"Aroden tried to do something clever so Asmodeus had to kill Him and their fight caused a massive planet-wide catastrophe that ruined some places permanently and also broke prophecy."

- the first, pointless thought that Leareth has is noticing how that sounds a little like the Cataclysm. And then musing vaguely on which role would be played by who, in that silly analogy. Presumably Aroden would be Urtho. 

"What exactly was Aroden attempting to do, that Asmodeus objected to so strongly?" 

Shrug. This is extremely illegal to discuss in Cheliax and not talked about much at the Worldwound either. "He wanted to bring an Age of Glory to Cheliax. He was going to embody Himself in the physical world or something to do it? I don't know what was wrong with the plan but no one should fight Asmodeus, not even a god."

Leareth's mind skids and bounces off of that a little, mostly because he had been vaguely musing on Aroden as analogous to Urtho, but that doesn't sound at all like something Urtho would do. 

...It sounds like something he, Leareth, would do. 

"I see," he says, distantly. He's trying not to show any emotion about this, which means his face is even more blankly neutral than before. 

"If He'd just been a little less - like He should blow everything up to fight Asmodeus - Cheliax wouldn't be under Asmodeus's control, now. So if you're upset about that, I think the takeaway is, don't pick a fight with Asmodeus that you're not going to win."

"Indeed. I prefer to pick fights with enough advance preparation that I will win - or at least will not lose everything." 

Which he HAD, here in Velgarth. Before...this...happened. 

"Then what the fuck are you doing? I - look, sometimes you run into a kid who is going to get themselves killed, and that's too bad, but some lessons you can only learn in Hell, you know? But you want things, and you don't seem stupid, and I'm not sure you're going to learn a thing in Hell, but you'd rather go there than just end this war and promise not to get in our way for the next century, when you've been not getting in our way for all of the previous centuries of your existence!"

"- I do want to point out that I am not sure. It is possible that Velgarth under Asmodeus is still - better - than the current state of affairs. At least Asmodeus instrumentally values wealth and education, and - keeps some part of people in Hell - even if given my own values He tries very hard to destroy what I think matters about their personhood." 

Leareth sighs. 

"The thing about wanting outcomes in the world, is that...there are ways to lose a fight much, much worse than dying and going to Hell. If I avoided that for myself, but in exchange sent a million people to Hell - people who might rather have ceased to exist than be tortured for centuries - then I would have lost that fight even moreso." 

" - look, sometimes people would rather cease to exist than go to Hell but that's a stupid tragic mistake they're making because they're human and foolish and can't do math. The process of becoming a devil hurts. It takes a while. Then you get all of eternity to - study things, learn things, come up with plans and execute on them, do all the things that make life good and meaningful. For - thousands of years. Millions of years. People will throw away millions of years because the first couple hundred will hurt but that's those people being stupid, you're not doing them a favor by listening to them. ...also I don't think you working with us changes whether Asmodeus wins, He's going to win. It might change what His objectives here are - like, if we have powerful allies we'll piss off by expanding further, we're less likely to do that."

"See, I am much less convinced than you are that Asmodeus is going to win! He has existed for I assume thousands of years, and has not conquered even one other afterlife, or most of the geographical area of your planet. And - honestly, the fact that it is apparently illegal to speak of various things, including Aroden - who Asmodeus claims to have defeated - I do not have the impression that Asmodeus is trying to build a culture that incentivizes believing true things as opposed to convenient propaganda. Which - for one, means that what you have been taught is not necessarily correlated with the conclusions I would form after my own investigations, and two, is...more likely in worlds where Asmodeus' route to winning is far from secured? If He were verifiably going to defeat the other gods and afterlives, the truth would not be His enemy." 

"Humans are very stupid and will not, given lots of information, arrive at true beliefs. Whether you want them to believe true things or specific false ones you have to restrict their access to information. But I didn't even mean Asmodeus will triumph over all of Golarion, I meant that we'll win this war in Iftel with or without your help, though probably sooner with it. And so not helping doesn't save Iftel. It doesn't save Valdemar - what saves Valdemar is Cheliax deciding we shouldn't fight them, which is likelier if we're allied with you!"

"You are likely right about Iftel. I am less sure about Valdemar. I suppose we shall see." He'll come back to that. "Anyway. I think I disagree with your characterization of humans, that we cannot arrive at incrementally more true beliefs by having more, and less filtered, information? I have never found that to be the case, and I wonder how much you believe it because that, too, is convenient for Asmodeus to have you believe." 

"Probably I believe everything I believe because it's convenient for Asmodeus. Since I want to be usable to Asmodeus I am fine with that. You aren't sure we can win a fight with Valdemar and its dozen mages? Because I feel pretty sure of that."

"Valdemar has - other defences. I had previously planned to conquer them and I amassed an army of thirty thousand, plus three hundred highly skilled combat mages, and made a number of other preparations in order to be confident I had enough margin of error there. ...The dozen mages is my fault, I suppose. I spent decades kidnapping their mage-gifted children before the Companions could find and Choose them."

Carissa isn't reading his thoughts right now. Leareth doesn't mention that all of that was before Vanyel built a Heartstone in the capital to anchor their defensive wards, giving the Web its own intelligence. Or that Vanyel himself once personally held the Valdemaran border, all two hundred miles of it, against all of Karse's remaining mages, for over a year. 

