"This is Freedom Radio, and for today's guest, we've reached out to the Church of Asmodeus!"

"...okay, that's true, but only very technically. We sent them a note. It said that when the worship of the Good gods is permitted in Cheliax and when Cheliax's children grow up healthy and happy and strong and when newspapers telling the truth are sold in Chelish street corners, we'll be happy to host them on the show. And we will, though I'll tell you how that's almost certainly going to go down.

House Thrune is losing. Many of you have been lied to about history, so let me spell it out. In Aspex's time, the Empire - the greatest power in all of Avistan - stretched as far north as Lastwall and Varisia and as far south as some holdings on the Mwangi coast. The Empire grew and prospered until Aroden's death, and then it collapsed into thirty years of devastating civil war, egged on by Asmodeus. Now, let me tell you some things about thirty years of war. The ordinary people die, when the soldiers take all the food they need for the next harvest. Disciplined soldiers moving through their own territory will have enough sense to leave some food. But as the war dragged on, the soldiers got worse. The first year that you leave a family with barely any food for winter, their children die, and their elderly. The next year, or maybe the year after that, they all die. Then the people in the cities where the food was taken die too. People get out, if they can, and starve, if they can't. No natural war I know of has endured as long as this one at the intensity of this one; it endured so long only because Asmodeus was making it. 

Asmodeus robbed Cheliax, crippled it and leached it and starved it, for thirty years, until he could puppet some cowards to the top of the pile of corpses he'd made of their country and declare them in charge.

But the people of Avistan are brave, and noble, and they're not idiots. And you'd have to be an idiot, to work for Asmodeus. Your only reward is eternal torture. If he says anything else, he's lying. It's worse than dealing with the fae. So the people of Avistan? Rebelled, either during the civil war or as soon as it was clear who Hell had placed atop their mound of corpses. Rahadoum broke free. Molthune and NIrmathas broke free. Varisia broke free. Korvosa broke free. The holdings on the Mwangi coast broke free. 

Pezzack rebelled, and the Thrunes had to burn one of its own richest and greatest cities to the ground because they realized they'd never see peace from it. Galt broke free. Andoran broke free. 

Once, there were twenty archduchies. Now, there's five to go.

One of those five is the place I'm from. I promise you, when I tell you what the Chelish people have been robbed of, I am not judging you. You had no way to know the worth that is your birthright and your inheritance, that was ripped from your hands by the Church of Asmodeus. You have felt, perhaps, the aching absence of something, something that should have been yours, but you did not know the words to put to it. I will be there to take it back with you. I know what we're supposed to be. 

Five to go. We'll get them. It'll take longer than I'd like, and more people will die than I'd like, but I truly expect that all of Cheliax will rise up and have their freedom, in our lifetimes, or by the work of our lives, because we will certainly many of us die in the doing. 

And then we'll legalize the worship of good gods, and bring good modern medicine and invent even better more modern medicine, and we'll allow any newspaper that speaks the truth, whether the people in power like it or not. 

And then we'll put every priest of Asmodeus who participated in Asmodeus's butchery of our country on trial for their crimes. And I'll visit one of them in prison, and that's how this show will fulfill its commitment to let a priest of Asmodeus tell us about their faith, though we'll still have some problems since I don't allow lying on this show and nearly every word out of their mouths is a lie. They worship an Evil, weak, pathetic god, that could only with enormous effort and expense manage to wrap his fingers around the throat of my homeland, and mortals have spent every minute since breaking those fingers one by one and prying him loose. And there aren't very many fingers left. 

The Thrunes are weak. It makes sense; strong and free people have their choice of employers, so Asmodeus can only work with slaves, or people too stupid to realize they're getting a bad deal, or people who no one else would ever choose to work with. In nearly every case I've ever heard of, a dynasty as incompetent and wasteful and self-destructive and infighting-happy as the Thrunes would be overthrown, and good riddance. But Hell keeps its puppets in power; it has to. All the rest of its puppets are somehow even worse."

Iomedae has several dozen embarrassing completely true stories about the Thrunes and then a segment called 'lies the Thrunes thought they could get us to believe'. Her tone sobers, as that wraps up. 

"I do want to admit something. We're going to kill Abrogail, if one of her relatives doesn't get to it first, and I'm very much looking forward to it. But I can't usually bring myself to hate her. Why? Because this is the story of Abrogail Thrune's life: she will spend it as a tortured lump of flesh that can't remember her name. That is the whole story of Abrogail Thrune's life, thousands and thousands of years, depending how long it takes us to fix Hell and that one might genuinely take us a while. 

There's a little brief window at the beginning of her story where she has some kind of title and does a lot of torturing people and feeling special, but it's unfathomably short, alongside eternity. Even if she outlives the median Thrune in power, and she probably won't, it's the blink of an eye alongside her eternal reward for it. Abrogail Thrune's story is that she will be tortured horribly for a very long time and she won't remember what it was for and no one will care who she was. Nothing else features in her story, not really. 

