"Weak in illusion and evocation, I strongly believe but have never confirmed that her specialty is enchantment. I have seen her cast five ninth-circle spells in a day. She doesn't craft her own magic items. She knows the trick to Dominate or Feeblemind people who try to scry you through the Detect Scrying glimpse back at them, that previously we thought was one of those things only Tar-Baphon could do, and I've seen her use a Limited Wish to imitate Arazni's Break Enchantment which works against spells above fifth circle and which no one except Iomedae was ever able to pick up. I haven't seen her imitate Arazni's Time Stop or Arazni's Tsunami and suspect she can only do it for things Limited Wish can imitate. She has at least two clones."

"We're not fighting her."

"She's Sarkorin, apparently human, apparently somewhere between fifty and seventy years old, brilliant as you'd expect. She joined up with the Crusade earlier than I or Iomedae, in...I want to say 3790, already fourth circle, hit fifth shortly after. If she has family, friends, or close associates outside us she has very effectively hidden this fact from the whole Crusade. She has a tower in Absalom. She is Lawful, probably Evil, sincerely Arodenite, has a shrine to all the ascended gods including Norgorber but I think that's just to get under peoples' skin. She's had Mind Blank up I think every day since she hit eighth circle which was more than a decade ago, and has Teleported or Plane Shifted out immediately on those occasions Tar-Baphon Disjoined her, though that was in fact strategically indicated and doesn't suggest more inclination to hide being Evil than I already figured she had. Her familiar is a fox named Curiosity.

I think she's with the Crusade out of a mix of interest in hitting ninth circle, interest in stopping Tar-Baphon from taking over the world, and personal loyalty to Iomedae of a complex character neither of them have historically had much insight into because it hasn't seemed worth it to either of them to examine it more deeply and endanger the exquisitely professional relationship they are carefully maintaining. I think she'll help you because she's as appalled as the rest of us about Cheliax; I think in her disapproval of Hell and Asmodeus she's genuinely not very different from most Good people I know.

I have entrusted important problems to her care and never known her to handle those in a manner I disapproved of, though she sometimes handles problems not entrusted to her by Lawful Good people in ways I approve of much less. I expended a fair bit of effort checking if she were using mind-control outside those capacities in which it's permitted and was able to find no evidence of that, though I separately know that she monitors and can counter much of my surveillance of our forces. ...I know this because sometimes I try to bait our paladins into sharing their unit composition or orders over dinner, and one time she impersonated a paladin in order to play along.

I have very little confidence that if faced with a sufficiently stark choice between her interests and the worlds', she'd choose the world. This is a standing disagreement I have with Iomedae about a person's character and Iomedae is almost always right about those, but - if she were wrong anywhere she'd be wrong here. 

I do think that it is extraordinarily unlikely that Alfirin will betray the Shining Crusade or the effort against Cheliax in this world, for as long as Iomedae exists in a form that could experience it as a personal betrayal."

- it mostly doesn't show on her face but oof.

Well. He now knows some more things about Alfirin, and about Iomedae, and about Marit.

"Thank you. When you say you aren't confident she'd choose the world's interests over her own - do you have a sense of what her interests are? And - would you mind sharing your plans for opposing her if it should become necessary? I assume most of them won't be applicable to ours if something has happened in the last nine hundred years, but they'll make a better starting point than none." The last is directed more at Iomedae than at Marit, though Jan has a suspicion that Iomedae will turn out to have underplanned for this contingency.

"I think she's broadly interested in - well, I suppose 'Arodenite' doesn't gesture very effectively at it, anymore - human flourishing. Better magic, better crops, better animals, richer cities, the destruction of the Evil gods and possibly also Pharasma were that the kind of thing that could be done without risking everything. Maybe even if it couldn't."

"If I had to stop her I'd ask for a Miracle," says Iomedae flatly. "Of Pharasma, to watch us that next minute and take her soul to judgment when she died and bypass - I'm not sure she doesn't already have something more than the clones -"

      "Of course she has something more than the clones," says Marit. 

"It is likely enough that I wouldn't want to try it without the Miracle even if we'd handled the clones somehow. But with the Miracle - trivial, obviously, if she doesn't know we've decided to kill her. I'd need some people to dispel her contingency and I'd need a round.

