The supply situation is that it isn't the harvest yet, and they'd be leaving behind the half-grown crops in the fields; they can harvest whatever fruits and vegetables are grown and bring their animals with them, but they won't have enough for a long journey.

If you go west or (they hear, the mountains are further off that way) south there's the mountains, but that's a longer walk than the peasants have ever been and it's haunted by bandits and ghosts and monsters and savage tribes (they hear). If you go south and east they hear there's the Empire of Holy Ithik, which worships some horrible god of slavery that they don't know anything about. Go east and you reach Zoskin which is fine but halfway across the map. They hear there's more countries with fantastic names off east and south and west and north but it's mostly the Eastern Empire, near them.

There's totally wildlife, it's very dangerous, Iomedae can stab bears.

The defensive talismans need to be recharged by a trained mage. The only trained mage around is about to be executed and REALLY NOT HAPPY ABOUT THIS. The other nearby villages are sort of foreign but basically like them, though if you go northeast you go into territory the Empire has ruled for longer.

(If mindread, the imperial officers have a slightly better map, but one that largely accords with the villagers - the western mountains are days off, the southern mountains are a lot more; there's a pass through the western mountains that leads ultimately to Hardorn, but that would be a long journey north to get there and require getting past imperial fortresses. Northeast is Tozoa Province, which was part of Oris but annexed much more recently, and, yup, the god of Ithik seems even worse than average.)

(The mage was planning on using the blood magic from the executions to recharge the talismans; he has uncharged spares in his saddlebags. He's not a very powerful mage and doesn't have the power to do much talisman-charging anyway.)

- horrible god of slavery worship is noted and on the to-do list, probably quite high on the to-do list. Aroden will absolutely want her to burn that church to the ground figuratively and plausibly literally. How far east is Zoskin? How far do the soldiers of the Eastern Empire imagine it would pursue peasants fleeing south into the haunted mountains, probably not very far? On the other hand she can't full-time protect or supply them there and also do anything other than protecting and supplying them there.

Really really really far.

They're near the western edge of this kingdom and it's at the eastern.

- great. Okay. 

When there's nowhere to run, you fight. It's not complicated. It's just going to be really, really, really terrible. 

Does anyone know who the most powerful and impressive spellcaster in the Eastern Empire is, and what the most impressive thing they've been known to do is.

The locals have nothing. The mage thinks that he doesn't really know - all the famous Adepts he's heard of were, like, really good, they can open portals across the empire and summon armies of demons and everything, but Archmage-General Altarrin managed to survive a Final Strike by opening a horizontal Gate under him while on fire and he designed their shield-talismans to be even better than the ones from a thousand years ago, which is really impressive.

'multiple people who can open Gates across the continent' suggests either a power level at which she will just lose immediately the minute the Empire notices they have a fight on their hands or a magic system that is quite different than the one she is familiar with. Of course, they also have something geas-like that even a very weak mage can cast, so probably it's the latter. 

But it's enough uncertainty that she really cannot let these soldiers live. If the magic system happens to be favorable to them, they go report home and someone scries her immediately and tries again and again until she's asleep and then teleports in invisibly to get a spell to land that they wouldn't stand a chance at while she's awake and then that's it. Until she knows much more or has some actual support casters, she needs it to be deeply unclear what is going wrong in Oris. 

She thinks for a few more minutes, just in case there's something she hasn't thought of, some other way out of this or through this. 

There's really not. There's 'abandon these people to certainly die', 'go try to argue with the expansionist mind control empire that puts priests of the goddess of atonement and redemption to death on the spot for worshipping gods', 'fight that empire' or 'go live in the mountains full of monsters who will frankly have their own geopolitical problems at least this complicated'. 

The time to walk away was when the soldiers of the empire told her to. But she doesn't regret that she didn't; she would've had a very long walk, it sounds like, past many many similar wrongs, probably past other rebels who she'd have to decide to assist or ignore, past other hostile imperial units, and she'd have made it eventually to some other country threatened by the Empire's relentless expansion. 

And this probably is in fact the best place to start the church of Aroden in this world. It seems to have some relevant and necessary teachings, and maybe a bit of a sharper edge than Anathei who is probably Sarenrae. And she's going to need the church of Aroden to crush the local slavery god who may or may not be Asmodeus or one of his archdevils.

The price isn't lower because she's judged it worth paying. But she has, in fact, judged it worth paying. 

She stands and draws her sword. "I see no real alternative to a war for Oris's restored independence," she says. "I don't know if it will succeed. Aroden gives me signs only when they will change my course, and this was my course by default. It is very likely that all of you will die in this fight, and I cannot even promise you paradise when you do. But when soldiers come to your land and kill your priests and name your countrymen traitors, you can choose to fight, if you like, even if you may lose. If that's what you choose, I will teach you what I know about how to win wars, and command you in this one, and I will demand of Aroden that He account you as His people and reunite you in His realm when you die in this war, though if you'd rather have Anathai's that's also fine." 

Iomedae looks pretty confident, and trustworthy, and awesome. So.

They want to hear about how to win wars.

(They also want to hear about this afterlife thing? Anathai doesn't talk much about afterlives.)

