He should have expected.

A lot of people are going to be saying that this morning, and for the most part, they’ll be wrong. Westcrown had been calm since the bread riots last winter. They were teleporting grain into the city for the convention: prices were good. The city was crowded, certainly, but the delegates were spending money – and no one knew about the pamphlets until it was almost too late – and, really, why would a city that couldn’t be bothered to free itself from the shackles of Asmodeus and his servants for seventy years rise to the occasion now – 

Well. They hadn’t seen it all before. He has. 

The thing about Iomedeans and politics is that they just fundamentally can’t work with people. They do try. Sometimes they try very hard. It never works, and he doesn’t think it can outside of Lastwall: nobody else is good enough, nobody else is responsible enough, nobody else has that glorious shining purity of intent – which is really the thing that gets you. If you’re Chelish, it’s like a drop of water in Avernus. It’s being unafraid for the first time in your miserable life. It’s shutting up the mortal aching terror of eternity that’s kept you paralyzed since you reached the age of reason. It’s hope. It’s killing the bastards and feeling clean, clean, clean. It’s enough to make a man a little mad, the first time, or the first ten. 

He knew that.  

He teleports to the temple of Iomedae. Is there a senior-looking cleric about? 

Iustin is the senior cleric of Iomedae in Westcrown, and will obviously drop what he's in the middle of (organizing canvassing for the missing and not-yet-known-dead) to speak with the archmage.

That’s not necessary. 

“I don’t mean to take you away from your work. But if I don’t miss my guess, someone in this building is in the middle of conducting a failure analysis. I’d like to speak to them.” Deep breath. “I think I have made some very serious mistakes.” 

"Ah, yes. You want Cantes and de Luna, they're in the meal hall through - that door over there - do you need introductions?"

When Élie does not request introductions he hurries back over to the people he was organizing.

Cantes is an older man, retired eighteen months ago and prevailed upon to stop being retired when 1) Tar-Baphon was nearly released by the Thrunes and 2) the Worldwound became somewhat less of a disaster and freed up a belt to make him a touch less frail. De Luna spent most of the last two decades in enforced retirement due to missing an arm, but that got fixed a few years back and he's been at the front. He's here because he wrote the Galt retrospectives.

Élie does not actually know this fact about de Luna! That’s Second Alex! Witch book guy! The guy who wrote the book about witches, not the guy who was turned into a book by a witch! He didn’t come to his wedding because at that point he thought Naima was the Myrabelle entity, but he was very polite about it! Élie stole his arm back from the mad alchemist who’s now his son’s pet turtle! 

He’s still not having a good day – in fact, he’s still having the worst day of the past two years – but this might be less excruciating than he feared. 

“De Luna! I’m sorry we had to meet again in such circumstances. How’s the arm?”

“Archmage! Works like a charm, and I’ll warn you if that ever changes as it might portend poorly for that turtle of yours. What can we do for you?”

“I’ve been told this is where I can find the failure analysis for the events of last night.”

“Oh. It’s not done yet, we’ve only just gotten started -”

“Good.” He conjures another chair, mostly because he likes being able to do that. “What’s the process, here? Have you already done your interviews? Do we all go around in a circle and tell the class what we think we did wrong?”

Cotonnet wants to know the process? Cotonnet wants to participate in the process? De Luna was sure they were going to have to do the whole failure analysis without any interviews with the parties that knew the most about what happened and could have done the most to avoid it, because they’re monarchs and archmages. “We haven’t finished the interviews yet, many of the people we’d want to interview are dead or otherwise unavailable. The interviews are the first step, while everyone’s memory is fresh and before the report-writer starts to form any theories that might influence the interviews. Are you willing to sit for an interview, then?”

– Oh. Of course. They don’t want his opinion. He can tell them what happened, but it’s for the good people of Lastwall to tell him what he ought to have done. 

Whatever. He came here with a mission, and if he has to be condescended to by paladins, it’s not like he doesn’t deserve it. 

“Certainly. Now?”

“If it’s convenient. Ah - let’s start at the beginning. In the leadup to the convention, a large number of 'pamphlets' were being published in Westcrown, can you tell us about… no, actually, sorry, that’s not the beginning, is it? Can you tell us about how the decision was made to have a constitutional convention?”

Ah. 

“...I have a demiplane where time passes at ten times the usual rate. Do you want to do this there?”

“- yes. Yes, that would be incredibly useful.”

