1 hour after Keltham's ascension

Iomedae has instructed her church to ignore Cayden Cailean’s interventions, which the tavern rumors about Carissa Sevar’s ascension obviously are, but he isn’t, actually, a member of Iomedae’s church. It’s not that he doesn’t follow Her; it’s just that he follows Her because She’s the only god making a serious effort to do something about Hell, and if the tavern rumors are to be believed, that’s not true anymore.

He didn’t, actually, believe the tavern rumors. He didn’t dare, mostly, quite apart from the complicated decision-theoretic reasons for which Iomedae wants everyone to ignore them. But the rumor was specific; it named a day, and an hour, and a sign, by which it might be believed; and when that day and hour come, and the lights of godwar appear in the sky as foretold, there is no power in Creation that can command him not to pray for Carissa Sevar to save his soul.

1 day after Keltham's ascension

When Abrogail Thrune falls asleep that night, she finds herself in a place recognizable to her as—

10 years before Keltham's ascension

She’s sixteen years old, and it’s not her first time in Hell but it is her first time in the throne room of Dis; there’s less in the way of overt suffering here than in the deeper parts of Hell, but that doesn’t actually make it less terrifying. Suffering she can withstand quite a bit of. The gaze of an archdevil on her, she absolutely cannot withstand at all.

“You propose,” says Dispater on His throne, “to sell Us the soul of Cheliax itself.” His voice is without heat or scorn; He is just making an observation of fact.

“Yes,” she somehow manages to reply.

“How exactly would this…work?”

“Is our Lord’s objection that countries don’t have souls, or something more complicated than that?” asks Aspexia Rugatonn, who is doing a much better job of things like ‘talking’ and ‘having thoughts’ than Abrogail.

“Be silent,” says Dispater sharply, and Aspexia bows her head. “This is between Myself as Lord Asmodeus’ representative and the one He would anoint ruler of Hell’s empire on Golarion. It does not serve Asmodeus for you to protect her here. But to answer your question: His objection is that countries do not have souls, and is also more complicated than that.”

1 day after Keltham's ascension

It isn’t actually the throne room of Dis, or any place that actually exists, just a mindscape based on Her memories of visiting the place as a mortal, with some of the more horrifying decorations removed; there’s a sense, of course, in which a god’s mindscape is less than perfectly distinct from a ‘place that actually exists’, but visitors to the actual Palace of the Iron Sceptre in Dis would find it, at this moment, a ruin. She’ll rebuild it, eventually, probably with more substantial change in architecture and décor than this, but right now She’s spending most of Her energy fighting a godwar, carrying on this conversation with more of Her attention than She really ought to spare but not very much of it, in the end.

“Hey,” She says to Abrogail. “We did it. Hell is Mine now.”

Abrogail kneels. It feels more appropriate than rushing to hug Carissa, which is, to her indignity, the thing she first thinks of doing. “Already?” she asks. She expected this, but she thought it would at least be a month.

“I know,” She says, answering Abrogail’s thoughts rather than her words. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have told you.”

Abrogail laughs. “Are you spending intervention budget on apologizing?” Aspexia has given her plenty of lectures on how expensive it is to Asmodeus to communicate many fewer words than this, and Asmodeus is an ancient god, not a brand-new one. “We are still Evil, you know.”

“Intervention budget goes by the importance of the information, not the number of words. And the way I see it, burning away all my mortal attachments would make me Iomedae. I’m Evil, so I can spend intervention budget on sentimental conversations with my complicated ex-girlfriend if I want.”

The word ‘girlfriend’ is not really in common usage in Infernal Cheliax; there is not, usually, the pretense that one’s lovers are supposed to be one’s friends. Abrogail ignores this. “I’m sure if Iomedae had an ex-girlfriend she was tediously boring and not worth spending intervention budget on talking to,” she says instead.

1,000 years before Keltham's ascension

When she reaches the inner chamber, the last of the traps behind her and godhood alone ahead, she pauses and kneels. Not to pray—there is no god who can see her now, without great effort spent to pierce the veil that Aroden laid about this place, and the one who would spend that effort anyway has been paid by a substantial coalition of gods not to trouble her—but to contemplate, not for the first time but for the first time that it feels real, that she is about to die.

She’s known, since she was twenty years old, that the best possible outcome of her mortal life was its permanent cessation. She’s never feared death, but then, she hardly could have. And strangely, in this moment, that feels wrong.

