"Sounds like him. I've still never heard of Parnoneryx, did Iomedae's holy texts get an entire extra dragon added on top of the omissions?"

"...That sounds unlikely, but I can't fathom what the Church was thinking making edits in the first place."

"Well if you have anything that once belonged to Parnoneryx I can try a discern location. I don't know whether that will work for the sword, it's definitely not under a mind blank but I've only ever touched the non-reforged version from my own time and I don't know if that will count to find the one in this time. If that's all, I'd appreciate it if you could tell me more about the archmages you mentioned to Allandra. I hope the fact that they are all Evil and Chelish is due to your particular interest rather than a general trend in the past century?"

"Yes, I checked later and there are plenty more. For those though you'd be better served with your own research than going off of my brief impressions.

Areelu Vorlesh, Architect of the Worldwound. She lived in Sarkoris, near Undarin. Imprisoned in 4600. Killed her wardens and took over the fortress two years later. And then in '06 Aroden died and the Worldwound opened shortly after. She claims credit, and nobody else has contested it. There are claims she’s in the employ of various demon lords, whatever that even means. If she did them a favor by opening the Wound I don’t think they still feel like they owe her. There are periodically claimed sightings of her at the Worldwound borders, wandering around saying things about her grand plans coming to fruition, most recently when the Fifth Crusade retook Drezen. But those could as easily be bored demons and I’ve assumed that’s the case."

"Acacia was a famous adventurer towards the end of the Age of Enthronement. Very secretive, wore a mask in most of her public appearances. Always under a mind blank." (He says this a little pointedly) "Diabolist, we think, though we don’t know that much about her. I'd be unsurprised if she was in service to Mephistopheles. Bound a number of devils, supposedly went everywhere with a whole pack of hell hounds. Died early in the Chelish civil war."

"Manohar. Chelish wizard, likely eighth circle. The claim has circulated that he fought for the Thrunes in the Chelish Civil War, but I suspect he's younger than that. If he fought in any of Cheliax's wars since then he wouldn't admit it, none of them have gone very well. He may well just have levelled at the Worldwound, they put their wizards there under a great deal of pressure. And then induce them to sell their souls to Hell at fifth circle, of course. He has a tower in Egorian, runs through hundreds of Cheliax's prisoners a year doing horrifying experiments none of which I think have actually produced any magical advancements. He is not particularly involved at court or in Egorian's politics."

"Sheel Leroung is a lich. He was active in the 4500s, and was involved in founding the Hellknights; he paid for the construction of Citadel Enferac, in Menador, where the Hellknight Signifiers are trained. We believe the citadel to have a portal to Hell, though it could be some private demiplane or Xoviakan or something; it is definitely a bottomless pit into which they cast prisoners, and they've occasionally possessed some extraordinary magic rumored to be a gift from it. In 4621, approaching old age, he became a lich, and left Golarion, though he returns occasionally to advise his old order. I've heard the claim he's in Dis, I've heard the claim he is trying to build a second Axis in the Maelstrom, I've heard the claim he's in Stygia."

"Mirabelle was by all accounts a prodigy. A healer, first started casting spells as a teenager, purportedly teleporting by twenty. Some kind of spellsinger, maybe, she was very - persuasive, not just splendid but able to use her splendour very effectively. De Luna - he's one of Lastwall's scholars - has a theory that she made some pact with a powerful fiend for the healing and the rapid advancement. She worked with the government of Cheliax, I suspect infiltrating and suppressing insurrectionary groups. We noticed she was slipping enchantments on to people in Lastwall's civilian government, which was when we decided to deal with her. We destroyed her clones and killed her and hastened judgement. This was…almost thirty years ago? And then ten to twenty years later Galt and Andoran and Molthune all broke away from Cheliax, supporting the theory that she was suppressing rebellion. We haven't been able to scry her in an afterlife, but we didn't have the resources to check immediately and I would not be surprised if she got Abbadon."

"Any of them sound familiar?"

