"I did that before I came here." She isn't scared, she's a paladin, she can't be, but she can - feel it, more than usual, that the shape of her mind has been pulled very far from where it would naturally fall in this moment, that she is unafraid by magic rather than by temperament. It doesn't matter. 

True Seeing. Greater Arcane Sight.

Disjunction. Antimagic field telling the universe that this antimagic field will permit enchantment, divination and necromancy. Sure Casting. Bestow Curse on ability to resist magic. Sure Casting. Greater Bestow Curse on ability to resist magic. Sure Casting. Dominate Person, order Iomedae to stop resisting Arazni's spells. Implant Urge (tell Arazni the truth). Greater Bestow Curse on Splendor, skill at deceit, and skill at persuasion. Conditional Curse visibly on her strength and visibly on her health, both of which will be extremely obvious if they trigger. (The triggers are 'attempting to deceive Arazni' and 'lying to Arazni'.) Conditional Curse against acting on 'trying to harm Arazni', while she's at it.

She would also kind of like to turn Iomedae into a goldfish but then a lot of Iomedae's magic would keep working, so. Limited Wish for Zone of Truth so she can keep that up and Detect Thoughts at the same time.

The antimagic field takes out the paladin immunity to fear - this has probably always been true and she just never noticed because she is mostly either walking through an antimagic field for security reasons or else fighting in one and very very distracted.

In this case neither of those apply and so she is just blankly and wholly terrified, and not accustomed to it, so it takes a bit to figure out it’s not one of the curses. 

This is the decision she made, for reasons she knows, and it’s fine, not in the sense it’s sure to be fine but in the sense it was her best bet in expectation and you have to just take those and then not waste your thoughts revisiting -

She is having trouble breathing, which is bizarre. She doesn’t see why Arazni would have made the air stop working.

She manages to conceal all this near perfectly until Arazni rips out her Splendour and capacity for deception and then she starts crying.

Arazni is extremely creeped out! It is very hard to model Iomedae as someone who keeps doing things like crying and being afraid and having friends, instead of a remorseless servant of righteousness!

She's not going to stop casting spells just because someone's crying, of course, so she'll finish her list of spells and then read Iomedae's thoughts.

It's fine it's fine it's fine it's fine calm down it's fine this is embarrassing. Tell (not)Arazni everything. Calm down so you can tell Arazni everything she wants to know. Not fair to (not)Arazni, to be visibly - possible to injure by this - (not)Arazni is not doing anything wrong and it is wronging (not)Arazni to make this have the semblance of hurting someone, only she's still not succeeding at ceasing to cry. She wants to tell (not)Arazni everything but (not)Arazni hasn't asked anything. 

Time to try more aggressive concealing-distress measures. She will bite her tongue half off and hold her breath so she ceases the stupid rapid-breathing-that-doesn't-feel-like-it's-getting-her-any-air. She will - there's got to be a way to do this that isn't Splendour and isn't deception but is just Law, presenting (not)Arazni with an interface that it is fair for (not)Arazni to expect she can interact with which isn't human and isn't in pain and isn't afraid - that is her duty, and she doesn't run duty on Splendour -

"Sorry," she says, mostly steadily. "Did you have questions?"

She casts Remove Fear on Iomedae okay it is really weird to have these astral deva reflexes, it wouldn't help anyway, she's in an antimagic field against abjuration spells.

"Have you lied to me since I came here?"

"No." Hardly requires any thought; she never lies, unless you count giving orders aloud to a person which you are simultaneously countermanding by Telepathy but which a listening third party that's a spy for Tar-Baphon will believe.

"When you asked Aroden to send me to the Shining Crusade, what were you thinking?"

"We couldn't win otherwise." She had been broadly far too eager to demand things of Aroden, because she'd half-suspected that He wasn't really trying to win and that He could afford to do things to help and often didn't bother. She hadn't understood, back then, that Aroden and the forces of Good on the Outer Planes had a budget, that doing things traded off against all the other things they did including empowering paladins and arranging miracles. She'd asked Him for things He'd been right not to grant her, things she wouldn't have asked knowing the costs.

