Cool, he'll get one of those and a book about the light-emitting people Griffie was talking about and - "Actually, do you have any works criticizing Griffie's faction?"

"Griffie has represented emself to me as an adventuring Celestial-aligned druid working closely with the goddess Aiyuna. I can get you criticisms of celestials, or of druids, or of the goddess Aiyuna, or of Griffie's species, or of Griffie and their adventuring party personally, but there aren't criticisms of 'celestial-aligned druids working with Aiyuna' that aren't specifically about Griffie."

"I'll take something about Griffie and something about Aiyuna, unless they're in the vein of 'Griffie snores all night and gets mud on the nice rugs'."

"Alright." And Bar will walk Val through the controls of the device he's borrowing.

Griffie is an abomination against the order of life and death. Druids are supposed to maintain nature, and ey defies it. While the rest of their abominable construct clan is at least insular enough to keep their soul-warping false life to themselves, Griffie and their party used a twisted ritual to return a young murder victim to some semblance of life, seduced her into their twisted ideology, and violently destroyed several psychopomps who attempted to extract her from their web.

Val is normally very in favor of returning young murder victims to some semblance of life! But it can certainly go very wrong. If this publication doesn't manage to explain exactly how it went wrong in this case he'll ask for one that does. And also for criticism of this writer, who seems kind of alarmingly in favor of death.

Terrorists Attack Imbrex Hearing | Know Your Facts | Axis Newswire

Zita Imbrex was murdered. Imbrex was later found to be restored to life via an exotic daemonic effect, leading her to lack the soul deterioration associated with death and resurrection.

Noticing this, a team of psychopomps responded by attempting to kill Imbrex, who violently resisted this with the help of associates including Griffith of Erlonn and an assortment of celestials. Inevitables then followed standard deescalation procedure, sending the psychopomps and celestials home and scheduling a hearing regarding the cases of Griffith and Imbrex. (For more information about the Griffith case, see following article.)

At the hearing, Imbrex was ruled to not be in violation of the law, as death is Abaddon's domain, and if Abaddon cannot control their daemons, it is their affair. On hearing this, psychopomps launched a premeditated attack on Axis, using weapons including a massive supply of Spheres of Annihilation and a negative-energy-based lightning effect. No connection has as of yet been found between psychopomps and sceaduinar, and no other supplier has been found.

"The author of the criticism of Griffie I showed you is not personally notable but is associated with psychopomps, who are also criticized here, so it's multifunctional."

"Are they broadly agreed to be in favor of death? Is that any less objectionable than it sounds on the face of it?"

"They're broadly agreed to be anti-immortality and in favor of various cultural understandings of a 'good' death – dying in an honorable fight, dying painlessly with one's affairs resolved, that sort of thing. This often takes the form of helping people cope with the deaths of their loved ones, discouraging the use of resurrection magic that would cause serious harm to the recipient, interfering with 'un-death', a common phenomenon which causes people to be animate and capable of taking actions but either mindless or with their minds warped towards evil aims, rescuing those who are kept alive far longer than they would wish to be, etc."

"Do you know if 'un-death' refers to the same thing as happens in our experience when resurrections go wrong?"

"To the best of my understanding, which is based on published material, local foods, et cetera and not direct personal observation, 'un-death' in the Suaal context is technically defined in a way that refers to a specific interplay of two forms of energy which are not present in your world. However, the term is not unique to Suaal, and calling the result of a botched resurrection 'un-dead' would not be unusual in various other worlds, or even among uneducated people in Suaal."

"Hm. Do you get the impression people in Sathend get along better than people in other worlds? Because I'm starting to get that impression."

"It's not particularly rare for communities the size of Sathend to be comparable to Sathend in getting along. Typical worlds are orders of magnitude larger than Sathend, which creates more possibilities for conflict."

"Hm. Someone should read about that before our population doubles a few more times but it doesn't have to be me in particular. Do you think the entities in Suaal are powerful enough that we can't afford to fetch the wrong one?"

"Sources who don't have obvious-to-me reasons to collaborate on lies do suggest that Suaal entities are at the high end quite threatening, I wouldn't recommend taking an entity from Suaal here if you weren't confident in what you're getting. However, while sources suggest that a high-powered entity could impersonate a lantern archon, in practice it seems likely that the vast majority of intelligent glowing spheroids of the appropriate size are lantern archons and will-o-the-wisps, the latter of which are made from a material that's notably distinctive from lantern archon material."

"Are there areas where apparent lantern archons are even less likely to be impersonators, or types of lantern archon that are even less likely to be impersonators, or anything like that?"

"Lantern archons in high-security areas of Heaven are, according to records, less likely to be impersonators."

"How would you recognize an area like that? And if they're high-security are they likely to have dangerous defenses that bite us if we try to get a lantern archon out?"