Then he can plane shift them, after telepathically alerting Naima that he’s heading into time dilation. 

“Catherine and I always planned to hold a constitutional convention. I pushed for it to happen now – she wanted to wait longer – but there was no question that we were going to have it. We both believe in a monarchy whose power is limited and delineated by the will of the people – she does, I mean, I’m not a monarchist, but one does occasionally have to be pragmatic about these things.”

He looks appreciatively around at the time-dilated demiplane. Lastwall would kill for one of these. Only volunteers, of course, but quite a few volunteers, if there came about an opportunity to kill volunteers and get a time-dilated demiplane. “What were your goals for the constitutional convention? What did you consider a likely outcome, a good outcome, an unusually bad outcome? How was the decision about timing made?”

Do they do this to everyone or just people who they’ve already decided are raving anarchists? …Probably everyone. Damn paladins.  

“Timing’s the easiest. I wanted to have it now because the work of rebuilding is never going to be properly done, and if we didn’t pick a date we’d put it off forever. People don’t like to let go of power once they’ve got it, even Good ones. 

My goal was to produce a body of laws dictating the form of the government of the new Chelish state. We all knew we had to balance representing the real interests and desires of the Chelish people with the fact that the Chelish people are mostly evil and have no notion whatever of representative government. I expected the convention to produce a constitution, and I expected that constitution to be very seriously flawed. An unusually good outcome would have been – but I don’t know if it makes sense to talk about what I’d want in a constitution. We’re not finished yet. In fact, we’ve barely started. 

Speaking of public order, then – I knew there was a risk of riots. My real concern there was food prices; we’d arranged to have extra grain teleported into the city during the convention. Housing’s harder, since the new construction is already proceeding as quickly as it can. I was ready to have some of my people start casting mansions daily, if it came to that. I didn’t think bread riots were likely. I thought we’d done enough to mitigate them, and we’d have time to respond if we were wrong. 

I wasn’t worried about the pamphlets. We had a trickle of them all summer. There was one on the first day calling for lynchings with names and in some cases addresses; nothing came of it. I spoke to the author and he didn’t strike me as the rioting type. Angry, certainly, but not desperate, and not even particularly bloodthirsty. You can tell when you’re talking to someone like that – they write a good game, but they’d never be the first to pick up a pitchfork. I thought that individual attacks against some of the city’s more prominent former diabolists weren’t unlikely, but nothing on the scale of what happened. 

An unusually good outcome, then – I mean, within the range of reasonable expectation – would have been for the convention to run its course with no interpersonal violence at all between or towards delegates. In actual expectation, I thought I’d have to break up a few fights. An unusually bad outcome – well, we could all have been kidnapped by Geb and raised as his undead slaves. Still could! The day is young.”

"Quite." He's going to have to remember to raise that concern with the governing council, because 'The archmage Cotonnet mentioned in an interview that he was worried Geb might kidnap and enslave him and his constitutional convention, but Cantes never mentioned this to anyone apart from including the interview notes in the report appendices that nobody ever reads' is not something he wants anyone else to have to write in their own report a couple months down the line. Also the underlying atrocity might be preventable with notice.

"Can you describe the processes by which you picked delegates to the convention, and how those processes were decided upon?"

“There was a conversation. Myself, the Queen, Naima, Ione, and the inquisitor. We all agreed that the first Galtan constitutional convention should be the rough model – elected delegates, the higher nobility, and representatives from all the non-evil churches weighted by how widely their gods are worshiped. I was worried that the sort of people who could win elections in Cheliax would just use threats and bribery – but we couldn’t very well not have elections – so I suggested picking some delegates by sortition as well, to make sure we’d represented the important “not single-mindedly devoted to the pursuit of power” demographic.”  

“How was the decision made to, as one of three representative of Iomedae’s church, invite Select Wain?”

“...Iomedae had ten seats in the weighting and two empowered clerics in the whole country. There wasn’t anyone else.” 

"...Only two? What about the Glorious Reclamation? On that point, is it only clerics who could take the seats, or would you accept paladins or inquisitors as well?" If a bunch of Iomedan Select didn't just move to Cheliax this past year, Cantes has a lot more questions about where they did go. Probably not for the archmage.

“We did consider asking foreign priests for some of the churches, but we realized very quickly that that wasn’t tenable – there’d be so many more of them. It would defeat the purpose to have the laws of Cheliax written by people who had no intention of living by them – and it was my understanding that none of the Reclamation clerics or paladins except Cansellarion wished to become Chelish citizens.” 

