To Iomedae of the Knights of Ozem

I, Archmage-General Altarrin of the Eastern Empire, am personally writing this letter to you, though I speak on behalf of my Empire.

I wish to begin this letter with several apologies. Given the differences between our worlds, I am not sure how to express it such that you will understand, and I hope you will take into account that my words may be misunderstood because I lack some critical understanding.

I am sorry that I killed you. The decision is one that made sense given what I knew at the time, but I regret having failed to notice my uncertainty and lack of context, and particularly that I failed to notice a situation where the gods of Velgarth might be manipulating us in an unexpected direction. I would likely have made different decisions had I received your letters in the order they were sent, and particularly if I had known your explanation that Aroden was once human. Given how often the gods' goals seem to be the precise opposite of my own, the fact that They appear to have worked very hard to deny me that information, in itself, evidence to me that negotiating a ceasefire with the Knights of Ozem, which is something I would have been more likely to do had I known more, would have been a path I end up preferring.

"- captured the rebel leadership," she says, quietly. "I didn't tell that many people my name. They're also the only ones who knew Aroden would return me here."                      

               "....if I were apologizing for killing you I'd send the diamond along," Jala says.

"I doubt they even know it used a diamond. I didn't talk about how it worked."

"Six against one that they're sincere. Seven against one was what I was going to say before we plane-shifted here, and this doesn't change that much but it seems - targeted."

"They have my headband." Which is more reason to think it's not sincere; it makes the targetedness easier to achieve and less informative. 

I regret deeply that the Empire, seen from the outside, is a place you would so predictably oppose. I regret the lives lost in the war with Oris, and while of course at the time the Empire was very opposed to your work, I do regret that our actions took you away from the people you had committed to help, with the result that they were overextended and lost a war you had asserted to them could be won. I imagine this would have bothered you a great deal. Having now seen the war that your order is fighting in your own world, I also regret having kept you from it for so long, and the cost your people very clearly paid for it.

The intent, presumably, is to persuade her that the war in Oris has been lost and the rebels crushed, whatever language about her feelings it's cloaked in. But it's an odd thing to convey along the rest, because - because there was no army in Oris, when she was assassinated. They must have transported and assembled one after killing her, and destroyed the rebels in the field, and captured Orestan or Samien or both, and then told her they regretted that due to the assassination all of this had occurred, as if the rest of it had been some kind of random accident rather than carried out by an army they had at extraordinary expense transported there to do precisely that -

- maybe if they didn't realize that they'd made a poor choice of enemies until after capturing Orestan or Samien? -

- set that aside. 'with the result that they were overextended and lost a war you had asserted to them could be won.' It stings, which is presumably the intent. She cannot in fact afford to refuse to work with the Empire just because they brutally reconquered Oris, or even because they did that and want to rub it in. 

"I am reasonably confident I'd have disliked the Empire as much from the inside," she says. "We can adopt the diplomatic frame that this was a misunderstanding and the fault of the local demon princes, and the local demon princes certainly weren't helping, but -"

           "Have you ever met an Empire you liked," says Jala.

"Everyone keeps saying that. Taldor is less bad. It was - possible - for someone like me to grow up in Taldor, it's possible for a noble-raised Taldane child to go 'wow, Taldor sucks, I'm going to do something else' - when Taldane forces are burning villages to the ground in a pointless internal war there are Taldane organizations that will protest and drag the charred skulls of children to court to embarrass everybody -"

"The headband was already accounted for. It's still - a very strong signal that they returned the sword, instead of siding with the enemy of their enemy and reaching out to Tar-Baphon - they might have done that first but I don't think that's likely, this isn't his style. Also - it's not the most immediately pertinent detail but - I don't think we have sufficient reason to believe that they're demon princes in particular. They could be, but they could also be some kind of abberation, or gods which, by treaty, do not grant clerics on that particular planet - Possibly they have a more normal intervention pattern on other planets around that star - There's a lot of possibilities, we don't want to get stuck in that one assumption"

"If they'd reached out to Tar-Baphon first he'd have just dropped a couple hundred of them on the army with the suicide attack ability, end of crusade," she says flatly. "He'd still have thousands to work with and it's not worth showing you his hand until he's ended the crusade."

