai to read me pamphlets and to read me a book about the Galtan revolution after I was advised I needed to know Galtan history. I made literate friends and I asked them for advice, including about being sure the speech was legal. 

Obviously there is some set of questions I could have asked first which would have worked better, some set of sermons I could have attended that would have been more useful, a different history book to pick up. Similarly there's probably a Wish that kills Asmodeus dead, so what's your excuse for not having figured it out and cast it?"

"Absolutely none.

I have spent the past ten years asking myself every day if I made the right decisions in Galt. I don't know if I let too many innocents die, or too few. I don't know if there was something I could have done to preserve the Republic. I don't know if preserving the Republic made us stronger or weaker in the real war, the one against Asmodeus. I don't know if there's something I could have done to make myself ready to challenge the infernal regime a year or two sooner – and I do know how many people died and were damned because I didn't. There are any number of important questions I don't have the answers to. The one thing I am certain of is this: if I was able to strike a greater blow against Hell at the age of thirty-two than at the age of twenty, it is because I have spent significantly more time thinking about how to do it right. I will be thinking about what I could have done differently for the rest of my natural life, and I expect it to be a long one. That's what fighting evil is." 

"You didn't ask if I could have, from three days ago, done anything useful with the rest of my life. The answer to that would've been obviously yes. I'm not saying that I was done fixing things. The question you asked is whether I could have done anything useful with your constitutional convention, held this week, and the answer to that is obviously no. It was stupid to invite me, and it was foolish of me to speak. If I wanted to accomplish anything at thirty, I should have spent the year I was eighteen reading."

"Choosing to invite representatives of the Good gods worshipped in Cheliax is not actually one of the choices I regret, leading up to this. I suppose we could have left Iomedae with just the one, but we weren't doing literacy cutoffs for anyone else, and some of the illiterate delegates have made very useful contributions." 

"You could have made it an invite and not a summons!! Admittedly I would probably have come but given what you were forcing all of us to risk I think the decent thing to do would have been to give us a choice."

"...It was an invitation. We didn't make attendence mandatory for anyone except the sortition delegates, which was trying to solve a different problem. I think I see how – what did the summons you recieved actually say?"

"Well, I had it read to me." He really seems to on some level keep forgetting this. "But I was told it said that by order of Her Majesty of Cheliax Aspexia III, and then a lot of other stuff about her, a constitutional convention was to be held in Westcrown and the Church of Iomedae was being given seats in the convention and I was directed to come to the Church of Iomedae in Westcrown and would be compensated for my time and my travel. And then a date."

"The message we sent to clerics of gods without formal churches is that Chelish empowered clerics of non-Evil gods are invited to attend the convention, their god was entitled to so many seats, and if they were interested in representing their faith they should report to Westcrown or their nearest major temple. Formal churches we left to handle the matter internally. I'm not actually clear on your formal relationship to the Church of Iomedae, but I don't think they would have intended to order you to come against your will." 

"I'd have come regardless but I definitely thought I was required to. That's probably not the most important thing, though. ...the 'sortitioned' were kidnapped and forced to attend, though?"

"Yes. ...If you asked me yesterday, that's the thing I'd have guessed was the most likely to go terribly wrong. My thinking was – we were going to have elections regardless, since we'd hardly be making an effort to represent the will of the people without them, but we also couldn't ensure that they'd be free and fair. The kinds of people who are most likely to win elections in Cheliax are unafraid of seeking power and probably used to it, rich enough to bribe or strong enough to make threats. The sortition delegates were an attempt to avoid that. We chose them at random to make sure that we'd have some people in the room who knew what it was like to live in Cheliax as ordinary people – but ordinary Chelish people wouldn't want to be in that room. If we left it up to volunteers, we'd have the same problem we started with: a room full of delegates who are all the sort of person who is used to pursuing power under the infernal regime."

"They wouldn't want to be in that room and many of them would be completely correct to not want to because there is nothing at stake at the convention that's worth never seeing their family again to them... I think that was immoral. I see the reasoning, I know that otherwise the nobles will just use the whole thing to give themselves power, but they're going to do that anyway and just bribe people, and...

 ...you have to convince people that your convention is a risk that is worth it to them to take because there is something at stake at it that they can help with and that matters to them. You don't just get to shove them at the nearest pike and call them a martyr when it impales them. I...the thing Feliu said that made me conclude I made a mistake last night is that he thought the people who were fighting would not have fought if they knew better, that they were being moved against their interests and not - reminded that they were allowed to move in favor of them. That's...betraying people, using them. I didn't want to do that.

Maybe it's good for Cheliax, to force some of its people to be at the convention, to provide their perspective, but - the people of Cheliax don't belong to the state of Cheliax."

"I think it will take at least ten years to convince the people of Cheliax that it's safe to interact with the government in any capacity, and I didn't want to wait that long. I don't think there was a moral way to get them in that room. ...I am coming around to the perspective that given that that was the case, I shouldn't have done it, but I'm trying to reserve judgement until the whole thing is over and done with. 

I don't know what Feliu said to you last night, but if he's got you convinced that you somehow hypnotized the helpless masses into rebellion he's wrong. Some of them thought that they were going to be martyrs and go to heaven, and some of them just wanted an excuse to kill their old enemies and get in some looting, and for most of them it was probably a mix. Disinterested altruism for the suffering people of Menador doesn't get thousands of people in the streets." 

"I said to him that I think people mostly only revolt if there's a lot wrong under the surface already. He said he thinks - sometimes you're in that situation and there's a spark, and sometimes you're in that situation and luckily there's no spark and things slowly improve and everyone calms down and then instead of being dead hundreds of people are alive. I'm sure they were muddled up about their motives. People usually are. It's - terrifying, right, and it's so confusing even when you haven't ruined everything horribly -"

"Yes. It's very confusing, and I'm sorry to report that it never gets any clearer. 

That's why I wanted to talk to you now, actually. I've met a lot of Iomedeans who do not do well with confusion. I was afraid that when called to speak at your trial – and maybe the other trials you'll have to testify at – you'd have decided that everything that happened last night was a small price to pay for the chance of purging the diabolists and the dead rioters are all martyrs in heaven."