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.