"...None of them? How was that understanding arrived at?"

He knew the Reclamation was technically independent from Lastwall, but this is really ridiculous. 

“I had the chance to speak to a number of his men in the process of replacing the old nobility and asked them if they considered themselves citizens of Cheliax. They were universally quite insistent that they weren’t – that they were instead sworn members of the Glorious Reclamation, which was an incompatible obligation.” 

“What does it mean to you for someone to be a Chelish citizen?”

“That they reside primarily in Cheliax, are subject to Chelish laws – and of course are due the protection of such rights as the new constitution guarantees them.”

"Is this… different in some way from being a Chelish subject?"

“Subjects don’t have rights! Catherine – I mean, the Queen –  and I always intended that the people of Cheliax would be citizens, once we’d conquered it.” 

Subjects of Lastwall's government have rights…

 “This strikes me as possibly a misunderstanding that’s a consequence of different political vocabulary in different regions of Avistan,” says de Luna, sounding a bit happy about this, “though we’d need to conduct interviews with some of the Glorious Reclamation officers to confirm that.” A Galtan would consider 'citizenship' to carry primarily the implications Cotonnet just named! A person of Lastwall or Molthune would likely interpret the question 'are you a citizen of Cheliax' completely differently!

“Political vocabulary? You mean to say, when I thought I was asking them if they intended to live in Cheliax and abide by Chelish laws instead of moving back to Lastwall or Molthune as soon as the immediate reconstruction was over, they heard – I’m actually having trouble reconstructing what they could have heard. As I understood it, their objection was that their oaths to the reclamation preceded any other obligation including loyalty to any specific country. Surely being a subject would have the same problem?” 

“They are bound to obey the laws of Cheliax while they’re here as anyone else would be, and they would believe that subjects of a just government do have rights. I would expect that they thought you were asking if they considered the legitimacy of the Chelish government to derive from the will of the people in line with the Galtan conception of such, and intended by their presence here to imply or otherwise comment on that legitimacy, and were politely saying, ‘I am a member of an organization without a position on that question’. Rather than taking you to have asked anything at all about where they intend to live, which will probably depend on whether the Reclamation’s granting land here. This is just speculation not yet confirmed by an interview.” De Luna enjoys cultural differences between regions of Avistan. He once meant to write a book about them but couldn’t really justify it.

“Whatever Cansellarion thinks personally, if the reclamation as an organization has no opinion on the legitimacy of the present Chelish government we might have some more serious problems in the future.”

…yes he’s an idiot for getting excited about a matter of language during a tense diplomatic conversation with an ally. In tense diplomatic conversations claims will be taken as having serious geopolitical implications, not as being descriptive of common language usage. “I apologize, Archmage,” says de Luna, chastened. “I meant, on whether the legitimacy of the present government derives from the will of the people or from some other source, not on whether Her Majesty is the legitimate ruler of Cheliax, which to my knowledge the Reclamation was among the first organizations to acknowledge.”

It’s weird when de Luna calls him “Archmage.” It’s weird when anyone calls him Archmage, like he’s Nex or something and not a man whose problems are still bigger than he is, but it’s particularly unsettling coming from people who knew him before. 

“You don’t need to call me that. I’m not offended. It’s just that we clearly weren’t speaking the same language before, and I want to get ahead of any other potential confusions while we still can.” 

“As you say. Well, we should further investigate if that was a miscommunication or if there wasn’t anyone else in Cheliax who met the criteria, but that’s not the priority right now. Did you have a  process for discussing delegates who seemed likely to pose problems? Did Wain strike you as one?”

“ – No. As I saw it, most of the delegates were going to pose problems of one sort or other, and if I didn’t like it I might as well write the constitution myself. None of my companions were following the day to day events that closely. 

I wasn’t worried about Wain before her speech. If anything, I was optimistic – I wanted more people from Pezzack. And I didn’t realize she believed she was being forced to attend against her will.”  

"She believed she was forced to attend against her will?"

"That's what she told me. I believe it was your church that contacted her."

“We haven't spoken to Wain yet. We have the interview with the head of the church here in Westcrown, if you’d like to read it. He had no authority to command Wain, of course. He mentioned sending her the royal notice and a note to the effect that there were very few eligible priests in Cheliax and she was one. The church often has - problems with priests not under our command taking suggestions as commands, which may well have been in this case inadequately anticipated especially since he was when he wrote to her unaware she could not read. He remains under the impression that she wanted to attend; if we get the chance to speak with Wain we can learn if that is correct or incorrect."

