She gives off the impression of holding everybody in utter contempt. It would be rude to complain about how someone from another culture comes across. Carlota will plunge bravely on. "There is more to do that matters in Axis than I imagined. Even though things like the present one that affect other planes are rare, they're rare because people don't tend to care very much about the happenings on other planes, not because there's any impediment if you do care to trying to do things with your own resources. And Axis has a trillion residents of its own, and doing things that matter to them is important. ...but I wanted Heaven. And I want it more now that I have subjects in Hell. If I came back I would be trying to get there, to listen to the Church even when the thing it demanded ran very strongly against the demands of my own conscience. And Iomedae's the only god of the Empire - unless that's changed and I haven't heard about it -"

"I thought that the Church holds that Iomedae retained none of the biases of mortality, none of her human attachments -" Lilia is in fact reasonably versed in Iomedaenism, having been spying on them for thirty years. She infiltrated the Reclamation half as a hobby, to see how long her pretend Iomedaens could last. 

"People are a product of their world. Even in the next one, even with lots of time to grow and change - in Axis people often cluster by culture of origin, at least for the first several centuries, because those are the people who understand the things that you care about. Iomedae is a god of the Empire, and a god of Aroden, and She did not cease to be of Aroden and I don't think She can have meaningfully ceased to have been of the Empire. She wouldn't favor it, over an Empire of strangers, but - She values courage. That's not a neutral thing, you know. Not all cultures value courage. There are some that relate to it as an idiocy to which young men are unfortunately prone. There are some that do not particularly contemplate it. In the Empire it was among the most important virtues. I would not have the people pray to a god who does not value the things they value, who does not elevate the Good they themselves are reaching for - even Asmodean Cheliax I expect valued courage. I don't see how you can have a country on Golarion at all that doesn't."

"Asmodean Cheliax had contempt for cowardice, which is in some ways similar."

"Well, it's worse but I think it probably gives you enough to work from. It's better than just not considering it an important measure of a man."

"Just of a man?"

"Mostly of a man. Some women need to also have the virtues of a man to be taken seriously - if, say, they're a duchess in their own right because all their brothers are dead - but unless a woman was doing the work of a man it would not have made any sense to condemn her as a coward. Women are not supposed to be ready to die for their homeland at a minute's notice. You don't particularly want them to do that or you won't have a next generation."

"I would expect that a culture that values courage highly and does not expect it of women ends up - not a very good place to be a woman?"

" - well, it's immediately better in life to be a man, right, for all the reasons it is generally better to be stronger. Though I think that actually women make Axis and Heaven at a higher rate than men, and there's a very important sense in which that's the true measure of who it's better to be. This also implies it is better to be a commoner, but a lot of people believed things that approximate that anyway, never in ways that inspired them to renounce their titles and become a commoner...well, very rarely in ways that inspired them to renounce their titles and become a commoner. There's a romantic appeal of sorts, right, to being a hard man who will sacrifice your own safety to do what must be done. It is not a romantic appeal that stands up to close inspection but - none of us were doing any close inspection -"

It seems to Lilia that it stands up to close inspection. "Why doesn't it?"

" - well firstly because almost no one is actually doing the calculus right. They are underestimating the goodness of paradise and the badness of Hell, because it's impossible to fit either into a mortal mind. But more impossible to fit the goodness of paradise in, I think. And secondly because - well, it's what I believed I was doing when I was actually in the service of Hell. It's what almost everyone believed they were doing during the civil war. It's just a very small slip, impossible to detect, from doing the terrible necessary things to doing a bunch of terrible unnecessary things -"

So you do both the terrible necessary things and the terrible unnecessary things, but the world is still much better off because you were willing to do all of them. "And instead you should do no terrible necessary things?"

