There are a lot of strategic implications there. If it's true.

(There are also strategic implications to be found in all the other nearby worlds where the Knights of Ozem's claims aren't entirely true.) 

Altarrin doesn't know enough, yet, to be sure - or even reasonably confident - that he knows which world he's in. Which means it's still not a good time to have emotions. 

(Altarrin can notice, around the edges of his thoughts as he moves on to actual tactical concerns and planning, that there's an enormous backlog of epistemic confusion and emotional reactions that will inevitably need to be dealt with later. If there is a later. Right now his gut has, perhaps not unreasonably, decided that 'later' is not worth worrying about until they find out that the Empire is still going to be in existence next week.) 

Iomedae is dead. Not just "In the town square, Greenvale, Grand County of Thale, The Geographic Region Where Order And Civilization Continues To Exist, The Continent, Velgarth, The Prime Material Plane" like she was about an hour after her disappearance, nor elsewhere on that planet like she presumably was for the next three weeks, but instead drifting along the river of souls where anyone can see, at least if anyone knows how to cast a scry powerful enough to get past dead Iomedae's still-formidable resistances and has a fourth-circle spell free at the end of the day to check with.

Alfirin hasn't had a lot of those lately. It's been a busy three weeks.

Nonetheless, it is the case that on Oathday there has not been that much fighting, and Malyas is recuperating from destruction and therefore not planning another night raid, and Alfirin has a whole four spells of fourth circle or higher going spare. That's enough for both the scry and a sending to Archbanker Tilbun Vakkad so that the next morning when she teleports to the threshold of the so-called Second Vault in Absalom with a sack of gold and a large diamond there's someone there who can actually do something with it.

And Iomedae returns to the world of the living with the tired aplomb of someone who has done it frequently. She stands, not particularly self-conscious of her nudity, and says, "Tilbun," warmly. 

And then she meets Alfirin's eyes, and -

- she trusts Alfirin! She really does! More than she trusts almost anybody alive!

Not quite enough to take her hand when no one else on the planet knows she's alive and consent to a Plane Shift. The set of circumstances that would make that a ludicrously bad idea are rare, but - not unimaginable, and she doesn't know how long it's been. 

It'd be very marked, though, if she looks back at Tilbun to ask, "What's the date?"

"Eighteenth of Erastus. Same year. If it was longer for you that says fascinating things about the nature of other planets, as far as we could tell you've been on the Material this whole time."

Two days dead. It could be much much worse but it doesn't allow that much more time before she loses whatever she'd built in Velgarth, and since she has to go back anyway she'd rather go back in time to -

- not now, certainly not here. She offers her hand. "Can you invite Karlenius and Marit," - "for an immediate debrief in the most secure location available" goes without saying -

(She paid for the Archbanker's silence, of course. Abadarans are convenient that way.)

She takes it and plane shifts to her garden. "I'll fetch Karlenius. Marit's a ghoul right now but we're hoping to get him back tomorrow."

- possibly Velgarth is not actually greatest among her pressing concerns. 

She gets dressed while she waits for Alfirin to return with Karlenius. Also looks around Alfirin's gardens for at least a weak intelligence headband, it's flatly embarrassing to try to talk to Alfirin without one.

There are two headbands, one a moderately-powered intelligence version, in a drawer on top of a neatly-folded stack of cloaks of resistance.

Alfirin returns with Karlenius and some of Iomedae's spare clothes and armor.

"I am going to want the robe of eyes back."

Well, it's not like there were any normal clothes in the demiplane! "Yes, yes."

"- the planet's called Velgarth. It's human-inhabited. They have local gods which may or may not be Asmodeus and Sarenrae with slightly different presentations. I lean that it's not Asmodeus, actually, but I didn't get the time to do as much investigation as I'd like. They have local sorcerers who are stunningly useful for army logistics, in their magic system same-plane Gates aren't all that hard. - I presume, incidentally, you can't Plane Shift to Aktun and then Gate to Velgarth, or I'd have seen you sooner?"