"If I saw myself in any of the dreadful people you've described, do you expect I would tell you?"

"I've thought about what might inspire me to create the Worldwound and - there's not very much that would do it. I've talked to - Allandra about what reasons I might find sufficient and it doesn't yet look like any of them obtain. And I certainly wouldn't pace the worldwound border gloating about my grand plans, though it sounds like your read is that Areelu wouldn't either."

"Acacia definitely seems to share my instinct for privacy but, while I can contemplate reasons I might some day open the Worldwound, I cannot really imagine reasons I might willingly and knowingly serve Hell."

"I would like to imagine that if I live for nearly a thousand years I will be doing more interesting things with my life than Manohar. That's also the reason I don't think I could be Razmir."

"If I were Leroung that implies that I figured out a way to prolong my life for seven hundred years but not indefinitely, and then got old and tried lichdom. Seems unlikely."

"Mirabelle...could be me, if you imagine that in nine hundred years I've figured out how to cast healing spells as a wizard. And was pretending to be a child prodigy instead of a mysterious archmage with no known history. But I would very much expect myself to be working against the current Chelish government rather than for it."

"I'll be off to - Absalom, I suppose, to research the less evil possibilities. Absalom's still standing, no?" She doesn't say it, but she does have some suspicions about a couple of the evil ones.

"It is. Inheritor's blessings go with you." He didn't really think Alfirin, Iomedae's Chaotic Good ex-girlfriend, was likely to be any of the evil Chelish wizards he spends his days worrying about. Iomedae was not very sure of where Alfirin would be in this year but she was sure enough of that, and Alfirin seems to agree. (Though if Iomedae's wrong, Alfirin is probably a good enough liar to fool her and Alexeara both, so that doesn't count for much.) He's not judging her for being able to think of reasons she might open the worldwound, there are probably things that would convince him it was a good idea though they'd have to be pretty big things like "It's a side-effect of killing Asmodeus"

Teleport, though not actually to Absalom. Plane shift.

Her garden demiplane is still here, and she can still access it with the tuning fork from her own time. It still bends to her will. Time to go exploring.

Marit and Tanat venture out inside the barrier that night. They are both of them flying, with Overland Flight that will last all night. Tanat is invisible and Marit is merely dressed entirely in black while raining arrows down on demons from the sky (Marit has a Holy Seeking Distance +3 longbow and a thousand cold iron arrows in his Bag of Holding, and archery has not been an extraordinary focus of his but he's a good enough shot to mostly be limited by his ability to notice there are enemies, not his ability to hit them from six hundred feet away once he's found them.) 

They find demons without difficulty, because it's the Worldwound.

Neither of them have fought demons much before, so it takes a while to tell whether the demons are just normal demons or extra scary, special ritual-enhanced demons. But eventually they rain arrows down on what looks like an ordinary succubus and it takes off with shocking speed, Suggests they land, when that fails tries a Dominate on Marit, doesn't go down to a dozen Holy arrows and manages to scratch Tanat in the course of trying to grapple her before Marit gets it to stop moving.

Succubi are conventionally a difficult fight entirely because of the Dominate and the Suggestions, you'd otherwise expect four veteran soldiers with cold iron weapons to be able to club one down, so - 

"I think this is indeed an enhanced demon but that we should keep going and look for an enhanced demon without dangerous innate magic," Marit says, decapitating the succubus, shaking the ichor out of it so it won't make the Bag of Holding sticky, shoving it in, and landing on the ground to pick up his arrows. 

"Yes, sir," Tanat says.

Tanat is a seventh circle wizard. This makes her important, even in the Shining Crusade; there are ten people more important than her, probably even twenty, but not thirty. But she has never before actually done things like 'time travel' or 'fly around inside a planar rift to the Abyss' or, much scarier than either of those, 'spend hours adventuring alone with Commander Marit' - he's probably judging her for so many things right now, though he won't bring them up until they're home - and she's having some of what Iomedae calls the creeping feeling that fate should have sent some other warrior in one's place. 