But the reason she'd asked for help was because she could see it wasn't winnable without it. They had no good counter to Tar-Baphon Himself, and lost every fight He deigned to pay attention to. If they did cobble together enough reasonably high level wizards to counter him, He would pick them off one by one; the wizards knew that, and refused to be cobbled together thereby. The Crusade was not winnable, and worse than that it was visibly not winnable, so no one who only chose winnable fights would fight for them. 

They could win with Arazni, and more than that they could make a rallying point out of Arazni, and have everyone who'd fight in a war that might win and not in a war that would lose. She tried to lay it out clearly in her head for Aroden, and asked in the Commune if they could win with Arazni's help, and if so if they could have the High Priest cast a Gate and Call her. 

"A rallying point."

- of course Arazni's reading her mind. That's good, it makes telling Arazni everything easier. "Yes. The wizards who refused to sign on would sign on to meet you, watch you fight, learn from you, tell their friends they fought alongside you. It was much easier to recruit the people we needed most to win the war."

"The people you needed to win the war." What's Iomedae thinking?

She's a little calmer now that they're talking about something concrete. She's confused about which parts of it stand out to Arazni. Of...course...they wanted to recruit powerful adventurers to the crusade? Because that's how you win crusades? Arnisant had been the one possessed with any political savvy, back at the beginning; Iomedae had been twenty-seven and not yet spoken Taldane like it was spoken in Oppara. He had explained patiently that it was often well-advised to tell people about your glorious victories so they'd want in for the next one. Arazni was not particularly a fan of wasting her spells on fireworks in Oppara but Tar-Baphon had access to a dozen people at eighth circle and they needed to make up the difference. 

"We wanted the Teleport capacity for a mobile force of a couple hundred, we talked about opening up a second front. Support for you so you could save your power for the things only you could do. We wanted to get some of the helpful priesthoods without a ninth circle cleric the opportunity to level one. We wanted so many archers."

Arnisant and Iomedae had... agreed...

She's going to send Iomedae a memory of their first meeting with Share Memory, when Arazni was Called to Golarion.

(The first thing visible is the grey fog, that fills everything; not a fog of sight but a fog of senses; Arazni sees everything in dimmed colors, true, but more than that all her thoughts and emotions are shaded, worn down with grit and exhaustion as the angel Arazni's had not been.)

(The second thing visible is that everything Iomedae says or does is wrong. All her movements are precise, planned, calculated; her eyes are the eyes of a visionary, not an angry young woman, seeing beyond the world to something beyond it.)

(The eyes of a woman who could very easily sacrifice a great deal, for an important enough cause.)

(It was just Iomedae making the decisions, then.)

Iomedae remembers that. She had been arranged a meeting in Oppara with the only ninth-circle priest of Aroden (the priest who'd done the Commune for her also present), to plead for her Gate. Her Taldane is barely mutually comprehensible with his, and he can't quite disguise his impatience. 

         "I think Tar-Baphon means to defeat us and force Aroden to come fight Himself. And it was a close thing, last time."

"No, it wasn't." say both of the priests at once. "Aroden is a god, and cannot be threatened by a delusional corpse -"

                   "It would be a travesty were it to be necessary, but no true threat to Him."

        She is pretty sure she's right but she cannot afford to argue. "I apologize if my speech is foolish. I am ignorant of many things. Nonetheless I think we serve Aroden poorly, if we force him to show up himself. And we're losing."

"There's all kinds of good news from the front," the priest demurs carefully. 

       "We're losing! No one says it because then they won't send us more money!"

The priest who did the Commune looks at the ninth-circle priest over Iomedae's head. "It doesn't matter. She purchased the right to run the Commune, and the answer was yes. Maybe we could win anyway, maybe Aroden agreed for some entirely unrelated reason, but it is His will we call His herald. And if I was somehow in this deceived, she simply won't answer."

" - I need not be implored to do Aroden's will. I'm happy to have the girl-Knight, too, if she'll speak of the things she is knowledgeable of and not things she is ignorant of."

