"Aivu is fine! This is a metaphor! Metaphor Aivu is not fine! Metaphor Aivu needs someone to take care of her, and support her, and make sure that she gets to be a kid again, and not to feel like a burden to the people she came here to help."

"Does Aivu need that person to be you?"

" - yes, actually."

"Then it sounds like you've already decided what it is you have to do."

"I know that, I just haven't decided whether I'm actually going to - "

And, at this moment, Aivu tumbles out of the sky right next to her.

"You didn't TELL me you were a MOMMY!"

" - hi Aivu."

"I knew you were a grownup, but I didn't know you had a baby! I guess it probably wouldn't come up most of the time. I really like her, though, I wish you'd said something so we could have been friends sooner!"

"You - have a baby?"

" - she's not a baby, she's eleven."

Oh wow wait that was way more information than she wanted Sosiel to have about her or her life history.

"Nevermind. C'mon, Aivu."

And she can leap off the parapet to the ground below, that being the fastest possible way to end this interaction.

She can do this. She at no point actually finished deciding to do this, but that's how it is, with children, you don't always get to decide. Sometimes things just need to be done, and you do them, even when you don't know how. Even when you're going to mess them up horribly. Better to meet your end in battle than in bed, as the Ulfen say.

She is, actually, about as terrified of this interaction as if she were facing a particularly deadly and important battle. She can't think why. There's no reason to be this afraid of Zara.

She turns it over in her mind as she heads back to the island, which isn't long enough to make sense of it. She keeps turning it over and over in the background, as she finds Zara and hugs her and listens to her account of what the Nirmathas soldiers do and don't know about druids.

And then she tells Zara more of the story of what happened to her, because Zara does need to know it, and it seems like an obvious thing to do, here, that doesn't take so much of herself. Aivu listens intermittently, not having heard the whole story before. The other orphans gather around and listen with rapt attention. Then the mimics, and the gnomes, and Ember, who has been tending to the sick, even though Ember was there for it.

It isn't until near the end of her story that she finally makes sense of the dissipating sickness in the pit of her stomach. Zara was the only person here, maybe the only person left in the whole world, who really knew the person that Korva was before she arrived in Mendev. She doesn't quite feel that she does know Zara, now, or like Zara quite knows her. And as long as Zara doesn't know the new Korva, the Knight Commander, and replace her sense of the old Korva with the new one, she can almost believe that the old one isn't really gone. 

But that Korva is gone. She died in a pit in the center of Kenabres, or perhaps in the middle of Galfrey's speech, or perhaps with the snapping of her collar. She has, in any case, been dead for months, and is not worth a resurrection, even if one might work. Perhaps it's more like the spell the druid taught her this morning, a new Korva rising from the ashes of the old, with the same soul attached to a new life to live.

In any case, the old version of herself is not recoverable. All the new one can do now is bury her, and hope to rebuild some kind of relationship with the child that the old one lived for.

In the morning Marit goes looking for her while the soldiers, who don't have Rings of Sustenance, are still dragging themselves into the training yard. "Knight-Commander. We successfully engaged some enhanced demons, and captured one, a babau, which is now in the dungeons. I had a question, if you have a moment."

"Sure. Go ahead."

"One question of fairly significant strategic import is whether enhanced demons have the same vulnerabilities as normal demons. I'd expect it'd be easier for a ritual to change a demon's vulnerability from cold iron to silver, or from good to law, than to make them invulnerable altogether; that might explain some of their unexpected tenacity, and if it's not that then I think this ritual is a lot more powerful than ought to be possible, which would be important in its own right.

The way to check this would be by cutting up the prisoner.

- I can give you my analysis of whether that should be allowed, if you'd like, but it's your decision and struck me as one where you might not want to rely on - what anyone else who has to decide things like that sometimes has to say about it."

Oh, fun, moral decisions. She has no idea what she thinks of strategic torture of demons. Regill, of course, would say it was necessary. Most of her companions -even Seelah, she suspects - wouldn't see the big deal. Ember would tell her that it was wrong. Arueshalae would... probably abstain.

And none of that matters, because Galfrey made her knight commander, and Marit has promised to obey her orders, and in the end this choice falls on nobody but her.

"...what is your analysis of whether that ought to be allowed."

"I don't know," he says flatly. "I wouldn't have to hurt it very much, you can tell if there's a vulnerability with a very shallow cut. I could use the spell Delay Pain; I could fix it with magical healing afterwards; I could do it while the demon was unconscious, if that seemed likely to spare it additional distress. I don't think we're talking about a degree of harm that, in itself, presents a particular quandry; it has injured itself more than that checking if it could break the bars.

But it seems like, as rules that apply across the board and are insensitive to the actual degree of harm go, 'don't deliberately injure prisoners' is a strikingly good one.

It's not actually the one the Shining Crusade used; that was 'if it is strategically necessary to deliberately injure a prisoner, get advance authorization, minimize suffering, provide magical healing as soon as feasible, report it in detail,', most commonly used when it was necessary to render someone unconscious so spells could take or because we lacked the resources in the moment to contain them while conscious, but also used to check if someone was the species they claimed to be, check if a spell had taken effect, or check if regeneration was suppressed. The relevant strategic necessity can't be attained through the prisoner being frightened or harmed into compliance, can't be the prisoner's cooperation, can't be an effect on other prisoners who witness it, can't be punitive.

It's a demon. I think there's an argument for being more careful, when the rest of the world is less careful, where a person in your care is very alien to you and your own conscience perhaps quieter or more confused, and so for being more careful with prisoners who are demons than you would be with prisoners who were human. Certainly were it the case that this would be illegal if the prisoner were human then I think it must not be done; the respects in which demons and humans differ are not relevant. 

