"When Iomedae lived she was a paladin of Aroden. What do you know about Aroden?"

"His symbol is the open eye. He was lawful neutral. Armasse was his major holiday. He created Absalom by raising it from the seafloor. He was the first ascended human deity, and the patron deity of Cheliax, before Asmodeus killed him about a hundred years ago. He was concerned with civilization and human achievement."

"Aroden was a man who became a god, and who believed that men ought to become gods. All of us, I think, ideally. As many of us as possible, definitely. He sponsored men to godhood, repeatedly; there are a dozen demigods who were once human men and women who he set on the road to godhood. Iomedae and Cayden and Norgorber, obviously, and Arazni, and Milani and Rixana and Dotara and Vadrus and Simaron and Doliu. He built the Starstone, of course. He was the god of the Empire. He was in favor of empires because he wanted to build Axis in this world, rather than tell everyone they have to wait for the next one. He wanted the world to be rich. He wanted every person to carry around pocket libraries and a thousand other things that I have witnessed and am not supposed to tell you about. 

Iomedae was raised in the empire, at its height, and thought it was making two important mistakes. The first is that it was spending too much of its might on stupid things that did not matter. The second is that it kept doing Evils that everybody said must be done, that civilization could not function without, and she suspected that many of them were not necessary. She fought in the Crusade against Tar-Baphon, she became powerful, and she started trying to build a civilization that did not spend its might on stupid things that did not matter and that did the evils which were necessary but not any of the evils which were not. Lastwall was her attempt at that. And then she became a god, the god of prioritization - doing important things that affect lots of people, choosing your battles based on how much you win if you win them - and the god of the thesis that you do not actually have to run a civilization on torment and cruelty, that Good is not weak and that a civilization which protects its people and deals rightly by them will be stronger than one that doesn't.

She is very opposed to Asmodeus. She intended that civilization would someday be strong enough to fight Hell for all its souls. She is very opposed to the Abyss and to Abaddon, for about the same reason. She is not particularly interested in fighting random doers of random evils, except insofar as this is a good way to make things better. In Menador the church seems to have just attempted reconciling with everybody, presumably because they thought that was an easier way to make things better."

It really seems like Cheliax was wealthier and had more libraries before the Iomedans took over - not a safe thought. Maybe those were the stupid things that did not matter - stop. It's not clear whether the church forgiving everything Narikopolus did should be alarming or heartening for her beliefs about what they'd like to do to her - no, probably they've forgiven him to exactly the extent that they've forgiven her, and they're just piloting him with much more precision. 

Focus. "Goddess of prioritization" is not a gloss of Iomedae she's ever heard before, but it kind of suggests that Select Wain was in fact operating on a pretty similar wavelength when she suggested beginning with the most powerful evils and then toppling more evils down the line, however far the line went, except that possibly they were supposed to start with an even larger evil and that was where she misstepped. Or maybe that's what fighting hell is, in places where Asmodeus doesn't have an organized church - finding the people who are dragging the most others down to hell with them, and either removing them or bending them towards absolute good, such that the souls in their power instead go to heaven. She can see why this would be a comforting thought to lots of people, even though - stop. She will try to find it comforting.

She should really think of a follow-up question, here. 

"What are her priorities in Cheliax, then?" There, that's probably a sincere-sounding way of asking what exactly the goddess of prioritization is trying to do.

"Holding the Worldwound. After that - the people of Cheliax are mostly damned, and we've got to keep them alive long enough they have a shot at making Axis. After that - the convention passing laws that make the country Good and prosperous and not inclined to invade its neighbors. I'm not sure how She'd want us to trade off between 'Good', 'prosperous', and 'not inclined to invade its neighbors', they're really all kind of very important. 'prosperous' has always spoken to me most, personally, and involves less conflict with people I want as my allies."

The idea that the Iomedans might care about prosperity on any level remotely comparable to the level that they care about good on is so mind-bogglingy distant from everything they've done that the only way she knows how to process it is as the sort of bald-faced lie that you are not supposed to try to reconcile with anything else. You're just supposed to accept it as a given, and understand that someday, when you're stronger and better and less pathetic, it will either make sense, or you will stop being required to believe it. It's so obviously false that a part of her is angry. 

