"....I really do not think it is at all in my interests to kill you. Even if I expected it to work, which I do not. You convinced Urtho to offer a ceasefire." 

"...in a war you were winning."

"In a war I did not choose and have wanted to end since the day Tantara invaded." He says it very quietly. "And even winning it was - costing us more than we could afford. More than it would have cost Tantara in the long run, in many ways - at least if you look at material resources only, I am aware that war causes...other kinds of damages that are harder to measure." 

He closes his eyes. "I am aware you think I am either very evil or very stupid, and I cannot even deny the latter, so much of this war was stupid. Just. You are not from Predain, or Tantara. I am getting the sense that wherever you are from is...better...and that you have much to teach us, but..." He doesn't know the words to say it. "But I think maybe you are assuming - common knowledge, shared history - that your homeland takes for granted, and ours...does not." 

"I almost certainly am. I can think of specific things, I can try to correct the right amount for all the unseeable things in between the specific things, I can try to correct too much about as often as I correct too little, but if you suspect me of being wrong I suspect you are right. ...it is very hard for me to make sense of Tantara's account of events in Predain if you didn't want a war."

"...We made mistakes. I made mistakes."

Pause.

"I think there are other aspects, where - our cultures are very different, right, even in addition to the language barrier, and so words or actions are interpreted differently. I think we should have set up more channels of communication, and sooner. If I - knew what I know now - I would have realized this was going to be a problem worth heading off. I should have tried harder to establish a diplomatic presence in Tantara, and encouraged them to send their own diplomats as well – the issue is that we do not really have diplomats as an institution, historically..." 

He lets out his breath, a little. 

"- If you have specific confusions I can maybe tell you what I think was misread." 

"Why invade a neighboring kingdom?"

"I am guessing you mean Avulle? Nowhere else that we expanded into was really under an existing state. Avulle does count, they had a king, even if their total population was well under a hundred thousand. ...I could justify it on humanitarian grounds but I do not expect you to find that convincing. They were an ongoing threat to our border security and a slave-trade hub where some problematic bandit gangs would sell children they had captured from our farms and their use of blood-magic was not regulated in any way and was causing droughts on our side of the border." 

"I am curious what makes you say I probably won't find the humanitarian grounds convincing."

Because no one ever does. 

"...Words are cheap, right? People can say whatever they want about their motives, and I know that I - consider it important to be honest - but how would you know and trust that? Whereas for purely strategic incentives, the same considerations apply whether or not you personally care about children starving and being sold into slavery." 

She nods. "Many people say their conquests are for the good of the conquered. - they admittedly do not usually send child mortality statistics."

"I can say quite confidently that conquering Avulle reduced child mortality even within the first year, and probably improved literacy within three years though this is hard to judge since they did not have records of that before."

He shrugs, insofar as he can while still lying on the ground with a sword at his throat; he's considered trying to promise that he isn't actually going to Gate out if she lets him sit up but it didn't seem like the highest priority.

"Of course, that is a different question from whether they are happy to be part of Predain now - I think that is mixed - or consider their own lives to be better off. And also a different question than - whether something of great value was lost, regardless of who mourned for it. Probably something– probably very many things were lost that are impossible to measure but were precious to someone. I...personally think it was almost certainly something that I would weigh less heavily than dead babies, but - still." 

"I'm not going to tell you I would never do that. I'd be more careful, I'd have more allies, I'd be much clearer with all my neighbors about what the provocation was, but I might also have done it, if I didn't see a better way."

It must be nice to consider 'just having more allies' to be among your options This is not a helpful line of thought. 

He's so tired. That is also not a helpful thing to keep noticing. 

"I can certainly in hindsight recognize many times when I could and should have been more careful. ....I think that being clear with our neighbors about the provocation would have been - harder - because of the communication issues I mentioned and. I think Tantara– no, I think Urtho specifically, is...not very good at recognizing the problems that happen outside his country's borders, and–" 

He stops, because, one, this is probably not at all a useful tangent to go down, and two, it's very hard to talk about and he doesn't actually feel like he knows the right words.

"He seems very oblivious," she agrees cheerfully. "A lot of this is his fault as well. - I think he cares about you and wishes you well, for what that's worth, though there are some failures of execution in his efforts at that."

The cheerfulness is so confusing! Ma'ar has no idea how to parse this interaction now and he's trying very hard not to react to it with panic, or to show any of his reaction, but he visibly tenses. 

(And if anything it makes it worse, or at least makes it hurt more, that Urtho cares about Ma'ar personally, when he doesn't understand and doesn't care about the rest of Predain's people, the ones who weren't his students, who weren't brilliant and articulate in his presence once, and he never considered their struggles to be his problem -) 

He takes a deep breath. 

"I think he has a...particular philosophy. About mages, I doubt he would extend it to you. But he believes - that power is inherently bad, that it corrupts, and we already have one kind of power and should not seek other kinds. Political power, obviously, but also just - trying to affect the world in too many ways, or with too broad a scope. 

...I disagree with that." 

"Hmmm. I think the claim I would make which sounds sort of like Urtho's, which is maybe built off the same things Urtho noticed in himself and the people around him which made him say that, would be -

There are many people who are deeply motivated by doing the right thing, and who are sincere in their intent to get in power so that they can do the right thing. They don't all agree on the right thing, but many of them are pointing at fragments of what I, myself, seek for the world. Peace and safety. Good harvests. No more dead children. No more dead adults, unless they're ready to go on to Heaven or wherever else they choose. Love and compassion and generosity and strength and determination and hard work. The destruction of evil and the redemption of evildoers. 