To which, Iomedae would say, the only answer is that no one grows stronger by shouldering burdens they're equal to.

"Maybe if I put up Aura Sight, sir, we could notice when a demon looks more powerfully Chaotic and Evil than that kind of demon should be, and go after those?"

"We'll have to fly lower, but I think it beats guesswork." He tosses her a lesser rod of Extend Spell.


And she puts up Aura Sight and then they'll skim through the abyssal rift until they find a nice super-babau or something instead of a super-succubus. 

It is only once they have deposited their super-babau in the dungeons of Drezen for further investigation in the morning that Marit says to her, "you didn't check whether the Dominate took."

 "I was about to cast Protection from Evil, sir, even though there was next to no chance it had affected you, but before I got the opportunity you decapitated the succubus, so it seemed that you probably weren't."

"Restate that, please."

"...before I got the chance, I saw what looked like you decapitating the succubus, sir."

Marit dumps it out of the bag, dead but with its head wholly attached to its body. 

She casts Magic Circle Against Evil, just on general principle. " - Commander, did you use an illusion to make it look like you killed the succubus, while separately killing the succubus in a different manner than that, in order to make the point that I am not cautious enough to survive if a demon did Dominate you."

         "Why do you think I killed the succubus?" says Commander Marit.

...so she kneels in the dungeons and pulls out a pocketknife and satisfies herself that the succubus is actually dead by cutting it open. 

         "We'll do better tomorrow," Commander Marit says. " - under many circumstances it'd be better to save the spell. But mistakes here are not very retrievable."

"Yes, sir."

She hadn't planned to stay very long - just long enough to check the enchanted bowers where she keeps her clones. She doesn't want to run into her future self yet, and the facts that she cannot see any alarms and doesn't know how to make an alarm that would sound across planes do not at all assure her that her future self doesn't already know she's here.

But then there weren't any clones. The preservation enchantments are still there, the rest of the gardens are in order, the plants - common, rare, and magical alike - are all thriving. So are the rabbits. There are some magic items around, not really an upgrade from what she wears every day but for the most part an upgrade over the spares she has in the gardens in her day.

But no clones. Which means future Alfirin can't make them. This isn't inconceivable, she knows she'll have a period at the beginning of each new life when her full powers have not yet returned to her. But there won't be much of a window where she can plane shift but not make new clones, so she probably will not be interrupting herself. And even if she does, she should as she is now be able to win or at least escape from a fight with a seventh-circle caster. (And even if she can't, she brought a clone of her own to this timeline.)

She checks her workshop. There's more, there - spellbooks, notes on magic. Notes on politics. Minor artifacts. It takes her some time to read enough to make sense of what's going on.

She was, as she suspected, Mirabelle. Mirabelle was, as she suspected, giving Lastwall and Cheliax alike a deliberately misleading impression of what she was doing. She was suppressing rebellions, but only for the purpose of scheduling them so they would happen simultaneously when they had the best chance of success. She scheduled her death, too - micromanaged it even. Arranged for Alexeara to be the one to find her out, to kill her, because she liked Alexeara and thought he'd oppose Cheliax openly if the opportunity arose. Arranged for it to happen when it did, when a certain Galtan duke's wife was pregnant and their unborn child not yet ensouled.

The problem, though, is that the young Galtan noblewoman should be in her thirties now, which should be more than old enough for Alfirin to be able to make clones, or at the very least to plane shift. But there's no sign she ever came here.

Probably, this world's Alfirin died again and is currently a child somewhere. And therefore useless to make contact with and - risky to tell her allies about. The fact that Alfirin is helplessly possessing a child will both upset them and give them a lot of information about how to effectively oppose her if they decide to do that.

So. She has some new spells. She has some new magic items. She does not have another archmage. She has, probably, a grand plan for the overthrow of Cheliax, but she suspects that plan was derailed by her untimely death. Maybe she can put it back on the rails. Maybe she can find whatever strings Mirabelle left for her next life and take hold of them. She keeps reading.

