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

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.

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

“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.”