Asmodia’s childhood feels idyllic, for the most part. She helps watch her brothers, and then helps with the goats, and when she’s a little older, herds the goats herself. She takes careful notes on what she sees looking down from the hilltops. If she goes to the right viewpoint and it’s a clear enough day, she can see all the way to Aspo Bay. She climbs rocks and runs through meadows and watches the stars. 

Her family plays Pretend. Pretend works like this: if father is wearing this hat, mother this shirt, or if either knocks on the table this way - it is time to Pretend. They must always be ready to play Pretend with a moments notice. No laughing, no shrieking, no smiling. If they do not Pretend well enough, it’s a whipping. If one of them is insufficiently stoic watching one of the others get whipped, it’s double the whipping for both. 

Their house has more guests than you might expect for its remoteness: some of the guests are familiar faces over for dinner semi-regularly, living somewhere else in the hills, and some of the guests are strangers, seen once and never again. Which type of guest it is doesn’t matter: if there are guests in the house, it is time to play Pretend. 

Asmodia doesn’t remember learning when the rebellion in Galt started. As far as she can recall that’s always been going on. She is aware, vaguely, when Andoran rebels. It coincided with an increase in unknown guests passing through her house, and an increased frequency at which she’s sent to the high pastures with the goats more often than the low ones, her mother carefully looking over her notes on what she’s seen when she brings them home. 

When she and her brothers are small, there is no school. They learn their letters at home, from the Asmodean Disciplines and from a handful of other books that are always carefully hidden away after they come out. 

One day her father grimly makes an announcement: the village is getting a school teacher. They are to make the two hour trek each way every day that school is in session. They and everyone under 16 in the surrounding hills. 

This schoolteacher is coming with a handful of men for defense - the last schoolteacher, a while back, got eaten by monsters shortly after arrival. Not quite as good as the mountain-folk in knowing how to avoid them, you see? 

Now Pretend has a new rule. Now it’s not her parents doing the whipping - she and her siblings are supposed to whip each other, if anyone breaks the rules at home.  

School starts. It’s worse than the whippings that they got if they failed at Pretend but she’s better at being just good enough to not be on either side of the whip. They’re all in one class, oldest to youngest, and she doesn’t entirely escape having to whip her brothers, but she does manage it stoically. 

Life goes on, in much the same way as before, except slowly getting worse. One student doesn’t survive his whipping. The cleric comes to the village more often. 

One day: the village gathers, the sermon occurs, but this time it’s different. It’s time for her to watch her first handful of executions. A couple that had been in her home more often than other local families. All but one of their children. The execution is slow. The cleric’s soldiers and the teacher’s soldiers watch the crowd, pulling out a handful of people who aren’t as skilled at keeping their expressions clear. Most of those survive their punishments, but not all. 

Asmodia watches the whole time without flinching. 

“Do you think it’ll be us, next time?” she asks her father, high in the hills with the goats. 

“It might be.” 

“What happens to the people who pass through here?” 

“They go on to Andoran, usually. Sometimes they're on their way back.” 

“I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I - don’t?”

“You can always choose to do something different than what you’re doing.”

“But - the rules are have always been so strict-”

“The rules were just until you were old enough to stand a chance at choosing something different. Sometimes all the other choices you have are worse. But you can always choose differently. Are all the choices you have worse?”

“ - I want to go to Andoran when the next group passes through.”

“May we meet again in Elysium if we don’t see each other again here.”

“- I - didn’t realize that was where you wanted us to aim at.” 

“There wasn’t the space even in these hills to point you at both good and free, but I hope you can grow into it anyway. One day, everyone can grow up to be free and I hope you and your brothers can forgive us for raising you here before that day happened.

- We couldn’t give you all the freedom that is your birthright, the freedom that my fathers father had in these hills, but - I hope we gave you enough of the taste of freedom to be able to help it blossom again when the time for that comes.” 

Asmodia is more help than hindrance on the trek, having been hiking these same mountains since she could walk. She doesn’t stay with the group in Andoran - no one said she had to and anyway, she could always choose not to - she turns right around and asks how she could help the next group do that again.

It’s a while before she makes her way home again. There are a lot of routes through the mountains and she goes through different mountains and forests besides. 

The first time she comes back, she collects the notes that one brother had been taking high in the hills as a goat herd, promises the other brother that he can come if he’s a little bit older - he can come now if he insists, she’d take him even if father said no, but she thinks it would be better if he was a little bit older. 

She’s wrong. 

The second time she comes back, there is only a burned out husk of a house waiting for her. Half the village is gone - the families that spent more time in her house than most, all gone, their corpses on display in the village center. 

She leaves. 

Asmodia has a real travel pass now. She delivers letters and sometimes people. She specializes in the roughest routes and avoids cities. She has a knack for avoiding monsters on the road, especially in the mountains, but she doesn’t manage it quite every trip. 

There’s an overnight attack and while she and her charge are still alive as dawn breaks, it’s unclear whether they’ll make it to dusk, much less to civilization. 

