Another obvious-to-him problem with lichdom is that humans aren’t, actually, meant to be dead. Much of what makes a human mind human belongs, as the universe accounts it, to the ‘body’ rather than the ‘soul’; Polymorphing into another species is dramatically mind-altering. He hasn’t done any studies on the alignment effects of long-term Polymorph into a rotting corpse, but he can sort of imagine what the results would be.

The first lich known to history was Zutha, runelord of gluttony. Undead can’t eat. This is a fairly strong suggestion that Zutha was doing something else. (In fact, classical necromancy, in the sense of manipulating and reinforcing the negative ‘after-image’ left behind by a departing soul in order to reanimate a corpse, most likely wasn’t even invented until after Earthfall.)

He finds Zutha’s tomb, reads Zutha’s notes. Zutha was indeed doing something that wasn’t quite undeath, and also didn’t quite work. The working that kept his soul bound to his body past its Pharasma-declared expiration date wasn’t quite stable on its own, and required an enormous amount of human sacrifice to maintain, even as Zutha’s still-living flesh rotted off his bones.

He designs a stable version of the working. The up-front energy cost is enormous, and the spellform isn’t stable enough to feed in the energy gradually—it will have to come from a single sacrifice. To do this, he’ll have to kill a god—

1 month after Keltham's ascension

A squirrel that wasn’t very visible to Her before suddenly blazes up like a supernova, extraordinary in both the intensity of its wanting-to-exist and its personal power. She doesn’t, actually, have to look any closer than that to infer who this is and why She can suddenly see him now when She couldn’t before.

She looks a lot closer after She figures it out, of course. This could be the start of a major problem.

…the squirrel is positioned a thousand feet above the center of Vigil. The squirrel has twelve Wishes prepared.

Yeah, this is a problem.

The squirrel is actually quite closely aligned with Her, in some ways if not others. So it isn’t that expensive for Her to reach out and say—

WAIT.

1 year after Keltham's ascension

“Eutropia has accepted my marriage proposal,” he says, one day during their weekly diplomatic luncheon in Absalom. “I would have offered it to you first, but I’ve heard some rumors of what you get up to in bed, and I’m really not into that sort of thing.”

Were Cyprian not a head of state Abrogail would simply Disintegrate him for saying that, but, unfortunately, he is. “Well, I wasn’t interested until you said that,” she says instead no she does not. “My ex is a god,” is her actual response. “You couldn’t possibly compete.” Still possibly interpretable as more flirtatious than she actually intends, but what the hell, why not?

“Your ex is going to lose the civil war in Taldor.”

“The revealed opinion of the Goddess is that Pythareus is an idiot and all so-called Sevarist factions in Taldor should focus on getting into Axis because She won’t possibly be able to make anything useful of them in Hell.”

“Revealed by Her church in Cheliax, they make sure to point out.”

“It is nonetheless true.”

“Oh, I know. That’s why Eutropia and I are going to win the civil war.”

Abrogail says nothing.

“So you are planning to intervene, then,” says Cyprian. “To reunite the Empire under Egorian?”

“If, hypothetically, I were planning to fight you, you wouldn’t find out until you had already lost.”

“Is that a doctrine of your Goddess?”

“It’s just a good idea. The doctrine of the Goddess is that what can be destroyed by the truth, should be.”

“Including the entire empire of Taldor?”

10 years after Keltham's ascension

The first member of the joint Lastwall–Chelish strike team Teleports in, twenty miles above the approximate geographic center of Geb.

He drops the object he’s carrying, and immediately Teleports out.

(The weapon is one of his design, invented during his long imprisonment, though more recently modified to incorporate this new ‘antimatter’ stuff.)

Radiant Fire II explodes into a burst of positive energy roughly five hundred million times the strength of a ninth-circle cleric’s channel. Across a vast four-hundred-mile radius circumscribing the entire nation of Geb, terminated only by the curvature of the planet as seen from the high vantage point of detonation, every lesser undead creature exposed to the blast is instantly destroyed.

Before the surprise round is over, two million enslaved corpses crumble to dust, their souls finally free.

(The rare living creatures close to the epicenter are not, unfortunately, having an incredibly good time. There is, they are finding out, such a thing as being way, way too alive. But there aren’t very many of them, compared with the number of zombie slaves.)

Behind the thick obsidian walls of the Cinerarium, Arazni is unharmed by the blast of positive energy.

Still, uh, what the fuck was that.

Time St—

The second superweapon goes off half a round after the first.

Keltham’s crude device has been perfected somewhat in the last decade.

The entire city of Mechitar is hit by an effect comparable to Disjunction, in the sense that Lake Encarthan is comparable to a teacup; the save DC decreases with distance from the center of the blast*, but is, at ground zero within the Cinerarium itself, over a hundred.

Every mundane spell effect and magic item in Geb’s vast palace is instantaneously and permanently destroyed; some artifacts will recover, but not all of them. Several wizards with supposedly non-dispellable permanent Arcane Sight find that sense blinded temporarily, though possibly only in the sense that staring into the sun will do that to one’s ordinary eyes. Any critical masses of unenchanted spellsilver in the storerooms and workshops are explosively vaporized.