- separately from any of that, I want to use the more stringent of whatever rules seem right to you and to Lastwall, because I showed their letter of assurance and am unwilling to while its beneficiary do anything they've, themselves, decided not to countenance."

She thinks, for some reason, of Jerribeth. Not of Jerribeth keeping her word in the Ivory Sanctum, which is easily enough explained by the strategic considerations at the time. She thinks of the questions Jerribeth answered after, about the ritual. She said that she had gone through it herself. That the memory of the ritual was a horrible one, so horrible that she intended to erase it upon returning to the Abyss. Her voice was an inhuman, telepathic buzzing noise - and even in that, the pain of even thinking about it still came through.

That is not what they are doing, any more than they mean to punish the soldiers who break the rules in exactly the same way that she was punished as a teenager. But -

"The differences between demons and humans are not relevant, no, though I'm not sure how many people would agree with even that much. But - it also seems perverse, doesn't it, if we say that we can kill demons on sight, but can't give them a minor cut with a knife beforehand. That's not a decision, that's just - it seems a very odd place to land."

"A lot of duties to prisoners end up with oddities, in that respect, like that you can't let someone who needs to eat go without dinner but you can execute them so as to save the dinner. 

I think the tricky thing is that it actually requires both deeply unusual virtue and deeply unusual knowledge to not horrendously wrong people over whom you have the power that guards possess over their prisoners. Even rules that make things a lot better than what you'd get without the rule are - gesturing wildly at those pieces it's possible to pin down. Either they end up banning a lot of things that are fine or they're deeply specific and confusing to apply in the field or they're easily exploitable and then the rule is in fact just decorative and whatever outcome you're getting you're getting from the personal virtue of the people carrying it out."

"That - also seems perverse, actually, creating a situation where if you run out of food you're required to execute prisoners rather than underfeed them. I suppose at some point there are cleaner deaths than starvation, but - surely, in most situations, most prisoners would prefer to live. Not all of them, obviously, but - it seems - ridiculous and cruel, on some level, to say that because it's all right to kill people sometimes, that you should preferentially kill people instead of committing some lesser harm. I am sure that the people who wrote the rules in question have thought of that, and have taken far more prisoners than I have, but - it still doesn't seem like - like a system that one would actually prefer to be a prisoner under, relative to the alternative."

"It really doesn't. And yet the rule 'ask prisoners whether they'd rather go hungry or be put to death', in the absence of sincere concern for the prisoners by the people following it, results in lots of unfed prisoners about whom you can truthfully say 'they said they preferred it!" but who you could, in fact, have fed, and wouldn't actually have killed. And of course presumably the rule is that they can be allowed to go hungry to some reasonable degree, if not outright starved, but that still means there's a point where you have to choose either to feed them or to release them or to kill them, just a hungrier point. And of course ultimately many armies largely don't take prisoners in the first place because you'll have to feed and guard them, which is the same decision just made on the battlefield.

The best I know how to do is to ask myself how much harm I am doing, and for what good, and then ask how liable I am to be wrong in either part of that judgment, and then ask whether a blanket ban on doing that kind of harm would overall make things better even if in this case it'd make things worse."

"Well, we in fact have never taken demon prisoners before, and only took this one for the express purpose of learning more about the ritual's origins and effects. I do not know that there exist any norms to be eroded, here. ...but, on the other hand, if we go and treat demons in our power the way that they treat us, then - we may still be defending ourselves from invaders, but it seems like we're sort of giving up some kind of claim to being... better."

"You should ask Lastwall where their line is, if you're going to do that anyway. I think that - given that we wouldn't have a prisoner, and would instead have a corpse, if we hadn't wanted to know about the ritual, I am inclined to ask what our options are for reliably knocking the prisoner out. Although I do think it's probably higher-priority to learn from it where and who the current ritualist is, if it knows, and I can imagine situations where these priorities are in conflict, depending on what resources we actually have and what we can pull off."

"....also kind of tempted to offer it a dismissal in exchange for its cooperation, honestly. There's an obvious sense in which this is incredibly stupid, but. We could."

"I'm expecting we'll need Alfirin's help for the interrogation, though it's worth trying without that. I don't expect it to believe you, if you offer it a dismissal, or particularly to be more cooperative, but - doesn't make it the wrong thing to do, and it'd be consistent with how you're trying to handle executions generally. ...you probably want Banishment, though, so as to not risk unleashing it on some random other plane, unless they've improved Dismissal since I learned it.

I think Alfirin has Arazni's Deep Slumber, which lasts all day. If we don't have that I do not know of a better method than nonlethal violence for rendering demons unconscious; I expect it's too strong for a normal Deep Slumber.... Arazni's Deep Slumber is another spell you should try to learn, it's really useful."

"Normal deep slumber it would probably just wake up when you injured it. If a stronger version is on the table, then it seems reasonable to use it. I - don't know dismissal to do that, but I'm not exactly a planar expert? Sosiel can cast dismissal and can't cast banishment, although Nenio might be able to pull it off if she had it. ...we should separately really get a list of all of the spells that Nenio ought to have, at some point."

"When Arazni cast it no power but Her or Iomedae could wake them. Dismissal used to sometimes send people to a random plane. I'll ask some of my archons if it still does that, they're how I learned of it in the first place. I can put a list together of all spells we make available standard to Crusade wizards at a certain circle."

"All right. Thanks. Let me know what you find out before we go ahead with any plans."

So Marit will drop by the headquarters of the Iomedaen inquisition in Drezen.