Alexeara Cansellarion is in his study when he gets the vision from his Goddess, which means he must have fucked up quite badly.
Myrabelle teleports away and Catherine appears on the threshold of the temple of the all-seeing eye. "I'm sure I have an appointment," she says, and clicks her heels together and flies up to the top of the tower.
She raises an eyebrow. She prefers tea. Catherine, when Catherine was still a separate person, preferred coffee. She does not know whether Nefreti is in fact sending her coded messages or just offering beverages.
…she takes the tea.
"Okay. You want my help to defeat Lorthact. Are you claiming that this will work out well for me?"
" - well, together we can destroy him and raid his false realm of all its souls. I am not a philosopher; I do not know if this is the pursuit of the good, for you."
"Does it involve me dying in any substantial way? Does it involve drawing more attention of the sort that I'd prefer to avoid, or is that a lost cause by now anyways? I'm interested in doing it, if it can be done, but I want to know the cost."
"You won't die, or not very much," Nefreti says. "It is certainly the kind of doing to which attention will be paid, but so is this conversation, and so was your adventuring in Vigil."
"We will have to travel to his false realm, and when we do he will return there. We can start in Almas but there is no real reason to."
Nefreti gestures for a box on one of the towering shelves behind her desk to come float on over to their conversation. It contains a pinch of something sulfurous, a shrunken essay written in a man's unfamiliar hand, and a block of gold.
"I don't actually speak in parables and puzzles. I speak very plainly and then everybody gets confused. It'll take us there."
"Fair enough. I don't suppose you know all of his weaknesses and can advise me on what spells to prepare?"
...It's a useful spell. She hasn't cast it in centuries, she never managed to get it working with her braindead god. And it was Iomedae's favorite spell. "Thank you," she says, only half resentfully.
"There are a lot of petrification traps in his demiplane, I would not have given it to you only because you desperately need to get over her by Oathday."
She wants to protest that it has been almost a thousand years, that it was a relationship of a single week that she has had plenty of time to get over and so must already be over - but this year has not been kind to that delusion. Iomedae is clearly still very important to her. Iomedae is clearly still very upsetting to her.
"Why do I need to get over her by Oathday?"
"I met the Chelish defector," Iomedae says. "I asked her about the wedding invitation and she interpreted it as a - coded message. Which I guess makes more sense than some good thing having resulted directly from her attending a wedding. I really wish she could've picked some different code and saved us a lot of worrying."
"I wish that too. I'm sure there was another way available, it just seems so - pointlessly disruptive -"
"And kind of - showy, right. 'I know everything about you, even things you don't know yourself yet' - Cansellarion also looked incredibly irritated at Nefreti. He silently watched the whole conversation, presumably because - it was an easy conversation to make mistakes at, right, it felt like she was learning more from it than I was -"
"Mmm. Did you make any mistakes - or nearly make any mistakes he was there to prevent?"