"Oh, I'm sorry, I just had this memory of you throwing some of my last remaining possessions away and cursing at me. I see now that this was a totally unemotional reaction on your part."

"Sorry."

"Had a note in the inside cover from my dad."

She sighs and picks up her pack.

"'S just a book, though. Could have done worse."

"Well, Asmodeus says he'll win so there's no difference between good things and bad things anyway. 

 - sorry."

She smiles a tiny bit, very tiredly.

"People can't actually live like that, you know, not wanting anything more than anything else. Even Asmodeus doesn't expect it of people, he just promises he'll return us to it someday."

"And you want that?"

"Easier than incurable disappointment, probably."

"If you think people should be slaves I don't see what your problem is with how Osirion treats women. Is it that we don't do it to men too?"

"I - think that if people came to want nothing, then it wouldn't hurt them, not having it. But it takes a lot to break the wanting out of someone. It sounds - horrible, I think, to want as much as anyone else, and to be denied all independent power to attain even the parts that are achievable, and to be told that the masters who have chained you up and discarded half your gifts have done so out of love."

"I don't think I buy that it wouldn't hurt people not to have things if they didn't know to want them."

"Then maybe we'll all hurt forever."

"If I thought that was true I'd help the Rovagug cultists finish their job."

" - y'know, it's weird, I don't think I would."

"Is that weird? 'maybe we should end the world' is a pretty fringe opinion."

"Yeah, I guess it is. Just - if I were making a list of stuff that was important to me, I don't think 'not hurting' would go at the top of it."

"- I mean, it'd be one thing if Hell involved doing important stuff but also hurting, or learning new things but also hurting, or protecting others but also hurting. But it's - just being tortured forever. Unless you become something that does nothing but hurt others yourself."

"Like I said. Takes a lot to break the wanting out of people."

"And if he succeeds you torture people forever. That's not better, that's worse."

"Not forever. Until all the little toy soldiers learn how to march in lockstep when ordered. And then we get to find out why we were conscripted."

"So, forever, because a lotta people are just really not the lockstep type."

"Not in this life."

"How much -"

He shakes his head.

He sits down and stares at the break in the tunnel.

"Any idea if there's another way around?"

"Might be but I don't particularly care to disappear from where we were last seen, when they have most of the firepower. If they haven't come for us tomorrow morning we can try to find our own way out."

"I guess that makes sense."