"Arrangements will be made with your [Secretary]."

"Thank you, your majesty." And he will gesture the [Clerics] out with him.

Does he want to stash them somewhere, interrogate them more, give them homework?

If he checks in on his Golarion cleric cohort, the class is having a great time looking up references to Cayden Cailean in the holy books they do have and stringing up a conspiracy board on the wall, half of which is invented whole cloth by the new [Bartender]-cleric.

He wants to stash them, and ask them to write down their accounts of their visions as completely as they can, along with any intuitions they may have about the relevant edicts, practices, etcetera their [Cleric]hoods may have come with.

He's glad the Caydenite is having fun, they're probably supposed to do it even more often than once a month.

They'll get to work on that. Does he have a CliffsNotes account of what's going on for the other [Clerics], or are they in information lockdown mode?

"I could try to explain it but you would probably very literally not be able to understand it."

Sounds rough. Maybe they can pray about it. (They're not very calibrated on how much one should expect praying to do anything useful and/or observable, but it's a good placeholder action when they cant think of what else to do, which is apparently part of the point.)

After a while, the professor comes back with a short write-up. She actually took shorthand notes last night about the Kasigna encounter, so she's just transcribing it back to long form. It's not terribly more detailed than the account she already presented to the King, she doesn't have a play-by-play of the conversation, but the extra note Blai might want to register are:

Titles:

• Goddess of the End
• Goddess of Death
• Three-In-One (clarified on further questioning to be the 'maiden', 'mother' and 'crone', aspects embodying mercy, judgment and wrath respectively)

Domains(?):

• Death
• "End"?
• "Afterlife"? (mentioned in passing, did not clarify, possibly important?)
• Necromancy? (speculated, based on apparent expertise)

Appearance:

• Female, adult, veiled face
• Moved gracefully but slowly
• Even voice (imperious?)
• Hand was cold and dry, appeared pale, but lighting was poor, may be trick of light

Mentioned a daughter, but this was before she revealed herself as a goddess, so may be an initial pretended character.

Mentioned she was "older than the mountains".

Details of conversation on clerichood:

• Kasigna offered to choose me as a [Cleric] first.
• I asked about her alignment. She was confused about the concept, I think, and when I clarified about Good, Evil, Law and Chaos, she said she was 'beyond such things'.
• I asked if she offered negative channeling. She said she could "do more than that". At this point she began creating the compass.

She had no aura of death magic, and no aura of death magic when she assembled the compass, although she was clearly manipulating the bone with an unnatural ability, but the compass had an aura of death magic after it was complete. However, the lack of visible magic during manufacture may be an illusion, as the bones apparently consumed to create the compass were later found to be still intact in the sand.

I prayed the same night, around 11:15 PM, and received (immediately, not when going to sleep):

• [Cleric] Level 1
• [Unholy Aura]
  • Possibly causally related to request for negative channeling?
  • Appears to strengthen death magic near the user, enhancing the performance of skeletons.
  • Appears to slowly wither plant life. Was not further tested to avoid damaging University property.
• [Prayer]
  • No observable effect.

Was the professor within range of any of his Aura Sight scans earlier...

Nope, he's never seen her in his life.

Well, he'll put her in range when he's checking the object. Would she like to have a look at his presentation notes on the afterlife?

She had vaguely heard of them second-hand but appreciates some actual presentation notes! Kasigna did not mention any specific afterlife... what was it she said, exactly? "Those concerned with their afterlife," as one of the demographics that worship her. Does that mean anything to Blai?

"Well, I don't know if there is any special arrangement for people on this plane, it's not impossible, but within Pharasma's Creation which I and the gods I've been introducing are from, dead people are sorted into one of nine possible afterlives depending on their alignment." Here's the notes with the chart and stuff.

Weird.

"Apparently our necromancy is different than your necromancy, I've heard. Could that affect things? Before you came along, it was commonly believed that souls don't actually... go anywhere... when they die."

"I don't think the necromancy being different causes the afterlife to be different but they could have some kind of relationship, or you could just lack any of the mechanisms we use to determine that souls go places, like scrying and resurrection."

"...So, in particular, it is understood that the souls of the dead of Khelt are bound to the land by the ancient magicks of Queen Khelta the First, and called upon by the King to animate the skeletons that serve as our workforce. But the parts of the soul that enable cognitive and spiritual function are unable to be sustained in the absence of a real living body, not without higher techniques of necromancy, so the parts retained by the Kingdom are partial, closer to a fossil, or a residual echo, than a living person.

"The mechanisms of the pact are not well understood, as no one in twenty thousand years has matched the genius and knowledge of the First Queen and she did not leave detailed notes on her work. It's possible we are mistaken. But the dominant understanding I've described, is... suggestive, at least, that ordinary souls of this world do not persist as whole entities that travel elsewhere after death, and instead undergo a process more similar to decomposition or dissolution."

"And the higher techniques, like what I presume to be operative for his majesty... are in less use? More difficult, more expensive, lost...?"

"More difficult, more expensive, and often considered unethical, as they are generally unpleasant for the subject and have a high risk of going wrong in many different ways. I'm reluctant to say more for secrecy reasons—" Actually, she might have said too much already. "—but there are relatively well-understood techniques for binding a soul after death relatively intact, preserving their cognition and agency. It is necessary for the eventual succession of Khelt's monarchs. Even individuals outside Khelt have managed it, through history, either rediscovering buried knowledge or by experimentation."

"...it's unpleasant enough not to be more popular than dissolving?"

"...I don't think people usually think of it that way."

"On Golarion one common motivation for becoming undead on purpose is to avoid an unpleasant afterlife and I don't have a good guess how dissolving would compare on appeal for most people."

"Well, if you ask anyone if they'd rather die or not die, they'd like to not die, obviously. But if you turn yourself into a skeleton, you can't eat or drink, you can't feel things properly, it's debated if the actual moment-to-moment sensation of existence is unpleasant, and there's a good chance you turn yourself insane...

"And it's not like—you can't just wake up one morning and decide to become a lich, right, there's a lot of not very tractable steps in between? Say you're a citizen of Khelt; it's hard to get good at necromancy, and harder to get trusted enough to learn the more secret ways, and practically impossible to derive a way to turn yourself undead secretly and with logistics you can afford... I suppose if you wake up one morning at sixteen and decide you never ever want to die, you have a passable shot at lichdom, but it's a very weird sixteen year old that does that. And if you're an outsider it's even harder, because where would you start? Necromancy's illegal a lot of places, and where it's not it's not very well regarded, nonetheless."

"So, what I'm saying is, dying isn't great, but turning yourself undead isn't a very practical or achievable way to avoid that, I think. There was that necromancer archmage from Terandria around a decade ago, if he hadn't gotten himself killed I wouldn't have been surprised if he eventually made himself into a lich? But most people aren't a necromancer archmage and can't expect to be a necromancer archmage."

"It doesn't take archmagery on Golarion to be a lich, I think it's been done as low as - fifth circle? Maybe only sixth, but still."

"I don't know how that compares to our magic. It doesn't take an archmage to make a lich but I wouldn't expect an ordinarily capable necromancer to be capable of rederiving a procedure and refining it satisfactorily to be confident it won't drive them evil and insane.

"I think it's... just not a thing people do? And not obviously going to extend your life expectancy if you do it?"

"It doesn't on average extend life expectancy on Golarion either because it makes one such a target. And I believe it does often drive them insane and requires a lot of evil to accomplish. But, well, the necromantic traditions clearly differ."

"...but if it doesn't on average extend life expectancy and often drives them insane, why do they do it?"