All right. 

Then Iomedae will cast a spell on herself, and grow the wings of an angel, with which she can actually fly, and she'll speak aloud for the first time, then, because angels speak every tongue in which they can be understood, and she wants to speak the tenets of Aroden's faith clearly and know that everyone heard the same thing. The spell won't persist very long, but you can't have too many tenets of your faith anyway because a lot gets lost in repetition.

In Golarion mages have used scrying and planar travel to search for the dead, and found the afterlives, and so they know what happens to you when you die. You go before the Judge, and they look at all you've done in life and send you where they think you merit it. Evil people go to the Evil afterlives, which are places of torment and cruelty, with Hell the worst of them; there they are destroyed or tormented or beaten until the humanity is burned out of them, and only the Evil - the pettiness, the cruelty, the anger - remains. Asmodeus shapes His mortals to be His slaves. He is Evil. The faith of Aroden has very few dealings with Him, all of them the dealings of enemies with temporarily shared interests. 

Aroden's own domain is in Axis, Lawful Neutral, and among His reasons for choosing Axis as His domain are that it was not His desire to restrict what He could build to those of unusual virtue or merit. It is forbidden, for detailed word of the wonders of that world to come to make its way back to Golarion; it would count as interference by Aroden, if Iomedae travelled to His domain and learned the secret of the gardens that go on forever and ever, or the buildings that stand thousands of feet in the sky, if she brought that knowledge back to Golarion for people to use. And He has judged it worth it, that the people of Golarion know there are bigger things and better things, that the aim of humankind is to build a paradise beyond the imagination of the builders, for every generation to surpass the last, for things of beauty and wonder to be everywhere; but He has not judged the price worth it to tell them most of the details. 

If they are Lawful when they die, and not Evil, they can go to Aroden's realm, and be united with lost loved ones who are there, and be nourished in glory and wonder forever. Or if it intolerable to them that Hell exists, that Evil exists, that the work of the world is not done, like it bothers Iomedae, they can go to Heaven, which does not content itself with building its own paradise but which also fights to bring hope and the end of Evil to everywhere else in creation. The wings she bears are a gift of Heaven.

In her world the goddess of fire and hope and redemption and the Good in every human heart is Sarenrae, and she doesn't know if that is Anathei or not, but Her paradise is called Nirvana, and Nirvana goes before the Judge to argue for every soul no matter how Evil and how damned, to argue that there is Good in that heart and a place for it in paradise, and it is a world turned towards making that true. 

And in her world the goddess of exploration and wonder and freedom is Desna, and Her paradise - She'd object, here, that it's not Her paradise, just a paradise where She hangs out sometimes - is called Elysium, and there is no Law in Elysium, just the beauty and wonder wrought by everyone desiring it and building it, and there is no organized operation against Evil but a hundred million smaller ones, as everyone asks their own conscience what blows against Evil they are personally inspired to strike. 

(She'll go through the other afterlives too, but in less detail; they are less important to warn people about, in her and Aroden's view of the world, and not cooperative so as she feels obliged to represent them generously as they'd do the same for her.)

The gods are ancient and inhuman. Some of them are kind, some of them are loving, some of them are generous, but they are not human, and they do not understand what it is to be human, not exactly, and in His centuries of adventures and exploration Aroden concluded that this was not the right way of things, that Creation would never permit humans to reach their true potential unless there were humans among the gods. And so He found or created the Starstone, which made gods out of men, and set protections around it, and ascended; and Irori and Nethys and Cayden Cailean and Norgorber and perhaps others have also ascended, and so very locally - because new gods are small beside the ancient gods - they are changing the balance of power in Golarion, they are making its future a future humanity chose. 

And what a future humanity chooses! Wandering the plains, humans choose to befriend and domesticate animals; they choose to replant the most promising crops, until they have created entire new kinds of plants like no god imagined, just in the careful choosing. They choose writing. They choose buildings. They choose courts and laws, and myths and ballads, and heroes and teachers. They choose magic and invention and trade and prosperity and freedom. Aroden is not the god of all of those things, He couldn't be, but He is the god of civilization, that which grows to provide a foundation on which people can choose all of those things. 

Iomedae does not know how directly He can intervene here. She doesn't know for sure if the souls of the dead, here, go before the Judge, or if some stranger thing happens, because Creation is very vast. But She knows that His vision is as true here as anywhere else, and that a civilization built here will have the support of every civilization across the stars aspiring to the same thing. 

There are songs that are sung in the war-camps of Iomedae's world, of Aroden's vision, of mortals and what they can grow to be. Of what it is, to face challenges the gods did not ensure you could bear, to witness miracles and want to know what caused them, to grieve and know you deserve something better. She'll sing a few of them.

This is a very persuasive pitch, and it does not, actually, take long before she has her first cult of Aroden, eager to spread the word that if you follow the rules and don't go around murdering and torturing and tormenting people you, too, can go to Axis, where there are shining cities and endless gardens and towers for everyone a thousand feet in the sky.

