Once he's sent her on her way, he spends a while considering whether he should suggest that they reduce her compulsions further.

He...suspects that the trap-spell (and then the convoluted additional layers of compulsions required to manage it) would have been the biggest impairing factor, for her. There may be other tweaks that would improve things further but it's less obvious and the effect is probably smaller. 

And then he should really get some sleep - a full night's worth, ideally, last night was less than entirely restful - before making a decision on whether he's willing to put on the headband next. 

They decide not to expend a Wish on returning to Velgarth right now.

It hurts. The other decision would also have hurt; Tar Baphon has been hammering them relentlessly since she got back, taking full advantage of the fact she's notably weaker without her divine-bonded sword and her preferred armor and gear, taking even fuller advantage of the disarray and exhaustion that had prevailed among the men in her absence.

She thinks, sometimes, of the people in Oris dying for a vision she did not in fact possess the strength to make come true for them, and it hurts much much worse than dying.

She doesn't expend irreplaceable resources without a commensurate benefit because it hurts. She does do it if she's made a promise, but she - didn't, because that'd have been a stupid promise to make. She told them her best guess was that they would win. She told the Marshal that if the gods were on her side, she could survive a dozen Final Strikes unscathed. 

The gods, it's fairly clear at this point, were instead maneuvering to get her gone. 

Alfirin's Soulseeker spell suggests a bizarre local situation where the local gods - Alfirin points out that they're technically not gods, as the word is used in Taldane - the local demon princes...recycle souls? Grab them when they die and save them to place back in the world, when new people are born? It's not impossible for them to get new souls, is the High Priest of Aroden Jala Neretse's best guess after a lot of Communes, but it's ...costly?? Maybe it makes prophecy more powerful when there are few unknown elements?

Iomedae is not full of delight about this system but it's not Hell, so that's cool, and it makes the problem of the Empire a less urgent one. They are planning to go back - for her gear, if nothing else - and she will free Oris then if it's not too late - but they can wait for Alfirin to develop Even Greater Teleport, instead of burning a Wish to rip a planet out of Asmodeus's hands before He can strike back. 

They asked Aroden if He could use the world, if they secured it for him. He answered 'UNCLEAR'. They asked if Abadar could, or Sarenrae, and those also got an 'UNCLEAR'.

And that's about all the research they've done because they've spent every waking hour since their return trying to hold the army together on its long miserable retreat to Urgir, which they do not even hold but which is where Iomedae intends to retreat no further; the Crusade cannot bear losing any more ground.

The dead don't sleep, they are untroubled by darkness, and the harassment and skirmishes and raids on the crusader's camp do not stop or even slow come nightfall. Alfirin spends her weaker spells when Malyas and his spawn come at night, and keeps her more powerful ones in reserve. Tar-Baphon has not personally shown himself yet, but they can't afford to be unready.

(She burns the witchgate forest. Command went back and forth on it for days, whether to slow the retreat to cut a path for next spring's offensive, spending lives today in the hopes that there'd be fewer ambushes next year. They hadn't made up their minds when Alfirin made up hers. They lost men to the flames, but - fewer, she thinks, and if their blood is on her hands instead of the Tyrant's, well, she's not planning to face Judgement anyways.)

The dead don't sleep. Two hours a day is too many for the living to afford. She gets by on wakefulness spells, and restorations, and two hours in the middle of every fourth or fifth day. That's eleven more hours a week to plan a war.

"Tar-Baphon didn't send you to Velgarth, he reacted too slowly, too carefully - I think he thought you left deliberately and could come back - I'm going to prioritize the Teleport, once things are stable. Even if the souls there aren't in danger, we could really use a few hundred sorcerers. Or even just a dozen if we can arrange to get them back after."

Iomedae sometimes sets fire to forests that'll kill her own men for a greater good! She discusses it with people first, because if it's a good idea they'll agree and if it's a bad idea she wants to hear that. She's not particularly concealing her lingering irritation; it's one of the costs Alfirin evidently decided to pay. 

