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When she was young, she tried quite hard to avoid dying.
It wasn't fear; even when she felt fear, it didn't push her away from danger. It was a simple calculation: if she died, then she wouldn't be able to get anything else done, and she had a lot that needed doing.
By the time she was middle-aged, by the time the crusaders established a beachhead in Vellumis and it became clear that the Tyrant's demise could be achieved, if only the empire could retain the political will to do it for the twenty further years it would take, she no longer tried all that hard to avoid dying. The thing was that it was hardly going to stick. She'd been Fireballed and speared through and disintegrated and dissolved in acid and bitten in half and bitten into smaller pieces than that, and then they'd put her back up on her feet, usually within six seconds so as to save on the diamond. She did not prefer it, really - for one thing, diamonds were a limited resource -- but it was barely even a consideration, when judging between a few plans to win a battle.
And then she got stronger, and for the most part stopped dying, though not because she'd started avoiding danger. It was just that Disintegrate wouldn't do it, and Fireballs certainly wouldn't, and dragons were more afraid of her than vice versa, and the only thing on the battlefield that really stood a chance was the Whispering Tyrant. He, too, avoided her.
She appreciated it, the respite from death. She imagined sometimes that if your life and instincts and priorities and memories were only war, you would become a god of only war, like Gorum; a god of fighting Evil, in her case. She does not intend to be the god of fighting Evil; she intends to be the god of defeating Evil. It's fine if, like Gorum would rust if war ever ended, Iomedae-the-god would cease to be if Evil ceased, but it's not fine if she, a human, would be a hollow thing without an enemy before her; that's not how humans work, not when the work ahead of them is very long and very hard, not when they don't know from which directions they'll be tested.
So being powerful enough she doesn't die every week is nice. She thinks it's easier to contemplate the future past the end of the war, when it's been a month or so since the war has killed her.
But when she does die, or something, in a Tyrant-orchestrated magical explosion of unfathomable scope and scale, she's not exactly surprised or afraid.