Obviously if she had any sense she could escape that fate. Get her soul trapped. Plane Shift to Heaven and beg them for help. Hire the best lawyers in Creation to try to find a way free of her contract. Why doesn't she? Well, part of the answer is that if you're the kind of person who realizes you don't want to go to Hell and does something about it, you're too smart for Asmodeus to put on the throne of Cheliax. Part of the answer is that Asmodeans have built up this long list of lies and rationalizations, and she may genuinely believe she's too special to be tortured in Hell. She's not, but she may believe it. Part of the answer is that Asmodeans try to insist that everyone goes to Hell, that there's nothing else, and -

There is something else. There is a better world, and it is in your reach. We'll talk with the dead, on this radio show, in the upcoming weeks. We might visit Axis and report to you directly from there, once we have some adequate recording equipment. Abrogail Thrune, if she found the courage to get out, would have some problems, but ordinary people can just choose to do the right thing, and escape Hell that way. It's not easy. But it's hard the way that getting the harvest in is hard, not the way that flying to the Moon is hard. You work hard, leave the world better than you found it, and get into paradise that way. Most people aren't damned, in countries that Hell isn't trying to strangle. Most people need not be damned, even in countries Hell is trying to strangle. 

Hell wants people to think that Goodness is a strange impossible thing you have no hope of doing. Goodness is very simple. Close your eyes, think about how you could leave the world a little bit of a better place, make someone else's burden a little lighter, do a little bit more of your part in keeping the wolves at bay. Take a sick friend soup. Pick up a baby and count to ten on their fingers. Tell someone who doesn't have a radio what the weather's going to be. It's these things paradise is made of. 

Asmodeus has to combat the natural human instinct to love one's children, the natural human instinct to love one's parents, the natural human instinct to love one's self, because all of those loves will guide you out of Hell, if you let them.

Asmodeus also claims that he's going to conquer the other afterlives, but I have seen the weapons of war that are made by free hands in the defense of free lands and when you see them too you'll know that's just another lie of His.

Evil has to fear the strength of its own people. Good doesn't. Cheliax has to closely monitor all its wizards because most of them defect at fifth circle, the minute they can Teleport to freedom. Good countries rejoice on learning that their wizards have reached fifth circle because their strength strengthens everyone. 

Anyone can see that they cannot trust anyone who wants them to be weak. Abrogail Thrune wants you to be weak. I don't. Her Cheliax cannot endure you at your strongest. The true Cheliax is built out of all of us, at our strongest. This is Freedom Radio, reporting from an undisclosed location; but one day we will report from the soil of my birth, in Cheliax, and we'll build paradise together."

When the episode ends she is crying. She wasn't expecting that. She isn't sure what to do with it. It feels slightly like being unable to breathe and slightly like everyone else is very far away.

And then there is a touch on her metaphorical shoulder, a feeling of recognition and conviction and love and safety - not the kind of safety where there isn't danger, but the kind of safety where you are at last a legal adult and at last have a concealed carry permit - and she can Lay on Hands in the morning. 

Abrogail Thrune II is upset about Freedom Radio. Reasonably so; it has presented them a thorny challenge. The radios are most popular with ship's captains, who rely on them to avoid storms, and who can obtain them cheaply in every foreign port; when the radios on ships aren't needed for weather-watching, people will inevitably listen to descriptions of chariot-races, or adventure stories, or Freedom Radio if someone's daring. Banning them has been tremendously unpopular and notably hard to enforce. Banning them because a teenage girl said mean things about Abrogail on the radio also looks weak.

The better option is to assassinate Freedom, or better yet to arrest her and host a public execution and malediction. Abrogail did not initially assume that this would be very difficult. But far from the ad hoc operation they initially presumed this was, it seems well prepared (Probably still Morgethai.) Manohar has met Temos Sevandivasen, and ran a Discern Location when the man appeared live with Freedom. It failed, which can only mean he was Mind Blanked. Scries for Freedom herself fail consistently, even when conducted by powerful casters who one might expect could overcome the difficulty intrinsic to having never seen her and only heard her voice; she’s probably Mind Blanked all the time too. 

There's of course one way to extradite someone which doesn't require knowing their real name or where they are. 

And so Paraduchess Lilia Ramona de Montero, Cheliax's spymaster, is not very surprised to learn that Abrogail is planning to use Gorthoklek's once-yearly Wish to try to grab the little bitch, along with seventeen other people Cheliax would like to publicly execute and maledict. (She learns this because Abrogail needs to know which of the other likely candidates are in fact still alive and not known to be operating at the Worldwound.) It will fail for a majority of the subjects, but strike terror in the hearts of all of them, and it's less likely to fail for Freedom, who can't possibly yet be a powerful adventurer. Mind Blank and a priesthood from Milani or Iomedae or whoever she's got them from won't save anyone from a Wish cast by Gorthoklek. Even if she’s a paladin the girl’s odds are very slim.

Then, of course, they'll broadcast the girl's torture, and her death, and her malediction, and all will be right with the universe again. 

