"I'm not sure how our friend's relevant powers work," Marit says, "but believe them not to be robust against a person dying and getting raised."

"...I didn't tell anyone that that was part of the plan… and I wasn't aware that she was using those powers regularly."

"We are differently specialized," Marit agrees. "...congratulations."

"Thank you. I take it they haven't launched any response yet?" Saiville shot him before they had gotten to that part of the conversation.

"The remaining powerful people we're tracking fled for the Worldwound, including the pit fiends we'd identified. As far as we can tell, it's over."

"I have good news and bad news on the radio today. The bad news is that Abrogail Thrune is no longer among our listeners. The good news is that this is because the forces of the Glorious Reclamation trapped her soul and finished conquering her country. …really a lot more good news than bad news, there, I guess. Anyway, the fighting in Egorian is over, the fighting around Ostenso is over, the neutral arbitrators responsible for determining who is in charge of Cheliax for the sake of determining who has the command of its Worldwound forts has determined that it's Lord Marshal Cansellarion, and you might think there's not all that much more to do.

You'd be wrong, though. Nearly all of the work of our lives is still ahead of us. Cheliax is free, but it's poor, because Asmodeus impoverished it, and it's damaged, because Hell did everything in its power to rip up the traditions and habits and virtues that made a people stand up to him. The churches that ought to minister to the Chelish people have all been uprooted; the local leadership who ought to have advocated for them and served them are all avaricious idiots at best and tyrannical sadists at worst. It's going to be a long journey. But at least the part of it that's about killing each other at spectacular scale is mostly over. At least from here the way to move forward is by building. 

I can tell you more of the truth, now, about where I’m from. I’m from Cheliax, from the archduchy of Menador, but when I was fifteen a magical accident picked me up and dropped me somewhere else. It says in The History And Future of Humanity that all of the stars in the sky are other suns like our sun, and about them are other worlds like our worlds, full of people both more and less alien than you would imagine; and it is on one of those worlds that I found myself, and saw the things that Golarion could grow up to be. I know that republics can work, I have seen a place where they do. I know how rich the world can get, and how fast the world can get that rich, and I’m going to see it done here, in our lifetimes, for the benefit of our children. It will take a million hands and a million minds and a million inventions, and we have them. 

And I can tell you now about airplanes. On Earth, you see, the world I visited, there are no wizards and the gods empower no priests, and all their great beasts are long dead, and so you might think that people could not fly. But people want to fly; it’s in our nature. If the world doesn’t hand us the strength we invent it ourselves. They jump off cliffs with cloth wings - don’t do that - and rise in baskets powered by heated air - tune in next week if you want to learn how to do that. 

Airplanes are built out of purely mechanical parts, there's no magic to them, and built well they can fly a Teleport's length in less than two hours, and fly across the oceans to the distant continents in six. I've been wanting to build them for ages, but while Hell had my homeland in its clutches other matters had to come first. But now, we're going to have airplanes. You'll see them in the sky sometimes, like a bird whose wings don't move, soaring eight miles up in the sky because the air's thinner there and that lets them travel faster. 

Asmodean Cheliax could never have had airplanes, because they are a complicated endeavor that requires people to do a good job on hard complicated work that if it fails will fail only years later, and tyrannies do terribly at that; and because the building of them in the first place required madly ambitious and frankly silly people to spend all their time trying more and more elaborate ways to attach a motor to a wooden frame and try to make it go fast enough it'd stay in the air, and only free people have the nerve, and the creativity, and the conviction that it is their birthright and their destiny to soar through the skies.

Some people believe that the heavens are up in the skies above us. In a strict sense, this is false. No airplane can convey you to paradise. But in another sense, I think that this is true, because the voice inside you that cries out to try a thousand different ways to reach the heavens by your own strength is the voice that builds paradise and the one that carries us there.

I have seen the tops of clouds. I was not surrounded by wizards and nobles and important people; I was surrounded by crying babies, and tired parents, and dockworkers and bookkeepers, all of us paying a few weeks' wages to soar across the continent to wherever our missions carried us. The waitresses handed out aluminum cans of apple juice. Heaven's not up there, but at the same time, it kind of is.

