They make an offer that sounds great and the point is to screw you over. They bury the screw-you-over-part somewhere so you don't realize what you're agreeing to and then they get everything they can out of you and throw you away and they call that being Lawful.

There's a whole god of it, Asmodeus.

"No, Mephistopheles is god of it. Asmodeus is just his boss."

"Same thing."

That does sound like an incredibly frustrating way for someone to be technically obeying the law while actually not being net-positive to make deals with! He's glad to hear Iomedae isn't like that. 

...He is curious if they expected the fight for Urgir to go this way? It sounds like they expected Iomedae was going to win, but the battle as described sounds like - certainly not how he expects things to go, in war - is it just normal here for things to go that way? 

(Altarrin is fairly sure it's not, and is in fact a direct result of the diamonds he brought, but he's also pretty sure these random soldiers have no idea who he is and that Iomedae is being very careful with information related to Velgarth in general. And he's curious to hear their answer.) 

Nah, this was a miracle. They figured they'd storm the walls and wizards would be throwing fireballs and demons and angels would be attacking everything and then Tar-Baphon's relief army would show up and everything would be a bloody mess.

... Miracles happen around Iomedae sometimes but not, like, often. 

"More than anyone else, though."

"Yeah."

....Can they tell him about Tar-Baphon and Tar-Baphon's army? He's heard - some - and it sounds pretty spectacularly bad, but he'd like to hear their side of it. 

Tar-Baphon is this evil necromancer guy, really powerful, who figured out a way to break the limits on how many undead a necromancer can control, so he controls, like, All The Undead himself directly, and he raises more undead every time there's dead bodies, which there are every time he wants undead. There's some orcs and stuff he recruited but they're mostly there because they think it's obvious he'll take over the world and they want to be on the winning side. 

And he's unkillable, because he hid his soul. (Evil wizards do that sometimes. Makes them more evil.) Iomedae will figure out where he hid it and break it, though. They say he first tried it a few thousand years ago and Aroden killed him and it didn't stick but he's back now.

That does sound pretty horrifying! He's glad that Iomedae is around to help handle it. 

(He has...other feelings, too...but those can wait, they're probably not urgent anyway because Iomedae knows everything in his thoughts and does not, in the short term, seem bent on killing him for it - and she needs him, in the short term, and in the long term he can figure something out - and he does not need to be distracted or having emotions with these random soldiers.) 

...He's guessing they don't know many details, but he's curious what they can say about this 'hiding the soul' thing, and why it makes wizards more evil? 

Not really? He's currently talking to the infantry, not the wizards. They just know that "evil wizard, usually necromancer, hid his soul in an object somewhere and is now puppeting his rotting corpse" is a thing, they're called liches, and they're all evil, and usually worse than they were before they were liches. You know, more atrocities.

That does sound pretty evil and horrifying! 

(If that's a known thing here, it - has got to give Iomedae certain priors on how to interpret someone claiming to be immortal– not now, he can think about it later.) 

Now that Urgir is taken, do they happen to know anything about what Iomedae would be planning next? 

They have SO MUCH SPECULATION. It turns out that soldiers with nothing to do sometimes try to predict what they commanders will do! The two most likely possibilities are "try to clean out more of Ustalav, where lots of slaves of Tar-Baphon live" or "try to attack Tar-Baphon in his fortress in Gallowspire," the latter of which most of the soldiers think means trudging through horrible mountain traps like when they lost Arazni, and a minority think means going around the mountains to attack from a different direction. Either way, lots of battles with undead are guaranteed.

Who was Arazni, and what happened? 

(The way they talk about it makes it seem like it's probably important, and - important context on Iomedae, maybe.) 

Arazni was Aroden's herald and a demigod. Before that she was a famous wizard - like, really famous, and a hero. She guarded the world from monsters and tyrants when Aroden went to travel the stars. He sent her to help Iomedae win the war with Tar-Baphon, and she died, really died, saving them. Aroden hasn't selected a new herald yet.

He's sorry to hear that. It must have been - a very difficult battle. And a very important one, it sounds like, and probably Arazni knew the risks, but. 

(It's not his loss, or his war. He has emotions about it and he's honestly not even sure why, it's probably - something died to a hundred memories he lost and didn't prioritize relearning the records of in this particular lifetime, that stuck only in the deeper emotional-association layers of his mind. He's...lost a lot of people, over the centuries.) 

Is there anything else they think a foreigner new to working with Iomedae ought to know? 

- She's Good? She always tries to save everyone? She makes sure people won't regret working with her? Not really.

Altarrin thanks them for their time, and he'll leave them be to celebrate. 

(He's not really in a celebratory mood, right now. He's not sure what mood he's in, really. It doesn't match any emotion he has a name for.) 

He returns to his bedroom. Paces, for a few minutes, not really thinking about anything in particular. 

He...observes that he is not sitting down and writing the letter to Bastran, even though he has pen and paper right there (requested from the servant-constructs earlier), and plenty of new information. 

So. What is he still confused about? 

...

He's not sure he is still confused. He feels like he has most of a picture, and - he's pinned down some points he needs to check, because obviously you have to do that, but it's not - like he really expects to get a different answer. If anything it's mostly because he wants to have better explanations for Bastran, that will cross the gulf between them, of different worlds and different contexts and different - well, Bastran doesn't know Altarrin's secrets, that he's immortal, that he was Ma'ar before the Cataclysm, that he was if not the First Emperor at least a co-founder of the Empire...

that he would have done better if he had known how

(He doesn't have the headband and it's actually noticeably harder reasoning through this sort of thing without it, but - it's not completely new ground, he has handles on at least most of the pieces of it, he can think through it anyway, just slower.)