And I regret the initial assumptions I made about you and your god. I hope that you may understand better why, if and when you learn more of the gods of our world; I expect you have already made some updates based on the fact that it appears They were steering for your death, and at the highest cost to the Empire that I was willing to pay. While I cannot say, at this point, that I know enough to be certain that Aroden is a god I would approve of, I ought at least update my baseline priors – and when I am starting from uncertainty, rather than the near-certainty that any given god is hostile, the specific evidence you have provided is at least somewhat compelling and I am very motivated to verify your claims and learn more. An allied god would change almost everything for our Empire, and if such an alliance were on the table, it would more than justify making compromises on some of the Empire's currently policies in order to secure it. I imagine is an outcome your order would be pleased about as well.

"- I do think it's just true, that the local whatever-they-are were steering for my death at the highest possible cost to the Empire. After the first round of suicide strikes, which were injurious and shouldn't really have been,  I actually said to the Empire that this had been mildly persuasive about their the-gods-hate-us case. I don't know if they had anyone nearby enough to hear."

Like she said, not his style.

"I - concur - My read so far is that they are sincerely hoping to turn relations with us around, they have plenty of reason to prefer us as allies - and this is just acknowledging that they've noticed. That doesn't say anything about what they'll do if we decline to ally, they might - not without reason - assume we are now their greatest threat. And they can traverse the distance between us, and we cannot, for now."

I understand that, given the Empire's actions in Oris, we are not starting off on grounds where you or the Knights of Ozem have any reason to trust our motives, and it is on us to prove them. As an initial offer of good faith, I am returning some of your artifacts, so that you may be better equipped in your current war. While I would be grateful if you considered it part of an agreement not to conduct further offensive operations against the Empire, including in Oris, I explicitly do not expect or demand anything in return for this offer, since it would be unreasonable to unilaterally force an agreement that you had no opportunity to negotiate or decline.

" - yeah, all right, we probably need this alliance,  but ....I don't want to agree not to conduct further operations in Oris yet."

         "....what would be unreasonable about making the return of the items conditional?"

"They don't have visible Law there, they might not want to test ours that far, like how I wouldn't ask anyone on that planet for their oath."

"I do, on balance, favor an alliance or at least non-aggression pact but - some considerations against.

First, as you said, they don't have visible Law. All of our intuitions about how to interpret signals like we've received come from an environment with visible Law, where - there's not reliably a short-term advantage to pretending to Law that you don't have.

Second, an alliance would  be of limited use to us - Iomedae and I discussed this earlier, and she observed that Tar-Baphon may very well have access to Even Greater Teleport. If we bring to his attention that there are resources in Velgarth he could go there and claim them easily, and we're not prepared to open another front on another planet.

Third, allying with the Empire could antagonize the Empire's existing enemies. We don't know that those enemies are not gods. Even if they aren't we don't know a lot about their capabilities. It's a pretty big unknown, and we're not in a position to pick up new enemies any more than we are new fronts."

"At minimum I think we need to respond immediately and warn them not to on their end do things that may bring them to Tar-Baphon's attention, warn them that he can Dominate them if they scry him, all that. I think if I swear emphatically that if I expect that to be very very bad for them they won't actively take it as reason to do it.

After that - 

- I don't know. I'm so tempted to see if we can leverage this to make Urgir less of a nightmare, and I don't see how we can afford the risk of showing off Velgarth capabilities even if we were going to negotiate something fast enough, and all of the Empire's soldiers are enslaved, many of them from childhood, and I don't actually know if that means I'm unwilling to use them for the crusade or not."

         " - you don't?" says Jala, who in fact is usually in Absalom and not usually in the command tent. "It seems fairly disqualifying."

"If they die here they get Axis. - the evil ones we won't take, obviously."

"Yes, warn them against Tar-Baphon of course -

If we were going to use them for Urgir we'd want to use their suicide-fireballs to clear the walls - "

:...or the whole city, I'm not going to bring it up with everyone else when it's probably not worth it to use them anyways but you should be aware it's an option. It would be - better for the soldiers' survival rate. And their Good. And their Law.:

" - but I think using them here would be a mistake until and unless we can fortify their empire against Tar-Baphon subverting it."

