"Our greatest salvation against the unending hordes of the Abyss is their inveterate sloth."

"Maybe the demons just stay in the village center - but then who's protecting all these farms?"

"Perhaps no-one. Apart from the demons, the Worldwound can be a remarkably safe place. And if all the demons here decided to play their little game..."

Creature which looked like a demon just killed a creature which looked like a human and was, in retaliation, eaten by a creature which looked like a white dragon, and which may be worshipped by the locals as a god. First team withdrawing. That resembles an explanation and is as much of an explanation as I expect to get.

A white dragon they could handle tonight  - and of course he had Daeran put up Protection from Cold the instant they saw it - but he doesn't want to count on it being a white dragon, once there's certainly illusion magic in the air.

Second team will hold position for rendezvous.

They're there swiftly; they're all flying. 

Marit likes to explain his reasoning, with his adventurers. After all, they're going to have to learn how to do this themselves. "It appears the village is protected by a white dragon who eats demons who don't nicely play the game the other demons are playing. If that's what's actually happening, then we probably want to kill the dragon and evacuate the people. But we still don't know where we are relative to Drezen, though I'm now betting 'in the Wound', and we have nowhere for the people to go. And, it'd be idiocy to assume that the orchestrator of all this is a white dragon, even if that's the form I saw. So, we're leaving, unless anyone can think of a reason we should instead stay."

"...If it really is a dragon that's a lot of treasure for the amount of danger? I don't think that's a good enough reason to stay but it's any reason. Sir." And Seelah's going to say 'Protecting the innocent' but would feel bad if Catherine pre-empted her on that and then said this wasn't the best way for them to spend their resources doing that.

" - these people are being - tricked into murdering crusaders, and preyed on by demons!"

"Yes, they are, and quite plausibly we could solve that tonight, but if we fail everything will be much worse for them and for all the other people in all the other villages," he says to Seelah. " - and the treasure will still be here once we've got some True Seeing."

There's a brief pause, then,

"I hear no further reasons to stay, Commander."

Then back to Drezen. 

More than the lives of the villagers, the fact weighs on him that going back there to fix the place will take four more Teleports that wouldn't've been needed if they handled it now. But it's a stupid risk, or would be if they didn't have an archmage who totally probably had True Seeing up, and he's not going to make an assumption-necessary-for-mission-success that he understands Alfirin's motives and precisely the game she's playing right now.

Wise of him, since said archmage is somewhat impaired at the moment and further limited in her spellcasting by the need to hide it. She did not have a True Seeing up.

"Pity about all the hypothetical treasure we never even saw. Wherever it was it was probably illusory anyways - Are we still on standby Commander, or are we done for the day?"

"Dismissed." Is that more than he'd have smiled at her if he didn't know her secret? He doesn't think so. He thinks it's the precisely correct amount of smile.

It was a liiiitle more of a smile than he'd have given to anyone else. The knight-commander isn't the most expressive person but Catherine is pretty good at reading people. She smiles back. "Care to join us at the half measure?"

It's hard to hew closely to the answer he would have given if he hadn't known her secret, because before he knew her secret, he was perpetually melancholic. However, while it might be convincing to Alfirin, acting like a person who eagerly awaits their death is a silly thing to do if you can avoid it. If she correctly infers that the reason he's full of optimism is her, well, good for her. 

"I think I will."

See, that? That is a man who likes her. The knight-commander is usually only slightly more eager to go to the tavern than Regill is. The group of them set off (except Regill, who stays behind with his maps. Of course.)

He doesn't like being drunk, but he's aware that it makes one an enormous killjoy to go to a bar and then drink nothing and make all your subordinates feel awkward, so he orders quite a lot of ale and then uses magic to render it harmless. 

"To our glorious triumph over the demons today!"

"To our swift return to free those people! - Daeran, what are you talking about, we didn't fight any demons."

"Sssshhh, Seelah, no one knows if your glorious victories are made up or not unless you tell them."

The knight-Commander can sure hold his drink.

She gets a cup of wine and drinks half of it and asks Daeran to dance, because Daeran is the only other person in this demon-infested backwater who knows how to dance. And also because he's actually pretty fun.

Okay, now she's just messing with him. It won't work. He will absolutely not betray anything in his facial expression just because Alfirin, archmage of the Shining Crusade, who had Iomedae herself in love with her, is entertaining the worst nobleman in Mendev. He simply won't. She cannot win that easily. 

Well it's not like there are any other candidates she knows well who aren't GAY or REGILL or less strictly-speaking humanoid than her tastes run - Lann's a sweetheart, really, but the scales in fact give her the creeps.