"Everyone who's approximately capable of standing up carrying a spear is rather encouraged to do so, and anyone else is welcome to have a go although they might find themselves peeling a lot of potatoes in the encampment if they don't have another relevant speciality. The Empire awards a patch of land or similar assets to anyone who makes it through two years service. Whenever it looks like we're going to have a shortage of wars, someone helpfully starts another one, which I'm kind of assuming will continue until we've assimilated the entire continent - although the mess in the Barrens might be making some people think twice - although that got that way by people thinking twice, so..."

"And they want the entire continent when short on people to live there because..."

"The people who are living there are doing it wrong, mostly.

Like, actually the people who live there mostly are doing it quite wrong, you've got the ones whose entire society is built around fear and torture, the ones with a hereditary aristocracy who enjoy locking people up for doing healing, the ones who magically control their people sometimes extremely directly, and the ones who live only for battle and anyone who doesn't fight is a serf who can't leave their village without permission. Oh, and the ones who like enacting tenfold vengeance on anyone who wrongs them, the ones who send their political enemies to the salt mines as slaves, and the ones who have this delightful habit of trapping souls in jars.

The idea is mostly not to kill everyone, but to replace their awful rulers with somewhat less awful rulers. Although attempting to let them rule themselves is not going very well in the one place we've even kind of tried it."

"It's not that I don't see the temptation but does conquering people and replacing their rulers work better here than it has in our history?"

"It seems to have worked pretty well in Ossium? That's a territory we took from the torturer people and their previous subjects seem to have been pretty relieved and happy to work with us, on the whole; some of them travelled to other bits of the Empire that they liked better, some of them stayed put, everyone seems to be getting along. And the thralls - serfs - we ended up with in the Mourne, that was originally Marcher territory that we took back but it'd been with the Jotun for ages so some of their people just lived there now, they've pretty much integrated happily too. The problem's when there are loads of different groups that don't really match up with one of the existing nations, like we've got in the Barrens.

And ones that absolutely refuse to integrate - like the Montanians, they originally fled to get away from the Empire and aren't pleased we're back. I think they'll probably all die."

"What don't the Montanians like about the Empire?"

"They're anarchy cultists - or proponents of freedom, if you prefer - they don't think anyone should ever listen to anyone else telling them what to do, so they all packed up to live in a commune in the wilderness. This is, well, distinctly incompatible with the Empire's insistence that people follow the law - which is mostly pretty sensible stuff about not killing people or taking their stuff - and definitely incompatible with religious law that considers Anarchy to be a False Virtue that you can get in big trouble for spreading.

It didn't help that they were not interested in being subtle about it either, the whole Liberty Pact thing has seen a whole load of Freedom auras going round - including one spontaneously occurring on the pen that signed the document!

I'm - not sure I can actually defend the Empire's stance against freedom of religion on basic principles, but in practice building a society that puts up with Anarchy, Hatred, Vengeance and chums seems to be somewhat more difficult than not doing that. The Faraden would say the same about Ambition and Wisdom though."

"What... do the Montanians do about people who kill people or take their stuff?"

"Whatever they feel like at the time, I guess? I'm really surprised they had survived this long, I don't know the details of how they did it. I've never even met one, although they were sheltering with the Great Forest Orcs in Therunin for a bit so I could probably write to someone who has."

"Huh. The Faraden are... organized in some way opposed to ambition and wisdom?"

"Yes - they follow pretty much the same religion as the Empire, they know about the Labyrinth where souls go through to get reincarnated and that Virtue makes you go faster through it and lets you eventually break the cycle, but they disagree on which things are True Virtues that are actually useful and which are False Virtues that look quite similar but aren't useful - they think Ambition and Wisdom are false virtues. They also have some other stuff about thinking they reincarnate in families and the Labyrinth is full of howling ghosts, but those are details that we mostly just haven't confirmed are true rather than actively disagree on.

It doesn't help that there isn't really a way to disentangle 'this virtue makes your society better at making virtuous people' and 'this virtue actually helps your soul directly', so it's possible for two sets of people to gather data and still have a disagreement. Not that I think the Faraden have all that much data, they don't make True Liao and organise the recording of past life visions."

"People get visions?"

"Yes - uh, did you get that down in your notes, or do I need to go through it again? I'm pretty sure I covered it in the souls overview, it's kind of the foundation of why we know anything about how souls work."

"Sorry, there's just, uh, a lot, and everything relates to everything else confusingly."

"Yes, I'm sorry. If you don't disappear from the world in the next couple of hours, I expect I'm going to have to start again and take everything a bit slower. I don't really have a 'completely orient someone from a different world' list prepared, even the briar kids we get over from the Marchers have generally heard of what a Virtue and an Egregore is."

"But this is a known phenomenon, people appearing out of nowhere? There's not, like, a pamphlet for us?"

"The people appearing out of nowhere are usually Imperial heroes using the Sentinel Gate to travel to a site of interest. I suppose you get the occasional person who has been trapped in a regio for hundreds of years and that's vaguely analogous, but that's uncommon enough that people generally just spend some time doing a specific job each time based on what they already know."

"I gotta say it just keeps seeming weirder that we're speaking Anitami."

"I suspect you've somehow got entangled with whatever the Terun left behind that causes every people-group on the continent to speak their language, which is extremely weird."

"Anitami has clear linguistic descent from Tapap and Middle Likanan!"

"Sure, and Imperial has clear linguistic descent from Old Asavean, although only some of it so it's likely glued together from several other sources that didn't handily leave a bunch of written records, probably including whatever turned into Gemeinsamesprache. And I suspect you'll find Old Asavean is suspiciously similar to one of those source langagaes of yours."

"Can you say a sentence in it?"

"I'm a bit rusty in both, but - Caelius est in horto - that's Old Asavean - Ich sprache ein bisschen Gemeinsamsprache - that's pretty obviously Gemeinsamsprache."

"Yeah, no, neither of those sound like Tapap or Middle Likanan, Tapap is more like Ina shu Shapto tso a fum and Middle Likanan is like, uh, Likana sefa nerika nu ad pal."

"Yeah, those sound like Jarmish if anything, and I don't know any dialect of Jarmish.

Other places don't have the same effect, they have lots of different languages - except the Commonwealth but they do it on purpose and the people they conquer have to learn it - so I guess that's not so surprising."