This Pharasmin has had second circle spells for about a week — she put down an awful lot of unquiet spirits after the riots — and frankly is kind of skeptical of this whole business. But the Calistrian's money is as good as anyone's, and it's not like there was anything else she was planning on doing with that spell slot.

Great. In that case Victòria will meet her at the Temple of Pharasma after the convention lets out for the day.

Early Judgment.

She finds herself at the bottom of a vast chasm, blanketed in ash and darkness. Jagged shards of hot glass dig into the soles of her feet. Smoke tinged with the scent of rotten eggs rises from a rift to her left, and when she inhales, she tastes blood in her mouth. In the distance, she can hear a woman screaming in agony, punctuated with chittering laughter.

Her head is pounding with the desperate, aching desire to hurt something, to track down one of the beasts of this realm and tear it limb from limb, to hurt them until they understand and then keep going. Her chest is blazing with hot, desperate anger at nothing at all. She tries to quiet her thoughts, just long enough that she can orient herself, but getting her mind to focus on anything else is like pushing a boulder up the sides of the chasm.

The Pharasmin is giving her a look of pity, or maybe contempt.

She's not — she can't be — Chosen Artigas is Neutral—

—if Pharasma thinks she's a worse person than he is, that's just saying — that's just saying that Good and Evil don't mean anything—

—only now that she's really, truly thinking about it, that kind of fits—

(It is Evil to want to hurt him, and if you call it Good, you're wrong, and if you act on this you're going to do a lot of Evil yourself, and if you keep doing this forever, you will go to the Abyss when you die, where you will hurt Evil people and be hurt by Evil people until one of them kills you.)

(That desire is Evil, and I hope that if I reach Heaven I will be cured of it.)

(Do you understand the thing I said, which is that hurting people is never Good?)

Pharasma would forgive Chosen Artigas for torturing innocent people to death in the name of Asmodeus, and condemn her to the Abyss for — what? For being angry at Guifré when she killed him? For being glad that he went to Hell? For hoping that he and Chosen Dalmau and her lord would feel some tiny portion of the hurt they dealt out to people who'd done nothing wrong?

(There's a scorching-hot fire blossoming in her chest, and she doesn't know if she's angry with Pharasma, or with Chosen Artigas, or with herself for not realizing—)

And, yes, she could stop. She's not in chains. She could walk away, and renounce Calistria, and go be a harmless fucking butterfly, and maybe she'd make the Maelstrom.

She'd just be giving up on everything that actually matters.

Her conscience has been crying out for justice against Chosen Artigas, against every man like him, who'd like you to believe that what they did was okay just because they stopped. She'd tried to beat that part of it down, telling herself it'd be Evil to hurt someone who'd stopped, and— 

Probably it would be Evil. 

But her soul knows right from wrong, no matter what Pharasma has to say about it, and making Chosen Artigas suffer the way he deserves to is blindingly, searingly, unshakably correct.

Let Pharasma damn her. She's not going to stop doing what's right.