"It turns out that most of the time when you hear a spell has unlimited range, you'd be lucky if anybody's bothered to test it as far as the moon. Two plane shifts, or a plane shift and a gate, can get you far enough past Aucturn that you can't easily make out the sun from the other stars, but not, apparently, as far as Velgarth. Discern Location still works that far, which is how we knew you were still on the Material. I haven't had the chance to write a circular letter on it yet because your crusade decided to have a borderline rout back to Urgir."

" - well, shit. Why -" but she knows why it happened, it happened because 'Iomedae is unresurrectably missing' is - the worst news since Arazni died, and that was very nearly the end. And she knows why they didn't contact her; it's presumably because Sending, too, turns out not to have unlimited range. "Wish should work, if Discern Location did."

 - and probably she wouldn't have resisted an attempted Wish to bring her home before all was lost but - well, she might have, it's not as if she's been on the receiving end of a transport Wish before and her default with unfamiliar magic is in fact to not let it fuck with her. And Alfirin may have attained the heights of spellcraft past where there are no further distinguishing heights of spellcraft, but if Iomedae wills that Alfirin's spells not touch her then they generally don't. 

          "It's not irrecoverable, not now that you're back," says Karlenius. 

"Oh, it's definitely not irrecoverable, because they don't bother mining diamonds on Velgarth, the gods don't grant resurrections there."

She was kind of hoping Karlenius would try to answer "why?" but dodging the question isn't actually any better a look for him.

"I expected wish to work but either it can't handle the distance or you threw it off. I was considering trying to wish myself to you and bring you back as soon as we'd found a third diamond for the return trip, but it wasn't clear that it was failing because of you, so it might have been another two diamonds used up for nothing. And we don't, actually, have a third diamond secured yet, so all those unmined Velgarth diamonds are out of reach."

She closes her eyes. "And if I could get a communication through to Velgarth, I could tell them to pick a kid and stuff his pockets with diamonds and I'll come back with an army, but we have no communications. 

- I set up a church of Aroden there, in the country I helped liberate from the evil empire, but He wasn't picking clerics properly even once the church was established enough I'd have expected He could. They don't have clerics, they have unempowered priests through which gods unpredictably do miracles. There's a school of thought that the gods are basically all hostile entities with inhuman aims and everyone would be better off without them," which Alfirin, who has floated that theory once or twice, will presumably be very sympathetic to, "but what the adherents of this school of thought have done about it is build a vast continent-spanning empire out of mind-control and an impressive state apparatus for tracking down and executing religious people, which spends half its time having civil wars whenever an important general gets a Dispel Magic to the face and the other half the time pacifying its conquests. When I showed up it was doing both at once, and one of them twice."

Well that does not sound like a very well-run continent-spanning mind control empire. On the other hand, it is at least supposedly continent-spanning. Geas must be cheaper with their magic, like same-plane gates, or it wouldn't be feasible at all.

"I think most empires wind up like that eventually, if they don't collapse some other way."

"They might be right about - their gods, at least, if their gods even are gods - the Abyss is infinite and we now know there's some weak correspondence between location on the material plane and locations in the outer planes - "

"Yes, I'm considering it fairly likely that their gods are something different. One local god really did sound strikingly like Sarenrae, to the point of the priest explaining how you should think of the Good in all people as the Empire executed him, but - 

- but how useful is Sarenrae, really, if you can't cleric people, if you can't dispense Healing, if you can't Commune, if you are stuck intervening on a low budget? The answer isn't 'useless' but it also isn't - enough - and it's awfully asymmetric in favor of entities that don't need or want human cooperation.

The liberators of Oris saw it differently; they'd asked for the gods to help free them from oppression, and the gods had delivered in abundance. It was obviously difficult to get much information about whether maybe-Sarenrae was backing Oris because the empire almost certainly damns nearly everyone in it, or because it served some other more obscure plan that can't be put into as sympathetic human terms. - the empire almost certainly does damn nearly everyone in it. It's worse than Taldor; there's no breathing room anywhere in it for anything but its own perpetuation. It's not hard to imagine that's what maybe-Sarenrae cared about! Until I died, my leading guess was that the god-equilibrium was worse than ours, which is saying something, but favored a recognizably good world over one overrun by horrors or the evil Empire.

