Nenio hit seventh at Blackwater, right?

And hasn't found anyone to teach her the spell since then, of course.

"We do not have a rod of greater extend spell. Anyone willing to teach our top wizard the spell in question would probably also help."

This is kind of mortifying, but it's not her fault that she only has one wizard who does seventh circle spells.

- Marit turns to look at Heleer, at this point very suspiciously. 

"Korva mentioned that I had lost my memories when we met."

"Heleer's memory is - not what it seems to be in this era. He's primarily offered his ability to tell the stories of objects."

" - understood. Well, we can teach the spell free of charge to your seventh circle wizards, and also share the experience we have on which foods to ask for and how to supplement the army with them in order to have the largest benefits to overall health and morale...there may actually be a lot of things like that, I suppose I was imagining that there were books on how the Shining Crusade was fought and expertise on that was widely possessed but I am now thinking that was probably wrong. It's pretty straightforward, anyway, you want to ask the mansion for steak and pork chops and liver and veal, hand that out per unit, and get the rest in nuts and hard cheese and wine for rations that'll keep, and you want to put up your sick and have the mansion bring them milk and broths with egg in them. ...unless nine hundred years in the future you know more about disease treatment than us, which you really should, actually."

"We'll obviously share any info we have on things like medicine, though I don't know what the state of the art is across both times. And - seventh-circle wizard, singular. Not counting Heleer."

That's not public information, but - realistically any demon that can fake her companions and the time travel this well already knows all about Nenio.

- Marit nods. "Right. We don't have so many seventh circle wizards ourselves that we could trivially give one up even offseason, but it's good to know that'd double your capacities if we did do it. Do you have access to scrolls of - what's best against demons - probably Tsunami?"

Whyyy doesn't she have everything Arsinoe's ever offered to sell her memorized -

"A few, I think, but obviously usually trading off against things like food and armor."

"Here as well, but they're easier to transport. And probably trading off substantially less, because we're ...a lot wealthier, I'm getting the sense."

"I'm also getting that sense." And not very sure what to make of it, although - of course things were different, before Aroden died. And maybe Iomedae is better at convincing people to take her cause seriously, that wouldn't exactly be surprising.

"We'll gratefully take scrolls if you've got them."

"You know the one thing we've got too much of? Demon relics. Some of 'em really powerful, and some of 'em with rare effects that happen to be useless for all of our top people. You ever wanna buy some rare magic items looted off of demon corpses, the Fifth Crusade has you covered."

" - we would probably happily pay for those, actually, Abadaran pricing, if you want to bring those back next time you come. And we can likewise send you things that might have much better resale value in your own world, if there are historical collectors who'd pay well for any books that have become rare or anything."

"You know, I bet there are. I'll see what our people can find out about which items will be in most demand by people who aren't busy crusading."

(Woljif looks so pleased with himself. And why not, if he's right?)

"I'm confused about - the degree of support Iomedae's church is offering the Crusade. What the Knights do today is take much of their pay in magic items, and at a high frequency leave those to the Church when they die, and I think Iomedae's plan was that eventually She'd have accumulated the means to outfit the whole army with good cloaks of resistance and rings of protection and all the paladins will wear mithril plate armor. I know Mendev's pretty far north, and pretty underresourced, but I'm surprised they haven't offered you more operational support and training and food and armor, if they're well-equipped themselves, and if they're not then I'm surprised about that separately."

"Well, see the previous point about everyone having their own problems. Lastwall certainly has stretches of the Worldwound border that they're responsible for holding - but Lastwall also has a hostile border with the orc hordes of Belkzen, and considers themselves responsible for seeing that Tar-Baphon remains sealed. We have lots of individual Iomedans - the most powerful is probably Seelah, like I said, by virtue of having fallen into a hole in the ground with me during the initial demon attack on Kenabres, but Seelah's from Katapesh."

" - and I've just realized that you don't have a timeline of any of this, does a timeline of the crusade sound useful? Nine hundred years is a lot, but the crusade is only one campaign season old."

" - that sounds very useful, yes please."

