"I agree. ...I had considered mentioning earlier that I think the heating-stone you were using to practice holding a spell while distracted, is not the best way to train holding your concentration in unexpected emergencies? When I wish to train my staff in that skill, I give them an artifact which will at random intervals fire a very underpowered levinbolt - not enough to cause injury, but it is very startling. - If you allowed me the use of magic, and either could find a blank quartz focus or let me repurpose one of my existing talismans, I could make one for you. If you wished. I think it is much more directly practicing the skill your superior felt you were missing." 

She is so suspicious. "That would be useful. I think focusing through pain and focusing when startled are both important skills."

...and plausibly the First Arcane assigned her work on the first of them because he was annoyed with her, but she does still need to learn it.

"Indeed." 

Maybe he needs to change tack, here, it doesn't feel like he's managing to make much progress on their underlying disagreement about - what - about what 'having values' is even for? 

Leareth takes a deep breath. "It would be valuable for Asmodeus to have me as an ally, no? As a living person with extensive skill in magic and a large organization to call on. That would be much more useful to Asmodeus than - whatever He might be able to shape out of the pieces of me via centuries of torture." 

" - yes, I think he'd probably trade quite a few competent devils for someone with directly applicable resources for this war right now."

"- And, right now, I would never agree to do that. From what I have heard so far - if I truly had no other options, it would still be better for my own goals to make Asmodeus send me to Hell and torture me for a few centuries, during which time perhaps other actors who share more of my goals will think of something clever. Whereas if I were to add my own, considerable strength to Asmodeus' efforts, they would not have a chance." 

Leareth lifts his head, looks Carissa in the eye again. "But I may be wrong, to think that. You believe that what Asmodeus is doing with Cheliax, and with Hell, is reasonable - that it is the best deal mortal humans can expect to find anywhere. Perhaps I am simply confused by some sort of cultural gulf, or perhaps the translation spell is missing important nuances. If I am wrong, then I want to know, but...at this point I think that would require your help, to figure out how to translate the relevant concepts in a way that makes sense to me. I suspect you can manage it if anyone can. You are clearly very intelligent." 

And they're back at flattery. 

"I don't understand what kinds of goals could possibly be served by being tortured and hoping that some extremely unlikely thing happens in the next several centuries while there's something remaining of you, compared to by working for a god you have some disagreements with."

"...I think we are back to the disagreement on whether or not it is stupid to - try to have ethical principles." 

Leareth frowns. "Or perhaps not. It - seems plausible we disagree on where to draw our boundaries of self, and what constitutes continued existence? And for me, a very important - perhaps the most critical - aspect of what it means to keep existing, is that I continue pursuing my original values and goals. If I worked for Asmodeus, and in fact he opposes everything I care about, then... I would already have ceased to exist, as the person I am now." 

"...that seems like a very unfortunate set of preferences but I guess it does produce thinking it's better to go to Hell than to fight this war."

"Why does it seem unfortunate to you?" 

Leareth is back to paying as much attention as he can to her thoughts. 

It just seems approximately as impractical as thinking you die when you fall asleep! Like, yes, in that case you're going to die! Which sucks for you but isn't really something other people should sympathize over, since you don't have an objectively worse lot than them, just a incredibly specific and basically unfulfillable want, and your best move would be to reconsider it.

She's mostly just reflexively saying what seems reasonable to her, she doesn't exactly want to do lots of soul-searching when she's definitely going to be closely scrutinized soon for how well she handled this. But it's not an uninteresting conversation. "Uh, because you're not going to get what you want and no one with that set of wants will ever be happy and from their perspective they'll all die?"

Leareth spends a few moments considering the tradeoffs around honesty. 

He concludes that it seems to mostly come out in favour. 

"Well, I have personally existed for nearly two millennia, and so far I have accomplished what I wanted on the front of 'continued existence'. I have not achieved all of the goals I want to for the rest of humanity here in Velgarth, but I have a plan for it - had one, before this invasion changed all the conditions." 

What.

He has to be lying. There's just no - scout parties don't accidentally capture millennia-old ninth-circle wizards. Even if they have locally-impossible magic. If - she tries imagining if some Velgarth mages had run across Nefreti Clepati or, no, really the right analogy here is Aroden - it wouldn't happen - they'd get immediately reduced to smears of blood on the ground -

She should think of something to say. 

