Her priests are putting together a very complicated Commune question-tree when She preempts them with a vision. There are not, actually, enough bits in a Commune to specify what the fuck just happened, starting from the priors of anyone in her church, or indeed in Creation, except perhaps Nethys, or Keltham himself.

What, indeed, the fuck.

Asmodeus surrendered.

Carissa Sevar is a Lawful Evil goddess and the ruler of Hell.

Hell is still not, and will not ever be, a place where most humans should go, but it is no longer the worst moral emergency in the universe.

It is no longer in the interests of Good to attempt to conquer or destroy Hell.

The rescue operation begins immediately.

He procrastinates for several days. It turns out he has significant flinches about the idea of visiting Hell, even if Iomedae says it’s been fixed, or at least fixed enough that they should focus on something else. But he does, in the end, have business to attend to there.

Mind Blank. Planar Adaptation. Resist Fire. Stoneskin. Enchantment Foil. Protection from Evil. Plane Shift. Plane Shift.

Dis is a ruin; the stones of which it was once built were souls in torment, and Her first act as its ruler was to free them all, which didn’t leave much of a city behind. Visitors to Dis at this moment will find Her realm a barren, blasted plain with an army of devils building a city on it; some, of course, work faster than others, but none, from Dukes of Hell to the meanest slave, shall be permitted to rest until the whole city is complete.

(Some of the stones are enchanted to display screaming faces which are, importantly, nonsentient. Also a lot of statues of weeping angels to replace the actual petrified angels. Some devils just really like the aesthetic. Others are too proud to decorate with fake suffering, but they obey Asmodeus’ last orders nonetheless.)

He has no point of comparison; he never had the occasion to visit Dis while he was in Cheliax, and would not have done so for any price thereafter—but it seems that he could probably breathe the air even without Planar Adaptation, and he doubts that was true in Dis of old.

His errand will probably take him deeper in Hell than this, but he heads toward the half-built palace at the city's center.

The half-built palace is an aesthetic choice; the rest of Dis is built with something like real stone and steel, but the heart of Her domain looks like whatever she wants it to look like. It will look unfinished at least until Heaven's rescue operation is complete and Hell can truly be said to have been remade.

There are, however, things at which even she must work; Jean will arrive at the palace to find it mostly empty, its doors open, the goddess sitting alone on her throne, working on a new and improved Crown of Infernal Majesty to replace the one that Asmodeus broke out of spite even though the destruction conditions were only very technically fulfilled.

(This, too, is somewhat of an illusion; in reality she's interfacing with a dozen petitioners and working on the Crown all in separate spaces of her attention, but a mortal could not possibly perceive the reality; what Jean sees is reality as it pertains to him.)

He kneels.

"My lady."

"You have come to bargain for your soul," she says, not looking up from her crafting. "It is yours; I do not want it."

(He will notice that he no longer has permanent Arcane Sight.)

What—

—that was easy.

"Thank You," he says, unsure of what else to say.

She looks up from her crafting.

"Prices of Chelish defectors' souls have dropped considerably since the injunctions against senseless torture, who knew," she says. "It was cheap to do, and Iomedae will certainly pay me for it."

"—although—"

"—I would have done it anyway. I don't, actually, want you here."

That's an unexpected sentence from any ruler of Hell.

"Why not?" he asks, although this is objectively kind of stupid.

"You're much too Good," she says, almost disapprovingly. "Even without torture Hell would destroy everything important about you, and I don't, actually, destroy people."

"The people who, in your situation, chose to get statued, probably belong here, though I'm sure they'll mostly find a way to make Axis. I'm not sure what I'll make of them, but—"

"—Creation already has a place for the kind of person who, in your situation, risks eternal damnation to try to fix Hell. It's called Heaven."

"Didn't, uh, You do that?"

"I was already damned!" she says, "and perfectly happy about it, though in hindsight I probably shouldn't have been, until my ex-boyfriend decided—"

"—well, I can't actually tell you what he decided. But—I think in neighboring worlds there are a lot of Carissae who do just end up Lawful Good. I was the one whose path to fixing Hell ran through becoming an Evil god, and so I—deliberately aimed myself into this weird corner of value-space that Pharasma considers Evil but mortals don't mind, or, at least, can endure."

