"Do you happen to know what measures were taken to contact outside forces, particularly those affiliated with Lastwall or the Church of Iomedae?"

"I think they tried Sending but I don't know who all they sent it to, and there might be other things people tried that I don't know about? I know Ramien was asking around about adventurers people knew, but I don't know who he ended up asking. Probably Irabeth would know for sure?"

He takes a few more notes. Underlines Irabeth's name multiple times on his paper.

"You've mentioned this 'Ramien' figure multiple times — who exactly is that? Is he available for an interview?"

"He's a priest of Desna, I met him the first day after I got back. But he's back in Kenabres, he stayed behind to protect the city so the demons couldn't just come back and take it over as soon as we left." (And even if he weren't she wouldn't tell a random Iomedaean where to find him without asking, most of them seem to recognize Hulrun was in the wrong but it'd be stupid to trust a stranger about it.)

Nod.

"Before we get into specific details about the miracle, could you tell me a little bit more about your background and that of your companions, particularly any qualities that might have made Iomedae especially likely to work the miracle at Kenabres through you rather than any of the others present?"

"Sure — uh, what specifically did you want to know? I assume you're not looking for my entire life story, we'd be here for hours..."

He thinks for a moment. "Could you tell me more about your selection as a cleric? It is generally believed that it is easiest for the gods to work miracles through their own followers, and particularly their own empowered, which is part of why this miracle is especially surprising."

...Huh, as reasons for Iomedaeans to be surprised about it that's more reasonable than some of the things she's heard when people think she isn't listening.

He can get the version of her life story pitched towards Lawful people who she isn't sure realize that Asmodeanism is awful. It's not how she'd talk about it with one of her friends, but he isn't one, and it makes it sound like she used to be a better person than she actually was but the things she could say instead aren't really better, just bad in different ways. (If she'd known she was going to end up in charge of the Crusade, this would've been secret, but as it stands there was no way to keep it secret from Cheliax by the time Galfrey appointed her, and they're the ones she'd've actually wanted it secret from.)

"I was born in Cheliax, and raised by Asmodeans. I know many people here are grateful to Cheliax for the work they do holding the northern border, but as a country to grow up in, it's — awful. They torture farmers and midwives to death just for being priests of Erastil or Pharasma, and send them to Hell while they're at it if they can find a fourth-circle cleric for the Malediction, and if people aren't careful they can be strung up just for putting another god before Asmodeus even if no god's given them any powers at all. In some places they'll whip children if they don't show up for school, even if the reason they didn't show up is because they were helping to take the harvest in. I was in Kenabres for all of about half an hour before Deskari's attack, and in that half-hour I was shown more kindness by the good people of Mendev than I was ever shown in my childhood.

I've heard that in Lastwall they think no one should be above the law, no matter how powerful they are," not that she believes for a moment that it actually works out that way in practice, "but it isn't so in Cheliax. There was a man I knew growing up, who knew that the law would never touch him, and took advantage of that to do — things he might have hung for, if he had been an ordinary man, to any girl who happened to strike his fancy. If a man tried that sort of thing on this crusade, he would be tried for it, but as it was there was no way to stop him under the law. 

So I put a stop to him myself, and the next day Calistria made me her priestess, and I was lucky enough to make it to Andoran, which is probably the only reason I didn't die of it." (The details of how she escaped are staying secret, her friends back home aren't even theoretically protected by the treaty.) "........Is that the sort of thing you were looking to know?"

(The Crusade's diplomatic staff would really like it if she would stop telling everyone how much Cheliax sucks!!! But it's not their highest priority, even if she were perfectly respectful of Mendev's allies Cheliax would still be pretty upset about Queen Galfrey appointing a random Andoren teenager who is specifically at the Worldwound to shelter from them after coming back to Cheliax to do more crimes. The bigger issue is that when she says things like that, Mendev's nobility might take her as saying that she disapproves of their privileges, as if they're anything like what Cheliax is doing.)

...That is not actually particularly helpful context for understanding why Iomedae would have decided to work a miracle through her specifically rather than through the multiple empowered Iomedaeans.

He had not previously been aware of the timing of her arrival and is noting (in his personal code) that someone should really make sure that she didn't secretly orchestrate the attack. It seems improbable that she could have concealed being a demon (or a cultist) for this long, but she does have a built-in excuse for the Chaotic aura.

"Why did you decide to come to Kenabres?"

"—That one's partially secret, sorry." There's a non-secret version but she hadn't specifically thought through a non-secret version for Lastfolk.

...That is not exactly reassuring!

"What about the backgrounds of your companions, particularly the empowered Iomedaeans?"

