She was expecting this, and tries to - relax into it, because He's not trying to hurt her and if she thrashes in response to the ways it feels like being scoured in flaming sands then they'll have a harder time communicating.

He's dead. That's the most important thing, the thing to convey first. In the other world, he is dead, and the storms of the godwar ripped the world halfway apart, and hundreds of millions of people starved in the year without a harvest. (At ABSOLUTE MINIMUM the Age of Glory should be RESCHEDULED TO MIDWINTER.)

Also there's a rift to the Abyss.

Also ASMODEUS has CONQUERED THE WESTERN EMPIRE and is trying to make everyone in it go to Hell. Eight hundred adults a day. Of course Alfirin looked it up. How can other people not trust her, knowing that she's the one - the only one - who looked it up - that's not useful context for Aroden right now -

Aroden's holy book has hymns about the aftermath of Earthfall, about waking to a shattered world where everything that you believed in is gone and won't come back, about piecing the world back together in its ashes.

It wasn't supposed to happen again.

....It wasn't,

and if it ever somehow did happen, He wasn't supposed to be dead,

that's among the only things that He would never have knowingly risked,

- and it's terrifying, to know that He apparently missed something anyway - 

- he never intended to walk away, never ever, that was always the most important thing, why He did everything He ever did, and if it wasn't even worth it - 

(Aroden wouldn't normally try to communicate this, but - not because it's hard to communicate to mortals without hurting them. Mostly because it almost never helps, to show His mortal followers that He, too, can and does miss things, however clearly He tried to convey in all of His holy books that of course He would.) 

- spare a moment of attention to convey that He needs no further convincing about Alfirin being their ally. He isn't sure how useful this will be for Iomedae (and he should be careful, here, so careful, if He wants her to clearly remember all of this conversation) - ...note that He is less convinced about the possible-distant-future Alfirin. It takes - a great deal of care, to maintain one's values over time as an immortal - but Aroden knows that it's possible, and Alfirin seems at least more likely than most to be careful enough. 

(He should really keep this conversation as short as possible, more for Iomedae's sake than for the sake of His intervention-budget, though both are relevant constraints.) 

- can Iomedae convey any more mortal-level detail about this rift in the Abyss, or about Aroden's future Empire that Asmodeus conquered. All of this is, unsurprisingly, not visible via His usual godsenses at all, and His only source of information on it is Iomedae. But He is bringing forward quite a lot of attention to interpret what she knows. 

She is doing her very best to lay it out plainly, but she doesn't know all that much either. Asmodeus took control of Cheliax through a pact with House Thrune after a horrendous thirty year civil war in the power vacuum left by the collapse of His church.

(She's going to go take it back, of course. She needs Him to spend the cost - which she knows is much higher when the strength isn't earned - to push Narthoc, his strongest cleric, to ninth, so that she can leave him behind with some diamonds to hold the lines while she takes half the Shining Crusade off to crush Asmodeus's country. If He wants to additionally help, she needs more diamonds, the ability to cast Miracles from her own strength instead of His, and Arazni back but He already knows she wants that.)

(Arazni in the other world is undead and enslaved by Geb. It's terrible and she can't just send an army off to go and fix it.)

The rift in the world was opened by an archmage named Areelu Vorlesh, right when Aroden died, when the planar boundaries were presumably all screwed up by the godwar. It is definitely also a problem, but - she thinks it'll hold until she's solved Cheliax.

Which is really all the information that Aroden needs. 

(He isn't pleased with it, and - it's a novel experience, actually, facing something anywhere near as upsettingly out-of-context as Earthfall, even if only in hypothetical form. Most of His establishing attention-patterns aren't used to it.) 

- acknowledged. He (a quick check of the relevant resource-budgets) can commit now to raising Narthoc to ninth circle. He cannot at this time commit to anything else. 

...should He also re-empower His apparent former cleric? He noticed her immediately but now has an actual explanation for her, He just...is not sure if from Iomedae's vantage point this seems like the best allocation of resources. 

(Note: Iomedae should assume in general that He knows far less than she is probably used to expecting about His ability to reasonably allocate resources, at least until He has figured out whether it's even safe to attempt to learn more directly about the other, later, Golarion. It may not be.) 

Yes, they want to shelter and reempower as many of Aroden's former priests as they can get, unless it's wildly more expensive than they're expecting. They can help on the Shining Crusade and be traded for resources to the other world, where god-intervention-budget is more constrained because it's only Iomedae.

(She did turn out right. They have that, at least.)

(Aroden is not surprised but it's - good to know, and probably even more reassuring than that for Iomedae, who doesn't yet have god!Foresight.) 

He will convey that it's actually less expensive than empowering new clerics, overall, especially if they can mostly arrange to send over former priests who were higher-level when Aroden died. It's a worthwhile trade. 

- and He is very proud of Iomedae, and expects it to go better for both of their goals if He ends the conversation now. 

