She is on the bank of a river running out of a lake, through a town of about fifty houses that cling to the river as if for protection; beyond them there are farms and then vast, dark, endless forest. It is dark and cloudy out, but there's a lot of very bright moonlight to see by nonetheless; the only sounds are the running of the stream, the occasional hooting of owls or other nightbirds, and the rare howl of wolves.

It feels supernaturally weird. Not anything concrete, just, different from the way both the earth's surface and the Neath usually do.

...Those noises...it reminds her of the Surface; she didn't spend a lot of time in forested wilderness, but the Surface is so much more alive than most parts of the Neath, at least outside of the water. 

Those look like real stars, too, not moon-misers. 

But this doesn't feel like the Surface, even the Surface at night. She can't put her finger on what's different, but there's something. 

It's night, so she can't call out to her grandparent--or whoever else--for an explanation. 

Feeling vaguely unsettled, she walks towards the houses and starts examining them. She isn't going to barge into someone's home in the middle of the night, but it's not like she has any better ideas for orienting herself. 

The houses all have locked or barred doors and shutters and do not seem to be inclined to let anyone in. They're made of sturdy logs, probably cut from the local forest, and none of them have any signs or writing on them or anything like that.

There are three buildings that look like they might not be houses; a watermill, which is locked and closed, a very large - town hall building? - also locked and closed, and one slightly-damaged looking - possible church? No unambiguous religion symbols she can see, but it's large, damaged, its door is open, and there's a graveyard behind it.

--Oh, a graveyard! That'll do. The dead have bigger problems than being bothered at odd hours. 

She makes her way into the graveyard, turns her arm into diamond, and plunges it into the earth, transforming it into its larger, crab-claw-like shape in order to grasp for a coffin or corpse below her selected gravestone. 

Coffin! Pretty sturdy one, too, not that that will matter if she has opinions on the topic. The lid looks very sturdily nailed shut.

(The gravestone has writing in a language she doesn't know.)

...Huh. She didn't really notice that, earlier, but--yeah she can't read that. Hn. Annoying. 

"Very sturdily nailed shut" is approximately no impediment to her; with inhuman strength and fingertips made of diamond, it's approximately trivial to dig into the join between coffin and lid and rip the latter off. 

The body is that of a man, rotted down to the bone. He's wearing also-decayed robes, plain, heavy-duty, and black, and there's an amulet on top of the body that she doesn't recognize with a spiraling comet pattern on it.

She doesn't recognize any of this!

Maybe they're in Russia. She knows Russia uses a non-latinate alphabet, and she doesn't recognize this one--she'd recognize the Chinese one, or the Arabic one--probably there are more alphabets on earth than she's heard of. 

She glows. 

And the man's flesh and skin regrows, and he looks up at her and then stands.

"- Incomprehensible," he says, picking the amulet off the floor of the coffin. "Incomprehensible incomprehensible?"

Welp, she was afraid of that. 

"Do you speak English? Uhh, sprechen sie Deutch? Parlez-vous Francais? Uhh, fuck, something, pǔtōnghuà?"

He does something magical with the amulet!

"Thank you," he says, soberly, bowing, "but that was not necessary. I was with my goddess."

"God...dess...? There's...someone hereabouts taking care of dead people? That's--very good to know--I came here by accident and have very little context."

There is a pause.

"This is the town of Corvischior," he says, "in the county of Varno, in the kingdom of Ustalav, on the world Golarion, on the material plane. I am a priest of Pharasma, the goddess of birth and death, and in Ustalav, humans, the species that I am and that you appear to be, call Her the Judge; Her other names are Mother of Souls, Lady of Graves or Lady of Mysteries, and the Gray Lady. She is the eldest of the gods, preserver of souls from destruction, and when a mortal's life ends, that mortal goes before Her court to judge where he shall go next."

“Oh, I’m only half human. And not mortal. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this lady, unless I very badly misunderstand, uh, some things. I don’t think Pharasma sounds anything like Mary anyway. The planet I’m from is called Earth! I was not expecting another planet to have humans!”

"We would not expect another planet to have humans, either," he says. "And I would have expected all of the elder gods to have been known in all worlds. But the universe is very, very large, and many strange things happen in it."

“I…guess…oh, is Pharasma the local star?”

"No."

“‘Kay, then I’m back to being stumped. So, is she nice? Are lots of people with her, and are they likely to not want to come back? If people don’t want to come back because they’re somewhere nice then knowing that is way more important than figuring out what the disconnect is vis a vis divinity.”

"Pharasma is neither kind nor cruel, and only Her servants remain with her. The good she guides to the planes of Good, where they have built great paradises; the evil she sends to the planes of Evil, where they torment each other forever; those who pursue Law are sent to planes of Law to build their realms of order, and those of Chaos go to endless lawless planes of chaos. Pharasma judges the dead, but She does not rule them; Her teachings to mortals are that it is the duty of parents and Her priests that children grow up to be adults capable of making choices among the fates among them, and that the destruction or - forced twisting? of a soul is an abomination."

“…Okay. Is there any way to check which afterlife someone went to, it sounds like the evil ones at least do need rescuing then!”

"There are magics given by the gods to their servants to allow them to speak with the dead, but She did not give me them the day I was killed," he says apologetically.

"That's totally fair. --How much torment are we talking here, like, I don't super want to bother someone who's, like, fine, but--I would want to be interrupted at being fine in order to, like, stop someone from hitting, uh, other people with rocks--normally I would simply resurrect the whole graveyard and the calculus is clearly different here but I am not actually certain it has a different answer--"

"Far greater than is humanly possible to endure in life," he says gently, "but you are right it would be - very bad, to the souls in the Upper Planes, to wrench them from their new lives in Heaven and Nirvana and Elysium to return them to this world." He pauses. "... I am not in fact sure that would be possible, with an old enough soul, our resurrection fails to work because the soul changes in the afterlife, but it would be - disastrously destructive to them, if it were."

She sucks a breath in through her teeth. 

"Okay. So...maybe worth it for people who haven't been dead long, wait 'till we can check for people who've been gone longer?"

"Resurrection spells the gods grant us do not work on unwilling targets. I am not - unwilling - but I did not notice the request when you returned me to life...?" Maybe he just forgot it? The Boneyard is not fitting very well into his living brain's memories very well; it's a different sort of place.