Alfonso Antoninus Iomedae Thrune i Blanxart, last Count of Egorian without a devil’s blood in his veins, was born, as his name might imply, to parents who were devoted followers of the new goddess, and he grew to share their faith. He almost had to be an Iomedan, to shield himself from his cousins’ reputation, but this did not mean his faith was not genuine. The altar to Iomedae in his family shrine stood in a place of coequal honor with the altar to Aroden Himself, and the cleric he kept on retainer for healing was one of Hers. But Iomedae was still a very young goddess with very, very much to do, and that cleric was far too weak to have cast a Forbiddance that might have stopped his cousin from teleporting into his bedroom and casting Flesh to Stone as he slept.

The Thrunes did not kill their enemies when they could avoid it; that would have just given someone else the opportunity to resurrect them, even if they had to go all the way to Aroden’s high priest in Oppara with a very expensive diamond to do it. Even later, when they ruled with Hell’s full cooperation and nearly everyone they were eliminating was soul-sold and thus unresurrectable without Hell’s permission, and Hell was more than a little bit annoyed about them getting turned to stone instead, they kept doing it. Over the centuries they accumulated quite a collection of statues, first in a vault, then in a series of secure demiplanes. Their last demiplane was very, very secure. Even trying to Discern Location any of its contents would break the minds of most mortals. Abrogail Thrune II could, and frequenly did, look people in the eye and say with perfect sincerity that they would be turned into statues and never found until the ending of the world. Of course, Abrogail Thrune was an excellent liar, and also kind of dumb, but in the end it took the intervention of the High Priestess of Nethys and three archmages working together to rescue the statues, and Abrogail Thrune would probably protest that she couldn’t possibly have expected that.

Seven hundred years later, one of Naima's senior apprentices is sorting through Abrogail's garbage with the help of an only mildly insane kitsune wizard. Frederick is an eighteen year old ex-dung-sweeper who can't cast any spells and has been in, like, half of one real fight in his life, so he really should be terrified of 7th circle wizards like Nenio, but in fact he is not. He's put up with too much of Naima's shit for that. This time the shit is 'oh, Frederick, you wouldn't mind individually questioning the dozens of statues we got from Abrogail Thrune's terrifying secret demiplane, would you? It has absolutely nothing to do with your core skills, but involves handling sensitive and confusing information, and I trust your loyalty more than almost anyone else in my organization. I also don't value your time enough in comparison to mine to find someone better, especially given the current state of my Chelish employees. If any of them try to murder you then Nenio will probably stop them, so it's fine.'

This is a paraphrase, but not as much of one as it sounds. On the other hand she's paying him for it, so. 

Nenio casts stone to flesh on one of the dozens of remaining unlabeled statues, dispassionately observing the results.

"Subject 23 appears stable, unlike the last one. Are you capable of answering questions, former statue?"

Former statue.

It isn't surprising—he knows Roderic has a spell that does that, turns people into statues and traps their souls in them so they're never even seen in an afterlife, and he knows that he's the last thing standing between Roderic and the county of Egorian, and that Roderic is a sixth-circle sorcerer and he's basically powerless to stop him from doing anything and neither the Archduke nor the Emperor seem to care—so it isn't surprising that one night he went to bed and didn't wake up. It is, maybe, a little surprising that he's waking up now. He didn't know the spell was reversible, and he didn't expect anyone to care enough to get the statue back and even try. Well, he has no idea how long he's been a statue. Maybe it's the Age of Glory.

Oh right, he needs to answer the whatever-she-is.

"Yes—uh, what year is it?"

"4714 Absalom Reckoning. What year were you petrified in?"

"3989—so it's the Age of Glory, then." And everyone he's ever loved has been in Axis or Heaven for seven hundred years without him, but he'll—process that later.

"That would make you a contemporary of the Vudran oceanographer Nanakdev Agnihotri, whose most significant works have unfortunately been lost to more recent history. Are you familiar with his work?"

What the fuck? Fucking wizards.

"I'm afraid not," he says. "My name is Alfonso Antoninus Iomedae Thrune, Count of Egorian—or I was. My dear cousins, I don't doubt, have made that name mud, if anyone remembers it at all, but I still have some pride in it."

