They will do what she says (grudgingly, in the case of the person she's reading, who would really prefer to KILL THEM KILL THEM KILL THEM ALL) and WOW.

Everyone is instantaneously perfectly healed? The soldiers are very confused and the farmers are very very grateful. And also slightly confused. Some of them are going to try praising Aroden! Or her!

:Aroden and I are not all-powerful and are not all-seeing. To make things better I will need to understand what's going on here. Can anyone tell me about it? How long ago was the war in which this place was conquered? What were these people sentenced to death for?:

This will get somewhat different responses from the soldiers and the farmers!

The farmers' narrative: They've lived here forever as subjects of Baron Agrost, and his father before him, and eventually the King of Oris. A year or two ago the baron went off to war when the king commanded and then never came back, and they heard a bunch of unreliable rumors about how the king had surrendered his throne or been beaten in battle and killed or whatever, and royal tax collectors stopped showing up and instead then imperial soldiers and tax collectors arrived to destroy all their shrines and kill their priests and demand taxes that weren't the old traditional ones they paid. There were people fighting the invaders and some people went off to join them, and others gave them food or weapons or money they'd been saving, or when the loyalists came through fed and hid them from the empire. Then these [UNPRINTABLE 16]s came through and they did some kind of horrible magic and then they were going to murder everyone!

The soldiers: There was an imperial decree that there were raids over the border from Oris, so the imperial army went marching (or in their case riding) over to make them stop. The army of Oris had lost by the time they got there so they were just in charge of chasing down rebels and bandits, not that you can tell the difference, and their company was assigned to go to the region this village was in to check if anyone was supplying the bandits, so their mage used compulsions spells to distinguish the guilty (of providing bandits and rebels with supplies and weapons and information) from the innocent, and apparently some of them were innocent, so they were carrying out executions for treason of the guilty because that's what the governor said they should do to traitors. There's rebels all over the place and they all claim innocence and then try to stab you in the back if you believe them.

Iomedae listens.

:Oris is still independent? This province fell to the Empire, but there's still a King of Oris somewhere?:

Empire: He surrendered to the Empire and became an Imperial subject (according to one officer, most of the troopers don't know.)

Villagers: Absolutely no idea, which does not stop different villagers from having lots of different speculative ideas, including "he's leading the rebellion" and "the gods took him up to heaven and he'll be back some day" and "the emperor threw him in a dungeon."

- all right. 

Iomedae suspects that she ought to try to negotiate with the Empire for more humane treatment of its subjects, rather than trying to fight the war for Oris's independence all over again. If she was sure she could win it, that'd be one thing, but she has little reason to believe the Empire doesn't have some actually serious firepower of the kind that would eventually succeed at killing her or just sending her off to the Elemental Plane of Fire or something. (Not no reason. A Golarion military unit that saw her but did not recognize her personally would nonetheless not have picked that fight, and that's some information about what capabilities the Empire has. But it's not very much.)

What gods did they worship, before the Empire came to destroy their temples and kill their priests?

The villagers are very unhappy about the deal where they're all probably going to die if she doesn't rebel, since helping sit on the soldiers is plausibly treason, but they're doing what she says.

Their main god is Anathei of the Cleansing Flame, whose priests talk about how there's good in everyone and you should try to extend love to everyone, even your enemies, who do what they do because of how they suffer (look what that got Anathei's priest, sacrificed by the Empire for their dark magic); they also have a bunch of more minor and local gods who don't map quite so well to anything Iomedae knows.

(This rules out one of the most Empire-sympathetic reasons for the ban on gods, if the ban was in fact a bad on some particularly awful gods.)

Sacrificed by the Empire for their dark magic? Can they say more about that?

Villagers: Yes!!! The empire uses the life of everyone they sacrifice for dark magic! They're probably only conquering people so they can get their life to use to cast dark magic!

Empire mage: (as if by rote) Blood magic is perfectly safe and only used by trained professionals, gotten from people they were going to execute anyway. 

