"I'm curious what you are saying.  Any tiny scrap of appreciation of Evil from you is progress, and I'd like to know about it and build on it and maybe bring you back to the side of Hell, someday."

"So take dath ilan, which nobody in the Conspiracy understood or could have understood, at the time.  Not even me, because I hadn't gone all the way over to Good, then.  Even Peranza didn't understand until she went fully Good herself, and that she didn't do while she was still under threat in Cheliax."

"There are kinds of Goodness you can't express in dath ilan, if it's the way that Keltham described it -"

"You don't know?"

"Even Nethys can't see there from here, or so Clepati implied that Nethys implied.  Neither of them is Lawful and either could be messing with me."

"Huh.  Go on?"

"There's kinds of Goodness you can't express in dath ilan.  Maybe sometimes a house there catches fire and the parents have to run in and risk their own life to save the lives of their children.  But no child ever starves to death, there, for want of food.  No mother or father ever decides to starve themselves so that their children can have a little more food.  They don't die for their children slowly, one day at a time, facing down the pain and enduring it.  That kind of Goodness isn't a thing, there."

"And it is better so.  It wouldn't be worth setting things up so that a child could face starvation, just once, so that their parents could choose to starve themselves instead.  Not even to complete the expression of Goodness, to complete the expression of what mortals can be, inside dath ilan."

"But if, somehow, that happened in dath ilan, just once - I think they'd be able to celebrate the Goodness of the parents who starved, and be glad their people had proved that about themselves, even as they wished it had never happened and mourned the parents whose lives were cut short."

"Really, when you think about it, there's much larger pieces of Goodness missing.  They don't have Hell, at all, let alone Malediction.  No paladin ever risks going to Hell themselves in the uncertain hope of maybe saving more people from Hell than that, not even innocent people, maybe, but just people."

"They would so never ever introduce Hells or Malediction, in dath ilan, just to get the paladins.  But if somehow, that happened to them, they would find a tiny space to celebrate that the expression of Goodness in their world had become more complete."

"You actually did go all the way over to Good, huh."

"Yeah.  Once I was out of Cheliax and no longer under threat and not, subconsciously trying to look a little less like a complete alien and traitor to my old friends from Ostenso.  I went all the way over."

"Well, you sound a little sad about that, so maybe there's still hope.  Do you know why you sound sad?"

"Put that question on hold.  I wasn't done talking about you."

"Uh huh."

"So - where was I -"

"Dath ilan would find a little space to celebrate the greater expression of Goodness in paladins, among all the mourning and wishing it hadn't been so, if Hell came to their universe."

"Because Good and Evil don't cancel out."

"I've been thinking, now and then, about how - being in this universe, Pharasma's Creation - might have changed things compared to what Keltham is so certain is the natural state of a world.  And I think - besides the categories of Good and Evil themselves, maybe being not the way we'd have sorted everything ourselves - we get used to thinking of people having a net total quantitative alignment and not just a, huge bag of events.  Where each individual event is one that could have multiple aspects we'd celebrate, multiple aspects we'd mourn."

"You can't, actually, make up for bad things by doing good things.  It can shift your alignment but it can't cancel the reality.  Every bad thing you do, is just there, forever.  And every good thing you do, is also just there, forever.  Which doesn't mean you should be sad about the badness over and over and over until the total sadness adds up to infinity.  It's just - the way things are, in dath ilan, that nobody ever judges them at the end of their lives, and they don't have any need to think of people as finally Good or finally Evil.  Instead people are the whole collection of everything they once did, and everything they currently are."

"So you morally disapprove of me, and think I'm hot, and the two facts coexist."

"Not literally, because if I had such an aspect of myself, a potential to appreciate that kind of hotness, Cheliax ruined it for me far past my own ability to put it back together again."

"Metaphorically, I suppose, yes."

"What you've become - isn't, I think, the best Pilar Pineda you could have possibly become, from the starting point where we first met in Ostenso.  If we were just considering the person you became for yourself, and not considering your effects on anyone else."

"But what you became instead is stronger than you were, and prouder, and finding new parts of herself and new ways to be happy.  I can celebrate that even if other people get hurt, even if I think it wasn't the best possible outcome for you personally, even if I wish our whole universe hadn't been shaped the way it was.  To say that I can appreciate some aspects of the more grownup Pilar, isn't to say anything one way or another, about whether it's a good thing on net.  I can celebrate, even, that our world has somebody like you in it, even as I wish it didn't have anyone like you in it.  Badness and goodness don't cancel."

"I'll have to think about whether there's anything useful buried under that enormous mound of heresy.  Do you already know why it is that you're sad you went full Good?"

"Because I did have Evil desires in me.  If I wanted to be hurtful at you, Pilar, I'd say that Cheliax ruined that for me.  But probably even if there'd been no Cheliax in my past, I'd choose not to do those things, because of how other people would get hurt, if I did.  And hurting people - really hurting them, not like you going on a torture vacation - hurting people is wrong."

"But it means I'm not literally - everything Ione Sala could possibly be, in every part of herself, and I can mourn that, even as I affirm that it was the right choice and I don't wish to be otherwise."

"I'm glad.  It sounds like you'll be okay, eventually, even after Asmodeus conquers everything."

"Noooooo comment."

Elsewhere and slightly earlier

"Fe-Anar.  Got a moment for something fairly important?"

"I expect so. Did you decide not to release Rovagug?"

"Not yet.  Maybe with two more Intelligence points."

"My Demiplane of Diamond Synthesis has been harvested, and my party is heading off to the City of Brass momentarily.  I didn't actually get two million Wish diamonds, more like - estimates since I didn't count exactly - two hundred thousand Wish diamonds and a million True Resurrection diamonds.  Not all of the seeds grew out the same way."

" - well, I can't actually imagine any plans that need a million instead of two hundred thousand, but my condolences."

"If reality was just being reality, the conclusion would be that diamond just won't be a limited resource, pretty soon; they'll be a material component in spells, but not a valuable component.  Even if something odd happened to me, and to the Iomedaen whom I gave sealed instructions, the Scientific Revolution would still figure it out in a year or two."

"The only way anything from the Demiplane of Diamond Synthesis could actually end up being valuable, was if something weird and tropey happened to make it be the case that what I did once, here, can never be done again.  That's the only way that any products of this event end up valuable, or rare, rather than useful the way that water is useful."

"It seemed important to disclaim that part, before I gave you some things that are probably worthless and not even slightly rare as of a year or two later, unless something tropey happens."

"People will probably start using them for jewelry like they use turquoise," he says in a tone of approval.