bring children to grow strong | Glowfic Constellation

Asmodia is going to die.

She has a few days, probably. A week, if she's lucky. And then her lord's eldest son will return from the next town over, or Egorian, or however far he had to go to find a proper wizard willing to ride out to the middle of nowhere, the sort who can pluck the truth out of your mind and force you to confess it to everyone, and then they will torture her to death.

It'd be worth dying, if that's what it takes for her to kill Guifré, but that doesn't mean she wants to.

Or she can run away, and maybe they'll catch her or maybe she'll be eaten by wolves or maybe she'll make it to Andoran province. She doesn't actually know where Andoran province is, but even if she's probably going to die either way she might as well give herself a chance.

She makes it out of the manor house, barely, mostly thanks to the fact that the guard who's been tasked with making sure no one tries to flee is more interested in getting drunk on the job than in paying attention to anything but the front door. There's a little wood nearby. Not a real forest, just the sort of wood where people grow trees, but at least it'll have more cover than the road, and fewer people checking over her for travel passes. She jogs through it as fast as she can manage to sustain. Sooner or later someone will notice she's missing, and her best shot at living is to be as far away as she can.

?????????????

...But what about all the other gods?

......When she puts it like that it sounds like a kind of stupid objection but it's hard to think of any other way to say it. Everyone knows about — well, no, that's not true, no one here has heard of any of the gods she knows, except maybe Pharasma. But Asmodeus was definitely real, or something like him, and — the Asmodeans lied about a lot of things, but it doesn't make sense for them to have made up a bunch of better gods that didn't actually exist. If anything they'd have wanted to do the opposite, hide as many of the less terrible gods as they could — and she can imagine reasons some of the gods are made up, but there's no reason to try to convince people that Erastil is real if he isn't.

...His 'god' is actually at least three gods, and it doesn't really seem like anyone is trying very hard to make it seem like they're all the same. People can't be their own sons, that doesn't make sense. And he said that people here pray to Mary a lot, which doesn't make sense if she's just a regular human, even a regular human who never did anything Evil. Maybe it's really important to the Church here that everyone think their gods are the most important, that's not confusing at all, and... for some reason that involves pretending that their gods are all one god and the other gods don't exist?

"...Is it illegal to say that there's lots of gods?"