Iomedae is in fact looking forward to going to Oppara. If Aroden has one home on Golarion it is Absalom, of course, but if he has a second it is the seat of the Empire. And there is in fact a great deal more real power in Oppara. Absalom is, as she understands it, an attempted corrective to the Imperial City's shortcomings, but it is not meant to be a place that can order half a million men to march north, and Oppara is. And that is what she means to ask of them. She has been giving the speech as she goes downriver, to get a sense of its reception, to address followup questions, to make sure it's landing as she means it to. She does understand that it is a provocative speech. All of the people it specifically criticizes are dead, but still. 

It has to be said. She does not really think that they will be willing to kill her for saying it, and if they will, well, she's not sure that'll actually change that it is obviously her duty to say it.

She arrives in Oppara on the 23rd of Neth, which is making very good time, really, considering that she didn't depart until the campaign season was over.

The speech gets rapturous applause along the way, as she might expect, mixed with tears of sorrow and prayers of repentance. Men in the crowd volunteer to sign up for an army, or offer her money, or swear to write their cousins in the capital and tell them of the urgency. Noblewomen pledge their jewelry for the crusade, noblemen their swords. Three times when she gives it someone in the crowd has a religious experience and comes away a cleric - one Gorum, one Aroden, and one Ragathiel.

There's also the people dismissing her as just a silly girl, of course, and there are many of those, but they get fewer and fewer as she practices and polishes the speech along the way. Silly girls don't normally have armor and a sword and the ability to channel and a wizard following them around.

Oppara is the center of the world.

Now, there are people who will say that Absalom is the center of the world. Those people are wrong. The Porthmos drains a third of the Empire and when its mouth reaches the Inner Sea it is twenty miles across, and from the imperial quarter atop the Black Cliffs you can see twenty miles of sails of the ships of the Empire, merchant vessels going upriver and barges laden with grain to feed the city going down and the imperial war galleys (each enchanted and costing more than any wizard's headband) on their precise maneuvers, and if from there you turn your head west you see the endless sea that runs 'round the bounds of the Taldane Empire, and if you turn your head east you see the city. You see palaces without limit and temples of unmatched splendor, a tower of golden glass raised from the wreck of Azlant and erected here, their roofs shining - for Oppara is the city of gold, and every palace and temple gleams like the sun, turning every day into a marvel of lights, while the nights are lit by shows of fireworks, for this is the city of wonders and the wizards of Taldor know no match, in the wonders they can construct (seven floating castles alone shade the lower city, though law decrees none may reach higher than the highest tower of the imperial palace), and the barracks of the imperial guard has its own gilded roofs and their soldiers gild their helms, and these are the finest soldiers in all the world, for among them are the knights of a thousand orders sworn to uphold the righteous throne. The city sprawls for mile upon mile outwards, merchants and artisans, lords and laborers all safe within its walls, for ever before Aroden made the walls of Absalom He made the walls of Oppara, greatest of the cities of the world, and no engine has ever pierced them. (Since these walls are older, they are more powerful; this is how it works.) Thrice in history has this city fallen and never to an outside foe, for though there have been a thousand wars and a thousand conquests, for a millennium now the only foe that has ever truly challenged Taldor is itself. 

And it is through the triple gates of Taldor that Iomedae passes, and she is really not that remarkable by comparison because what is she, really? Just one more paladin? Is her sword even magic? We've got lots of paladins. We're Oppara, and she's not.

It is the only thing men have built that can stop Tar-Baphon and if her personal tastes run towards austerity that does not mean that she disdains it, for its spectacular wealth and majesty. They are spending their resources wrongly, but they don't know. No one has told them. And Iomedae, who would never have spent her resources this wrongly, also might not have built a thing like this in the first place, and would then be without an Empire capable of putting down Tar-Baphon. In the reaching of a million men for a million dreams there will be miracles wrought that none of them could have directed.

She spends half a day just riding the streets, and then walking them, noting the differences in the ways that people talk. She will never sound like she is from Oppara, but there is the advantageous way to sound like an outsider who will say the truth no one else can or will, and the disadvantageous way. 

