She floats a step back, because otherwise she would float a step forward.

“It does. They don’t - get normal petitioner forms. They’re just rabbits. Which would be more ordinary if I could send them to Nirvana but I can’t - I tried that too, once I realized I could target any Evil plane - “

Iomedae starts giggling.

Slightly hysterically. “As - a - Good - person - I - disapprove - of - sending rabbits to Hell - but -

- but that’s really funny -

- why would it work that way -”

Deep breath. 

“Well, I can talk about my feelings, which is a bad idea, or I can never ever ever talk about my feelings, which in the conventional wisdom is also a bad idea but we’ve had a pretty good run, so, I dunno, maybe the conventional wisdom is, as usual, unnuanced and incorrect if you are smart and actually being careful.

But if you don’t want me to talk about my feelings then I think I have no further analysis of your - thing you’re doing.

And I do feel somewhat less anticipation that something terrible will happen, if only because it maybe already did.”

She manages to pull herself out of her own giggling fit, because it’s really not that funny if you saw it yourself through a scry, but this conversation has been very stressful and the giggling is contagious. Breathe.

“I…”

“I do want you to talk about your feelings. But. It would be unwise. To do it now. Or decide now. To do it later.”

Huh?

....because it’s the 700 year old man from the other world that prompted Iomedae to bring this up with Alfirin, of course. She’s an idiot. It wasn’t her conscious reasoning process but Alfirin is almost certainly right that it was upstream of it, that this is a conversation that was vanishingly unlikely in prophecy and that they should endeavor to not allow to have extremely large-scale effects. 

(Gods sever causal influence from their not-supposed-to-have-causal-influence sources easily. Iomedae feels embarrassed in that characteristic fashion she associates with noticing she’s not in fact a god yet.)

-“ - oh right. Thank you. I - yeah. All right. In that case I should get back to scolding everybody who successfully used a sword in my new city, and figuring out how to get more of the army inside of it. And so on.”

(That was not what Alfirin was thinking of at all. It’s not her job to minimize noise in prophecy and in fact having conversations in a demiplane which is resistant to prophecy probably made that worse. She was thinking that it’s - too tempting, when the only reason she’s not afraid is Iomedae’s presence, to fall into her arms and do something they’ll both regret.)

She drifts back toward Iomedae, with her hand held out for the plane shift.

Iomedae squeezes it slightly more tightly than is necessary for the plane shift.

(She'll weep for an unknowable number of dead people later, where Alfirin can't feel manipulated by it, where she can separate it from contemplating what things she'd pay that price for.)

Before the battle they bring Altarrin new copies of Aroden's holy books, in the extradimensional mansion, and another Scholar's Ring, and notify him that one of the other rooms has a few injured soldiers awaiting the crusade having the spare resources for a Regenerate. He doesn't have to speak with them, but he can, if he is lonely or curious at some point. 

(Someone ducks in to notify the housebound that the battle went well, and cheers erupt from the other room.)

Altarrin woke up that morning and - because mage-sight is allowed - took a second to notice the lack of subjectively-noticeable compulsions, and to parse the ridiculously overpowered spell they have on him as compulsion-like, and remember that he's no longer in the Empire and he is nonetheless still a prisoner. It's - not fine, actually, and it's reasonable to be distressed about this, and he may not be safe, but it's not productive to spend ten minutes untangling panic about that. He can spend thirty seconds doing that, and move on to actual priorities. 

...He doesn't really want to talk to the injured soldiers. Maybe later. He wants to write a letter to Bastran, and maybe at that point Alfirin will be back and he can get her to carve out the exception so he can scry Velgarth. He hopes it's less exhausting in the other direction; there are some reasons to think it might be, he has a better sense of Velgarth and can maybe target specific places more effectively. 

He feels weirdly stuck on writing to Bastran. In a sense it doesn't matter, or at least won't matter in most possible worlds, because Bastran isn't going to believe him, but - he tries not to think of that as a reason to put less effort in. There are still ways it could end up mattering a lot.

