Yeah, that was the hope! They deliberately founded a new temple-order for the purpose in the hopes that Aroden would start giving them spells like he does Iomedae, but he hasn't yet. (Or, at least, hadn't as of the point Samien was captured.) Mostly the temple order is preaching all the things Iomedae preached, about not letting the Empire monopolize order and civilization and about the afterlives and so forth and so on.

Can he say anything more about the design of the temples? It's intriguing. 

That's what Iomedae wanted them to look like; she said it was what they looked like at home - or, no, they looked more impressive at home, that they were supposed to be - shining symbols of what civilization could build if it tried really hard, to show just what there was to aspire to.

She said it was very important they show the night sky, because Aroden loved the stars at night.

He can be confused about that later. 

He'll keep going, asking more question from different angles about Aroden's known traits as a god, Aroden's apparent history as a human and how similar it seems, Iomedae's apparent relationship to Aroden, and everything Iomedae taught the rebels, including teaching them to fight. He'll steer gradually more toward finding out what Samien knows about the rebels' position and resources at the point when Samien was captured in the battle. 

(He is not intending to give away any hints about the outcome of said battle, which Samien was unconscious for and wouldn't have seen and it's not totally impossible the Empire could have taken prisoners even if they hadn't won.) 

A lot of this, Samien doesn't know! But yeah, with prodding from Arbas he'll share what he knows. Iomedae didn't do much teaching them to fight; they mostly knew before her, that was the Real Orestan.

And he knew rather a lot about their position and resources, though that's a pain to extract from him and will take forever; of course, they may have changed since.

That part is both important and urgently decision-relevant, and Altarrin will patiently keep asking questions different ways, or sometimes nudging Arbas to try a different compulsion tack, until he's pretty sure he has all of it.

...And he'll also try to get any specifics Samien knows about Iomedae's repeatable miracles and Iomedae's magical artifacts and how exactly Iomedae could survive fourteen Final Strikes, if not by literal godpossession, which it sounds like it wasn't. It's less urgently relevant but it might be very relevant, at some point, if Iomedae does in fact return. 

(His mind is not entirely on the task. He feels - not dizzy, exactly, but some sort of non-physical analogue to it - he hadn't realized it was possible to be confused so intensely that it hurts  - and that's not the point, or the priority, focus on the tactical problems they can actually address.) 

Iomedae's miracles were given to her by her god, and he can give some specifics on how some of them worked! She could immediately heal everyone near her and inspire them with hope while filling the hearts of her enemies with fear, sometimes to the point where they all had heart attacks, that was the big one. Her magical artifacts she mostly didn't explain, other than that they made her very very hard to kill and were generally useful, and that the pearls replenished her spent miracles and could be used regularly.

Apparently she's a legendary hero and where she's from all legendary heroes are that terrifyingly powerful and hard to kill? She seemed to think that and "paladin of Aroden" were a complete explanation.

That is...probably also important to try to make sense of...but it does not in fact make any sense, and Altarrin is too tired to try to stare at the pieces until the shape comes together. It's been a lot of candlemarks, at this point. He'll wrap up fairly soon. 

Arbas thinks their prisoner is fascinating (and delightful), and also terrifyingly skilled at manipulation, and should be held under compulsions that let him do less thinking than this, unless they need to question him again in which case Arbas wants to be here personally for it. 

Altarrin doesn't like that, unsurprisingly, but he's not currently in the mood to argue. Sure, Arbas can put him back under whatever level of compulsions made him do less of the thing Arbas finds alarming. 

Great. Good choice. In that case Samien can go back to having all of his routes to putting on masks and pretending to be other people blocked - not that thoroughly, Arbas doesn't feel like being here another half-candlemark, but thoroughly enough that if the previous pattern holds he's not going to be finishing any lines of thought, and even if he manages to learn his way around it, he probably still won't be preternaturally convincing. 

He is not, really.

