At the end of his third tour of duty, now fourth circle, he’s offered the standard choice given those with his obvious level of potential: civilian life, as free of danger as anyone can ever be in Cheliax, or an officer’s commission and a chance to hit fifth circle and beyond. The latter choice will, of course, require him to sell his soul.

Well, he thinks, he certainly wasn't going to overthrow Hell as a fourth-circle wizard.

Now, however, he has to.

Five years later

The war in Andoran is going badly, because Infrexus Thrune is an idiot.

It's not that he wants the war to be going well for Cheliax, even though he mostly expects any resulting experiment in self-government by Andoran to be a disaster that only improves on the previous state of affairs if one happens to prefer the Abyss to Hell. (He doesn't.) The problem is that the war is going badly in a way that his specific competence is required to correct, and it doesn't actually serve his long-term interests to be incompetent on purpose. (Or so he tells himself, and while he has enough Wisdom to probably not be wrong about that, he also has enough Pride to disprefer solutions that involve being incompetent on purpose.)

Chelish supply lines are being decimated by guerilla fighters in the mountains of western Andoran; if Cheliax could retake the port of Augustana it could feed its armies without traversing the mountains, but the walls of Augustana have not been breached since the days when the Chelaxian Empire* ruled the whole Inner Sea, and they don't look likely to suddenly fall now. The city is blockaded and besieged, of course, but it's rather hard to starve out a city when its defenders have a Chelish quantity of wizards (plus foreign volunteers) and much less fifth-circle-related defection risk, and are willing to devote a significant portion of their Teleportation capacity to keeping it fed.

Riudaure does not want Cheliax to win, but there's not wanting Cheliax to win, and then there's wanting the war to go on forever because Cheliax is far stronger but its generals are selected for being stupid enough to think Asmodeanism is a good idea. He informs his commanding officer that he has a plan to take Augustana with a dozen wizards and roughly as many high-level fighters, but could they please issue the fighters Intelligence headbands first.

*Technically the Taldan Empire, but Cheliax has always been of the opinion that it's the true heir to the legacy of ancient Taldor, and the country now calling itself that is a bunch of half-Qadiran pretenders at best.

Issue...fighters...what?

"This plan cannot, in fact, be carried out by idiots. I was assuming wizards had that covered but one never knows with fighters."

(Really it's Wisdom, not Intelligence, that he requires, but Wisdom enhancement has a fraught history in Cheliax and a defection here, even by a fighter, could actually do serious damage.)

(Which is the point.)

"Your point is made. What, precisely, is the plan."

"Teleport in, announce I'm defecting—"

"Are you?" His voice grows even colder than usual.

"The problem with plans that have that as a first step is that then we can't tell if you're defecting for real."

The problem with Cheliax, among many, is that they can't abide even fake disloyalty in the service of an espionage operation. He doesn't say this, of course.

"—pretend to defect, get close enough to the gatehouse to Dispel the Forbiddance, Teleport in a team to take it over," he continues. "If for some reason you think I'm a defection risk despite the fact that my soul is the property of Hell, and Andoran for some reason agrees, that only makes the deception more believable. But, in fact, the problem most people in Cheliax would have with pulling this off is that they're not loyal enough to contemplate disloyalty without actually breaking, so they just prevent themselves from thinking about it at all. This is, in fact, an extremely obvious plan; I see no other explanation for why it hasn't already been suggested, attempted, and executed."

One does not, in Cheliax, imply that one's superiors are less competent than oneself without being lit on fire, which Riudaure now is. The effect this has, of limiting the competence of units to that of the weakest link in their chain of command, does not seem to have been noticed.

Riudaure, however, is lucky enough to have a commanding officer who will light you on fire and then pretend your idea was his all along.

"Can you. Dispel the Forbiddance, that is."

He greatly prefers being on fire to being surrounded by idiots. Well. He's still surrounded by idiots, but at least they're not incorrigible idiots.

"Intel suggests their highest-level cleric in Augustana is a sixth-circle of Iomedae," he says. "You can send someone higher-level if you like, if you think Andoran will fall for it."

Genuinely high-level wizards in Cheliax are very strongly selected for being incredibly terrible people, the sort who wouldn't help Andoran even if it would get them out of Hell, which it wouldn't. Riudaure is, in peacetime, a captain in the Chelish secret police, and difficult to mistake for Good unless he's trying hard to fool you, but no one would ever mistake him for one of those either. There's a reason he's marked as a defection risk in spite of being soul-sold.

"I'll approve a strike team under your command. I certainly don't want anyone more valuable to lose their head if this fucks up. We cannot, actually, afford Intelligence headbands for fighters but I will try to ensure that they have balanced abilitystats, as they say." A slight curl of one corner of his mouth.

"And Captain? I am sure you know what our agreement with Hell says about those who betray Cheliax having sold their souls."

(It says that they should suffer as much as Hell can make them suffer, even at the cost of any other use they might have; Cheliax will compensate their owners out of its own treasury if need be.)

"Dismissed."

"Sir."

He bows almost imperceptibly, and dimdoors out. It's not the wisest use of a fourth-circle spell, but the major is only a mediocre wizard and this is one of the few ways of showing him up that won't get Riudaure reflexively lit on fire, since he's now on the other side of the camp.

He Teleports in to Augustana's central plaza and raises his hands above his head.

A rather pointless action, since he's immediately hit by five Hold Persons and a high-powered Detect Thoughts.

He doesn't resist any of the spells, and is thinking very clearly that he is Captain Jean Riudaure, sixth-circle wizard, of His Majesty's Secret Service for the Preservation of Peace, Order, and the Asmodean Faith, on wartime assignment to the Eighth Infantry Division, and he is here to betray Cheliax because, in fact, worshipping Asmodeus is stupid even if you're going to Hell anyway.

Spell Gauge.

Detect Alignment.

"He's a wizard. Lawful Evil. Higher level than me."

Bestow Curse (Intelligence).

"On your knees, diabolist."

That was rude. No need to prevent him from thinking.

(He recognizes that the purpose is to deprive him of his higher-circle spells, but it's still rude.)

He kneels.

One soldier handcuffs him while another deprives him of his headband (+4 INT) and other magic items.

Eventually someone dimdoors in who can cast Antimagic Field. Mercifully, they Remove the Curse first.

"Keep me unscryable unless you want half the Chelish secret police showing up."

A woman arrives, in the dress of a Good cleric. Pulls him out of the Antimagic Field and Plane Shifts him to a demiplane. It's also antimagic.

(Or so it appears to wizards. In fact, divine magic works fine. It's a gift from the Church of Sarenrae to the war effort; fighting the Infernal Empire attracts a lot of foreign volunteers.)