...He's confused about Aroden's church, and it feels like he needs to be less confused, to have some kind of more solid grounding, before he can explain Iomedae's world to Bastran in a way that holds together and doesn't sound completely implausible. He - suspects some of that feeling isn't actually reasonable - but it might still help to read Aroden's holy books, which are conveniently right there. 

Altarrin requests food and water, and then settles in to read. 

Aroden, as his histories tell it, was born before Earthfall in Azlant which only Axis, in these days, has perhaps surpassed, and He had become notable even before the Cataclysm as an extraordinary mage, brilliant and powerful, and then the alghollthu grew afraid of the human civilization on the surface, grew jealous, and they went to war, and they were, to their astonishment, losing. And they called in a great power from beyond the world, to destroy the humans, but they miscalculated, and very nearly destroyed the world.

He's...not quite managing to form thoughts in reaction to it.

For one thing, he...doesn't actually like thinking about the Cataclysm. He doesn't go there often, anymore, he used to dwell on it but any lessons there to be learned were ones he internalized centuries ago, and any remaining lessons are ones he can't learn, anymore, because the relevant information is lost and gone. Usually, trusting that he's internalized all of his mistakes and changed his habits and policies to avoid them in future means that it no longer hurts to think about, but...this was always different. 

He has emotions about it. He doesn't really have opinions or an interpretation, yet, separate from that. Just confusion, again, and he's so tired of being confused. 

He keeps reading. 

Aroden survived, Aroden rebuilt civilization - not on Azlant's continent, which is just gone, a few isolated islands poking up above the sea, but on the alternate continent, devastated only by the indirect effects of the catastrophe (still sufficient to nearly extinguish humanity).

Aroden founded Taldor and worked to prevent the magical knowledge of ancient Azlantl from being forgotten forever, and he led an army into the Abyss and fought a demon lord, and he became a master of magic unparalleled in his world. And He travelled other worlds, looking for something, though He never told anyone what, and had spectacular adventures there, some recounted and some totally unknown.

And then, after hundreds of years of work, he dragged the Starstone out of the sea. It was a remnant of the moon that hit Golarion during Earthfall. It's said that it contained the essence of two gods, the ones killed when Earthfall happened.

Aroden set a series of elaborate precautions around it, and then ascended, and became a god. It is said He will return to usher in the Age of Glory.

It is a perfectly reasonable, coherent, well written summary of a very impressive person life. One that at least says good things about Aroden the mortal - well, immortal - wizard. If any of it can be believed, but it’s fairly careful about citing other sources, that Altarrin can’t personally check right now but Iomedae surely would have, and on the level of facts, he’s not actually suspicious that the entire book is a fiction written to persuade. That hypothesis mostly rises to attention because it feels written to - not even persuade, at this point, it’s mostly upsetting - to cause strong emotional effects of some kind to him personally. Which is positing a level of inexplicable complex deception that doesn’t at all fit with anything else. 

He still reads the entire book with a growing feeling, of not even quite of disbelief, but of…surreality…the flavor of dreaming, noticing a world full of rich details that feel like they make sense but will crumble if he looks too closely. Even though as far as he can tell they don’t crumble, no individual piece is dissolving into dream-logic…

Once he’s finished, since he’s not sure what else to do, he goes back to read the remainder of the other holy text, the one with Aroden’s vision and teachings.

This one is much more poetic, written for sermons, full of songs, of the achievements of humanity and the many achievements ahead of it, of the evils of the world, those of neglect and indifference and those of the malice of enemies and evil gods - and the power of human strength to overcome evils, to build and grow and learn and make the world better, to look up at the stars and wonder who else is out there and grow up and go check -

Altarrin is running on approximately negative emotional equilibrium and he is, maybe, going to slightly cry a couple of times.

