Is his bodyguard still there. He is. Good. "Yes."

She is not actually going to attack him about it but mostly because Valia'd be upset about her getting herself killed. Also she'd be dead but that kind of feels worth it right now.

"I — Iomedae is supposed to be Good—" (and that feels like a very stupid thing to say but she doesn't know what else to say—)

"She can have clerics who are Lawful Neutral. - do you want a copy of the interview I published explaining this."

Probably that's some kind of Asmodean trick where if she says yes he has her arrested for breaking the publishing laws. 

"I don't see how it's possible to work for Asmodeus and be Lawful Neutral — how many innocent people did you have tortured and murdered—"

(Her chest feels tight, and her head feels heavy, and she (stupidly, pathetically) keeps remembering things her priest did only this time she's seeing Chosen Artigas in his place—)

"Do you in fact want me to produce a number."

She's still angry but now she's also confused!

"—can you?"

"- well, it depends on what you mean. If you're including every situation where someone under my command at the Worldwound disciplined their subordinates or abused the camp followers and I could technically have intervened in any handful of those cases, or situations earlier in my career where I was ordered by my own superiors to carry out such disciplinary action and did so, then no, I do not have a number. If you want to know how many people I executed and what they'd done so you can decide if you think it was justifiable military discipline or murder, and a separate number for how many people I tortured with my own hands, then I do."

What she wants is for him to just tell her how much to hate him — having thought about that for more than a second that's obviously a stupid thing to want, literally no one in the entire world is going to do that.

She wants to know what he did to every last one of them and then she wants to make him experience exactly what they felt. Which is less stupid, except someone would stop her and she'd die for it and Valia would be upset, and also even if she weren't stopped he'd die before she could get through almost any of it, and then apparently he'd somehow go to Axis and get to just be okay — maybe better off than his victims, if some of them were people like Lluïsa—

—ordered by my own supervisors to carry out such disciplinary action, he says, like it matters whether it was some other priest of Asmodeus who came up with the idea, if a priest of Asmodeus orders you to torture a child to death for disrespecting Asmodeus a decent person should refuse, the Evil her priest did wasn't any less Evil when it was her lord demanding it—

"...The right number is zero," she says, which she's pretty sure is also a stupid thing to say. "I don't see how Iomedae could say 'oh, sure, he tortured someone to death for saying no one should worship Asmodeus, but it's fine, he only did that once or twice or however many times it was—'"

"- yes. The right number is zero. You are correct. I did not get the right number and cannot now change that."

She thinks maybe she'd rather deal with Delegate Ibarra laughing about murdering children than whatever this is.

"I don't know how you can live with yourself."

Well, the other day I did get attacked by a mob and - no. Isn't it a gladdening fact that my feelings don't - no.

"Iomedae has some use for me. I am trying to fulfill it."

"I think she should've picked someone who isn't awful."

"It would be reputationally simpler."

It's not about reputation, it's about how no one should be able to just — get away with that sort of thing, and then be chosen by the goddess of fighting Evil, as if he hasn't done worse than almost anyone here — it's actually very weird that both of them count as Neutral, does Pharasma just declare nearly everyone Neutral no matter what they've done, is that why some of the Evil nobles didn't show up to her spell, she'd thought it was just that they weren't strong enough—

Instead of saying any of that she's glaring at him silently.

"Four," he says.

That is a smaller number than she was expecting and somehow it doesn't make her feel better at all.

(For a moment she feels like she's fifteen years old again, watching a kitchen-slip beg incoherently for her life as if anyone will listen, until eventually she can't beg at all.)

Four is — it feels almost possible that there's an amount he could suffer on Golarion that could set things right, not right enough that he'd deserve to be a priest of Iomedae but right enough that if he got the Final Blade afterwards it wouldn't feel fundamentally unjust that he was being spared the suffering of Hell. Not that he's going to Hell, apparently, but still. It's a fathomable amount of Evil, rather than a completely unfathomable amount.