       "I need not speak, sir, but I would be honored to be present."


----

"Just don't venture theological opinions," Arnisant tells her, that evening. "Or at least only in a one-on-one conversation, not to a room full of people. They can't let it go, under those circumstances."

       "I understand, sir, and I'm sorry."

"I think it's one of your great strengths, that you built everything up yourself from scratch and then asked Aroden if He'd go along with it. In Oppara it is not one of your strengths. It's - threatening, right, if the generals of the Shining Crusade get very opinionated about things outside our remit. - and they're probably very jealous, because Aroden has answered your petition for aid."

.       "He'd have answered anyone. I'm just the one who bothered to look into our options and figure it out and ask."

"Maybe. But no one's going to believe that. They're going to look to you and wonder what Aroden sees in you, and 'blinding political ambition' is a bad answer to that question. The blazing righteous determination to defeat Hell itself is fine, you can lean into that."

        "- they're the same thing, sir! I want power so I can defeat Hell!"

"Iomedae, no one in all of human history has ever wanted power so they can defeat Hell, gotten power, and then used it to defeat Hell."

        " Sir, you could've started that sentence however you wanted and it'd still be true. - I'm sorry. I hear your counsel, I'll try to follow it. ...I hope Arazni isn't like this."

"Oppara is its own beast. Angels would wilt in it. I bet you'll get along with her splendidly."

----

Iomedae is kneeling anxiously on the floor venturing no theological opinions. Arazni invites her to rise, and she does, unsteadily, because of the ridiculous ceremonial armor. She wonders if Arazni is judging her for the ceremonial armor. She's judging herself for the ceremonial armor. 

"I'm told you are the noble paladin with a plan," Arazni says, "to save the world."

And she can't help herself. "Not just the world. I mean - there's lots of them, right, I assume you can't save all of them, so I wouldn't have asked if - if the plan even if it works only saved one -" Her face is burning, but it doesn't matter, because in a few hours they'll be free of Oppara and she can hear from someone much much smarter than her all the reasons why her plan is actually very stupid. 

- She doesn't remember that.

Not the face burning. Not the shock. Not the youth - Iomedae was so young -

"You had a plan to ascend."

"Yes. It's what Aroden told us to do, to follow Him, because He couldn't fix it all Himself. I figured that if I survived the Crusade I would become extremely powerful, and then I could try the test of the Starstone, if Aroden said I had good enough odds it was worth it. And that I probably wouldn't survive the Crusade, so it was early to do that much planning, but - the thing I'd been holding out for, when I tried to find a paladin order to join, was - some account of how if they did everything they wanted to do that ended in a true victory. Knowing that - most of those plans wouldn't happen - was one thing, it felt poisonous to not even be aiming for it, to be doing things without any account of how, if they went well, if they got lucky, we would actually win. And 'ascend, fix whatever's wrong with Shizuru' was - closer to that account than anything else I'd thought of."

"...unless it can only be one every thousand years for some reason, but even if that's so, we're due," Iomedae concludes her explanation of her plan to the herald of her god who is much older and wiser and probably has noticed by now that Iomedae is not actually intelligent, even if she can fake it when she concentrates hard enough. "And it's weird Aroden would've misrepresented it that much - why are there even trials around the Starstone, why not just put it out there and let people Commune and ask their odds."

        "I am not going to answer that," Arazni says, and there's a bit of detectable tiredness at this point because it is the thirty-fifth question Iomedae's asked to which that has been the answer. 

" - should I stop asking things? I'm sorry. I ask Aroden when I can afford to but that's not all that often. I - well, I don't understand why you won't answer, but I believe you that there's a good reason."

        "I haven't asked you to stop," Arazni says. "But I don't expect you'll achieve much, and I hope that's not what you were trying to achieve here."

" - no! No! You need never speak to me again, if you don't wish to! The command has far better sense than I of what we need an archmage for.  I just - wanted to be clear. About what the plan was. So if it's very foolish you can tell me to knock it off now before I've done a lot more planning."

         "It's not obviously very foolish. It'll probably fail."