Yeah. Oooof.

(If Alfirin wants to fret from a distance, she'll have a much easier time landing a scry on Iomedae now than she usually would.)

She can usually land a scry on Iomedae, when she needs to. It helps that she knows her well, and it helps more that she has a lock of Iomedae's hair. (Iomedae wouldn't let her return it)

She does it greater, so that instead of anchoring to a mirror it directly gives her another set of senses, and frets, and paces, and argues with herself about whether it's appropriate to actually do something about the thing where Iomedae is suffering.

She and herself negotiate an agreement where she brews Iomedae a pot of her favorite tea for when she wants to relax, and sets it down with a cup next to her and slips out to (quietly) chide the guards for letting her do that.

Korva feels like it's been entirely too long since she killed something. She sort of wishes she could blame this on the sword, but Lariel's sword has waited a hundred years for someone to pick it up and continue its quest, and it'll patiently wait as long as it needs to to see the quest through. So it's all Korva. She wants the simplicity of ending another creature's life.

The crusade, unfortunately, doesn't need her to kill anything just now, since she doesn't have any more leads on notable demon activity, or survivors inside the barrier, or any place that she particularly needs to scout before the spring. The crusade needs her to go over their troop deployment decisions. Or, at least, that's what Regill is doing in the command center by himself, at six in the morning. She can see that he's doing this because she has to pass the command center to leave her room and get breakfast, which is in the same building off the same hallway. He has the map marked with half a dozen little red stones, along the barrier.

"What's up."

"The snowcaster elves lost two members of their patrol squad to the north, last night, and wish to speak to you. An entire patrol to the south was found dead, one of the mixed Lastwall and Mendevian teams."

"Bad night."

"The Lastwall people can usually handle themselves, do we have any idea what kind of demon it was?"

"As the entire patrol was found dead, we do not. They were stripped of obvious magic items, but not their armor, which may imply a certain range of attention span or may reflect simple disinterest. Unfortunately, these losses are not unusual. We've been losing more and more men, as winter drags on."

"Each of these points you have on the map is - what, a lost patrol? Over how long?"

"The last two weeks. Not all of them were wiped out entirely, a few included dying survivors who were later recovered. But each of them represents a skirmish that the demons won. Obviously, that's in addition to losses that occur in the course of conflicts that do successfully rout the demons."

" - Regill, that's a patrol loss every other night."

"Yes. And it is unsustainable, with the numbers we have."

"Okay, what do we think. It wasn't that bad a month ago. What's happened."

"Most obviously, winter, and the influx of troops with no corresponding increase in supplies. Tired and hungry soldiers fight less well than ones that are properly supplied. The pattern is, as one would expect from that explanation, a gradual increase in the number of casualties over the course of the last month, not a sudden uptick. Most immediately, the disappearance of Woljif Jefto and his frankly concerning number of endure elements spells, which limits us to four fewer patrols a day."

...she had known that, about Woljif. All winter, they've had plenty of troops who are available to go on patrols, but not enough wizards or clerics to give them endure elements. You can't send soldiers out without it, this far north. They'll die half the time, whether they run into demons or not. Woljif, probably because of the power bleed he got from the fight for the Kenabres wardstone, covers eighteen people a day, and Korva has a trick to extend the arcane version of the spell for a full forty-eight hours. So thirty-six fewer people a day, on the barriers. 

Feeling sorry for people sucks. It is, apparently, a really shitty thing to do to everyone else.

She stares solemnly at the little stones for a bit.

"No, that doesn't explain these losses, does it? Fewer patrols means worse spacing and more demons getting through without engaging a patrol, it shouldn't mean more patrols getting wiped out. Assuming that the people we have on deployment did in fact respond by sending fewer patrols out, and not thinning the ones we have."

"We did respond by sending out fewer patrols. The effect on losses depends on the circumstances. Sometimes, a demon may get through entirely without engaging. Other times, a patrol team is far off enough that they are forced to spend the entire period the demon lies stunned on reaching it, and doesn't have enough time to finish it off before the demon comes to its senses."

"Even so. ...and the men have been eating better, the last week. If losses are still going up I don't see how it can be due to supply issues getting worse."

"We do need to find someone else to give us more endure elements. I know Mendev is notoriously low on wizards, but there must be a way to recruit people willing to do that, it doesn't even require a person to see any combat. Its first circle, a completely normal laundry wizard could do it."

"Foreign wizards would increase our safety margin enormously, but the vast majority of them would, of course, require payment. The number of people willing to work for the sake of a cause, let alone endure any sort of adversity for it, is unfortunately quite small."

"Naturally."

"Have you asked the rest of the Godclaw forces again about getting us some Signifiers?"

"I have. They claim not to be able to spare any at this time."

Hm.

"Regill, you served under Aminos Renth for years before you made Paralictor, right? You know each other well?"