"I do not think we can do that without an allied god operating there. The interference of their god-enemies is just an enormous advantage for their non-god enemies, and - everything runs on mind control, and they're used to being the most powerful game in town... I expect there are less than three dozen people empowered to do anything if the Emperor is subverted and I expect the Emperor knows who most of them are."

She is not going to force the Empire's slaves to suicide-Fireball civilians to spare her own soldiers the hit to their Good and Law from sacking the city, but she doesn't want to argue it with Alfirin right now. 

" - could ask them for diamonds. It's less good-faith than I'd like, doing that without mentioning the diamonds also give us the ability to traverse the worlds, but my impression is that it'd be comparatively inexpensive for them to send us a dozen True Resurrection grade diamonds and I would agree to let them complete their butchery of Oris, for that."

      Jala makes a face.

"- I know. I hate it too. It is very hard to describe how much I hate it. But it is a price I already decided to pay, because I couldn't save Oris and our world both, and if the Empire now wants to come to us with bloody hands and express their sympathy at how badly I must feel about what they did, then that's the least part of that price, really."

Someone is going to have to kill the civilians and - it's better if it's quick. It's better, for their ability to hold the crusade together through the winter, better for their campaign next year, better for their chances of destroying Tar-Baphon for good, if the common soldiers think of themselves as crusaders against the undead hordes and not as a bunch of murderers and rapists and looters. War is full of horrors and - sometimes there's something better, but sometimes all you can do is choose who gets the blood on their hands. It's why she burned the witchgate without waiting for orders, it's why she's going to have cloudkills ready to clear the tunnels if they wind up going over the wall, but - she can't actually kill every civilian in Urgir who refuses to run. It's not that it would break her - that's - part of what her role is, she's the person who comes closest to keeping pace with Tar-Baphon's planning, she's the one who rederives Even Greater Teleport when they need it, and she's the one who can commit atrocities without damaging her effectiveness or alignment.

Iomedae didn't actually say anything which means she does not want to hear this now and it won't be productive to press the point, when the object-level question is purely hypothetical.

"Diamonds are a good ask. If we do make some alliance with them it's - a way for them to send us substantial aid at relatively low cost and without revealing their capabilities to Tar-Baphon."

"Right. Let's - get them a fast response immediately, then, and after that we can work out a longer one."

Archmage-General Altarrin, Duke of Kavar:

We acknowledge and wish to express gratitude for your message and for the return of these magic items, and hope for productive further conversation. We hope you'll forgive the brevity of this message, which ignores most of the interesting considerations you proposed.

It is of extraordinary importance that the existence of your world not become known to the powerful necromancer who my forces in Golarion are presently combatting. He may possess a cheaper means of transit between worlds than the one possessed by us, can instantly identify and extremely-powerfully-mind-control people who scry him or anyone in his presence (we make no representation as to whether we can also do this, but will not do so in response to scries to drop off letters as part of the course of honestly conducted negotiations), and we believe would experience no difficulty in enslaving the whole of the Empire and immediately reallocating its already-mind-controlled forces towards his aims. 

(We could be wrong that he would experience no difficulty if there are either of a highly capable and powerful task force of people whose location and abilities aren't known to the Emperor or any of his senior staff who would react immediately were the Emperor so compromised or magics that make the Emperor immune as I am to all external control and which would pass immediately and uncomplicatedly to a successor were the Emperor abruptly killed.)

I strongly recommend that you not Gate here at this time. I represent that our primary motivation in giving this advice is that I anticipate an error that brought you to the necromancer's attention would be irrecoverable and not at all in your interests or ours. 

I swear to the representations in this letter on my honor, that of my order, that of Aroden's Church.

Noting in case additional time on this is valuable to you that the most useful item for trade I identified while in Velgarth is diamonds; they are compact and extremely useful to us and we expect to be willing to pay generously for them. 

I am not at this time willing to make commitments re: future intervention in Oris, and note also that my commitments re: nonintervention in the Empire would no longer hold were it conquered by the necromancer in question. If resources are provided alongside conditions on their use I will abide by the conditions or not use the resources (/permit their use by others, make their location known to others, take loans with them as collateral, etc.)