"Then you are most likely of no academic value to me," she says, solemnly. "Assistant, you may conduct the less interesting parts of this interview."

She walks three yards off, and then sits down to read a book.

Frederick is dutifully scribbling down the name, after the year. He squints at it, once it's on his paper.

" - yeah, anyway. Iomedae, huh?"

He can guess the meaning of that look.

"Yes, my parents were devotees, as am I. I take it, from your expression, that my diabolist cousins have maintained their infamy. Did Aroden finally depose them, when he returned?"

Frederick opens his mouth, and then is not entirely sure what ought to come out.

"...sort of. Do you, uh, want seven hundred years of bad news all at once, or do you want to pace yourself."

It is, now that he thinks about it, more than a hundred years after the prophesized day of Aroden's return. It shouldn't have taken that long to depose the diabolists abusing his family's name and dig him out of their basement. 

"Is it the Age of Glory or not?" he asks, with the sudden sinking feeling that it's probably not.

"Not as advertised. Aroden's dead, my man. Mind you, he died a hundred years ago, and we've just about cleaned up his mess."

"Dead?"

He does know, in the abstract, that gods can die. Every temple of Aroden has its shrine to Amaznen and Acavna, dead gods of ancient Azlant. But for Aroden himself to be gone feels as impossible as for the moon to fall from the sky—okay, bad metaphor. Still.

"—what mess." Not as bad as Earthfall, at least, if it was cleaned up in a little over a century.

"You don't know the half of it. Anyway, I am cleaning up after your recently deposed diabolist cousins. I didn't know there were ever any Iomedan Thrunes."

"Yes, I suppose if all you've known is Roderic's side of the family—but the name is older than the taint of Hell on us, and not even all the tieflings were bad, in my day. Antoninus, also my namesake, was the first of them, and he made Heaven—though the Crusade definitely helped, there. My parents picked up the devotion to Iomedae—probably mostly to emphasize how they weren't diabolists, but they were sincere in it."

"Anyway, what have my dear cousins been up to while I've been gone?"

Frederick sighs. "Let's see, you're - Aspex is four thousand something, I forget when, but you'd be from before an independent Cheliax?"

"The emperor's writ was not strong in the west, else he would have stopped Roderic, but I was still formally a vassal of the Taldane Empire, yes."

"Well, your cousins have been ruling independent Cheliax for the last seventy-odd years. Diabolically. My employer and her companions kicked them out last year, and now they have to fix the - " don't say stupid, he can be lazy without being outright mean "- place. It's in bad shape, though."

Gods damn that whore Porphyria and her whole tainted line—no, he reminds himself a moment later, in fact they would have, and that's bad. 

"Sorry," he says, his jaw still slack with disbelief, "did Iomedae die too? How the Hell did they conquer the whole Western Empire?" He's actually kind of angry at Iomedae, if she isn't dead. She promised that, by their efforts, one day Hell would cease. Not that their servants would conquer half the fucking Empire.

"—actually, you know what, I don't want to know," he says a moment later. "Tell me more about the people who got rid of them."

"Yeah, sure. So there's my employer - not her," he says, waving almost dismissively at Nenio, "I mean my actual employer, Naima Cotonnet. She's not Nex, or Geb, or Aroden when he lived, either, but she's close, and closer than any of them were at twenty-six, I can tell you that. She's a witch, specializing in healing, currently heading the effort to resurrect enough non-infernal nobles to run the place. There's her husband, Elie, a wizard about as powerful as she is. Inquisitor Shawil of Abadar, and the sorcerer Ione Dujardin. And their friend, Catherine Marianne Euphemia Aspexia de Litran, heir to the Chelish crown through Aspex - he's the guy who broke Cheliax away from Taldor however many centuries ago. De Litran is on the throne, now. The Thrunes tried to take them out before they got too powerful, and they responded by declaring war. It was over in four days. Not to say that they weren't meaning to declare war before that."

Hold on.

One, two—

"Three archmages? Working together?" he says, his jaw even slacker than before but in an entirely different way. And non-caster companions of presumably comparable power, though he's not entirely sure what an archmage-equivalent Abadaran inquisitor would even do.

"It's great, isn't it?" he says, smiling broadly. "Hell didn't know what hit it."