(Cyprian, the military dictator of Galt whom Riudaure had aimed very loosely at Cheliax, and no one else in Lastwall has any meaningful ability to influence, donated an enormous amount of money to the effort to rescue Riudaure’s soul. Not out of any particular loyalty to the man, which he does not feel, despite how instrumental Lastwall’s covert operations were to his rise to power, but because he, himself, reads Lawful Evil, and does not expect to make Axis until he at least manages to overthrow the Infernal Empire, and should he fall to Hell before then he would like Lastwall to put at least that much effort into saving him.)

—except that, in this case, the Wish did not even work.

For most people who have sold their souls to Hell, a Wish is enough to revive them, even when no lesser force will, but only because a ninth-circle caster can typically beat the Will save of an ordinary contract devil. Riuduare is not most people, and his new owner has a substantially better Will save than an ordinary contract devil.

At this point, even they would probably give up. Spending vast resources on the successful rescue of an ally would be one thing. Spending those resources, when all they can bring to bear will not even be enough, would be simply foolish, and Iomedae is not the goddess of Stupid Good.

But Jean Riduaure, in fact, has secrets not even he knows, guarded against the day that he might fall to Hell.

There is a letter, written by him and sealed with instructions to open in the event of his irreparable death, which is opened and read by Lastwall’s most senior officers after Morgethai’s Wish fails. It reads:

There is a way to break the grip of Hell upon Cheliax, which I commit now to this page, and will erase from my memory after, lest I fall to Hell and they learn of it.

The loyalty of Cheliax’s high-level wizards is, as is well known, almost entirely dependent on the ownership of their souls by Hell, and this is, as my own case demonstrates, often not even enough. If the sale of their souls would be reversed, Cheliax would fall within a day.

It is told in Cheliax, that there is no way to reverse the sale of a soul, but this is not true. It is written in the Book of the Damned that if both physical copies of an Infernal contract are destroyed, that contract is null and void. I have confirmed this with others who have tracked down and destroyed their contract devils, some of whom are prideful enough to carry their contracts on their own person.

(You should not, yourselves, attempt to read from the Book of the Damned; it is said that any who do so are themselves damned to keep the information from Heaven’s hands. As I am already certainly damned, or would be but for the information in that book, I considered it an acceptable risk; I hope only that this summary is not already sufficient to trigger that provision.)

Those contracts made by devils not stupid enough to carry them around are kept, according to the Book, in Caïna, the eighth circle of Hell, in the domain of Mephistopheles, called the Merchant of Souls. It might be possible, though Hell certainly guards against the possibility, for a powerful enough adventuring party to enter Hell, reach the hall where the contracts are kept, and, with a Wish or similarly powerful weapon, destroy them all. I mean to do this as my dying act, when I am as powerful as I will ever be; if you are reading this, I am dead and beyond the ability of mortals to raise, and someone else will have to carry out the plan in my stead.

If you, on your adventure into the Pit, should come across my soul, I would appreciate the rescue, but you will have, frankly, more important things to do.

Uh.

Wow.

They can't do that.

—can they?

A word on Lastwall's current situation, geopolitically speaking—

Lastwall is kind of screwed. They lost more on the operation in Ustalav than they even intended to gamble, for rather little gain. Their main consolation is that their enemies also did the same thing, and also that Razmiran, which was always actually pretty terrible, is gone, and Cyprian's Galt which replaced it has all the usual problems of expansionist empires but is mostly not a terrible place to live, at least for those not caught up in its endless war, but these do not, in fact, make Lastwall any less screwed. Their covert operations are in shambles, and their undead enemies were beaten and expended a lot of their own non-renewable resources but are still more united than they've been since Tar-Baphon's fall, under the uneasy rule of an eighth-circle lich who might well become the next Whispering Tyrant even if he makes no attempt to free the original one.

Also, among those agents now exposed to Hell are those in Galt, charged with defending the First Consul from his many internal enemies; with those either evacuated or gradually being picked off by Cheliax, Cyprian may not live long enough to topple the Infernal Empire.

They have, as they see it, two options.