She casts a Miracle, of her own power, to temporarily suppress her immunity to fear, which functions now even in antimagic fields, and thinks about the question again.

Is she afraid to die now?

(“It sure is a choice of last human indulgence,” Marit said. “I feel like personally I’d—”)

She’s not, actually, or if she is the feeling of glorious triumph overwhelms it easily. She is a little bit afraid of what might happen, a hundred or a thousand years from now, now that she won’t be around to—

As god or mortal, there is nothing at all she can do about that.

She takes her fear, then, and imagines bundling it up with the rest of her mortal attachments, all the things an impartial god of saving everyone ought not to feel, and locks the bundle in a little box in her mind. It’s a mental motion she’s practiced hundreds of times; it has to, when she does it this last time, actually work. She doesn’t, actually, want to destroy her humanity; if the Starstone preserves that box, somewhere inside Her divine mind, to be opened in a better world to come, that world will be better for it. But until then the contents of the box must have absolutely no bearing on Her actions as a god.

The Miracle ends, and She rises, fearless, and starts to walk toward the Starstone.

1 week after Keltham's ascension

She hasn’t, actually, been to Hell before.

She asked Arazni, once, to take her; Arazni refused, of course, and as a god She could see that Arazni was right; for Her to have gathered any substantial fraction of Herself there would have been risking everything, however important it might have been, in the abstract, for Her to see the thing she was sending Her soldiers to die fighting. But Hell is safer for Her now, and She is stronger than she was.

A slightly different goddess might have felt, in spite of everything, a deep and abiding wrongness, walking into Hell for the first time in triumph, Her battle already having been won by someone else. But that goddess would not, actually, be walking into Hell for the first time—and across all possible worlds, some substantial fraction of those goddesses would be dead.

Iomedae is not, actually, that goddess, and if She feels some slight wrongness at others going behind Her back to fix Hell, it is not located in the fact that she did not foolishly risk Her life more. Even to walk alongside Carissa Sevar as she enters into Dis is not the most efficient possible use of resources, and the war is not, actually, over yet, that She can afford frivolity.

But there was a girl, once, who dreamed of walking into Hell with her sword held high, and saving everyone, and that girl is dead, now (what remains of her is sealed in a little box inside Iomedae that it is not, yet, time to open), but She can fulfil that girl’s dream all the same.

And as They walk into Dis Someone else joins them, and reaches out to Iomedae with a fragment of memory—

100 years before Keltham's ascension

The web of futures is strained, now, twisted around the Age of Glory like twine on a roper’s loom, and She sees—

Cut that one thread, and they would all break.

She wouldn’t have thought it would be that simple.

It isn’t an easy decision. Aroden and She didn’t always see eye to eye, but He was Her god, once, and the more human parts of Her will grieve Him forever. But She doesn’t, in the end, have very much doubt it’s the right decision.

He notices almost immediately, of course. It’s just that ‘almost’ immediately is too late.

Why? He asks Her, and His metaphorical voice is more confused than angry.

She shows Him.

Oh, He says, and now He’s just sad. I won’t—try to tell You—that it’s not—

—I hope it is—

And then the world itself crumbles around Her, because the main part of Her attention is standing in Her little domain in Axis, surrounded on all sides by the City of Man.

1 week after Keltham's ascension

“I’m sorry,” She whispers to Iomedae.

“Surely I ought to be the one saying that to you,” Iomedae whispers back.

1,000 years before Keltham's ascension

She’s walking toward the Starstone, and there’s a sound like a whip cracking as a huge insectoid creature teleports in to block Her path, and She would have been paralyzed in terror if She still had the ability to be afraid at all—what did She miscalculate—what did Aroden miscalculate—

“Get thee behind me,” She says, her voice unwavering and stern in rebuke. She’s unarmed, but already more god than mortal; there would, in fact, be something that could meaningfully be called a fight, if He came for Her, even if the outcome wouldn’t really be in doubt. “My passage was bargained for by One greater than you.”

“Yours,” He says, a raspy, chitinous sound like the crunching of dried leaves. “Not hers.”

Achaekek has never been recorded to speak at all, though it may just be that no one who’s heard Him do so has lived to tell of it. What He’s saying isn’t confusing; someone who was once dear to Her means, if not to become a god, at least to grow powerful enough to threaten Them. It’s just—baffling that He would expend the effort to say it.

