"There are. Have any of my other personal friends been unwillingly reanimated for a thousand years, that you know of?"

"None that I know of. 

....There are a few you turn into sapient swords and things over the centuries and in the case I'm most familiar with it was entirely voluntary, but I wouldn't swear to that being true across the board."

"...Anyone I know yet that I turn into a sword?"

"None that I'm aware of, but we may yet change the course of history."

"We may yet. On which topic, we should probably tell Iomedae what happens to Arazni so she can destroy the body."

"...Of course. I don't know why I hadn't thought that you could just prevent it this time."

"Well, I don't know what Geb can do. It might not work to stop him but - we ought to at least try."

She takes some time to compose herself before plane-shifting back, but even so it's only been a few minutes on the Material since she and Élie left. Iomedae's still in the command tent.

“- that can’t have been long even for you. What’s going on?”

"We need to - or, we probably ought to - destroy Arazni's body. Élie just told me. Geb steals it and raises her a couple decades after you ascend."

“Gods. I - yes, we should. Only - I thought there was a chance Aroden can do it in the Age of Glory, even if He can’t now -

— I - why - I suppose that’s a stupid question -

— she’d - rather we destroyed her -“

"She would. I'm so sorry." It's not an apology, just an expression of grief.

She has tried over the last two years not to take too much comfort in the fact it'll stop hurting when she goes for the Starstone, one way or another. It seems like an unhealthy thing to take too much comfort in. 

But it's better than failing to function at all and sometimes that's the alternative. 

She stands up.

She wonders if Arazni's remains will burn. The person was resistant.

She is really, really not okay and she wants to hug Alfirin and cry and she absolutely cannot do that, it's one of the very few things that could still at this point be catastrophic. Her arm, which is for some reason experiencing delayed communications with the general command, starts reaching out for Alfirin anyway before she is able to rescind those orders. It did not move very far but Alfirin will have seen it. 

"I am going to call some people," she says, "to see if they think of some option we're missing," - more incomplete than she permits herself to be with allies without strategic reason - "and to cry on someone's shoulder." She doesn't have quite enough wherewithal for the distant smile to land right when she adds - "shouldn't be you."

Ow.

"As you say."

And that hurt Alfirin, very understandably, and she might think it's some deficiency of hers rather than of Iomedae's, which is not true at all. Arazni would tell her that she was being very foolish, except Arazni will never tell anyone that ever again except in the timeline where she's spent hundreds of years a slave of Geb. She steps out of the room to send a summons over the Telepathic Bond. 

"I'm sorry," she says, and it is the kind of apology that's about an admission of fault. She isn't precisely sure what it's for but there are several candidates and all of them were her fault.

"I am not sure what for... I should go."

"Yes," she agrees. "- I'm happy for you. That you have Elie."

Something about the way Iomedae said that makes Alfirin suspect Iomedae does not just mean the obvious literal thing she said that should have never been in doubt.

"That...seems like a conversation for another time."

"We don't have to discuss it at all. But - if you'd like, sure. Another time."

She doesn't feel like going straight back to the demiplane after that. She teleports to Absalom instead, to spend some time studying divinations.

She ends up crying on Karlenius's shoulder. Alfirin doesn't like him but Iomedae does, and most of the people she was actually close to who aren't in the Crusade command were murdered by Erum-Hel in the weeks after Arazni died. (So were the ones in the Crusade command, but those warranted a resurrection.)

That's probably, when she gets some perspective on it, part of why she's emotionally unstable with respect to Arazni's death even more than is warranted by the magnitude of the loss itself. It was the start of the end of almost every human thing she had in the world. And that's fine, she doesn't need human things, she didn't even when she was more of a human, but - quite evidently there is some part of her that is still twisted up in agony around the subject, and probably always will be -

- probably will be for eight more years, if it goes as it did in Elie's time. That's not really very long.

She has ordered people to pay much more for much less. 

She is aware that she is handling Alfirin unfairly but she doesn't, actually, have a plan to do better. It is better to place too little weight there than too much, and neither of them know how much would be too much, so. None at all, except the mutual trust they can collaborate where it's strategically relevant. 

She asks Aroden if Arazni's body is safe from Geb in Axis. He answers that He can't observe Geb doing this at all, which isn't promising, but that it'd be pretty surprising if Geb could do anything within His own divine realm. They'll put it there for now and recalculate later.

Realistically, they'll recalculate when Iomedae is a god and then she'll be able to make the decision to destroy Arazni without it hurting and then she'll go ahead and do it. She is too close to being a lawful being to actually derive any comfort from this fog-cloud; it hurts nine tenths as much as if she has already had to do it. But it's sensible. She orders the body brought to Axis. She doesn't want to go herself. Arazni took her to Axis, the last time she visited. She never wants to go again. 

....

She's really not all right, is she. Perhaps she never was, but they were going to lose so there was no time for it, and now they have two archmages and there's time for it. She takes half a day off to spend in prayer and reflection and is still a wreck at the end of it but a less disorganized one; she hopefully isn't grieving in any ways that will surprise her. 

And she is self-aware about the fact she loves Alfirin and would prefer not to and that Alfirin probably does not know and it is probably good that Alfirin does not know. It's a fine decision to make but it's definitely one to make in a self-aware fashion.

She takes a day before coming back.

"How are you? Did you come up with anything better?"

"Axis. It's not - Aroden can't see this at all, which bodes poorly for whether He can stop it, but He still thinks He probably can, in His own realm. We're going to recalculate in a decade or so, if Elie's confdient it happens after that."