There's something in his expression that makes him feel like that's - not getting at what Cotonnet was hoping for. "It stands out as a likely place where a serious error was made, though not the largest. If you have more thoughts on that one in particular I'll take them down but - we try to get down everything that happened before we start writing up all the serious errors, because once people start having a picture of where we went wrong we often end up - looking there for more detail and missing similarly large mistakes elsewhere. It is rare that something terrible happens without our having made quite a few separate enormous mistakes. ...would it be helpful to describe the whole process from start to finish?”

"You certainly can if you wish, though I don't see why you'd consider it a good use of your time." It's not as if they want him to participate in it. 

Being an archmage really doesn't seem like it suits the man. And De Luna really did like him, last time they met. There is absolutely no diplomatic way to say that. "...if you'd rather just continue we certainly can." 

Oh for gods' sake. 

"You have made it very clear that you want my recollections, nothing more. I had been hoping we'd be able to discuss what happened and come to a mutual understanding, but I didn't come here to tell you how to do your job. That being given – I'd much prefer if you didn't try to appease me.  If I was anyone else, you'd say that you're extremely busy and explaining your procedures is a waste of your valuable time: indeed, it is. My understanding of your process won't improve my memory. Please treat me just as you would anyone else. I won't mind. I promise, I prefer it." 

"....I don't understand what makes you say that we only want your recollections of events, but that's not so at all. And even if this were just an ordinary interview with a miscellaneous involved party it would be my obligation to explain our procedures, were there any interest in them, which there never is because most people aren't interested in procedures. The important constraint here is your valuable time!"

It was the thing where he offered to help and they immediately started treating him like a useful species of talking insect, but he can't say that. 

"I really meant it when I said I'd prefer it if you treated me like anyone else. If it's your usual practice to explain things, of course I'd like to know, but I came here to be of use, not to make you dance around the archmage and his whims." 

"...all right, should I treat you like anyone else who wants to know the procedures, or anyone else who knows them already and has read ten of these, or anyone else who doesn't want to know the procedures and is indulging me because they're vaguely convinced I work for local law enforcement?"

"...I did not realize that these reports were available to people outside the church heirarchy and would definitely like to read ten of them the next time I have a free minute. In the meantime, I'd like you to treat me as – someone who deeply regrets what happened yesterday, and wants to do everything in his power to prevent it from happening again, and who believes that the first and most necessary step is understanding what he himself did wrong." 

"Right. So I've written a couple hundred of these, a couple dozen really big ones on really important catastrophic mistakes. Most people haven't done as many but I had fifteen years with nothing better to do. If a prisoner dies in custody in Vellumis I write it up and when Cyprian declared himself Emperor I wrote that one too. - that's why I'm here, actually. You start with the interviews. I know it seems like we're - picking around things that aren't all that important. But the problem is that the mind can't keep five different stories alive at once, it picks one and then starts getting all its soldiers to dig in around that one. So we do the interviews first, even if we are ignoring very big obvious things that need recommending, to try to get down as much of the situation on the ground as it was when we started poking it as we can. It's not instead of talking about what we did wrong, it's - so that there's some record to refer to when we're talking about that. After the interviews, I build a timeline. I like to do it all visually, take over a couple of tables, flag every point where anyone made a decision, or could have, that would have prevented this. Three months ago a letter sent out to Valia Wain sounded like marching orders, that'll be on there. Around the same time no one asked 'should we hire a staff for the delegates?' That'll be on there. They probably failed to think about that because Iustin's inexperienced for his command and sleeping about six hours a night and working every waking moment outside his required break times, that'll definitely be on there. But the interviews are first, because there are probably thirty, forty things like that, and if we start by listing all the ones we can think of we'll miss more than half and then not really go back to them later. It's human nature. ...everyone else's nature too, as far as I've noticed.

Then from the timeline, you look at all the decisions that would have prevented this and - some aren't worth it. Maybe you could have prevented this by not letting people hold political debates, but that's not worth it, skip that one. Maybe we could have prevented it by funding all temples 30% more, but we don't have the funds, skip that one. And you figure out which decisions would have prevented it and also been a good idea, and that's your first draft. We write the core thing, but everyone with an interest writes their own takes on it, as a supplemental, and it all gets submitted together. There might be a few things in there which can't be distributed outside the Church - if an interviewee tells us something in confidence, if it's got guard schedules in it - but there's always a public version, and it'd make me downright proud if you took a look. 