None of which even slightly excuses being a priest of Asmodeus.

Valia would say, did say, that Evildoers who keep seeking power should die for it, and it's hard to see becoming a priest again and joining the convention as anything but seeking power. Alicia would say — well, she could just ask, but she's pretty sure Alicia would say — that if he really has given up serving Asmodeus completely, it's better to put him to work helping people who deserve it. Raimon would say that justice does not come to the defense of people who are tortured to death by Asmodean priests, and that that's wrong.

The azata would say that no matter how many innocent people he's tortured to death it's wrong to kill him if he's stopped. She really doesn't feel like listening to the azata right now.

There's a sense in which this is all kind of irrelevant. She's almost certainly being watched; if she tries to hurt him she'll die for it, and it won't even work, they'll just put him back. (She feels a flare of anger in her chest that there are so many innocent victims who stayed dead when Chosen Artigas is not just alive but resurrected.)

...Delegate Ibarra was in the hall when Delegate Fraga brought it up, and for all he's Evil she's pretty sure he really does hate Asmodeus. But trying to get someone like Delegate Ibarra to help give Chosen Artigas what he deserves feels obviously wrong, and anyways the idea of talking to him feels even less appealing than the idea of listening to the azata.

She wonders how he did it. Her priest was never very creative, with the torture, and it's making it kind of hard to imagine him getting what he deserves with any degree of specificity. Flaying would work, it's not like it has to be exactly the same, but there's something satisfying about the idea of hurting him the same way he hurt his victims.

"...What were they like? The — the four innocent people, I mean—"

"The four I have in mind under the most restrictive definition were all chosen for me by my seminary instructors for training exercises. I didn't know them personally."

"If an Asmodean priest ordered me to torture an innocent person to death as a training exercise I would kill the priest or die trying." Probably the second one, but still. They'd Maledict her but it would be worth it.

"Yes. A lot of people wouldn't make the mistakes I made. I'm still working through how I could have avoided them myself."

Victòria really does not see how "torture innocent people in the name of Asmodeus" could be a mistake. It's not like there's anyone who doesn't know that that's incredibly Evil! No one just trips, falls, and finds themself holding a knout! Calling that a mistake is a Hell of a way to talk about deciding to torture innocent people on behalf of Asmodeus.

"You could have just... not done super Evil things that everyone knows are Evil. And then you would have avoided it."

"I think that works well for people who are temperamentally Chaotic, as a strategy."

Yes! Obviously! This is one of the many many reasons why being Chaotic is better!

"I know Lawful people are weird about this but 'it is more important to be Good than Lawful' is the sort of thing that feels really obvious to me."

"You're right, it is more important."

Blink blink. She had not even slightly been expecting him to say that.

"...so why didn't you decide to just not be Lawful when you were being ordered to torture innocent people to death?"

"I was explaining to Valia this morning," was it this morning, it feels so long ago, "that when the seminaries chose students to become clerics they looked for seriousness as a proxy for Wisdom and rule-following as a proxy for Law. They didn't have to sort for Evil. Instead they just invented ways to make people worse, in imitation of Hell, which can often make devils of even Maledicted moral paragons given time enough. I was made worse, and am now trying to be made better by Iomedae's guidance."

At the mention of Valia her chest twists up. Valia deserves better than being forced to listen to a former priest of Asmodeus explain himself, and certainly better than having to share a church with someone like him. (Gods, she misses Valia. It's only been a day and she already wishes she could ask her about — a lot of things, really.)

And — it's hard to get all her thoughts to line up right, the front of her head feels like it's burning and she can't stop imagining him carving Asmodeus's symbol into someone's shoulder or flogging a child half to death or any of the other things the priests did that aren't really torture but aren't okay either — but this feels like it might be important, if she can't do anything about the former Asmodean priest who's probably never going to face justice because of Iomedae's bizarre choices—

"I think there's probably bad things someone could get me to do if they were trying. Like, when I was a little kid I prayed to Asmodeus, I whipped the other students for doing badly in school — apparently that's an Asmodeus thing, not an everywhere thing — that sort of thing. But there's no one who could get me to torture and murder innocent people to help Asmodeus. If I got Maledicted to Hell they'd have to use me as a paving stone.