It...does seem worrying, in some kind of way, that he feels like he's confident in certain beliefs and also like he definitely cannot convey them to Bastran. It would be less worrying if it were just that Bastran wouldn't believe him, but it feels - more complicated than that - right now he's not sure he could convey it (whatever "it" is) even if he hadn't fled the Empire and there was no shadow of suspicion on him. Maybe even if he could tell Bastran his secrets, though definitely that would help. 

All right. Can he break it down into pieces, the - thing he feels like he understands but doesn't have the words or even the shared concepts to convey to Bastran...? 

He - thinks Aroden is different, actually, from the Velgarth gods. Not completely different; He's still not very good at communicating with mortals, at least not without damaging Them, and He is still...a being that perceives and interacts with the world mainly through Foresight, which does impose certain incentives toward nudging - or forcing - those confusing noisy hordes of mortal beings to be less unpredictable. 

But. Aroden does not consider Himself owed our cooperation with not making Foresight messy, Iomedae said. There are pragmatic reasons not to throw sand in the eyes of our allies, but He didn't ask me to keep my head down and He's never asked anyone to stop inventing and discovering things. 

Altarrin didn't really believe it, at the point when she said it. 

He does now. Why?

Because he's now read through all of Aroden's holy books, and -

- it's not just that the teachings of His church are ones aimed at discovery and invention, at nourishing the basic human drives to build and grow and learn and make the world better - to look up at the stars, to wonder who else is out there, to someday be strong enough to go find out - 

- or that the history of his life describes a man - not mortal, but nonetheless definitely human and not a god - who very clearly pursued those goals, even at great cost - 

(It's also definitely not just that both came across as written for him personally - if anything that made him more suspicious -) 

But...it feels like maybe there's a thing there, some kind of core foundation, and maybe anyone who actually cares about it converges on...similar trappings...it feels like it's the thing Arvad meant, when he described it in clumsy words like 'civilization' and 'progress'

(words that are so easily misunderstood and corrupted, and end up being meaningless propaganda for an Empire that doesn't get at the core thing very well at all...) 

but the core thing is just, really, 'a world where everyone, everywhere, can be alive and okay and flourishing.' 

That was a series of thoughts that he definitely cannot write down in a letter to Bastran and expect it to make sense. 

The simpler argument is that Aroden isn't like the gods that the Eastern Empire knows, because Iomedae intends to become a god. And appears to be setting up quite a lot of groundwork for it, and the known mechanism for ascension isn't just mentioned in the holy books, it's also one that random soldiers take for granted.

And Aroden isn't stopping her.

Aroden seems to be, instead, pouring a lot of resources into supporting her. Not just by giving her very powerful repeatable-miracles, but by retrieving her soul from the gods of Velgarth, when Altarrin killed her there, and - given Aroden's other intervention decisions - that must have been costly for Him. 

One can assume that a person like Iomedae becoming a god is not conducive to a world remaining predictable along its existing track. 

In the Eastern Empire, one of the standard complaints about gods (in the category of arguments offered in scholarly treatises, not the sort of complaints made by tired soldiers bitter about their comrades' deaths, which are generally much less philosophical) is that They do not, and cannot, communicate with mortals about Their actions. From the perspective of the mortals, trying to negotiate with gods is as pointless as trying to negotiate with a volcano, or an earthquake, or a hurricane. From the perspective of the gods, but mapped onto human metaphors, it's probably as absurd as trying to talk to - not ants, Animal Mindspeech does exist - trying to talk to trees, or grains of sand. 

But Aroden communicates with Iomedae. Not easily, it's costly for both of them, but He gave her instructions, when Altarrin appeared in their world as an out-of-context source of diamonds, a new option that shifted their priorities - and that wasn't the first or the second time. 

The first time wasn't an emergency. It was just - Iomedae deciding that she had learned enough to trust Aroden to keep His promises, and asking Him for one. 

Of course, a lot of that he only has on Iomedae's word. 

......This would be a very bad idea according to approximately everyone he's every respected and asked for advice in the context of the Eastern Empire.

He wouldn't be considering it at all, if not for the fact that he's - not just convinced enough to gamble on Aroden's church being better than the Eastern Empire - but very close to convinced that Aroden, as a human, approximately shared Altarrin's goals, and claimed he could ascend to godhood and keep his values intact, and - everything he's learned since about Aroden the god and Aroden's following bears that out, more or less. 

It's probably still not a good idea. But. 

He...could, if he wanted, pray to Aroden right now. 

(And probably not get an answer, given the cost to Aroden, but - in that case he loses nothing. There are, of course, more horrifying scenarios where just 'deciding to pray to Aroden' opens a new vulnerability, but he doesn't, actually, expect anything disastrously bad to happen here.

...He'll guess there's a 1 in 1000 chance of trying this being a very bad idea, just because he doesn't have enough context to be more sure than that. But he's taken risks on far less favorable odds than that, before.) 

The next question is whether the upside is enough to be worth it, given that Bastran definitely won't be inclined to believe anything Altarrin writes to him on the basis of having directly spoken with a god. 

- thinking about it in terms of what will convince Bastran isn't the point.

It's an understandable habit, given their past work together (and the loyalty compulsion), and it separately does make sense to consider how to communicate with Bastran effectively, whether the aim is to convey his current information state or to try to persuade Bastran of a particular plan. 

But that's - not mostly why he wants to run this test. 

He wants to run this test to convince himself. Or to stop being confused, one of those two. (Though probably the end result will be that he's still confused and unconvinced, because gods don't generally communicate Their responses to prayers, even here.)