"You can't leave Velgarth until then."

"We're trying to get a church established there right away.  That should give Aroden a lot more visibility into his options. We - won't leave Velgarth until we've fixed the Evil afterlives, but I also - think most of the people damned to Hell - and that's most of the senior people in the Empire - I think they'd rather get another shot at living a life. Petititioners in Hell retain fairly little of themselves, and not for very long."

"It looked pretty terrible," she concedes, grudgingly. 

What a person. "I will bring you in on strategy meetings about it, and let you know once Aroden has enough visibility to work with us on it. It will - be an honor, to have you working with us on that.

Did you have - other questions -"

" - the oath. What am I supposed to - what do you want me to do."

"I don't know everything, Aritha. I can't see as far as a god can, and the gods can't see as far as they like either. It is my sincere desire, for you, that you get whatever afterlife most delights you, most opens the pathways you want to grow down.

 And I also think that for some people, part of being their most whole self is to ignore, entirely, what Pharasma has to say about you, and live your life willfully disregarding Her."

- but then I might get a bad afterlife, Aritha barely restrains herself from objecting. How could I - be my most whole self by willfully ignoring the most important question of my life -

" - I think you are not that kind of person," Iomedae says. "And so I will tell you that my best guess is that the Aritha who goes to Axis or to Heaven keeps her word, on this oath, even though it is enormously unjust that she was asked for it, and my best guess is that the Aritha who goes 'yeah, that was deeply unfair, and I am not held to it' ends up not being judged Lawful. It is not impossible to in a Lawful manner reach the conclusion that was unfair and you were not held to it, but it is very hard, from your starting point, and I would not actually expect you or anyone in your position to succeed at it. That is my prediction about the afterlife-related stakes of this decision you mean to make.

I could - separately from that set of claims - make claims about the true nature of Law and Chaos and what I think the right thing to do is, but I'm not, actually, trying to deliver a lecture on moral behavior, here, you haven't asked me for that. I'm just trying to give you some concrete predictions about what will probably happen, since it's your soul at stake and you deserve to know."

"I want Axis."

"That makes sense. It's a lovely place."

"I also - want to have my word mean something. I - I obviously wish I hadn't promised - but I did mean it -"

"I know. One can very lawfully wish they were not bound by their commitments."

"I - don't think I know what it means to have promised the Emperor my loyalty if I'm going to be a prisoner forever."

"Not forever. Once Aroden's sufficiently established in Velgarth that I feel confident we'd foresee Tar-Baphon taking over the Empire, or once Tar-Baphon is sealed or dead, you can return to the Empire. - and have lots of extremely valuable magical knowledge for them. You could also - ask the Emperor to release you, at some price, though I don't know if he would. The Empire obviously wasn't deliberately and knowingly toying with the fate of everyone's immortal souls."

"I don't think he'd release me. That doesn't serve the Empire, and he's - he's bound to serve the Empire too -"

Something flickers across Iomedae's face. "For whatever it's worth - it's a common belief that being more like the Empire - not all the way like the Empire, places in Golarion don't usually go that far - but that being more like the Empire serves an Emperor, or serves a nation, or serves a Church. I think it's not true. I think the strongest human institutions are built out of free people, doing what they believe in, with justified trust in the people around them. This is - a thing people disagree with me about, so you shouldn't assume that I'm right. But my own best guess is that the Empire, if it were the kind of place that'd let you go free, would ultimately be stronger and better, judged on its own terms. The Knights have a process to Lawfully renounce our oaths, so that if any of us ever find that this path isn't the one that we think fixes everything, we can choose a different one."

She's a strange woman. Perhaps the Emperor would be just as strange, if Aritha were to speak to him more; perhaps being free, the way only Emperors are free, makes you strange. Or perhaps it's her god that makes her like that. 

Questions.

"You said - that what you were saying was just predictions about where I'd be sorted, and wasn't about what the right thing to do is."

"Yes."

"What do you think the right thing to do is?"

"It depends on the person," she says after a while. "Both the end goal and the best route there - depend on your strengths, which I don't know, and your weaknesses, which you don't want to show me. There isn't a single right thing to do when you are sworn to the service of an Emperor who cannot permit you to grow in the ways you'd grow if you were free. ...personally, in that position, I would try to derive from scratch Law as the gods understand it, until I was deeply satisfied with what it was and whether it was something I aspired to, and what implications that had for my oath, and whether in the conception of Law I'd grown into, people in the position I'd been in originally could swear to things meaningfully. And I'd try to convince the Emperor I was right about human flourishing and what it takes to attain it.

But that's because those are two routes to a stronger position that I understand how to take, and that'd be stupid advice for many other people. 

I would be thinking in those terms - in terms of routes to a stronger position - for almost any person. The right thing to do is usually to become more capable of identifying and doing right things."

She's very strange to listen to. She's obviously using the speech and conventions of a different court, and that's a big part of it, but there's a strangeness to it beyond that. It's as if Aritha can feel the force of her conviction and intentions and persuasiveness brushing past Aritha, not in fact coming to bear on her at full force.

The opposite of what the Emperor did.

Aritha - isn't at all sure she likes it better. 

She does think she understands, what Curiosity meant, that the Knight-Commander is too Good to resent Aritha choosing Alfirin. The Knight-Commander's power comes from - well, from the sword and the invincibility and the army, no question, but the Knight-Commander's soft power, the things that would be threatened by political snubs, comes from her narrative, and her narrative is one in which no mage-researcher's freedom can threaten her, in which some mage-researchers snubbing her is everything working exactly as intended. There is no way for this interaction not to make the Knight-Commander look good. If Aritha is grateful - and Aritha is grateful, that's just not the level of analysis she's using right now - then the Knight-Commander gently and undemandingly laid the afterlives out before Aritha and inspired her to hold to her oath, against the Knight-Commander's own interests. If Aritha breaks her oath, then she did it fully informed thanks to the Knight-Commander. If Aritha storms off angrily, the Knight-Commander grieves for Aritha's difficult position, is too forgiving to retaliate. If Aritha calls her on it - what is there to call her on?

"I want to learn how to craft your world's mage-artifacts," she says, after a long pause. 

"Alfirin asked me to get a wizard in who can teach you. I'll do so."

"I wish you'd gotten me a day sooner."

And at that the Knight-Commander does turn the whole force of her gaze on Aritha, and what is in it is regret and pain and loss. "I am very deeply sorry that we didn't. We could have done so, at an acceptable cost, but were busy and didn't think of any reason to hurry,  and if you were to never forgive that I don't think you'd be wrong. There are few evils as profound as the ones we do by not thinking very much."

"I'm not angry, Knight-Commander," says Aritha reflexively, because she can't - process that at all, right now. "I was just saying, I - I like the thing, that you're doing, and I'd be part of it, if I could - there's - nothing that you owed me, and nothing to forgive."