"In that case I don't know that generalizations about humans apply," she says, because it is a complete sentence and doesn't require arguing the point with probably-not-basically-Aroden.

Leareth takes a deep breath. 

"Do you have another of the mindreading spells today? Because - I think in fact this might be easier to convey if you were reading my thoughts. Since I am going to be saying some very implausible things, and it is understandable if you wish to check that I am not lying." 

" - yeah. You have to not resist it, if you want me to believe you." And she casts Detect Thoughts.

Leareth doesn't resist. And he takes his shields down fully, this time. 

He's been reading her thoughts this entire time - or, well, at least during the two blocks of time after he was sufficiently startled to do it instinctively and get around the compulsion against all volitional actions. (Leareth is almost two thousand years old and has spent a great deal of that time frequently in danger, and reflexes transfer between his incarnations much better than explicit memory. He has a lot of trained combat-magic reflexes instincts.) 

Underlying all of his thoughts, his current attitude toward Carissa herself is one of - some sadness about the position she's been in, that has pushed and incentivized and constrained her into such a...small...shape. Confusion, at the entire way she reasons around goals and values; it's not just that it's alien, many pieces of it are actually less alien to Leareth's own thinking than how Heralds think about ethics, it's just - it doesn't entirely hold together. But there's also growing respect. For her obvious intelligence, and ambition, for the fact that she's clearly trying to grow, to become more... 

She's pretty good at noticing her confusion and making inferences. To the extent that she hasn't made all the right inferences, with Leareth, it's because he's been deliberately concealing as much as he could get away with. And also, in addition there's the vast cultural gulf between their worlds, there's the fact that Leareth's existence would sound shocking and implausible to most Velgarth natives. 

She's right to be confused about having captured him, of course. He would respect her reasoning a little less if she hadn't noticed it. The missing piece here is that it shouldn't have happened, in any sane world - Leareth's mind flashes briefly over all the absurd components that went just exactly wrong, the earthquake alone must have burned a vast quantity of Vkandis Sunlord's resources. And toward a goal that will probably harm Iftel in expectation, since Leareth has in fact revealed relevant strategic information to Chelish leadership already - and will end up giving them a lot more intelligence, if they successfully get him back to Cheliax. 

The missing context is that Vkandis doesn't like Leareth. 'Doesn't like' is an understatement. He's set Leareth on fire twice for attempting to open communications with Him. None of the gods like Leareth, and he's not entirely sure why - due to the fact that They refuse to talk to him - but he has a few guesses. The gods of Velgarth don't care about the things Leareth does, which draw significantly on his understanding of what most mortals want for themselves; people value continued existence, lives that contain successes and joys and a minimum of pain. Certainly the endless grind of subsistence farming, with its occasional inevitable years of starvation, seems pointlessly bad to Leareth in the same way that the endless recycling of souls without memories does. And - it seems that the gods don't like change. That they oppose human progress almost on principle. At least, that's one of the simpler theories to explain the particular plans that tend to have gotten him murdered. 

Leareth hadn't really wanted to reveal this much, so soon; at the very least, even in the worst-case scenario, where they hauled him back to Cheliax and threw every resource at interrogating him, he could at least have stalled. Maybe long enough for his people to intervene - if not in rescuing him, at least in mounting a counterattack. 

Long enough for Vanyel to do something, maybe. 

...Vanyel. 

That feels - relevant, here, actually. Herald Vanyel. His destined enemy, according to the gods' Foresight. And yet, by some bizarre further meddling - one which Leareth is still confused about - they were granted the chance to speak. Over a decade of conversations in dreams. He's tried to teach Vanyel. To make him stronger, which on the face of it is bad for Leareth's goals, since he plans to invade Valdemar for the next stage of his fight against the gods.

Because all the methods of teaching someone to reason more clearly, to come to more true beliefs and take more effective actions toward their goals, are ones that make them stronger. 

And Leareth believes that he's right. That's the core of stability behind all of his thoughts. It's the anchor holding the fear and exhaustion, the distracting thirst and headache, at bay. Leareth has spent a very, very long time trying to understand what would be best for the world - what would lead to the greatest flourishing for all the sentient, conscious beings... 

