Naima has no idea whether any of this remotely describes the situation seven hundred years ago. She does know that she's talked to far too many distant candidates for archduke who, if not detestable people, are not capable of answering the question lucidly, or can speak only of political rivals and military threats.

"I see. I'm sorry to be so brief, but I unfortunately still need some sleep. I do know what Iomedan to send you to, now. May I teleport you?"

"Of course."

Naima teleports them to the house of Alexeara Cansellarion, recently Count of Lladó. She would quite like to speak to him privately for a moment - without Alfonso - before she leaves.

"Archmage. What brings you to Lladó?" He makes no comment on the hour.

"I'm sorry to call at this late hour." She doesn't sound it. "But this is important. The man in the next room was found in Abrogail's statue collection this morning. He claims to be seven hundred years old, a Thrune who was once the Count of Egorian, and an Iomedan. He claims to have, among other things, a weak, seven-hundred-year-old claim on the archduchy of the Heartlands. I have spoken to him for ten minutes and believe him to be sincere and a reasonable human being, if relatively weak and off balance. I am seriously considering recommending him to the Queen for the position of archduke of the Heartlands. I have not told him this. He would also badly like Iomedan counsel about what to do in the new world he finds himself in."

"I am asking you to assess him for the position of your boss, and to provide or find for him some of the Iomedan counsel he's requested. I will investigate records of the claim separately. If he is who he says he is, and you feel that he would be a good archduke, I will recommend him to the Queen, at which point I will also ask you to support and advise him in his new responsibilities."

"Don't mind the hour," he says idly while he digests that. "I don't sleep."

"I'll speak with the man. Seven hundred years... that's going to be much more of an adjustment than any of the other raised nobles."

"It is. I like him better than the other raised nobles, so far, but even if this extraordinarily cursory assessment of his character is reliable, that doesn't mean that the challenges he faces won't be significant. Can you house him here, for the moment? I can return for him in - three days, say, and get your assessment then?"

"Yes of course. I'll go introduce myself." No need to take up more of the archmage's time.

She nods. She ought to say goodbye to Alfonso, but she's tired. She teleports home and leaves it to Alex.

"Lord Thrune," he says, realizing he forgot to get the man's name before Naima left. "I'm Alexeara Cansellarion, newly count of Lladó and paladin of Iomedae."

And a powerful paladin, judging from the look of his magic items.

"Alfonso, please," he says. "I'm not lord of anything currently, and I'm recently a bit uncomfortable with my surname. My mother's surname was Blanxart; I'll likely end up using it." Her family is also the source of his claim to the Archduchy, which they apparently might give him, something he's a bit uncomfortable with for different reasons. "I'm honored to meet such a distinguished servant of our Goddess."

"Alfonso. I understand you probably have a lot of questions, do you want to sit down and ask those now or do you need to sleep first?"

"If it's no trouble for you, I'll sleep. It feels rather as if I haven't slept in seven hundred years."

"Of course." He rings a bell for a servant; most of them are asleep, but one sleeps days and works nights to account for Cansellarion's habits. "Please prepare one of the guest rooms for Senyor Blanxart, he'll be staying with us a few days. And then a pot of tea for myself, thank you."

He follows a servant to the bedroom they've appointed for him, and falls asleep soon thereafter; he awakes feeling physically much better if no less unmoored. He takes a brief breakfast and then seeks out Lord Cansellarion again.

Cansellarion has finished his morning prayers and is back in his study.

"I imagine the Archmage gave you only a brief summary of the last seven centuries, she is very busy. She also mentioned that you were seeking advice from another Iomedan. Did you have particular questions, about either subject? I can also just - start at the beginning, as far as the history is concerned; I'm less sure where to start on religious matters, as I have much less of an idea what might be new to you."

"I think you should probably start at the beginning; I'm hardly oriented enough to know what questions to ask. Among the things I've heard is that Aroden is dead, that prophecy is shattered, and that my ignoble cousins had managed to lead the whole of the Western Empire into the service of Hell, from which it has only recently been liberated. And also that there are three Good archmages alive on the planet at the same time, so I can't actually consider the past century to be one of unmixed bad news."