By long force of habit, the spark immediately dies.

She supposes that this is technically a list of answers to which goods Iomedae cares most about, even if 'keep them alive long enough that they have a shot at making Axis' feels more like a frame around an empty space. At least Hell - no.

"I see. Then it sounds like they'll favor proposals that take strain off the crown's budget and free up more resources for the army, as long as the army is being used only in ways that are responsible. So the abandonment crisis is potentially of great interest to them for the same reasons it's potentially of great interest to the other people invested in the military, if there are any proposals that solve it by spending less money rather than more."

"I think the abandonment crisis is of great interest to them for many reasons, though I would not expect 'we could spend more on the army' to particularly loom large....hmmm. I guess we could free up our allies if we took over more forts at the Worldwound, and the Church would highly value that, but - I'm not actually sure what the main constraints are, for that, and it might well be qualified officers rather than funding, or teleporters rather than either. We should ask the Archduke d'Sirmium if he thinks it could be done and what he'd need to do it. If we can do more at the Wound then I suppose the Church would rather fund the army more but if we can't then I bet they'd actively prefer to have it smaller.

Anyway the abandonment crisis is obviously a disaster from an Iomedaen point of view because an enormous number of children are suffering and will probably be less likely to become law-abiding and productive citizens because of not being well-raised, and because their parents are doing evil in conceiving and abandoning them, and because it is costing us an enormous amount of money which we could otherwise put to better uses."

They suffered less before.

"I don't see how it's possible for Cheliax to have a shortage of qualified officers, unless -" oh, it's possible if they killed most of the qualified officers. How to end this sentence, now - "there's been a tremendous loss of staff since the war. Cheliax has held the northern border for decades, across all of its recent wars, and it doesn't seem plausible that an army that did that is incapable of training people to take on more." Don't say 'especially with this many people unemployed', she doesn't even mean that one as a dig but it absolutely sounds like a dig to her now. "I admit I don't know anything about our teleport capacity." They probably also killed the teleport capacity, in addition to shutting down the ways of making more teleporters, which isn't even a fair thing to be upset about because she's aware they apparently actually don't have money for it, but -

Korva. Stop it.

"We can't take over Lastwall and Mendev's forts with unreformed Asmodean officers because they will do an enormous amount of casual rape and murder and make our allies really irritated with us. Being an officer of a nonevil military is sufficiently different as to possibly be an entirely different job. If the Archduke of Sirmium can do it I think it'd be because he has enough of his own men to supervise all the unreformed Asmodeans. 

Most of the people capable of teleporting fled the country. That's the thing about people capable of teleporting, right. If they're nervous it is entirely trivial for them to go to Absalom and retire extremely wealthy."

That really sounds like Iomedae's top priority is not holding the worldwound. She supposes maybe they're holding the worldwound fine and it just isn't worth it to leave it to go after the second most important thing. But who even is there to rape or murder at a military fort in the middle of nowhere, besides your own soldiers? Just make a rule that they can't interact with anyone, she's pretty sure they weren't allowed to interact with anyone else anyway. It doesn't sound any harder than meeting their existing treaty obligations with Mendev, which they've been meeting fine for decades. This is the thing, they tell you they have important work that needs doing and then they refuse to hire people to do it, because it won't be done to their-

Korva.

"I would expect Cheliax to be able to meet its treaty obligations with Lastwall and Mendev, though maybe you would want to make a rule that Chelish soldiers can't interact with anyone outside their fort, to be cautious. And I'd expect that money could be used to hire more teleporters, if that's the bottleneck, even if not the same ones. But I don't know much about militaries, and I could be wrong."

"Cheliax is presently meeting our treaty obligations, which involve keeping our troops far from theirs under most circumstances, and I am confident we will keep meeting our treaty obligations, though I think the treaty has technically expired with the wound closed. The question is whether with further expenditures we can usefully help relieve the strain our allies are under in meeting theirs - they are much smaller and poorer countries, and holding their assigned borders is more costly for them than holding the north is for us. I don't know ...many things one would want to know to make such a proposal. I think that one can always hire teleporters but a wise person does not want to commit their military in a posture which can only be sustained by mercenary teleporters, as then the mercenaries have a great deal of power...but maybe the archmages could do it themselves at sufficient need. I'll look into it."