If she knows - I'm not actually sure. It is not easy to pry an archmage out of their demiplanes, or learn which one they're in. If I had a way to do it without spending divine power like it's copper I would not be fighting an entire war with Tar-Baphon."

"...So as I understand it the situation where you're expecting her interests might diverge from those of the world as a whole are if she gains the power to kill Pharasma. I suspect I misunderstand."

"It might not literally have to be that but yes, we don't expect her interests to diverge from the rest of the world under most ordinary circumstances. The problem is - well, here we are in an alternate timeline with prophecy broken and Aroden dead. It is hard to bound what sorts of opportunities to betray the world she could, conceivably, eventually be presented with, and she's going to try to become immortal. Nearly all of my concerns with respect to Alfirin are fears about - the very long term, and the very unusual. But we live lives in which the very unusual features frequently."

"I think she might damn a planet in exchange for a layer of Hell, like Barbatos," says Marit. "Probably on the grounds that she could then improve the layer of Hell, but still."

"Thank you, that's informative." It's the sort of situation he'd expected when Marit first suggested that Alfirin would choose her own interests over the world's, which is not the sort of thing any of his officers would say if what they meant was 'She'd kill Pharasma if she could, maybe even if this destroys Creation'

Iomedae thinks that Alfirin would not, actually, do that - not Alfirin as she is today - but Marit has accurately summarized the state of this standing disagreement of theirs and there isn't much to be added by reiterating that it's a standing disagreement of theirs. "Do you think it's worth asking god Iomedae if I ended up thinking I was wrong in my assessment of her character?" she asks him. "I take it Communes are much more expensive now but I was inclined to say it was worth it."

"Seems it, yes. - same budgets, presumably, or more generous ones, so it's just the interpretation cost? But this is something She'd have contemplated before prophecy broke."

"It isn't obvious She'd have contemplated it, this world may not have had one or she may never have risen to particular attention, which I expect she'd have been actively trying to avoid. I was imagining a discount of maybe half, for if She thought about it already."

"I was imagining we would - bundled with other questions, of course - ask first "Did the Shining Crusade involve an archmage named Alfirin?" and only ask further questions about her fate or Your judgement of her after confirming that she existed here."

"It is not obvious that I as a god, even if I knew Alfirin all my life, would specifically have calculated already whether I was wrong to trust her, assuming no institutions were established in the Church for ongoing trusting exchange with her, and there are presently no plans for such. I don't expect to find the question of what mortal Iomedae was wrong about much more important or more interesting than the same question about other mortals - what the holy book was wrong about, yes, but it definitely isn't going to contain an endorsement of Alfirin. The question tree still seems reasonable, but I don't expect it to be the case that it's a request for a previously-run calculation, even if this world had an Alfirin."

"I was not expecting it to be a previously-run calculation, but I expect it will be much less expensive for Her to determine whether She was wrong, if Alfirin existed here, than whether you were wrong. Not least because if our world does not have Alfirin She cannot simply look at results."

"Yes, that's right."

"Lastwall doesn't know if she was cut from the holy books on purpose?"

"Lastwall made edits to, ah, 'de-emphasize things you did that it would be unwise for most people to emulate'. And then the originals were stolen."

"Is it," says Marit, "heretical in Lastwall to say that sometimes mortal Iomedae in fact made mistakes and not just decisions that are unwise to emulate."

"Not in the least! Plenty of mistakes are still in the holy books, almost every graduate of the war college has written a paper excoriating some of your operational decisions in the Crusade - after the battle of three sorrows -

But there were things you did, some of which I'd probably call mistakes and some of which I probably wouldn't, which were not obviously mistakes based on the historical record, where your example seemed to inspire people to decisions that were, for them, poor ones. And for a hundred years afterward nobody who read the originals tried to reverse the changes, and now we trust that they were making the right call because we can't check them anymore and we couldn't reverse the decision even if it was a bad one."

Iomedae is not going to glow with pride about her country where graduates of her war college write papers excoriating her operational decisions. It's not the right way to relate to them. 

"Two to one Alfirin stole them," Marit says.

"I won't take the other side of that."