"We could really use the sorcerers. I'm - worried Tar-Baphon could follow us. He must have Even Greater Teleport, if it can be done at all, and is constrained by not having all that many extraplanetary destinations -- or maybe he does have them and that's where the phylactery is -"

"If he can target off of the name of the planet he can do that now, I'm sure he tried to find you and you weren't mind blanked over there. If he can't - I might have to share your memories - then I don't think he'd be able to follow me. If he needs a memory then the sorcerers would be a vulnerability if captured and we'd have to take steps to prevent that."

Iomedae being honestly, openly angry at Alfirin for burning her own men alive is in fact the main reason she didn't bother to ask permission. She hates every second of it.

"Or it wasn't interesting enough for him to burn a Wish before and if the sorcerers show up, suddenly it is. What's your guess on whether he has a safe wording that gets there off the Discern Location readout, given that I'm no longer there to target."

"Yes. That's not even a guess, discern location is enough for wish transportation if you only care about accuracy on the scale of a planet - if I tried off mine I might wind up in the wrong town if the county of Thale has more than one greenvale -

If you remember all the places you'd been in Velgarth we could spend some time creatively naming locations on a trapped space-rock, but even then that's only fifty-fifty unless he's sourcing his wishes from genies, which he is not. Point taken."

"It'll take - probably years - to have Velgarth in a state where he's not enormously advantaged by access to it. We need Aroden there for visibility, at a minimum, and some kind of stable arrangement with the Empire. I'm not sure 'you eat it' is that stable arrangement, quite apart from whether I'm otherwise happy with it" which she's very much not, now that it's established that the Empire's Lawful Evil isn't in fact damning people at a much higher rate than most places, and now that Alfirin, more than ever totally indispensible as an ally, is being a tremendously unpleasant one who BURNED A BUNCH OF HER MEN TO DEATH. "Tar-Baphon can beat you at puppetting a Dominated political apparatus. Our comparative advantage, playing against him, is that we're better allies to have."

"Yes, I know I cannot actually keep hold of the Empire in a useful state against active opposition from other powerful Golarionites. I had not been considering that Tar-Baphon might have categorized Velgarth as - reachable but not worth the effort." Possibly because she has a dozen more of the Tyrant's possible plans to keep track of, possibly because his focus is so clearly on Golarion - possibly because she needs more sleep. (Tar-Baphon does not need sleep).

"Speaking of which, I am going to need a fifth-circle cleric with dispel evil prepared on the days when I sleep, the Tyrant has someone sending nightmares and I've ever been injured in battle, I assume they have a body part." Admitting that she might ever fail a will save is only slightly less galling than missing a key fact about the enemy's state of mind, but it would've been stupid to never mention it.

" - I think it's still worth prioritizing the spell, possibly moreso, because if he does notice there's something valuable there we need to be able to contest it. After Urgir, we should plan for me to have fewer spells available for fighting." Gods, she is not looking forward to Urgir.

Iomedae's radiating-anger relents slightly. It's in fact rare that she thinks of any consideration Alfirin hasn't, even when Alfirin is pushing herself much much too hard and the considerations have just multiplied by an entire world, and it's rarer for Alfirin to admit to needing anything.

"I'll assign Chamesa to you." He's not Lawful Good - actually kind of rare, among people who've been on the crusade a long time, what with how it's such a Good crusade - and Alfirin has a bit of a habit of deliberately antagonizing the paladins (and the paladins a bit of a habit of deliberately antagonizing Alfirin) which none of them need to deal with right now. "And I agree it's worth prioritizing the spell, after Urgir. 

- or, you know, before Urgir. If you're at your limits, we can sell this secret and transport-if-arranged-successfully to the Church of Abadar, and buy some help with Urgir, at the cost of control over everything after that. I could buy enough help, probably, that you could mostly sit Urgir out other than buffs and being on-call if he shows." This is as close as she can get to saying 'I'm worried about you', conceivably closer than she's in fact allowed to get to saying that.

"That would not really be any better."

There are civilians in Urgir. Lots of them; it's a city. An orc city, but that - doesn't matter, not to Iomedae and not to Alfirin and not to Aroden, except insofar as it's informative about the odds they can negotiate a clean surrender once the walls are breached. (They definitely can't). 