"—Well, I don't know how much they'd want me telling you, you should get the full stories from them, but... so, Lann's a mongrel, which're the descendants of the first crusaders, they live underground but they're not mostly evil and they mostly worship normal gods. Anyways, Lann found out about what had happened up on the surface and he wanted to come help fight. He wasn't actually chosen as a priest until after we'd gotten back to the surface, which would've been less than a week before the miracle —I don't know if that would've changed how hard it was for Iomedae to send him a vision.

Seelah's a paladin, I don't know exactly how long she's been adventuring but she's definitely been a paladin longer than Lann's been a priest. But there's not an obvious reason it couldn't have been her."

She used to be a thief, but Justice used to be an Asmodean, which is a lot worse than stealing, and she's Chaotic, so it really seems like any reason not to pick someone because of being a thief would've also applied just as much to Justice.

"—I have some guesses about why it was me but I don't know if any of them are right, and most of them probably won't make sense until I've explained what actually happened."

(Does he seem inclined to ask about her other companions, or did he really just want to know about the Iomedaeans?)

"Was there anything that would make your other companions particularly likely or unlikely targets?"

"...well, Nenio's got some kind of curse that makes it hard for her to remember things, there's a lot of reasons she might've been a worse choice — uh, we did all end up affected by the first miracle, I was just the only one who got a vision. And she's True Neutral, I don't know if that makes a difference, but I was still Chaotic Neutral back then and that's farther from Iomedae... Woljif — was — also Chaotic Neutral, and... I liked him a lot as a person but I can come up with a lot of reasons why Iomedae probably wouldn't have wanted to send him the vision. And Ember's" (how does she say this in a way that a paladin who doesn't know Ember won't hold against her) "not very religious, it would've been kind of mean to her if she'd been the one to get it."

(And if it was from some god that wasn't Iomedae, the obvious guesses being Desna or Calistria, that'd help explain why it was her over Lann or Seelah, and apart from alignment all the reasons not to pick her companions would still be just as true.)

"To confirm, Woljif was detectably Chaotic Neutral at second-circle?"

"Yeah, he'd got some fighting experience in addition to the wizardry, and in his case I guess that meant he started detecting a little early."

He finishes his page of notes and turns to the next one.

"Can you describe the miracle itself? Just the bare facts for the moment, hold off for now on speculation."

"So, we'd split up into a couple groups, with Irabeth's group holding off the demons while my party went to try to fix the Wardstone. —I forgot to mention earlier, besides the six of us and Ragathiel, that's Seelah's horse, we also had Finnean with us — Finnean used to be an adventurer but he got cursed to be stuck as a weapon." (She visibly finds something about this uncomfortable.)

"Anyways, we got to the room with the Wardstone — with most of the Wardstone, it was kind of sideways" (hand gesture) "and the tip of it was in another room, but we hadn't been able to get anywhere with just the tip. We didn't see anyone else there, which was really surprising" (wait, is that the sort of thing he wanted her to leave out?). "So we were on guard for an ambush, but when we tried walking into the room to touch it, that just... worked fine, no one stopped us."

"When I touched the Wardstone, I had a vision of what exactly the problem with the Wardstone was, that they were going to use to blow up all of them. The exact details are secret, sorry." She has no desire to help Mendev keep it secret that the Wardstones are full of miserable indentured angels, but she really doesn't want demons to hear about it and decide that actually it would be a great idea to capture another Wardstone and start torturing the angels inside. "And I could see a few different ways to fix the problem, and I sort of... reached for one? It's sort of hard to describe, it was a little more like channeling than like casting a spell but it wasn't very much like either."

She pauses for a second.

"So then, when the vision went away, two things happened, sort of at the same time. The one I think was technically first was, there was a big rush of magical energy from the Wardstone, and some of it went outwards and took off the roof, but some of it went... inwards?... to me. And then — it's sort of hard to describe, none of these are exactly perfect — you could say it felt a little like I was... a cup, or something, that someone had just poured an entire lake into, and the lake spilled over the edges and into everyone else I was with. Or you could say it felt a little like I was under a Bull's Strength and a Bear's Endurance and a Cat's Grace all at once, and a Haste besides, but honestly that's kind of understating it. Or you could say it felt like a sharper version of the feeling of being picked as a cleric, if you somehow took away the part where you feel your god reaching out to you, and you know them and they know you. Or you could say that part did feel like channeling, but the thing I was channeling was magical power, and also I wasn't doing it on purpose, it was sort of just happening to me.

