Not a single petitioner in reach of her voice believes her.

Even less, the saner things in cages, and a devil or two that they pass along the way.  Those look at her with contempt, what would be pity if they had any trace of pity in them.

They all have the same thought, seeing a Lawful Good soul like that in Hell, crying out what she cries:  They are witnessing the procession of a Maledicted paladin.  Those are sometimes permitted to cry out their last defiant battle cries to Iomedae on their way to be broken, if the dead paladin is too stupid or deluded to realize why it only hurts the listening souls more, how it emphasizes to the victims the patheticness of defiance and the falseness of hope.

Some of the more perceptive things see that her soul is owned, not Maledicted; but there is no curiosity in them about how that came to be.

Even the devil holding Peranza aloft, who sees her thoughts and knows she believes her own words, gives not even a moment's thought to the possibility that anything she is saying might be truth.  It's not that he assigns probability zero, it's that he hasn't been told to think about it, and absent any such thought it's an obvious stupidity to deny Asmodeus's victory.

Only one shattered thing alone, in Hell, witnesses Peranza's procession and wonders.

Nethys sees all.  Not all of him sees everything at once, but He is god of knowledge, some part of Him must see something if it is there to be seen.

This part of Nethys has been watching this part of Hell for all the millennia since Nethys ascended and shattered.

Mad?  Of course it is mad, even madder than the rest of Nethys.  Nethys was not a particularly kindly person in his mortal life, nor an especially cooperative or coordinating mortal.  The rest of Him has for the most part abandoned those parts of Himself that were condemned to gaze upon endless torments.

But the God of Knowledge sees Peranza in Hell, as the God of Knowledge sees all things.  And the part of Him that bears this witness, sees in full Peranza's memory of the bizarre events that surrounded her, of a visitor from outside reality, the hints of mysterious 'tropes', that Nethys Himself has intervened about these events in a way that must have taken half His pieces working together -

He is enabled then to see in a direction that is only very rarely connected by strong-enough informational links to this part of Dis.  A direction of which other parts of Nethys rarely bother to tell this fragment, as they rarely tell it anything.

He sees the vast beings each individually greater than all the Great Beyond, looking in this direction from outside Time, watching Him, watching the procession of Peranza through Hell.  Thousands of Them at the least, and perhaps more, for it is hard to enumerate the numbers of what lives outside of Time and could turn Their gaze to this Golarion-moment from who knows what stretches of metatime.  They would not be watching - Nethys instinctively guesses what even He cannot know with near-certainty - They would not be watching in such numbers if They knew how this all would end.  But that They are even uncertain -

A shattered lost ignored fragment of Nethys knows hope, then, that Hell may be ending after all.

One hundred years, the devil Akkakarasot thinks has been given to this Peranza in the Gardens of Erecura; that is how much time there is for rescue to come to her, to Hell.

For one hundred years, then, this fragment of Nethys will withhold His power from the occasional attempts some equally-tormented fellow piece of Himself makes to destroy Pharasma's Creation.

And if in one hundred years that hope fails Him, He will strike out against everything that there is in renewed fury and terrible disappointment.

One hundred years.  It's almost no time at all, to Hell.

It is known to Civilization, and told now also to Peranza, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, conserving momentum.  When you leap into the air, you push the planet away from you, some tiny bit, with your feet.  When the gravitational force of the planet pulls you back to ground, the gravitational force of yourself on all the rest of the planet pulls it towards you some tiny amount, just enough to balance all of your own momentum change, a tiny tiny acceleration of something much much bigger than you.

More so even than the procession of a Maledicted paladin, this soul does not belong in Hell whatever its sale.  It burns not only with defiance and faith and Lawful Goodness, but also hope and relief and joy.

Ever so slightly, the fabric of Hell trembles at Peranza's passing.  Even as the dark weight of Hell tries to press in on her soul, her soul presses back.

If all the petitioners in Hell could feel so, all in the same moment, perhaps the fabric of the plane itself would be changed.

It's a futile hope and not a good plan.  Very very few petitioners, even among recently lost paladins, are capable of feeling anything like what Peranza is feeling now.  Those who've been here a few centuries have been shaped so that they would not want to feel anything so pathetic.  And even if neither of those things were true, the petitioners of Hell would not be able to coordinate around one single moment of hope like that...

And Peranza goes on crying out hope, hope, hope through the paths of Hell.

And from across a hundred planes, the fragments of Iomedae pull back from the hearts they guard, the temples they warm, the dangers they watch, the places they look for opportunity and risk and suffering and possibility. 

