"Oh, she wants me to be knight-commander of a Fifth Crusade. A bit sad to leave the library I've just started getting to know but I reckon I may take to it."

"Well it certainly could be worse. I can't say I'd recommend the position, but admittedly there isn't anyone else I'd rather have it. Whatever you do, though, I suggest you keep a close eye on any bureaucrats or advisors from the capital you end up taking on; I'd offer to help with screening, but everything I know about Nerosyan politics is hopelessly out of date by now."

"Huh, what's the trouble with them?"

"Half of them will be looking for any chance to line their own pockets at the expense of the crusade, and the other half will take the opportunity if it looks good enough. Most of them will be involved in some opaque court politics where they look to use you as a tool to the advantage of their own faction at the expense of others, but of course if you do without them good luck getting any aid from Nerosyan then that the queen doesn't shake free personally. Oh, and presumably some of them will be demon cultists and good at faking it, though I suppose it's technically possible that whatever inquisitor they have running things there has smoked most of them out."

"Why are there so many demon cultists?"

"I haven't the slightest clue; I can't say I've ever seen the appeal myself, and I have significantly more of a bone to pick with Iomedae than average person."

"Well, I suppose if they're going to be an ongoing problem and not just a crisis situation issue I will need some reliable way to screen for that."

"In that case, I wish you the best of luck, and must say this: better you than me!"

"I will not dispute this. Do you have... any idea what running a crusade is going to... entail... or should I run back to the library that is every so briefly mine and read up on it real fast."

“I can cheerfully say I have not the slightest idea. I have done my best to spend my entire life avoiding crusading as much as possible, and it has thus far been wildly successful. The Iomedaeans might be able to help you, they’re big on crusading, but I rather feel if they were all that good at it we wouldn’t be on the fifth one right now.”

"As far as I knew the previous ones were aimed at entirely unrelated goals! But I will go read and inquire. Do let me know if there's progress on the ballads, I can never have too many ballads."

“That certainly sounds like a more agreeable way to pass time.”

Daeran heads off southeast, in the direction of his mansion.

She nips off to her library and reads - "reads" - about previous Crusades, about the Queen, about the Worldwound itself -

Her books are happy to answer these questions! According to them, the definition of a crusade as derived from Hallit etymology is a war significantly backed by a church or churches. That sees some use in scholarly works, but in the sense that everyone else uses the word, a crusade means a war that's like the shining crusade. The shining crusade was a decades long campaign between the empire of Taldor, the Church of Aroden, and the Church of Pharasma (plus a dozen lesser powers) led by the paladin Iomedae against the necromancer archmage Tar-Baphon and his armies of the undead. In the thousand years since then, there have been several other conflicts that are sometimes called by that name, but nowadays it's used almost exclusively for the fight against the worldwound - a task that is largely being undertaken by the churches of Asmodeus and Iomedae and the nations of Cheliax, Lastwall, and Mendev.

The history books claim that to date there have been four of these crusades. The first simply sought to support the struggling Sarkoris against the abyss, and was declared a victory prematurely when the lines stabilized. The second saw the scale of the disaster coming and attempted to seal the wound, but came to an end when the Lung Wa empire collapsed and the angels returned to heaven, leaving the wardstones to secure the boundary. The third crusade, if it can even properly be called that, was fought almost entirely within the borders of Mendev against demon and cultist infiltration, while the fourth was a long and drawn out affair that tried and failed to retake notable territory inside the wardstones and ended up largely just blunting the demons' own efforts at organization.

Queen Galfrey of Mendev has reigned for almost a hundred years by now. Prior to the age of lost omens, she was a paladin of Aroden, but when he died she converted to the faith of the inheritor. The niece of the reigning king, Galfrey was expected to go nowhere near the line of inheritance and live out her life in service to the goddess, but demonic attacks and assassins ravaged the royal family and her abilties as a paladin made her extremely difficult to kill, eventually resulting in her ascending to the throne when her uncle died of demonic poisons. In addition to being the ruler of the nation of Mendev, Queen Galfrey is a powerful warrior and a tactician of considerable experience.

The worldwound is a permanent planar rift to the Abyss, the chaotic evil afterlife, that opened in Sarkoris at the beginning of the age of lost omens. Allegedly, it was opened by a powerful witch named Areelu Vorlesh who had been hounded by the sarkorian inquisition for being an arcane caster and decided to take revenge. From its mouth pours an endless stream of demons, largely following the demon lords Deskari and Baphomet, and almost all of Sarkoris-that-was has been occupied by such fiends.

Gosh, okay. So - they want to move wardstones in closer to the center of the problem. That actually sounds kind of straightforward as a strategic goal unless they're really hard to move - what does the library say about that - did it look hard to move -

The wardstones are enormous and quite heavy, but not impossible to move. If you're in a hurry over short distances, you can spring for a few reverse gravities and pull it through the air while weightless, but this will get prohibitively expensive if you want to go far. The more usual method seems to be binding an enormous earth elemental to flatten a path, then move the wardstone onto a sledge and have it pulled by teams of draft animals. Moving it is thus very vulnerable to demonic attackers, who can teleport freely while inside the barriers, and of course wherever you stop the advance you'll need to build a new fortress to defend it, deal with all the demons that are now on the wrong side of the barrier before they go wreak havoc, and then stretch your supply lines across however many more miles of abyssal tainted land. It does happen, but always seems to be a big undertaking and usually only occurs when doing so will greatly drop the size of the perimeter, there's a river to float it on, or someone is really putting the work in.

Probably something she will be able to do more or less singlehanded once those ballads start circulating. The barrier doesn't - move with the wardstone while it's in transit -?

The books don’t explicitly seem to mention it, but the obvious guess is that they do; the issue most likely comes from the fact that stronger demons crossing the barrier are normally stunned for a while and the goal is for patrols to kill them before they can recover, but if you are moving the barrier then any demon currently hiding can just stay hiding until you pass and attack from the rear or freely ravage settlements once they regain their strength.

So ideally you'd want to have a line advancing along the barrier itself detecting evil, but you'd need a lot of people for that...

That or having fought a campaign to clear the area of demons for long enough to move it seem to have been the solutions used in the past, though both have their flaws. There apparently also used to be a banner called the Sword of Valor that inhibited teleportation and one author theorized might make the task easier if they could find a way to protect Drezen in its absence while they used it, but it seems to have been lost when the city fell to demons.

Probably this library doesn't happen to know where the banner is but she's gonna check.

It might still be there as a trophy, but if anyone has checked they have yet to share this knowledge with the authors of any of the library's works. If it was moved, it could be pretty much anywhere in the wound or the abyss by now given how many years it's been.

The demons might have gotten rid of it because it inhibits teleportation! Unless it only does that for the holder's enemies!

Well, since the banner is an artifact it probably wasn't destroyed - major artifacts are the next best thing to indestructible. Supposedly the banner needed to be displayed visibly as a flag or upon a wall in order to function, though, so if it's folded up somewhere it might be difficult to track down without magic.

Aha.

She confers with Iskander about her prepared remarks and then looks for Irabeth-or-whoever to give them a second look.