"Professor. Hamil. Do you have any light to shed on the situation?"

"Kasigna called herself the Goddess of Death. She did not say if she was from Golarion, or here, or some other world. I'm not sure it was exactly a vision—I should tell it from the beginning.

"It was at night. I was working on a design in Tkayl's Court when an old woman appeared. She felt familiar, so I thought it was a student come to watch me work, at first. She asked me questions about the craft. We spoke for... it felt like hours, but it couldn't have been. She praised my skill, and she... offered to make me a cleric. And she introduced herself then, as the God of Death. She said she could give me mastery over life and death beyond even Queen Khelta the First. She created a... compass... from the bones in the courtyard and showed me how to use it.

"At the end, Kasigna asked me to take her hand. And I did, and when I touched her—she vanished, and it was suddenly earlier in the night, and I found the compass in my coat pocket even though she was still holding it when she disappeared. And the bones she'd used up to make the compass were still there under the sand when I checked. So I wasn't sure if all of it was—real—but the compass still worked, and later the night I prayed to her and I got the [Cleric] class."

"Do you have this 'compass' with you?"

After a moment's hesitation, she takes it out of her coat. It's a spherical cage of bone with rings and needles spinning within, closer to an intricate gyroscope than a compass, but more complex an instrument than either. On closer inspection, there are runes etched inside and out.

"- that almost categorically rules out a Golarion power doing something strange, sometimes they enchant or even transmute existing objects but I've never known them to give new ones without sending someone in person to make a physical delivery the way we've been getting books through Axis."

"Professor, to confirm, the person you spoke to identified herself as Kasigna, a goddess, and not as an emissary thereof?"

"Yes."

"Hamil, was your encounter similar?"

He fidgets. "Yes... Laedonius Deviy knocked on my door at home, made a pitch like the Professor said. After I touched his hand and he disappeared, I asked around my neighbors and none of them saw him come or leave. But he didn't give me an artifact." Did he get ripped off???

"Select Artigas, do you have ways of studying this 'compass' to characterize its nature and origins further? I will send for an enchantment expert from the Arcanorium as well... though the Professor here is an expert in necromancy as well, and may have insights?"

"Its function is highly useful for necromany of our tradition, but I suspect it would also be useful for necromancers of other worlds as well. It is obviously not enchanted with a simple bound Spell, but that is true for most advanced artifacts produced by [Mages] as well, let alone gods. I do not have the background in enchantment to compare any details. It has a strong and complex aura of death magic, but more similar to natural death magic than mana emanation, but it is not quite natural either."

"That is my assessment as well. It is dissimilar to powerful necromantic artifacts of Khelt, but not sufficiently on casual inspection to rule out being of local make."

"I can stare at it with Greater Detect Magic but don't know that I'd get much of anywhere; its primary advantage over the cantrip is that it lets one recognize a particular artifact-maker, sometimes, and I'm neither greatly talented at that nor likely to have seen anything else by the same hand. I can see if it has an alignment, some objects can."

"That may be useful. Although we believe you said that ordinary necromancy spells registered as Evil to your detection, so a necromancy enchantment may also be regardless of origin, which this certainly is, although it does apparently raise any undead... does it? Professor, would you be willing to relinquish this to our custody for three days?"

She bows. "Of course, Your Majesty. It does not raise any undead; it is purely a measurement instrument."

"Select, might your inevitable contacts have insight on the matter? At the least they may be able to fully rule out it being one of Golarion's powers which you have simply not heard of, or which is acting in an uncharacteristic way."

"I don't know if my inevitable contact is an expert on Golarion and which powers operate there in particular, but I can ask."

"Are there typical ways to discern the trustworthiness of a god, or characteristic behaviors of Evil gods? What is your assessment, if a definitive answer on the alignment and origin of Kasigna and Laedonius Deviy cannot be found?"

"Iomedae assessed Aroden's trustworthiness but - He was Lawful to begin with and the question was more about how He related to His mortal chosen. If they're -

- your majesty, are you able to consider the possibility that they are local gods returned to life?"

"Surely not. The gods are dead."

"...which is why they would have to be returned to life to do anything."

"Well." He touches his chin. "That would... but how would that happen? No, that cannot be possible. If they were returned to life, then they would not..." He shakes his head. "It cannot be the case. The gods are dead."

"I have noticed that people on this plane seem to have some - hitches - in thoughts about local gods -

- Aroden, the god who was Iomedae's patron when she was a mortal, died about a century ago. If someone appeared with a holy symbol like His and cast with it, and bore an aura of Law, and had an Arodenite ethos they wished to preach - I would expect one likely explanation to be that Aroden had returned to life. Yes?"

"Is that so? We do find a bit of—awkwardness—

"Aroden is one of the gods of your world, yes? You mean to draw an analogy to... Kasigna, and Laedonius Deviy, that they were ancient gods of this world which are now dead, who have now reappeared and begun acting upon the world again, from which one would reason that they have returned to life...

"However, the dead gods could not empower a [Cleric] and dispatch them to preach their work, as they are, of course, dead. It then stands to reason that the characters which empowered these two citizens cannot be the dead gods."

"Your majesty, I think you are falling into this mishap. I do not know for certain that Kasigna and Laedonius Deviy are local gods at all - they could be something I've never heard of, or inventions of some trickster power, or hoaxes by these people here though I have no reason nor wish to so accuse them. But, if they are local gods, then they are acting on the world here, and they are therefore live ones."