Lilia is quiet a moment. "Alex wondered - if you are my only way out of Hell."

"Most likely. You know how it works - I could try to see if it's possible to buy you out of your soul contract entirely, if you ask me to. The price would be high, and Evil; I expect Alex wouldn't like it." Neither would Iomedae but really it's none of Her business. It's only Alex' because Lilia cares for him.

"I don't think you'll try to hold it over me and am not that worked up about going to Hell. I keep trying to find ways to say that which don't make it sound like I'm a brainwashed idiot - obviously the other afterlives are nicer - but I just dislike letting any of them decide all my choices -"

"I love you. That doesn't sound brainwashed to me. I never tried to make you think - that Hell was okay -"

"I don't think I ever believed that Hell was all right but I did believe that - actually I don't know that it makes sense to say I believed things for the last few decades. I enjoyed that I could send people to Hell."

"I think… you couldn't have done what you did if you hated it."

"Alex said it would've broken him."

"I am sure it would have. People who are dispositionally inclined to be paladins…"

"People who are dispositionally inclined to become paladins," says Lilia dreamily.

Catherine is not enough of a hypocrite to disagree. "You're - actually trying at being Lawful Good?"

"They won. I feel like if I have to play by the rules anyway, and I do, I may as well actually get the benefits of being trusted to play by the rules."

This is true. It's also profoundly incomplete. Lilia isn't even sure how profoundly incomplete, because she decided that she is not going to try to interrogate how Alex ended up entwined with load-bearing bits of her psychology while she's also figuring out her relationship with her mother.

She doesn't owe her mother a full explanation, so she stops there.

"Well. That will help."

Alex doesn't take security when he brings Lilia to Axis. Just the cleric who does the Plane Shift. He doesn't really need more. He's a paladin. She's Evil. It would take him about two seconds to kill her if he was trying to; he could do it faster than she could cast a spell.

She's trying to fix that, though. The part where she's Evil, not the part where he's a paladin, which she sincerely does not want to fix. She thinks initially there was some part of her that would have been fairly delighted by getting the most glorious paladin since Iomedae himself to abandon his Goddess but - only because it would have been difficult, because it's the kind of thing her old social circles would have been very impressed by, and now that she likes Alex she feels fairly contemptuous of that motivation. And also at the time she didn't really understand how a person could be an instrument of Iomedae's annoyingly demanding will and be - more independent, somehow, more whole -

She doesn't want to change Alex. This is inconvenient, since his rules won't let him have her, but probably there's attainable rules-lawyering. She's really good at rules-lawyering.

She tells Alex she wants to attempt the Atonement again. Now that she's thinking about it more clearly, it seems very obvious that it didn't go through the first time because she was attempting it in service to the will of her Evil mother. Intending not to do Evil things in your Evil mother's service is part of being a good person, surely, but - of course Iomedae would not certify Lilia as Good when Lilia was someone else's, someone Evil, and when Lilia in fact wanted to be certified as Good so that she could more effectively serve her mother.

That's not why she wants it this time. She wants it this time because - well, dissecting all her own motivations with more candor than she ever intends to show anyone including Alex and ideally including Iomedae Herself, because she's got a very neat little story here, where she secretly worked for the cause of Good during the war and Atoned after it, and she is really quite attached to having a neat little story, even knowing - or maybe precisely because she knows - that people never really do. And because she's doing all of this sometimes-very-frustrating work of being a good person and would like to be acknowledged for it by someone who can distinguish the fake thing from the real thing. The opinions of people she can fool are meaningless. Iomedae can look at her closely - that's what an atonement is, paying a god to take a close look at you - and if there's a way to fake that Lilia doesn't know it. 

(You'd probably want to do something with imbuing your clone with limited intelligence and memories, so they think they're you but aren't. Or at least that's where she'd start if she were trying to fool Iomedae, which she isn't because she's a Good person.)

And she wants it because it's a test, and she loves passing tests, and because it'll make Alex trust her more, and she wants Alex to trust her more. And because she is curious if she will feel less adrift in the world if there is something at her core that she chose to put there.

