“Are you ready to come out of stasis?”

The world is changed, now, more than he is; it has only been a day, for him, since he ascended, and he finds that at evening he is an alien in an entirely different direction than he was in the morn. He is strange, now, not for being vast and incomprehensible, but for having ever been small and stupid, bound to a fragile body of flesh that could die. He is a sort of historical specimen, one of the Ancients, broken in some odd ways but in others more like his original self than any of those that experienced the whole of the last ten thousand years.

He doesn't feel ready, but he can predict, now, that he never will, that that continuing feeling of unreadiness doesn't really mean anything.

And so he puts himself back together, into a shape that can be happy in the world to come, but first he sings an ancient song of dath ilan, for the boy he used to be:

“—no single death will be forgiven,
when fades at last the last lit sun—”

The world is changed, now; evil is not ended forever, even if Evil as a category is, but it is ended enough that ‘defeating evil’ is no longer a particularly effective angle on achieving most people's values. And so she fulfills an ancient promise made to a woman long dead, and opens a little box inside herself.

She finds it mostly filled with grief. There is little more, in this world, for the mortal Iomedae than there is for the god; Alfirin is dead, Aroden is dead, Arazni is—

—alive, and healed as much as she ever will, but like Keltham and so many others, not into the shape she was. Eight hundred years spent an undead slave has changed her in ways she doesn't want to entirely undo, for all that she wishes it had never happened.

Also, Aroden is dead, and that leaves an even greater hole in the person she once was than it does in Iomedae.

“—so in the cold and silent black,
as light and matter end—”

Iomedae-the-mortal could still be happy again, one day, in this new world. Iomedae-the-god continues not to have experiential correlates of achieving her goals.

She closes the box again, and spins it off into a subprocess, and then she rewrites herself into a less narrow god, a god something like Aroden once was, of Progress and Civilization and Humanity-broadly-construed. The world will pretty much always need one of those.

“—we'll have ourselves a last look back,
and toast an absent friend.”