He doesn't like the answer. 

Carissa thinks that Leareth is Evil, according to her world's classification. Which, well, the Heralds of Valdemar would agree. The Heralds of Valdemar are very Lawful Good. (Except - maybe not Vanyel, maybe not anymore - because over those long years, Leareth has forced Vanyel to stare into just how broken, and how inconvenient, the reality they find themselves in is...)

Leareth is ruthless at achieving his goals. His goals...just happen to involve wanting the world to be less broken for everyone, for all the people, not just him. 

- a tower against the stars - lights in the world, he says to Herald Vanyel in the snow - and it is too late to save all of them, it was always too late, but it is never too late to save some - 

Leareth is willing to kill millions of people (though he hopes to get them back, afterward) in order to take his fight to the gods, because the world as it is now is unacceptable, and for thousands of years no one and nothing has changed it, and so if he doesn't act then probably things will never, every change... 

He wonders what Vanyel is thinking right now.

It's an interesting test case, in a way - for whether Leareth is right, that he believes true things and therefore making his enemies stronger, showing them how to better understand the world, will in expectation lead to them no longer being his enemies. 

If Vanyel, knowing about Cheliax, mounts a rescue attempt, then he'll know he was right. 

Okay, Carissa has no idea what to do with any of that, except observe to herself, sort of distantly, that this confirms that Good is a very narrow road and even if you're very bleeding-heart Good with your goals if you try to actually accomplish them that counts as Evil and you go to Hell for it. This man is Good enough to fit right in with every paladin she's ever met and - he will go to Hell, when he dies in Golarion, they won't have to do a Malediction or anything, they'll probably have to circumvent whatever he has set up but then Pharasma will sort him to Hell.

(She is absolutely not going to feel upset about that, that'd be stupid. It seems true, that this guy has made himself into someone who Asmodeus can't use very efficiently, but he's also entirely determined to stay that way, and you can't save people from their own stupid priorities.)

She hasn't seen that much of Velgarth and has no idea what'd make people declare an entire world unacceptable but it seems ...predictable that that would bring him here? A god manufacturing a coincidence to get you sent to Hell for all eternity is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you fight gods. It feels like there's something incoherent there, some kind of conviction that he did something right despite understanding the predictable effects of the thing he did and acknowledging they were effects of the thing he did and knowing that if he hadn't decided to fight the gods then it wouldn't have happened. 

- she should probably be thinking through the implications of there being yet another would-be rescuer on the loose. A paladin. Maybe he'll get distracted by all the horrible war things going on. ...what actionable is she trying to come up with here -

"If there were some way for people to stop trying to rescue you," she says irritably, "I could get you food and water and we could have a conversation you're not tired for. But if you keep summoning rescuers then you're gonna spend a lot of time in that bag and not much time in a state to try to convince me that your worldview isn't just 'I am too busy confusedly caring about things that don't affect me to defend my own interests'."

"- I am not sure there is. Sorry. At this point, even if I were to - hmm - send a message, somehow, to my people and also to Herald Vanyel - they know I am a prisoner and presumably under coercion, I do not think they would listen..." 

Leareth is musing that he's pretty sure Vkandis had no idea that 'sending Leareth to Hell for eternity' was what he was doing. Velgarth gods - according to his best understanding - perceive the world mostly via Foresight, constantly swimming in a sea of possible futures, nudging those threads... 

(Leareth cuts off a line of thought that follows naturally from that one, he's not ready to go there just yet.) 

"- Who was Aroden, by the way? You were thinking about him, as - the person I seemed somehow analogous to...?" 

"An immortal wizard who did all kinds of epic things before he ascended. Long time ago. If I found myself five thousand years ago for some reason and my unit tried to capture him there's absolutely no question that we'd - well, we might survive it, only because he might not have ten minutes to spare to resurrect someone for questioning and it's only slightly more bother to take them alive. But if he actually felt threatened we'd die. You're - not that."

"- I have certainly killed people because I felt threatened. Though... The incentives are different in this world, right. Where people do not - continue to exist, after death - where they cannot be resurrected at all by repeatable magic that mortals can cast directly. I strongly prefer to use mind control, mostly for that reason."

He sighs. "...Because I - define as part of my 'self-interest' that I care intrinsically about thinking beings continuing to exist. I suspect that is still something that is not quite making sense to you." 