The demiplane is a grassy field with a uniformly white sky overhead. There are house-sized buildings to either side of where they landed. She leads him into the one on the left.

"Are we still unscryable?" he asks, taking a seat in what appears to be their interrogation room, although it's vastly more comfortable than any such thing in Cheliax.

"Building's lined in lead and keys to this demiplane aren't easy to get. Are you expecting them to escalate to Wish-kidnapping? We can get you a Mind Blank."

"No. Before I go into more detail on that, who's your god?"

"Milani."

"I don't negotiate with Chaos."

"I'm Neutral Good. I keep my promises, although I do prefer not to make any to diabolists."

"I want someone Lawful. Verifiably so in some way that isn't Detect Alignment, which I can't cast."

"Very well."

She leaves and a few minutes later a man arrives. He's visibly a high-level paladin of Iomedae, wearing an Andoren army uniform. (Which is basically just a Chelish army uniform, but blue.)

He casts Zone of Truth.

"Your name and rank, for the record?" he says.

He repeats them.

"To be clear," he says, "this is a negotiation, not an interrogation. I will, however, have to provide certain information for my negotiating position to make sense. To proceed you will need to swear on your Law and the honor of your goddess not to use that information against myself or Cheliax until I grant you permission. If you do not think yourself capable of keeping that oath please find me someone who is."

"I will need to pray to my goddess for guidance on this matter, if I am to swear on her honor," he says. Which he then does.

Is this, uh, legit?

Sure, gods do this sort of thing all the time. Mortals inventing the concept themselves are pretty rare and I doubt he actually understands it, but yes, make the oath and keep it.

(Iomedae's comms bandwidth to random paladins, even high-level ones, is quite limited, so all that comes across is a vague feeling of yes.)

"Upon my Law and the honor of my goddess, I so swear."

"They think this is a fake defection. I am, in fact, defecting for real, but they don't know that. If I start giving away troop positions, Teleport locations, and such, then we will actually have half the Chelish intelligence service after us, and while they are mostly not so intelligent as the name may suggest, I am not in fact sufficiently confident that either of us survive that. I would greatly prefer not to die until I do something about the fact that my soul is owned by Hell."

(He hasn't actually decided whether he's defecting for real, but it's a real enough possibility that he can fool the Zone of Truth about it, while also trying to preserve as much option value as possible in the world where he doesn't.)

He nods in agreement. "Hell is a horror and no one should go there," he says. "We intend to do something about it too. In the meantime—well, when we have to execute Lawful Evil people we usually statue them, or barring that Plane Shift them to Abaddon, but neither of those protect a soul-sold defector from being assassinated by Cheliax. The only thing I can think of is a Contingent Soul Bind, which we could probably arrange, but it would trade off against lots of other important uses of Felandriel Morgethai's spell slots.

"If you want to tell us everything you know and then be a statue in a vault in Heaven until we fix Hell, we could arrange that."

(The fact that there are Good factions whose main goal is to improve conditions in Hell is not knowledge available in Cheliax, even—especially—to soul-sold Security wizards.)

What.

Why does Iomedae care about Hell?

It's obvious why the Good gods would want to overthrow Cheliax: it's the biggest stronghold of Evil on Golarion (that is, if you don't count the Worldwound), and it contains millions of people who would probably be Good or at least Neutral if they hadn't been tricked and threatened into Evil their entire lives. (This thought is not even heretical, in the Inner Ring; it's perfectly Asmodean to trick people into doing Evil, thereby exploiting the Contract of Creation, which damns those souls to Hell, for Asmodeus' benefit.) But Cheliax also contains a lot of people, probably all of the important people, who are genuinely Evil. If you're going to Hell anyway, why wouldn't you be?

The rest of the world, he supposes, is much the same, at least if you aren't in fucking Lastwall or some other country that's ruled directly by a god of Good. The difference between Cheliax and Osirion is that in Cheliax, everyone important is soul-sold and being Stupid Evil is high status, so people are mostly Stupid Evil, while in Osirion people realize that Hell fucking sucks and they don't want to go there, so they donate however much Pharasma requires to keep them on track for Axis. If Iomedae turns Hell into Axis Two, Her church loses half its income and a whole lot of people lose their only incentive not to actually deal with their problems in a way that Good doesn't particularly approve of. This does not, to him, seem like an improvement to the state of Good on Golarion.

Not only that, but Lawful Evil rules the most powerful nation on the Inner Sea even while being ruled by a god of Stupid Evil. If you overthrow Him and replace the faith of Cheliax with a Lawful Evil one that isn't fucking stupid, they probably straightforwardly conquer Golarion. He fails to see how this is an improvement from Iomedae's perspective.

"It would seem to me," he says, "that 'fixing Hell' would be an Evil cause rather than a Good one. I am—frankly unsure of what Iomedae's interest is in this."

"Iomedae's interest is that people not be tortured!" He would have thought this obvious but he does know that Chelish people are sometimes confused about whether torture is bad. "The suffering in Hell so vastly exceeds that caused by merely mortal Evil that it simply doesn't make sense to focus on anything else, although of course we are also quite opposed to Abaddon and the Abyss."

Oh.

"I am Evil, and doubt that I could ever be Good," he says, "but I do not, in fact, value the suffering of others as an end in itself, and it has always seemed to me that those who do ought be the enemy of all. If it is not, in fact, the case that the torments of Hell were demanded by the ancient gods of Good as a disincentive against Evil, or there are at least Good gods who reject this, then perhaps I have more interests in common with Good than I thought."

"Of course the torments of Hell were not demanded by the gods of Good!—well, if that does turn out to be the case we'll overthrow whatever god did that too!"

(It wasn't a Good god, but a Neutral one, who set up the alignment system, but they're totally going to overthrow Her too if they can figure out how to do it without destroying the universe.)

"Anyway, you said that Cheliax had instructed you to pretend to defect. What's the plan there, as far as they know?"

"Dispel the Forbiddance on Augustana's gatehouse so they can Teleport in a strike team. I think you either have to allow that, or statue me in a way that doesn't look like I had a choice; if they conclude I've defected for real I'm not sure we can keep me alive.

"—I don't, actually, want to be a statue yet. I've been waiting for years to betray them in a way that matters; I just don't think this mission is it."

"...that would not have worked. Our usual policy for defectors is to keep them far away from the actual fighting and use them in an advisory role only; for a wizard of your level, we might have made an exception, but if so you would have been assigned to a randomly chosen location, not the one you happened to Teleport into. For reasons which are obvious, given what your superiors were planning.

"That said, if there's a plan to win this war that's served better by Augustana surrendering, Augustana can surrender. I just can't imagine what that plan might be."

