"She isn't planning on adventuring in the short term as far as I know. If she does decide to, well, she knows the risks. I'm more concerned about somebody snatching her because of me than I am about her dying and going to Elysium, that would still be a tragedy but - she's a free woman. Of course, if she does want to become an adventurer, it would help if I could introduce her to good potential companions, but that's not what I'm considering right now. Just - anything that might happen if she goes on like she has for the last month, reading books in the library, selling her spells and bothering no-one."

If anyone can become an ethical adventurer without a god-backed Lawful structure propping her up, it's Belmarniss. Tanya isn't worried on that score, at least, and she's headed for a Good afterlife. But letting her die because she chose to pursue the power to improve things in the way this world is set up to encourage, rather than the way of building technology and organizational power and allies, would be such a fucking waste.

"Yes, that makes sense as a concern."

"I didn't expect you to give me an answer on the spur of the moment. But since I've discussed this with you before, I wanted to tell you what I'd settled on before you refer me to someone else."

"The other thing I have is a question. It's fine if you don't have the best answer to that one either. The Iomedaens are fighting a war in the Worldwound, and preparing to fight one with Cheliax. Presumably there are other, non-military projects of equal importance I don't know about, but those two are about preventing or undoing Evil. If you had those handled, if it was a century or two centuries ago before they happened, if you had ten times as many resources, what would you aim for? What do you want to build, rather than preserve or defend? What is the victory condition here, besides reclaiming Cheliax and stopping anything else from getting worse?"

"Besides the Wound and Cheliax and Tar-Baphon - who is sealed, not dead - and the same thing Iomedae prayed for in every chapter of the Acts, the end of Hell and the other evil afterlives? After all that? Paradise for everyone dead or alive."

"I suppose I asked for that, didn't I. But you're not - as far as I know - actually fighting Hell outside of prayers. Or you weren't, before Hell invaded Cheliax. Are there some - closer, more realistic goals? On the scale of Golarion, if not yet 'paradise for everyone'?"

Contain and close the Wound. Reconquer Cheliax. Find a way to kill Tar-Baphon, which is functionally equivalent to 'make sure he never gets out'. What was Lastwall doing for six centuries between Iomedae ascending and Aroden dying? Maybe it's another case of an army with a state and there was simply not much need for them before the Wound opened and Cheliax conquered by Hell, so they confined themselves to guarding Tar-Baphon's prison and researching ways to kill him. And praying for Iomedae to end Hell, which is a nice sentiment but doesn't actually help achieve that end.

This seems - wrong. Incomplete. Not what Lawful Good should be doing, if it has spare resources and the rest of the world still looks like Taldor, let alone Noctimar.

"We need armies, but it would be - nice, to know someone is working on the home front to build a better world while the army is busy defending it. I suppose I was hoping Iomedae's bigger project included that, besides the armies of Lastwall and the Reclamation. Presumably other people do end up working on those things, I just don't understand why it's not - equally Iomedaean, beyond the present crisis."

"It's not how she's specialized. There are plentiful Good gods who focus on the home front, on building peace instead of making war; Iomedae is hardly opposed to that; but when she ascended she did so to fill a gap, not to add her voice to the existing ones exactly. And there is always a crisis. Hell is a crisis and has been so long as Creation has existed."

"...but you're not normally contributing to fighting Hell, are you? Whatever it is Iomedae does, I imagine the way mortals fight Hell is by making it so nobody goes there on our end. And you don't do that with armies, outside of Cheliax, you do it by building and spreading a better civilization, improving coordination so there aren't wars, improving technology so people don't have to do evil to survive... People can serve some other, less martial Lawful Good god or cause and then help Iomedae in Heaven after they die if that's a thing... I think I'm probably confused about something here. Was Iomedaenism a much more - minor concern for mortals before Aroden's death?"

"She's picked up a lot of his legacy since then, but was originally intended as a complement more than a duplicate, so the inheritance is imperfect. There are some strikes mortals can make against Hell. It's not impossible to go there, attempting a rescue or some other strategic move. I'm not sure what you're missing - we have simply never been in the position of running out of worthy causes that are well within Iomedae's wheelhouse even if the present priorities are new. Arazni's corruption was in response to an ill-advised strike on Geb. Nidal is ancient. Lastwall has a border with orcs it must hold, for lower-circled combatants."