She is already praying as dawn is breaking and she abruptly notices that this is having a more tangible effect than usual for prayer. She’s not sure whose spells they are, but she has a good enough guess - her first try as a holy symbol works. Freedom, luck and travel. Dreams and the night sky. This suits her. 

This changes relatively little for what the shape of her life looks like. She now has even more reason than before to avoid cities - as far as she can tell, the main new risk for her is Asmodean clerics with Detect Good. When other people are watching, she only casts things she can try to pass off as sorcery. She can take some more risks with the paths she chooses to take, with the ability to create water and detect poison and heal. She covers ground faster on foot. She takes to making decisions with a coin flip, when she feels like it. Most of the time she takes the outcome of the coin flip. Sometimes she doesn’t.

One of the times that Asmodia does take the outcome of the coinflip, it goes badly. She goes into a small town, to pick up and drop off letters. She doesn’t come out for a month. 

While she’s there, the forces of Hell are driven from Cheliax. The cleric that was holding her was killed by Reclamation troops before he got around to killing her. 

She thinks she might have managed to laugh at him, if she could tell that she was finally going to die, her afterlife still secure despite his best efforts. Maybe that’s why he didn’t bother. 

Asmodea tries not to notice how much less happy she is after the war than before. Hell is defeated and the people are free! 

When she does notice it, she blames it all on the aftereffects of being held in captivity. That’s not that surprising, she supposes, even though in some ways that’s stupid. Nothing really permanently bad had actually happened to her. She healed up just fine. She still has her spells and that means she still likes where she’s going. She’s in fact so lucky that she somehow managed to escape certain Malediction thanks to the literal overthrow of the forces of Hell in Cheliax.

Why isn’t she basking in her newly increased freedom, knowing that the Goddess of Fortune smiles upon her? 

She still avoids cities, but now that her god is legal she stays in towns more often, spends less time in tiny far-flung isolated villages. They need the healing and the water more - at first just towns that the Reclamation has gotten to and cleared of priests, later on everywhere as the remaining Asmodean clerics lose their spells.

She tries to preach but - she’s not actually good at talking to most people. She’d specialized in conversations with people who were already known to her to be trustworthy or the people who she picked out herself to gamble on. She’s good at staring down a person and asking them a few questions about themselves and determining whether they’re safe. 

She’s never tried to say true things to even a dozen unrelated adults at once. She doesn’t know how to talk to these people, she’s spent her entire life trying to avoid having a sincere conversation with them. 

She wants them to know that they should repent and become good and become free, but she can tell she doesn’t have any particular skill at telling them this. She tries anyway.

The baby arrives eight months after the war begins and ends.

It makes things easier in some ways and harder in others. She doesn’t sleep as much, of course. But it feels a bit more okay, that all she’s doing is feeding him and creating water and channeling. She’ll worry about preaching when he’s a little bit older and she’s had a little more sleep each night. 

She doesn’t name him yet - she doesn’t remember about Thraxus but very faintly recalls that Infirius wasn’t named until he was a year old. She’ll wait until then too, a small way of keeping a maybe tradition alive. 

She won’t be able to name him after her baby brother though. 

She can’t even keep her own name, though it’s the last thing she has of her parents, at this point. There’s too many people who think not changing the name is a sign of sympathy for the old regime. She’s not sure if it’s worse when they threaten her about it or when they murmur their mistaken solidarity.  

She tries on a half a dozen unobtrusive ones, one in each new town she passes through. None of them feel right.

She hears about the convention, about the seats for clerics, and makes it to Westcrown the evening before it’s supposed to start. 

The city is too big, too crowded, too full of Asmodean temples appearing in front of her as she rounds corners. 

She hopes that all the slots for Desnans have been filled, so that she can know the seat is filled with someone who represents the interests that she and her god share, but they aren’t all full yet. 

So she should stay and take a slot, if there isn't anyone else for it. Maybe the convention can do something about the slavery. Maybe the convention can do something about how things aren’t good yet. 

She decides to go by Desnia here. At least that will make it clear to everyone else why she’s there.

The night going into the convention, her baby sleeps even less than usual, sick and feverish. She preps Remove Sickness in all her spell slots, but it doesn’t stick any of the times, only helps for a couple hours at a time. She’s barely awake through the first day, and ducks out with the baby whenever he cries. In her haze she doesn’t manage to join any committees, in the initial mad rush for seats.  On the second day, it looks like all of her spell slots of Remove Sickness and the passage of time have helped, but she now hasn’t slept for a second night in a row and doesn’t feel any more capable of giving speeches or elbowing her way onto committees. 

Things happen, in a blur. The floor vote she remembers most clearly is the vote on slavery being Asmodean. Maybe this means they’ll vote on ending it soon? 

The Iomedaen cleric has a beautiful speech, all rousing and crisp and good. Is that what she’s supposed to have been trying to sound like? She’s uneasy for reasons she can’t pin down even as she succeeds at not showing on her face how close she is to crying over how beautiful it is. 