"Let's say you met someone who had a girlfriend, kids, lots of money, nice house, interesting research, great life. But he was miserable, because he'd learned from a book one day that there was a mountain on the other side of the world, and the book said the mountain was green, and he thought it ought to be purple. Just utterly wrecked about this, all the time. And he felt like it wasn't decent to be happy in a world where the mountain was green instead of purple. And he'd put lots of thought into how to fix it - what kind of paint works on stone, what kind of paint lasts a long time outdoors, how to get to the mountain in the first place, but realistically, he was never going to be able to paint more than a tiny fraction of it, and it was going to be gone by the end of the winter, and he knew that too, so he didn't paint the mountain, just hung around being really fucking upset.

That's what is going on with people who have preferences about things that don't affect them, and it's not healthy, even when it is not immediately in a matter of days going to get you tortured eternally."

Leareth spends a few seconds just boggling at her, absorbing the fact that THIS is the analogy she finds most natural. 

"...For one thing," he says faintly, "I - am not, in fact, miserable all the time about the fact that the world is still broken in many ways. That would make me less effective at working and so it would be stupid." 

He pauses. Tries to think back over their conversation - where is there common ground, where can he start, here... 

"All right. So - you said that a reason it mattered to you, whether Velgarth treats women in general well and gives them opportunities, is that your future circumstances could change? ...I think that holds in general. You could - say, suffer a head injury in battle, and lose much of your intelligence and skill at magic, be less valuable to your superiors - and at that point it would be in your interests to live in a world where even those less intelligent and skilled at magic had good lives. And - this principle holds in a more abstract way - there is a sense in which 'you' could have been born with different innate abilities, or in a different country - and you would care about your own self-interest in that hypothetical... I think that is the fundamental difference between the example with the mountain, and how I actually think. Mountains do not suffer for being the 'wrong' colour - it is not like anything to be a mountain, they cannot have an internal perspective and self-interest... But I care about all of the beings who do and can. Because, in that abstraction, I might instead have been born as them." 

"...I could also have been born as Asmodeus, and want the humans to stop running around having stupid human frailties and making terrible slaves. There's - more of something it's like to be Asmodeus than something it's like to be us, more perspective, more self-interest - if you start counting everything as potentially you it seems like some of those things count more."

Honestly, Leareth thinks, if he had somehow ended up born as Asmodeus instead he is pretty sure he could have done better. Even just in terms of making effective use of resources. He's managed subordinates before. Technically he could just use compulsions to make them do what he wanted, but - this doesn't actually work very well, compared to understanding them, understanding their needs and desires and goals, knowing the common ground between them... 

...Or, hmm, maybe a better analogy is that he's on a few occasions worked to train animals. Including very unsophisticated ones, like sea-worms, though that was mostly theoretical research on simple minds rather than accomplishing anything directly. But still. He's found that animal training in practice goes much better if you, as the trainer, at least try to understand the animal's native desires, and - as the far greater intelligence in the situation, with far more resources and control - set up everything so that the animal can best meet all of its needs and goals by doing exactly what the trainer wants. 

That's probably a digression. 

"I - suppose I have considered whether the Velgarth gods in fact have far more moral worth than any human," he says quietly. "It - is possible they do. But that...does not, in fact, mean that I - or any other human on this planet, or on yours - has less moral worth than - what each of us would assign ourselves, internally, the strength of our continued desire to exist..." 

Leareth feels like he's running out of words to convey this. It just seems obvious to him, that there's a fundamental symmetry there; if he wants to not die, if he wants to avoid pain, he knows what that feels like, and he can look at other humans born of human wombs and infer that they feel the same way, and it would be inconsistent for that to matter less - 

- which of course hasn't stopped him from harming or killing other people, to achieve other outcomes in the world. But he's tried so, so hard to always make it worthwhile. 

"Well, you know, 'I will get to keep existing and keep doing stuff' seems pretty worthwhile, to me, as a reason to kill other people. It's - symmetric - in that I expect them to kill me if it's the best route for them to exist and keep doing stuff. And I wouldn't think the caring about other people was stupid if you were like, I'll fight Iftel but I want to mostly do it with mind control, that doesn't seem stupid."

"- Why not?"