The permanent portal to Geb’s vast nest of demiplanes, beneath the pyramid, is shielded from ordinary disjunction by an antimagic field, which the shock wave shatters as if it weren’t even there, destroying the first layer of demiplanes and casting the rest free of their gateway to the Material.

An ordinary mortal spellcaster standing where Arazni is now, near the apex of the Cinerarium closest to the detonation, would have to make a DC 40 Will save against the permanent and irreparable loss of all her spellcasting abilities.

Arazni is, of course, not an ordinary mortal spellcaster.

It is nonetheless the case that her Time Stop blows up in her face, the rest of her prepared spells are shredded where they hang on her scaffold, and her magic items are experiencing difficulties ranging from ‘temporarily glitching’ to ‘literally on fire’.

It’s at this moment, then, that a Gate opens behind her and pulls her through.

—not to Heaven, which would hurt Arazni in her present form and also make it more difficult for Carissa to help Her with this, but to the ruins of Aroden's domain in Axis.

(The third and final superweapon dropped on Mechitar, a moment after that, is just ordinary antimatter.)

10,000 years before Keltham's ascension

She’s never seen the stars.

Aroden does illusions, some nights, for the village—he can make a Silent Image that encircles the entire meeting-place, of the clear night sky lit by a million tiny pinpricks of light, and the two moons—there’s only one moon now, he says, the other one sacrificed Herself to save Golarion. She can’t, actually, tell Aroden’s illusions apart from reality, even when she knows they’re illusions and is trying to. But they’re still not the real stars.

The actual sky is dim grey even by day, the sun a pale white disc barely visible through the clouds of ash and dust that encircle the entire planet. It’s cold, now—not as cold as it once was, the year her parents died, when the sun couldn’t be seen at all and the world (so Aroden said) was frozen from pole to pole—but they still get occasional snow, even close enough to the equator that there are no discernable seasons, and many of their ancient staple crops simply will not grow. Aroden invented a spell that creates an extradimensional space with enough food to feed a thousand people, but it’s seventh circle, and so it will never, ever be enough.

The stars are still out there, Aroden reminds them every time he does the illusion, high above the darkness that covers Golarion. They’re other suns, so far away that they look tiny in Golarion’s sky, with their own worlds about them, inhabited by people unimaginably different from them, but people all the same.

They would help us, if they could cross the unimaginable distance between the stars, Aroden says; you can’t pray to them because they would never hear you, but what you can do, he says, is be the sort of person who would help them, if your places were reversed.

The stars are still out there, he reminds them. A powerful enough wizard can just Teleport straight up, past the clouds of ash and dust, and see them. He’s done it himself, though only when he needed to look at the planet from space to assess how it’s healing from the damage of Earthfall; with that same pair of Teleports he could have saved a village from starvation somewhere even worse off than they are.

And so Arazni has never seen the stars, and possibly never will.

10 years after Keltham's ascension

Iomedae sits in the ruins of Her god’s city and holds what remains of Her best friend, whose skin is now cold and ashen pale, whose eyes now stare up at Her with hate.

—cold, yes, but not decayed, as most liches are; a demigod’s body is incorruptible no matter how much time may pass. She wonders, knowing what She now does about how dath ilan freezes its dead, whether this has anything to do with how Geb raised her, when outsiders, by all accounts, don’t have immortal souls. She computes, idly, a Wish wording that might have worked, where the standard ones failed—

“What do you want?” says Arazni bitterly, her voice, too, exactly the same as it was in life.

—it doesn’t matter now. It is far beyond Iomedae’s power, now, to be hurt by what happened to Arazni. All she can do is try to fix it.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “There is nothing I could have done differently, realistically and at an acceptable cost, but I never forgot you and I never gave up.”

She touches a mithril chalice to Arazni’s cold lips. It’s filled with blood.

10,000 years before Keltham's ascension

There’s a new spell that someone across the sea invented, that reanimates a corpse with negative energy. It’s horrible, says someone who’s been subjected to it; the closest thing to it that a living person can experience is the dull, numbing pain that comes from being immersed in very cold water, except that it drowns emotion and motivation along with the physical senses. Also it magically enslaves you to the caster, because of course someone who would invent a spell like that would make it do that too.

The only way someone would choose it voluntarily, says the victim, is if they were otherwise damned to Hell.

But—critically—the so-called ‘undead’ can work without themselves needing to eat. And so, now, whenever their city has to execute bandits, Aroden first explains the spell to them, and asks for volunteers.

10 years after Keltham's ascension

Tar-Baphon thought that this spell would require the caster to sacrifice a god for power, but Tar-Baphon is really shockingly bad at spellcraft for a mythic archmage with Intelligence 36.

It does require some sacrifice of divine energy, just, a much smaller one will do fine.

The Chalice of Ozem shatters like glass, and its power is drawn into the spellform She’s building around Arazni, completing the last loop that wouldn’t stabilize without it.