"I do know that. I - it's fine if I die. I just want to be doing something where if enough people are doing that thing, we actually win."

Arazni remembered different words. She remembered Iomedae with a burning desire to know - to cut straight to the answer, to jump the curve, you could do that or you could win - angrily demanding because she needed to know to plan, no apologies because she's never -

And she shared her memory.

"I haven't asked you to stop," said the exhausted angel to one more mortal doomed to die but one more mortal with a strand of destiny that made her not quite a mortal, "But I don't don't expect you'll achieve much, and I hope that's not what you were trying to achieve here."

"I'm trying to win, however I have to to stop Hell, and I need to know if this plan won't work so I can find another one."

- It was the Arodenite virtue that Geb knew best, probably.

"It will probably fail." Slightly testing.

And, confident, burning, "It's fine if I die. But someone has to do it."

That's not impossibly wrong.  It's not as if Iomedae did not, at various points, try intimidating people into getting out of her way with her aura of destiny. Not her allies, because you don't treat your allies like that, and not her commanding officers because that just seems stupid, but - there are probably plenty of minor Taldane nobility who remember her that way, because they were getting her people killed. 

If you do that to your allies you end up unable to benefit from any cleverness but your own and Iomedae's isn't adequate, actually. She needs people to tell her when she's being an idiot. 

Also saying sorry as a strategy just outperforms being unwilling to do that. The apology Iomedae makes most often is 'I am sorry I haven't conquered the Evil afterlives yet', in one form or another, and it works very well. 

"I'm sorry," she says aloud, at that point. "For - being an idiot and making the decisions that got you killed. And - if you wish I'd never asked, then I am in a sense sorry I did, though - I don't know that I'd follow a different rule next time about asking."

"- I trusted Aroden, trusted the shape of prophecy that he saw better than me. I thought I saw clearly enough." She didn't think she'd die. She thought she could beat him. (She'd thought that she was invincible.)

There's a good deal she wants to say. 

"- The decisions that got me killed. How do you remember them?"

Because Arazni knows how she remembers them.

They were so close. They could spend another five or ten years marching the whole army across ghastly Virlich, at immeasureable human cost, but they had Tar-Baphon on the defensive, they were actually outgunning him in some fights after miserable years of having less spells and fewer casters but more ability to use what they had and more willingness to spend everything on this. 

They talked about it. They all understood that they were taking a risk. But they didn't feel it in their bones. They felt in their bones that they had triumphed and triumphed and triumphed, that they'd paid in blood for twenty years and were done paying, that there would be an ambush in Vaishali Pass and it wouldn't matter because they were most of the way to being gods. They did have procedures, for these things, they put numbers on it, they debated the merits of different plans, but it was very very hard to contemplate putting ones' nose to a grindstone of bleak horror for ten years when one considered it overwhelmingly likely that a straightforward assault now would succeed, or would fail recoverably, maybe cost them the four diamonds they'd accumulated for the fight at Gallowspire. More diamonds, they were pretty sure, than Tar-Baphon had. The worst-case scenario they seriously considered was that they'd burn all four in a retreat (or in True Resurrections of people lost in that retreat) and then have to do it the slow way. 

Which wasn't that much worse than just doing it the slow way in the first place. 

They contemplated scenarios where Iomedae died, where they lost Aroden's Shield or its bearer, where they lost a bunch of the wizards and had them raised as enemies.

They thought Arazni was invincible. They thought Aroden would see and warn them, if that were wrong. And it felt like a betrayal, of sorts, to send men to their deaths not to save their kingdom from Tar-Baphon, as they'd originally been promised, but to make it so no one important had to take any chances. (This logic feels like madness, to Iomedae now, but she knows she felt it at the time.)

Arazni thought she was invincible, too. At the point where you're a ninth-circle wizard, an astral deva, and a demigod, there shouldn't be things that can land a spell or sword on you, for any spell, for any sword. 

It turns out "Disjoin her and then have a dragon push her through a Gate into Bloodrot, where most of his army and also Urgathoa's were waiting" did it.

... That happened, right?

Yes. That happened.