Ma'ar shivers. :I think I am glad to know, at least. I - had not been including as a consideration, for my work in Predain, that the gods will apparently sometimes send priests with superweapons after you if they dislike what you are doing for mysterious god-reasons. And it is helpful to know that maybe we have allies among Them too: 

He closes his eyes. :There are so many things I - had no idea of, and was not even aware I was missing. It makes it– I am not going to stop trying to fix things but I am much less sure it will work: 

:Aroden spent thousands of years looking before He was satisfied He hadn't missed anything and didn't have a better plan than ascending.:

:...He must have been very patient. It - sounds hard - to wait and watch there keep being problems that you could solve if you moved faster: 

:Most important things are hard, I think. And many of them involve witnessing terrible things it would be inefficient to oppose.:

:That makes sense: Sigh. :I....

- at least I am not going to be doing it alone. That - means a great deal to me. I would like to find a way to repay it.: 

:If you'd like. But payments are for - things you value that your counterparty doesn't, or not as highly, and I'm not actually sure what those are, between you and I.:

:Maybe: Ma'ar doesn't know how to think about that, and - for some very confusing reason it's an upsetting thought, a feeling like being on abruptly unstable ground, to notice that he's still confused about Iomedae even now. 

Emotional reckoning continues to be scheduled for later. :I need to go prepare for speaking to Urtho. I will have someone bring you my notes on the timeline, and - we should speak again later: 

:Of course.: She misses the headband for the first time, at his disconcerted expression. Usually people find it comforting to realize that they're not repaying favors which in wartime rapidly grow too large to substantially repay but just lending their strength to their and their friends' common cause, and there are lots of reasons one might not feel that way about it but she doesn't know which one applies.

(Ma'ar also doesn't know which one it is. He's pretty sure he could figure it out - with the headband, he can even see what thought-paths he might want to follow and what nameless feelings he might want to tug into the light - but it's not a good time, and his enhanced self-awareness seems to agree that it's not urgent. It's not the kind of bottomless pit of uncertainty that risks leaving him abruptly unable to make himself do things, and it's also unlikely to lead to any gaping blind spots in his tactical judgement. He can wait. He expects it to feel a lot - safer, to have that conversation, once Iomedae once again feels to his hindbrain like she's invincible and unbreakable and can do anything.

...the headband-self-awareness is going to poke him about that, too, but it can go on the list for later too.) 

He hugs Iomedae again, and thanks Kariasha very warmly, and respectfully leaves the cave-sanctuary before Gating out. 

Kariasha gives Iomedae a couple of minutes, and then brings her some sweet tea. 

:Is there anything you want to talk about? You do not have to - you do not have to agree to me doing anything else to your head, either, even if you stay a day or two - but I am here if you do: 

She suspects that'd be very valuable once she has her notes but she doesn't want to do policy-setting, where she evaluates the rules she was using for decisionmaking and how they worked out and if there are different rules that would have worked better, until she can reconstruct what happened. They can talk about other things if Kariasha would like but that's the main processing ahead of her. 

Kariasha will engage in light conversation with her about the temple order's work here, then, and stop when she seems tired. Mindhealing is generally intensely exhausting and she doesn't expect having vastly more life-force than normal people to help Iomedae with that as much as it helps her with standard Healing-fatigue. Iomedae can also take a nap, if she wants. 

Probably a good idea, after a little while.

Ma'ar manages to arrange to have the notes delivered within a couple of candlemarks, the holdup being that he didn't really want to give the location to one of his mages while the peace treaty isn't yet finalized, and so just had someone bring them from his office in the Citadel to the peace talks location and then handed the notes to Thaliss, who then had to arrange a Gate separately. 

It's a thick package. He's written down his own recollection of every interaction they had, which with the memory-reconstruction-boost of the headband is nearly word-perfect except for the period when he was badly injured. (There, he mostly remembers his own reactions rather than what Iomedae said, but he wrote it down for her anyway in case that still helps.) 

Apart from that, he has notes on his indirect guesses, based on spying and from later conversations with Tantara's people during the treaty negotiations, on everything she did while she was in Tantara. He's sketched out a calendar of when she probably met with who, underlining the conversations with various god-representatives since those were presumably especially important. He interviewed Marlana on her meetings with Iomedae and noted down what she said they talked about, but hasn't had a chance to ask Thaliss and does not really intend to personally interview the surviving shaman or the mages who worship Vkandis. 

The main policy she intends to reconsider, she tells the priestess after she's napped and read all the documents, is the one about - trusting unvetted prospective-allies she has reason to be suspicious of. It's the policy that led her to let Ma'ar go when he warned her about Sheiknam, and that led her to meet with the representatives of Bastet and the Nameless Flame and Vkandis and the Star-Eyed Goddess. It nearly got her killed, obviously. It is also the reason the priests of Vkandis were able to warn her about the superweapon and she could be far away when they dropped it. You can craft detailed policies that get one of those right but not the other, but - she suspects that doing this is in some sense cheating, trying to use prophecy rather than describe a policy that'd work in the next world she was dropped on. But on the other hand, cooperating with the Star-Eyed was ludicrously costly and it'd be very surprising if it weren't in fact a mistake. 