Is that helpful?"

It's actually extremely helpful, but the only thing he can think to say is, stupidly – 

"Cyprian crowning himself Emperor was a failure? I was sure – your goddess must have wanted it. I've thought about it" – more than is healthy or reasonable to admit – "and it's the only thing that makes sense when you look at everything she was doing in Galt – "

"It is indeed our understanding that it was better from Her perspective than the available alternatives at the point where it happened, presumably because She thought He'd fight Hell. It still very obviously involved a bunch of important failures on our part. There's one for the Four Days' War, and that was an unqualified triumph for everything we cared about! We still want to learn from our mistakes. I admit it's easier to get things on the desk of very busy people if you can say "hundreds of people died because we didn't have this figured out" and not just "this could have happened a year sooner if we'd had this figured out" but that's - not how it's supposed to work, not what we aspire to."

Oh, that's not fair. He pushes down a brief, hysterical stab of fury at the thought of generations of Lastwall functionaries carefully, patiently, admirably studying their errors, and carefully, patiently, admirably concluding that things should go on just the way they always had. Besides, he was all set up for the Iomedeans to be rigid and unreasonable while he nobly blamed himself for everything, and he's irrirated to be denied the treat.

"I'm very curious what you think you got wrong during the Four Days' War, but we're getting off topic." 

"I didn't fight in it, to start! But yes, we are. Is there anything you've identified that the Church or its representatives could have done before Valia Wain's speech, to prevent it, other than 'don't invite, or better train, or better supervise, Valia Wain? - we will of course be making recommendations on those points."

"Actually, I stand by the decision to invite her. I'd have done the same thing even if I'd known there were ten Reclamation clerics ready and willing. It matters that she's from Cheliax, and from the only town in Cheliax that pushed out the Thrunes and decided to rule themselves. There are things they learned in Pezzack that almost nobody else in that room or in this country or – if I may be perfectly honest – even in Lastwall understands. If your church hadn't chosen her as a representative, I probably wouldn't have interfered, but I would have seen it as an attempt to subvert the project of Chelish self-governance. 

I don't know why your church didn't contact her the first time I mentioned she existed – I'd actually assumed you had, but I suppose nobody took note of it at the time. Failing that, it bothers me that it doesn't seem to have occurred to her that there might be a reason the Menadorian nobles retained their ranks, and that she could have asked a superior in the church if she wanted to learn it. I don't know exactly what you could have done to create the impression that there was someone who understood the situation who she could have gone to for advice, but I think that's where things went wrong." 

"That makes sense. Were there any precautions prepared for the case where a delegate gave an unlawful or dangerous speech on the floor?"

"Certainly. The precaution was that I would give them a stern talking-to and if necessary physically restrain them." 

"Did you consider interrupting Wain's speech?"

"Yes – no – at the time, my mind was – elsewhere. On reflection, I don't think I would have interrupted her, but I should have said something in response. Or had Cansellarion do it." 

"He identified that he should have be much quicker to get your attention and get to the front and speak. He was taken aback. 

After the speech, did you think that the delegates were in particularly elevated danger?"

"I thought Valia Wain would be in danger. Less so when there wasn't an obvious reaction on the floor. I didn't take any precuations there either, and would have if I'd been thinking straight." 

"Was anyone else on your staff present to notice things like that or make calls like that if you happened to overlook them?"

"No. None of them are Chelish or have any particular reason to care about Chelish politics." 

"Do you have anyone on your staff who is assigned full time to supporting the Constitutional Convention?"

"No. Nor anyone who I think would be suited to it." 

"One of the most common recommendations we end up putting in incident reports is that almost everyone whose time is very valuable should delegate more. I know there are a lot of practical barriers to that. Have you tried hiring in Cheliax?"

"No. ...I can't say I didn't know it would be a good idea." 

"When did you specifically consider it, and what decided you against?"

"I've considered it many times – if nothing else, a good portion of wizards around the inner sea are Chelish, and it would have made things like the arcane engine installation in Westcrown easier. And I wouldn't turn away a talented Chelish wizard if they came to me – I think – I mean, if they were capable of acting like a human being. The truth is that I don't like working with them. They're servile to your face, scheming behind your back, and even if they're too terrified to try to against me they can't help undermining each other, and if any of them had the capacity for original thought it was mostly beaten out of them long ago. I'm sure if I spent enough time looking I'd find someone in the country who would suit, but I haven't, because I find the prospect depressing." 