"I mean, if I thought that I would definitely stay here in the safety of Axis where there are no terrible necessary things, even if you could afford to bring Jitiri back with me. The Material is full of terrible necessary things and the only way to avoid doing any of them is to abdicate all responsibility for doing things. But - you've just got to check, right. You just have to stop when you're in the middle of crushing your hated enemies and check. It's much much harder than just 'don't do bad things'. There is a reason the greatest of the Arodenite saints is the one who even attempted a theory of how to do the necessary bad things and not the unnecessary bad things."

"It was not Her church that freed Cheliax."

"- sure, but - maybe Her church was not even pursuing the policies that were best in expectation for freeing Cheliax. I don't know. But it's a high-variance sort of thing, and I would expect all the worlds in which it actually happened to look very different, and in many of them I'd expect the church to look foolish even if it was in fact positioned as well as it possibly could be. Not every resource that you position perfectly is going to be useful in most actual things that play out. You don't want to account value by what actually happened, but by what was worth it in expectation -"

It is a very appealing philosophy that you should evaluate Lilia not by the fact that she failed but by in what share of worlds she failed. Unfortunately it is appealing in the way that makes her discard it out of hand. "So then your own mistakes are - less, because you had no way of knowing Hell was making a play for the Empire, and usually Hell doesn't intervene in civil wars in the Empire -"

"No, no. There were rumors the Thrunes served infernal powers, everyone knew that Hell was intervening. We did not take seriously the possibility that they could actually win but we were not operating in total ignorance that they were trying, which would in fact make me only as culpable as anyone who prolongs a civil war which is still really astoundingly culpable."

"You made Axis, so I think you cannot have been all that culpable in the end -"

"I think Pharasma allows into Axis a great many people who have done unfathomable harm with their lives and could have known better. I do not know why she does this beyond observing that in fact we all do fine in Axis, and I do think an intended feature of judgment is that it sorts people based on what kind of civilization actually wants them....Nirvana aside. Hell is gleeful when it claims a participant in the Chelish civil war but Hell is not the thing those people build, given a chance. The Empire is the thing we build, given a chance, and it has its flaws but it was a monument to virtue as we understood it, and better with every passing century, and - Aroden was not neutral out of indifference between Good and Evil, but out of doing monumental amounts of both."

"What Good did you do?" ...probably that's a cruel question.

Not one she hasn't asked herself. "I don't remember the trial, I am not making any particular claims about my own case. It was important to me to feed the poor and protect the innocent and have a good man on the throne. None of those things actually happened, really, which is much of why I suspect one is judged in part off the performance in expectation of the policies one adopted."

"Can you tell me...the decisions you made, in the civil war? Or - starting earlier than that, I guess. I am not mostly interested in judgment but I am very interested in the choices that people were making and the reasoning behind them."

"Sure. As far as I remember it, which isn't perfectly. Being a petitioner makes it kind of difficult to remember being a mortal, your biology is different and the thought processes that are instinctive are different. I asked some people when I was considering going back and they said it works the other way, too, that when you're mortal it's hard to remember what it was like to be in Axis. You can remember all the facts but not the underlying processes, not as well .... anyway. I was sixteen when Gaspodar was assassinated, and he'd been effectively not ruling my whole life. Chelam was acting approximately like an independent principality doing diplomacy with nearby ones, with the expectation - which became more of a pretense, over time - that when the King recovered we'd naturally be again in his service. We had a favored candidate, among the claimants, a cousin of mine..."

"And so we were betrothed. Everyone agreed he was a violent madman, that he'd ordered a whole city slaughtered after it surrendered for suspected complicity with the Thrunes, that the littlest things would set him off... I knew it'd be awful. But sometimes it is our duty to endure awful things and I was pretty clear that this was one of those cases. Really the worst thing about it was that my parents clearly felt so terribly about it. They kept - flinching at it - it felt like I had to reassure them that I would do my duty without needing them to tell me it would be all right, that if they spotted any weakness in me then I would be injuring them -" 

Lilia's been finding something about the story of Carlota's parents betrothing her to an awful man for their greater plans to be very soothing but that part's just baffling. "...why?"