"This isn't news to all the manxome wizards and plate-mailed fighters who roam the continent with their flaming swords drawn, but the essence of improvement is struggle and not practice," she continues, finishing the last of the ritual symbols. "Soon, your suffering will transfigure you into a greater and more terrifying threat than you could ever dream of becoming as a paladin, and I can finally show that Thassilonian halfwit—"

As soon as the brush leaves her skin Maree convulses wildly, her flesh quivering like ooze in a bowl. Old wounds reopen across her body, blood spraying like rainfall onto the black altar's surface.

She's not even going to make it into the vat?

Areelu rips the thermometer out of her mouth. Her temperature has rapidly spiked to 105 ℉, and sparkling pink slime is dribbling down her lower lip.

Damn it. She grabs the scroll with one hand and the back of Maree's head with the other, jamming the end of the scroll into her throat where it'll feel the most uncomfortable.

"You still have the chance to renounce them," she hisses into the dying woman's ear. "Your febrile Heaven will strangle the vitality from your soul and leave you dead. Your story will end forever. It doesn't have to be this way."

She no longer has ears, strictly speaking, but Areelu Vorlesh's words burrow into her skull like the clamor of prayer bells on Sunday morning. The witch leers down at her, her eyes darkened to black pits that swallow the light.

"We have such sights to show you."

Nope nope nope nope nope.

Areelu is a wizard, and wizards need their voice to cast spells, right? Her face is right there. Maybe she can stop her from talking, for a bit.

Maree reaches up with one disfigured arm and tries to jam her hand into Areelu Vorlesh's mouth. This mostly amounts to waving the stump around fruitlessly.

That confirms she's motivated. Alas, the paladin isn't going to survive.

"Coward," she says fondly, and slits her throat from ear to ear. Glory to Deskari.

Maree's deformed corpse flops bonelessly against the altar, which thirstily absorbs the final dregs of her strength. Her soul departs for the Boneyard to face Pharasma's judgement.

They never take her up on it. Good riddance.

Areelu has eight more of these to do today; five if she doesn't bother with the other paladins. Then she has a few hours to spend on routine matters – counterintelligence, Dominating anyone naive enough to go outside in the Wounded Lands without Protection from Evil, divining Galfrey's lackeys to keep them on their toes – followed by some contract work for the Cathedral of Epiphenomena.

(Not even Abyssal invasions are free from the need to go fundraising every once in a while. Demons win battles, but diamonds wins wars.)

She brainstorms out loud while finishing the experiment log.

"Sonic magic won't work, unless the radio towers transmit the spell structure in addition to the sound. Worth checking; the odds are low but the payoff of edifying every crusade fortress at once with Wail of the Banshee is too high. What else, what else… passages from the Letters of Harsh Truth and the Asmodean Monograph – the good ones they sell in Dis, assuming Dispater hasn't intervened yet – names that call attention when spoken aloud, instructions for deeds that moral busybodies have tried to censor, recipes for strange brews… I ought to write a book and mail it to them."

Many radio hosts will take some convincing with Vision of Doom, but Areelu is confident that she can get her message out.

… getting into the radio business is lower priority than disrupting whatever the goddess has planned.

Of the three likeliest places where She would've intervened, Lastwall is the smartest – Mendev has more holes in its defenses than a blanket fort manned by toddlers and the Seventh Church in Absalom has impeccable but predictably sporadic security in the form of Iomedaean adventurers passing through. The Knights of Lastwall are one of the strongest organizations defending the Wardstones despite nearing a full century of war on three fronts, and Watcher-Lord Jan Zima is the most dangerous sort of political opponent: one with competent advisors. Passing Baphomet cultists across the border is easy; getting them into position undetected will be challenging.

It's looking like another long week of nothing but Possession and Scrying spells, searching for clues in Vigil. The most critical components will be hidden from her, either in Castle Overwatch or by Mind Blank, but this intervention is too small to be kept within the four walls of Arazni's keep. Lastwall doesn't have enough fifth-circle wizards to conceal everything with Mage's Private Sanctums – the cracks in the veil will add up eventually.

It might take too long. The eastern front doesn't exactly demand her constant attention, but every day spent watching and waiting is a day she can't spend running Teleports for Zuhra Aponavicius or figuring out how to get the cursed— huh, there's an idea.

Divine Health seems to take an ontological view of what constitutes 'immunity' to 'disease'. If the agent is getting blocked as a disease (and subsequently absorbed as the horribly poisonous chemical slurry it would be if it weren't extremely magical), then explicitly typing the fleshwarping process as a curse might do the trick. This is getting dangerously close to reinventing the werewolf, but if she can't figure out how to corrupt paladins into ravening horrors that explode when smote then what kind of archmage is she?