"If I'd serve Good better with some other organization, will you direct me to the right one after I detail my abilities and before I sign up? Or detach me afterwards? I should make sure I'm doing the right thing - the most effective thing I could be doing - and not... accidentally signing up with the army because I happened to talk to you before I did someone else and because I - understand armies. Every time we talked earlier, about your people praying to Iomedae or communing with her about the best use of me, I thought the scope was - for all of Good. Not just for fighting. Although after I finish transferring all the useful knowledge I can, it may be the best of use of me to send me to fight." Assuming her orb remains un-disassembled and they're fine with her abilities leaking before they have a thousand mages ready to go. Or maybe she'll just be one of those thousand.

"The church is capable of allocating you where you'll be most efficiently deployed and I'm not certain, from here, that it'd be a combat position, though that seems likeliest. But... our main disagreement with churches like the Shelynites isn't that they aren't doing something good, but that they're not doing something efficient. In the world we live in the efficient thing is usually not to devote combat-capable people and resources, ready and willing to serve in that capacity, to peaceful posts, in part because there are always plenty of people like me who aren't worth the investment to get back up to fighting condition, such that I was instead retrained to manage a peaceful church assignment, and people who would find it intolerable and break under the strain but can contribute from another angle."

"That makes sense, if the military need is the most pressing on the margin. You're acting like you're..." Fighting a total war, and not winning. That's how a soldier with a medical discharge ends up giving ethics advice slash recruitment offers in the biggest church of the second biggest city of a nation that used to be an empire. Select Oliva is a good man, and reasonably competent in his position as far as she knows, but this wasn't his first choice of career. Because staffing a recruitment office, or teaching people to reach Heaven, is less important on the margin than fighting on the front lines, if you're able-bodied and of the right alignment to be a cleric.

Except they don't have anywhere near the state capacity necessary to do this properly. Not the tax base and not the industrial base and maybe not even government buy-in outside of Lastwall. Their logistics use sailships made from corpses and horse-pulled wagons on land, their militias are equipped with fucking spears. Between bandits, nonhuman species not allowed equal rights, nonhuman species not interested in equal rights and teleporting enemy agents, not only do they not have a secure home front, they might not even have the concept of striving for one. 

Taldor can't field a mass army, and its neighbors can't be too different or they'd have conquered it. But a mass army armed with mass-produced weapons is, counterintuitively, what allows a nation to direct its best and brightest people to peaceful pursuits on the home front. Mages aside, nobody sends high-quality human resources like scientists and engineers to the trenches. Those are the people who, in between building new weapons, also build everything else that makes tomorrow worth fighting for. 

That is, nobody running a universal schooling-to-conscription pipeline. These people don't have even the first half of that! When the best and brightest of the few children taught to read line up to die in the trenches, because Good means joining the cause and smart means wizard and wizard means fireball, they can't afford to turn them away. And for those who are Good and live in a city rather than engaging in primary production and choose to stay civilians, it's no wonder a pacifist religion becomes popular: incentives align with selection effects. 

But there's an alternative missing here. Its lack is glaring, though maybe only to someone who grew up in the middle of scientific, industrial, social and political revolutions combined. Someone used to the background assumption that things will improve in fifty or a hundred years, on every axis including some you hadn't realized were possible. That waging war is necessary to ensure we'll still be there, and supporting it is noble, but that it won't in itself make anything better. Someone like that will look for religions of science and invention, of medicine and of transportation, of construction and synthetic chemistry and magic engineering and a hundred other subfields. They don't need to have different gods, it's fine for Iomedae or whoever to manage them. In fact they don't need to have gods at all.

They do, obviously, need to be Lawful Good. More precisely, Lawful Good needs to be them. Because you can't really win without them, once the immediate military crises are over, and so why should you trust them to anyone else?

Someone needs to be planning on the planetary scale, if they're to stop anyone from going to Hell. Tanya really hopes that someone is Iomedae. If it isn't, she may have to insist on a shorter term of enlistment.

For a moment, Tanya considers the terrifying possibility that the way for Tanya to do the most Good will involve arguing with the Iomedaean leadership. Convincing them that other things matter as well as armies, and often matter more. 

A soldier doesn't shirk her duty. Iomedae, she thinks loudly, I will fail if I try, and leaves it at that. 'Do it yourself', she doesn't add, because what would be the point? Either she already knows, or she doesn't.

"You're acting appropriately for someone fighting an eternal war, whose state is much worse than it was a century ago," she says evenly. I will endeavour to rectify the matter swiftly, she doesn't say, because he would probably take it as a brag or an insult, but she does think it. "Where should I go from here?"