It's Tar Baphon's, among the most valuable of his remaining holdings, and they cannot actually hold out until next campaign season without it, and they cannot actually afford to guard it as a thorn in their back next time they press forward - it's not only because Iomedae was gone that that was so catastrophic this time -

- and still, there are little orc children telling each other frightened stories of the metal-clad monsters massing outside the battlements, and when their parents are dead the little orc children will pick up spears, probably, because they're very fierce and very brave.

Arazni's Prayer will take them down. 

"I don't suppose it would," she says. Alfirin isn't a paladin. Alfirin is ....probably Lawful Evil. She doesn't show up to Detect spells (she is never without Mind Blank) but a Lawful Neutral person might take some steps to make that knowable. And she doesn't mind Dictums.

But she trusts that Alfirin - the whole sense in which she trusts Alfirin is - that Alfirin, too, is someone who'll do it and someone for whom it'll never stop hurting.

(Until or unless the mechanism by which Alfirin chooses to escape Hell, someday in a hundred years when Iomedae isn't around to supervise, changes her -)

She stands up, and heads out. 

The burning of Tatanka was accidental, really.

The law of nations is that a city is sacked if it resists and is not sacked if it surrenders; this is true because it is really, really hard to keep your troops in line when they've breached the walls, given the death rates on storming attempts (even with compulsions, the officers who command them may be dead when they make it into the city), and because sacks tend to turn into street-to-street fighting, in which the difference between an enemy soldier and someone with a kitchen knife defending his house from robbers is not immediately obvious, and because it produces incentives that both parties prefer, since most cities would rather yield than be sacked and most armies would pass up the loot of a sack for a chance to avoid a storm.

But, ultimately, averting a sack requires that both sides have control of their forces. When the exceptionally pissed-off Sixteenth Legion makes it to Tatanka after a campaign with exactly one battle and a tremendous number of raids, ambushes, and night murders, they are held in check by discipline and compulsions, and after tense negotiations the city surrenders with no conditions except that there will be no sack or general reprisal, and in exchange the garrison will surrender.

Then people in the houses start yelling - then they start pouring chamber pots over soldiers - then it's stones and arrows and a mage takes an arrow and throws a fireball back -

- After the disaster is over and the troops and the flames are both under control, every temple in the city is burned down and every priest in the city is put to death, because the Eastern Empire is pretty sure it knows who was screwing with it, there.

Altarrin doesn’t sleep well that night, but he’s - functional, the next morning, when he rises and sits at his desk with a blank piece of paper and stares into the distance, thinking. 

It doesn’t feel responsible or safe to try the headband himself. But he thinks that’s mainly the mental voice of Kastil, whose job is to be maximally paranoid at all times about everything and especially gods, and not to be tracking the Empire’s broader strategic position or the potential upsides of a risky move. 

Still, just because Kastil only ever makes tradeoffs as far as possible in the risk-avoiding direction, doesn’t mean that in a given case he’s wrong. 

The upside here is…big. It could mean finding a way to Gate to Iomedae’s world an order of magnitude faster, if his guesses are right about the difficulty of the problem and how much the headband helps. 

And, maybe more importantly, this is an enormously out of context problem, hitting him at a time when he knows that he’s already overwhelmed by more urgent priorities that are nonetheless not nearly as huge as this. The headband seems to help at least some people see things that they had been missing. 

What are the specific downside risks, here? 

One: it’s not entirely ruled out that Aroden can use the headband as a conduit to influence him, because with what he currently knows about Iomedae’s world, it’s impossible to entirely rule out a lot of things. There’s just too much uncertainty, either because they’re missing facts entirely or because their only source is Samien’s head. 

All the concrete evidence he has is against it being a thing that will happen. Aroden is far away. Aroden did not intervene through Iomedae, who was already His devoted follower and presumably much cheaper to influence. Aroden hasn’t intervened to try to send Iomedae back. Also, after talking to Aritha, he’s much closer to the opinion that they don’t need to posit Aroden having made the artifact via divine intervention; however miraculous it seems, Aritha thinks - and Altarrin is inclined to agree - that it could well have been crafted by human hands. 

It would be fairly catastrophic if Aroden compromised him, but - for the Empire, he thinks it would be recoverable? He told Bastran to take precautions; it's likely that it will be noticed if Aroden gains power over him, and his decisionmaking will be cut off. Which is bad enough, but - he does die sometimes, and the Empire has sometimes sprouted a lot of new problems in his absence but it's never collapsed. . 

