It feels a little like a Virtue.

He doesn't actually have any guesses for how that would have contributed to the miracle of the Wardstones but he diligently records it anyways.

"So, to summarize—" He reads back her description of the miracle. "And your best guess is that the miracle was directed at facilitating the repair of Wardstone and the prevention of its use as a weapon, while also preventing demonic forces from immediately recapturing it and reintroducing the issue with the Wardstone, with possible additional benefits as regards the Crusade itself? Is there anything I'm missing?"

"—Well, it might've also been supposed to kill Minagho, rather than just stopping her from taking back the Wardstone? Another moment and we'd've had her, I don't know how obvious it was that Staunton was going to save her." She hadn't liked him, and certainly wouldn't have trusted him, but presumably at least one god disagreed with her until he actually swapped sides.

"Are there any actions that members of the Church of Iomedae, or the government of Lastwall, could have taken to avert or mitigate the situation that necessitated the miracle?"

"...Yes?" Isn't that true of... pretty much everything ever... and it's just that the vast majority of things are things that Lastwall doesn't care about? "...do you want me to list all of them I can think of?"

"Yes, please do."

Well, okay then.

"Some Desnans noticed the issues with the Wardstone before Deskari even attacked, and had a dream telling them he was going to attack, and they warned Hulrun, who was one of Iomedae's inquisitors and had some sort of important role in the city. And they had a guess for how to fix the Wardstone, so they tried that too, and rather than listening to them about the attack or helping with the Wardstone Hulrun got mad at them and tried to have them killed. And then Voyager Ramien tried to protect them, so he tried to murder him too.

I don't know how hard it would have been to fix the Wardstone before the attack even happened, but if it worked the miracle wouldn't have been needed at all. I don't think all of us who were in Kenabres could've stopped Deskari's attack even if Hulrun'd done everything he could to prepare, but we might've been able to save more people, and have more people for the fight to take back the Wardstone. But even if it hadn't helped at all, I think basically anything would've been better than trying to murder some of the only people who'd actually tried to do anything about the problem.

And then apart from Hulrun, one of the other inquisitors could have pointed out that murdering innocent people was bad and suggested that he do something else, or Iomedae could have taken away his powers, or she could have taken away his powers decades ago for torturing Ember's father to death and trying to do the same to her, even though she was just a little kid."

...She pauses for a second to try and see whether he actually wanted her to point out things the Iomedaeans did wrong or whether he wanted her to say that actually they did everything right and the only problem was that other people didn't just blindly follow them.

He really does want to hear what she thinks the Church did wrong! It's so much harder to write incident reports when no one he interviews is willing to assign any sort of fault to the Church or its representatives. 

(He does privately suspect there is more to the story than what she's told him. He would generally expect the Goddess to renounce someone who had genuinely attempted to torture a child to death; it is an important teaching of the Goddess that there are harms that cannot be avoided at any cost worth paying, but intentionally killing a child by torture seems particularly unlikely to be one of them.)

"So then, apart from the Desnans, there was also this wizard in Kenabres who tried to warn them about the problem with the Wardstone, and no one listened to him either. I... don't know if anyone even bothered to tell Lastwall? And I'm guessing you didn't have anyone strong enough to fight Deskari regardless — he basically killed Terendelev right away, I hit him with a crossbow bolt and it barely hurt him at all that I could see. But if you do have someone that strong, and you'd sent them to Kenabres, then we wouldn't have needed the miracle, or at least it would've been a lot smaller. 

And then, after the attack, it would've been really helpful for Lastwall to send a bunch of powerful adventurers over to help with all the demons in the city, or to already have a bunch of adventurers there — in the whole city the only person I know was from Lastwall was a priest of Erastil, and I'm pretty sure he came to Mendev on his own. I assume you were one of the places people tried Sending to, and — I mean, even before we knew what the demons were going to do with the Wardstone, Terendelev was dead, Deskari'd thrown the Wardstone across the city, it would've been helpful just to have another adventuring party as strong as mine was and I'm sure there're lots of adventures in Lastwall who are stronger than any of us was back then."

She hit Deskari with a crossbow bolt????? At first circle???????? ...Probably she means she got it to make contact with his body, not that she actually got it to do anything.

"...I guess the Queen could've also teleported in? She was bringing an army down from Nerosyan, though, if she'd gotten there in time that would've been more helpful than just her. I don't know how hard it would've been for her to have someone else bring the army and just teleport ahead, if she could have done that it would've been super useful for her to help fight the demons. Uh, for that and for Lastwall sending over people after the attack, we probably would've still needed a miracle to fix the Wardstone, but they could've been helpful for fighting the demons that were guarding it. But I don't know for sure whether that would've meant a smaller miracle."

