That's sort of weird - maybe it's just something to do with how helpless she is exactly. "Do the handcuffs do anything besides anti-magic - she didn't try anything, but it didn't look like it would have been especially hard for her to hit me -"

"They wouldn't stop her from hitting you. If you feel unsafe you don't have to go, of course, or you could ask the guard to stay with you, or if she wants to see you enough to agree to be further restrained while you're there we could arrange that."

"That won't be necessary, I was just curious."

"Of course. It's good of you, to want to know how that is done here. I think you can learn a lot about a society from how they treat prisoners."

"I don't think I'd heard that proposed as a benchmark before."

"Well, most societies are nice places to live for their elites, whoever those are, and most societies are - all right for most people as long as they work hard and don't get unlucky with a plague or a famine or a work accident - but a society doesn't gain very much by treating prisoners well. So if they do it, it has to be because they care about people even when it won't immediately help them."

These people think in such weird terms. "Would it be possible for me to go on walks outside this general area?" he asks.

"Yes, absolutely. You shouldn't leave the city without an escort but you can walk anywhere within it."

"Is the edge of the city obvious?"

"Yes, it's walled."

"I see, thank you."

"Of course. Hmm, what should you check out if you're exploring - the spire has great views, you can watch the cavalry practice on the south grounds, there's a market just a couple blocks from here where the spiral-road meets the straight one, there's the memory garden...there's the room Iomedae stayed in, once, when she was human..."

"What's a memory garden?" he asks, instead of she was a human?

"It's for people lost in combat. A bit less grim than the cemetery. People leave things that remind them of them, and when we get updates from Heaven about what kind of angel they are we add a sculpture."

"...updates from Heaven about what kind of angel they are?"

"When Lawful Good people die, we go to Heaven, and our souls are transformed by the light of Heaven, typically into angels. The process takes a long time, but eventually we join the warriors of Heaven. And people go back and forth to and from Heaven on business, occasionally, and they'll pass along updates."

"And sometimes people turn into gods, instead, or -"

"Iomedae ascended while alive. I think it's also possible to ascend after you're dead but ascensions are so rare I don't know much about it."

"Sarenrae started as an angel, though a native one not a former mortal," someone offers. 

"There you go."

"There's a sacred rock in Absalom called the Starstone. It is a remnant of the collision of an asteroid with our world. A god died preventing the asteroid from destroying the world, and now the rock has the essence of gods in it, and anyone who touches it and is worthy of it ascends. No one's been worthy in 800 years, since Iomedae."

"...worthy?"

"No one knows much about how the Starstone chooses. Aroden's the one who put it there, so maybe it was Him choosing, when He was alive - He'd definitely have chosen Iomedae, She was His paladin....but some of the other ascended gods are weird choices, honestly." Shrug. "You have to be very powerful to even get past the protections surrounding the Starstone."

"I see. Weird choices how?"

"One of them is Cayden Cailean. He was an adventurer when he drunkenly decided to go for the Starstone and ascended. He's now the Chaotic Good god of revelry and drunkenness." She sounds disapproving. "And then there's Norgorber, the Neutral Evil god of crime."

"Those do sound very odd," Kyeo agrees.

 "It's often hard to make sense of the gods' long term plans, and that was even more true before prophecy was destroyed."

"Prophecy? Was destroyed?"