I want to congratulate you, people of Cheliax, even if the only thing you did in the war was hide away and survive it, even if you served your evil queen until she met her evil end. You are free, now, and being free means it's your choice what to do from here. You can do profoundly stupid things with your freedom if you'd like. But you made it here, to this crossroads, and I'm glad for you, and I am eager to see what you choose to make of your lives from here, and I really do believe that most people choose goodness, and progress, and airplanes and blazing ambition, when they're free to choose at all."

Lilia returns from Vudra and gets oriented.

….well.

Wow.

She really wasn't expecting any of that, but most especially the signs of her mother openly aiding the Reclamation. 

"Where am I needed now?"

"We won, in no small part thanks to you. You can retire, if you want. That's not a trick, or a test."

If it's not a trick or a test or an order Lilia flatly has no idea what to do with it. She feels…rejected, she thinks. She's aware this is pathetic. "Understood," she says.

"Is it? Do you want to retire, or do you want me to keep using you?"

"I cannot imagine you have accomplished everything you want, even if this was - a big thing."

(They've stirred up a bunch of hornet's nests, for one thing. It's hard to predict what the demon lords at the Worldwound will do when they see the writing on the wall, but probably not 'go quietly'. Arazni's back in play. Geb is back in play.)

(It's definitely that and not just that it would hurt to be useless.)

"Not everything I want, no." One thing she wants is for her daughters to be happy. She's not going to get that one. "I could still use someone watching Cheliax. And Lastwall. I don't think I will get the Chelish crown, but it may be worth trying for the First Citizenship or whatever they end up calling it."

See, that makes more sense. Lilia nods. "I will endeavor to get reoriented. If you're working openly with Cansellarion, is he going to trust me more? I'd like to take the opportunity to remove a bunch of people I particularly dislike who are going to try entrenching themselves, but I don't expect it to work if he'll only meet if I'm in chains and only trust a truth spell that he may at some point realize he shouldn't trust."

"He'll trust you more. I don't know if it'll be enough…No murders. I'm sure you realize that we must appear to be model citizens of the new regime." Alex will suspect they aren't but he's neatly tied up pretending he thinks she's just a Galtan swashbuckler. It hardly matters. At least in the short term, they'll be model citizens and Alex' suspicions wouldn't get him anywhere even if he could act on them.

Has her mother been spying on her in Vudra - probably primarily to check that she wasn't a Wish-kidnapping target. It would not be hard to learn about the murder because they put it on her tab.

"Of course. I intend only to check if other people are doing murders and report them if so to our wise and benevolent leadership. Does he know that Isarn was my warning? I'd been considering that my - currency, if the forces of Good ever did get their hands on me somehow."

"I have not told him that. Nor about the first Freedom kidnapping, though he may have guessed that one. You may tell him, if you think it advantages you."

"I'll see just how distrusted I am." She smiles, slightly. "I do not even have to pretend to think the paladins have gone and made a compelling case that paladining is not a stupid thing to do."

"They did wildly outperform what I expected of them five years ago." They had some unexpected help from a wholly unpredictable source but Myrabelle habitually does not mention things like that to Lilia.

Lilia would never expect her to. "Anything else?"

"It might seem like a bit of a ridiculous request, but - may I hug you?"

It does seem like a bit of a ridiculous request. "Of course."

Myrabelle hugs her. "It really could not have succeeded without you. There is nobody else in the world who could have done what you did for me, and nobody else in the world I would have trusted to do it. I may not be the best at showing it but I am proud of you."

Oh. Lilia is very very very good at controlling not just her expressions but the feelings that might produce them, or she'd probably be having some difficulty, right now. She leans into the hug. "You know I've never wanted anything else," she says, and she is not particularly a person who keeps track of whether things she is saying are true, when no one else could possibly tell, but she thinks that one is. 

They return to their original workshop after the war. Alfirin's looking into land purchases and legal agreements in Andoran, and they're probably going to relocate there in the medium term, but it wouldn't be the kind of thing that happened overnight even if Andoran's government wasn't extremely busy with the emancipation of all of the slaves in Cheliax right now.

Anyway, Iomedae wants to be in Lastwall right now because she's worried Andoran wouldn't invent the concept of gay marriage in order to pressure her into comporting herself appropriately, and she trusts that Lastwall will.