Lilia agrees it’s a good plan. One that requires complicated setup: for Freedom herself, ‘Wished into the immediate vicinity of a pit fiend’ will probably do for taking her prisoner, but if you’re not wasting the opportunity to grab seventeen other people then you want to make sure you can secure them if you get them, and the list is going to include people like Morgethai who wear a wizard’s hat and can’t merely be dropped right into an antimagic field. She gets a very small team to work on it; you don't want to risk something like this leaking. 

...Lilia falls asleep and into a routinely scheduled mindscape, and informs Myrabelle of this. They're going to time the Wish for mid-next-broadcast so it's harder for the show to hide by getting an imitator. They're going to try for, in addition to the little brat, Morgethai and Cansellarion and Galt's Cyprian and some of his marshals and Andoran's Supreme Elect, Codwin, and some Andoren generals and leaders, and a half-dozen prominent Chelish defectors and Catherine de Litran and a couple noted political philosophers and one of Abrogail's distant cousins who defected and is in hiding somewhere.

She gives Myrabelle the whole list because sometimes Myrabelle may want to adjust the results of such matters, though in this case she doesn't really expect any adjustments, certainly not for the benefit of very stupid teenage girls. They're not in the saving brave idiots from the consequences of their decisions business.

Well that can't be allowed to happen. Myrabelle has no adjustments for Lilia to make, but she's going to make sure some of the parties are alerted and Lilia should make sure she's covered in case Cheliax learns that this leaked.

Two days later, Catherine de Litran uses a wand of sending to request a secret meeting with Cansellarion. She's expected to be a future ally, and they've worked together before - He tells her to visit his estate disguised and under the name Salda. The guards let her in, and lead her to a study within a private sanctum.

"I think you know who Freedom is, or at least how to reach her."

"If I knew that it would be secret. I decline to comment."

"Well, if you do know how to get in touch with her, or how to send her resources - Cheliax is planning to abduct her via wish in the middle of her next broadcast. I'm also intending to tell Morgethai. You're both targets too. Am I correct in guessing that between the two of you you have enough resources to make sure this fails?"

"We can protect ourselves. If one of us knows how to reach Freedom we'll be able to protect her too. Do you need any protections? Do you know who else is a target?"

"Cyprian, Codwin, myself, Marshal Belmont. And presumably others. From the timing, I would guess that Freedom is the primary target and the rest of us are opportunistic. Can you - discreetly - make sure Cyprian is tipped off and on his guard? He and I aren't on the best speaking terms right now.

...And yes, I'd appreciate any additional protections you or Lastwall can provide cheaply, I think I'm adequately prepared but it's not something I want to take risks about."

"...Of course. Come to Vigil that day if you can, unless Morgethai suggests somewhere else." He goes to his desk to take out a sending wand and warn Cyprian. Catherine takes out her own wand to inform Morgethai.

Cansellarion summons Iomedae to his office in Vigil the day before the broadcast. It's not the first time he's done so, so it shouldn't stand out much.

Did she fail to clean her room Iomedae comes promptly like a responsible professional adult.

She looks nervous. He'd tell her she's not in trouble, but she kind of is. "I've recently learned that Cheliax is going to attempt to have you kidnapped via wish spell during your broadcast tomorrow. We're planning to cast some spells on you that will help you resist the kidnapping, and to otherwise proceed as normal. This is secret and you should not tell anybody - Cheliax will probably learn that we knew, but we might get away with them thinking you are much more powerful than they think, or your normal protections are strong enough to prevent this, and even if they do determine that we knew the less they know about how much we knew and when the better. Do you understand?"

"- yes." She had no idea a spell could do that. She in fact wasn't clear on whether Wishes were a real thing anyone could just do or if they were something only Aroden could do or something. "Is Alfirin safe? It'd be even worse if they got her, she knows more."

"I know that they are targeting more people than just you, I don't know Alfirin to be one of the targets - We think this is revenge for your last broadcast. I don't yet have any reason to believe that Cheliax knows Alfirin exists. But you're right, that we should try to protect her too…do you know if she is Good?"

"- I would really expect so! We have been doing all the same things, for all of the same reasons. Are we safe in a Forbiddance?" She hasn’t had time to get caught up on all of the possible interactions of magic - and most of what she did learn was aimed at understanding magic warfare so they could figure out which weapons it was most important to make soonest - but Lastwall has lots of Lawful Good Forbiddances, they are safe to walk into and out of only if you're Lawful Good, and one can't Teleport directly in or out of them, she knows that much.

"Wish is - I think the only known spell, though I'd have to ask a wizard to be sure - which can teleport someone out of a forbiddance. If it couldn't - I expect they wouldn't try it. I asked if she was Good because some of the protective spells that we'd use only help Good people…I think we will not be able to protect her as well as we can you, even if she is Good. Paladins are already very resistant to magic and the same protections we have that only work on Good people work better on Paladins. I'm sorry."

Iomedae nods, tightly. There's no point getting upset with him about it. "May I tell her about this."

"Yes. Tell her not to tell anyone else, of course… And bring her with tomorrow, to the broadcast. Dismissed."

" - if the things that we did go wrong, and Cheliax kidnaps me, what should I do."