It’s - he doesn’t know why it hurts - it makes sense of Iomedae, in a way, how someone could end up with that particular combination of - determination and ruthlessness and nonetheless holding to sacred principles, drawing those bright lines…he suspects he’s still not looking at it the way she would describe it herself, it feels like she wouldn’t see it as a tradeoff but as pieces of the same thing…

He wants - something - he wants to talk to someone but not really to - a stranger who has no context on why he’s here and probably isn’t cleared to know it anyway -

…Maybe going to see the injured soldiers is better than being alone with his thoughts. He can, at the very least, ask them for their impressions of Iomedae and the Church of Aroden.

They're all missing limbs, and one is missing both legs, an arm, one eye, and his nose. They're in good spirits about it. Regenerate is seventh circle, so it only happens when it's not campaign season, but they've just taken Urgir (did he hear! Iomedae took the whole city by Miracle! No deaths at all!) and so soon there'll be time for a cleric to get to them.

They ...worship her, that's actually the dynamic there, not very complicatedly. She is their god, more than Aroden; She spends their lives, reluctantly, never hesitating to also spend her own, towards her aim of ending Tar Baphon and then Evil everywhere, and they are honored to serve her and will go to paradise when they die in her service. She is unfathomably powerful, and she is going to actually be a god someday. Anyone who didn't know that before Urgir knows it now. 

The Church of Aroden is - less a matter of deep religious devotion, for most of these people, and more the background fabric of their lives. Aroden made the world they live in, and He wants them to make even more of it, and He chose Iomedae, and allied they are unstoppable. They know the hymns and the stories from the holy books and they pray to him for guidance and wisdom, to make plans that work, just like they pray to Pharasma for the dead or to Erastil for a good harvest or to Sarenrae for a wayward son to awaken to the ills of his ways. But one gets the sense that it's hard for a god all the way in Axis to compete with a god on their very own battlefield, and - that's how Iomedae's people have been steadily growing to see her. 

That's - really impressive, actually, on Iomedae's part. He can recognize that there's a strategy, there, she's impressive and charismatic but you don't get this level of hero-worship by accident. 

It makes him think better of her, overall. That her reaction to there being problems she can't solve, yet, is to be strong enough to solve more of them.

...It seems like information about Aroden, too, actually, it's - a much more direct sign of what He wants than just His church's teachings. He is supporting Iomedae, rather directly, and Iomedae wants to become a god - plans on it, seems to have plans that might succeed, if ascension is just...a thing that Aroden solved, thousands of years ago...that says enough about Aroden by itself, He could have taken away the ladder after He climbed it, but He didn't. 

Also, he was aware that something had happened and was probably good news, he heard the distant cheers, but he hasn't in fact heard any details of the battle! What happened? He suspects they'll be delighted to tell him the story. 

- and after that he'll gently poke those who seem willing to talk about their own history. How did they end up following Iomedae? How long have they been with the crusade? What was it like - the good parts, and the bad as well? 

It varies, obviously! For this crusader, he's a second son of a farmer, there weren't any apprenticeships to be had, so he joined a mercenary company. They'd done some pretty bad things - halfway to bandits, sometimes - and then Iomedae was hiring and it sort of... snowballed from there? He didn't want to go to the Abyss, so, well, Iomedae paid Lawfully and on time and he figured he might as well do Good...

Oh, the leg? Some undead sonofabitch was taking a swing at Korkh over here and he took it on the leg. Happens, in the Shining Crusade.

Altarrin listens thoughtfully, nods and tries to make the appropriate expressions at the appropriate spots. 

...He's a foreigner who doesn't know that much about Iomedae's forces. Can they maybe talk more about what they mean, when they say Iomedae works and pays Lawfully? 

It means that she keeps her bargains. If she signs a deal, she keeps the deal, and if she says she'll pay on time, she'll pay on time. She doesn't cheat you. And she's Lawful Good, so none of this Asmodeus lawyer shit, no "exact words" nonsense. She makes a deal. She keeps it.

...What's the 'Asmodeus lawyer' type of deal like? He doesn't think he's encountered them. 

(He can make guesses, but wants to hear it himself.)