One might notice that none of those are Good motivations. Lilia reflected on this a while and is willing to gamble that this is fine. Iomedae wants Lilia to be a good person and do the right thing all of the time; Lilia intends to do that; she intends to do it even when it's very hard, and even when it's very annoying, and even when no one including Iomedae will give her credit for it. Her motivations are not particularly inspiring and she is, relatedly, not petitioning the god of virtue. Maybe at some point she'll start caring about people who aren't personally endearing. Maybe she won't. The historical record is deeply unclear on whether Iomedae herself ever did.

"I'm not very sure it'll work. If you'd rather I wait until I'm more sure, I will, though I do not anticipate any specific point in the future where I'll be more sure."

"It is not so very expensive that we cannot try now, and again later if this time fails and something changes." Though he doesn't expect any changes to Montero's circumstances as dramatic as recent ones to happen again soon.

That's part of why she is doing it now. There are, she thinks, no more traps that remain unsprung. There aren't very many more shadows. She knows who she is. She expects to spend the next several decades hardening into it, if events let her, but - that's different than having the foundations shift under you.

 "Very well, then. ...I'd risk wasting the resources of some other church, but they're all so unreasonable about what being a good person is."

"I don't really see you meeting Erastil's standards, and for all I know Torag objects to spymasters on principle." He calls over the Cleric and arranges for the plane shift to Heaven.

"If I had to try someone else I'd probably try Shizuru, as I bet Her criteria are exploitable, but if I did that then you still wouldn't trust me, as I bet Her criteria are exploitable." Heaven is very pretty. Lilia mostly finds it an irritating place and is fully aware that's only because no atonement can direct her soul here.

"That sounds correct. Maybe Ragathiel would have you, though, relatedly, we prefer not to spend His budget too freely either." They can do the atonement. He rather hopes it goes through this time.

Lilia prays. She is not really one for prayer. Aspexia indicated once that in commune Asmodeus had suggested that Lilia was satisfactory, but that wouldn't have been because of her prayer habits. Probably it was because gods mostly see the shadows that mortals cast when the light of a particular concept shines through them, and Lilia was a very good Asmodean. Just not in the service of Asmodeus.

She would like Iomedae to certify that she is Lawful Good, because she understands Lawful Good to be a set of institutions Iomedae built and with which She has conquered the world, and Lilia is glad to see those institutions conquer the world, and would like to work with them, and work for them, and make them better at combating all of the evils in the world. She means to stop Asmodeus's church from taking root elsewhere in Golarion. She means to make the forces of Good competent and strong. She will be better able to achieve these things if Iomedae tells Her church that Lilia is a Good person. She is well aware that to benefit from this designation she has to be a good person all the time, even when it does not immediately serve her or Iomedae, and she intends that. 

She isn't sorry for anything she did during her previous career. But - Iomedae, Herself, chooses every day to allow people to go to Hell - to send them there directly, in some cases, when Her guns are turned on Chelish soldiers, because Her resources are better expended on something else. And She isn't sorry, is She. Because every scrap of attention She could have spent on guilt or grief She spent instead on accomplishing Her spectacular play for Avistan, and that's better, and Lilia wants to do that too. 

All her reasons are selfish. But she isn't selfish, not really, because the selfish thing to do would be to ask Heaven to take her soul, and she knows this, and yet here she is, fully expecting to die at some point in the chaos that is obviously impending as the fertilizer and steel and radio Iomedae unleashed crashes its way across the whole world - Lilia knows, and Iomedae must know, what wars it will enable. Lilia knows, and Iomedae must know, that you'd kill fewer people if you unleashed the Tarrasque. Lilia knows that she will die in those wars, probably, because one of the first things any competent person would try to do is kill her, and eventually it will probably stick.

Lilia is going to go to Hell because she is too stubborn to instead go home while the fates of billions of living people are in her power to alter.

And she wants to be Good. Please?

Yes.