When evening approaches she finds the grandest and most marvelous Church of Aroden and goes in to ask after lodgings, and whether they have a convenient way for her to provide her healing and her spells in the service of the Church. 

The grandest and most marvelous Church of Aroden in Oppara is exceedingly grand and marvelous, since it is in a grandness-and-marvelousness race with the grandest and most marvelous Church of Aroden in Absalom.  It is gigantic, because it has the backup duty of being the place where you can get the largest fraction of the city's population assembled when it rains, but that's secondary. The first priority is winning the race. The outer walls are merely marble painted and sculpted into images of the Marvels of Man, with idealized, heroic people cultivating crops and scribing books and killing monsters and building ships and ruling justly, because the outer walls are accessible at the range where anything too pretty might get defaced in a riot. (This is why it's only gilded higher than a stepladder will go.)

The inside floor is where it really starts. It's the world in stone of green for the grass and red for the mountains and blue for the sea flat like a painted plan, the world as it was when Aroden was young and Azlant was flourishing, drawn from old maps Aroden redrew from memory - but not exactly according to them, because the sculptor's brilliance has made it seem to bend away from you, to shrink and recede into the distance down as well as out, so that you seem to stand on a pinpoint so that it must have been painted from the outer rim of Golarion's orbit on a cloudless day, looking down on the world as a tiny precious jewel. The center is where Oppara will be founded, and it stretches away into the distance from there to show Avistan and Casmaron and Garund and Azlant, vanishing into the infinitesimal distance enough that there's little room for Arcadia or Tian Xia at all.

The inner walls, meanwhile, have moved from allegorical Man At His Labors to individual, specific men and women and angels, Aroden and Arazni and Sarnax and Simaron and Taldaris and a thousand others, all in the heroic acts that they were known for, and little scenes from the History and Future of Humanity scattered among them as Aroden forges the sword or the sinister algothollu plot the end of all, done in a riot of colors that demonstrates the sheer splendor of the paints the empire has access to, faces done as vividly as though they had been from life, and rising above them are the wonders man will ascend to with all the impossible arts of Azlanti wizardry illustrated slightly more fancifully, to suggest that they aren't quite depictions from life. The dome is, of course, the heavens, with innumerable stars all visible and the moving planets projected into it in their current locations relative to the world, moving slowly before your eyes. In an artist's depiction, a handful of the distant stars - mere pinpoints of light! - are surrounded by even tinier, dots distinguishable only by the flash of blue or green that marks them as the million worlds that are humanity's birthright.

As Cayden Cailean put it most of a thousand years ago, it's a beautiful fucking cathedral. There are a lot of stories about this cathedral - that the plans were dictated by Aroden, that the Emperor Taldaris himself marked the grounds for them and left them empty for he knew that no architect alive could raise his dream, that hidden in the vaults rests the crystal coffin of Emperor Sabbatios I of eternal memory, with many arcane runes engraved on the surface, reading, IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS AND REMOVE STAKE. But mostly it's just a really beautiful cathedral.

When she saw the one in Absalom, six years ago, it was a religious experience. She fell to her knees and lost herself in it, in the thing that Aroden had seen in mankind, the thing mankind had seen in return in Aroden, the incomprehensible beauty and ambition, the call to do the impossible just because you can, or just because your rivals can't, or just because you'll never know unless you try, the power of men wielding a whole civilization of hands. 

She does not feel that way, here. She looks at it and - yes. It is this she is here to protect.

She does not wish to feel this disconnected, from the thing that she is here to protect. 

(There are half a billion people in the world, and she's here to protect them more than she's here to protect this - 

- they are only in tension because she chose, in her imagination, to set them in tension, the actions she needs to take aren't competing -)

- It doesn't, obviously, have guestrooms for traveling paladins from the wars, even ones who are from some tiny noble family in the back of beyond. But there are lots of temples in Absalom and they can use channeling, so, yes, they will send her over to the part of the temple complex that handles assigning channeling and spellcasting for newcomers, it's in the same general area as the Church of Man's Destiny.