And I'm Chaotic now, but I haven't always been, I was plenty serious and plenty rules-following as a little kid. And then I stopped. So it doesn't — I don't think it's an excuse, that there were Asmodean priests trying to get you to be Eviler, that's still — you still chose to do it—"

"You evidently have the ability to be a cleric. It's fortunate for you that you weren't pulled as a candidate to be one of His. But I believe you, that you would have refused, and if you know how to cause other people to have this virtue I hope you will teach it."

"I'm not sure — I don't know how I'd explain it, if it's not already obvious that you should just... not do incredibly Evil things that you know are incredibly Evil, even if someone is ordering you to, and even if you'll die for refusing. I — it's not quite the same thing, but I—

—Two days ago I got arrested as part of the whole thing with Valia's speech. And I was sure if I let them take me they'd — spend a while torturing me, and let the guards do whatever they want, and then when they were done they'd have me executed. And I thought there was a decent chance I could escape, if I tried to, but I didn't see a way to get away without hurting and maybe killing a bunch of innocent people. So I didn't fight back, I let them arrest me, because killing innocent people is wrong even if you're not torturing them.

And there's a sense in which that's kind of the opposite thing, following orders because fighting would be Evil rather than the other way around. But there's a more important sense where — it's all the same thing, either way you can choose whether or not to do the obviously Evil thing that you know is Evil just to save yourself. I don't see why — if there'd been someone ordering me to hurt the innocent people so I could escape, I still wouldn't've done it, that doesn't make a difference, the part that matters isn't the orders."

She's not sure why she's trying to explain this to someone like him. She thinks maybe if she explains it he'll — understand, somehow, stop trying to act like becoming an Asmodean priest is something that just happened to him — and then what, she's not sure what's supposed to happen after that, it feels like there should be something but there's lots of somethings it could be.

She feels — not even angry anymore, not exactly, more like her body is all full of cold dark shadows where her blood is supposed to be. She doesn't really understand what people mean by "virtue," she's seen it used six different ways in the pamphlets, but she doesn't really think it takes very much of any of them to not murder innocents. She's Chaotic Neutral, she's not as brave as Valia, she really doesn't understand any of the people using virtue to talk about sex but that really doesn't seem relevant here. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing she could just teach someone to have, if they somehow didn't realize they were supposed to.

He nods. "I don't know if I could have avoided being killed if I was willing to hurt the people attacking me. Maybe I could have. But I knew they were probably coming after me because they thought I was still an Asmodean priest, and I didn't think it would be right to hurt someone for trying to kill an Asmodean priest. Is that what you mean?"

Oh.

It hadn't — it hadn't felt real that he could actually be trying. It would be easier if he weren't trying, easier if he were like the sort of nobleman who calls for Valia to hang because he's angry she told him to repent and give up his undeserved power, easier if he were still just as Evil as any other Asmodean priest—

—and that still leaves four innocent people who he tortured to death, four innocent people who will never see justice, four innocent people who deserved better—

"I'm glad you didn't kill them," she says softly. 

"I was later told by most of the people I asked that I had actually erred, there, but - I think it's the better mistake to make, if confused enough that one will be made."

"I think if you're listening to people telling you you should've killed innocent people that's — not as bad as torturing innocent people to death because an Asmodean priest told you to, but the same sort of thing. I'm not going to tell you 'listen to your conscience' because apparently your conscience thought it was fine to go be an Asmodean priest, but you've got to have something that's not just — doing what other people tell you."

"So - in that particular case 'innocent' is not straightforwardly true. They... committed murder. If I'd stopped them it would have been attempted murder."