Oh. Yeah. That makes sense. (Cheliax hasn't thought very much about how to handle people defecting to their side, since there aren't any.)

"I had thought of several traps which Cheliax might be lured into by the apparent fall of Augustana," (obviously he isn't going to volunteer what they are to someone who hasn't confirmed he's cleared to know about that sort of thing), "but simple surrender would, I think, arouse suspicion. The city must fall by my hand, and you cannot simply return me there now. No one in the city when it falls may know that anything is out of the ordinary. If they do Cheliax will almost certainly learn it from them; they are very good at that."

"That would imply that you yourself must not be recaptured, I assume?"

"No. I'm needed. I can beat—"

—he could beat Detect Thoughts before, when he intended to betray Cheliax eventually but not right now, and possibly not ever if no worthwhile opportunity presented itself. He almost certainly can't do so now.

"I need someone who can cast Modify Memory here in the next, uh, thirteen rounds," he says, and starts explaining the plan.

Two days later in Ostenso, a priest of Iomedae is arrested for being a priest of Iomedae, and given how stupid it is to be a priest of Iomedae in Cheliax, presumably an Andoren spy.

He doesn't last long in a torture chamber before he starts promising to give up all the details on Andoran's secret operations demiplane as long as they swear not to torture or Maledict anyone there.

(They switch out demiplanes every few weeks anyway. It isn't too great a cost.)

They'll take that deal.

Riudaure gets a Sending: "Extraction imminent. Team briefed on Augustana plan, proceed if possible. Acknowledge only if safe."

He doesn't say anything. It's not safe.

A Gate opens, and the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus steps through, flanked by several lesser Asmodean clerics and followed by two dozen elite Chelish fighters.

"This demiplane is mine," she says. "Are we all in agreement or do we need to have a fight about it?"

SHIT.

Even priestesses of the Chaotic Good goddess of revolution recognize that the rules of combat in Golarion are that the ninth-circle caster wins.

That said, they do have a plan for something like this. She starts joining hands with the other Andorens, plus Riudaure, preparing to Plane Shift them to Elysium.

Dimensional Lock.

"That," says Aspexia Rugatonn, "was as predictable as it was foolish."

She looks at Riudaure. "Did you get a good look at the gatehouse."

"Yes, Most High," he says, kneeling.

"Take my hand."

He rises, and does so, mostly not terrified.

"Kill them all," she tells her subordinates, and Plane Shifts both of them to the Material.

Clerics, even ninth-circle ones, can't teleport within a plane. He has to do it, and while Rugatonn could easily resist an involuntary Teleport, she doesn't get any information about the destination before making that decision.

The Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus is, in this moment, completely within his power.

He's only ever seen the House of Oblivion in a scry, but it's within his Teleport range. Even a ninth-circle cleric probably can't walk away from landing on its doorstep.

He knows the odds. It's only three in four that they even get close enough that Rugatonn has a chance of losing. It's probably more likely than not, in the end, that she walks away and he suffers in Hell forever.

(He starts weaving the spell.)

There are people who would make that trade, but not him. He doesn't, actually, want to die, even to Abaddon rather than Hell.

They land just outside the Forbiddance of the gatehouse of Augustana.

Dispel Magic.

The Forbiddance shatters, and a round later there are a dozen simultaneous Teleports and the gatehouse is basically taken before the fight even begins. Riudaure doesn't even really get a chance to join in.

An eighth-circle wizard, one of less than ten Teleporters whom Aspexia actually trusts not to send her to the House of Oblivion or the heart of the Worldwound or anywhere similarly stupid, Teleports her away to safety, and then they raise the gates. The battle for the city itself, such as it is, doesn't last long either.

Riudaure, somewhat predictably, is arrested while they investigate the whole "fake defection" business.

He suspected it was going to go like this, despite the fact that he just delivered them a city of vital strategic importance and somehow, also, Andoran's secret operations demiplane where they keep their wizard prisoners. Well, mostly Aspexia Rugatonn did that, but she evidently wouldn't have bothered if he hadn't come up with the plan.

—how did they find him? He wasn't thinking about that in the heat of combat, but it's hard not to think about now, chained to the wall in a torture chamber back in Egorian to await his fate. The probability that they chanced upon the intelligence somewhere else at precisely the right time is obviously quite low. Andoran must have given it up on purpose.

This is a trap.

He doesn't tell anyone, because he doesn't actually want Cheliax to win.

The interrogator comes in. She's a woman, which isn't unusual, though she's young for her apparent rank, and rather prettier than one normally sees in the army. Her clothing is plainly expensive, plainly intended for combat, and very Asmodean in style, but is not actually a Chelish military uniform. That's somewhat more unusual.

She casts Mind Probe. There's something strange about the way she casts the spell, though Riudaure lacks the context to identify it.

(There are few people in Cheliax with the Sense Motive to reliably beat Riudaure's spectacularly high Bluff, but there are any.)

"Did you, in the course of this operation, knowingly betray Cheliax?" she asks, the force of the question carving into his mind in search of its answer like a knife.

"No." Well, only as a deception.

"Do you expect any harm to come to come to Cheliax as a result of your actions, intentional or unintentional?"

"I'm not sure how you found me. It seems likely that they leaked that information and therefore that this is some kind of a trap." No point trying to hide that at this point.

"That's a wise thought," she says. "Security." She gestures at presumably an invisible wizard in the corner of the room.

Break Enchantment.

Remove Curse.

He's not enchanted or cursed, so this does nothing.

"Are you loyal to Cheliax?"

"I'm Evil. I'm loyal to myself. Keep my incentives aligned and I'll serve you well."

"I suppose I need not remind you of what those incentives are," she says.

"Under what circumstances would you betray Cheliax?"

"None." If I thought there were a way to escape Hell by doing so.

She laughs, and cancels the Mind Probe.

"A reasonable answer," she says. "The very same, in fact, that I would give. And yet there is not such a way. Had I my way, I would send you there now, so as to remind you of this essential fact, but my handlers inform me that sixth-circle wizards are 'valuable' and Raise Dead diamonds are 'expensive'. So I suppose I shall have to make do.

"Alas, my art is not yet the equal of the devils'. But I suppose I shall require practice to perfect it."

[torture censored]

The morning after he arrives, a slave comes by his quarters to return the items Andoran confiscated from him, now recovered: his headband, Medallion of Thoughts, and Bag of Holding.

The Bag of Holding is an advanced model that requires a password to open, but he opens it just to make sure everything is still there anyway.

Everything is there! Plus one additional item that he definitely didn't put there: a scroll of Meteor Swarm.

Huh?

That's a ninth-circle spell.

