Nod. "In that case — I'm given to understand that there was a miracle attributed to Desna during the siege of Drezen. Can you describe the circumstances under which it occurred?"

"Sure — we'd been fighting since just after dawn, and we were all pretty low on spells and healing, but we'd been saving some of it for later, we knew we'd probably have to fight Minagho at some point. Anyways, we'd found a passage to the main citadel, and my party, minus Sosiel, who'd pretty much run out of spells, went to sneak in and try to find the Sword of Valor. I forget if I already explained this but the Sword of Valor isn't actually a sword, it's a magic banner that stops the demons from teleporting and weakens them. Anyways, we found the banner, and we went to go hang it up, and it happened pretty much right when we were hanging it — is that the sort of thing you wanted to know?"

"Was this before or after your fight with Minagho?"

"Before, but not right before, after we hung it up it took a little while to find her."

"Can you describe what happened?"

Nodnod. "So, as I was going to unfurl it, I could feel — something like the power left over after fixing the Wardstone, or from fighting that demon at Lost Chapel, only — stronger? More intense? More tied to me in particular? I don't know exactly how to explain it. And I could tell there were a few different ways to reach, so I reached for—"

—the first time she met the Eagle Knights, realizing that she wasn't alone-but-for-Calistria, that there were other people who cared, people who wanted Cheliax free of Asmodeus, wanted to bring justice to the Asmodean priests for what they'd done, who thought that the sorts of things that Asmodean nobles got up to weren't okay and were willing to risk their lives to stop them — her first weeks in Andoran, realizing over and over that she was free, that no one was coming to punish her if she read a pamphlet mocking Codwin or disagreed with something a priest said — the moment Calistria had chosen her, the first time it had felt like anyone was really on her side — the belief, burning bright in her chest, that Hell has no right to force people into slavery, to torture priests of Erastil to death, to hurt the weak and powerless, and that she could put a stop to it — her very first mission, before things started to go wrong, channeling for a group of newly-freed slaves — the hope that one day, some day, even if she doesn't live to see it, all Cheliax will be free — staring down Hulrun, thinking about what he'd done to Ember, and telling him that if he wanted to kill an innocent man he'd have to go through her — finding the woman she thought was Yaniel, and cutting her free, and running off to chase down the people who'd done that to her — warrior-azatas, risking their eternal fate to wrest souls from Hell or the Abyss, because Asmodeus shouldn't have them and nearly everyone deserves better that what he'll do to them — Arueshalae, imprisoned in the dungeons of Drezen for choosing to fight for the side of Good, free at last—

—that wasn't, actually, all that she was reaching for, but the rest of it was in some indescribable way in another direction—

She can't, actually, say all that to someone from Lastwall.

"—freedom and hope and that sort of thing. And there was a gust of wind, and these butterflies appeared, and the Sword of Valor changed from looking like Iomedae's sword to looking like a tree, and that's also when Aivu showed up. Aivu's the dragon, you met her earlier, she's from Elysium. And ever since then I've been a little bit of a song-sorcerer, and sometimes I can make it so that the Worldwound can go regular plants again instead of being like, well," (she wiggles her hand a bit), "and I've picked up a couple other tricks that're secret."

If the goal of the miracle was purely the liberation of Drezen, it sounds like Desna did wildly more than what was actually necessary. Desna spends her intervention budget more freely than Iomedae, and sometimes in confusing ways, but something like this is far beyond what would be typical of her. The obvious guess is that she wasn't just aiming for the liberation of Drezen, that she wants to be sure the Crusade won't declare its goal accomplished. The most unique component of the miracle (and least applicable to the conquest of Drezen) was most likely the plant-magic; perhaps Desna is hoping they can push the Wardstone line substantially inwards?

(Or Desna could be playing for Cheliax — it makes sense, from a certain angle, that Iomedae and Desna could both have been angling for that — but while some forms of song-sorcery (not to mention the aid of a dragon) could be helpful, and the visible sign of the goddess's endorsement could potentially make it easier to gather allies, making plants grow in the desolate wastelands of the Worldwound isn't obviously applicable.)

...He also has some factual confusions, which are probably more urgent to clarify. "The demon at Lost Chapel?"

"—Right, so, the short version is, when we were getting close to Drezen, we got attacked by gargoyles in the middle of the night, and they carried off a bunch of people to this old church to try to turn them into ghouls. And during the initial attack, one of them, some sort of shadow-demon, said something about how someone'd been talking about me, and we were supposed to be equals, or something, I don't remember the exact wording. Anyways, at Lost Chapel, once we'd fought our way up the mountain and through the chapel, we ran into him again. And Staunton and Minagho were also there, and they were talking like he was really scary and definitely going to destroy us, and I was sort of wishing I'd asked Nenio to cast a Haste, except then he was... kind of a pushover? Like, Ember just made him fall asleep and then Seelah cut off his head. Except, for whatever reason, it felt like... the cup where I was keeping the leftover power from the Wardstone was expanding, and I could hold more of it? And after the fight me and all my companions, and also Camellia and Daeran, had all picked up some sort of new trick, except Woljif. —Woljif died during the gargoyle fight and we weren't able to get his body back." Technically they don't know he died, but their only reason to think otherwise is Nurah's word, and Nurah was secretly working for the demons.

That does seem confusing. An ordinary nabasu could be affected by a Deep Slumber, but it seems unlikely that a single nabasu would be particularly threatening to a well-prepared party of their circle, and his understanding is that more powerful nabasu are typically also too powerful to be affected by a Deep Slumber even if they get really unlucky. Possibly Minagho and Staunton were bluffing? But in that case he would have expected the Knight-Commander and her companions to face more resistance.

"Was there anything to indicate whether that was also the result of divine intervention?"

Headshake. "I've been assuming it wasn't, it didn't really feel like it the same way, and there wasn't anything like—" Gesture at the butterflies.

...They did possibly get a miracle from Desna while going back down the mountain, but as far as she can tell that was unrelated.

In that case he's going to focus on the almost-definite miracle; he's curious about the events at Lost Chapel, but he assumes the Knight-Commander's patience is finite.

"And the Sword of Valor is the banner currently hanging outside the citadel? Has anyone been able to verify what school of magic, if any, the change originated from?" Direct miracles don't usually leave obvious traces of a specific school of magic, but various other possible causes would, and it's relatively cheap to test.

"Nenio says it's not an illusion, but she couldn't say what it was instead."

"Just to confirm, when you mentioned 'Nenio' earlier, this is the same Nenio?"

"...y...es?" She's pretty sure Nenio isn't a common name??? Maybe it's a common name for fox-people, she doesn't know.

"My apologies if the answer was obvious, Knight-Commander, I'd heard conflicting assertions, some of which suggested that she had died in Kenabres."

"—she did but I brought her back. Not fighting Minagho, this was at the Defender's Heart."

...He is sort of curious about how but the Knight-Commander really obviously doesn't want to talk about it. He would have expected that if anyone had a Raise Dead scroll it would have been used earlier, but perhaps none of the plausible candidates had an intact body.

"That makes sense. Returning to the miracle in Drezen, what happened after the miracle?"