"—The part that matters isn't the part about whether they technically did or didn't break the law. It's — it would still be wrong to kill someone for liking Pharasma too much even if we were still under Asmodeus and everyone was supposed to worship him the most, even though they broke the law. But — there's a difference between, between a mob getting together to murder — Liushna, or even just, just a devilspawn that hadn't actually done anything wrong, and — and someone who was a priest of Asmodeus—"

"I am reasonably confident that at least most of them based this belief on a pamphlet. The pamphlet also said that I was still Asmodeus's, and that is not true."

Frown.

It's very stupid to kill someone because of something you read in a pamphlet. Lots of the pamphlets say things that aren't true, everyone knows that. And normally you shouldn't kill people just because they're stupid, but if they're so stupid that they're trying to kill you because of something they read in a pamphlet — if Valia got attacked by people who read the pamphlet about how she was a Calistrian whore who'd murdered innocent people during the riots, it wouldn't be wrong for her to defend herself.

But Valia isn't an Asmodean priest. If someone reads in a pamphlet that an Asmodean priest is an Asmodean priest, and they go to try and kill them, then... they might be stupid, but they were still right? She's not sure if that makes sense. She wouldn't think they'd done anything wrong.

And Chosen Artigas wasn't an Asmodean priest anymore, but — her head feels a little like it's on fire — but it's still the same sort of thing, it's not like a bunch of people got together to murder an innocent and accidentally picked him, they were aiming to kill an Asmodean priest and were just a little late — when she killed her priest he was technically not a priest anymore—

—Chosen Artigas didn't fight back, a real priest of Asmodeus would've fought back—

If — it's hard to keep thinking about the Asmodean priest example without getting angry again — let's say it's not an Asmodean priest, let's say it's someone else Evil but not quite that Evil. If there was a slip who was secretly an Evil murderer, and someone went to try and murder it because it was a slip, like that delegate who got executed, then... both of them are Evil murderers? So probably it would be fine for the slip to try to kill the human, even though the slip also deserves to die?

That doesn't really feel like it's very relevant to Chosen Artigas. 

Probably the azata would say that Chosen Artigas stopped deserving to die when he stopped being a priest of Asmodeus who tortures innocent people. But probably the azata would also say that the people who killed him don't deserve to die for being stupid. That is relevant, sort of, but it feels like it's missing everything that actually matters here.

If someone is a total idiot, and kills someone innocent because they're a total idiot, you've still got to avenge that, you can't just say that actually it was fine for them to do that because they were just stupid, not trying to Evil. Maybe if they're a little child, too little to know any better, but not if they're an adult who just believes everything pamphlets tell them. But if someone is kind of an idiot, but still they manage to point themself at someone who deserves it — then it doesn't seem right for them to die for that. Probably it would be good for someone to tell them that the pamphlets say a lot of things that aren't true, so that they don't accidentally go kill someone who doesn't deserve it, but — it would be fine if it were something like Feliu telling her how burning down the school made it harder to catch the Asmodean cult. They don't need to be executed for it.

"...I'm still glad you didn't kill them, even though it sounds like they were kind of dumb."

"Ser de Luna said when I asked him that - mobs usually don't disperse on their own after they've killed their target, so I might have just allowed them to go find someone else, maybe someone from the same denouncement list whose charge was completely false or much less bad or both. And that there are steps between refusing to use lethal force and actually trying to kill someone. If I'd been armed and prepared spells that would have damaged them a little bit, I could possibly have stopped the mob, healed the injured once they were calm, and sent them all home, without taking up one of Archmage Naima's resurrections for myself."

That sounds like it depends a lot on who they actually went after next. Victòria is still pretty confused about the thing where apparently mobs here just go after random people that aren't the ones you said to go after but maybe that's more of a risk in a city where not everyone knows each other?

"If you had to injure some people who were attacking you, and you were doing it to stop them from going after an innocent person later, that would probably be okay? But I don't think it'd be okay for you to kill them just because they might go kill someone innocent afterwards. ...Also I think if I were attacking someone in a mob and they started trying to attack me, but only a little bit, it wouldn't make me want to stop attacking them, but I guess maybe you have a spell for that that I just don't know about."