There are. She's summoned the beings that live there, and spoken to them for advice. And under ordinary circumstances, she'd be content to place a symbol of Aroden beside the others in their temple and go on her way, but, well, they're going to have to fight a war for the right to build that temple, aren't they. She'd like them to take the equipment off the captured soldiers, including the talismans that they presently lack the resources to recharge, and tomorrow they'll start training.

- mostly without Iomedae, who is going to take the healthiest looking of the invaders' horses and go out looking for other Eastern Empire military units, because if only one of them goes missing the Empire will definitely come right here to check it out but if a bunch of them have gone missing all over the place then the reprisals will probably be more distributed.

Are there any, among the soldiers of the Eastern Empire, who would like to change sides? They could be useful in training these people to fight, and while it's not going to be trivial to feed that many more people she can go stab a bear and that ought to make it not an urgent problem.

The rebels will do this! There's not enough in the way of weapons and armor to go around (and most of the talismans blew their charges turning her "nonlethal" blows actually nonlethal) but they've got enough to train with, albeit they also have nobody who knows how to fight.

Some of the Imperial soldiers are conflicted, but in the end, none can bring themselves to switch sides.

The invaders have pretty good horses! (In general, they have pretty good equipment.) It's not that hard to find other patrols, though being stealthy while on a horse and wearing full plate is perhaps not the easiest task.

She respects that the Imperial soldiers are unwilling to switch sides and also once she's done her best to persuade them she is going to kill them; leaving them here with the villagers while she's out conducting operations will predictably be a catastrophe.

What are local burial customs. 

Followers of Anathei usually burn their dead on a pyre, and the priest explains why they were good people and what was best about them and encourages people to celebrate their lives, and prays Anathei's looking after them wherever they've gone, and then everyone goes off and eats dinner.

... If you can't afford the smoke from a pyre, and they are imperial soldiers who murdered the last priest of Anathei, their general opinion is that they should just bury the bodies somewhere nobody's likely to dig up any time soon and say good riddance.

- she would rather do the Anathei custom, actually. For three reasons. The first is that it seems to her to be a good custom, one she would be honored to take part in. The second is that it would be a tragedy for the Empire to have succeeded, in wiping out the customs of the followers of Anathei in these lands, to have in killing the priest accomplished their aim. And the third is that war is terrible, and ugly, and this war will be a particularly terrible and ugly war, and war makes people even on the righteous side Evil sometimes, by swallowing up all the parts of them that feel compassion and mercy and recognition-in-the-other, and strengthening the parts of them that feel bitterness and anger.

It is true, of these people, that there was something good about them, that there are families at home that will mourn them, and Iomedae has killed many thousands of people and expects to kill many thousands more but they were, in fact, all people, whose mothers loved them and whose children are now fatherless, people who under other circumstances could have lived good lives, people that do not deserve what they will suffer where they may be headed. 

....the smoke is an important consideration. They'll do burials, but they'll cut off a bit of each man's hair, and they'll burn it on an ordinary fire overnight, at the site where the temple used to be, and know that there was something good in these men, which no one here knows, and which no one will ever find out, and they will pray that Anathei can find the good in them, enough good to keep them out of Hell.

These arguments are in fact persuasive, and the villagers are around eighty percent convinced.

... Mostly by "spite the Empire," to be fair. But also by the whole thing where Aroden pays with an afterlife and they want to make it.

'Spite the Empire by continuing to believe in compassion and mercy and redemption' works for her. These people have been through a lot; they do not need to adopt Iomedae's whole and entire perspective on it. She's never helplessly watched her friends executed by a conquering government with incomprehensible rules. She's never helplessly watched anything; she has watched many things she couldn't afford to prevent, but it's not the same thing, actually.

They'll do the burials overnight. She'll sleep two hours, in anyone's home who has a spare space. She'll assign them some very very rudimentary weapons practice. 

And then she'll ride out looking for Imperial patrols to pick fights with where the subsequent investigation won't lead right back to her people. 

Paladins are not amazing at disguise. She has borrowed a blanket, and is wearing it as a sort of cloak over her extremely shiny armor. She still clanks.

She can leave with step-by-step directions to all the neighboring villages and the biggest town in the area that assume you've memorized all local landmarks from the villagers, as well as a few quiet words about who else is on her side from someone whose brother went off to join the rebellion, which still existed last she heard but she doesn't know where to find it (because if she did, the empire could make her tell them, just like it made her tell them that she gave her brother everything she could think of that would help.)

The roads are not, to be clear, much better than goat paths.

She'll probably get lost, at least the first time out, especially since she's going to put her magic belt on the horse and then try to put a deeply implausible-for-a-single-rider distance between this place and her next move, but she thanks them and listens carefully and tries to memorize the lay of the land at least well enough to find her way back.

And then she'll ride east. A well-trained horse with the fanciest belt of constitution the great and ancient empire of Taldor knows how to produce can maintain a gallop for quite a long time.

The roads are goat paths, the wildlife not particularly actively hostile but not exactly friendly, the horse with implausible levels of stamina.

Is she deliberately seeking out - fields, towns, construction - or avoiding them until she's built up some distance?

Avoiding them entirely at least until she's put some serious distance behind her. She'll honestly be devastated if the Empire comes in and executes her entire village, at this stage, and she bets they would do it.