Two: the fact that it sometimes causes emotional breakdowns, either while wearing it or after its removal, and preventing these requires heavy compulsions, which are themselves directly impairing and likely cancel out some of the headband's benefit.

It would be a pretty bad time for Altarrin to have an emotional breakdown! Anything that might leave him nonfunctional, even temporarily, is a massive risk to the Empire. Certainly it's another reason Kastil would be firm in not advising him to try it at all. 

He could try to get more information, but - he's noticing that he has a strong prediction of how it will go. People are distressed when the headband is removed. (That's fine. Altarrin can handle distressing experiences. He's already having a lot of distressing experiences; making a lot of progress on his real problems here might on net result in less distress.) People sometimes also have inconvenient realizations. Altarrin...mostly also thinks this would be fine? He's so much older than anyone they've tested, for one, and he's - pretty sure he's not sitting on unrealized self-deception around his own motivations, he would have noticed by now. He's faced awful revelations, before (the Cataclysm comes strongly mind) and it's never pushed him into the kind of despair where he would stop trying. 

Is there anything else? ...'Disloyal thoughts' is a concern Kastil would bring up separate from the emotional breakdown part, but Altarrin doesn't think this even applies. He knows where his loyalties to the Empire live, and it's not just - not even mostly - in compulsions suppressing the real person he would otherwise be. 

It feels like he needs to spend at least another two candlemarks going back and forth, weighing arguments and counterarguments in both directions, before he can justify making a decision. But Altarrin can recognize, by now, the feeling of already knowing what he's going to decide, and stalling because it's terrifying. 

The obvious precautions to take are annoying, but it would be stupid not to. He'll ask one of the research leads, the most experienced at compulsions, to place one on him that will prevent him from resisting if someone on the research team goes to remove the headband. Which he wants them to do if he seems very distressed, or if he's incoherent or otherwise showing signs of mental instability, or if he starts trying to give them a lot of new orders on how to run the project; he assumes he will think of changes to make, but he can make notes, write a report after the headband is removed, and run his ideas by the offsite team before implementing anything headband-inspired. 

(He writes an official Imperial order to himself, too, and stamps it with the Imperial seal; it should have quite a lot of weight if he ends up conflicted and stuck because of it, but he doesn't want to count on it.)

He really shouldn't have anyone reading him as he's putting it on - his mind is a repository of state secrets that no one here is cleared to know, and usually he can control his thoughts well enough to avoid thinking about them but the headband is known to be potentially very disruptive, and he wants some time to settle and get used to it. He does order them not to leave him alone in a Work Room, even if he requests it, until it's both been a full candlemark and he's agreed to having his mind read. 

He writes up a report on all his reasoning to be sent to Bastran directly, and a less detailed update to the offsite team. 

He feels like he should spend more time preparing, but he can't actually think of any specific preparations to add, so...probably that's more impulse-to-stall than genuine prediction of something going wrong. He's in an area almost entirely free of godinfluence, underground between shields, supervised, and not currently making any decisions that will affect the Empire outside this facility. 

...he'll ask for a compulsion not to communication-spell anyone offsite while the headband is in place, since they won't necessarily catch him doing that if they're not reading his mind. 

And then he settles himself in a comfortable chair at a desk in one of the offices, and (scaredscaredscared but it won't help) puts the headband on. 

It feels....

...like a pressure being released that he hadn't realized was there, hadn't realized that he's spent his entire life with his thoughts confined to such a dull and narrow working surface - it feels a little like discovering writing and note-paper for the first time, but more intrinsic and close-up than that. Like he could draw out a chain of reasoning of a dozen steps and still see each of the earlier steps clearly. He's not especially seeing a sudden obvious solution to the planar routing problem for finding Iomedae's world but it's also obvious, now, that this is because he's barely explored a tiny corner of the problem, and now he can see all the different paths of curiosity and uncertainty he could choose to chase down - he can understand now why the researchers they tested this on found that it made them feel more alive, it's like being more alive or maybe just generally more - 

- but only a fraction of his attention is on that, because another abrupt shift is...hard to describe but perhaps best described as his thoughts both spreading out and becoming transparent – like there's not just a bigger piece of metaphorical foolscap to think on, but also a suddenly-much-larger space in some metaphorical third dimension, where he can notice his own thoughts and reflect on them even as they're happening. And not just his explicit thoughts, but - mental flinches, buried assumptions, areas of his own mind in shadow that he's built habits of not looking at directly. 