It really speaks to the man that this is what he thinks of them and he wants them to self-govern. "Would you have benefitted from more operational support from the Church of Iomedae?"

He can't help it if he has a principled belief in the moral necessity of democratic self-governance. 

"That's an interesting question. Quite likely, but I don't think I would have accepted it." 

Huh. "Why not?"

Does he really have to explain this to de Luna, who he actually quite likes – 

Yes, of course he does. That's why he's here. 

"I don't want Cheliax to be an Iomedean theocracy. If your church had offered to assist with the convention, I would have assumed that it was with the goal of steering events towards that end. And even if not – well, I'm not sure I'd have liked the price." 

The Church does not want Cheliax to be an Iomedaen theocracy. Iomedae is too busy to supervise any more countries. "Do you feel in general able to ask for the Church's assistance where you require it without the price being unexpectedly high?" Because that's really failing at one of the things that it is most important for them not to fail at, if not.

Seriously? 

"There's nothing unexpected about it. It wouldn't have occurred to me to ask the Church for assistance, because I know perfectly well that you don't offer it unless you're paid more in kind than you can give."  

" - has there been a breakdown in diplomatic relations with the Reclamation which should feature in this report?" he says, that being the only even conceivably diplomatic way he can think of saying that fully a quarter of the Church's strength are presently dedicated to rebuilding Cheliax with absolutely no payment or benefit beyond the souls saved thereby.

" – What? No. I have great respect for the Reclamation, but I thought that Lastwall was consistently extremely clear that they don't represent the Church and operate entirely independently." Because the organized Church has and has had insane priorities for the past hundred years. 

" - the Reclamation is the single largest organized arm of the Church unless you count Lastwall itself as one. The Reclamation is not part of Lastwall's chain of command and does not operate out of Lastwall, so that if when we picked the fight for Cheliax we lost there was a chance the world would survive Cheliax's retaliation."

What.

"...I think we may need to have a longer conversation about what exactly the church is. Does Cansellarion answer to – who, Varvatos? But I've been in a room with the both of them, and he didn't treat her as his superior officer – are there Church headquarters other than the ones in Vigil? Do the different Paladin orders exchange personnel? If I was going to ask for help from the Church of Iomedae and not Lastwall or the Reclamation or anyone else, who is it that I'd have to speak to?" 

"- this is entirely our fault and I should have anticipated it. I owe you an apology and I suspect so does the Church.

The Church seventy years ago decided to keep efforts to retake Cheliax out of Lastwall's chain of command and out of Lastwall's territory and have them not employ Lastwall's resources in any way that any Good organization on the face of this planet couldn't employ Lastwall's resources. They did this because they expected that if an effort to retake Cheliax failed, and Cheliax conquered Lastwall in retaliation, the Worldwound would fall and Tar-Baphon be released. They thought that preventing that was worth some costs to the efforts to retake Cheliax, and that those costs could be - relatively small, if the division was executed cleanly and if open communication was still permitted about the question 'where can each individual do the most service to our world'?

Cansellarion resigned as an officer of Lastwall to found the Reclamation. He consults with Varvatos on matters of how the Church ought to allocate resources across its different fronts, but the only authority she has over him is the authority to find that the Reclamation is not in good standing with the Church, and accordingly to, say, deny it Communes or officially recommend that the Church's members exercise the caution in joining it they'd exercise in joining Cyprian's army. 

Lastwall made it very easy for any person in Lastwall to resign for reasons of conscience. Almost every powerful person in Lastwall's chain of command spoke with Cansellarion about whether they, personally, ought to resign their role and join the Reclamation.  When we took Drezen and there was a little less pressure on the Worldwound, several thousand resignations as a matter of conscience, which is of course the objective for which we had taken Drezen. When Cansellarion said he thought the war would be soon, several thousand more resignations as a matter of conscience. When it actually started, several thousand more."

Well. That explains a lot, really. 

" – I thought you were asking for a bribe, with Drezen. If we solved your problem, you might, at some point in the future, deign to consider helping us with ours." 