"All right, so. Middle of Sarenith, during the Sunwrought Festival. The demon lord Deskari attacks the crusader city of Kenabres with an enormous horde of demons, which is supposed to be impossible because the city has a Wardstone. Daeran, Woljif, and Ember were in the city when it happened. Me, Seelah, and a couple of other people fell through a hole in the ground and fought our way back up to the surface, then spent the rest of - maybe five days - trying to take back the city. At the end of that time, we have a big fight trying to regain control of the Wardstone, and a Lilitu comes in and is going to kill us all. Most of us are second circle, then, a couple of us were third. Miraculously, though, everyone in the fight is apparently granted power out of myth at just that moment. The Lilitu retreats, and we retake the city. People say it's Iomedae. Of course, they say a lot of things."

"Queen Galfrey of Mendev, a paladin of Iomedae going back decades and decades, hears about this and comes to Kenabres. She declares, fairly immediately, the start of the Fifth Crusade, with the goal of retaking and then sealing the Worldwound, rather than merely holding back its expansion. She appoints the so-called Hero of Kenabres, yours truly, to serve as Knight Commander of the new crusade. Our first goal is to secure the ruined crusader city of Drezen, so that we can move the wardstone inward and take territory back from the demons for the first time in more than half a century. We had a few forces, almost entirely Mendevian, with a smattering of others. More Iomedans than anyone else, but we had a couple Abadarans, at least one Shelynite, whoever we could get. We start out in - I want to say the hundreds."

"We march north. This is where we meet Regill, who is commanding both the remains of his own Hellknight troop and the remains of a group of Sarenite crusaders in an emergency situation. He holds out long enough for us to bring reinforcements, and adds his forces to ours afterwards. A bunch of other stuff also happens, of course, but that's how we met Regill, if you're wondering. Arue we met in the dungeons of Drezen, where she was being held for having warned some acolytes of Desna about the initial attack on Kenabres, who unfortunately nobody listened to beforehand."

"At the end of Rova, we reach and retake Drezen. I make fourth circle fighting a Balor. Not alone, of course, everyone here but Aivu was there, and many more besides them. We move the wardstone in. - oh, and I recover and hang the Sword of Valor from the walls of Drezen, which is an Iomedan relic in the form of a banner displaying her symbol, the radiant sword. But instead of a radiant sword, the banner decides once it's up that it's going to display a tree now, and the butterflies start showing up. This, I understand, is what prompts someone to finally actually ask whether Iomedae wants me in charge of the Fifth Crusade. I am told they got an affirmative answer."

"We've done some stuff since then, but the army is currently mostly hunkering down for winter, and we're trying to amass more forces to fight in the spring."

“- hit fourth circle killing a balor,” he says tiredly. They are - very lucky, if what they’ve found is - the kind of person fate bends around, the kind of person Iomedae is, the kind of person who is only mostly not a god who can command the futures to settle in their favor.

Or she’s lying, or deluded.

“That sounds like a very exhausting six months. It makes sense that your resources are lagging your ambitions under the circumstances. And - I’m not at all surprised Iomedae wants you running Her crusade.

We should maybe go back through history before that. Did anyone else die in the godwar that killed Aroden? Are there any new ascended powers in the Inner Sea? Who should be backing you and isn’t yet, the Western Empire?”

"Oh, this is the part where I'm reminded that I know many histories, most of which are false. No ascended gods newer than Iomedae that I've heard of, no other gods dead in the intervening time that I'm aware of. - oh, prophecy broke, that's in that genre. Instead of the Age of Glory they call it the Age of Lost Omens."

" - sorry, what?"

"It doesn't work anymore. When Aroden was supposed to reappear - it's said, anyway - all of his clerics lost their spells, the whole of Golarion was wracked with earthquakes and hurricanes - one of them's still going, the ships just kind of go around it, when they go - and when people tried to use prophecy to determine what would happen now, nothing. We don't see the future anymore, it's just us."

" - do the gods see the future?"

"My understanding is they don't. Not like they used to, anyway."

Marit turns his head pointedly to look at where the scrying sensor's presumably sitting.