"Yes, yes, yes, and if we fail spectacularly this time around at least it'll be instructive for our descendants. 

– I'm being maudlin, here, not defeatist. This isn't the first time I've found myself trying to reform the world, and it really is useful for me to remember that in all probability I will fail. And, of course, that it's worth doing anyway." 

"It sounds like you succeeded, though. In your time. I'm not saying we aren't likely to fail now, but - I would have expected more optimism given your success."

He laughs a little. 

"Oh, no. I failed. Of course I ended up succeeding at something entirely unexpected and nearly infinitely more important – but, at the very beginning, I wasn't trying to start a coup in Hell. I was trying to make Galt a glorious republic. A light and an example for the ages. 

Some of us survived, but – nobody remembers. Galt's a grubby little dictatorship, and, wouldn't you know, the loudest republican I've ever met runs the tyrant's secret police. So – that's what happens when you try to change the world. At least, in the usual case. Fabricate and the arcane engine could make a big difference. I hope they do, that's why I invented them. It wouldn't surprise me too much if in ten years I find myself bitterly regretting them. 

One does like to keep an open mind." 

"I haven't really tried to change the world like that - toppling governments and all - but I would imagine that it takes time, if you want something stable and good and not just an abyssal mess, at least. And Wisdom, which - you must have been what, twenty at the time?"

"I deserve neither most of the credit nor most of the blame, but I don't think my friends intended to die in a coup in less than five years." 

"I am sure they didn't. That's the sort of thing that can happen, acting quickly and recklessly."

He's tempted to tell Alfirin you started it – which, while technically arguably true, would be less than helpful. 

"If you discover a way to rid your nation of diabolists slowly and deliberately, please do tell me – but that's unfair. I would do things differently now that I'm older and wiser. In fact, I've just said I intend to. But – the better part of Wisdom is recognizing that the world has more in it than we can comprehend, and most plans at the scale of our ambitions crash and burn. 

– Of course, wizards are famously cleverer than we are wise." 

"We are. If we were doing anything of this scale besides the thing we are actually doing, I might suggest bringing in a priest."

"Oh, I just meant we should keep forging ahead blindly, as is our wont. 

I spoke with Marit today. He thinks I should be figuring out a way to take Tar-Baphon alive, and I do have a few ideas, but it would trade off against prophecy research."

"Seems like the sort of thing that might. Let's hear them."

He'd forgotten, for a moment, that he wasn't talking to his Alfirin. It's not that this one is naive, exactly – she's still older than him, probably more paranoid, certainly more ruthless. She also hasn't spent eight hundred years throwing herself at a wall of blind idiot inevitability. She's never founded empires and seen them topple. She hasn't born children and turned them into weapons. And her god is still alive. It probably changes a person – now that he thinks about it – to dedicate themselves wholly and completely to the realization of one great, glorious hope, and then to watch it die. It hadn't occurred to him that that was something they might have in common. 

His Alfirin isn't here, though, so he'd rather talk about normal problems. 

"My first thought is I could try to adapt some of the infrastructure we use in the future for sealing up planar rifts to see if we can't pin him down at Gallowspire. It'd be massively slow and expensive to start with, but probably nothing a little ingenuity can't fix." 

"I would worry that he could still get out, even if the normal exits to Gallowspire are sealed - Is this related to how he was sealed in your history? How...many planar rifts do you have to seal, in your day, it sounds like this isn't a one-off thing?"

There was some subtext there, in his pause, probably about her future self. She really wishes she knew what it was.

"Oh, just the two, if you don't count Holomog. The reason I think it might work is that, at least in my day, he's invested a great deal of himself into Gallowspire – it's why he's impossible to assail there, but it also might make it easier to design a set of wards that can keep him in. That's not how his original seals work, but it is related to the ways I think they could be improved."

"Top-of-your-head estimate, how long would it take?"

"I'd want to know what the situation on Gallowspire looks like now. It could be that he's only so deeply embedded in the place because he's been trapped there for so long, in which case this plan wouldn't work. Otherwise – I could work out a prototype inside of a month, but it's harder to say how long it would take to develop something that's practical to use." 

"Hm. Seems worth trying to get a closer look at Gallowspire. We haven't been prioritizing that because it's risky and we weren't expecting to have uses for the information yet. Did Marit mention why he thinks we should be prioritizing taking him alive, instead of hunting down his phylactery and destroying him?"

"He wants a way to bind him if we don't manage to knock him out in the field. Destroying the phylactery would be better, of course, but in the default timeline you don't. 

– That is another angle I could work on, Nex had some notes on tracking a lich's soul back to their phylactery when their body is destroyed." 

"Mm. Seems useful for this. Any other highlights worth mentioning now, or should I just read the whole stack?

...Also do you have any more details about your trip that it's worth mentioning, now that we're in private?"

"Many." 

And he can tell her about the beach where the tide turns sand-castles into living cities, and the hidden kingdom-beyond-the-kingdom where the descendants of aliens from almost every inhabited planet in the prime material plane build chemical and mechanical (but not magical) marvels, and how Nex wouldn't let them go home until they told him that prophecy was broken. 

(He won't say what he talked about in his private conversation with Nex. After all, she hasn't told him about hers.)

Well this Alfirin certainly can´t tell him, since it hasn't happened to her yet. The beach sounds...really concerning, honestly. Objectively speaking it seems much worse than the rest of Nex' demiplane even if it's less viscerally upsetting to her personally. (She tries not to let it show, how upsetting Nex' little universe is.) Did they tell him to stop that? Maybe that's what future Alfirin talked with Nex about, though probably she's too pragmatic to have lectured Nex on ethics while being both evil and his prisoner.

Yeah the beach is extremely creepy. Fortunately it's also not very inhabited. The normal human residents don't seem to go there much, and the sand people themselves seem to be doing alright when there aren't any terrifying big people trying to ask them questions about their living conditions.

Well. That's better than the alternative where the sand people are not doing alright. She does not herself want to go there ever, not even to have a conversation with Nex.

Does Élie - or the future in general - have any new techniques for getting through spell resistance? That's the main barrier to them doing - anything, really, to Tar-Baphon, he has incredibly powerful spell resistance, (Though not full magic immunity like a golem) and if they could get through it - even only one time in five - that would open up a lot of options.

– Quite possibly, but if they're going to have this conversation, shouldn't they rejoin the crusade? 

She'd be happy to but perhaps they should, instead, spend some more time on prophecy research while they are here in the secret demiplane and return to the crusade in another day or two.

Right, yeah, they were going to do that!! 

Élie's creative process involves a lot of spitting out terrible ideas and then taking a metaphorical axe to them until he's either ruled them out or has the foundation of something workable. He wants to cast Minor Prophecy again. He wants to watch Alfirin cast Minor Prophecy in various different conditions. He wants to see if prophecy is limited by Mind Blank or other protections against divination. He wants to see if he can graft prophecy hooks onto other divination spells. He wants to make prophecy glasses. ...He really wants to make prophecy glasses.