"Oh. I see. I mean, it was a - trade of your assistance for resources for the war, but not one that went through how friendly your relations with Lastwall were, just  - many men will go and fight in the south if that won't mean we lose a fortress in the north. Fewer forts to man in Mendev and the March of Gundrun meant more people could join the Reclamation. 

The aim was - that our enemies could be openly enemies with the part of the Church that was dedicated to destroying them, without that part being shielded behind the parts that are dedicated to preserving the planet."

"My understanding had been that the main body of the organized Church did care about the Worldwound, and didn't particularly care what happened in Cheliax, and when the war started a few thousand people changed their allegiance because at that point it was obvious even to them what really mattered – actually, I'm not sure I did know that had happened at the time. It didn't end up mattering, in the end." 

"This seems like a fairly obvious consequence of trying to maintain a separation of concerns in the way that we did. I do think the Church was, while the Worldwound was open, unwilling to trade the loss of containment of the Worldwound for a free Cheliax, which might be a values difference between the Church and you. You can read all the relevant reports if you'd like. Mostly they argue that the loss of containment of the Worldwound would likely increase Hell's power on the Material if it didn't result in the end of the world. But it is not a certain argument."

He's having the uncomfortable realization that he's spent a great deal of time resenting these people unfairly for the second time in ten minutes. 

"I think it's I who owes your Church an apology, for thinking so little of you. But, then, I don't understand. If you thought the continued existence of the Worldwound was likely to so advantage Hell – why not close it yourselves?" 

"...how?"

"The ritual took about a year to develop, from my perspective, and I don't think I needed to be an archmage to do it. It helped that I had Tien ritualists to work with, and Holomogi wardstone builders, but you could have asked them. We needed to kill Deskari, but Cansellarion and your paladins actually did most of the work there. We needed Nocticula's cooperation, but she's really shockingly easy to work with, if you just reach out and learn what it is she wants. And Areelu Vorlesh – would have been truly difficult, I grant you. But I wasn't applying the whole resources of a nation to solving this problem for seventy straight years, and it was not an especially insurmountable challenge once I started to really try." 

He's really not sure what to say to that. "I think that is indeed what Iomedae would have done, and would have wanted Her church competent to do," he manages, after a while. "It does seem easier if you are an archmage. And we do try to produce archmages." They just all die along the way.

"Easier, I'm sure. But being an archmage is overrated for – almost everything important, really."

"This conversation is turning out reminiscent of the one with the Archduke Blanxart, whose ultimate advice for the Church was 'if Tar Baphon is that much of a constraint, figure out how to kill him'."

"...Do you want me to?"

"...yes. Yes we do, very very badly. The facf that any one of the seals suffices to release him is an enormous problem for the world even with the wards reinforced; having four locations to defend is just a much more substantial constraint than having one."

"I wish you'd said so earlier. I'm already spending a lot of my time figuring out how to fight Geb, if it comes to that, and I think a good deal of that work should straightfowardly transfer. I'm sure he has three or four tricks I don't know about, and I'd have to consult – my allies – " because they both know who he's talking about but there are some things you don't say out loud – "but I'm cautiously optimistic. I don't think he's really entirely sane in there." 

"I think that having to devote - to purely defensive not-game-changing measures against the destruction of the world - more resources than the Church even commands without extraordinary efforts on the recruiting front has been very bad for us, and very bad for our ability to work with our allies, and intend to make a great many recommendations to this effect in the report, and yes if you think you can kill Tar-Baphon we would be delighted to give you almost whatever we can in support or in exchange.

Do you have other recommendations for the Church here."

"If there's one thing I've learned in this conversation it's that I don't know enough about the Church or how it operates to give any confident advice. If you're willing to listen to me opine anyway, though, I might say you should stop acting like communicating with your allies comes directly out of your goddess's ability to intervene on the material plane. I know I'm not the only person who to assume that Lastwall speaks for the Church, and that the Church has no interest beyond securing its own ancient obligations – and then, even the Reclamation didn't manage to tell me that they wanted representation in the convention. It would be much easier to work with you if I had an idea of what you were trying to accomplish and what you needed to do it." 

you should stop acting like communicating with your allies comes directly out of your goddess's ability to intervene on the material plane. 

That's a good line. He'll quote it in the report. 

"Thank you. I have a great many thoughts on that but I think they're better saved for the report than given now, especially since immediate collaboration with you is complicated while we presume you forbidden from intervention in Razmiran."

"I look forward to reading it." 

On consideration, he sincerely does.