" - the first part that's complicated is the part about judgment. Pharasma, the Judge, evaluates souls by how they lived in life. Whether they were Good or Evil, whether they were Lawful or Chaotic. Good is about - doing right by others, and not doing wrong by them. It is Good to feed the hungry, Good to shelter the desperate, Good to defend the innocent. It is Evil to take an innocent life, or a guilty one when you had better options, or to make laws that take many. To harm someone for your own benefit, that's Evil, and to strengthen someone, that's Good, for a first outline of it. 

Law and Chaos are more complicated. People often say that mortals are - badly approximating the thing that those truly are, that the thing the gods mean is broadly not the thing we are doing. I think I know what the gods mean, but I often fail when I attempt to convey it; you should expect that what you're hearing from me is not in fact what the gods mean, even if I understand it. 

An exemplary Lawful person is one whose word is trustworthy, always, when they give it to allies and when they give it to enemies; a judge who cannot be bribed and cannot be threatened into wrongly deciding the cases that come before him, a minister who notices her own side is undetectably breaking a treaty condition and who fights her own court to get that to stop, as she cannot be party to it; a person so trusted not to cheat where it gives them advantage that it is possible for even their enemies to come to the table with them and expect to be better off for it.

An exemplary Chaotic person - and I should be less trusted here, I'm not myself inclined to this style of thought and the habits that make it good for people - but an exemplary Chaotic person is one who, finding themselves oathbound to the service of an evil King, walks away, not because he has a full and complete conception of how he might Lawfully account for the breaking of the oath, but because ultimately he's not going to serve an evil King even if he said he would. I would expect a Chaotic person to say things like that you should, mostly, just look at the world and use your mind and your own strength to figure out what's going to go best, and make promises very rarely, and keep those promises while the reasons for those promises hold, but not place the promises themselves in the place of the reasons."

She pauses. 

So, everyone will go to judgment when they die? Seems better than going to reuse when they die? Or - it depends on how much of yourself you retain in the afterlives, but surely you retain - or why call them that -

And why tell Aritha this, in person, now, with such - carefulness, such urgency - it's not about how to bring the afterlives to Velgarth, this conversation, even if the Knight-Commander is willing to indulge a digression -

It takes Aritha a while to come up with it, even once she can tell the Knight-Commander is waiting expectantly for her to say something. "This is - about my oath, to the Emperor -"

"Yes. It was, in my view of the world, a tremendous evil to ask that oath of you. And you have the choice to declare - though not yet, please, not before I've finished explaining - that you don't want to be a person who holds to their oaths - especially to ones coerced like that one was coerced, that being a person whose word when so given is meaningful and binding is less important to you than other things. I cannot tell you what to do; I do not know which things are important to you. But I want you to make this decision with full information."

"Coerced?" she says eventually and dumbly.

"- can you tell me about the circumstances under which you swore to serve the Empire?"

"- they interrogated me, after Altarrin left, and they learned about - that I'd been scheming to go over to the invaders, and broken my oaths of office - that was Kottras, he told me to break some rules, not important ones - and - I thought that they were going to - use me the next time they needed a Final Strike - they did that to a lot of people who hadn't even committed any treason - and then the Emperor came to see me, and said - that he needed to be able to trust me, not just to compulsion me but to count on me, that if you offered me - whatever you offered Altarrin - I wouldn't - disappear - I didn't disappear voluntarily, Alfirin made me -"

"I know. You haven't been offered a choice, and won't be offered one until at least after the war is over."

"I told him, I swear, your Majesty, you can trust me. I won't - even if they cut my compulsions, I'll be loyal to you, I'll do this work for you."

It feels terribly dangerous, somehow, saying those words aloud again, like Iomedae can reach out and shatter something, maybe everything, maybe Aritha, with that deceptively gentle voice - the Emperor, too, had a deceptively gentle voice -

Iomedae nods and says nothing.

There's something she's not conveying and she doesn't - know how - 

"No one ever - asked me, before, for - to do anything more than hold still while they adjusted my compulsions -"

"And you meant it," says Iomedae, watching her intently. "You wanted to be - someone whose word meant something. You would - not have been happy, not have been served, if I'd showed up to say 'don't swear it, Aritha, I can offer you more than you can possibly imagine' -"

"Not unless you could've saved me from being executed on the spot."

"The Empire probably wouldn't actually have killed you, you were very valuable to them. They were probably making you believe it so that you'd be more loyal once offered escape from it."

This feels like being plunged into cold water, or noticing you were plunged into cold water a while ago and now are numb all over.

"Oh."

"Do you think you wouldn't have given your word, but for that?"

" - probably if at any point in my life the Emperor had personally asked me for a loyalty oath I'd have given it! He's the Emperor!"

Iomedae nods. "I don't intend to tell you how to feel about what was asked of you, or what to do about it. I do expect that your decision will have a large effect on which afterlife you go to, and so I wanted to make sure that, in deciding, you knew about the afterlives. I have a book here with pictures, of Axis and the Maelstrom, of Heaven and Elysium, with stories from people who live there. I want you to know what your choices are. Axis and the Maelstrom are very different."

And she takes off her headband, the headband, and hands it to Aritha, along with the book, and says, 'take your time', and then pulls out some unrelated paperwork.

What.

WHAT.

She puts it on, of course. She thought she'd never feel it again. She -

She was fucking right that the Empire is going to lose this war. She was completely right and they had the nerve to blame her for thinking it instead of getting ahead to what it would mean.

The Empire should lose this war. It deserves it. Gods may suck, but if there are paradises on offer, then gods are worth putting up with. And these people are - it's hard to describe it, it's not just that they have different local customs, it's not just that they have time for her - the Knight-Commander is hardly less busy than Bastran -

- it's an entire tapestry of everything that's happened since she got here, that their impulse is to not hurt people, that their impulse is to not use people - she can't describe it but she can recognize it and it's different and maybe she's making this up because she wants it to be true but it seems related to the magic that makes mansions and makes headbands, magic so abundant that there's not any more point begrudging brilliance to people than there is begrudging them

- she's supposed to be thinking about the afterlives.

She wants all of them. She wants to live forever and ever and ever and consume every experience and every wild possibility any god has ever dreamed up. She wants to be a god herself. She wants everything. 

She looks at the pictures, only half of her paying attention. They're all beautiful in their own way except the horrifying ones.  

She's so angry at Altarrin for defecting without her. He - plausibly couldn't have taken her, she would have had to try to stop him, and also he must've been thinking around his own compulsions very carefully, but - he left her to the Empire, after he'd realized what it was, he left her in a position to be bound to an Empire she knew could lose and should lose and would lose - 

....afterlives.

How would you build buildings like that. How would you build magic like that. Who would you learn from - why would they teach you -  but of course they would, if they had forever, if they weren't all of them pinned to things they never asked for and never agreed to and never wanted and no one ever cared -

How can such good news make her so mad, it doesn't make any sense -

Aritha is loyal to the Empire, to the Emperor, and what that means, is that she's going to make sure they all fucking live forever no matter how little they deserve it.

...she hopes they get the nice ones. But she doesn't hope it that much.

She slams the book shut. ...she didn't mean to do that. She was trying to close it in a normal way. Her hands are shaking.

"Do you have questions?"

"The complication, with the afterlives, it's that everyone in the Empire sucks and so they'll get bad ones?"

" - approximately, yes. Or Aroden could pull His own followers who He can see well enough to be sure they'll be Lawful Neutral or better, but given how the local planet works, that'd be - systematically draining the planet of all its best people, which doesn't seem ideal - I am going to fix the Evil afterlives. I just don't know how long it'll take me."