"Iomedae says that Hell still isn't a place where anyone should go who didn't choose it, but that, actually, the same is true of Heaven, it's just that a lot more mortals, given full information, would choose Heaven than Hell. I think She's—ignorant of some important aspects of human experience, just because of who She was as a mortal and the kind of god She chose to become. But She's probably right about that."

Having now visited all three Lawful afterlives, he still prefers Axis. It's not that he's actually unwilling to risk his afterlife for the greater Good—or even that that's mandatory in Heaven—it's just that, in fact, the idea of spending the rest of eternity surrounded by typical Lawful Good people really does not appeal to him.

"Valid!" she says, smiling brightly. (The nature of their interaction is such that she can hardly not be reading his mind.) "I totally agree. I don't think Pharasma cares what you want, but I don't think Heaven stops you from leaving once you're there."

"It doesn't. By the way, do you know if Cheliax still has the huge bounty on my soul?"

"I actually have no idea what the government of Cheliax looks like right now. I should probably check on that."

"I'll be going, then. Tell Abrogail, if she's still in charge, that I delivered myself to Hell and she owes me a hundred thousand GP."

Plane Shift.

Abrogail Thrune, who is still in charge of Cheliax, though maybe not for much longer, feels a sudden pain in her head, and then she's somewhere else.

"Hey," she says. "We did it."

She does not rush to hug Carissa; that would be undignified and unbefitting a Lawful Evil monarch. She does, however, start crying, kneeling before the woman who is now, actually, her goddess—she's fairly sure that mortal Carissa couldn't get her into a mindscape twice.

"I didn't think—I guessed you would but—I didn't think it would be so soon."

"That was the point, of course. We could hardly have hid that we were planning something, but we could make everyone think we were planning something for a year from now."

"I would have told you, if that had been an acceptable cost. Said—goodbye. Not that I'm not still, fundamentally, Carissa. Ascension changes you, of course, but if there was a moment when I actually became a different person, it was sometime in those ten minutes that I erased from my memory, before I sold my soul to Dispater, and not when I touched the Starstone."

"I assume," she says, "that there is a point to this conversation besides sentimentality? We are still Evil, you know."

"You have that backwards. Iomedae burned away all her human attachments to be a perfect avatar of Good. I'm Evil, and so I get to burn intervention budget on sentimental conversations with my complicated ex-girlfriend."

"I'm sure if Iomedae had an ex-girlfriend she was tediously boring and not worth spending intervention budget on talking to."

"Anyway, there are also some non-sentimental things to say, and this conversation is going to be bad for your head soon, so. I left a will with an agent in Axis specifying the disposition of my temporal possessions in the event of my leaving the Material by one means or another—at the moment of my ascension these mostly consisted of Cheliax. Unfortunately my will makes a lot of references to my church, and I don't, precisely, have a church yet. I have like four organizations in Taldor and two in Vudra which would like to be my church, which I'm sure would have worked out fine for Cayden Cailean, but I'm a Lawful god and it's kind of embarrassing. There's probably going to be a civil war in Taldor about it now that I'm actually a god—if civil wars in Taldor can even be said to have causes—"

"—my church should conquer Taldor at some point, to be clear. My church in Taldor should absolutely not conquer Taldor."

"Is that an instruction?" she asks. (She is after all the only person in Carissa's church, if she is indeed that, with an army.)

"Not yet. Yes, if the politics there turn out differently than I'd prefer, but I genuinely don't know what I'd prefer yet, and that itself depends on how things turn out. Maybe some of them are more impressive than they look. In the meantime I want you to be my Grand High Priestess. Temporarily, because you're already an eighth-circle sorcerer and the Queen of Cheliax and I can't actually make you more than a first-circle cleric, on account of that, but it doesn't befit a Lawful church to be leaderless and you're presently the only person still on this planet who understands what I want well enough to actually do it."