Option one: return to their pre-Cyprian state of uneasy de facto alliance with Cheliax against the demons and undead that menace Avistan. Cheliax has, in the aftermath of the collapse of Razmir's regime, a Hellknight-ruled protectorate in Ustalav-that-was; together, they could destroy the lich-emperor who was once Taldaris II before he becomes a real problem. If Cyprian does manage to conquer Cheliax, Iomedae's strength be with him, but they can no longer afford to be pulling as many strings in the courts of Avistan as they did when Jean Riudaure was theirs.

Option two: they are not, actually, screwed in the sense of not having resources, especially if they openly ally with Cyprian's Galt. They could burn them all on ending Infernal Cheliax now, go out in a literal blaze of glory in the eighth circle of Hell, and if Tar-Baphon returns and razes Lastwall to the ground while their backs are turned, then they will leave behind a continent-spanning empire ready to beat him back as Taldor did in the ancient days when their goddess was still mortal, and a generation's worth or more of the people of Cheliax will be spared from the fires of Hell.

However.

Lastwall has plenty of money, and plenty of almost everything that money can buy. From here to Tian Xia, nobles and powerful merchants concerned about their alignments pay their tithes to the Church of Iomedae, long since established as the most efficient vehicle in Golarion for converting gold to Good, and among the nations of Avistan, only Cheliax exceeds Lastwall in ability to throw money at its problems—Taldor is wealthier, of course, but spending money on things (as opposed to merely spending money) is not a free action in Taldor, because nothing is a free action in Taldor.

What Lastwall lacks, however, is genuinely high-level casters in its service. Iomedae is a young goddess, and has no true cleric higher than the seventh circle, and only a handful of those—and one paladin of a slightly higher level than that, but she cannot be spared for anything other than defending the world against the wound in it. On the arcane side, they have one other eighth-circle wizard in their service besides Riudaure, and a handful at seventh; none of this, of course, is enough to survive even the first circle of Hell.

A very rich faction can, to some extent, cheat, with scrolls and items and Wishes bought of the City of Brass, but doing this at a level high enough to stand against Hell requires wealth commensurate with "controlling the entire spellsilver production of a major nation", not "getting generous donations from most of the rich questionably-Neutral people in Avistan".

In short, Lastwall does not have the capacity to raid Hell. Not while they also have to stop the world from being eaten by demons.

Unless, in fact—

Any god could close the Worldwound in an instant. Even a reasonably competent fake god could do it in a day. The forces actually responsible for the Worldwound's existence are just not that powerful, next to even a baby god like Iomedae. This begs the question of why, given that a large number of churches in Golarion, presumably endorsed by their gods, have established a formal alliance to fight the Worldwound, the Worldwound still exists.

The answer that might perhaps suggest itself is that some god(s) intend to benefit from fighting the Worldwound, not from closing it, and have arranged for the current situation, in which the Worldwound is just barely contained by all the nations and churches of the world working together, to continue existing, because that's actually the thing they prefer.

And once you've put it this way, it's kind of obvious who.

To be fair, there are other gods, like Gorum, who like the war against the Worldwound for what it is. But only one god (a) has a church that's signatory to the treaty, (b) benefits enormously from the Forces of Good not being able to go after His country and also not wanting to worsen an x-risk by forcing His country's military to do anything else, like defend itself, (c) has scaled wizard production to previously-unexplored heights and needs a similarly scalable XP grinder to get them all past third circle, and (d) would even think of this kind of bullshit.

Asmodeus, when He committed His church to fighting the demons of the Worldwound, did not in any way represent that He was not, also, spending a significant amount of His intervention budget on keeping them coming.

(Iomedae, to be clear, is definitely not allowed to tell her followers any of this.)

(But that doesn't stop them from making inferences.

Did you turn over the letter to the back?)

That—is not an explanation of how to close the Worldwound. It does not in fact make the situation look better, there.

According to Pharasma, and most mortal scholars of Golarion after Her, there are these things called 'demon lords', which live in the 'Abyss', and are 'Chaotic Evil', one of nine metaphysically fundamental categories into which all things must be sorted. The demon lords themselves, perhaps unsurprisingly, laugh at Pharasma, and why should they not? Many of them are older than She.

