… What does Arazni value?

She does not, particularly, think she values all the people in Hell not being tormented, any more. There’s sort of a weak belief that this is bad, but the only emotions she can muster about it are “yeah, I should probably see if I can stop Asmodeus before he does it to me.” She’s pretty sure she doesn’t mind Rovagug cultists trying to destroy the world, any more, which is obviously something that would be a problem if she wanted to ascend more fully; her attitude as a lich was ‘that won’t succeed because attempts to make things better don’t succeed’, but she clericed more than a few True Neutral or Lawful Evil followers of Rovagug working on it anyways because why not?

… Why doesn’t, or why does, she particularly value the people of Hell not being tormented? She does, intellectually, know the arguments for why their suffering is meaningful. She might have been them, they are people, their life experiences matter…

… She’s tired. (She leans back into the bath.) It is conceivable that she’ll wake up caring about them. She values them, she puts any importance on their happiness, just so much less than she values herself.

Why does she value them, then?

Well, Aroden cared about them.

(She misses Aroden. Less the god, though she misses him too, than the hollow-eyed young man with so limited knowledge and so few circles, who taught her wizardry and eventually said he was mending his own mistakes, and she ran away - sharp shame - and came back - because that’s what needs to be done, because she learned it from him - never stop working - never surrender - don’t you think they’d want to know - she lasted seven hundred years without giving up hope in Aroden even as she gave it up in everything else, just because nothing that was Aroden would ever stop - could ever stop - could ever die - until the last person in the world was rescued, and if she was last she would still be saved.)

(Waiting for the age of glory that never came…)

(... She’s tired.)

Who else does she have strong opinions about? She’s moderately grateful to Lucy, and aware she ought to have stronger feelings on that topic; to the extent it’s only moderate, this is probably another sign of her brain being damaged, and she’ll need to sort that out. Maybe she’ll feel appropriately strongly later, or maybe she’s just an ungrateful person, now. Either way she has to repay her, eventually, but that’s a burden waiting for her shoulders, not anything she desires to do.

What does she desire to do, other than see if she can, actually, unmake herself without going to Hell, other than meet Aroden again, other than have there be someone she can ever trust again, and that she can't have? Nothing she can think of; the only emotions alive in her right now are hate and despair and being so tired…

(Wisdom catches her, and -)

- Geb? … If Geb ever leaves his extremely secure demiplane she is going to stick him in an antimagic field with ten marut inevitables, beat him unconscious, steal his magic items, destroy his contingencies, trap his soul and feed it to Charon, that’s how she feels about Geb.

This is not particularly unexpected, really. She suspects that Aroden would not have agreed with this policy, and she finds it plausible that before her resurrection she would not have agreed with that, but she thinks that it was mostly that she wanted to be Aroden as a child, and Aroden didn’t do vengeance because he cared about people as - things capable of being happy, not as actors who incurred debt and guilt and could ever deserve spite, and on due reflection she thinks she disagrees with him, there, at least for the moment, we'll see how this shakes out in a month or two.

Who else?

- Iomedae. She is incandescently furious with Iomedae. The water in the bathtub is heating up further, just from how incandescently furious a ninth-circle wizard is. She cannot, actually, think of individual things she enjoyed, in life and afterlife, but she is vaguely aware that they existed, and Iomedae - generously, Iomedae’s screwups - were at minimum responsible for her death, her reanimation, and quite plausibly for every other thing that went wrong since she was last summoned to Golarion. 

… Milani? Aroden’s other saints? She misses some of them, but… no, no emotion that strong. Iomedae is the one who got her killed and took her job over and screwed it up.

… Yeah. Right now, Arazni feels like her top priority is to go through her mind looking for traps, and then - 

One hour later

Plane Shift, Greater Teleport, and Arazni is now at the gates of the Court of the Inheritor, a name which does not make her feel happier about its owner.

“I’m here to talk to Iomedae,” she will inform whatever archon, angel or other servant of the Champion Of The War On Hell happens to be around. (There will not be very many, given that Heaven's full field armies are presently attempting to solidify their control of Avernus against scattered resistance from Hellish soldiers who would commit more if they weren't worried about Lucy Whitman's possible return.)