"...You know," he says thoughtfully, "the place where this would be inconvenient for you is - if in fact you are wrong, and Asmodeus is not going to win everywhere, even if He wins in Iftel and perhaps even Valdemar. If that were true, and you realized Asmodeus was never going to conquer the other afterlives, would you not prefer to be useful to a different god who would torture you less?" 

She's going to just ignore that. " - wait, why were you planning to conquer Valdemar? ...you spend decades kidnapping all their mage-gifted children? That sounds like wildly more effort than conquering a place!"

Leareth blinks at her. "Really? It was much less effort! Have you ever tried conquering a large country without destroying most of their farmland and infrastructure in ways that would take decades to repair?" 

" - admittedly no? But - I'd expect that if you're kidnapping all their Gifted children they'd notice that and put them under guard, and then you're just at war anyway only starting with being ambushed, and if you have decades you can just...mind control the entire government, with that much time and effort..."

It took Valdemar a surprisingly long time to notice, actually, and if not for the Foresight dream with Vanyel, there still wouldn't have been any way for them to connect it to him. Leareth doesn't feel especially inclined to give Carissa more potentially-useful intelligence about Valdemar right now, though. 

"For reasons specific to Valdemar as a kingdom, that would not have worked very well," he says dryly. "And the reason my plans worked as well as they did is that Valdemar had no warning and no reason to suspect it."

The advent of the new Heartstone-powered Web would have made it a lot feasible, if it weren't already moot because he made an agreement with Vanyel.

"If Valdemar still knew nothing about Cheliax or Asmodeus, I would give your army better chances, but - well, I made sure they were thoroughly warned and briefed." 

Leareth has absolutely no idea what Golarion magic is capable of; even assuming he's somehow (how?) been secretly communicating with would-be rescuers that wouldn't get Valdemar to 'thoroughly warned and briefed'. He has seen the activities of half of one scout party whose cleric was already dead, and one of the few scout parties that didn't have a real fifth-circle caster on hand. She - is going to not think through how Cheliax would take Valdemar, he doesn't need to know that, but he's kidding himself if he thinks it'd take them more than a year. 

"You know nothing about what we're capable of," she does say. "And if you're captured they'll learn everything you know about Valdemar's defenses, which it sounds like you investigated very thoroughly."

Carissa might have a point, there; Leareth did his best to extrapolate, and his people - and Vanyel, hopefully - will be trying even harder, but that still doesn't get them a detailed breakdown of exactly what to protect against.

(Though any magic they do will show up loudly and clearly to the Web, and instantly inform every Herald and Companion in Valdemar. It's already been shown that a Teleport can get the Web's attention even when it happens well outside the Valdemaran borders. It would be stupid to say this just to make a point, though, so Leareth holds his tongue.) 

Still. Leareth is also pretty sure that Carissa has no idea what Velgarth magic is capable of. More than half the Gifts never came up in the interrogation at all. Carissa's people never asked what the range was on Thoughtsensing. Mindhealing never came up at all, and that alone could be game-breaking - 

- and Leareth still feels, a little, like Carissa is underestimating the gods here. Velgarth's gods are in many ways less competent on human-legible axes than Asmodeus, true, but - still. 

Carissa is probably still right. Iftel is likely doomed already, was doomed weeks ago, and Valdemar's prospects don't look good. Not unless the Star-Eyed Goddess and the...nameless Valdemaran god who Leareth understands even less than the others...pull out something unprecedented. 

(Involving Vanyel, maybe, because after all Vanyel was already an unprecedented gamepiece on Their gameboard, laid out to stop Leareth, before the schemes became even more tangled and baffling than that...) 

Leareth has very little idea what's going to happen after this. He suspects it'll surprise both of them. 

"Or, " she continues when he doesn't say anything, "you can work with us and just say you're allied with Valdemar, they're Lawful, you won't work with us on fighting them, and then probably we don't even try."

"- It is not impossible that would work, and - I would consider agreeing to it, under certain conditions. ...The most important being that I would need to talk to Valdemar first, to negotiate the terms of alliance between us. Because I do not, in fact, think they would feel at all bound to honour an 'alliance' they only learned of after the fact, that meant standing aside while a god conquered other kingdoms and tortured their dead souls in Hell. And..."

He frowns, trying to find the right words. "- And they are Lawful, yes, but - also they are Good. I am not sure which is stronger, overall, in the country's philosophy. But I have known Vanyel for a decade, and I am fairly sure where he would land, if those two principles ever came into conflict." 

"They can't fix it!" What is wrong with every single person on this entire stupid planet!! "Deciding to fight us won't save any soul in Hell, it'll just mean joining them!"

"Maybe. Maybe not. I - honestly think that neither has complete enough information on the conditions here to make confident predictions of what will happen." 

Leareth shakes his head. "- You know, in a way you are lucky it was me you captured, and not Vanyel. Because I am not Good, and so if in fact I learned that the best route to my goals was an alliance with Asmodeus, I would take it. But... I imagine you have met Good people before. Do you think they would ever accept that?" 

"No, of course not. I don't ...see how that makes me lucky? They would do the exact thing you're doing, which is immediately decide that just because Hell hurts, it must be the worst thing ever, and also they should with certainty condemn themselves to it for eternity rather than trying to accomplish their goals." She's not really sure why she's mad at him. Maybe just because it's been a stressful day.