He has a lot of those! It's really alarming actually! There's not even anything as specific as an unwanted revelation, at this point, just - the reaction he has to his mind being like this is almost disgust. 

He's also weirdly more aware of the people around him. You wouldn't think there was enough space to think about people, with everything else going on, but he has more attention to work with now, and it sort of feels like the people-tracking is happening in a different working area entirely. It feels suddenly almost trivially easy to track who knows what and who has what incentives and who is probably feeling pushed into a difficult corner right now and who needs reassurance. His mind is giving him some bizarrely precise predictions about which compulsion-tweaks some of the researchers who he's barely met would benefit from. He also definitely has quite a lot of thoughts to unpack about Aritha specifically, but doing that does feel like it would take actual attention. 

(His mental model of Kastil has much sharper imaginary words for him, too, but it also feels vastly easier to respond with counterarguments, tailored to Kastil's reasoning and worldview - wow, that feels kind of dangerous, actually, the headband is making him better at thinking for sure but he expects it's also, separately, making him better at targeted persuasion in a way that may or may not correlate with being right...) 

And at the same time as all of that, there's more...color, is maybe the best way to metaphorically describe the new deeper and richer awareness of his emotions. Where before he could mostly only be aware of one emotion or rather poorly differentiated emotion-blend at a time, unless he was deliberately introspecting on it, now it's just...there, in front of him, swathes of different emotional color and flavor neatly separated out, even individually coloring each line of thought. 

This aspect is mostly deeply unpleasant, because almost none of Altarrin's current emotions are ones he enjoys having! 

Externally, he can still keep his expression level and his shoulders relaxed. It's not even very hard. He...doesn't feel in control, at all, but (at least it feels like) it's mostly the situation careening out of control all around him and his own mind responding accordingly. None of that has to affect his face. 

"I am noticing significant effects," he says, calmly. "I can think faster and hold more concepts at once, and I am more aware of my own thoughts. There is also significantly increased - emotional salience - I expect that is one of the causes of the breakdowns and it could be mitigated with the right narrowly targeted compulsions without affecting research ability. ...I am not especially worried that I am personally going to have a breakdown about it although it is certainly intense." 

And he's going to go back to thinking. 

...focusing on the emotions first, because for one they're pretty intensely distracting, and two, he doesn't actually need

Go back to thinking. 

...focusing on the emotions first, because they're taking up a lot of space and he doesn't even need enhanced self-awareness to remember that 'unexpected strong emotions' are a pretty good angle on what he needs to think through. 

Is there anything positive in that tangled tapestry of emotion-color? He's...sort of excited about the magic research, but his mind is no longer particularly letting him get away with thinking about it in isolation apart from its context, and the context - 

- is that at the end of that path is Iomedae's world, which he isn't ready for, which he's terrified of, which may be an opportunity and a resource but he's not ready for it, the Empire isn't ready for it, there are too many things going on, they can’t afford another war - that's not really the point, though, they couldn't afford a war with Iomedae's world under any circumstances, but in addition they can’t even really afford an opportunity that will inevitably cost resources...  

Why now, why like this, a war fraught by misunderstanding and miscommunication and letters fallen through the cracks that the gods were surely pulling wider, and if Iomedae had ended up here in any other year it could have been different, better – but for some reason that though isn't landing, there's only doubt and confusion and the feeling of not-dizziness that, with more space, he can start to pull apart into its constituent pieces. 

It could never have gone better than this. It wouldn't have mattered if it had happened twenty years from now in fully pacified Oris, or two hundred years ago when the Empire hadn't even taken Tolmassar yet. If anything one could argue that now is a better time than when Altarrin was young and still building his influence, or gods forbid, in his previous lifetime when half the court hated him. 