Probably both Oppara and Iomedae are making a great many complicated mistakes because that is the mortal condition. She can see the beauty of Oppara's project even while suspecting them of complicated mistakes; and all she can hope for is that they can see the necessity of hers even while suspecting her of some. She gives herself a minute, to take it in, and then goes to find that part of the temple-complex.

Grigore Dimitru has served Aroden for thirty years, and they have been thirty reasonably good years. He has two boys and a fine house and a smiling wife, heat in the winter and tickets for the races and wine with dinner and what more can a man really ask for? Aroden has never chosen him, but this is a minor side note in a long and peaceful life. He is Aroden's and Aroden is his patron, and if any attempt to describe the rest of his patrons produces an elaborate and dizzying maze of connections that would drive any conspiracy theorist to give up thumbtacks and string for strong drink, he is at least actually trying to serve the interests of Aroden in the Empire, and has chosen priests of Aroden who will tell him when he screws that up.

Also, he is a bureaucrat. "Welcome to Oppara, paladin. Your letters of commission*?"

(*: A fairly complicated concept that includes everything from "written orders from your boss" to "a note that says you're part of the imperial household" to "I am the high priest of Nethys and can do whatever I want, signed, me.")

Possibly she should've tried to get Oppara-specific ones but she decided on Oppara late in her planning, when they lost another city and she realized that it was quite plausibly going to be too late to do this next year. She has only the Knights of Ozem's charter with the Shining Crusade, which identifies her as their Knight-Commander. "Will this do?"

He will read it carefully. "Knight-Commander Iomedae of the Knights of Ozem?" He has never heard of the Knights of Ozem, but he hasn't heard of most tiny crusading orders on the frontier. "It will, Your Excellency."

"Thank you. I came here to get on the channeling and spell rosters, to get guidance on where I and my staff can lodge in the city, and to get recommendations on people I should speak with. I am here to do recruiting for the Crusade. I would like to give some speeches, but first I would like to speak to anyone with advice on how to better by my speeches serve my cause."

Her papers also confirm that she is authorized to recruit for the Shining Crusade and meticulously noting which titles and offices she is allowed to promise. She does a lot of it and is very good at it. If there were more time she'd just spend this winter getting even better at it, but there isn't.

"I can place you on the channeling and spellcasting rosters as fits your schedule," Grigore says, that's his job, "and the priestly lodgings at Ridgemont, Westview and Merithion all have space to accommodate you." Here is a map showing where they are. "The speeches will need to be cleared, of course."

"Who do I submit the speeches to?"

"Praipositos Emilian serves as protomandator of the Church," he says.

Praipositor. Protomandator. Important to remember, probably. "Thank you. And where do I submit the speeches to him?"

"His office is within the temple quarter. If you will wait just one moment -" Grigore will ring a tiny bell, summoning a junior priest to serve as a messenger! The junior priest will bow to both of them! "For Praipositor Emilian, should he have a moment." And he can hand a scribbled note to the messenger, who can bow and head off.

"Thank you!" And she'd like to get lodgings settled before it starts to get dark - it's not that she's not perfectly safe on the streets even of dangerous cities in the dead of night, but it's slightly indecent to be wandering then - but she takes it they are to linger, so she can get her speeches to the censor promptly, so she'll admire a mural and wait.

After about twenty minutes the messenger will return and transfer her to a waiting room in another building across the street. It's a very pretty waiting room, there's tapestries on the door and comfy couches and someone comes in regularly to ask if she needs wine or water or anything.

She does not need those things. It is a luxury, to have a little time to spend doing nothing in particular, and she will spend them in prayer and discussion with her staff. 

"The speeches need to be cleared?" asks Angelu, quietly. "Why?"

        "So we don't step on anyone's toes. I was - particular about not picking examples that are specific enough to name any man from them - except Guiretz, you can guess it's him but he's gone on hopefully to Heaven - but I expect it'd cause a right mess if we said outright that any of the lying was being done by the Crusade's current generals.

"Well, then they shouldn't all be lying all the time."

        "I think... it's complicated? I do think that the generals of the Crusade are - acting in a way that endangers the whole world. But I think they also imagine that if they were truthful it would make things worse, not better, and - it would probably make some things worse in the short term, worse nearby, because the system is not one that tolerates the intervention of truth very well. I think they are looking around at what options they actually have and picking the best one, and - the problem is that none of the actually winning options are in reach at all.