(An entirely pointless thought; of course it's a ninth-circle spell; that doesn't actually tell him anything about how the scroll got there.)

Almost reflexively, as he's long been in the habit of doing when faced with a mystery, he casts Cunning and Wisdom on himself.

...there's a discontinuity in his memories of his interrogation. It's incredibly obvious now that he's looking at it.

They erased something. What did they erase? Something he was meant to rederive, on encountering this incredibly expensive scroll that they certainly wouldn't give to an enemy.

He defected, truly and unambiguously, and they erased the memory so that he could pass an interrogation by Cheliax about it. Which means the Church of Iomedae must have shown him a workable way out of hell. (It was a paladin of Iomedae who interrogated him, and it seems unlikely that Andoran as a faction could do that.) That's the only condition under which he'd risk Hell's wrath, which can, in fact, always get worse.

He must have given them the password to the Bag of Holding, which means he must have helped formulate the plan. What was it?

It's obvious. A significant portion of the Chelish fleet, down on supplies and in need of repairs after the long blockade, has come into the newly available port. He can actually see the ships out his window.

Ships are extremely flammable.

He reads off the scroll, targeting the docks.

He doesn't stick around to watch the ships burn, of course. The moment the first spell pulls itself free of the scroll he's already casting a Teleport to the Ascendant Court in Absalom.

He runs into the Temple of Iomedae.

"I just destroyed about a third of the Chelish navy and I need to be unscryable in the next six seconds," he says to no one in particular.

The Iomedaens are rather concerned about the high level Chelish wizard running into their temple! Somewhat less so when he announces that he just destroyed a third of the Chelish navy; probably he's a defector? Although this could be a lie, Asmodeans do that a lot.

Someone grabs his wrist and Plane Shifts them both to Heaven.

Plane Shifts to Heaven's Shore are redirected based on the alignments of both the caster and their passengers; they land in the area designated for Good casters with non-Good passengers. The possibility that some of those non-Good passengers might be trying to escape Infernal Cheliax is something Heaven has thought of, and so adjacent to this plaza there's a safe house with an effect on it that those who insist on describing magic in mortal terms might call an Area Mind Blank, which is to say that no power known to Golarion can see inside. The priestess of Iomedae who Plane Shifted them here tells Riudaure to follow her, and leads him inside.

"I apologize, your magic won't work in here," she says.

"Understood." He's busy staring in wonder at the effects with Arcane Sight; is that an alignment-conditional antimagic field? It sure looks like it only blocks magic from Evil casters.

His headband still works; evidently it must be an import from outside Cheliax. His Medallion of Thoughts doesn't—though it wouldn't anyway because Area Mind Blank, seriously.

She turns to face him.

"So. Uh," she says.

"What?"

"My name is Jean Riudaure, Captain, sixth-circle wizard, and I have just betrayed Cheliax by using a scroll of Meteor Swarm on their fleet in port in Augustana," he says in the calm, rapid idiom of someone quite experienced with emergencies. "There are complicated details there but I doubt any are urgent on the scale of minutes. My highest-priority personal request is clarification on what protection from Hell I can expect of your Church—I am soul-sold—but that is also less urgent than the situation in Augustana, I expect."

She breathes in, then out.

"Right," she says.

"I'll be right back." And she runs out into the street and flags down a lantern archon.

     "Hi! Can I help you?" it asks cheerfully.

"Convey the following to the Temple of Iomedae in Almas: arson attack on Chelish fleet underway in Augustana. Request all available support."

     "Sure!" it says, and disappears with a !pop!

She returns to the safe house.

"We can statue you," she says, "but normally, soul-sold defectors ask about protection from Hell before they call down a Meteor Swarm on the Chelish navy. Speaking of which, where the fuck did you get a scroll of Meteor Swarm?"

"I knew that, at one point, or so I assume. I had my memories erased at some point so that I could pass a loyalty screen." He explains the original infiltration plan, the gap in his memories, Aspexia's takeover of the demiplane—

"—speaking of which, have you ever considered trying to get to one of her Security and having them Teleport her into the House of Oblivion? I almost did it but I didn't think I could hit the target closely enough. Or ten feet from the Worldwound, I think that would be more likely to kill her but I didn't have the range."

Wow.

Who is this guy.

"—I think that, in practice, Aspexia Rugatonn mostly doesn't trust people to Teleport her who would do that. Even to escape Hell. I'm not sure why such people exist but empirically they seem to."

Obviously they should start assassinating those people then. There can't be more than, like, ten.

"Anyway. When I found the scroll of Meteor Swarm in my Bag of Holding I guessed what the plan must have been, and then did it. If you want confirmation of this that doesn't involve memory fuckery you should find the paladin who interrogated me. I didn't get his name but he had a colonel's insignia."

"Yeah, we can do that."

"I am making inferences about the contents of my deleted memories here, but I gather that Iomedae is opposed to the existence of Hell? If so, I think we could be allies, if not friends."

"Of course Iomedae is opposed to the existence of Hell! It's—

"—She's the goddess of defeating Evil, right, and Hell is the worst evil in the world without question. It's not fair, it's not justice, it doesn't even discourage people from doing Evil in their mortal lives because humans aren't good at thinking about that sort of thing, it's just—suffering. We wouldn't subject Asmodeus Himself to it."

"It has always seemed to me that Evil ought be at least as interested in the melioration of Hell as Good; we are the ones going there. I would work with you, I think, if you would cooperate with Lawful Evil who shares your most important interest. I appreciate your offer of Flesh to Stone but I have, in fact, too much Pride to be content to be a statue while others solve my problem."

"...you keep identifying yourself as Evil but you don't have to be, we can get you an Atonement. It wouldn't fix the soul sale but I think people prefer not to have the alignment aura either."

He laughs softly. "I doubt I could manage Good," he says. "Neutral, perhaps, but not yet—a Lawful Evil alignment may be an asset, in some places, and losing it will not make me any less damned.

"I was, you see, part of the Chelish secret police. Primarily counterintelligence. I have sent too many of your spies to Hell to ever read Good, I fear, and if there is a spell that can make it so anyway then I dispute Pharasma's categories—though of course I do that anyway. I have less experience with the other side of the game, but I am, I suspect, still better at it than your paladins; it is not Good work, even when done in Good's service. And unlike them I have nothing to lose."

Clerics of Iomedae are somewhat selected for not being the sort of people who will get angry at people over sentences like 'I have sent too many of your spies to Hell', but that's definitely producing some sort of strong emotional reaction. She's not quite sure what it is.