This is… doable, but it's going to be tedious. She adds another nine items to her shopping list, most of which are not commercially available on short notice unless she wants to visit Quantium or Shraen and spend a small fortune in the process. The Rasping Rifts and the Midnight Isles, like most other layers of the Abyss, are filled with gemstones that no one has bothered to prospect for and short on biological reagents that don't come from demons or the damned petitioners that live there, so she's not expecting any help from that quarter.

Realistically, if she wants to get her hands on the yolk from an unfertilized simurgh egg or a hundred gallons of lycanthrope serum before the end of spring then she needs to acquire them herself – which will take time, but right now she has more time than money, a situation that no other archmage in history has found themselves in. Any other ninth-circle spellcaster can churn out magic items faster than the coffers of the Shining Kingdoms can afford them, but Areelu Vorlesh has been maintaining some strategic ambiguity as to her whereabouts ever since she and Queen Galfrey fought to the death in single combat atop a lava geyser in 4630 AR. Arranging for both of their bodies to wind up incinerated by pyroclastic flow in the aftermath was tricky, but the results speak for themselves.

She could infect almost the entire population of Kaer Maga with incurable leprosy in a single day. Rinella Brenon would probably pay extra, if she did that. Unfortunately, Mendev is not completely devoid of people who might notice that everyone in a large city contracting a serious magical illness in mere hours looks an awful lot like Mythic Greater Contagion, and from there it's a short leap of logic for some of Galfrey's advisors to wonder why they're still alive. Her time is, ironically, better spent adventuring outside the Worldwound in between minor errands.

Areelu occasionally disguises herself as a lesser demon before picking a fight with Setsuna Shy, just to keep her skills sharp, but on the whole she's participated in a single-digit number of strategically important battles over the last eighty years. Her generals are more than competent enough to keep the borders of the Worldwound right where they are.

Troublesome. On the one hand, she has to travel abroad and have fun hunting strange monsters in distant lands. On the other hand, she also has to camp out in the Hungry Mountains to coordinate her cultists in Vigil, where she'll finally have the chance to experiment with a radio of her very own.

"Why is my life so difficult?" she asks rhetorically.

She finishes the paperwork and prepares to depart the Worldwound.

Areelu Vorlesh can multitask.

She hunts rare monsters in Sarusan, sells their carcasses in the secret markets of Indapatta, scourges Varisia from mountains to coast with plague, and spends three to six hours per day Scrying on her enemies. She works on other problems at the same time, making slow progress as she roams from one hidden fortress to the next, talking to anyone who'll listen (a rarity, when it comes to demons). Her upgraded fleshwarping project, the collaboration with Anemora on a wondrous item of Astral Projection, investigations into the nature of time and space that range from nauseatingly abstract to brutally practical – oh yes, she can talk ears off metaphorically, too.

By Desnus the edge of the Worldwound is bordered not only with Wardstones but radio towers as well. The signal penetrates the barrier, audible from as far away as Undarin – she suspects that some of the operators are compensating for Cheliax and Irrrisen having neglected to construct their own towers – and is mostly ignored, even by the residents whose interests are broader than wholesale slaughter. The Yearning House in Iz owns a radio, occasionally playing live music performed by bards in Absalom and Oppara for the benefit of the guests, but that's as much as anyone other than Areelu cares.

But she cares enough to make up the difference.

The first sign that the world had changed forever was the radio station where bankers do nothing but recite prices all day, over and over again. The base value of informing rural farmers of the market goings-on in the nearest city is merit enough to justify buying a communal radio for small villages, but it's when Areelu notices that radio stations are frequently relayed over what seem like arbitrary distances that she realizes why the archbankers sponsored this invention.

Everyone must know.

"Let's say it's been a good season. Everyone's boats have come in with enough fish to feed this whole town thrice over. You want to sell the excess catch somewhere else, but you'll have to buy a Teleport to get your merchandise there before it spoils and you don't know whether it'll even cover costs. What do you do?"

Three facts underlie Briza's approach to this conversation.

First, the Darklands are a wild and dangerous place where calories are scarce. The price ratio between a Teleport and a square meal is lower in Sekamina than it is anywhere else in the world. Heavily-armed caravans are an expensive luxury, compared to a day's wages for a single sorcerer.

Second, minor drow merchant houses are theoretically capable of pooling their resources for a single Sending between cities to gather critical information, but in practice never do this. What some might call a failure to create gains using cooperation, others would call prudence in a civilization primarily organized around slavery and backstabbing.

(Priests of Abadar have tried evangelizing to drow in the past, bringing ample evidence of the wealth that comes from trade along with them. When drow listened to them at all, a rare occurrence strongly correlated with the evangelist in question being female, they often responded that the priests of Abadar were welcome to try their luck.)

Third, drow society is rife with prescribed rituals for social interaction. These vary from settlement to settlement, but 'do not, under any circumstances, irritate the heavily-armed spellcaster' is a universal constant.

"I'm not sure," says Briza, feigning interest.