(Flag that his mind is just...putting that out here...as a confident claim, and it feels like the kind of pattern-recognition that he can generally trust even if it's a good idea to explicitly check the steps anyway, but here he doesn't even know if he can trust it, he's operating in a very different state from his usual one.) 

...he would feel better than that if it had actually helped, instead of just meaning that the gods had a pawn who could be steered into actually killing someone who could otherwise have been a powerful ally, when no one else would have been paranoid or prepared enough– catch that thought too, his mind is also feeling very confident in the claim that Iomedae could have been an ally, if - 

- if nearly everything were different. 

All right. Stop and make his brain give him some specific claims about what would have needed to be true for the Empire - and for him - to be entities that could cooperate with someone like Iomedae. 

...the Empire is fundamentally broken and always has been and was never going to work. 

(This is much more a muddy exhausted flavor of despair than it is a thought, he - can't really make the thought come together -) 

Great. That continues to be a completely nonspecific claim! What does his despair think is wrong with his Empire? 

- some part of his mind is reacting very strongly to thinking of it as 'his', that feels upsetting, it feels like - not how he wants to be seen by Iomedae, when he can guess exactly how she would view it – which is a really unhelpful emotion to have, really, when it's just true that the Empire is his project, nearly start to finish, and it's really on him that it's not....what he wanted...that it's never been what he wanted... 

(It's actually kind of hard not to get caught up in eddies of emotion that feel even more amplified by the echoes coming back from his unexpectedly vivid sense of what Iomedae would think, where is his brain even getting that, he's never met the woman - his instincts are just suddenly confident he can see a pattern and fill in the rest. It's not an unfamiliar feeling, even, it's a practiced motion, just, normally one that requires a lot more input than having read a handful of her letters and heard Samien's secondhand report on her teachings.) 

No, come on, specifics - 

- he can't, there's - pain and a wall - 

All right. Fine. What are the specific complaints that Iomedae, who he's never even met, would voice about the Empire? Predicting what Iomedae would say isn't disloyal, it's just being strategic, because Iomedae is powerful and either needs to be defeated (unlikely to work long term, if she's indeed still alive and will return) or appeased. 

...she would say that it's caught in a self-perpetuating pattern that leaves no one with any space to notice that there's a whole other world of better options. It's a place where no one has a way to become - how was it that Samien put it - "If you're powerful enough, I think, you stop seeing enemies and just start seeing people who aren't dead yet, are probably going to die, and might be possible to make not die."

She would say - Samien did say and it was Iomedae's words in his mouth - that it was a vast waste precious human effort and ingenuity and idealism and the desire to build, spent pointlessly on wars of conquest, and driving out religious cults, and squashing the inevitable peasant revolts, and dealing with the fact that a high percentage of the Empire's local leadership will, if no longer mind controlled to serve the Empire's interests, instead start a war of their own. Because - why - she might say that it's not even because they're against the cause of civilization, it's that they don't and can't trust the Empire to be - a place where you can ever afford to reach out in good faith if it makes you vulnerable, because the Empire is a place that eats people who do that, because even its theoretically all-powerful Emperor - and even Altarrin, who in some sense has even more power than Bastran - don't have the space or the leeway to afford the luxury of assuming good faith and trusting that someone whose compulsion were snipped is nonetheless going to work for a common cause because they believe in it.

She would point out that even when they do believe in it, because a lot of the Empire's best and brightest genuinely do believe in civilization, it's still somehow true that thousands of people who all believe in the same vision nonetheless can't trust the others not to stab them in the back if given an opening. 

(Altarrin's emotions are...resigned, with a heaviness that might be shame, it feels like - he already knew it, he can't argue with Iomedae even when she's imaginary, he wanted to fix it and he's spent this entire lifetime trying and despite his rare successes, like getting Bastran on the throne, every single one of her grievances holds)

(a mental flinch, for some reason, but he'll come back to it)

Iomedae would say that any progress he's ever believed he made illusionary. Because it's been six hundred years, and it's not any better. In a very real sense it's much worse than what Arvad built with the First Emperor. Bigger, richer, but for what, when all that wealth and manpower is being poured down a bottomless sinkhole of power struggles and petty court politics and the endless hungry need to conquer and pacify new provinces. Iomedae really doesn't like the conquests. 