Villagers: MAXIMUM SKEPTICISM.

Ah huh. 

What is the Empire's - deal, the way they themselves tell it. 

The empire's deal is this, as their officers explain it: Everywhere else is terrible. They're horrible despotic tyrannies that fight civil wars every twenty years or more. They have famines because of bad weather and they have nobles who make up whatever rules they like, and everyone starves all the time, and half of them burn mages for witchcraft and they're all illiterate and the other half are bandits.

The Empire does not, in fact, do that. The Empire has one law, enforced throughout the whole of it, and people can appeal to imperial officials if some lord wants to bully them and if the law's on their side it will be enforced; the empire ships food in to places that have famines or floods which they mostly don't because there's enough magic to just control the weather to always be good, because the Empire has schools, and roads, and isn't terrible to live in. The Empire prevents civil war because the Emperor is practically immortal and can pick a successor and bind everyone to support him and then nobody has to fight, so there's peace in the Empire. When somewhere else starts a fight with the Empire, the Empire wins it and expands, and everyone in the troop is from some province that the Empire conquered a hundred years ago or more and none of them want to live somewhere else.

Gods are just all horrible, no offense to Aroden.

The Emperor can pick a successor and bind everybody to support him? How useful. How does that work.

... I mean, you can make people do things with magic? Their mage used compulsions to make the villagers tell the truth about which of them were bandits.

And imperial armies are all under compulsions to maintain discipline and obey orders and (grumble, grumble, grumble from the troopers) not rape and pillage. And all the generals and powerful wizards and so forth are under orders to serve the emperor.

An interesting social experiment. 

Why do they feel that all of the gods are horrible?

Most of them have not really considered this, they just think it's kind of obvious? Divine cults plot murder and sedition, and gods want people to worship them and be their slaves even though they don't do anything for the people, and all these famous and good people got murdered by crazed cultists. Really, why would gods not be horrible?

- well, it makes sense that religious orders would plot sedition in an empire where they are banned. But in empires where they are legal, they instead do things like run soup kitchens and orphanages and hospitals. And, in the case of the Knights of Ozem, fight wars against great evils no one else possesses the courage to fight.

And certainly one should absolutely not under any circumstances worship a god who wants people to be their slaves, but these people here were just describing a god who wanted people to forgive their enemies and see the good in everyone, and it doesn't sound like anyone checked if their priest had done any murder or sedition before they put the priest to death. Maybe some gods are bad and some gods are, actually, allied with humans in various ways, not adequate to make the world good but a part of a good world.

That sounds unlikely to the soldiers, who are pretty sure all the gods are bad and some of them just have good propaganda, though some of them are trying to avoid thinking thoughts that will offend Iomedae. (The mage, who has read history, says that they only outlawed the gods after their cults did lots and lots of murdering and sedition before they were illegal, up to the point of assassinating an Emperor.)

And they evidently don't distinguish...which gods....are doing which things. 

All right. Iomedae would like to talk longer. She'd like to explain more about Aroden, and about herself, and what's important in her view. But that seems unfair, when every single person here other than her is afraid for their lives and right to be. She is going to pray to Aroden for guidance, and to Anathei for more local guidance, and then she is going to decide what to do, where the options are to return with these soldiers to their Empire, and speak with their leaders, and hope they can be called to reason (she suspects Anathei will be able to see if this is a good idea, and will tell her to do it if it might work), or to kill these soldiers and leave this place with anyone who prefers to leave with her, walking for the borders, or to join the rebellion for the independence of Otis, which she would really love to have Aroden's consultation on and which will fail if they don't get some allied powerful mages, Iomedae can win battles but she cannot actually on her own win wars.

She does not want to represent to these people that they are safe now that she has come; if they go to war, they may all die in that war, and if they stay they may die in the reprisals, and she has the strength to save anyone but not everyone, and so she will go where she saves as many as she can. Though first, if they want, she'll walk with them to the border of the nearest country that isn't the Empire, and kill everything that gets in their way along the way, and sell a magic item at the border to give them money with which to try to make their way; she owes them that much, before she goes wherever she can help as much as possible. 