"There's a second circle one that temporarily blinds or dazzles people for a ways around, and it's not as damaging as my negative channel used to be and it only hurts Evil people, but it could still kill someone if they were unlucky. A lot of people in Cheliax are evil and too weak to detect and that's exactly who it would be able to kill and then they'd go to Hell. But murdering me wasn't very good for their alignments either, it would take strikingly bad luck to get a person too burned to stabilize, and if I were alive I would have been right there to do the stabilizing."

Wow, that spell sounds like it would've been super useful for the Diabolism Committee. ...Probably former priests of Asmodeus have an obvious reason not to help the Diabolism Committee track down all the secret Evil people. Probably if you tried to use it to catch out the Evil nobles they'd have you punished for attacking them.

"...Assuming you're telling the truth about how that works it probably would've been fine to use that, if you'd asked for it? But there's lots I don't know about magic so I can't say for sure."

You definitely wouldn't get anyone who was all the way innocent that way, anyways, which seems like a huge upside. It would suck if you accidentally hit someone who's Evil-like-Lluïsa, but if you don't kill them it's probably fine to hurt someone to stop them from maybe hurting someone else later.

"Mostly I wish I'd had my Calm Emotions but I'd only prepared one and used it earlier that day breaking up something unrelated, but I am preparing spells that could if I were unlucky kill someone now, yes. Even though - I'm now in the business of denying Hell soldiers and it would in fact be very bad to send them one, in most situations it is in practice not worth more than five thousand gold, and that's what a resurrection tends to run."

Blink blink blink. That's also very confusing but it feels like a different kind of confusing than most of the conversation.

"...Money is less important than not killing innocent people, even if it's a lot of money."

"- well, it would be, except that you can turn a lot of money into a lot of not killing innocent people. It costs a hundred paper dollars to get a soul out of Hell. Less than that to buy a reincarnation or a healing from the same archmage who resurrected me. It would be easily possible to take this line of reasoning too far but it does weigh on my mind how much it cost to resurrect me and whether it kept Archmage Naima from saving ten or a hundred people who just didn't happen to be delegates."

That sounds like a very weird way to think about people's lives but she can't actually see a problem with it. Well, apart from the part about getting souls out of Hell, that part could easily be a trick, if he's getting souls like other Asmodean priests' rather than souls like Lluïsa's. She didn't actually know you could get souls out of Hell, let alone that Hell was just selling them for regular Golarion money for some reason instead of keeping them all to turn into paving stones.

It would be stupid to assume there isn't some kind of trick there just because she can't see it, especially when he used to be an Asmodean priest, but maybe she can ask Alicia about it when she tells her about the pamphlet that wants them both executed, it seems like the part about people people not getting healed might be important for deciding whether they should take the free guards from the archmage. She's not really sure why the archmage Naima having to resurrect someone would mean fewer people get healed, she's pretty sure she charges money to everyone whether or not she just had to resurrect someone, but she's not sure if that's the trick or if she's just not understanding something. Either way it probably won't hurt to check whether she'd be getting innocent people killed if someone murdered her in the streets, even if he is trying to trick her.

"She could've left you dead and spent the money on not killing innocent people instead," she says, instead of any of that. She'd've been upset if the archmages had left people like Liushna dead but if they'd left Delegate Artigas and the Evil nobles dead that really seems like it would've been better.

"Yes. She didn't consult me while I was dead, except that I could have refused the raise, which would have wasted it. I believe her party feels obligated to the delegates endangered by our presence in Westcrown and that's why they're now funding bodyguards for delegates who believe ourselves at risk." His is being very quiet.

"The archmages make a lot of decisions that I don't really understand."

"Me too."

"I — had assumed, when I heard that a bunch of adventurers had kicked out Asmodeus from being in charge of the country, that they'd go track down all the Asmodean priests and deal with them. And not just — let them stay around being Asmodean priests."