That night, the riots came. She sticks around long enough to use up all of her channels that evening and the next morning and to let the convention know that she’s alive, and then she disappears for the rest of the week, finds a small place far outside of city where she can be useful in the ways that she’s used to and can still see the stars clearly at night.

Desnia returns to the outskirts of Westcrown the night before the convention resumes. Catches up on the rumors, skims the pamphlets.

The pamphlets are still there. She’s not a strong enough reader to even try to keep up with all of them. But they are maybe her favorite thing about the city. 

Valia will live. There are charred remains of buildings, but there are no corpses displayed as warnings. 

She eventually remembers that delegates are now allowed to stay in the palace. She goes there instead of trying to find another inn again. It - feels a bit like being trapped. But it’s cleaner and quieter and much closer to the convention than the tiny room she had been booking before - and it is free. 

She’s not spending almost any of the delegates' stipend and she already had a pile of savings going into the convention, even though she hasn’t been trying to charge as much as she could for spells unless the customers looked rich. Being able to operate openly now helped, but also before the war, she knew how to convert money into people she could help smuggle out of the country, and now she doesn’t have a particular sense of what she could do with it. 

Pay someone to look after the baby so she can pay attention during the convention and sleep through the night? Buy Remove Disease when her baby is ill because Remove Sickness usually doesn’t stick? Those would have helped last week. But last week she was also too tired to figure that out. 

She sleeps. She doesn’t dream, or at least doesn’t remember her dreams. 

She wakes up more rested than the prior two convention days. She nurses the baby. She prays and prepares spells.

She still doesn’t manage to say anything, during the floor speeches, but she manages to at least follow the arguments, start recognizing recurring faces, and remember most of the votes. 

In favor of another convention in the future. Against a law and order committee, in favor of the paladin for appointments if there absolutely has to be one. Something about magic that she doesn’t think there was a vote on, but maybe she missed it, the baby was fussing and it didn’t seem like the worst time to step out. In favor of censorship, going mostly on her impressions of who was speaking for and against - on the text of the law, opposed, but she could just barely follow along well enough to conclude that it was this or something worse? She hates politics. Abstained on the forms vote, she wasn’t quite following the arguments.

Detect Fiendish Presence hasn’t detected anything in a long while now, but she still picks it every morning and casts it whenever the anxiety gets particularly bad. See? Still nothing. 

At the start of the slavery debate, the deeply annoying though possibly not actively evil noble claims that the Iomedean cleric was an Asmodean one, and she reflexively starts casting Detect before she works out where he was going with that. Still nothing. 

She hasn’t talked to that priest, because she still mostly hasn't talked to anyone yet. She had been mentally bucketing him into definitely not Evil, along with enough of the clerics that she was mostly managing to not be constantly on edge about the number of powerful strangers in the room with her in addition to the exhaustion. 

Suddenly it has stopped feeling tolerable. She did not indicate this except by a slightly increased tenseness. She wasn’t the only one who had reacted at that, though of course it was hard to say who felt more or less strongly. 

She knows how she’s going to vote here, she doesn’t need to follow the arguments. She makes an attempt to track who speaks for and against. She holds the Detect until it runs out. 

By the time the time to cast votes comes around, the baby is bawling at a level where she’d have otherwise stepped out, but she’s not missing this vote, not if she’s sharing the room with an Asmodean priest, not if she’s bothering all the other delegates. She casts her vote and ducks out before she hears the results - but a few minutes later the Mage’s Decree rings out. 

The slaves are free and she helped make it happen.

This helps enough to make the final floor session bearable. She manages to not keep casting Detect Fiendish Presence - this would be noticeably weird behavior and she can manage to keep it together as well as anyone else in this room.

Against criminalizing slander, in favor of truth being a defense - why are people like this, how can people think this, why can’t she figure out what to say to explain what’s wrong with what they’re doing?

She thought she might try her hand at committees, but not after all that. She goes into the city. She eats lunch. She collects pamphlets while they’re still being handed out. She’s not sure if the ban didn’t take yet or if people are breaking the rules about it. She doesn’t care. 

She goes back to her room for a long nap, she has reassuring dreams that she doesn’t quite remember, she basks with her baby in the sunlight in a patch of grass, she reads the pamphlets she collected. 

She reads Artigas’ pamphlet. Now that he’s not in the same room as her, just a few rows away, thinking about this is less unbearable. 

The Select is a cleric of a Good god. She believes in the possibility of redemption for - anyone, everyone. 

She prays, she flips a coin. 

Maybe if she goes to talk to the priest at the Asmodean Iomedaen temple, he will tell her why he now chose to do good instead of evil and she will believe him well enough to feel less insane. Or at least well enough to not feel the overwhelming need to keep casting Detect Infernal Presence and track where he is relative to her. 

She prays some more, she flips a coin some more. 

She’ll try the temple and then she’ll find some other delegates to talk to and then she’ll strategize about how to actually manage to engage with the rest of the convention.