She does some magic, as she says this, so that everyone present can, if they wish, choose not to be afraid. 

The local peasants are divided between Join The Rebellion, Flee, and Both These Options Are Terrible Why Can't The Empire Just Go Away And Leave Them Be.

The soldiers do not want to be executed, and feel very strongly about this. While she is off praying some of them will try to escape, since they are immune to fear and consider this to have the best odds of success.

This isn't shocking, but it won't work. 

Look, she explains to them once she's dragged two runaways back, her problem here is, unless she gets good news from the goddess of everyone-is-redeemable, who is a lot more optimistic than Iomedae herself about everyone-being-redeemable, she can't let them go; it is a large disadvantage to the rebellion, or even to the flight out of the country, for the Empire to have any idea what happened here. She can take them along as prisoners to the nearest neutral country, possibly, if she's doing that; some of them will presumably then make their way back to the Empire but not in time to be in possession of information the Empire won't possess already. That will be deeply inconvenient but not outside the range of inconveniences she'll put up with to save their lives.

In her world, the after-lives have been scried and visited by powerful wizards, and so they know where Evil people go. It isn't good. Iomedae would much, much rather not send these soldiers there. (And if she ends up deciding that she has to, she's going to give them as much time to think, with and without the aura of courage, as she possibly can, so they can maybe have some last minute revelations about their choices.) 

If they would like to be taken along to a neutral country as prisoners, they need to stop trying things. And if they keep trying things -

- anyone have a shortbow Iomedae can borrow -

Yeah, someone has a hunting bow she can borrow.

(The soldiers are REAL UNHAPPY about this.)

Iomedae hasn't used a hunting bow in more than a decade but it doesn't matter. She will demonstrate on a distant tree that she is very good at shooting things. If the soldiers attempt escape again, she will shoot them. Because otherwise she predicts soldier-villager scuffles are going to get innocent people killed.

She asks of them, if they decide to escape anyway, that first they think about the innocent lives they've taken, and whether they are proud of it or glad of it or whether it may have been a terrible mistake, or at most a tragic necessity, a price it'd have been much better to not need to pay. She asks this of them because she thinks it might affect their eternal fate if they run away and she shoots them.

They are very unhappy about this entire situation??? It's hard to tell which part of them all completely regretting so many of their decisions is because of them not being under her aura of courage, or the aura being insufficient, or just their regret that they are... all going to die... but they acknowledge she is very good at shooting things.

(They do not try to run again.)

It is so profoundly unsurprising they're very unhappy about the whole situation. Iomedae is also very unhappy about the whole situation, though she doesn't make this apparent. When you have a terrifying amount of power and are unpredictable to people, showing emotions usually just makes you scarier rather than making you possible to relate to on a human level. They'll more accurately model her if they're modeling her as an implacable avatar of Aroden's than as a woman who is very sad about this entire situation, anyway, since it's not as if the being very sad changes what she's willing to do.

She prays, which mostly means she looks directly at Aroden, insofar as a mortal can, and conveys what she knows of this situation. My intent is to head with these people towards the border, to learn more about the rebellion situation along the way; you can nudge me, instead, to go back to the Empire to talk, or to start a church right here in occupied territory, if either of those would be better. 

There is no answer, which could be because her default course is correct or because Aroden can't reach her here, at least not cheaply. 

She prays to Anathei, posing the same question, dwelling on her desire for peace and healing and for Anathei's priests to not be executed because some other servant of some god assassinated some people, a problem which Iomedae would be delighted to solve for Anathei.

There is again no answer. 

All right. What is the supply situation of these hundred people who she has plunged into grave danger. How far are they from the border. How much food is there in this village. Is there local wildlife, Iomedae's only real comparative advantage at feeding people on the march is that she can and will stab bears. Are the defensive talismans on the soldiers reusable. Do these people know the people in the villages they'll pass through heading east.