Iomedae, Knight-Commander of the Knights of Ozem and of the Shining Crusade

They do not have the letter Altarrin originally sent them to attach this communication to, but they can attach it to the sword and leave it in a scryable location along with a Scholar's Ring so the Empire can read it.

Altarrin is, unfortunately, going to spend the next twelve candlemarks more or less bedridden while worried Healers do as much as they can about the backlash. He hands off the headband for Aritha's use, wearing it lets him think through the pain but he probably shouldn't. It's been a long time since he last gave himself backlash this severe without also being severely injured - usually if he's pushing himself that far it's because he's in combat or escaping an assassination attempt - and it's shockingly unpleasant even with nothing else wrong with him; on top of the blinding headache, he's feverish and nauseated and repeatedly cycling between being too warm and too cold. 

After four or five candlemarks of rest and Healing he's...more functional, he's pretty sure he could work, but he certainly won't be able to scry the other world again until he's gotten a full night's sleep and his reserves are recovered, so it doesn't seem worth taking the headband back from Aritha. He can at least write a formal report to the Emperor, not that there's a lot to be said in it; Iomedae was behind shields against scrying this time, which might be relevant, and then he dropped the package at their camp and did not really have any chance to observe the reaction to it. 

It's not until almost a full day later that he returns to the Work Room and tries to scry for the letter. He's...not shocked to find nothing. He methodically tries the returned magic items instead, which are an obvious alternate target for Iomedae's people to use, especially if they copied his letter and destroyed the original before reading it. He doesn't start with the sword, it's the one Iomedae is most likely to keep on her person and be using, and so he is again rather drained by the time he gets to it. 

...he should not raise a Gate that will predictably leave him incapacitated for another day before he can send a reply. He'll...take a nap...and then go check in with Aritha. Does she have any suggestions on making the search-spell more efficient, he could badly use a slightly less power-intensive version and he's pretty sure it's possible, the initial attempt was approaching this in just about the least efficient way that could work at all. 

With the headband on and another day to play around she's had some ideas, though they don't actually reduce the power requirements all that much. He could consider wearing the belt of extraordinary stamina?

That's actually a very good idea!

(Which Altarrin had completely failed to think of because...well, mostly because he hasn't been leaving himself space to think at all, outside the specific research problem, and this is a very predictable oversight from that and one of the reasons it's a mistake, and it still doesn't feel like there's...another option...his thoughts slide away from something there as well.) 

He requests the belt and puts it on, and tries to gauge his reserves now.

Yeah, that's notably better. 

In that case the Gate should just be doable. He has Aritha's minor efficiency tweaks, and his own routing intuition is improving now that he's done it once. Though he does have to spend a while figuring out where exactly to place the threshold so he gets the scroll and not the sword, which Iomedae is...apparently not using??...but which he does not in fact intend to take back for that reason. 

It's still an exceptionally hard Gate, for sure, and eats through most of his enhanced reserves, but he doesn't have a headache at the end of it. 

...he's going to lock the package in the Work Room and go sit down for a few minutes and have a snack before he does anything else, actually, and then - once he's very sure that he's not fatigue-impaired - return to inspect it very closely with mage-sight before touching it. 

By the time a day has passed they've added another letter (though Iomedae feels some dread around the fact the first one hasn't been picked up) and added Aroden's holy books and a dozen history books.

Archmage-General Altarrin, Duke of Kavar:

The Knights of Ozem remain committed to not conducting offensive operations against the Empire outside of Oris, so long as the Empire also does not expand the scope of its offensive operations against the Knights to any outside Oris. 

We have much in common with the Empire. We believe it is through the manipulations of the gods that the Empire has been driven to the appalling and inhumane conduct we have witnessed from it, and we believe that the Empire free of the manipulation of those gods could be a state which we would be honored to ally with and protect.

We are indeed persuaded, in part through the gods' apparent role in your success at killing me (the method attempted would have failed, were I not subject to unusual bad luck in the moment), and in part through conversation with Aroden, that the powerful entities operating in your world are opposed to Aroden. It seems likely that they have also steered the Empire in its decision to reconquer Oris and, we presume, suppress His church. Aroden would represent a rival to them and a danger to their intentions of suppressing prosperity and innovation on Velgarth, and the Empire is easily employed towards their aims here.

