Vanyel stays with Moondance most of the rest of that afternoon, until he asks to please be alone, at which point Vanyel can bring him to the other Work Room so he can get some space from Starwind, and leave Kilchas just outside the door to keep an eye on him. 

He's so tired, in a way that has nothing to do with his perfectly adequate two hours of sleep, but - it could be worse. 

Khemet Plane Shifts to the demiplane the next day; Urtho hadn't asked for anything all day, though a scry confirmed that he was mostly reading quietly and not attempting suicide in despair or anything. 

(The demiplane is designed to make that difficult. The curtains are gauzy and rip at the slightest pressure, and the bedsheets are the exact opposite - nearly impossible to tear without a knife, which there isn't.)

Urtho is sitting by one of the trees outside. He sets his book down in his lap. "Should I come in?" 

"You can stay out here if you would like." He sits down not too far away. "I just wanted to check if you were doing all right. We gave you - a lot to come back to."

"I feel I cannot really complain about the circumstances, when you are the one who restored me to life." Urtho's expression does indicate that he has mixed feelings about this. "Thank you for the books." 

"Of course." He waits a moment to see if Urtho thinks of anything else he wants to say.

"I do not mean any offence, obviously you can do as you wish," Urtho says, a little hesitantly, "but - how long are you planning to leave me here? It is - somewhat lonely." 

He nods. "I would hate it. I can take you back to my home country right now, if you'd like. There are a few things I would want you to know about first."

"...Yes, I think I would like that." He's also scared, but - if this strange man who's raised him from the dead means him harm, it would be a lot easier to harm him here, where he can't access magic. And he really doesn't want to stay in this strange (incredibly) miniature world forever. "Go on." 

"My world is not like yours in that there are places where people go when they die. They are sentenced to one based on how they lived their life. One of them, for people who did evil in life, is called Hell, and there the people are tormented into submission and enslaved to the will of the ruler of Hell, Asmodeus. A hundred years ago, Asmodeus took over a country in our world. The gods usually act less directly than that, but there was a sudden power vacuum. He made the country so - everyone in it counted as evil. They were routinely taught as children to do evil things, the coins they used were tied to evil causes...almost everyone from the country was sentenced to Hell when they died.

Ma'ar - learned of this. And his army was among the forces that fixed it. And now he governs there. I understand why you would have worries about this, but he is honored and trusted by the allies he aided in the defeat of Hell, and it is important that you not try to harm him whatever his past misdeeds."

Urtho is silent for a long time. He doesn't seem to know what to think. 

"I...will not defy your world's leaders," he says finally. "It has been a very long time since he was the young man I knew, and - it does concern me, that he seeks power in your world also, but his allies know the man he is now better than I." He shakes his head. "I have learned my lesson - it is a mistake to address what frightens me by starting a war about it." 

"Thank you. If you'll take my hand, for the Plane Shift -"

Urtho takes a deep breath, and takes Khemet's hand. 

The land in the middle of the desert, because of course they do, and then Word of Recall takes them to a temple of Abadar in Sothis. He summons some people over to take Urtho to the quarters that have been arranged for him at the palace. There are magical researchers who'd be delighted to meet him.

Urtho is kind of overwhelmed, there's a lot happening right now and all of it is bizarre and confusing, but he'll go with the flow, and he's never going to turn down an opportunity to discuss magic. 

He drops Leareth a Sending with two pieces of news. "Starwind and Moondance apologetic once Break Enchantment directed at pact with goddess. Worried goddess will escalate. Raised Urtho. He's at the palace."

Leareth's reply just thanks him for the update. He's too stunned to come up with anything else on the spot. 

He gets through the rest of his current meeting with city administrators, and then cancels his afternoon plans and goes back to his rooms and curls up on the sofa. He has no idea what to say or how to feel or what to do about any of it. 

If Vanyel were here, Leareth would consider talking to him, but Vanyel isn't here, he's in Haven with his Tayledras friends, who were apparently literally mind-controlled by their Goddess - on the one hand it's not that shocking that the pact is a magical construct which Break Enchantment can hit, Golarion Enchantments are so overpowered so Break Enchantment is too, but on the other hand... It feels like it means re-evaluating a lot of things and he's not sure what those things are yet, and either way he can't make room to think about it because his entire brain is suddenly full of emotions about Urtho. 

He considers talking to Abadar but it's absolutely not worth the headache, and besides, this is probably the sort of human thing Abadar doesn't understand. 

Instead, after some consideration, he prays to his now-much-clearer sense of Iomedae. I need advice. She doesn't have to answer if it's too frivolous a question, but it seems worth at least checking. 

And he falls and there she is, sharp-eyed and armored and ageless. Sitting closer than she was the first time. 

"I need advice on..." Leareth's chest feels tight, even though his body here is presumably a metaphor. "Khemet raised Urtho. He was - my teacher, my mentor - friend - my enemy... His death was my fault. He betrayed me - his weapon caused the Cataclysm - he did not mean to do any of it, and I - just..." He is absolutely going to cry, apparently, something about Iomedae makes that happen.

"He - tried to show me what Good was. And I do not think he ever succeeded. The thought I had. When we spoke. Is that you could have showed me in a way I understood..." Leareth doesn't know how to explain what he wants, what he desperately needs, any more clearly than that. 

She nods. There's a pause. There's maybe very faintly, in the distance, only because he got a much stronger sense of it when he talked with Abadar, a sense of a god shuffling concepts...