"- is there anything we could offer you such that you'd prefer to wait for a week," says the angel, who does not look like this is entirely unexpected. "- She said She'll do it now, if the answer is 'no', but -" But it's in fact extremely important to have her attention on the suddenly astoundingly chaotic situation on and about Golarion. And Avernus. And Abaddon.

"Nothing you can offer," says Arazni.

"All right. Come on in."

Right then, she will.

(Under heavy buffs, obviously. She trusts Iomedae not to murder her on entry, but not confidently.)

Which way's Iomedae?

Everywhere, here, but She can pick a sitting room, for this, if it's what Arazni seems to be looking for - a face and a body and expressions and a sword - some people prefer that. Some actively dislike it.

Arazni wants someone to yell at, and she appreciates Iomedae giving her the courtesy of a face, yes.

"Do you have a justification?"

"I think that the Arazni I knew would have - agreed with the decisions I ended up making about rescuing her. She wouldn't've made the same tradeoffs, in all possible cases, but of the actual tradeoffs actually available, there are none where I was acting otherwise than I thought she would have wanted." 

"Well. That sounds like a pretty general justification."

"I think the most unjustifiable decision was the one Lastwall made to attack Geb, most powerful wizard in Golarion and more than four millennia old, at a time it had no ninth-circle spellcasters of its own, but I suppose you can say that that was all your subordinates and you had nothing to do with it and so I can't blame you for it at all. The claim that it was completely impossible to ever carry out the thinnest of attempts to recover my body was much more modest, really, and I can't even say that it was the wrong one given how the last attempt had proceeded." Her words are very precise. "And I remember you had excellent excuses for the headlong rush towards Tar-Baphon through unsecured and frankly unscouted territory that lead to my death, so I suppose you can say that I would have agreed with that decision, given that I did go along with it."

"They had a narrower mission objective than 'defeat Geb', which they still stood nearly no chance of achieving, but which would have been worth the chance they might, given what they and I thought they were risking, which was only their own eternal fates. You can absolutely blame me for it, as I should have called them off, and would have done so with a more complete state of information, and would probably have had a more complete state of information if I'd gotten oriented as a god better sooner." She doesn't need to point out that it's not as if 'get oriented as a god faster' would have implied doing something different.

"I don't think I fully understand - what you remember about the Crusade. Do the decisions you made at that time make sense to you? Do they seem now like you were being - foolishly altruistic or foolishly trusting, or is the reasoning not there to reconstruct, beyond the facts of what we said to one another?"

"Really," says Arazni drily. "The narrative as I understood it from talking to them afterwards was that it was part of a plan to destroy the nation of Geb, in the arrogant belief that Geb himself wasn't looking."

"What I remember at the time was the knowledge that we were taking a risk, that you argued very persuasively for a rapid advance - chiefly, as I recall, on the grounds of the suffering and the slaughter that Tar-Baphon himself was producing every day until we would defeat him - that I myself was persuaded, and that the evidence for the planned ambush was excessively obvious in retrospect."

"We were overconfident. Not that there wouldn't be an ambush, that there would be and we would handle it. We'd won so many victories through desperate effort while he was far more powerful than us, and we reached the point where we'd ground away his whole advantage and were his equals, and we considered plans that'd win the war in one year and plans that'd win it in ten and we judged the risks worth taking. Which was idiocy, of course, of precisely the kind that -

- it was idiocy because, from the perspective of Good, slightly improved odds of your survival was worth the death of a hundred thousand more ordinary soldiers. Because ultimately, most of what we were staking on that battlefield was the mere temporal lives of mere humans, and one has to be ready to pay those prices over and over, abundantly, with both hands, for the rare thing that matters far more than they do. I know how to make trades like that now. That is the field where I learned.

You - 

- when we spoke of this last, as I remember it, you did not really like my plan, to become an impartial and perfect Lawful Good god who would unflinchingly trade those who trusted me for small probabilities of things that mattered more than they ever could. It's not what you are; it's not what Aroden is.