She supposes you can reconcile 'cares about prosperity' with everything the Iomedans have done if Mendev and Lastwall are both even poorer, so your bar for prosperity is even lower than where Cheliax is right now, and every time you hear that someone wants books or enough food that they're not hungry it sounds like they're complaining about not drinking out of jeweled goblets, because your baseline for a society that doesn't care about prosperity is somewhere north of Mendev where nobody grows any crops and everyone lives in animal skin tents and shivers for three quarters of the year. She tries to think how poor the Thanelands used to be - poor, okay, yes, and she didn't feel when she was reading about it that the poverty was completely crushing, but then again it was mostly about the landowners, who would be least hit by it and were in fact still kind of poor -

She's just filling space here to cover for the fact that she's not doing very well at either integrating this fact about Iomedae or accepting it without integrating it. She should really be asking about what is supposed to go in the empty frames, but she doesn't know how to do that without -

"Do you have any ideas what sorts of policies will work best for directly tackling the issue where most people are damned?" There. She's so smart. She's sort of aware that she began this conversation with the frame that she was trying to figure out whether the Iomedan church disagreed with her about anything important, and has now sort of inexplicably jumped to giving the impression that her priority is in fact just giving Iomedae whatever she wants, but she doesn't know how to fix that without pausing.

"Well, in Andoran Codwin tried encouraging them all to be Chaotic Good and that worked reasonably well but also produced a bunch of pirates so people are reluctant to follow his example. And he didn't solve the abandoned children thing at all. And Galt tried a very idealistic thing - they got rid of all the nobles, initially - and that led to a decade of chaos and bloodshed and then Cyprian. I think the Queen is hoping that if she just keeps as many people as possible alive during the difficult transition then over time many different people can try many different approaches to getting them Neutral, I don't know that she has a vision for it herself....the thing is that you don't need people to care about Good to want to escape damnation. If they have accurate information about Axis and about Hell and about what gets you to Axis instead of Hell they will all choose Axis. We've just got to get information to them. Which is part of what we'll be picking up in Lastwall tomorrow."

SHE'S TRYING TO ASK WHAT THE FUCK IT CONSISTS OF TO TRY TO BE GOOD TO ESCAPE DAMNATION. SHE IS ASKING IT AS DIRECTLY AS POSSIBLE AT THIS VERY FUCKING SECOND. HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO -

"I think I am asking more about what that information is, but I suppose if we'll be picking it up in Lastwall tomorrow there's little point in going into it all now."

" - about what gets you to Axis? Aren't you Neutral already?" Valia Wain rather made a fuss about it in her famous speech. "It's not that it's secret information, it's just that you've got to try two hundred ways of saying it to find one that lands with Asmodeans instead of getting horribly misinterpreted. Don't kill, rape, torture, torment, enslave, or terrorize people. When you've got enough to make do, give some to the less fortunate. All we'll find in the books is a great many attempts at saying that enough different ways that everyone finds one of them not confusing."

Korva honestly doesn't want to go anywhere right now, or maybe to go someplace nobody has tried to get her to go just to get away from everyone, and is going to have to re-examine her thoughts about that at some point when she isn't busy trying to have a dangerous conversation. It seems kind of maladaptive to select an afterlife to aim for out of spite.

"I'm not asking for myself, I just need the moving parts in order to think about how it can be fixed. The last time someone asked me why I thought I was neutral, I told them that when the earthquake hit I ran across town to drag the children at my orphanage out of the rubble before the fires reached them. I do not think this is a particularly reliable method."

"Probably not. People who are damned are mostly damned for the extended abuse of, or occasional murder of, other people. You can make up Evil by repenting of it, by sincerely becoming someone who would not do it again, or you can do as much Good as you did Evil - saving the lives of orphans from rubble, defending the world at the Wound. Voting at the convention to end slavery and not go to war and save our countrymen from hardship and suffering. Adopting orphans, I know the Erastilians are recommending that. Marrying a woman who has children and stepping up to be a good father to them. Anyway if it balances out, or even comes close, one'll mostly make Axis."