And Altarrin heads out to write up an urgent report for the Emperor. 

Altarrin is bizarrely failing at writing this report????

All right. Why is he stuck. It's not just that he's tired, though he very much is. Why does it keep feeling, every time he starts to put his pen to the paper, that he's forgetting something critical? 

...put like that, it's a little easier to get traction on, though for some reason he's still having to push against quite a lot of mental resistance to do that. Again, it feels like it's not just that he's tired, it feels - dangerous - that's a flag to pay attention to, flinching away from thoughts because they feel dangerous means he's not thinking clearly and this is too high-stakes for him to be able to afford not to think. 

He feels stuck because the urgent part of the report, that both the Emperor and his field general need to know as soon as possible, is - not the same, and feels downstream of - the part that's dizzy confusion and fragments that aren't yet making sense but certainly don't fit into the world as he knew it and leave him with the awful sinking falling sense that he's - not in the reality he thought he was...

Why does it feel like that, though? 

Because Iomedae is from another world, and suddenly all the relevant things he thought he could predict are drowning in a vastly wider margin of uncertainty? But - that doesn't feel right, either, because he does actually have some details he at least somewhat trusts, now, on the gods and the magic and Iomedae's organization, it just - 

- doesn't feel like that's the part that matters - 

What is the part that matters, then? 

That he's...thinking about this all wrong, his priorities aren't lined up or coherent, there are conclusions he reasoned through when he belatedly received Iomedae's letters, and when he got the report on Iomedae's magic items, that he...hasn't reassessed...and until he's done that, he– it doesn't matter how urgent the tactical problems are, or how otherwise-straightforward the response seems, it might be tempting to think he can write up a report on the rebels' forces and then think about this but (- why is this so hard to think about -) but trying to reason about local tactical problems when he knows that he can't currently make sense of the bigger picture is always a mistake... 

Start with what he knows - 

(nothing, anymore) 

- start with what he thought he knew yesterday. 

From the letters: 

Iomedae did, in fact, seem to very strongly prefer peace talks.

(He never met her, it's hard to form a reliable assessment of her character, and Samien is probably genuinely very good at character assessments, and Samien seemed to believe that Iomedae preferred negotiation to war, but Altarrin separately isn't sure how much they can trust literally anything dragged out of Samien's thoughts.) 

Iomedae had principles and was committed to following to them, and Altarrin remembers feeling genuine respect for this, even back at the point when he had almost no trust in Iomedae's god. 

He remembers wondering about her claim that the gods might be steering this war mostly to burn the Empire's resources and weaken them. And he remembers...noticing, quietly, that the order he had received the letters in, especially with the earliest of them received latest, certainly made it seems like the gods had been nudging things, that They hadn't wanted him to see an opportunity for something better than war until it was already too late. 

(He had already been suspecting it wasn't Aroden's doing, just because it wouldn't make sense for Aroden to steer for Iomedae's death. He...still comes to the same conclusion, now, but from a different premise: that Aroden can operate in Velgarth either not at all, or at prohibitive cost. How much does it matter that the reasoning is different, if it doesn't change the answer...are there other answers it does change, he's not sure...) 

...He remembers the deep pit of confusion around some of Iomedae's examples, that they felt so precisely targeted, not just to be sympathetic to the Empire's ideology but to be appealing to Altarrin personally. Reassessment: ...he's more confused about that, actually, if Iomedae was from another world and Aroden couldn't speak to her in this world then she must have had very limited avenues to know anything about the Empire apart from what the rebels told her. And he doesn't expect the rebels' reports would have been charitably framed. 

That - feels important - but he can't find any traction on it, he's not sure what the right questions are to ask and even if he had ideas he's not sure what possible avenues he has to answer them. Iomedae isn't here. 

And the main update from the last letter (that he received, not the last written): that Aroden was formerly a human mage, and that He had studied ascension for long enough to preserve His human-aligned goals. 