“Are you threatening Me?” She asks, this being the most plausible explanation. “You should have known that couldn’t possibly have worked.”

“No,” He says, and stands aside.

All Her mortal attachments are locked in a little box. She keeps walking.

1 month after Keltham's ascension

He figured out how to escape his prison within a century of being sealed; it took the breaking of prophecy, however, for it to be worth the attempt, and a further hundred years to actually do it. But he’s almost done.

The barrier raised around Gallowspire by a Miracle of Aroden cannot be crossed by undead, or the magic of undead casters. This suggests a very simple solution for escaping it: stop being undead.

That’s easier said than done, of course. There’s no law of magical physics that forbids a lich with a normal positive-energy-based soul instead of a negative-energy shadow of one. It’s just that, well—

4,000 years before Keltham's ascension

Why does lichdom make you Evil?

The most obvious answer is self-selection. Almost anyone who can attain a non-Evil afterlife by any means at all would rather just do that. Undeath is generally regarded as unpleasant—lichdom is actually among the better forms, there, but still worse than ordinary existence almost anywhere outside the Lower Planes.

The second most obvious answer is that the process itself is incredibly Evil. There are hundreds of variations on it, at this point—liches are not the sort of people who share research—but almost all involve copious quantities of sentient sacrifice, souls burned as fuel or mutilated by experimentation.

Neither of these are, actually, enough to explain the apparently inviolable trend of liches to be Evil. The marginal Good archmage can do an enormous amount of Good. The costs of lichdom are high, but not so high that a ruthless but well-intentioned archmage couldn’t possibly consider them worth paying for immortality.

Many well-intentioned archmages, of course, have. Golarion’s history books are practically littered with that sort of cautionary example.

If you know quite a bit more about value alignment theory than the average lich, or indeed most people since Earthfall, you might then theorize that the problem is that the lich ritual more-or-less freezes the target’s values in the moment of consummation; and most people are such that, if they murder a hundred people for what they perceive to be the greater Good, and then have their values frozen in the moment in which they did it, they will afterwards just be someone who would murder a hundred people. (If they were ever otherwise. Among the ways in which lichdom tends to simplify a mortal mind is by removing that part of oneself that believes that one is motivated by the greater Good when one is, in fact, not.)

He isn’t, precisely, motivated by the greater Good. But he wouldn’t murder a hundred people for immortality if he didn’t think this would buy him time to find something that scales. It’s not that he couldn’t have had a non-Evil afterlife; it’s just that all of the afterlives, as far as he can tell, turn you into an unrecognizable slave of an ancient alien god, even if some do it by a more pleasant process than others.

(There is a place, the City of Man in Axis, that strives not to be that, as much as any place in the Outer Planes can, to be a place where people only grow up as they choose to; but to Tar-Baphon’s people Aroden is a hated enemy, the god of Taldor, of conquest and empire, and he will not learn this until it is too late.)

1 month before Keltham's ascension

He has been working, for most of the past hundred years, on turning an undead creature into a living one by a complex and tedious feat of spellcraft, replacing the negative-energy soul with a positive-energy one bit by little bit. It hurts worse than the flames of Hell (so say some of his servants who have spent some time there), one slight misstep will utterly destroy the target creature, and he will, at some point, have to do it to himself. He’s really not looking forward to it.

When he does, eventually, succeed, it has the somewhat embarrassing result that the test subject, his seneschal Jomah Gildais, immediately repents of serving him and runs away to surrender to Iomedae, but this is not actually altogether a bad thing. The curses he laid on Gildais still allow his allies outside the Seal to scry him past the wards Arazni laid on Vigil, and this is how he learns of the otherworldly visitor, and also that Lastwall is being remarkably free with its diamonds.

He isn’t stupid. One might validly accuse him of having dumped Wisdom, but that’s in comparison with an INT score higher than that of Mephistopheles. He didn’t pursue diamond synthesis, despite it obviously being possible, because there are still things that can kill him and a primordial inevitable is one. The kid from another planet, apparently, just went ahead and fucking did it anyway.

—and isn’t utterly soul-destroyed or trapped in an impenetrable barrier for the rest of time, as far as anyone knows, so maybe he actually did overestimate the risk there. Or maybe the other shoe is still yet to drop.

Nonetheless, if the world does in fact make it to an equilibrium where Wish diamonds are free, that’s good for him. He can cast more ninth-circle spells in a day than any wizard alive.

4,000 years before Keltham's ascension