The person I am now would never have tried to shave ten years off the Shining Crusade by risking the permanent death of my herald. But also, and not unrelatedly, the Arazni I knew would like me now much less than she liked me then."

Either Geb has screwed with her memories (likely) or Iomedae is lying to make her mistrust her memories (likely). Maybe both. Probably both, honestly; neither one is trustworthy. Despite her Lawful alignment, Iomedae is goddess of victory, not of honor, and Geb might be 'lawful' in the sense that his kingdom has laws, but not in that he thinks of people as things to be honest with.

"I do remember that your argument that we could handle whatever Tar-Baphon could throw at us, which was quite improbable idiocy for an experienced commander, yes. I don't remember why I believed it, other than the moment of being emotionally swept away in the prospect of the war finally being over, and reports that were in retrospect desperately underestimating about his troop strength."

"And I do remember not liking your plan, to ascend as a god who would trade away the people who trusted you for small probabilities of things happening that served the destruction of Evil. It didn't seem like it would end well, being the sort of person who who would do things like that." Not that Aroden didn't make horrible tradeoffs himself, when there wasn't enough cleric-healing to go around - there's still groups who sacrifice their enemies on ancient altars with enchanted sacrificial daggers of Death Knell, in the places near Old Xopatl, or were last time Arazni visited.

"We discussed that, too. It's not, ultimately, an advantage to be someone people would not choose to deal with, or someone they would deal with only through great caution. It would, as you say, not end well, and so one can just not do it. I don't employ people towards ends that will make them regret ever having trusted me; I tell them what tradeoffs I mean to make, and make only those. I would not lie to you. I can, if you'd like, pay Abadar to tell you whether I'm lying to you, if you'd trust it from Him. I never lied to you. And when we made the decision to try to end the Crusade faster, your Intelligence was twice mine, and your Splendour half again as high."

"Really. I'd like that." She'd trust it from Abadar much more than she'd trust it for Iomedae. Iomedae fights to create a world where she will be meaningless, which is her win condition; Abadar doesn't do win conditions. "In retrospect the obvious explanation was that you thought that it was worth trading odds of victory against Tar-Baphon for odds of the success of your plan to ascend, because of just how useful it would be to - destroying Hell - and bringing about the Age of Glory - to have another Starstone-god. Much more useful to have one than just to have Aroden keep having His Herald. That was a very easy tradeoff to make, for the sword that cuts to the heart."

"No. I couldn't meaningfully have traded odds of success at sealing Tar-Baphon off against odds of successfully ascending, because I could hardly have run off to ascend while Tar-Baphon was still loose and threatening all of Avistan. I could have, if we'd been cleverer and more cautious, both kept you alive and ascended.

And because I would've discussed that with you, if it were the tradeoff we were making, because predictably betraying one's allies is a terrible strategy for accomplishing most goals. And because humans trying to be cleverly ruthless only ever goes well if they're able to debate and plan it with the people they trust, and usually not even then.

I think - it might be a high priority, for us to seek Abadar's confirmation I'm not lying to you, and for you to have restored to you the memories Geb took or twisted."

"Certainly you could have. Ninety-nine percent odds of defeating Tar-Baphon and ten percent odds of ascension into ninety-eight and twelve. There are a great many ways to fail at ascending by the Starstone, Iomedae; legendary heroes manage it all the time."

"And the first part, obviously. The second part - 

- If I'm going to end myself by having someone rewrite my mind into a properly efficient servant of Good, as presently seems the best way to go, I'll do it after talking to a few more people who were there, so I know exactly what I'm doing."

"And I'll pick a different Good god to do it."

"Like the one who didn't let Aroden get killed. Do you have a justification for that, Iomedae? The incompetence involved in every detail of my death, reanimation, and unlife, which I will believe if Abadar confirms it to me, does seem like plausible incompetence. How do you fail badly enough at being Aroden's second-in-command that there is no Age of Glory?"

"Sorry, which is the Good god who didn't let Aroden get killed, in your accounting of this? Here we all are, and He's dead."