- he drew a lot of conclusions, from that, starting from the method of ascension. He - doesn't actually know which of them should be rolled back to full uncertainty, or even conclusively refuted. The gods of Iomedae's world operate differently, though the only concrete intelligence he has there is the repeatable daily miracles, which - he thinks was at least implied wasn't just a practice used by the once-human Aroden, but he doesn't know for sure.

The magic of Iomedae's world is different. Most of the detail he has on the differences is based on the artifacts Iomedae left behind. That might imply a different power cost of ascension. Possibly even an entirely different method of obtaining the power. But he doesn't know enough to really draw any conclusions, and doesn't yet see an avenue to learn more. And it feels - important, to know, but he can't actually pin down how it's tactically decision-relevant, which makes it feel especially hard to think about right now. 

- a peripheral observation that maybe is decision-relevant is that it seems increasingly unlikely that Iomedae's artifacts would open the wearer up to possession by Aroden.

One, because Aroden probably can't operate in Velgarth, or at least doesn't find it worth the cost. If He could, He would probably be granting repeatable miracles to other priests now that Iomedae is dead. 

Two, because it actually sounds like Iomedae's powers didn't come from possession at all; she had a mix of specific repeatable miracles that she could reuse with ordinary non-Aroden-mediated magic, powerful artifacts (that may or may not have been created using divine intervention but aren't themselves ongoing divine interventions), and - the fact that legendary warriors in her world are all extremely tough??? He didn't really follow that last part. 

That implies that the artifacts are, if not necessarily less dangerous, at least differently dangerous than he and his researchers' worst fears. It might be justified to try to use them on one of the fronts. 

(Altarrin...doesn't like that conclusion? He's not sure why he doesn't like it, it just feels - wrong, cheap, and like he's still somehow missing the point, but when he tries to query his mind on what the point is, he gets only blank dizziness.) 

What else. 

Iomedae taught that afterlives existed. He...initially assumed this was a lie, of course, because in Velgarth it is, and he made the appropriate negative updates about the church of Aroden's honesty. 

It's...at the very least more complicated than that, with the new information, but - to the extent he's willing to put weight on 'Iomedae is a principled person trying to achieve sympathetic goals', it plausibly wasn't a lie. There are scenarios where she was tricked, when she tried to confirm it back in her own world, but that's actually a more complicated explanation than 'different worlds are different.'

If the gods of Iomedae's world really do preside over afterlives, then that has a lot of ramifications. Altarrin...can't really think about the implications, right now, they're too big and vague and far away and he has too many more urgent pieces to juggle. 

It has one implication that isn't vague or far away. Which is that Iomedae was drawing some incorrect conclusions about Velgarth, perhaps on very reasonable grounds but she was still wrong. She misled a lot of Aroden's new followers, and whether or not it was intentional manipulation, it's still - selling them on fighting this war based on a false premise... 

...but, more importantly, Iomedae was apparently confident that Aroden would return her to life, if she died. One can assume her confidence was based in facts she believed to be true, like 'the souls of the dead in Velgarth go to an afterlife, such that Aroden might retrieve her from His.'

And she was probably wrong. 

It's only a 'probably.' Retrieving the soul of His dead follower might be cheaper than granting her the standard repeatable miracles, or Aroden might have been willing to spend more on it. 

But he cannot currently think of any way to check. 

It seems entirely possible that, before he had any way of knowing how much Iomedae mattered or why, he arranged to kill the only person who knew the secrets of another world, secrets that could - be the solution to problems he's banged his head on fruitlessly for centuries - (he can't think about that up-close either, he's so tired) - 

It seems entirely possible, even likely, that the gods of Velgarth steered this to happen, because They saw that, if given a foothold, Aroden would work to reshape Velgarth in ways They dispreferred, and that They saw an easy route to making Altarrin Their pawn. 

It seems entirely possible that, at this point, there's no longer any way to recoup that loss. 

...This isn't an answer to the question of where to go from here.