—they aren't Sarenrites, to deny almost all agency to the mortal instruments of Evil. Cheliax itself is a vast machine designed by a superintelligent alien being who shares approximately none of human values, but those who rise high in it still chose to do so. There is a difference, between an ordinary Chelish citizen and someone who sells his soul and joins the secret police and has spies Maledicted having already decided that all humanity ought to unite against Hell, and that difference has to matter, but—

—but it doesn't actually matter at all, because it's not actually better to stay small, whatever the cost, when such a thing as Hell exists in the world, and the price of not being small in Infernal Cheliax is one's soul, both literally and metaphorically. That's a fact about the world that, for all Iomedae desperately intends to change it, Riudaure didn't choose, and—

—and those who stand up for Good at the earliest possible moment, over something like being made to cast Acid Splash on their classmates (such a silly little thing, in the balance with all Hell), are brave but foolish, and they're probably doing exactly what Asmodeus wants; they just get tortured until they do it anyway, or if they outlast their tormentors' patience Maledicted, and never have the chance to stand up for Good again, and the classmate still gets Acid Splashed, and—

—and Cheliax would fall, if everyone stood up at the same time, but humans aren't shaped like that by default, and if they want everyone to learn that kind of courage they need not to be taught by the empire of Hell on Golarion, and sometimes what it takes to defeat an evil system is to play along until you can strike a blow that actually hurts, and—

—and if the hurt Riudaure did to Cheliax today isn't nearly enough to make up for all the Evil he's done while playing along, well, hopefully he's only getting started.

"It's important, I think," she says, "to try to stay Good even in war. Not foolishly so, not in a way that risks defeat at the hands of something far worse, but if you're too willing to justify Evil for the greater Good, even if you're right in each individual case, I think you risk losing sight of what you're fighting for in the first place."

"I'm not fighting for the greater Good; I'm fighting for there to be no more Hell, and I'd disagree with you even if I valued everything you value. That said, I don't particularly mean to start a theological debate."

"It is difficult to lose track of what we're fighting for, when it's something like that. I lack the authority to formally accept your service, but I think that we would."

"If Iomedae could damn a hundred people to Hell forever, and thereby save the rest, would She do it?"

"Yes." Unhesitatingly; you'd get at least that many volunteers from a single paladin order.

"If they had to be random peasants, and not paladins cursed with whatever insanity the gods curse paladins with?" A smile; 'insanity' is meant mostly in jest.

"Yes, though it isn't wise or useful to contemplate such unlikely—"

"If it were a million that were required, rather than a hundred? Ten million?"

"...I expect so, though She'd spend correspondingly longer to seek alternatives that didn't require—"

"Then I think we shall get along just fine."

Ships in Golarion, especially warships, are generally quite prepared for the possibility of fire. They're made of wood and canvas, and Fireball is a third-circle spell. If they didn't have good fire protections, all naval combat would be suicide and at least the Lawful countries of Golarion, and probably most of the Neutral ones, would have just made an agreement to Not. Meteor Swarm is as powerful as one would expect a ninth-circle spell to be, but it's still, fundamentally, just a lot of Fireballs.

They're less prepared, however, for a fire this bad, in an overcrowded port that isn't at all a proper naval dockyard, while a dozen parties of random adventurers Teleport in to pick off the Asmodean clerics casting Create Water and also Fireball any ships that aren't yet on fire, and a fucking seventh-circle elven druid shows up from gods know where and starts casting Control Weather to stir the wind and whip the flames.

(The surrender agreement signed regarding the city of Augustana prohibits Andoran from Teleporting in any forces for at least a month, but doesn't prohibit them from putting out the word to any and all that there's an opportunity to kick Cheliax while they're down if they act fast. They aren't paying them, except in XP from targets that can be killed without it being too bad for one's Good.)

There's a wizard on site with Aqueous Orb prepared, as is standard for naval dockyards, but only one; they were expecting an accidental fire or maybe less extravagant arson, not this. They'll have to send to Ostenso to get scrolls of it.

Within minutes there's an actually serious Chelish response team on site, including literally half of Cheliax's seventh-circle wizards and Aspexia fucking Rugatonn for the second time in four days, with twenty scrolls of Aqueous Orb from the naval base in Ostenso, but by then all the foreign adventurers are gone and there isn't a single ship in port that can go to sea without major repairs. The five or six that were closest to the center of the original Meteor Swarm are almost certainly unsalvageable, and the docks are going to require serious work too.

Aspexia Rugatonn obliterates a random third-circle wizard in unholy fire. He didn't do anything wrong, except be stupid enough to stand next to an incandescently furious Aspexia Rugatonn.

That helps her regain her composure enough to cast Overwhelming Presence. She guessed, upon getting that spell this morning, that today was going to involve a giant disaster, but unfortunately Asmodeus isn't allowed to tell her in advance what the disasters are going to be.

"YOU MISERABLE FOOLS."

Her voice isn't actually loud, but it carries. Everywhere within a hundred feet of her is somehow even quieter than dead silence; the spell's effects carry far beyond the range in which people are actually compelled to prostrate themselves.

"THE DISASTER YOU SEE BEFORE YOU IS MADE UP OF SO MANY SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL FAILURES THAT I CANNOT POSSIBLY LIST THEM ALL BEFORE YOU ARE NO LONGER MAGICALLY COMPELLED TO LISTEN TO ME, SO I WILL CONFINE MYSELF TO THE WORST OF THEM FOR NOW.

"FIRST, THIS TREASON OBVIOUSLY TOOK MORE THAN TWO ROUNDS TO PLAN. NINTH-CIRCLE SCROLLS WERE INVOLVED. I MUST ASSUME THAT, SINCE CHELIAX STILL EXISTS, OUR MINDREADERS ARE NOT THAT INCOMPETENT, AND THERE IS SOME GOOD REASON WHY THIS PLAN WAS NOT DETECTED IN THE TRAITOR'S MIND." (It's memory fuckery. It's totally memory fuckery. She's considered asking Asmodeus for a Miracle to erase Modify Memory as a spell from existence, but she supposes her Lord requires even her to be improved by suffering.) "HOWEVER. THIS CONCEALMENT SHOULD HAVE, ITSELF, LEFT OBVIOUS TRACES WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN REPORTED TO SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO DEAL WITH THIS SHIT."

"SECOND. I AM SURELY NOT THE FIRST TO NOTICE THAT HE WHO SPEAKS OF DISASTER COURTS IT—"

Wait, how does she know about tropes already? That's not supposed to happen for eleven more years!

"—THIS IS MORE THAN SUPERSTITION, WHEN IT COMES TO TREASON. WHOEVER SENT THE TRAITOR ON A MISSION INVOLVING FALSE TREASON PLANTED THE IDEA IN HIS HEAD, AND IS ENTIRELY AS GUILTY AS HE.

"WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS? BRING HIM BEFORE ME."

     (Two soldiers drag Major Olivera out of the crowd and throw him at the Most High's feet.)

     "His—idea—" Olivera squeaks out, but it's incredibly hard to speak under the effect of Overwhelming Presence.

"WHEN YOU GET TO HELL, LET YOUR OWNER SEE WITHIN YOUR MIND THAT I DID NOT THINK IT NECESSARY TO TELL HIM WHAT TO DO WITH YOU, BECAUSE IT IS IN FACT FUCKING OBVIOUS."

(Slay Living.)

"NOW FOR THE MOST IMPORTANT MATTER. WHERE IS THE TRAITOR NOW?"

(She cancels the Overwhelming Presence. She's made her point, and now she needs people to be able to actually respond.)

"Un—unscryable, Your Highness," says the senior Security on-site. "We did attempt one as soon as we identified who had cast the Meteor Swarm."

Bestow Curse (Cruciatus).

(Aspexia once specialized in custom curses. Causing the target to suddenly experience intense sourceless pain isn't even, theoretically speaking, a complicated one, although she can't seem to teach the technique to anyone else.)

She Removes it after a few rounds. It's an essential feature of an Asmodean tyranny that people get punished for failure, even when that failure wasn't "technically" "their fault", but she doesn't want to discourage accurate reporting of bad news too hard.

"I suppose that, once again, I shall have to do this myself," she says, and speaks her Word of Recall to return to Egorian. She really doesn't trust anyone to Teleport her right now.

She goes to her office, finds a Miracle diamond, and prays for Asmodeus to pluck Riudaure from wherever he is and deposit him in front of her. Standard procedure for this is to have a team of Security waiting to kill him the instant he appears, but she can actually handle that just fine, and if Good has afforded the traitor the absurd level of protection he would need to avoid the kidnapping (or even, for that matter, had his soul destroyed to keep it from Hell), she really doesn't want other Security knowing about that.

lol

She cannot Bestow Curse (Cruciatus) on Iomedae, but she would really fucking like to right now.

Two weeks later, Cheliax recognizes the independence of Galt. It's kind of a moot point—there hasn't been meaningful fighting there since Andoran broke away, cutting Chelish forces off from the distant province, but it's still a symbolic blow to Cheliax and a sign of hope for those who hate them.

Two days after that, King Infrexus Thrune goes out ice skating and drowns.

What.

What??

"WHAT?!!"

"It could hardly have made anything worse."

"Your status as the Church's favored heir does not, in fact, prevent me from Resurrecting him and allowing you to be tried for regicide."

"And yet you're threatening me about that rather than having already done it, which suggests that you, too, recognize that that would in fact make things worse than they are."

Unfortunately, nothing she's saying is wrong. Infrexus was neither competent nor popular, and foolish as the girl is, she has somehow acquired allies who would make it less than tractable to just execute her. Probably most of them just want a young and inexperienced woman on the throne so they can manipulate her for more power of their own.

Ah, mortals never change. At least not in this life; Hell will burn it out of them.

"Did you, at all, consider in advance what you were going to do next?"

(She's aware why certain of her supporters support her, and finds it hilarious.)

"I was hoping to persuade Hell that, if they mean to keep their empire on Golarion, they might send us a fucking COMPETENT GENERAL!!"

"You would dare demand a devil of Hell as a retainer to command your armies?" she asks. She's not actually sure that Hell would say no—it would solve as many as several of Cheliax's problems—but it's a rather braver request of Hell than any previous Thrune has made. Having devils around is not, in fact, fun.

"Yes, and I also want a headband of +6 all stats with built-in poison immunity and fucking Mind Blank and whatever the fuck else Asmodeus thinks is necessary to keep me alive longer than the last four idiots, because if this god-damned Hellhole—no, in fact, that's a compliment not deserved—this Abyss of a country is going to SURVIVE it needs people who can FUCKING THINK without IMMEDIATELY FUCKING DEFECTING!!"

"And what would you offer your Lord, in exchange for these boons?"

"The soul of all Cheliax."

"That's not how souls work."

"Yes, yes, I'm sure we can come up with an acceptable formalization in terms of afterlife statistics or whatever. In the meantime, start interviewing candidates for my personal pit fiend while I go torture all of the idiots my uncle claimed were 'advisors'."

And a few weeks later Abrogail is anointed in the blood of her enemies and crowned Her Infernal Majestrix the Queen of Cheliax and Isger, Protectress of Korvosa, Eternal Empress of Taldor, Steward of the Infernal Empire on Golarion, Favored of Asmodeus, blah blah blah blah blah, with a Hell-wrought crown rumored to have been made by the hand of Asmodeus Himself, and received by her subjects with thunderous applause and abject terror. There are questions whispered, like how a sixteen-year-old became an eighth-circle sorceress and what the fuck she paid for that crown and is that pit fiend staying; she deigns to answer none of them, going around the post-coronation celebration mostly with Alter Self up and reading everyone's mind. At the end of the night she'll invite whomever seemed most afraid of her for a special surprise.

There's a stunningly beautiful woman at the party that no one remembers having invited, dressed elaborately in an exotic yet very Asmodean style, covered in more and fancier magic items than the monarchs of most small countries could afford. She has a powerful Lawful Evil aura but her mind is utterly unreadable; she claims to be a noblewoman of the Padishah Empire of Kelesh, and no, she wasn't technically invited, but she has always been an admirer of the order of Hell (though the Church of Asmodeus be thoroughly suppressed in her own country), and she has come to pay her respects to the new mortal ruler of her Lord's domain on Golarion, whom she's very curious about.

Rumor of Abrogail Thrune's beauty and terrifying power reaches even Kelesh, you see, but she wants to know what the Queen is really like.

No one falls for this extremely obvious trap by saying anything even slightly uncomplimentary of the new Queen, though a few can't help but think some less-than-flattering things.

Eventually, once the latest set of guests has politely fled, there's a hand on her shoulder.

"Your Majesty."

She turns to face Aspexia, and curtsies ironically.

"Most High."

"Stop doing...this," she says, gesturing. "We need to know who's supposed to be here and who's not. It's a huge security risk."

"Yes, it is."

Disintegrate.

Not even a ninth-circle cleric has much chance of making her save against a Disintegrate prepared in an eighth-circle slot by a wizard with a Greater Rod of Persistent Spell and as much Intelligence enhancement as magic can achieve. She goes down.

And Felandriel Morgethai activates the device she's carrying, a simple combination of a tiny Bag of Holding and Portable Hole, which when combined suck everything within ten feet—namely, herself and the ashes of Aspexia's corpse—into the Astral Plane, Forbiddances be damned.

