"Eminently. Should I come with you?"

"I don't think I'll have to go too far." Are there still guards posted at her door?

Of course! Is she still dressed as the little mermaid?

No!! She's back to her work jumpsuit. "My ordinary manner of dress will draw too much attention at the ceremony," she says. "What would be expected?"

"Initiates from other countries who don't have a rank yet usually wear plain white robes, under armor. If you're not accustomed to armor yet I think just the robes will do?"

"Thank you," says Iomedae with dignity, or something resembling it. 

In that case she will wear plain white robes to her ceremony.

The Cathedral de Sancta Iomedaea is very very nice. It's hard to imagine the Lastwall leadership she's met authorizing spending this much on an incredibly nice cathedral. Maybe magic makes the economics make more sense. There's a wildly-more-than-life-sized sculpture of the goddess, with Aroden's eye on her shield, holding a blazing sword aloft.

It's nice in the way she associates with Arodenite Taldor, beautiful to prove you can make beautiful things, grand to prove you can make grand ones. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard and we're better at hard things than the Russians. 

She hadn't been expecting the shield with the eye of Aroden. For some incredibly stupid reason; of course the goddess Iomedae had a shield with her god's holy symbol on it. Iomedae's heart hurts a little. 

No one's staring at her but it feels like everyone's staring at her. 

The ceremony is not as short as it possibly could be; It does not have a ton of extraneous detail, but Cansellarion does give a speech, and each initiate walks to the front separately to kneel and take their oaths. They pray together, at the end, rather than individually, for the Goddess Iomedae to hear their oaths, and to help them keep them, and to hold them accountable should they fail.

It doesn't feel instantly right and perfect once it's done, like all her worries were nothing really. It also doesn't feel like a grave mistake. It feels like -

Like she's been a free person since she turned eighteen and now she's something more complicated than that. Maybe better, but definitely more complicated. She asks the Goddess Iomedae to end the evil afterlives and it doesn't feel quite the same as asking Aroden but that's got to be in her imagination. 

Is there something she's supposed to do after this.

Not exactly supposed to. The other initiates are standing around socializing, being congratulated by their friends and their families and Cansellarion - some people are at this point staring at her a bit curiously, probably because she showed up for the ceremony and took the oath and was definitely not in training with the rest of the initiates who all seem to know each other. One of them does eventually wander over and ask. "Aina, was it? How did you come to join the order?"

She should make friends. It is known unhealthy to have one friend, who is also your entire support network, who is also your coworker, who you are also sleeping with. "I'm sorry, it's not just a bit of a long story but also a bit of a secret one. And yes, I'm going by Aina. Marit, right?" He was one of two in the ceremony. It must be a popular name. It was in the holy book, too, so maybe it was a popular name in her time and just not in her part of Taldor.

"Yeah, that's me. Also Quintus, over there, but I'm not the one with another name to tell us apart by. Chelish? Wait, nevermind, that's probably secret. Sorry."

She picked the name to imply it. It's true, but still kind of misleading to be implying. She looks at her shoes. "Well, if you're guessing instantly I think the secrecy-related error has to be on my end. How about you, are you from here?" This is differently excruciating than high school in America but she's not actually sure it's less so. Which is fine. She figured out high school in America eventually and at least here people share her basic premises about the functioning of the universe.

"From Vellumis, yeah. My father is a ship's captain on lake Encarthan." He would ask about her parents but apparently that's secret.

Yeah she's going to be substantially handicapped at making friends by the secrets. She's really not very much of a secrets person, temperamentally. She misses her father and there's nothing she can say that's not either outright false or wildly misleading - if she says 'my parents are dead' that means different things, in modern Cheliax - "When did you decide that you wanted to be a paladin?"

"Oh. I can't remember not wanting it. Ma says it started when I was six - Who wouldn't want to be a paladin, really? I mean - if you want to be a soldier, right. If you really want to be a farmer I guess maybe it doesn't appeal as much."

"I guess I was mostly comparing to having a lot of children, who could themselves be soldiers. Or to being a wizard before it became clear I'm not smart enough. It seemed to me like probably being a wizard was the best way to fix the entire world all at once by yourself, but only if you were very good at it, which turns out to be quite the catch."

He laughs. "Well, I'd be no good at it - And being a paladin doesn't mean you can't be a father some day - I guess you can't but that's different."

"Right, it'd be a terrible idea to have all the paladin orders celibate and breed lawful goodness right out of your population like an unfavorable color of sheep. But my mother's theory, and she did have half a point, was that women who'd make good paladins should instead have five sons who'd probably inherit the aptitude and who could pursue it without choosing between that and children." Iomedae lacked the vocabulary to articulate her disagreement at the time. She's vaguely curious if her mother was ever persuaded. It would be sort of like her to be unpersuaded even when Iomedae won the war and became a god.

"Huh. But you disagreed?"

"I figured that it was the sort of puzzle easier to sort out if one was a god, and yet the gods did pick women sometimes so it couldn't always be decided in the one direction. I think if I were arguing the point with her now I'd say that it is bad for societies and the people in them if only men in them hold power because there are concerns they will miss, and that a person really has much stronger evidence about their aptitudes than they'd arrive at reasoning from first principles, but at the time I didn't know to say either of those things so I said we'd see if I got chosen or not."

"Well, the Goddess doesn't really choose on a schedule, so how would you know if your ma was right?"

"We agreed I could try when I was twenty, for a year, and I wouldn't be too old to get married if it hadn't happened by the end of it."

"Oh!" He squints, trying to guess her age. "And She…chose you already? Or are you just pretty sure it'll happen soon?"