So with all these well-meaning people around, the question is, why aren't things better? And you could give a thousand answers, but certainly one of them is that humans are not made of stone, are not angels and are not archons. We have bad days. We make mistakes and then it hurts to think about the mistake so we never think about it carefully enough to learn how to not make it again. We lose things that in a better world no one would ever have to lose, and those wounds heal, but they don't heal back to the way they were originally. We learn habits that permit us to keep going in the world we've made for ourselves. Habits like killing people. Habits like not thinking too much about people. This is not inevitable, but it takes great skill to avoid, and moderate skill even to notice if you're not successfully avoiding it. 

And we are, in significant part, the people who surround us. When we are not very diligent to do otherwise, we believe their flattery and crave their approval. We want to be liked. We want to believe in our own importance. And all of this is much worse if you are, in fact, important, if the words people have to say to convince you you're far more important than anyone else can be completely true. When you're in power, you're busy, there are immense demands on your time, it's hard to know who to trust and it's unhealthy and exhausting to be alone. And the people who surround the powerful have their own agendas, and the more power you have the more people have tried or are trying to be in your inner circle, and the more likely they are to be deeply unusual, deeply manipulative, and fairly dangerous.

So, if you could, you might distribute power; you might give no one the authority of an Emperor or a King. In practice I haven't seen anyone get that working very well. You might try for weak Kings who answer to many factions; in practice that doesn't work very well either. Or you might just try to find a King of exceptional virtue, and surround him with advisors of exceptional virtue, so he can think clearly despite all the pressures against it and get things right more often than not. In my experience that one works only if the gods are doing a lot of the work. It's a difficult problem, if you're building a nation. If you are, as an individual, deciding whether to seek power, you have a different difficult problem, and it's not as if everyone who says 'I'm better than the other guy' is wrong.

But if a country's most gifted mage and strategist came to me and said 'should I also seek to rule my country?' I would, in fact, counsel him not to, even if he was very virtuous, maybe especially if he was very virtuous, unless he was also very very careful, and had friends and allies ready to embark on this journey with him, and had already thought about how much damage he could do if power changed him, or changed how people reacted to the way he'd always been."

All of this seems very very important, both in terms of actual information and advice that he badly needs and, separately, wanting to make a good impression on the powerful stranger -

- and it's inconveniently difficult to focus. because of the handful of notes of confusion near the beginning, that aren't quite serious enough for him to interrupt the person holding a sword to his throat but that's a high bar and he is maybe mostly not coming to that decision because he's very tired and decisions are hard. 

(other faint side-notes of disagreement - he doesn't think that he craves the approval of the people he works with, actually, it's– he's not natively good at noticing that kind of thing, and it feels like such safer and more solid ground to focus on tables of numbers you can measure, though he's aware that this is not how everyone works, if it were then he would have much better numbers on so many different things...)

...and then there's the second note of confusion, around the concept where "the gods are doing a lot of the work" and - where is Iomedae from, it seems so incredibly alien - 

Calm. Focus. 

"- I appreciate your counsel," he says, mostly on reflex. "I - there were some words you used there that I am not familiar with and it seems important. What is Heaven, and what are angels and archons?" 

"In my world, souls, on the death of their body, go on to judgment, and from judgment to a next life that reflects the way they lived this one. This is totally unsatisfactory, obviously, since some people get bad next lives, and I do mean to fix it, but there are a lot of gods who like the current system. 

I don't know if this is true here. I have been presuming it might be false. I doubt that we are outside the Creation in which souls are called to judgment, because I have the ability to see a glimpse of that judgment when I look at people and that part is working fine. But your local gods might be doing something unusual; it's a wizard who'd be able to tell the difference, and I'm not one, and I've prayed without response to the gods I am familiar with. 

Angels and archons are beings that humans can grow into, in the next world, and they possess a sort of internal clarity such that it's not true of them that a lot of sad things happening would permanently change their outlook and values, and such that they would never betray their word or their aims. I speak to them frequently; seeking their counsel solves some kinds of problems with being a mortal surrounded by equally confused mortals, though also mortals shouldn't actually try to approximate being an angel or an archon except under very unusual circumstances."

“- As far as I am aware, souls in our world do not go anywhere in particular or continue to - have experiences - after death.”

Ma’ar is pretty sure he has emotions about this. He is also definitely going to put off figuring out what exact emotions those are until some later point when he has pen and paper and doesn’t have a sword at his throat.

"That is possible, but it'd be a bit surprising given that I can still see how they'll do at judgment. If souls here are meant to go to judgment and the local gods are interfering with that, we'll have a bunch of difficult choices ahead of us, but it also seems quite likely to me that souls here do go on. I'm sorry I can't yet provide you with either more certainty or a better arrangement."

Ma’ar so confused and so tired and those continue to be unhelpful thoughts to keep noticing. 

- he still has no idea how to respond to it. 

“I suppose you should find a way to - test your theories about what the situation is here,” he says faintly.

" - yes, definitely. After the war we can sit down and talk about the options."

….Ma’ar is, again, running into the problem where he is failing at finishing any thoughts or producing any response he can put into words. 

He’ll just - lie on the ground and wait. He’s starting to distantly notice that he’s cold.

He's probably scared. She doesn't actually know what that's like but she can make the inference. She'd - like to give him a slightly better understanding of who she is, but you can't do that by starting conversations people don't want to have. She will think about approaches to the traitorous general, and leave him be. 

"The spell I'm using to understand you is going to wear off in a few minutes," she says after a while. "It's all right if you want to save further questions for later - I expect there will be plenty of time - but if there is anything else you wanted to know, it will have to be Mindspeech."