In this world, there are -- for the main part -- three kinds of people.

There are people who want to conquer all Golarion, because their urge for domination has no end.

There are people who want to hurt all Golarion, because their suffering in life has led to vengefulness, hatred, envy of those who suffer less.  Perhaps that emotion could have someday been satiated in life, if its fulfillment button had been pressed over and over to the point of monotony and boredom.  But once you are undead your feelings will never change that much.  And so the desire to deal out suffering becomes an urge that has no end.

 ...And then there are the normal fucking sane people.  Who just wanted to go on researching magic, without getting eternally tortured, merely because Pharasma for all Her super-divinity cannot comprehend how those experiments could not possibly have been Evil given that they were productive, useful, and let's be frank here, fun.

At least, those are the kinds of people that seem to last and stick around.  Many proto-liches, the raw material from which liches sometimes arise, do not fall into one of these three categories; but those such mostly do not stick around, and no one who matters will trouble themselves to memorize their names.

As for the notion of a non-wizard who is a person, that is a contradiction in terms.

Azkiran considers himself a straightforward sort of entity.

His religion is a simple one that doesn't bother with stupid doctrines.

There is no fun god but Nethys, and Takaral is His herald.

If one were to ask why liches do not rule the world already -- given that they accumulate, and other sorts of entities mostly do not accumulate -- the obvious answer would be that they are not very cooperative.

The hurters hate each other as much as they hate the world.

It is a rare dominator-lich who successfully dominates other liches, and Tar-Baphon is the exception who proves the rule.  Yes Azkiran is using that expression correctly; Tar-Baphon was an exception, and did come close to conquering the world, and the non-exceptions don't.

And Nethys is famous among gods for His inability to cooperate even with Himself.

But Nethys's disability is not the entire story, when it comes to the third kind of person.

For Takaral, the most skillful necromancer of all time -- not to be confused with Tar-Baphon, whose philosophy is apparently 'why bother grinding Spellcraft when you are mythic enough that your spells work anyway' -- Takaral is yet sane.

From the perspective of Nethys's herald, of course, even grown liches must seem like just a pre-creature that might eventually turn into something one twentieth as interesting as Takaral.

But adults will sometimes interact even with toddlers that they do not love, in a way that they will not trouble themselves with insects except to trod them underfoot.  It's rare, but it happens.  This is true of liches and wizards, and it is also true of Takaral and liches.

Eriape went and published an interesting new spell, giving it to the world of her own will, motivated only by the will to spread that particular magic that was her own special interest.

Eriape now languishes, betrayed by the Law she offered nothing but obedience and help, unloved by Good.

She is not trying to be a normal person, even by the standards of the third sort of people.

She is a very Nethysian lich.

It is the preference of Takaral that Nethysian liches occasionally pretend to act like they care about each other a tiny little bit, if it costs them very little.  So that there are slightly more of the sane kind of person to very rarely end up mattering.  Takaral isn't Lawful about it, Nethys forbid, but it's the sort of anecdote you can drop to get a favoring nod, if there happens to be a brief conversation once every thousand years or two.

After some extremely careful, ginger, and largely secondhand investigation, the situation wouldn't look to a less incredibly sane person like an easy issue to resolve.

Eriape cannot be rescued with her own cooperation, for she is under a mythic Dominate, and that mythic mage will know the instant a rescue attempt becomes apparent to Eriape herself.  Azkiran is not actually good enough to Dispel that Dominate, nor powerful enough to Disjoin it, and being mythic the Dominate would last through a non-mythic antimagic field or any other kind of magic that Azkiran can wield.

That Dominate will not extend across planes, however, mythic or not...

...Eriape's lump of stone cannot be plane-shifted out in a lightning assault, because it is inside the palace of Cheliax beneath a Forbiddance.

But the first principle of sanity is to not overcomplicate your problems; and the first question to ask about inherent problem complexity is, "Can I solve this problem just by using an explosion?"  Often the moment you ask yourself, "Could I solve this problem using an explosion?" you can see it's not a complicated problem.

Nobody put Eriape under serious guard.  He'll just Dominate an adventurer and have them explode the lump of petrified stone, Eriape, and of course themselves.  Then Eriape resurrects from her phylactory -- which she has successfully kept hidden, or the mage wouldn't bother with the Dominate.

It is, definitionally, not complicated.

And then, three days later, in a small broom closet in Axis- the mortal-information-restricted part of Axis- Eriape wakes. 

"Gosh!"

She looks at her reformed integument. 

"That was Surely a Most Wicked Queen! Killing me would have been Most Inconvenient, for Pharasma does not yet Value Badgers as she Ought, despite the Many Letters i have Sent Her."

She sits up, scratches her head, and smiles. 

"Rude if you ask Me!" 

(...That didn't actually end up uncomplicated, but it did get resolved by explosion, and that's the most you can ask out of unlife.


That's been Azkiran, over and out.)