The other thing that happened was that Minagho and a bunch of demons showed up. Not like they ran into the room, or teleported in, like they were there, they'd been in front of us the whole time, more like they'd been invisible and un-hearable and hadn't been taking up any space. Which normally would've been pretty scary, but — I could feel in my soul that we were stronger than her, at that moment. And she started complaining about how Iomedae had pulled some sort of trick to let us get in without her noticing, but she was going to kill us all anyways. And she and her demons attacked us, but they could hardly touch us, and we were tearing through most of them in a single hit." Wince. "And we almost got Minagho, too, but then Staunton Vhane ran in to be like 'surprise, I've decided to betray you for the demons because I'm mad that people don't like me,' and he bought her a moment to teleport the two of them away.

And then the power mostly faded, but a little bit of it stuck around, and since then all of us have been able to do something a little weird, maybe except for Finnean, it's hard to tell. For most of us it just let us cast way more spells, but a couple people wound up with weirder things. And then on top of that, I could sort of feel the ability to... shape it, a little, but I don't know exactly how to describe it, except that it feels the same way the butterflies feel. ...Also, for some reason, a little bit of it went to Camellia and Count Arendae, who weren't even there," (and who kind of suck as people) "and when I met Songbird Sosiel the next day, a little bit of it sort of... hopped?... to him too, except not in a way that meant I had less."

He has in fact been entertaining the possibility that the miracle didn't originate from the Goddess in particular, but frankly even if it didn't it seems like there must have been a truly astonishing number of failures leading up to that point. Either she performed an enormously costly miracle, or she was saved from having to do so by the intervention of some other allied deity, but 'ability to persuade other deities to perform miracles at their own expense' is not exactly an unlimited resource, if one that can less straightforwardly be reallocated; in either case, the fact remains that this situation was almost certainly preventable at costs that the Church would have endorsed paying even before knowing the outcome. (And of course, for all the other Good deities frequently have questionable prioritization, they do still serve the cause of Good by their actions, and a miracle this costly will carry real costs no matter who was sponsoring it. ...Unless it was Calistria, he supposes, but it sounds like she prefers her miracles to be more obvious?)

"Who exactly are Camellia and Count Arendae? Were they with Irabeth, or somewhere else entirely? Do you know if they would be available to be interviewed?"

"Neither of them were at the Grey Garrison. I don't know off the top of my head where they were, but probably the tavern we were running things out of, Count Arendae's house had gotten smashed up by demons. Uh, Camellia's another person I met underground after Deskari showed up — not a mongrel, as far as I know she's from the surface. She basically spent the whole time we were underground complaining about having to be around the rest of us 'peasants' rather than other rich people, which, we weren't about to leave her to die just for something like that, but that's not the sort of person I want to go adventuring with, you know? She was there the first time we met Minagho, but so was Irabeth, and Irabeth didn't end up with special powers. As far as I know, she's something sort of like a priest, except that rather than getting her spells from a god, she gets them from nature spirits, and some of the spells are more nature-y to match, and also she can't channel.

And then Count Arendae's a nobleman — after Deskari attacked, he decided he was going to throw a really big party, and then the party got attacked by demons, and me and the people I was with showed up right as the demons were attacking and saved him and some of the other people. He's some kind of healing sorcerer, he didn't actually want to come on the Crusade at all but the Queen made him — they're cousins a couple times removed, he might inherit if she dies. Him I've barely adventured with at all, we were together for a couple minutes at the Lost Chapel but then he went back to the main camp."

She is genuinely unsure whether he has any positive qualities beyond 'didn't hand over Aranka to Hulrun' and 'not nearly as bad as the nobles in Cheliax, unless it turns out that he really did murder his whole family, which he might have.' Nobles anywhere are mostly going to suck more than regular people but at least in Mendev they generally manage to, like, fight demons without someone making them and act like they care at all about doing the right thing.

"Both of them are in the city but Count Arendae might not want to talk to you, he really doesn't like Iomedaeans."

...From that description it almost seems reasonably probable that the Queen is actively trying to get the Count killed, except that she's a paladin, and in general paladins can't secretly assassinate their relatives. He supposes possibly she had sufficient cause to order him onto the Crusade regardless, even if she separately views his death as beneficial?

"You mentioned earlier that you had some guesses about why it was you in particular who was the focus of the miracle?"

"So, my best guess is that for some reason, I was the only one who'd actually be able to fix the Wardstone. That makes sense with some of the other things that happened — like, for example, when we were underground, me and Seelah and Lann and Camellia found this sword that used to belong to the angel Lariel, and I had some sort of magic vision of his death, and I can do a little magic with the sword that Seelah wasn't able to. But that still doesn't explain why the sword and the Wardstone work for me and not for anyone else."

