Arazni screams. This really does hurt quite a lot.

—but at the end of it, she is no longer undead.

She immediately tries to Plane Shift to Axis, and then, when that doesn't work (she's already in Axis), throws herself away from Iomedae and starts sobbing, curled up on the broken cobblestones of the ruined City of Man.

1,000 years before Keltham's ascension

He notices, obviously, when a thousand sources of input suddenly pause, when the bright web of futures stops scrolling endlessly by. There is only one person in all the world who could have pulled Him into a Time Stop, and so, obviously, he starts to look for her.

That person is standing alone on the plains of Abaddon, facing an enormous army of the undead.

“Do you—”

10,000 years before Keltham's ascension

They are both of them, now, as powerful as wizards can be, and Aroden special in some indefinable way beyond that, but Tlochach is a Spawn of Rovagug, or some even stranger horror released from the deep places of the world when the planet was cracked by Earthfall, and one has to be more than a mere archmage to stand a chance against something like that.

“—see a way?”

1(0),000 years before Keltham's ascension

“No,” he says sadly.

10,000 years before Keltham's ascension

“Go,” she tells him. “Evacuate the city. I'll try to hold it off.”

Aroden won't waste time arguing. They both know which of them needs to live forever.

“Come find me,” she says, “when you're a god—I think I'll make Nirvana—”

And she smiles, and turns away—

1,000 years before Keltham's ascension

—to face the Whispering Tyrant, hovering above her, motionless, smiling skeletally down, and girds herself for a last, hopeless fight as the Time Stop ends.

10 years after Keltham's ascension

The world is changed now, the tyranny of the gods dealt a serious if not fatal blow by a boy out of another world. The afterlives are reformed, ancient gods are dead and new ones have ascended, magical research is progressing at an unprecedented pace, diamonds are effectively free.

None of that, actually, is enough to get him to leave his Refuge. He has all that stuff already. Nor would the news that Geb's country has been annihilated in the space of three rounds move him, on its own. The combination of the two, however, is worth the Plane Shift to check it out.

That, then, is how he ends up standing on the blasted plain where Mechitar once was, facing the ghost of a man he once thought of as his enemy, in the folly of his youth.

“Before today I hadn't thought about you in four thousand years,” he says, and that's all he has to do.

100 years after Keltham's ascension

She kneels, and casts Commune, as she has done once a year for the past century, and asks the same two questions she always asks. To Him it has only been two rounds since the last one, but the spell, when she casts it, stops time for both of them.

“Are you ready to come out of stasis?”

NO

“Do you consent to your children being born in Golarion?”

YES

1,000 years after Keltham's ascension

Even She does not know the fate of the soul once known as Aspexia Rugatonn, but She can guess: little news out of Nessus has come to the rest of Creation since Asmodeus’ defeat, but His utilities have not changed, and so She can guess that Aspexia Rugatonn, who served Asmodeus as faithfully as ever mortal served god, who went to Him willingly when she did not have to, was for that service broken utterly, slowly and in agony, so that there is now no one in Creation that remembers being her, and no clear point from which her thread-of-conscious-experience might be rescued.

She does not spend computation to grieve her; She is a kinder entity than Her mother, by Civilization and Pharasma’s last bargain, but not a wasteful one. Trillions of souls have been broken by Asmodeus, and Aspexia Rugatonn does not deserve any special pity for being the last.

No, the thing that brings Aspexia to Her attention at all is something else: like a number of significant people in Creation, she has a near-copy in another world visible to Her, a version of herself never touched by Asmodeus, and from that copy, She can begin to imagine Aspexia Rugatonn as she might have been—

Among the first things that Aspexia does upon being instantiated is take out a large loan from the Church of Abadar, and then visit the high temple of Carissa Sevar and pay a senior cleric there to summon Her herald for a little chat.

There appears a devil, even more inhumanly beautiful than she once was, with horns and black feathered wings, but otherwise looking much as she did in life. She does a little double take as she looks through the Gate.

“Aspexia?”

“As she might have been.” Her tone is not one of warm familiarity. “I only came here to ask you one question.”

“Why?”

She's currently being updated with context on this otherwise baffling interaction via backchannel with her goddess, and so she can infer that Aspexia(?) is asking ‘why did you/I/Cheliax serve Asmodeus?’, a question to which there is, of course, no satisfactory answer.

“You would have to ask my great-grandmother, for a full account,” she says, “but among the things I've learned since being dead is that Asmodeus had been planning the takeover of Cheliax for almost a thousand years before Aroden even died. He thought he could stop the Age of Glory that way—ha! My whole family was bred to be His puppets, starting with some poor fool of a Taldan count who sold his wife to a devil.”

“The offspring of that union, and the founder of the illustrious House of Thrune, went to Heaven, or so I hear, having spent most of his life in the Shining Crusade. You should try summoning him.”

It's about what she expected. If anything, what happened to Cheliax looks disturbingly normal, for an optimization that a superintelligence spent a thousand years on. Like it wasn't even hard, to get a country to serve the tyrant god of Hell.

She doesn't ask any more questions, the answers to which would predictably just hurt. She thanks the priest who cast the Gate graciously, and leaves the temple, not quite sure why she expected that to make her feel better about anything. As she goes she sings a song that she seems to know, for some reason illegible to her, for the soul of her true-dead twin:

“If the stars should die in heaven,
our sins will never be undone—”

10,000 years after Keltham's ascension