But, well, I am somewhat surprised that I'm dead, and now hypothesize that the equilibrium of powerful entities in Velgarth wanted it that way, and so that suggests there's more afoot than was obvious."

         "Sorry, who killed you?"

"Evil empire. Via a mechanism that wouldn't've worked, if I'd gotten the kind of fortuitous impulse that is the common mechanism by which the local gods operate. There is a local spell to suicide in an absurdly destructive Fireball."

        "...that worked?"

"- doing that fifty times worked. In the third round." An assassination attempt that takes three rounds is more or less unserious, the way these things work on Golarion. Anyone worth trying to assassinate would just leave by then. Iomedae could perhaps be read as mildly embarrassed.

"Might be for the best, actually. When -" since apparently it's a 'when' and not an 'if' " - we go back we'll know more about what's waiting for us, and be prepared with some prophecies of our own and maybe a teleport or two."

"How - uniform - are their sorcerers? Is it just one tradition or do they have as many kinds as we have here, or somewhere in between?"

"Comparatively extraordinarily uniform." She would not have tried liberating a country in a place like Golarion; there are just far too many unknown kinds of monster and magic to assume that just because you're tougher than everyone nothing will go horrendously wrong. "Half a dozen common types of sorcerer, half a dozen rare ones, half a dozen one-off ones recorded in history books. Only the one species, outside the history books. Sorcerers are understood to be born with the innate aptitude to reach a certain level of skill, and if they're adequately trained they'll reach it, and they can't surpass it through any degree of practice.

People do not seem to grow more enduring through combat, and you'd have to tell me what implications that has for our theories of how that works."

"It does mean that - Arazni's Prayer spell - just cuts through them like butter, if they're not wearing something for spell resistance or false health."

      "You can cast Arazni's Prayer spell?"

"I was feeling pressed for magical healing so I worked it out."

And Iomedae would feel guilty about that because - it's basically slaughtering civilians - no it's not just that, it's hardly even a weapon, it's like if you decapitated a child every third time you tried to butter your bread -

"...I think probably this means the theory that you get tougher from repeated magical healing is right, if they only have useless gods - or it could be something about our proximity to some special region in the positive energy plane or something like that, there are other possibilities, but the healing is most likely." And between that and the uniform sorcerer spellsets and some inferences about their general capabilities she's pretty sure she could take over this empire within a week. Dismantling it would take longer, if that's what she decides to do with it.

This is the inference Iomedae expected her to be making, yes. Dominate Person on the Emperor seems like it'd get you a substantial fraction of the way there all by itself.

"I committed that the Knights of Ozem would not operate in the Empire outside Oris, because I was confused enough about the god situation to not in fact want to wreck them if it turns out they're right that the gods need fencing out at nearly that price, and because I wanted them to not correctly parse me as a threat to their continued existence, and because the place will be a humanitarian catastrophe if it falls apart, and I don't guess the local gods would be nudging away from catastrophe."

Alfirin, they all know, isn't a Knight of Ozem; Iomedae has no right to make commitments on her behalf.

"From my perspective the next steps - and I have no idea how they ought to be prioritized alongside salvaging the crusade - are determining with some scrying whether Velgarth souls reach Pharasma or not and if they don't where they're going. This may be impossible because of range limitations on scrying; maybe Aroden knows, or Sarenrae. 

If they do, and if I'm right that the Empire is an engine of damnation whoever operates it - give me an hour with a good headband." To attempt to persuade you that you should not stick around being Empress once you've taken the place down. 

"If they don't, then probably it's just not worth operating there unless Aroden - or Abadar, or Erastil - can give us visibility. It is still worth stopping by, my headband is more priceless than the Wish diamond, but we can pick my gear up and leave some people who'll benefit from the local afterlife or lack thereof and recruit some of the sorcerers and give notice to the church of Aroden that Aroden can't reach them. The cost of not doing that in the next week is that free Oris is quite likely to be brutally reconquered and everyone who might spread stories of me put to the sword."

           "Aroden travelled between worlds and probably not with Wishes," Karlenius says.

"I have been mentally calling it Even Greater Teleport." She looks expectantly at Alfirin.