"No."

"No?"

"No. You have many fine explanations for why everything is failed, but the Empire has been great before, and it can be great again. There are men who agree with me, lords and senators, commons and soldiers, and when you say that all is hopeless I have not lost hope."

"You haven't, no. You will do what it takes to win? Whoever you have to go through?”

She nodded, once.

“You know,” he says, “there’s an emperor, eighteen hundred years - I don’t know if your tutors told you about him - Bassanius?”

She shakes her head.

“This was long before the Ulfen Guard. There were some nasty sorts running things, the Insomniacs - guards of, hmm, Horatiu the Second, he’d pulled them out of some tribesmen back on his property, fanatically loyal to him of course, and of course by Basso’s time they’d really taken over. It was them and the Clubbers that were the guards that mattered, and they hated each other but any time the Emperor wanted to do something that wasn’t pay them to do nothing - make them drill, send them to war, train up an army that could really fight - they’d whip his head off and pull one of his cousins on the throne. And of course the Keleshites could see that, and pressed us hard, them and the Iobaran raiders and the tribes up in what's Galt today. Around and around it went, emperor after emperor, the Empire circling the drain as province after province vanished to us."

She nods.

“Well, the Palaean dynasty had been pretty well established by that point, and nobody would think of an emperor who wasn’t one of them would amount to anything, and good old Basso was the last left but a lunatic and a priest of Torag who couldn’t be pried out of his shrine with a crowbar. Sensible fellow."

"That gave Basso room to work. He tried to put a new army together, but they told him they weren’t having any of it, so he gave up on the project and just tried to make the Insomniacs and the Clubbers really, really hate each other. He gave it everything he had, blew on the flames, and before long the Clubbers could be talked around to the Soms being even worse for the empire than the way things were. So he hosted a big feast for all the Som generals, got them all in one place, and then the Clubbers came in and butchered them all."

She's grown up in Taldane politics, too, yes.

"They spent the next week hunting down the survivors and settling old scores before they said to the Emperor, well, fair’s fair, we’re your guards now, and that’s when the Volghars he hired from up in Iobara shot the Clubbers full of arrows. Then they looted the capital - that’s where the great big hammer at the grand temple of Torag comes from, the Volghars broke the old one trying to pry the gems out. Dreadful people, Volghars, but they didn’t know politics and when he had to pay them off, they went, because by then we had an army worth spit he’d trained when they weren’t looking, and we went and conquered half Qadira and most of our eastern provinces. Basso the Great, they called him."

"He went to Hell, and I do believe he’s a Duke now. Well. Part of one."

“You know, I rather like the idea of the Maelstrom. It seems so restful, after a life in Taldane politics. No responsibilities, and I can just sit back, and rest, and relax, and watch Golarion go to hell.”

“That’s what you do here.”

“A job I have experience at, too!”