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He should have fallen on his sword. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
Punched his ticket for Elysium right away, no waiting around.
He thought they'd only kill him.
Why did he think that? How stupid was he? Why in the world did he think that?
And now instead of his next great adventure he's flubbed a save against dominate person.
Cressida Kroft hadn't thought of that, and she really, really should have.
And if they eat everyone in Lastwall, who's going to guard against the return of Tar-Baphon?
Geb will be less harmed than its neighbors. They might look about themselves and think the Inner Sea ripe for conquest.
Do you know who else will be relatively unharmed? The gearmen and Iron Gods of Numeria.
Robots versus demons versus zombies vie for dominance in a world that fell to shadows!
I'll loot a lasergun and make popcorn.
..It feels like she was flying and her flight was dispelled and now she's in freefall.
There's a similar lurch to it.
She's realizing how feeble and absurd the hopes that she'd thought audacious and perhaps beyond her.
She'd been living in an impossible world where if she could hold Korvosa together the rest of the world would have to handle itself.
She hadn't even faced up to the real challenge to fail at it.
Cressida Kroft was born in 4673 AR, 67 years into the Age of Lost Omens.
When she was one year old, the red dragon named Glarataxus set fire to Korvosa.
Pursued by the Sable Company, Glarataxus then crossed Conqueror's Bay to lay waste to Veldraine. When the hippogriffs caught up to him there, he traveled up the coast to Palin's Cove and ate their Lord Mayor.
After that he flew back to his mountain layer, free as a merry moth.
4674 AR marked the sixth occasion in the past hundred years that Glarataxus left his cave and set at least one Korvosan city on fire.
The attacks were getting worse as the dragon aged.
There was no plan in the works to avert attack number seven.
And if you'd said Glarataxus was the worst problem facing Korvosa at the time - or even in the top five - you'd have been incredibly mistaken.
4674 pretty much set the tenor of Cressida Kroft's life.
There's an old Abadaran saying that's taken on new life across Golarion in the hundred years since Aroden died: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."
But by 4690, Korvosa's ruin seemed pretty well plumbed.
They'd held out for heroes but the heroes they'd had - Toff Ornelos and Queen Domina Arabasti are the big names here - only slowed the acceleration of the decay.
No one was adding ruin to the ruinous stockpile.
So in a way, the entire world coming apart is just a return to form.
The problem is flatly impossible, multi-headed like a hydra, and each and every head seemingly a match for her.
It used to be that every big problem looked that way, but she'd dig in and find a way to make it work.
Cressida Kroft joined the Korvosan Guard in the winter of 4692.
She made Watch Sergeant in the spring of '93.
In 4699 she had Glarataxus tracked down and helped kill him.
The dragon problem had seemed important-but-not-urgent to her since before she could read, and one day she was happily surprised to find it at the top of her list of priorities.
4701 was the year she really attacked the important-but-not-urgent list.
And none too soon: one suspicion led to another and before the year was out she'd rounded up half a dozen cultists of Norgorber who'd been planning some kind of mass poisoning.
She was made Field Marshall in 4702.
By 4707 people had mostly stopped saying that Korvosa was in decline.
Sure, the kingdom was still running a massive deficit, crushing poverty marred the capitol's streets and rooftops, Old Korvosa was haunted by crime and strange disappearances, bandits ruled the roads and pirates had free run of the waves (if less and less each year), Shoanti raided the holdings with little fear of repercussion, the king was widely and rightly disrespected, the succession in doubt.
But things were trending up and it was clear to see.
...She'd put so much effort into building Korvosa up into something that could survive anything the world had to throw at it.
She'd been proud of it.
Proud of her... success.
It hadn't felt like that at the time, but for the past year, last year and a half - hadn't she been resting on her laurels?
Why didn't she study monsters in greater breadth, instead of chasing diminishing returns prepping for threats she knew Korvosa could handle?
Now the world is falling to manifold apocalypse, and... Korvosa is going to miss Golarion's doomed last stand.
If there's someone somewhere out there that did a better job than she did, they'll have to fight Rovagug and the Worldwound and Geb and the Numerian Iron Gods alone.
While Korvosa dies with a useless whimper.
The mood in the room is abject despair.
The pressure that's on them is unbearable.
Some express it as anger, others as nervous energy, or wipe tears from their eyes or excuse themselves and leave.
Even the Field Marsh - even Cressida Kroft sits quietly, fiddling with her pencil.
"Does someone," she asks levelly, "happen to have calm emotions prepared? I'm rather out of sorts, and likely not the only one."
More than one person assumes that she's covering for their own emotional display; it's the kind of thing she'd do.
Right!
Anyway, I think the next question I have is, can we source a diamond?
What our strategy is, I think, depends on that.
Standing offers in Absalom for a wish-diamond range all the way up to 20,000 sphinxes.
There are beings which can grant a mortal creature's deepest wishes without the use of a diamond.
I would offer to sell my own soul, out of love for Korvosa, were it yet mine to sell.
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