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They do not lose Canorate the year Iomedae turns twenty-five. They lose most of the rest of Moltuna. Canorate itself languishes under a constant uneasy not-quite-siege. Fog and darkness hang low over the land; the sun sets early; the crops do poorly. Those who leave often do not return; no one goes out at night. The plagues come, and come again, and come again; Iomedae's order is of course mostly untouched by plague, and also growing, and so finds itself everywhere there is work to be done.
She gets a ring of sustenance. She ceases to eat and mostly ceases to sleep. She fills the extra hours with politics. She is disappointed with herself, for not doing it sooner. To have an army under your command is to have one lever by which you can move the world; to have all of the armies is to have all of them. Going to Oppara was a mistake but a mistake in two halves: half that she did not wait to do it until she knew how to do it properly, and half that she did not do it at fifteen. ...probably if she'd done it at fifteen she would have fallen.
Oppara is, as she knew in the abstract but didn't quite have the experience of knowing, not full of incomprehensible aliens, nor even of particularly evil men. It is full of lies, choked thick with them to a degree that makes the Crusade's internal communications look like the very model of clarity and virtue. But the Church is trying to support them here, in the north, and it has allies, and the problem is that it and its allies are at this point not even advantaged by the truth.
To say that a war is not going well is a gift to the peace faction, not the war faction. To say that it is very important is - meaningless, in Oppara, because everyone can say that things are very important, and there is no particular tendency to say it only when it is true, or to present only real proof of it. The Church has not bothered to determine if Tar-Baphon is really Tar-Baphon because it would not help them to claim that he is. The only thing that can help them is the ability to claim that the war is even more righteous and justified and guaranteed to succeed than they have already been saying. ...actually, that's not true, a lot of unrelated things can help them, like various people embarrassing themselves on completely unrelated policy issues, but not things Iomedae could meaningfully bring about.
They are, of course, underestimating what's at stake here, but the fact they're underestimating what's at stake here isn't even their main problem. They need the Emperor to decide it's worth marching his own armies to the front to turn the tides, and no one has any way to persuade the Emperor of that, and it might well plunge the Empire into decades of chaos even if they did persuade him, which doesn't move Iomedae much but does move anyone who thinks that merely millions of lives and not the fate of the world are at stake here.
Arnisant's conviction is that it will happen or it won't, and all they can do in the meantime is loyally fight to the end of their strength. Iomedae disagrees, but it is a complicated disagreement, and she is aware that she owes him better than for it to be a reflexive and unthinking one. Where she lands ultimately is that it is not what Aroden would have done. If He were here, as a mortal, on this front, He would be trying to determine how to win the war. And they are commanded to surpass Aroden, in far more verses than they are commanded to obey Him. Though also she would make her stand here and die, if she in fact believed that constituted obeying him.
She asks. Do I serve you best by waiting in Canorate for aid to come or fail to come, and building our strength for that battle?
No, says Aroden.
So there's something better. She just has to figure out what it is.