The Queen is not actually part of the formal hierarchy of the Church of Iomedae, in the sense that they do not have the authority to give her orders. (It would be extremely diplomatically awkward if she were sworn to obey orders from a foreign power.) Nonetheless, they do sometimes give her recommendations, and she occasionally implements them.

......Possibly the Knight-Commander is confused about what it means to be part of the Church of Iomedae. He would have expected someone to explain it to her, but he is in Mendev.

(She's a paladin of Iomedae! What else would it even mean to be part of the Church of Iomedae?)

"I've got some ideas for how you could've gotten more people to volunteer to fight, so that we'd've had more adventurers in Kenabres without you having to go out of your way to bring them over, but that's a bit of a side point — do you still want me to list them?"

"Let's circle back to that once you've given your other thoughts, unless that was the last thing you had to say."

Nod. "In that case... depending on exactly what the gods were going for, we might've only needed a smaller miracle if the Queen had just had Staunton Vhane executed back when he got Drezen captured, so that he couldn't just show up and help Minagho escape. I'm... not sure how accurate the story I got from his brother was... so I guess in theory he might not have deserved it back then... but it's not the way I'd bet." 

To hear Jhoran Vhane talk about it, Staunton's problem had basically just been that he was the dumbest person alive. Justice isn't sure she believes that anyone is actually that dumb? It's possible he was mind controlled, people don't deserve to die for getting hit by a Dominate if you can avoid it, but in that case she'd really expect Jhoran would've just said that.

The dwarf gods seem kind of bad at picking priests, or at least bad at not taking away their powers when they obviously should, but that's not Iomedae's fault.

...That sounds like a complicated story that he would rather hear from someone who is not a Calistrian.

"—oh, that reminds me, it probably wouldn't have changed anything about the miracle but it would've been helpful if one of the paladins hadn't gone and decided to be a Baphomet cultist halfway through the first time we were fighting in the Grey Garrison. Or if Iomedae had picked someone else rather than a guy that was going to join the demon's side." 

?????

Is that... a common issue... in Mendev?

Maybe she... misinterpreted someone as being a paladin when he was actually a swordsman with a holy symbol?

"Can you be more specific about what happened?"

"...well, we were fighting our way out of the Grey Garrison, and we ran into a group of Baphomet cultists, and one of them knew him, and the cultist was like, 'why don't you consider becoming a Baphomet cultist, that way you'll get to live,' and he was like, 'sounds good to me! Hail Baphomet!' ...And then we killed all of them, so that didn't really work out for him." 

"How did you verify he was a paladin?"

"He had a holy symbol, and I'd seen him Lay On Hands to heal himself, and afterwards the other paladins were complaining about him."

"...Have you observed other similar incidents of paladins or other empowered of Iomedae defecting to Baphomet or engaging in similarly harmful conduct?" He would have liked to more directly ask about whether they were engaging in conduct that Iomedae forbids, but he doesn't particularly trust her to know.

She pauses for a moment, then starts listing off incidents, with a shorter pause between each of them. "...Well, I already told you about Hulrun, and then there were a few other people helping him, but I'm not sure if they had powers. The day after I made it back to the surface, I ran into some people who were planning on murdering Ember and doing some sort of ritual with her blood so Iomedae would bless them, but I'm not sure if they were paladins or just rich. Some of the priests with the Crusade support slavery, or think it's good to torture prisoners — as far as I know none of them own slaves or are actually torturing prisoners, but Iomedae didn't renounce Hulrun, so I'm not completely sure. —Oh, and I don't think Zacharius the so-called 'martyr' was ever a priest or a paladin or anything, but it turns out he secretly turned himself into a lich.

I'm skipping over all the times people started fighting for succubi, I'm pretty sure those were all mind control, but let me know if you wanted to hear about those."

Dear Select Metochites, he's sure you're very busy, but could you possibly spare a single unempowered lay-priest to explain to the people of Mendev that Iomedae does not prefer that they engage in blood sacrifice

"If you're confident they were under magical influence, you can skip those, yes. Who else was present for the other incidents?"

"When I ran into the people trying to murder Ember I was with... Seelah and Lann for sure, and Woljif, and obviously Ember was there, and the people trying to murder her, but I think not Nenio... yeah, definitely not Nenio, I remember it was already dark when we ran into her. The clerics wasn't just one time, if you go to the barracks you could ask around until you find someone? And when we fought Zacharius that was me and Seelah and Lann and Ember and Nenio and Sosiel."

More notes.

"Were there any other actions that Lastwall or the Church of Iomedae could have taken to avoid the miracle at Kenabres being necessary or reduce the necessary expenditure?"