"I do worry about this in terms of teachings of the church, actually," Iomedae is now saying. "If character runs in the blood like the knack for wizardry, and I'm not sure it doesn't, then it'd be a fairly spectacular mistake to have Knights hardly have children. And it seems potentially culturally corrosive, or something, to say 'well, the men should, it's a lot less trouble for them' -"

"It feels like a sort of freeloading," says Karlenius. 

"You should do an experiment. Take a few hundred knights, tell a third of them to have children they don't raise, another third raise unrelated children, and the final third raise their own."

It's not obvious (to people with the sort of sense motive normally found in humans) if he is joking. 

Iomedae has better sense motive than that, and doesn't want to be a scold while they're all joking, so she sets aside some genuine horror at the idea of using power like that.

"Ah, why didn't I think of that!"

            "Seems like it might be hard on morale," says Marit.

"Morale? What's that, a kind of turnip?"

"Are we still talking about just the men here? I imagine that women bearing children on crusade would also have effects. Though maybe this is the sort of problem that can be solved with lots of horrifying necromancy, or at least transmutation - "

"Nex has these incredible artificial womb things in his demiplane, but he wouldn't let us take any of them back." 

...You did not tell me you talked to Nex in his demiplane!

I thought it was implied by the fact that I visited and successfully got out! 

"Oh, Geb totally lets you take his home as long as you ask nicely," says Marit after the shocked silence has really stretched on a while. 

I thought he was dead and his demiplane cracked open at the turning of the age or something! Or that someone found a bunch of his notes, you never actually said you went to his demiplane before!

"See, horrifying necromancy. Told you so."

"Do you happen to recommend reproducing your Nex-related adventures?"

"Getting there required tools which I didn't invent – " you did, a few lifetimes back – "and can't easily recreate. And if I could, I'm not sure I could reproduce the conditions under which he was willing to let us go. 

He has a billion people in there. Domestic afterlife setup and everything. Everyone's sort of unsettlingly placid but otherwise it's quite nice." 

" -wow. 

That's - in a sense terribly admirable and in another - do they know what it's like out here?"

"If he's not willing to let people come back that does - complicate any plans to go there. What do you mean, with specialized tools, can you not get there with a gate?"

Is the reason you could leave related to prophecy breaking?

"Gate won't do it, it's this complicated nested structure – we used a specialized planar transit artifact made by a witch who who won't be born for another few centuries. Most of the people in there don't especially care to know what's going on out here. I did tell Nex – if I was born there, I'd want to know, he should give them the choice – 

– One of them came back. He lives in a pond behind my house. Right now he's trying to prove that it's theoretically possible to make interplanetary teleportation circles."  

He doesn't want the gods interfering. 

" - it is?" says Marit.

"I don't know! He seems to think so. And in principle – I don't think anyone alive could cast it as a spell, but as a sufficiently powerful set of artifacts I don't see why not." 

"Naively it would stabilize at 11th circle and - you can, with magic items, do things that would naively not stabilize until 11th, I do it every time I quicken a greater teleport or limited wish... Of course sometimes you expect something would stabilize at a particular circle but nobody's actually managed to, like mass dominate person."

Iomedae sits back in her seat and drinks her wine faster than it's advisable to drink wine if you're not immune to all poisons.

        "Go on, spit it out," says Karlenius, once the archmages seem to have successfully communicated with each other and maybe with Marit though not with anyone else.

"I have something like a twenty percent success rate at recruiting, in random villages, with a one hour conversation. I don't do this very often because I think the success rate exceeds the rate of - of it being a good idea for people to join the crusade, it being something they'd look back on from Heaven or from Axis and be glad I came to their village - doesn't exceed it by a lot, but exceeds it by a little -

- there are all kinds of good human lives." She glances wryly at Alfirin. "Maybe Norgorber led one. But - but I can't help but - and Nex's people perhaps aren't humans and maybe that matters,  my maps there are just full of blank spaces - sticking to humans, where I have more of a picture, I don't think it's quite twenty percent of them that should join the crusade, but I think it's more than one in six. And part of what I hate most about Taldor is that it feels to me like a place that can barely be bothered to nourish, in people, the strengths that make them someone who should join the crusade. In my country I believe it could be one in three. And -

- even if everyone's happy, even if no one wishes anything were different - there's something in me that cries out that if it's one in a hundred you did something terribly wrong, but I can imagine, in the world where we've triumphed and Heaven is just Axis, that - they'd say I'm making a mistake - I'm not sure what they'd say the mistake I'm making is."

"Oh, I certainly think there's something terribly wrong with them. And then I think about it more, and I realize, none of them have ever known what it is to be afraid. They have no lower planes, no wars, no sickness, the whole place is just positive energy aligned enough that all wounds heal quickly and naturally but nobody spontaneously explodes. The great god Nex tells them what to do, and they do it, and it always works out in the end. When you try to tell them what it's like out here, they're just confused. I don't think they lack compassion, but to them, Hell and plagues and undead tyrants might as well be fairy stories – there's nothing inside of them for it to touch. 

Nex would say – has said – that he won't make his people suffer just to build up their moral character against threats they'll never have to face. 

And then, I think about it even more – and I think that whole premise is wrong. People don't have to suffer to become whole. They just need practice. When they're protected from every real decision they might ever make – when they spend all their time contemplating how best to please their masters, because they know nothing they do will ever really matter to anyone but themselves – the part of their soul which should be directed outwards atrophies and dies." 

"I don't think I would have predicted that, necessarily! I'm displeased if that's in fact how human nature works! - ' no lower planes, no wars, no sickness, the whole place is just positive energy aligned enough that all wounds heal quickly and naturally but nobody spontaneously explodes ' all just seems - good, I'd be really surprised and sad if that's where any of the problem is introduced - if Nex is telling everyone what to do, then maybe that's the entire problem - gods, are we going to eventually need to overthrow him -"

"Humans have been known to start wars. Maybe whatever Nex did to prevent that or - have humans who never do - went too far."

"It's all in the blood and you can domesticate us like dogs," says Marit. "I'd believe that."