"Not unmixed, no." Though he's not intending to say much about the recent good news. And he gives a somewhat more detailed overview of the last century. (He's not a historian and can't say much of the other six centuries Alfonso missed) The famines and disasters after Aroden died; The worldwound; thirty years of civil war in Cheliax; (Briefly jumping back to describe Aspex' even-tongued conquest) the end of the civil war and the retreat of the antidiabolist coalition to Molthune; The rebellion in Rahadoum; The revolutions in Galt and then Andoran. Cyprian and his wars. The House of Oblivion being sealed. The intercontinental portal connecting Osirion to Tian Xia. The four-day war and the raids on Hell and the closing of the worldwound. The worldwide Spawn of Rovagug Event a few months ago.

"And that brings us to today, more or less."

None of that is surprising, given what he knew, except—"Hell seemed, from your account, extraordinarily invested in its hold on Cheliax. I wouldn't actually expect to fathom their reasoning, in any case, but—how certain are you that they aren't going to try to take it back?" He's not even going to ask about the Spawn of Rovagug incident; leave that to the archmages.

"Hell exhausted a great deal of real power and likely nearly all of their permission to operate on Golarion in the near-term. The Goddess confirms this, and also believes that Hell will not make another such attempt in the forseeable - predictable - future. I will not speculate to you as to Her reasons for believing that."

"Well, that's good. The reason I originally wanted to speak to you was—well, the archmage Naima, whom I gather to be a friend of the new Queen, suggested that I would probably be offered a title, if not the one I used to have. Obviously you don't yet know me well enough to tell me whether I'm qualified to accept one, in spite of my, frankly, somewhat foreign origin, but I was hoping for—advice on the challenges I would face, if I did accept such an offer. I have far more experience dealing with diabolists than anyone would like, but none dealing with a whole country of them."

"I have found that many of the challenges of a county in Cheliax are simply the challenges of a title or county anywhere else, magnified. One must manage knights and barons, more attentively for them all being partially-reformed diabolists. One must deal with bandits - and there are many, because of the war and all the officers and clerics of the old regime who turned to banditry to escape justice. One must deal with monsters - I suppose the monsters are not that much worse, barring the occasional neglect.

But there are also challenges unique to modern Cheliax. Half the villages, if you visit them, will be full of terrified farmers who think you're here to execute some of them for being insufficiently devout Iomedans. The harvests are bad, because priests of Erastil are scarce and the druids have spent the last seventy years equating civilization with Asmodeanism. Many places there is not enough clean water and certainly not enough healing, because clerics generally are scarce."

"Is the Goddess—and the Good gods more generally—acting to alleviate that shortage? I suppose there might be a lack of sufficiently aligned people, after seventy years of diabolism. What fraction of the population, do you think, are—I won't say sincere Asmodeans, I'm not sure there is such a thing—but the sort of people who would oppose Iomedae even if they understood her? Among commoners, that is."

"Most of the Good gods seem to be picking clerics where they can find them. Iomedae has picked very few clerics since the war. We infer that She spent a great deal of Her ability to act on the material in order to achieve some of the good results we've seen lately. It's not going to be a permanent state of affairs, but we should expect few new Select of the Inheritor for a generation, barring some new crisis." He smiles a tired half-smile and adds drily, "Pray Her absence is prolonged."

"Among the common folk... there are very few who are sincerely philosophically opposed to Iomedae. Most of them are former priests of Asmodeus. Apart from those... one in fifty, maybe? More if you count those that aren't against Iomedae, per se, but would rather no-one have anything to say about the fact that he beats his wife, or whatever else his particular petty evils might be. It's higher in the cities, they worked harder to diabolize the people of the cities. But - they're not the majority of people who hate or fear us. That's going to be people who have nothing against Iomedae's teachings, but resent Iomedans for killing their son or brother or daughter or father or cousin, for destroying their homes or their business, for - fighting a war that they had the misfortune to be caught up in."

"An inevitable part of the tragedy of war in all cases, I think. Hopefully this war has actually left them enough better-off in the long run that their resentment will not last."

"I gather there's an effort ongoing to replace as much as possible of the realm's nobility." He doesn't actually know what question to ask about that, so he'll just leave it there and let Cansellarion say whatever he thinks is most relevant.