(Bags of Holding still work fine in a Forbiddance, even though they're obviously interacting with other planes, so clearly when the gods designed Forbiddance they carved out a special exception for them.)

And from there she can Plane Shift back to the Material, leaving Aspexia's ashes to drift and scatter.

And then she immediately removes her ring of Malediction, commissioned at great price from a Kuthite cleric who also dabbled in magic items, which has the effect of temporarily actually changing one's alignment to Lawful Evil—strongly enough to fool Forbiddances, but also strongly enough that, had she died while wearing it, she would have actually gone to Hell.

She's hard to kill, especially quickly, but it's still a risky item to use.

She Teleports back to Egorian, to the edge of the palace Forbiddance, now wearing her true form.

Go in one round, she says into her Telepathic Bond, and then casts Mage's Disjunction, as ought to be sufficient to break even Aspexia Rugatonn's Forbiddances.

It breaks.

All of the Security have responded to the incident in the ballroom, for all the good it'll do them now, but there's one seventh-circle Asmodean cleric sprinting for the edge of the Forbiddance, trying to get news of the attack to Hell before the situation gets even worse.

"STOP."

He was going to stop anyway, what with fucking Felandriel Morgethai being right there, but okay.

Well, he did reach the edge of the Forbiddance, in a manner of speaking, but now his tuning forks don't work and he also cannot take any actions.

She casts a Touch of Idiocy, to further wreck his Will save beyond even what disabling his headband already did, uses her Pearl of Power, and then, using her Rod of Quickening, casts two Teleports in the same round, to the House of Oblivion and back, leaving the still-stunned, stupid, and forkless cleric to be eaten by divs. She's not as bothered by sending Asmodean clerics to Hell as Iomedae's people—they, perhaps alone in Cheliax, did choose it—but they need as many of Cheliax's high-level clerics as possible to be un-Resurrectable anyway.

(At INT 28, with literal centuries of combat experience, one can just come up with plans like this without having to particularly take time to think about it.)

And then basically every person allied with Andoran who can cast Teleport appears in the Palace's inner courtyard, clerics and fighters and weaker wizards in tow, except for those who can cast Greater Teleport, who are in the ballroom already.

Abrogail is already gone. Within seconds of Aspexia's death she was Mind Blanked and being rushed out via one of the Palace's many secret escape routes, Security coating her in every protection spell her Crown didn't already provide as they walked, and the moment the Forbiddance fell they were Greater Teleported to an unscryable underground bunker in an undisclosed location far outside Cheliax. Even she doesn't know where they are now; it's safer that way. She demands to watch events unfold via a scry; as long as Morgethai took out all of the Palace's scrying protections they might as well take advantage of that.

Meanwhile, a few blocks from the Palace, in the High Temple of Asmodeus, an apparently unmagical man knelt in apparent prayer pulls a scroll from inside his cloak, reads it off, and Disjoins that Forbiddance too.

As in Augustana, the people who Teleport in are mostly not, formally speaking, Andoren forces. Those have mostly been reserved for the main assault on the Palace. It turns out, however, that an opportunity to loot the High Temple of Asmodeus for its impressive collection of divine scrolls while Cheliax is extremely distracted attracts rather a lot of adventurers, even recruiting only Lawful Good parties under conditions of strict secrecy.

The temple is nearly deserted, compared with its usual state, and those clerics who are about are generally of lower level. All the important people are at the coronation. It isn't a long fight. Nor is the vault where the scrolls are kept particularly hard to get to; it would be, under normal circumstances, but normal circumstances include "being under a Forbiddance" and "not having had all its magical protections Disjoined". It's a simple matter, then, to Dimension Door in, fill one's Bag(s) of Holding with scrolls, and Teleport out.

Across Cheliax, similar assaults on lesser temples are triggered at the same time. Most don't require ninth-circle scrolls; all temples where scrolls are kept are Forbiddanced, but generally not by Aspexia Rugatonn herself.

The adventurers' contract requires them to turn over scrolls of Resurrection, True Resurrection, or Miracle to the Andoren government; all others are theirs to keep.

Back at the Palace, some people may not have realized there was going to be a pit fiend in this fight before they started it.

They realize it now.

Within two rounds of the Andoren forces starting to appear in the courtyard, he calls a Meteor Swarm down on them.

People who don't put Protection from Energy (Fire) up before going into battle don't generally live long enough to learn to Teleport.

That said, many of them now don't have it anymore.

And in a bunker far away, Abrogail watches the fight in the ballroom over a scry, and tries to figure out exactly what Andoran is doing. The high-level casters they teleported directly in (presumably with Greater Teleports; there's no way that many people got Teleport locations inside the Palace) are outnumbered by the Security that were already in the room, but they're not really fighting like they're desperately outnumbered. They actually barely seem to be casting offensive spells at all?

Meanwhile, the larger but lower-level group outside has a pit fiend between them and the fight, and additional Chelish casters are being Teleported in as rapidly as they can be interrupted—though mostly lower-level ones. The coronation ball was already using up most of Cheliax's supply of high-level Security wizards. They've resorted to pulling in clerics from the major temples across Cheliax—

And then she sees it. She's three standard deviations smarter than she was this morning, and it takes longer than that to learn to use that kind of an Intelligence boost for anything but spellcasting (in the case of wizards, which she isn't anyway), but she is learning.

The offensive spells they have been casting have all been almost exclusively aimed at clerics of Asmodeus, and they're strongly favoring spells that destroy the target's body—or Flesh to Stone, which keeps them un-Resurrectable in a different way. They're trying to take out Cheliax's entire capacity for Resurrection.

She conveys this observation to her Security who has a Telepathic Bond with Egorian, along with an order to fall back to the ballroom if it isn't obvious.

The order is passed along, and then word comes back along the relay that all of the now-unguarded temples are being hit for all their scrolls by what appear to be random adventurers but are, given the circumstances, almost certainly in the employ of Andoran.

"Order to Gorthoklek: end this now."

(It doesn't bode well for the future of her reign that her personal pit fiend was forced to use his once-yearly Wish on the first official day of it, but so be it.)

She gives her Security a round to convey the order, and then lights him on fire over the objections of her newly elevated Wisdom.

And then every non-Evil creature within four hundred feet of Gorthoklek is dead.

It's over.

...well, not quite.

It is not actually possible to design spells that do infinite damage to an arbitrary number of creatures with no save, which is what "kill every non-Evil creature within 400 feet of me" would try to come out as, naïvely. This is a mistake often made by Wishers who are new to having ninth-circle spells, though generally only once.

Gorthoklek is much, much Wiser than the typical adventurer who finds a Wish scroll in a dungeon or makes an ill-advised trip to the City of Brass, and also his Wish observably worked, so presumably it specified finite limits. The energy budget available to a ninth-circle spell using a diamond that large (or whatever pit fiends do, which is actually slightly different) allows those specifications to be very, very high, but Felandriel Morgethai's saves and also sheer number of hit points are also very high, and she had essentially every protective effect known to Golarion upon herself, either as a spell or an item, and she is, if barely so, alive.

Well.

He has Stun at will. Good luck doing anything with your remaining two rounds or so of life.

(He regrets only that his Lord didn't give him Malediction at will, but that's generally reserved for the devils who guard Avernus, so as to discourage Good clerics from trying to Plane Shift damned petitioners to Nirvana. Though sometimes they do it anyway.)

And she has one use left on her rod of Greater Quicken Spell, and one remaining ninth-circle spell.

Time Stop.

She's out of Teleports again after the House of Oblivion trick, but a ninth-circle wizard doesn't carry just one Pearl of Power.

She refills a slot, and casts Teleport, and collapses in a heap in the middle of the Temple of Sarenrae in Almas, where she lays until the Time Stop expires, and then a round more before she's blasted with so much positive energy and is approximately fine again.

Aspexia Rugatonn is also, somehow, approximately fine, for definitions of "approximately fine" that include being dead, in Hell, sitting across from the Infernal Duke to whom Asmodeus has entrusted the day-to-day management of her soul. She's not, at this moment, being tortured, which even by the standards of Cheliax (to say nothing of the standards of Hell) probably qualifies as "approximately fine".

She's actually sitting on a very comfortable couch in a very well-appointed mansion, if one ignores the gruesomeness of some of the decor and also the pit fiend in the other chair.

"My lord," she says. "What would our Lord Asmodeus have of me?" And also why have I not been resurrected but one doesn't ask that of the devil who owns one's soul.

To him, interacting with a soul he owns, there's not actually that much difference between things she says to him and things she thinks to herself.

"You haven't been resurrected because the remains of your body were lost in the Astral Plane, and there is, as I expect you know, no other cleric in Cheliax or allied with them who can cast the True Resurrection."

They're supposed to have scrolls.

"My lord. If it please you, I would like to know how I died, and what has come to pass in Cheliax since then."

He laughs. "It involved a great deal of what one might call—cheating. It is my nature as a devil to appreciate such things for their own sake, but you may not."

Is he doing this to torment her because if so she would like a different torment that is definitely not something you think where a devil can hear you.

"Tell me."

"Of course I am doing this to torment you but there is, also, a point. We'll get there when I've had my fun.

"Felandriel Morgethai infiltrated Abrogail Thrune's coronation ball, passing the Forbiddance on your palace by, we believe, having herself Maledicted, so as to temporarily read Lawful Evil at a level deeper than that normally targeted by false aura spells. She went about pretending to be the Queen pretending to be a foreign noblewoman until you approached her, and then hit you with a surprise heightened Disintegrate. She then escaped into the Astral Plane via a Bag of Holding, which as you know function even in Forbiddances, scattering your ashes there.

"We were, of course, aware that this behavior of Bags of Holding was exploitable, but it is not generally in our Lord's nature to petition Pharasma to have exploits patched."

She does have any Asmodean appreciation of this sort of cleverness, but also fuck Abrogail Thrune and fuck Alter Self and fuck Felandriel Morgethai and fuck Disintegrate and fuck Bags of Holding and fuck—she is too corrigible to be capable of completing that thought.

"—and then they raised me with a scroll of True Resurrection, except that obviously that did not, in fact, happen."

"Morgethai returned to Egorian and Disjoined the palace Forbiddance, at which point Andoran Teleported in a small army to serve as a distraction while they assassinated all but four of our Lord's seventh-circle clerics in various manners not Resurrectable, and in many cases not True Resurrectable—for example, Flesh to Stone followed by more Bag of Holding tricks to scatter the statues in the Astral Plane, or in one case baleful Teleport to the House of Oblivion. Meanwhile all of Cheliax's major temples, while their high-level clerics were away for the coronation, were looted of their scrolls by adventurers presumably in Andoran's employ.

"You have, actually, Queen Abrogail to thank, that Cheliax was not wholly deprived of the lesser Resurrection as well as the True one. It was she who discerned the Andorens' motives and ordered our Lord's remaining clerics protected.

"—and then Gorthoklek cast Wish, and the battle was over rather quickly after that, notwithstanding that Morgethai managed to escape. I suppose that, while it's said that one doesn't become a ninth-circle wizard by running away, one also doesn't become a ninth-circle wizard by not running away from pit fiends."

"—there are scrolls not kept in temples," she says, but her voice is smaller now.

"Indeed! They didn't get any of the hidden scrolls. They did, however, get all the people who know where the scrolls are hidden."

Okay, this one is her fault, for sharing critical secrets with the people would obviously be expected to know, and only them. When she gets back, the locations of the new hidden scrolls are going to be told to a bunch of random slaves geased not to think about it unless she's killed.

If she gets back.

"You seem to know, my lord," she points out.

"I do know, because as your soul's owner the contents of your mind are mine to examine. But for me, or the owner of the other knowing soul who made it to Hell rather than being a statue in the Astral Plane, to convey that knowledge back to Golarion on your behalf, would be an intervention outside the usual framework of things. It would be what one might call cheating, and not the fun kind. By ancient agreement, the other gods could demand payment equal to what their followers would have gained had it not occurred."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH

"What...do they want...?"

"A simpler question in this case than most, because several major churches with ninth-circle clerics have already named their prices to True Resurrect you. The Church of Sarenrae, predictably, demands that Cheliax recognize the independence of Andoran, and affirm their separate and equal station among the powers of Golarion, blah blah blah—there's more but you're familiar with their independence demands, the Sarenrites repeat all of them. The Church of Abadar demands that Cheliax cease and desist from backing its currency with souls, which is expected to be even worse for our Lord's interests than releasing Andoran. No one knows what Nefreti Clepati wants but I personally predict it would also be bad for Asmodeus' interests. The Kuthite response to the situation can be summarized as 'fuck you'. These offers have been conveyed to the Queen of Cheliax and she has conveyed to Hell that it's your choice.

"To the other offers, however, I would add my own: stay here with me in Hell, and you shall not be tormented, you shall be my honored guest and not my slave, as long as the Infernal Empire remains upon Golarion; elsewise, when you return to my possession, you shall find no such mercy." The offer is, of course, meant as a torment of its own; he knows she won't take it.

No, a stay of torment for as long as Infernal Cheliax exists without her is not, in fact, a particularly attractive offer.

"—Andoran," she says.