it would be better for her if she had never been born - Epilogue: Lilia, Alex
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"I assume you're not hiding a secret way out of soul contracts."

 

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"We wouldn't hide that," he says very seriously. "But we could soul-trap you, or petrify you."

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"I could do that myself. Then I never get to find out if it was worth it, though."

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"Well, the benefit of having the Church soul-trap or petrify you is that we can bring you back later if you want. And we can provide security for your statue or soul-gem - mostly Heaven does that part."

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"There is not an obvious point at which to say 'now's the time to get my soul trapped'. I'm aware if I never say it then at some point I will be sufficiently murdered. I don't know. It'll sound strange, but I'm not very afraid of Hell. I am not mistaken about what it entails but it just seems like - conceding all together too much to Asmodeus, to give up everything else avoiding it. …there are separately security concerns but I have a solution to those."

 

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"Do you expect aging not to be a problem?" She looks young, now, but that doesn't mean anything.

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"That's correct." In however many centuries Lilia's mother has been alive she's learned a lot of secrets and this is one of the less well-kept ones, in that hundreds of people in the world know it. Though nearly all of them are druids.

 

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"Congratulations."

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The assumptions he's almost certainly making are in fact, in this specific case, false. It's an expensive ritual, but absolutely none of the components are the hearts of innocent babies or anything. 

 

"I didn't do anything horrifying at all, I promise. Just have friends in - a lot of places."

 

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He raises an eyebrow. "Did your - friends - do anything horrifying for this?"

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"No! No horrifying things happened at any point. I cannot certify that you'd like how they spent their payment, I guess."

 

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"Making someone younger without requiring any horrible sacrifices seems like something a lot of people would be interested in."

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"Unfortunately I don't actually think the guns and radios have improved your bargaining position here specifically but I can put in an inquiry for you if you'd like."

 

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"Oh, I'm happy to go to Heaven when my time comes. I meant it in the abstract. Kings and emperors and first consuls, though I don't know that I approve of them all getting it… I assume it's not scalable."

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"It's not. You know, it seems rather unfortunate for the world if all the evil people are desperately trying to stick around and all the good ones happy to head off to Heaven. The moreso the more achievable it is to stick around."

 

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"We call this 'the lich problem' and find that - the evil people who manage to stick around and keep doing things in the world tend to accumulate enemies and eventually be destroyed for good. The ones that stick around and go into retirement are not much of a problem. And… enough people and enough great heroes are born every generation that the number of immortal evildoers isn't an overwhelming factor in how the world turns out. Outside of Ustalav. I admit it's a bit of a convenient way for the world to be… You think it would be better for me to have my youth restored non-horribly and remain on the Material?"

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"It seems obviously better for Iomedae. I guess I haven't yet pieced together when that's decisive for you and when it isn't."

 

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"I have given my life to Her service but I had envisioned that as a somewhat time-bounded commitment and would want to re-evaluate if it didn't seem to be the case anymore… though I suspect, knowing the option is there, if it really is, that when I grow old I will feel that there is still more to be done."

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"...huh. …when I met you the thing that stood out the most was" how thoroughly Iomedae could make Her people Her slaves...rephrase that... "how little you had - ordinary human impulses that Iomedae opposes." How little you wanted to torture me to death, as would be natural and proper for you to want... "I am very loyal to my own purposes but it feels like resisting the impulse to do something else, not like not having it.

But I guess it makes sense that Iomedaen culture would carve people in the shape of - not wanting to hurt people you have power over, things like that which are likely to come up - and not build in any impulses about unlikely distant hypotheticals that only apply to a few people."

 

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"Does Lastwall carve that impulse out of people more, or does Cheliax carve it in? I don't think it's universally present or absent in Taldane peasants."

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"I admittedly haven't asked any Taldane peasants. Taldane nobles always struck me as Chelish ones who were scared of Hell and had a similarly scared peer group. Ordinary city guards anywhere will beat their prisoners just because they can. Ordinary armies will rape and pillage. Cheliax was of course trying to exert a lot of pressure in that direction, but I think the way Asmodeus pushes against human nature is in trying to get people not to love their friends, not in trying to get them to be near-arbitrarily vicious to their enemies."

 

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"Hm. I think most people have no impulse toward cruelty to those who are close to them, and so for many people avoiding being cruel to people in their power is just a matter of having compassion for them, treating them like they would someone they know and care for - would you be cruel to your sister, if she were in your power?"

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The answer to that is 'yes, absolutely'. She wouldn't torture her, especially, but only because she wouldn't need to. She and Rose could always hurt each other plenty without lifting a finger.

She does not really want to give this answer, because she's trying to make Cansellarion less worried about her mother and she can see very clearly that that's the kind of answer that makes someone more worried about her mother. "I haven't seen her in forty years," she says, staring off at the Axis skyline. 

 

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That…sounds like an evasive non-answer. Which is concerning, but not, in hindsight, shocking from someone raised… more Chelish than most Chelish children. "I'm sorry," he says.

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"I'm not sure it works anyway. You love your family, but presumably you'd start to feel differently about them if they joined the Chelish government and started murdering your people. So how does loving them even help with impulses towards someone who you don't know who did that?"

 

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