I am hoping that the Empire tolerates the truth better if you intervene with the truth where the people actually making the most important decisions are. They have no excuse, here, they aren't fearing they'll get no support at all if they admit how badly the last battle went, they aren't responsible for getting men fed and healed ahead of whatever responsibility they understand themselves to have to the empire as a whole. ...anyway, even if a man would deserve to be condemned for having lied to his Emperor and his country about how badly the war was going, it wouldn't serve our cause to bring that about, not - selectively in the cases where I happen to know the whole lurid story, not where it's all of them, not where half the time they're lying to themselves -"

"If I were the Emperor and I learned everyone had been lying to me I don't think I'd go 'well, it's all right since it was all of them'. If you ran across an enormous bunch of bandits, you wouldn't say, well, it'll be terribly disruptive to kill all of them, they're all doing it -"

        "I have some inclinations in that direction, actually, if the bunch of bandits gets large enough. A bunch of bandits of sufficient size is just an ill-disciplined army and you should in fact improve those, where you can, what with our terrible need of more armies. We want the Empire to realize they're losing the war and help, not to condemn everyone for not telling them sooner. I think you've got to have the part of the speech that's about how everything you hear in Oppara ends up being a lie, because it is very very important for people to understand it, but I would rather not alienate or anger everybody any more than absolutely has to be done to get the key point across. ....anyway if the Emperor has managed not to notice that everyone thinks they have to lie to him then that would be - surprising. I think sometimes it's quite noticeable, and I'm sure he's a wise man. He probably has no idea the extent of it or that it's about something that matters this much in this case but I cannot imagine the basic dynamic will shock him any."

"And if the Emperor does take it seriously, and recalls them all to put them all to the sword for lying to him?"

        "- that's his right but if there is some way I could instead by giving a different speech get him to instead just send more help and leadership which won't tolerate it I would really very much prefer that. It is very very important that he understands that none of the reports out of the north are true, but there are many possible things one could choose to do about that, and were he to end up understanding the situation the way I understand it he would send more help."

"Are we speaking to the Emperor?" Lide asks, incredulous. 

     "I really doubt it! But if we speak to enough people, and enough of them are taking it seriously, then someone'll tell the Emperor that it's being said, or at least that's my understanding. And then he can talk to us further if he wants to."

"So the speech-clearer will make sure we don't offend anyone?" says Angelu. 

      "I assume that the speech-clearer will object that I'm absolutely going to offend some people but will help make sure I am not doing it by accident, or without great need. Or maybe they will insist I give a very carefully inoffensive version of this speech that goes halfway to implying all the lying is enemy intervention...I did write a version like that, because there is almost certainly some enemy intervention to that effect, but I would have to pray very carefully on actually giving it, if they are not comfortable with my just saying candidly what's really going on. Anyway - it's their city. I am trying to help them save it; they can tell me what things I want to say will actually help do that. In a matter like this everyone has a common purpose and I am happy to defer to them about how to get it done, so long as they understand that it needs to get done."

"...do they understand that it needs to get done?"

"This is Aroden's Church! If I cannot persuade them of my case we can just ask Aroden!"

She's going to be sitting here for a few hours.

She is not upset about this! They have as of yet no grounds at all to believe the fate of the world is at stake! She will read the speeches back to her assistants, and then write a lot of miscellaneous Oppara inspired philosophical musing about luxury that will probably be a sermon once it has consolidated.

After a few hours she will be politely escorted into the room of Praipositor Emilian, who looks the archetype of the sober, dignified priest of Aroden, with his white beard and bald head and eagle's-beak nose, his rich green and gold robes and holy symbol made of gold and set with emeralds and his fancy Wisdom headband.

(Praepositor Emilian is chosen of Aroden. One has to be, really.)

"Welcome, Knight-Commander," he says in the sort of voice that suggests (to someone from the sticks) wisdom, cultivation and dignity, and (to someone from Oppara) that this guy is either a well-educated imperial functionary or a con man.