"I am interested in ways in which the war between Good and Evil is asymmetric," she says. "Tools and tactics we possess which they do not, and vice versa. It is known to you, it bothers you, that there are tactics Good people will avoid, while Evil ones won't hesitate to stoop to them. This is an asymmetric advantage for Evil. Hell is full of slaves that made weapons for Cheliax; Heaven isn't. Asmodeus's country can announce that if you hide a traitor your family will be killed alongside you; my country cannot.

I think the correct concept of Good - the one that wins the war - is one which brings out strength in people that Evil cannot bring out in them, one that inspires transmission in a way that Asmodeus's ideology, despite a hundred years of tinkering, does not and so never really caught on anywhere He couldn't indoctrinate people with it from birth. And therefore Good must be - shaped for those aims. It must tell ordinary people that they possess the strength to do extraordinary things when their families, their countries, their futures are at stake. And it must be a target which, when they aim at it, will actually cause them to mostly do things that actually help or at least don't hurt. Because they are young, and foolish, and confused - you're confused, too, Leareth, and I am confused, what Good really is is an unimaginably hard question - and because they're in a world whose other actors are young and foolish and confused, and looking for cues they can evaluate quickly about who is a threat to them and how that threat is bounded. 

If someone admired you, Leareth, and saw what you were trying to do, and set themselves to trying to do it too, but they were not quite as careful or quite as clever, what would happen?"

"...They would make mistakes. Misjudge the benefits of a path of action, or fail to see its true costs... I have made such mistakes before. It is not impossible I am still making them now. And - most people's decisions do not leave great marks on the world one way or another, but if someone is trying to shape themselves like me, they could - be very very large mistakes, with comparably vast consequences." 

Leareth looks down, folds his arms around himself. "I know I am - not a very safe person, and what I have tried to do, how I have tried to be, is a dangerous path to follow. If I lost some small part of what I am and what I care about, if the pattern that is a Leareth were jumbled at all, many such small steps leave a monster. I know that." 

"And you know also that it is very very hard for anyone to tell from the outside whether that is already true, that it requires an expenditure of their time and attention that very rarely are they going to be justified in paying. And so you cannot be followed, and should not be followed, and would not benefit from transmitting your worldview except under exceptionally unusual circumstances, and set bad precedents, and the resources of Good people and institutions are wasted on trying to stop you, and you risk losing the bits of yourself that make it even conceivably worth it. 

Maybe you could have won, that way. Aroden nearly did. I would not in advance predict of anyone that they could endure like that, but the two of you could, and did. And the price is high the other way, too, but - different. Trying to be Good means going slowly, sometimes, when going quickly could save people who will be dead by the time your careful allies who do not understand the stakes decide to back you. It means that people die when they could have lived, not because you could not have saved them but because you would have had to cut off part of yourself to save them, and you decided to hold it instead, for yourself and for everyone who looks up to you and will try to do what you've done. Being someone it is possible to cooperate with the way it is possible to cooperate with Vanyel means, sometimes, seeing a way to solve your problems and not taking it, and not knowing if another way will come up.

But in my experience - there is Good in people, and they blossom when they see it in others, and there are more souls shaped-like-mine in armies that possess already souls-shaped-like-mine, in a way that's not true for Asmodeus, in a way that I don't think was even true for Aroden. Because they're doing something people want, they're doing something people can believe in, they're doing something people can reach with their own strength. And so the other paths open, from directions you didn't expect them, because a hundred people trying will open more doors than one person door-opening as ruthlessly as he possibly can. And maybe, in Velgarth, where all the gods stood determined to murder your allies, that wasn't true - but I would have moved to a region without any gods and set up weather magic and raised lots and lots and lots of orphans and hoped that I could build a little corner of the world where it was, before I gave up on it."

"...I understand that, I think. And - I do know what I was giving up. I did not understand it yet in Urtho's time, when he knew me, but later I did." Something hurts, obscurely, Leareth isn't sure what. "I tried - not exactly the orphans, but things such as that. Perhaps I was unlucky. Perhaps I - am just too much the shape I am, and cannot be like Vanyel. I think that most people cannot be like Vanyel." 

He raises his eyes to hers. "Urtho tried to be Good. But - he thought that it meant setting bounds on one's duties. I would understand if that is, in fact, better for most people and will lead to saner choices. But it is not something that I can do, not without - destroying the entire kind of being that I am...and so I never knew how to speak of it with Urtho..."

(There's almost terror in the thought, fear not of dying, but of - losing that core part of him that says, over and over, never to give up never to stop trying never ever ever–)

"There are Good gods who are very old, much older than Aroden, old enough to remember the battles of the beginning of creation. They believe that the universe is, and always has been, and always will be, the site of a grand struggle between Good and Evil. And Good will do our part, though it may be futile, walk our destined path whether it leads to triumph or ruin or most likely neither.

That's stupid. We're not doing show swordfighting. We're here to win. I introduced myself, to you, as the goddess of defeating Evil; it's a different thing than the goddess of fighting Evil. Urtho does not trust himself to be Good, and to be fair when he tried it didn't work at all. He had no gods worth listening to; maybe he can do better now. But the thing he believed in was wrong for you, and you were right to see that. And the part of you that will fight until your dying breath for as many dying breaths as there are diamonds to raise you is Good. When you come to me you are not walking away from it."

"I know." He looks her in the eye. "That is what Aroden said. That you are trying to win. He loves you. And - you love him, no? And so I know we are on the same side." There are tears in his eyes again. His breath catches. "Maybe you can help me explain it to Urtho. Perhaps it should not matter so much to me, but - I want so badly, I have wanted for such a long time, just for him to see it, to understand, so that we need not be enemies, it was so stupid..."