In fact, or at least as someone from outside Pharasma's bubble might tell it, there is a tiny, tiny fraction of entities-that-matter which, by chance or deliberate creation, are some combination of value-aligned-with-mortals and capable-of-making-binding-agreements such that they can be party to the system of treaties which allows a place like Golarion, a bubble where smaller entities can grow up, to exist, and these are given the title 'gods'.

'Demon lords' are just everyone else.

Most things in the Abyss do not hate you. They do not desire your suffering or your destruction like Asmodeus or the lords of Abaddon. They will just kill you because you are made of resources.

(Jean Riudaure lacks the context to deduce any of this. But Iomedae does not, and now that Her followers have independently deduced the secret that Asmodeus is paying to keep, there are directions of thought that it might now be worth spending compute on, because She might actually be able to communicate the results without violating any agreements.)

Even the Good ancient gods do not really value exactly the things mortals value. They value some adjacent thing, often something simultaneously simpler-in-absolute-terms than the mortal thing and also too deep for mortal comprehension, which accords well enough with mortal values in virtually all of the cases that actually get tested, but she can see the gaps, and does what she can to steer events such that they never come up.

Demon lords, presumably, are way less aligned (or anti-aligned) than that; the thing Deskari, maker of the Worldwound, actually cares about is likely to be almost completely orthogonal to mortal values or Her values, and he may be almost completely impossible to meaningfully communicate never mind negotiate with, but there is, in fact, the possibility that he might somehow be steered to do his thing somewhere...else. Uninhabited.

On Golarion, Deskari is named the demon lord of waste and desolation. In Deskari's opinion, if he had anything that mortals would call 'opinions', 'waste' and 'desolation' are kind of harsh words, not that he cares what anyone thinks of him. Deskari is the demon lord of wanting to be LEFT THE FUCK ALONE, and it isn't his fault that he came into being in the area that Pharasma uses as a dumping ground for people She doesn't like, and even the neighboring areas of neighboring spatial-continuua have life EVERYWHERE including on the FUCKING SUN.

Deskari wasn't about to fight Pharasma, so his plan was to instead break through to Golarion and kill all the annoying things there, which are a lot easier to kill than the annoying things most places, so that he could finally have some PEACE AND QUIET.

... this, uh, isn't going particularly well for him, to be clear.

She has all Aroden's notes from when He went exploring the stars. Turns out Golarion's solar system is kind of an EXTREME OUTLIER in terms of how much life it has, and most of the Material Plane is just the way Deskari likes it. Here's a dead planet around a neutron star. Looks pretty wasted and desolate to Her.

Looks great! How do I get there?

(Spell development in the Abyss has been somewhat impeded by it, uh, being the Abyss, such that he doesn't know the truly unlimited-range Teleport even if he's quite powerful enough to cast it.)

She also has the spellform for that.

Are you literally insane.

Do NOT give Interplanetary Teleport to a demon lord. There is a REASON we've kept that one out of the Abyss.

Is there an actual treaty against it?

Yes, and it would also count as an intervention to close the Worldwound. So would telling Your followers to ask Nefreti Clepati to do it, or communicating anything to them such that You expect them to figure it out themselves.

Lastwall is tragically unaware of any of this. All they have is the theory—admittedly a very sensible theory, from someone who is rarely wrong about this sort of thing—that the gods have the Worldwound under much tighter control than They seem to, and if Lastwall just...walks away...Asmodeus will not, actually, let demons eat Golarion.

It's a huge risk to take—even if the theory is true, this might be the sort of incentive that Asmodeus will predictably ignore, so that other gods don't bother to shape His incentives so. He didn't, technically, threaten Golarion with the Worldwound—he didn't make it, and fighting it would be Iomedae's null action if he weren't intervening to keep it open, so pulling back arguably is a threat—

Their goddess is silent on the subject, so they summon a high-level angel to talk through it, because they are, in fact, not smart enough for this. The angel explains that when decision theory looks that complicated it's usually just because that's what Asmodeus wants you to think, and this case legitimately is complicated but their prior reasoning was also just what Asmodeus wanted them to think.

The only concern the angel has is that Asmodeus was presumably paying a lot to keep the Worldwound open, and if He no longer has to pay that, it could cause problems.

They start to withdraw their forces anyway.

Well, shit.