Marrying a woman who has children really doesn't seem like the same kind of thing there at all, though she supposes that if you're good to people generally then it makes sense that that counts towards being good. Non-evil. Whatever. ...she had not really thought about that as one of the reasons why someone might think she was an especially bad marriage prospect, but maybe she should.

"I am not sure everyone has a sense of what counts as extended abuse of other people. But I suppose that's probably enough to be getting on with. It - kind of suggests that the church should be broadly in favor of laws that place limits on powerful people's ability to do harm to the powerless, but I don't know if I'm imagining this to be a more convenient position than it in fact is."

" - I very much expect the church to be in favor of those proposals, just like the church supported abolishing slavery."

"Well, for example, not allowing legally enforceable general obedience clauses in contracts would be a significant help to the cause of not allowing the powerful to do unlimited harm to the powerless, but if they're in favor of marriage contracts having those by default, then they won't back it. In which case having a better idea of the set of things they will back is going to take more information about how things work in Lastwall in practical terms, and not just the two-paragraph version of the theory."

"I told the Lord Marshal that I wanted to work on a theory of what orders should not be legal to give in marriage, and he thought it was a good idea. Maybe in fact the situation in Cheliax is such that women should not promise to obey their husbands at all, but certainly it is such that there should be a clear understanding of the many things that obedience does not oblige them in. I would expect the Church to be more pleased about - a theory of which orders are illegal - than about a ban on promising obedience in general, because that will also disrupt the normal functioning of the army - but maybe you could persuade us nothing short of that is good enough, or that something short of that which is good enough won't pass the floor and this will."

"...I'll think about that. Though I don't think soldiers promise general obedience? You can't, like - I see what you're saying, but I don't think normal army contracts involve promising complete obedience to your superiors such that you would have to sign a contract adding years to your deployment if they told you to. Legally, I mean, obviously if they have leverage over you then they can force it by threatening you. I guess I've never read one and am mostly guessing from the fact that people mostly do eventually come back.

We were talking in rights about that being a specific limitation, not allowing contracts which force anyone to sign additional contracts, modeled on the idea that it would be an illegal order to tell someone to take an oath. But the problem with general obedience is that even if you carve out a few exceptions, you can still order people to do any number of other miserable things until they do the thing you're not allowed to force them to do, and then punish them if they refuse to do those things. Though an escape method like the religious orders would help."

"...I think that in most places soldiers swear to obey their lawful superiors for their term of service and it's just understood that their commander can't use that power to make them sign on for longer. And in Lastwall they swear to obey lawful orders, which would prohibit orders that are just about making someone miserable and also certainly prohibit oaths to sign additional contracts. But perhaps we will need an escape method for at least as long as it takes to train enough Lawful Good magistrates.

And - I think that probably even in countries not previously ruled by Hell there are women who aren't sure if their husband's treatment of them counts as cruelty or not, and if they got illegal orders training before marriage maybe then they'd know. It does not only strike me as a - necessary adaptation to Cheliax, but as an actual good thing, an improvement in marriage."

"In Cheliax an unbounded promise of obedience is in fact an unbounded promise of obedience, and usually asked for when a lesser promise wouldn't do, since everyone knows that one." Probably not literally everyone. "It does seem like having a list of things which one is not allowed to be obliged in would help, although I worry that - well, I guess prohibiting orders designed only to make people miserable would help, but when we talked about the scope of obedience it wasn't immediately clear to me how to apply it to marriage. One of the illegal order categories was orders which serve no lawful purpose, but it's very difficult to say what counts as the scope of obedience owed for a personal servant, let alone a spouse.

It's surprising to me that no one has written up a list of orders that wives are not obliged to follow from their husbands, if in fact in the rest of the world they are always expected to swear obedience but it's understood that this doesn't oblige them to follow every possible order. I would expect it to come up pretty often. But - if you think they'll be receptive then I'll think about what would be good policy. I do very strongly think that wives should not promise to obey their husbands without any such limitations in place, and I think it's a very important point for any proposal that aims to encourage people to marry and take responsibility for their mutual children."