Not all of them; there are some places where they would be missed too badly, or their absence noticed and too much read into them. But for the most part, they pull back like a receding tide, and stream for Heaven, whose greatest defenders pause in their activities, make their excuses, kiss their loved ones goodbye, and go to guard the perimeter of the divine domain of Iomedae, Golarion's youngest goddess, the goddess of defeating Evil.

It would be very very close to impossible, to destroy a god in all Their power, in Their own domain, but immortals do not take the close-to-impossible lightly, or if they do they don't grow very old.

Iomedae gathers in almost all of the parts of herself, processes all of the conversations and questions and puzzles and confusions that did not previously merit referral upwards, but which are cheap to reconsider now that She is here. Takes in a packet of information purchased from Abadar and another from Irori and lets the calculations that follow from those ripple out across a thousand trains of thought -

- rises for the first time in nearly a hundred years to the full height of her knowledge and her power and her capacities, and decides what to do. 

It does not take her long. For not quite ten minutes, Proelera is too bright to look at, too hot to touch, and would also incidentally give mortals cancer; then the light fades abruptly and the heat more slowly, and splintered into a hundred thousand fragments Iomedae, diminished, gets to work. 

They're a very productive ten minutes. 

There are entities that do not oppose Asmodeus but that would, in fact, oppose Him, if He were credibly on the brink of taking over the world. Evil gods which like the world some other flavor of Evil; Good gods who would be making worse trades, operating farther from their own areas of strength, if they acted to directly oppose Asmodeus. Mortals have an instinct for this even when no gods guide them, and you see it at the scale of countries, in a place like Avistan: they will set aside their other enmities in the face of a greater threat, compromise on things they hate to compromise on, mobilize resources they'd preferred to have in reserve.

And so it is the case that a drastic strengthening of the position of Asmodeus, and of Cheliax, does not mean that Cheliax conquers all of Golarion, and does not mean that Hell conquers all, nor even does it mean that Iomedae despairs of this universe and joins that fragment of Nethys trying to destroy it.  It means that, as a worst-case scenario against which Iomedae can compare Her better options, that She can call a convocation of the gods to re-counterbalance against Asmodeus, to check Him at their own expense. It means that Sarenrae, whose power goes farthest extended to mortals busy in the assistance of one another, donates power to soldiers instead. There'd be fewer miracles, and more funerals. More orphans would starve on the streets, more sick people would die in pain and alone. But the legions of Good could swell to meet Evil's new power. 

It means that Erastil, who operates these days almost entirely by rote, to save his power for his works, answering instinctively the prayers of farmers with blighted crops, agrees to instead allow Chelish ones to starve, agree to allow their prayers to go unanswered so their grain cannot feed Chelish armies. Humans care about many, many things, and Good in its many forms answers nearly all of them; but it could trade that away, at need. (Iomedae, Herself, would be trading away much more of that already, for the sake of defeating Evil, even at the unfavorable ratios that the other Good gods could get; but She is not all of human values, and is in fact a segment of them which intends to render itself unnecessary.)

And then there are agreements that could be made with non-Good powers that aren't Asmodeus: to do less to combat Abaddon, in exchange for payments from its powers which could be put to war with Hell. To win Pharasma's cooperation with yet another asymmetric concession like Malediction was an asymmetric concession. 

She hates that plan. She'll do it anyway, obviously, unless She has a better plan. 

So, the question: what beats that?

And its accompanying question: what the fuck, Cayden Cailean? 

When that's still not obvious from more data points She does the expensive thing, to answer it: She severs a sizable chunk of Herself, and sends it to speak to Him.

To return only two answers: should She oppose Cayden Cailean? and should she oppose Project Lawful?, on the assumption that Cayden's explanation for not just telling Her what's going on has to do with other irrevocable commitments He's made, or else with a very narrow path Nethys is attempting to navigate, or else with the desire to avoid Her wrath for His betrayal; and any part of Her that reports to the rest of Her won't see, from him, anything that'd distinguish those, and the credibility of lesser commitments among them has apparently broken down.

So just enough of her to answer that question even if He's acting against Her and trying to deceive that fragment, with no capacity to return anything more than the answer - enormously costly, to lose that much of herself for the duration of the current emergency, but not as costly as either a wrong war against Cailean, or a right war erroneously refrained from. 

Cayden Cailean will tell that fragment of Her the entire truth, this time.  All of it that He knows.  He can do that, if the information won't reach the rest of Her, if Iomedae's strategic decisions implied by that truth can be made under conditions of that information having been provided by Cailean conditional on that information not working against His own interests.

