" - well I don't know if that's true, I could probably find plenty of reason to be impressed with an ant under the right circumstances. But I think you'd get at their mindset more accurately if you think about how men treat dogs - of course it's very rare to prefer dogs to men, but some are weak and cowardly and some are strong and loyal, compared to others of their kind, and it's the strong and loyal ones who receive the reward of breeding and having children instead of being killed to improve the overall quality of the pack, isn't it?"

"I suppose so," she says politely; she is not sure the comparison works, but she doesn't know enough to be sure it doesn't? Certainly some people are much more valuable to the gods than other people.

Shrug. "Well I'd mind that. Good to have some idea what sort of people they are. I suppose Vigdis's court is really one of the safest places you could be, if you're going to be going around doing the sort of magic that might attract attention to you anyway."

"The archpriestess is the Emperor's daughter, yes?" It does not feel like a safe place to be at ALL.

"A favorite daughter. It's very rare for a woman to be given control over more than a single settlement, but he gave her the whole island. Which means that if she finds you useful, then he's more likely to listen to a request that you be kept here, and not brought to Akershus, even if you do attract his attention. - and I suppose if you want to reach his court it's a good stepping stone to that, too, although I'd think very carefully whether that's what you want, before making any plans along those lines."

"I think I do my best research away from - courts and politics, though of course I would be delighted to make anything the Archpriestess or her Emperor request."

"Well, you can also leave after you've spent the night and told some stories, if you have anywhere to go. You're not a member of the court, not yet, although I don't expect it'd be difficult to become one if that's what you wanted. I guess it really depends on your goals and your options. But if you want to avoid coming to anyone's attention then I suppose Iceland is the place to be, and if you want to avoid being dragged into imperial politics then the Archpriestess is probably about the best patron you could hope for. Within Scandinavia, anyway."

"That makes sense. Thank you. I - wanted to find the Church of Asmodeus, if it's here, and if it's not I guess I will have to think about what I want to do."

"I haven't heard of it. I suppose there might be something to the south, or further east, but they try pretty hard to discourage other religious practices around here. And in Iceland there is no organized religious practice of anything besides Norse paganism. This area's never belonged to anyone else, and it's too remote to see many missionaries. - being a missionary is one of the things that tends to get people imprisoned, in Norway, although I guess I'm not sure whether that applies to other pagans or only to Christians and Muslims."

" - is primary worship of other gods illegal, or just proselytizing?"

"Depends how badly you annoy people, doesn't it. - many, many people to the south aren't pagan, and go about their lives mostly unmolested, for the moment, I wouldn't worry about it too much if you're not going around annoying people. But that's the real line, most places, upsetting the people who have power.

"The Archpriestess isn't easily annoyed by people disagreeing with her. So like I said. Not the worst place to be."

- nod. "What are the permitted gods? They're the ones who value...strength and human sacrifices? Do they even get to keep the human sacrifices, don't people in this world go to Hell unless the god of battle has a claim on them?"

She laughs, very weakly. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't know whose cosmology you're working with. The afterlife is a matter of some debate here. Do you want to know what the pagans believe? Do you want to know what I believe? Do you want a collection of various stories I've heard on the topic?"

"I....want to know what the gods' priests say? Do they contradict each other?"

"Occasionally, but that's not quite what I'm getting at - 

"There are various possible religious understandings of the world. Norse paganism is one such broad religious understanding. It posits a certain set of gods, with a certain set of values, including some disagreements within that set of gods. It posits a certain understanding of the other realms that exist besides this world. Different Norse pagans may disagree on some points of this worldview, but all of them are working within the same basic understanding of how things are structured, and all of them share a certain set of religious values. 

"But there are also other understandings. There are other kinds of paganism, which suppose different sets of gods with different sets of values, and different kinds of worlds besides this one, and different rituals. There are kinds of paganism that no one believes in anymore, that were once very widely believed but whose followers have since died out, their children converted to other sets of beliefs. There is Christianity, which posits a single very powerful God with values that are different than the Norse set, and Islam, which also supposes a single very powerful God, but ascribes to him different values and different characteristics, and Jews, who suppose that this single God has a plan specifically for them, and no grand plan for the rest of humanity. There are Buddhists, somewhere far to the east, and I am sure I have only the vaguest grasp of their beliefs, though I understand them to involve some sort of belief that people are born into the world again after they die. There are probably others. And there are various disagreements within all of these factions, some them important disagreements over which wars are fought, and some of them unimportant disagreements which no one pays much mind.