Iomedae would say that they're caught in a repeating cycle. That feels like most of the thing, really, that Iomedae would say the Empire is predictably playing out a story that will repeat, over and over, the small victories made by individuals always crushed by the burden of the far more nebulous but far more pervasive weight of incentives that emerge from the Empire's fundamental nature.

Iomedae would say that she can see it everywhere, played out in a broken ugly fractal of loops that make forward motion impossible. Iomedae would admit that Kastil is...in many ways a principled if not really a good man, in many ways deeply and truly loyal to the First Emperor's vision, but he isn't his own person, not really. The Office of Inquiry is the entity that puppets him, not a mind but nonetheless a process that pursues goals, or really just one goal: to perpetuate itself, to secure its own position. And so it accumulates power, and inevitably overreaches and tries to take full control of the state apparatus, and is destroyed...and then rebuild in a new guise with a new name, because you can't not have an office of secret investigators operating autonomously from the ordinary chain of command, not when you're trying to be what the Empire is. 

Iomedae would - agree, Altarrin thinks, that Bastran is in many ways a genuinely good man (...again the mental wince), and certainly a dedicated one, and - still he orders thousands of executions every year, still he signs off on ordering fifty mages to kill themselves for the Empire's security against a threat (that was only a threat at all because the Empire can't be trusted to operate in good faith.) He hates it but he can't not do it, he too is steered down such a narrow path with so few options to, instead, do something else that isn't that. 

And even that isn't stable, Iomedae would point out, and be right. Fighting uphill, spending decades of accumulated soft power, someone like Altarrin can back someone like Bastran - and usually someone will, even people who aren't him, certainly Bastran will try to appoint a successor he expects to do well - but the system pulls away from it, and sooner or later the dance is fumbled and the next Emperor chooses for political favor or to promote their family's power and then it falls back to the lowest attractor of Emperor's choosing their sons and it's - nearly random, whether a given succession will go well, and then inevitably at some point there's an Emperor who isn't even competent enough to stay in power, and there's a war that burns a generation worth of resources more nebulous than coin and lives, and the cycle starts over.

But...worse, each time, unless Altarrin is here to fight it, and he can only fight one piece of it at a time and there are so many of those loops, so many patterns that emerge out of anything shaped like the Empire, he can't plug every gap himself and even if he could it's not what he wanted, it - barely deserves to be called 'civilization', really... 

Iomedae would point out that over and over they try to squash the religious orders, because they have to - because there's no wiggle room not to, no space to try trusting first because they can't afford the betrayal that will come - and over and over the faith will grow in any corner too small or too distant to be worth razing, because that's what humanity is, the hope for a better future that grows in the darkest places. And how could any peasant in Oris watch their village temple burn while their village priest was put to the sword - or hear stories of it happening a generation ago - and think that the light of that better future could be found in the Empire? And so the cults grow, and when they're big enough to be a problem, they have to be crushed so the Empire can maintain its grip, and thousands of people die, and thousands more have even more reason to look at the Empire and see a faceless grinding machine that will crush the spirit of their dreams, in exchange for a handful of grain in bad winters, and a "gift" of schools that take their brightest children away and send them back years later, shaped and pruned into the Empire's pawns. 

And what about the Empire's rich and powerful, its mages and nobles and generals, the winners currently (if temporarily) riding on top of the Emperor's brutal grinding wheel? 

...he thinks Iomedae wouldn't see any winners at all, really, except maybe the system itself, which isn't a person, only a mindless faceless pattern, and can't enjoy its winnings.

Just - people surrounded by walls and dead ends. Just people who were robbed of their fundamental human birthright to look an enemy and notice their shared humanity, see another person who was probably going to die but wasn't dead yet, see - the basic symmetry of the situation - and wonder if, maybe, they were powerful enough to make that leap of faith and try something better than killing. Because most people, if they can see clearly to a crossroads ahead of them, and both paths are open and let them survive and have what they need, will choose the path one with less killing. Not everyone. But - enough to hold a world together, if they're allowed to try. 

...Even Altarrin. He might in many ways less trapped, but - he's not above the Empire, he's within it, he too is subject to the faceless wheel and Iomedae would point out that even if he wanted to he couldn't - 

- what - 

- he can't remember what thought he was having just then.