"If you want to fly overland to Lastwall..." He can outline what bits of the world she might not care to overfly on his map. "I'll write you a letter to carry along; it'll take me a bit of time."

It's about fourteen hundred kilometers to Vellumis, and then another three hundred fifty to Vigil. "I can be there in three hours, but it will take me some time to pack and - make arrangements - so perhaps it is wiser to set out tomorrow morning." It's never wise to risk overflying unfamiliar lands in the dark, and she needs to talk to Belmarniss and set up a personal cipher and maybe help her find safer lodgings. "So you can take your time with the letter; I can pick it up tonight or early tomorrow morning. ...I release you from your personal promise of confidentiality." It would be rather embarrassing to show up with a introductory letter that has to dance around that! "I do expect Lastwall will decide to keep at least some elements secret, so I think it would be best for you to wait for their decision."

"Thank you, for all the help you've given." This one feels more pro forma than with Cuoco, even though Oliva has undoubtedly helped her more and deserves to know that. He was, after all, acting on behalf of his organization.

"You're welcome. May you do much with it."

Tanya leaves Oliva's office and heads outside.

...the paladin from the first day is on duty again.

There are presumably going to be many paladins in Lastwall; it would be annoying to have to stay ten feet away from them all the time. And Tanya did promise to work out her grief-or-whatever issues. She needs to come to terms with whatever she feels when the aura affects her.

"Hello again. We met two days ago; I'm afraid I didn't get your name. I'm Tanya von Degurechaff. Could I impose on you for a few minutes again to use your aura?"

He smiles at her. "Of course."

There it is.

The aura thinks makes her think her men - her people - don't matter more than anyone else. And, objectively speaking, it is right. Tanya can hate that, but she can't deny it. Not while she's in the aura, at least.

Tanya failed them. She failed them in life when she didn't lead them to peace and quite possibly damned them instead. And now she might as well be dead to them, and so she failed them again.

It's not her fault in the sense that she considered doing otherwise and didn't. It's her fault only in the sense that she was a certain person, who predictably acted in a certain way, and not a different and better person. Until it was too late.

Tanya has killed hundreds by her own hand. Many thousands, through the men she commanded, and many more than that indirectly. If even a small proportion of them went to Hell, that's not a burden of Evil one can fully comprehend and look at without flinching. It's just as well, then, that Tanya lacks certain emotions related to empathy. After all, it would serve no purpose for her to suffer now that it's too late for it to matter, just as it would not help anyone if Tanya followed them to Hell. 

She might do a lot of Good on Golarion. Not through any personal virtue but incidentally, as the bearer of a few minor artifacts and bits of knowledge from two superior civilizations. She could help save many lives, and maybe that could be parlayed somehow into fewer of them going to Hell. Enough Good to balance the Evil, on Pharasma's scales. 

Personally, Tanya doesn't think that's how morals work. The evil done isn't gone, wiped from the record by a spot of community service. The people sent to Hell are still there. The only way to counteract Evil is not to permit it in the first place. But if it is the way Pharasma thinks, she might as well exploit that. The Iomedaeans aspire to the destruction of Hell and Tanya can certainly agree on the goal but she isn't deluded about the real enemy, the one actually sending people there.

Curse Pharasma, and Being X, and all other would-be gods who play uncaringly with dead people's souls without even bothering to provide clear instructions.

She'll always carry the knowledge and the memory of the evils she's done, but she's not trying to do Good to balance or counteract them. She wants to do Good because it's obviously the right thing to do. It may be hard to be unselfish and she may fail at times, but who wouldn't want to do Good if it bore no personal cost? If Tanya had done no evil she would still want to do Good, standing where she is now. If anything, it would be easier without the need for an occasional dip in the aura of anatta.

She steps out.

"Oh, by the way," says the paladin. "Congratulations."

She came here directly from Select Oliva's office after releasing him from his promise of confidentiality! Do they have some kind of telepathic communications system inside the church? Belmarniss hadn't mentioned a cheap spell like that. She wonders what he told the paladin. Presumably nothing sensitive; 'Tanya's working with us now' is a reasonable thing to let everyone know.

"Ah, thank you. I'll be flying out to Vigil tomorrow for an interview. I - very much hope the congratulations won't turn out to be premature."

"...I meant," says the paladin, "you're not Evil, today."