"I don't know if they did any of that within the country. Probably some at the higher levels of the church; I doubt they considered first-circle village priests a top priority. At the Worldwound any systematic purge would have cost the border. The expectation that it might happen spread us very thin and when we woke up without spells the margins were thinner still."

"If they'd gone and dealt with all the village priests first before they did anything about the Worldwound priests that wouldn't be confusing, as far as I know there's not archmage magic that would let them just get rid of all of them at once. ...or, uh, sent them to the Worldwound, I guess?"

Victòria would rather they have just executed all the Asmodean priests but if they'd sent them to go fight demons instead they'd've at least not been hurting innocent people, and probably a lot of them would still have been killed by demons. She thinks. She doesn't actually know how strong demons are, maybe they'd've been fine.

"If the logistics of the Worldwound actually interest you I can talk about them but they're complicated and most people find them boring."

"I don't actually care about Worldwound logistics." If the logistics would have meant the archmages had to just kill the village priests Victòria has no problem with that.

"I don't think it's impossible that the archmages guessed in advance that Asmodeus would pull his clerics' spells. Which would have affected how they handled nonthreatening low-circle ones."

If the archmages were hoping that people would take care of the Asmodean priests themselves as soon as they lost their spells, you'd think they could've done a second amnesty for people who killed their Asmodean priest as soon as they had the chance.

Victòria is not stupid enough to say that to a former Asmodean priest.

It feels like it's missing the point, to act like just because the Asmodean priests were dealt with eventually the six months in between don't matter. Six months is a long time for someone to go around getting to stay powerful and safe and alive, getting to avoid justice for everything they'd done previously, when every day they go on like that is a wrong that can't be put right. And — and it's not just that—

—the day the news came, the priest ordered everyone to come to that day's sermon, and then he picked out a man who was looking a little shiftier than the rest of them and cast a spell that opened up wounds on his body, and told them that Asmodeus still reigned there no matter what had happened anywhere else in the country—

—two months in Victòria found one of the chambermaid's daughters with welts all down her back and she wouldn't say why, usually you at least knew why he was punishing someone, she was years younger than Victòria—

—one of the serfs had heard a rumor that the barons in the next county over had been replaced, when they'd dragged him back home neither the priest nor the lord had him killed over it but he might've been better off if they had—

—dozens of injustices, each one of them kindling for the flame burning inside her, but more than that each one of them avoidable, if the archmages had just — if she had just — she burned every one of them into her memory so she'd never lose sight of what the priest deserved, but maybe she could have stopped them, maybe she'd have died but maybe not — is that why she's Chaotic Neutral—

The Queen is Good, and Feliu says she's very busy, but it really seems like she could've asked the teleporting enchanter who went after Raimon to hunt down all of Asmodeus's priests. Maybe she didn't realize how bad they were, the way a lot of the nobles from other places don't realize the sorts of things Asmodean nobles do.

"Even if a priest isn't strong enough to threaten an archmage that doesn't mean they're not strong enough to threaten the people who live under them. Six months is — there's a lot that can happen in six months."

"Yes. But - that's not unique to priests. Unruly soldiers can hurt people. Monsters can. Lords. Bandits. Teachers. Completely ordinary commoners in a barfight. If you're an archmage - or a god, or anyone, and you're trying to save as many people as you can, and as many as you can is not everybody, someone's going to be hurt somewhere."

"Do you know what they were doing instead?"

"Only what one can hear by listening to rumors and reading pamphlets. Archmages aren't exactly the same thing as gods but sometimes it seems like it's equally expensive for them to communicate, or at least to do it effectively. They did close the Worldwound at some point."

Closing the Worldwound sounds good but if you have to do one or the other Victòria would rather not have Asmodean priests even if it means a tiny chance of getting eaten by demons. ...Maybe not if you knew that in six months everyone would be able to give the Asmodean priests what they deserved.

"What do you mean about, uh — I didn't think gods used money, until you mentioned the thing about buying souls...? What do you mean about communicating being expensive?"

