The last time Alfirin noticed she was inadvisedly in love with Iomedae she handled it quite badly. She is older and wiser now and determined to do better this time.

She stares into space with the kind of blank expression of someone who's mostly paying attention to her scrying sensors instead of her eyes.

If Alfirin has ever taken other lovers, over the years, she has kept them comprehensively secret. Iomedae presumes she has. Hopes she has, really. It is healthy for people who are not trying to be gods to have people they love and who love them. If Alfirin is excessively invested in Elie - and that could easily just be because she has a new intellectual peer, even if it's in fact more defensiveness and more Iomedae-specific awkwardness than Iomedae would've predicted a new intellectual peer would've produced -

- then that is a good thing for Alfirin, and Iomedae wants Alfirin to have good things. - and being a paladin she is inclined to objections related to Elie's wife but that's really very profoundly not her business. Anyway he is a Galtan revolutionary; quite possibly his wedding vows permit them each three lovers per annum.

If this room seems unusually tense right now Élie sure isn't picking up on it!

"Somebody said something about alghollthus?"

"I was using discern location to track some of Tar-Baphon's lieutenants and one of them is in Orv negotiating with some alghollthus. We're planning how to respond and were wondering if you'd run into any and knew things about them."

"I've never run into any and I'm not sure I'd know more than you do. – I do know that even in my time, none of them have ever been reported to leave the Sightless Sea."

"That's good. Of course, I don't think they went anywhere when they caused Earthfall. We can ask Aroden if there's anything there Tar-Baphon can trade for which substantially changes how we ought to plan to fight him -"

"I'd give that good odds," Marit says flatly. "They wouldn't need to have that many tricks up their sleeve for it to be true, if they aren't tricks we've seen."

"I was thinking seven in ten but if the cleverer people think it's higher I can put it down at nine."

"And we know they've got some tricks - I think the question is less 'how likely are they to substantially change things' and more 'does Tar-Baphon have anything they want?'. Given that Tar-Baphon seems to think it's likely - nine-to-one sounds better."

"Should we more highly prioritize diamond acquisition - I'm on the edge about that one, obviously -"

"Now that he knows we have Elie we have much less to lose by aggressive diamond acquisition except for making him nervous, if we shouldn't be pushing harder it's only because the archmages' archmagery is more important and we know He has poor visibility there. You could ask if we should prioritize fixing that."

"I suspect the biggest things we can do to improve Aroden's visibility also improve the visibility of other gods - so it might be better for the crusade's success but worse for our long-term interests more generally."

"I guess we can ask Aroden whether humanity's long-term interests are served by the gods having more visibility, but I'd actually bet on a yes, there - note that they won't permit ascensions while they have poor visibility -"

"I expect we might have a less generally disruptive method by the time you're ready for that."

"I broadly oppose trading our odds of winning the crusade for most other things at most plausible exchange rates," says Marit, "even if Aroden thinks they are good other things."

It is after all the mistake they made last horrendous mistake they made. But you have to correct for mistakes the precisely correct amount, you can't just steer in a new direction until you get slapped from the opposite failure. 

"Fortunately for all the people who'd live in the Asmodean western empire you're not the one in a position to make that call."

- okay, Alfirin is definitely in an unusual mood. Marit is at this point highly skeptical about the whole 'Asmodean western empire' thing but hardly intends to get into that. "It is more obvious to me how an Asmodean empire would be overthrown than how Tar-Baphon's would, should he triumph, and not obvious which damns more people," he says. "I think Aroden's investment to date, on both this and the previous occasion, is suggestive of a situation he thinks is not just bad but irrecoverable after-the-fact."

Also, they know how to beat Tar-Baphon, and have been told nothing about how to prevent the Asmodean western empire. But he can't actually think of a phrasing of this observation that isn't being snippy right back at Alfirin. 

"I'm just saying that there are reasons that indiscriminately improving the gods' visibility of Élie in particular could be very bad, and - I'm not going to expand on that further, so we should return to the question of alghollthus."

What an absolutely disastrous line of conversation! Let's stop talking about him, please. 

"I'm sorry, I must be missing something here. Do you have the means of changing how visible we are to Aroden, or to the other gods? Why do you think Aroden has particularly poor visibility right now? In any case, if it looks like alghollthus are going to involved, I'm in favor of acquiring whatever divine assistance we can."

(He's not consciously thinking about how this might interfere with his work of breaking prophecy, because this seems like a very bad time to be consciously thinking about his work breaking prophecy). 

"- oh, sorry, I don't know that I mentioned to you. Last commune was half 'unknown' until I thought to ask 'are all our Elie-contingent plans hard to see' which is obvious in hindsight but which I hadn't thought of in advance. Anyway. They are, and if we're going to be relying on divine assistance we could at least think about if there are ways to address that, though I don't know if there are any or if they'd be worth it. It'll make the commune less reliable than it usually is, though still worth running - I'm trying to mostly ask things He can answer out of knowledge He had months ago. 

We can do this in smaller groups, if tempers are running high." This is about as much of a reprimand as she feels comfortable directing at Alfirin and she's honestly internally wavering about whether she's just hypersensitized to Alfirin's protectiveness of Elie and it wouldn't even stand out to her otherwise, except Marit definitely noticed too -

Alfirin blinks. Frowns slightly.

"I'm sorry." She takes a breath. "Carry on."

Right. How about they just focus on coming up with some Commune questions about the implications of alghollthus and not on anything that touches on Alfirin's feelings about Elie. Iomedae does not think she presently has the skill to pull off reassuring Alfirin about that in any respect other than ignoring it completely. 

She can absolutely think of some questions for Aroden, though.

Élie can help! 

" – and if a veiled master were to infiltrate our camp, would we have any way of knowing? I'm assuming the ordinary methods of magical detection aren't sufficient."

"One of the post-Erum-Hel precautions is to have the only access to the command tent involve briefly walking through an antimagic field. I think that'd suffice. - I guess I could get confirmation that's adequate."