Arialla nodded, setting aside her juice. "If you want to talk about it, I'm happy to listen. I don't exactly feel friendly towards the Voice myself, to be honest."
And what tolerance she did feel towards the Voice had mostly been engendered by Samuel himself -- and Osozo, a little, but mostly Sam. Hearing that he had grown disillusioned with her only made Arialla more suspicious of the goddess -- even more so as she listened and realized that he had far more reason to hate her than Arialla did.
What could Arialla say to Samuel's description? She felt like condemning the Voice's behavior would only tell him what he already knew: that she'd mistreated him. And those last words -- was he going to die for leaving the Voice? Arialla would have asked for clarification on that point, but she didn't want to be alarmist.
The truth was, what Samuel described wasn't that different from how Arialla viewed the gods at home. "Where I'm from, we look at the gods as ... forces of nature, more than people. They don't really care about mortals. They find us entertaining, or they use us for their own ends, to glorify themselves or get a leg up on other gods. It's like ... if a prize ram pleased you, you might give it a treat as a reward, but that wouldn't stop you from hitting it if it went the wrong way, or slaughtering it if you were hungry. Or simply if you had no further use for it and didn't want to feed it anymore."
Well, that was depressing. Arialla sat back a little. "The Voice ... She wants to claim she's building a family, doesn't she? But she's really just using people, like any other god. You can't ... I never expect any of them to act as a mortal would. With compassion, or loyalty."
And then, that last, most important question, one that she had to put calmly in the hopes of not making him feel even worse: "Samuel, will leaving the Voice cost you your life?"
please don't take my sunshine away