"All the gods have a treaty or detente or something of that ilk amongst themselves limiting what miracles and powers and information they can give mortals. I don't think it's denominated in money but you could imagine it that way. That's why resurrections and some other spells need diamonds - the gods don't want the diamonds for themselves or want the diamonds to be destroyed, but it's a limiting factor on how much of themselves they extend. This means that they rarely spend energy on directly cancelling each other out; the treaty pre-cancels them out where their interests are simply opposed and they work as much as possible on everything else. With exceptions."

That sounds kind of confusing and kind of wrong. She's pretty sure that Calistria making her a priestess partly cancelled out Asmodeus making Chosen Dalmau a priest, and yet here she is. And she's heard that Archmage Naima can bring people back to life without a diamond, and turn people into kobolds even though that's usually a diamond-spell too, and that the archmage who is a cat can teleport to the Moon but maybe that's not the sort of thing that needs a diamond. Probably she should find someone actually trustworthy and get them to explain how it works to her, only the people she trusts to answer questions about magic keep turning out to have secretly been murdering innocent children or being Asmodean priests.

"Oh, I guess that makes sense."

"It's the only way anything about how gods act makes sense to me. Pharasma remains incredibly confusing because She's in charge and could presumably do whatever She wants and yet evinces disliking a lot of commonplace things like zombies and infant mortality."

Victòria had always just assumed that Asmodeus didn't want to help them because he thought they were all useless worms, and the other gods were weaker than him. Except it turns out that actually Asmodeus wasn't even strong enough to stop a group of humans (and a cat, for some reason) from kicking him out of the country, so probably that doesn't apply.

"I don't really see how she could stop infant mortality without a lot of mind control. ...Probably it would be easier to stop there from being zombies, she could just kill all the zombies."

"I could imagine her deciding not to stop people from killing babies on purpose but a lot of them die of disease."

Victòria's not really sure how many babies die of disease and how many die of being murdered. She's heard that sometimes people whose babies are really sick decide to just kill them sooner rather than waste their effort, maybe if they hadn't done that Pharasma would've sent a miracle and cured them. (Should she be avenging all the murdered babies? That sounds — for some reason when she thinks about it it mostly just makes her feel sick, not at all the way it feels to take vengeance on Asmodean priests and Evil nobles — probably this is not very relevant right now.)

"Well, I don't understand Pharasma any better than you."

"Did you have anything else you wanted to say to me?"

She hates him and wishes he were dead. But there's a place in her chest that would normally have a festering flame, burning with rage and urgency and the desire to personally kill him herself if that's what it takes to see justice done, and instead it just has a dull, throbbing ache. It's kind of a bizarre sensation, looking at a man who tortured four innocent people to death — oh, now the fire in her chest is back—

She doesn't really want to say any of that.

She's not sure what to say instead.

"I hope you regret it every single day for the rest of your life, and all the days after too," she says, after entirely too long of a pause. It feels entirely inadequate but she doesn't know what wouldn't be.

That doesn't seem like it would help anything at all. You can't make regret into diamonds.

"If I could bring them back by regretting it they'd be alive today," he says instead.

Killing her priest didn't undo any of his pointless stupid petty Asmodean cruelty but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing.

"Then I don't think I have anything else to say to you. ...If you do anything to hurt Valia you'll regret it."

"I'm not going to do anything to hurt Valia." I'm going to fix her eyes next time I see her - no, that's extraneous, what if this girl doesn't even know about Valia's eyes.

"Good." She glares at him.

Glare. She's not going anywhere but she's not making any attempt to stop him from leaving.

Okay, he's going to take a couple steps orthogonally and if she doesn't react to that he will go on with his day.

Last time she told him Gods go with you but this time she'd really rather they didn't.

She doesn't stop him from leaving.

He goes, with Iomedae's spells and Iomedae's symbol and Iomedae's commands, whether Victòria wishes them on him or not.