With that said, if it isn't too late, I want to urge you in the strongest terms to cease the Empire's activities in Oris. You are acting in the employ of your enemies. Were there a free Arodenite state on your borders, you would have time and opportunity to determine at your leisure whether Aroden is aligned with your priorities, and whether He is lawful and possible to work alongside; when you have been employed by your gods to make that impossible, it will be harder for us to present persuasive evidence of it, and harder for Aroden to gain a foothold in Velgarth should you become persuaded He would be a valuable ally. Orisan independence serves the Empire and one of the strongest pieces of evidence your gods were working against our shared aims is the fact that the Empire was instead induced to prioritize Oris's destruction over the multiple civil wars that genuinely threaten it. 

The Knights are unwilling to commit to nonintervention in Oris primarily because we are skeptical about the representation in Altarrin's previous letter that the war in Oris is over and the resistance crushed. Obviously if it is in fact the case that the Empire has already slaughtered all followers of Aroden in Oris then there is little point in returning for what would effectively be the start of a new war, but it seems more likely, frankly, that the Empire is in the middle of that effort, and that it's going to be a slow one. You could instead - I entreat you to - stop. Not a single killing conducted in Oris in the Emperor's name has served him, from Iomedae on down.

If the Empire instead remains committed to its war, the Knights can, in fact, be bought off. Unfortunately, our world is under threat and a sufficient supply of diamonds will save it. We are open to negotiating nonintervention in the Imperial brutality in Oris, though we condemn it in the strongest terms as serving neither the Empire, nor the Emperor, nor the cause of civilization and human flourishing, nor the Knights, nor anyone but the cruel gods of Velgarth. 

In trade for diamonds, the Knights can provide potions and wands of magical healing, powerful magic items (though the specific ones currently in the Empire's possession we need returned), instruction on the manufacture of said magic items, and protection from the necromancer and from other external interference the Empire might invite should it draw Golarion's attention to it. In further trade we could perhaps send soldiers to aid in the Empire's other wars and of course we'd be delighted to be permitted to send priests who can cure disease, produce huge amounts of clean water, and do magical healing on a routine basis as is standard in Golarion. (It is broadly unacceptable to us for these people to be enslaved in the manner routine in the Empire, but we're happy to make binding commitments about their conduct before they go, including placing our own Geases under some circumstances, and with more negotiation it would be acceptable for there to be limited, non-motivation-altering, compulsions.)

The present form of communication seems perhaps costly to the Empire. Interworld transit is costly for us as well, and expends resources we would prefer to use on the war, but with a few diamonds I expect we could set up a safe and less costly method of communications, and would make doing so a high priority, and pledge not to employ the diamonds against the interests of the Empire.

The Scholar's Ring is as baffling as any Golarion magic item, though included is a sketch of a happy person wearing it and reading a book!

Altarrin is going to take the obvious precautions here! Once he's examined it for a while, and escalated to poking it a little with magic and making sure it's not set to explode on touch or something, he hands it over to the research team to test. 

He's pretty sure he knows what it does, based on the diagram and the fact that he certainly can't currently read the letter. He is unsurprised by the eventual finding. 

Within two candlemarks, he's sitting down to read it. 

The first letter is...a valuable warning, if it's true, and he sees no particular reason for suspicion that it's instead a convenient lie except for the bare fact that it might, under some interpretations of the Knights' goals and motives and information state on the Empire, be convenient for them to discourage the Empire from further contact with their world. He actually thinks it may mostly be inconvenient to them, by dramatically reducing how much the Empire can offer its aid. 

And it fits with - and makes sense of - the fact that an army with Iomedae in it has clearly been fighting this war for a long time, and still hasn't won. 

It's otherwise unsurprising. He writes out a copy - it actually takes him a couple of tries, and taking the ring on and off to check, before he manages to copy it in the Imperial tongue and not accidentally copy the characters he can't under normal circumstances read - and dispatches it to be sent to the Emperor, before moving on to the longer and later-dated letter.