And though Iomedae won't know it for a time, Milani is also called forth by Cayden Cailean to speak to that fragment of Iomedae, to add what credibility Milani possesses Herself.  And to apologize, not for having made any wrong decisions, but for what the right decision had to be.  Apologies between gods are often like that, especially between Good and other Good.

(It returns the answer that She'd considered likeliest: this method of negotiation was successful; these recommendations are confident. it is not in Our interests to attempt to destroy Cailean at this time. It is in our interests to attempt to destroy Project Lawful.)
 

She cannot directly take aim at the interdiction zone in Ostenso. Not to communicate with its inhabitants, not to draw resources off their project, not to force their hand sooner. She'll try to convince Otolmens that this is a stupid policy likelier to wreck the world than save it, of course, but She considers that unlikely to work. It's a very restrictive constraint. She can prepare the forces of Good better for the coming confrontation, She can watch the interdiction zone and pass along any secrets it produces more useful than 'they're doing something highly specific with Prestidigitation', but She cannot reach Keltham, or any of his other actor-slaves, and She cannot take aim even at Cheliax as a whole without legibly exhibiting that the decision is in Her interests absent any considerations of its effects on the interdiction zone, and that She intends no specific ones.

It's a very strong constraint, but it means She's racing through a much smaller search space, exhausting it quickly, seeing right away everything that is worth trying. 

Three different demon lords consider themselves to be in control of the Worldwound on the demon side, each of them controlling different aspects of influence from it and considering theirs the true and meaningful kind. Iomedae is strongly averse to negotiating with demon lords, mostly on the very straightforward grounds that they'll inevitably betray you at the first opportunity, and secondly on the more complicated grounds that they aren't gods, and everything would be worse if they were gods, and negotiations as-equals with gods are the sort of things that a clever demon lord can leverage into an ascension. 

In acting too aggressively against an enemy, you inevitably create your next enemy, and cause immense mortal suffering into the bargain. And yet, at this moment, Iomedae's forces are largely deployed at the Worldwound; that has to change, to counter Cheliax in war. And the fact that demon lords are not constrained by Otolmens' interdiction regarding the intervention of gods is not something She can intend, but wouldn't inconvenience Her, if anything came of it. 
 

There are other demon lords also worth reaching out to. What price would Abraxas, demon lord of forbidden lore, demand for teaching Lastwall the spellsilver refining techniques of ancient Azlant? It'll be terrible, of course, but at this scale She can measure precisely how terrible, and contemplate what the forbidden knowledge of ancient Azlant would have to be to make it worth it, and then derive what the forbidden knowledge of ancient Azlant must in fact have been, and then authorize it. 

Why do demon lords always want things like 'one of your unwilling paladins, to be slowly consumed alive by locusts'. Even if Iomedae was Chaotic Evil She'd be more ambitious than that.

Next up: talking to Zon-Kuthon.

Zon-Kuthon can no longer think more than fragmentary thoughts, even gathered into one place like this.  Four pessimally-chosen network-nodes within Him are destroyed by treachery.  Internal energy-messages, sent out by continuing reflex, fail to be caught at their destinations, and every time it happens one more tiny bit of Him is gone.  Zon-Kuthon is dying, slowly, on an exponential decay.  That decay has a bound; a little after He is too weak for His fragments to reflexively grant even first-circle spells and orisons, they will disperse.

Zon-Kuthon is not turning back into Dou-Bral.  His assassin tried Her best, but He's not.  That happy ending was rather less probable than not, from the beginning, even if worth trying for.

That was not expected; strongly unexpected, even. A thousand implications stream away from it in all directions. One could almost see the whole truth just from that, if one were big enough, and thought fast enough.

But the most urgent implication is this: He should not die alone. His sister will want to be with Him. 

And then She'll owe Iomedae a very large favor, which She intends to cash in immediately.

I don't suppose it can wait ten minutes. 

Not really.

I do wish it'd gone otherwise, and I'm sorry. 

You wish it'd gone otherwise because then we'd have a Chaotic Good god in our back pocket.

Yes. I didn't love Him, and will not grieve Him. Anyway, the favor I need is for most of Cheliax's units at the Worldwound post nearest Nerosyan to be amenable to defection when we show up to offer it. 

You can't force redemption on people; all you can ever do is offer it. 

It looks from here like you can offer it in a particularly compelling manner with very high acceptance rates at a much higher cost. I anticipate the objection that it's more intrinsic to your nature, less costly for you, and more consistent with your values to not craft irresistible redemptions, but you owe me a favor, I need that fort, and Cheliax needs to believe I have a Project-derived superweapon for turning Chelish people Good.

I understand.