Inconveniently most of her guesses about why are secret, or based on things that are secret.

"It's also possible that Seelah and Lann would've chosen a worse way of fixing the Wardstone, or a worse way of shaping the power from the explosion afterwards." Or that the miracle wasn't from Iomedae, and whoever sent it really wanted to make sure that someone who would definitely care knew about the trapped angels so that they wouldn't have to just be stuck forever and ever.

"I don't know how hard it would be to guess that the Queen would call a crusade because of the miracle, if that's something the gods would've been able to guess it's possible there was some reason I'd be a better Knight-Commander?" Admittedly that's also pretty confusing, it's not like she knew anything about Knight-Commanding when they left for Drezen. "Which — I mean, Seelah and Lann are great and all, but Lann's spent most of his life living underground, there's a lot he doesn't know. And anyone who was going to sign up to fight if they heard the Crusade was being led by one of Iomedae's paladins would've probably come to fight anyway, seeing as the Queen's also a paladin, whereas people who" (want to be absolutely sure that the Knight-Commander isn't going to randomly murder children for no reason? care about doing the right thing but not at all about being Lawful? follow a god that Iomedaeans don't get along with? have talents that are kind of weird and want a commander who'll appreciate that?) "find it reassuring for their commander to be Chaotic Good might be more likely to volunteer this way. Uh, it's also sometimes helpful to be able to lie to demons, I'd be worse at my job if I couldn't ever do that, but I don't know whether Iomedae could've done a miracle if that's what she was aiming for."

Or maybe Iomedae has noticed that closing the Worldwound is the sort of thing that could easily give Cheliax a big advantage, if you go about it wrong, and cares more about that than you'd expect from talking to any of her people that weren't born in Andoran. Or it's supposed to be a message to them that they should care more about stopping Cheliax, or that they should be less obnoxious about Calistrians, or that it's really great that Lastwall doesn't have slavery and Mendev should consider copying them. Or there's some sort of complicated god reason why it was easier to send her a vision, like maybe she's secretly Iomedae's really distant relative or something. Or maybe she was worried that people wouldn't want to serve under Lann because he looks weird.

Or it just wasn't Iomedae at all. If it were from Desna or Milani or something, let alone Calistria, it's pretty obvious why they'd have picked her over Seelah or Lann.

It seems like it would have been really quite an extraordinary risk for the Goddess to employ a plan that relied on a single specific person surviving the attack on Kenabres and happening to be present at the Wardstone, though possibly there is still some feature of the Knight-Commander that made it possible for her to repair damage to the Wardstone more easily, or to a higher quality, or at a lower cost to the Goddess. He wouldn't have expected previous visions to especially make a difference — if anything, he would have expected the opposite, given the risks of prolonged contact with a god — but it seems likely there is some feature of the situation that neither he nor the Knight-Commander has identified as relevant. (The specific details of the possibilities she saw for repairing the Wardstone seem highly likely to be relevant, but he presumes them to be classified.)

The speculation about people who find it reassuring for the Commander to be Chaotic Good seems rather questionable; certainly there are people who would find that reassuring, and it could partially explain the Drezen miracle attributed to Desna, but she was self-admittedly Chaotic Neutral at the time. It seems unlikely that there are many soldiers who strongly prefer to serve under a Chaotic Neutral Calistrian rather than a paladin... well, perhaps not in Mendev? Certainly he's heard about the sorts of complaints soldiers from other countries make about Lastwall's disciplinary standards.

He also would not expect that Iomedae was able to foresee that Queen Galfrey would call a Crusade unless she was already planning to at the time of the miracle, but for all he knows she was. It would admittedly be a confusing decision but he is given to understand that she sometimes makes confusing decisions.

"May I see a demonstration of the magical properties of the sword, assuming that you won't be expending limited resources that you expect you might need before they can be renewed?" He doesn't really expect it to be helpful but it might be cheap to test.

"Oh, it's not limited, I can use it as many times as I want."

She manifests the sword — it looks more like it's made of light than of metal, and doesn't really look solid enough to cut anything — and thinks of the angel Lariel. In his last moments he was torn between punishing Evil and saving his friend, and some tiny part of both those desires made their way into the sword.

It glows, just for a moment, and a little pulse of magic washes over the pair of them.

"—It also makes it a little harder for people I'm fighting to see, even if I don't know they're there, but, uh, there isn't exactly anyone around to demonstrate on." She could probably slide into the right mindset to use it offensively on him but it seems like it'd make the rest of the interview really awkward.