"And I wonder, given that you are from very far away and likely have a very different understanding of how the world actually works, what precise lens you would like your explanation of the local beliefs filtered through. I think I'm all right at most of them, or at least the best that you're likely to find around here. Not much good on Buddhism, I have to admit."

"...do some of the gods have priests who do miracles? Not - arcane magic, not the kind of magic humans can command ourselves through our own power, but divine magic that only flows from gods. Resurrections. Energy channeling. Consecration. Creating water. Regrowing limbs, destroying the undead, truth magic..."

"Sure. - not all of that, I'm not actually sure what all of that is, but the category, sure."

"Which gods have priests who can do that."

"I think to some extent that also depends on who you talk to."

"Okay. The, uh, framework that I guess I am coming from is that there are many powerful entities that concern themselves somewhat with humans. And in my world some of them are called - demon lords or demigods or heralds of the gods, or stranger things that we don't have words for. And some of them are called gods. And the difference is that gods can identify their truest followers, and grant them power to do their gods' will. All gods can do that and only gods can do that; no matter how powerful, an entity that can't do that isn't a god, and even a newborn god can do it. And - because of that there is not a lot of disagreement about which gods there are. Some places ban some of them and some places haven't heard of some of them, if they're not very interventionist or if they need something awfully rare and specific from their servants, but - but it is new to me, to imagine a place where true priests of the gods are rare enough that there are these confusions. 

I guess - I know that Hell exists, and people go there when we die. So I want to hear about what's going on in this world from the perspective of one of the faiths that says this."

"Norse Pagans and Christians both have afterlives that they refer to as 'Hell'. They are very different places. I believe the Muslims also have the concept of an afterlife of eternal suffering, but my Arabic is terrible and I don't know what they call it."

"They call two of the afterlives Hell? Uh, I mean the one where there are devils, and they're at war with Heaven?"

"Norse pagans do not accept a place called Heaven, that sounds much more like the Christian conception of afterlives."

"We have nine. They're divided by Good and Evil and Law and Chaos, which are - godconcepts, that humans try to approximate but not very adequately. The bits of them that humans can understand are like - Law is about keeping your word and obeying authority and doing things organizedly, not haphazardly, and about people living in civilizations and not just doing whatever they feel like. Chaos is about everybody doing as they please all the time. Good is about destroying Evil and appeasing Pharasma, who sorts people into afterlives and doesn't like it when they do anything to interfere with the sorting or make there be a lot to sort all at once. Evil is the innate nature of people and the way they mostly sort if they don't spend their whole lives throwing themselves at Good."

"I see. I don't know of any system with nine separate afterlives, although the Norse pagans do have nine worlds, and I suppose there are references in some stories to humans living in the halls of gods - perhaps if there were nine such gods and not just the most widely discussed three or four, you could make them fit together quite neatly - I'm sorry, this isn't very relevant, they probably come from very different traditions, and the rest of what you're saying sounds much more like a corrupted understanding of Christian thought - 

"Christianity holds that there is one God, the creator of this world and of all other worlds. There are other powers, as you say, even other powers that can bestow magical abilities on humans, but they pale in comparison to this single God, who is powerful enough to decide precisely what happens to everyone at any point in time. This is not a power He fully exercises, as He wants every human to freely choose to follow Him, and accept His offer of salvation. The offer was made in the form of the sacrifice of His son, who He allowed humanity to kill, that the son might take on the burden of their sins, of their fundamentally evil natures, as you say, and pay the torturous price of all their crimes against Heaven. In this way He made it possible for humanity to accept a free offer of forgiveness, and to join Him in heaven, regardless of the magnitude of their crimes, if they would forsake that evil nature and commit to try to be good, and delight in goodness, and love all humans as God loves all humans. And so those who follow Him are not condemned to Hell, but welcomed into his home as adopted sons and daughters.

" - it's not a very popular understanding, around here. Very popular in other places, but here they've put too many Christians to the sword and the gallows. But that's the understanding I hold with, if it matters to you."