This would of course be much easier if she remembered how she'd made the decision to go see the Star-Eyed, but she can guess, because she does know her current decision procedures for that sort of thing, and she knows where precisely she would have done something different if she'd been following a different rule. (Often, that's the hard part.) 

Kariasha listens to all of this, thoughtfully. 

:It seems to me that you are - used to being one of the most powerful mortals in your world, with a god who can protect you from the dangers of other gods. And because of that, you can afford to take risks where the upside is - more cooperation, more people working together to help each other. I think we both agree that is important, and beautiful, and a way the world can have more good in it than otherwise. ...Also it seems to me like you were reasoning that your death would not be especially costly to you personally or your allies back home, though it might lead to many deaths here: 

She frowns. :I am - not sure you were entirely wrong. But it does seem like what happened with the Star-Eyed Goddess was much more costly to you and to Aroden than if you had simply been killed, and I - am not sure if it was one of the kinds of danger you were weighing: 

:I don't know. I wish I did. I suspect not? I would not have guessed it would have been either possible or - obvious as a thing to do - She could've killed me, I'm sure I'd accounted for that risk, but -

- I don't in fact understand why it was to Her advantage to do this instead.:

Kariasha makes a soft huff that could be a snort, not of laughter but of something darker.

:It seems it did not actually work out to Her advantage. So - maybe even gods can be wrong and make mistakes, if other worlds are involved? ...Maybe she wanted to keep your soul, if She saw that simply killing you would just mean that Aroden's church brought you back and eventually figured out how to intervene here again, and maybe it would have worked if Aroden had not expended the effort to stop it: 

Sigh. :I am not sure I exactly have the feeling that She would spend that effort for Her own people: 

:To be fair neither would Aroden, for most of His, He couldn't afford to. But also He's lawful and not using us against our interests, and She - very much isn't, as I can tell.:

:...I would be curious to hear more of what you mean by Lawful, there. It - seems important - and I am not sure it matches to anything in our temple's teachings: 

She can attempt to explain. There are a lot of accounts of Law, and most of them are imperfect in varying ways, but the key thing is that Law is a thing for aliens and for enemies, the core of it doesn't depend on general goodwill-towards-the-other or the preference not to harm the other too much and it fact it works even when you prefer to harm the enemy as much as possible. Law is about making sure that it's possible to do better than outcomes no one wants, making sure that there's more tradeoffs and fewer tragedies.

She's not sure Vkandis cared at all whether the superweapon killed everyone in a fifty mile radius; when she swore to spend some time vulnerable and away from everyone, she was ensuring he could see in Foresight that he would lose nothing by ordering her attacked during those hours, because she didn't want to rely on his willingness to trade anything for that outcome. She doesn't know if He was Himself being lawful, she suspects not, but gods can see Law, because a lot of it is about predictable regularities in your conduct, and it was her study of Law that made that response obvious from her perspective; Good would have inspired her to flee to a depopulated area, but Law inspired her to commit to doing that and not taking addiitional precautions there  - or maybe you could get that just with Good if you knew Vkandis was a god and could see ahead in prophecy, but Law works among entities that have imperfect prophecy, and in a sense all intelligent beings have imperfect prophecy. 

Kariasha listens closely. And then thinks for a while. 

:It sounds like - a way to be clear to the gods, who see us only from a distance in Foresight, but - maybe also to be clear to other mortals, in all the usual mortal ways? Where even if people cannot trust each other, they can still - make agreements with an enemy, and expect their enemy to keep it because the alternative is worse for both of them?: She tilts her head. :My sense of Ma'ar is that he wants this very badly, and has been searching for it his whole life, and - found little of it, even in places where people were trying to be good to one another. Until he met you, and he would love you very much for that, if you let him:

- she cuts herself off. Makes a face. :- Also I have barely met the man and you might prefer not to have this conversation at all. I - sometimes I just say things like that. It seems to come of having had a god in my head so many times: 

:Need also pointed it out. I think I do want him, but once I'm sure I'm back to ordinary function and have vetted him more thoroughly. I haven't actually known him for very long and sometimes you fall in love with people and : you come to suspect they're pursuing lichdom :they turn out to have a lot going on.:

Kariasha isn't reading Iomedae's mind and wouldn't even if her shields were less utterly impregnable, and so has no way of picking up on that aside. :That makes sense, and I think it would be wiser to consider it once he has returned the headband that empower's one's thinking. I doubt he would mind - I think he would prefer it, actually, he - feels badly about having important conversations where he thinks too much faster and more clearly than you: 

Her lips twitch. :Though my guess - this part is not as a Mindhealer touched by a god, just, I have met men in his position - if you decide to speak with him about it, and you want him to have any emotional awareness at all, it will probably go better if you let him have the headband for that part: 

:I will take your advice on it, I haven't actually attempted many romantic assignations. I would mostly have wanted the Wisdom, to counter the thing where it's harder to consider whether you should kill someone if you're in love with them.: