"Razmir's invasion was—known to us—before it happened. One of our conditions for noninterference was that he take as much care as possible to avoid any actions that would increase the number of people in Hell or other Evil afterlives. As Neska is of an age where he could die at any time, and Lawful Evil, that included sending him to us, to be given the opportunity to Atone, or made a statue forever if he refused."

"I should not need to remind you that the Church of Abadar condemns offensive war," says Temos, "and that your revelations do not incline me to take Lastwall's side in this. I will not accept that Neska wishes his knights to surrender on your word alone; I would speak with him."

"We cannot bring him here for risk of him being seen, but if you have a wizard on staff who can cast Message through a scry, and has your Church's trust, you may speak to him that way."

And one Greater Scrying later, they can both see Count Neska, and speak to him through their wizard intermediary. He is indeed alive, and unhurt, and Detect Magic reveals no compulsions on him, and he's being kept in a comfortable if windowless room.

He was, indeed, mind controlled into surrendering. He hates wizards, especially wizards who think that knowing some spells, rather than any actual skill of leadership, entitles them to rule countries. But Razmir clearly does, in fact, rule Ustalav now (or at least there's no other government that can make that claim more strongly, not that there was much of one before), and at least he's ostensibly Lawful and not a damned necromancer. Indeed, Neska does not want his knights getting themselves slaughtered as traitors, and he'll even acknowledge Razmir as his overlord, if Razmir gives him back his county and swears not to mind control him or any of his subordinates again.

(This offer can be conveyed to Razmir by Sending.)

It's beneath Razmir to negotiate with mortals, but Neska is Lawful. Here's the list of concessions required, such as payment of reparations for the death of his men, return of the bodies, and either execution or large fines and exile for the rebels, as well as acknowledgement of Razmir's divinity.

Razmir, as his mouthpiece will freely admit, prefers making examples of rebels to negotiating with them. But he takes bribes.

Reparations and return of the bodies: fine.

Executions: his first impulse is to let Razmir kill everyone else if he lets him keep Eilisilo, the only genuinely competent person in his whole organization, but this is probably the sort of impulse that had him on track for Hell before. He'll execute the leaders himself, so as to make sure it's done in a dignified manner. Executing literally everyone who participated is just, in fact, a terrible idea.

Divinity: he hasn't actually investigated Razmir's claim of divinity enough to have an opinion? He wouldn't actually be opposed, though, if Razmir were a god? It would be nice if there were a Lawful Evil god who weren't quite so into torture.

(Technically he's not Evil anymore, but this is really just a technicality.)

He can at least swear not to make public statements that Razmir isn't a god, and that he'll enforce the laws of Razmir's realm on religion as he would on other matters.

He feels that this is suspiciously easy, but will in fact accept those terms as long as Count Neska enforces his law and punishes the rebels, because he is having a day, here. How many people does he need to publicly raise from the dead for people to start admitting he's a god???

Privately, he thinks that Razmir probably isn't a god, but he is genuinely uncertain, and he has long wished that there were a formerly-human Lawful Evil god, even if Razmir isn't precisely whom he'd choose.

He's back in Barstoi within the hour. How do his Hellknights feel about these developments?

"Sir."

(She's overjoyed to have him back. Is this apparent from her face, which resembles her face at all other times? Maybe if you're Count Aericnein Neska.)

The rest of his knights, Varga's own Hellknights and all the other various enforcers of his totalitarian regime, are also mostly glad to have him back! Provided he's not under mind control. Except the ones who are going to be executed for treason and are not the Paralictor. That's going to suck. Some of them are trying to flee, which, of course, the Paralictor will do her best to prevent.

(The Church of Pharasma is, of course, terrified, and its clerics and inquisitors are also trying to flee, but once again the Paralictor is demonstrating that the difference between Lawful Neutral and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder is, perhaps, not as sharp as one might hope.)

He nods stiffly.

"Paralictor.

"I cannot fault you for what you did. There are many worlds, perhaps most possible worlds, in which it was the right thing to do. But, alas for both of us, it is not one of those worlds in which we find ourselves."

"Acknowledged, sir."

Actually she thinks it was exactly correct, since it got them to send The One Competent Person In The Province back, but. That's not what her boss, the One Competent Person In The Province, says.

"It was an honor serving under you."

"As it was to accept your service."

He beheads the traitors with his own hand and his own sword.

(Iomedae's church will Raise the ones who end up in Hell, but they're not particularly inclined to give Hellknights who make Axis a second chance to fail at that.)

(Razmir does not really care if they get privately Raised as long as everyone who witnessed the execution knows that If You Rebel Against Razmir It Will Go Badly For You, which was the point of the exercise.)

And, in spite of Heaven and Nirvana's arguments that she spent her entire mortal life pursuing the good under the mistaken impression it was called Law, and Hell's arguments that her actions mostly consisted of enforcing the rules of despotic states with horrible consequences on their inhabitants, Paralictor Eilisilo Varga does indeed get Axis and so depart from our story.

It takes Razmir about a week from the time the contract is signed to finish his road, taking two days off to summon planar allies to assist the Worldwound (and Plane Shift in teleporting strike teams to put down rebels), which he cannot do if he needs to reserve his high-level spells to be spent on anything other than defenses against an ambush that never comes. It starts at Thrushmoor on the coast of Lake Encarthan, moves up through Versex to Lantern Lake, then from Lantern Lake skirts the Hungry Mountains to its western flank to instead head in a straight line north-northwest up through Barstoi, Sinaria and Technically Ardeal to reach Lake Prophyria on Ustalav's northern border where the Worldwound fortresses loom.

At that point, he would like Lastwall to DELIVER. The road he built is presently unusable because the Furrows (thank you, Count Neska) are an uninhabitable wasteland of ghosts, ghouls, and animated war machines (why), and sorting this kind of mess out is what paladins are for.

Lastwall sends eighty paladins, of varying level, plus a smaller number of wizards and clerics and support staff, initially stationed mostly along the road and especially in the Furrows, though they'll spread throughout the country as they render it increasingly not haunted.

They do not (yet) move against undead who hold actual titles of nobility, such as the Count of Varno, who by all accounts would really prefer not to be a vampire, and who only hasn't killed himself because he would then go to Hell. (Reasonable, really.) The thing where he has to murder people to survive, however, is not reasonable, and they politely ask Razmir if his divine powers include any way of making vampires Not That.

That hasn't been his chief priority since his ascension, no. Perhaps they should ask Sarenrae, it seems more her sort of thing.

(Razmir has, in fact, done some research on it, specifically for Count Tiriac, but it was a private gift for the Count not to be shared abroad, and largely consisted of some valuable directions that Razmir thought underexplored in post-Earthfall science, as well as his own first thoughts from looking at the present state of the research. He's quite confident Thassilon had a Wish wording for simultaneously restoring vampires to life, sanity, and youth, it doesn't seem impossible, but Razmir had never been the sort of wizard who cast Wish - that was for people whose 18 INT was natural, or, better, whose 20 INT was. More necromantic research is on his schedule, eventually - Tiriac is one of his best allies, and he has no desire to offend the man.)

Sarenrae almost certainly can, and is constrained by god-agreements not to; they were hoping that Razmir, as a fake less traditional deity, might not be subject to the same restrictions—but whatever.

(It seems like, in principle, the sort of thing a Wish could do, but if they had enough money to pay ninth-circle wizards to do Wish experiments, they would have paid Felandriel Morgethai to do this a long time ago. She probably would have charged them less.)

And Morthalas, the loyal servant of the Countess of Caliphas, and who is not at all under Dominate Person, Teleports into Kyonin to petition the Winter Council for help, having alerted them to her imminent arrival by Sending.

It is really quite probable that Kyonin is the richest, most peaceful, happiest country in the world, per capita. Those last two words are, admittedly, doing a great deal of work; the elven birthrate is 'do we have to?', and the elven death rate is More Than None, and there are not so many as there once were, for Kyonin, once the greatest of their realms, is now merely the last. Nonetheless the joy and safety and wealth of Kyonin remain.

Why and how is Kyonin the richest? Why, because elves are immortal; to a first glance, elves do not have 'unskilled labor'. By the time a human craftsman has spent forty years learning a skill, his mind is slowing and his muscles are starting to go, and so he must pass some of his work to unskilled others, and by the time he has spent a century, he is dead. Elves do not have that difficulty. By the time an elf has spent six hundred years mastering a skill and has felt the weakening in his muscles, he can afford to put one hundred years of the profits aside to pay for a Cyclical Reincarnation, and so elves can reach heights of craftsmanship of which humans can only dream.

Why is Kyonin the most peaceful? Why, because elves are, to a first approximation, mostly Good. Nearly fifty percent of the elves (who read as anything) read as Chaotic Good to Detect Alignment, and another thirty percent read as the other Good alignments. Per capita, there are fewer than a sixth as many Evil elves as mortals (referring only to the elves of Kyonin, and leaving the hateful Drow aside, as the elves of Kyonin prefer to), and few of those reach the same depths of Evil as, say, a typical person born in Cheliax. With so much Good, they need little Law to cope; an elf can simply trust that most other Elves mean well, and handshake deals are made that a human would either balk at or demand sworn oaths and Detect Alignment and Zone of Truth spells, eating up the gains from trade with expensive verification methods. The few children can simply play in the streets, with no worries about harm, doors can be left unlocked, favors can be given and met with favors and all these feed into Point One. 

(Someone from outside Kyonin, who is, perhaps, used to thinking in terms of equilibria might ask, how is this stable? Won't individual evildoers prosper in this thieves' paradise, and - even if elves want so few children that they are a dying race - others copy them and learn from their methods? Why, no - elves are immortal. A reputation as dishonest will follow you for centuries, and very few people in prisoners-dilemma situations want to defect on the first move of a three-thousand-plus-unknown-turns iterated game. A smart evil elf isn't evil, and a dumb evil elf can be exiled before they reach their second century.)

Why is Kyonin the happiest? See points one and two, honestly, they mostly cover it.

... Which does not, in fact, mean that there is no suffering in Kyonin.

Elves can trust other elves. Elves can't trust humans. Almost a third of them are evil, and honestly by the time you've gotten to know that an individual human is honest, they're already dying and you need to meet their kids. And humans can kill elves, thirty seconds of violence costing a hundred years of labor to repair. And during the period that most of the elven population was off in Venus the mystical land of Sovyrian taking cover from Earthfall, humans kinda looted the whole of the country dead of precious belongings the elves thought wouldn't get stolen because they... were not really used to people stealing things when you politely ask them not to and explain this is very bad behavior???

Yeah, Kyonin got over that. They sealed the border, when they came back, and sealed it with weapons and magic and Awakened animals and trees. Most elves in Kyonin have not met a human in the past several thousand years who wasn't an invader, and as a result even well-intentioned humans tend to get the entire population looking at them like they're thieves and terrorists.

And being a half-elf in Kyonin isn't much better. People go "you poor thing!" a lot, and every time you do something wrong they wonder quietly (sometimes out loud, sometimes just visibly) if it's because your human blood is taking over.

There are reasons for leaving Kyonin, is what I'm going for, here.

And, of course, there's the reason for leaving Kyonin that is Treerazer, nascent demon lord of despoilation, waste and pollution, whose goal is to take over Kyonin, turn the old portal to Sovyrian into one straight to the Abyss, and double the number of Worldwounds on Golarion. They call his domain the Tanglebriar, and smart people do not go there.

The Winter Council is based fairly near his headquarters, because the alternative is not being near his headquarters, and they, overall, consider that to be worse. Make whatever assumptions about their intelligence you prefer.