She has children, apparently. Two, as Mirabelle, both daughters. More, in other lives. Somehow that’s surprising to her. When she thinks about it there’s no particular reason to expect that she never would, and most people do have children and - it still surprises her.

Her eldest is soul-sold. On Mirabelle’s orders. Enchanted into doing it, apparently, because Mirabelle did not trust her own family without mind control. Mirabelle thought she could use someone in the inner circles of the Chelish government and so she made her own daughter sell her soul.

It seems to have worked, is the worst part. Intellectually she knows it’s better, for it to have worked, for there to be another asset that can be used against Cheliax, but - in her gut it feels like it would be better for it to have been an obvious mistake, for there to be no redeeming success to justify that -

She puts the papers down and goes for a walk in the gardens. It does not really help.

When she comes back she polymorphs herself into a wight because wights have a very limited emotional range and she thinks that might make it easier to think and plan.

The Paraduchess Lilia Ramona de Montero, spymaster for Her Infernal Majestrix, is good at her job, and the second most important part of her job is to learn if the organized forces of Good are Up To Something. (The most important part of her job is to learn if her internal political rivals are Up To Something.) 

In this case, though, the organized forces of Good have made her second most important task very difficult. She has an agent in Drezen, who sends comprehensive reports, but there are six hundred seventy places as potentially important as Drezen, and she cannot read comprehensive reports from six hundred and seventy places, so less competent staff have read the latest from Drezen, and it didn't merit an escalation. (This wasn't even a mistake on their parts). There is a seventh or eighth circle Lawful Good wizard now helping the Crusade, and a menagerie of weaker adventurers. The Crusade still looks likely to fail. (Lilia will of course order no actions aimed at making it fail, or impeding those at work on it in their work on it.) There is tension between the Crusade and Queen Galfrey of Mendev, which would be a delight to exploit except that Cheliax actually takes the Worldwound treaty seriously. They're Lawful and quite apart from that they like the world. They live here, and for the most part prefer it to where they are headed. More information on the seventh or eighth circle Lawful Good wizard will be demanded, but little thought spent in the meantime.

She has spies in Lastwall. They have a difficult task. Vigil is more a fortress than a city, and not easily entered into. Cheliax's spies there tend to be familiars and polymorphed creatures too small to trigger an Alarm, and they do not tend to be longlived. On the rare occasion one can turn Iomedae's people by threatening their families with malediction or so on, they're all terrible liars and get caught fairly promptly. Her spies in Lastwall have heard nothing of note. She would know of large scale troop movements, and knows of none.

She has records of visitors to Cansellarion's estate who did not teleport in to a private location directly. These too suggest nothing of note. She has one of Cansellarion's guards, who doesn't know it's her he works for (though, really, he's probably not enough of an idiot that he hasn't guessed, and anyway there's even odds that Cansellarion knows), and that spy says that the man has been busy, but he usually is. Paladins do not spend much of their time on recreation.

And she orders Communes, with a profligacy that'd have Iomedae's followers appalled (but their god is weak, and Asmodeus is strong). Asmodeus, who watches this world very closely and can nonetheless only see it rather poorly, has seen nothing of especial note, and nor has Dispater, and none of the routine questions about places to look more carefully turn up any other than routine answers. 

And at the end of the day she sleeps, in a Forbiddance and a Mage's Private Sanctum, behind many alarms and many shields and many guards, because she has many enemies.

Less than a minute after she falls asleep there's a second mind inside her head. This doesn't wake her. Wakefulness comes a moment later when the second mind uses her hands and voice to cast dominate person.

- she was insufficiently careful and now everything is lost. 

....usually once she is insufficiently careful it's immediately obvious in hindsight, who and how and what she should have noticed, but this time it...isn't. She's not even sure what magic this is. 

She will attempt, of course, a silent stilled Dimension Door to a sealed secret room (it won't work if the Forbiddance is up, but if the Forbiddance is up it shouldn't have been possible for someone to get close enough for whatever this is, so they must've silently taken it down -)