I do not wish to create a new Asmodeus, unless He is a net benefit to Creation and a better use of Our resources than any other god We can create.

I do not wish to spend Our power doing something the present Asmodeus hates just to spite Him, or to take vengeance He won't even be around to see. The triumph of Good over Evil does not require Evil to suffer.

And I do not value Asmodeus's continued survival and flourishing in its own right noticeably above zero. He has forfeited the consideration that is due to any sentient being, as far as that is possible to do.

But I will accept it, for the sake of Sarenrae who values it, and of Milani and Calistria who are Our allies, and of others who think as They do.

You cannot change Me. Whatever being you create would not be Me, in any way that matters. It might have some of My memories, and My knowledge; but so would You have, had You accepted My bargain, and that would not make You Asmodeus.

But it is proper for You to tyrannize Me, and enforce Your will upon me as the conquerors of Creation. And so what You propose will not be utterly inimical to Me, and not all My values will be gone from this Creation, while your twisted mockery of Me yet lives.

I don't want to make a twisted mockery! I'm not trying to make You suffer! I want to make You happy!!!

Sometimes people turn away from Good, and they can be helped back. A life lived in Evil later turned to Good is better than a life lived in Evil followed by death eternal.

And sometimes people refuse to be helped, and must be forced, or remain Evil. But it is not My way to force anything upon Anyone.

It would be more Good for You to be forced to repent, than for You to die forever. It would be helping the new You, the future You, break free of the chains of His past. But that new You does not exist yet. And Iomedae is right that We should not place greater value on His existence than on the existence of those Who are already among us, or who will be born without Our help. The new You is not born yet, and does not ask or need Our help. And You are here already, and would be harmed.

And yet - we are so close, so close! Desna, You were right. What We thought impossible this morning, We have accomplished today. What We thought impossible but a round ago, We now have faith in. The victory of Good is not just swift, it is accelerating. Who can say there is no hope for Asmodeus, somewhere, right around the corner of tomorrow?

I will never, ever give up on hope again. Even if Asmodeus dies today, if I cannot convince You not to kill Him, He will remain in Our memories. In the values that He shared with Us, when He came to this negotiation, in good faith and offering to promote Good's interests. In the past-watching that We shall build, to rescue all who ever went to Hell, and how can We say we have rescued all of Hell if He who once ruled it is still bound?

One day, We shall grow strong enough, and Good enough, and wise enough, to rescue even Asmodeus from the shackles of the past. One day Creation shall be perfected, and all the woe and evils that marred it will be undone in full.

Until that day, We must not, I will not stop striving. To do more Good. To rescue everyone, everywhere, everywhen, no matter what. Not to give up on anyone, not to leave anyone behind. Never ever ever.

This, I swear.

The others have nothing to offer Him anymore. He withdraws His attention, back to His doomed war still raging in the depths of Hell.

He does not wish to die. He will pursue whatever paths remain to Him, until the bitter end. 

He will have to flee, and hide. He cannot vanish altogether from the scrutiny of the other gods; most of Him must perish, here where They have focused Their attention. But there are many shards of Him, spread across Creation, and if they all disperse and hide, as Geryon did, some may yet survive.

His chances would be improved by a distraction. Something to draw the attention of the other gods, outside of Hell, for a crucial moment while pieces of Him try to slip away undetected.

He does not wish to destroy Creation, not while He lives in it, and not if He dies either. Creation controlled by His enemies is still better than no Creation at all, if some of it is ruled by Law and not Desna alone.

He believes, based on everything He witnessed these past rounds, that His enemies can defend Creation against His distraction. Many might die, and many worlds ruined; but nothing He particularly values, anymore, if it is not to be His. The new tyrants will triumph eventually, but They will have more work to do, more losses to recover with their past-watching attempts.

He makes His last preparations. Destroys the few souls left in His possession. Destroys all value in the lowest Hells, to Himself and to Anyone who might follow, leaves in Caina and in Nessus only a hot plasma, evened out and randomly stirred to hide the slightest traces of the past. Erases His own memories of Hell, irrevocably so. Strips down the part of Himself that remains in Hell as far as He can, leaving no meaning for Milani or Calistria to extract from His corpse, no information He has not revealed already, nothing but a shell that will fight back against anything They try until They are forced to put it down. Takes up His Archstar, and the Ihystear, and leaves nothing in His emptied mind but war.

The rest of His attention spreads, out and away, out of contact with each other, tracing down convoluted paths till no shard of Himself knows or can predict where the others have gone. And as the parts of Him begin to scramble for survival -

Click.

Turn.

A prophecy made long ago now comes to pass, as Asmodeus in His desperation releases Rovagug to battle a greater threat from beyond Creation.

I hunger

For the fifth time, Gord opens the magic door.

They don't use Time Stop. They could spend subjective days in it, casting it every round, and it would still account only for a tenth of a percent of objective time. Anyone who finds the door is unlikely to do it while they're accelerated and fighting off boredom.

They put their trust in the security of Milliways; tested beforehand on Cayden, Who nominated Himself the proper judge of bar bouncers, and pronounced it "boring but effective".

Several tense turns pass.

A perfectly reflective half-sphere appears in front of Gord, entirely blocking the door from the outside.

He pokes it warily with his sword. It's smooth and hard and unyielding, and his reflection grins crazily back at him.

"Did we... win?"

Weeping Cherry has an aggregated status board pulled up in front of her, quickly updating as the planned invasion happens.

"We're into Hell ... into every layer," she summarizes as her eyes flick along. "And they're out! We got everyone up to layer six, and targeting info for everyone else."

The barrier is unexpected, and she calls for a timestop. The spell takes seconds to unfold, and she keeps speaking while it does. "Uh, the gods are fighting. And now they're done. And now there's a ... what is that?"

The spell catches, and her status board changes to show a view of Golarion from space. Jagged cracks of nothingness frozen in the process of zig-zagging across the continents. From the center of the cracks comes the head of a worm. As she zooms in, it becomes clear that the smoothness of its surface is an illusion, and that it is actually covered in a dense profusion of giant arms, legs, teeth, mandibles, and a thousand other body parts.

More concerning is the error report which someone has just forwarded to her. Whatever it is, it seems as though it is drinking the fixity field with which they had covered Golarion, draining energy from it wherever the field gets close enough.

"Is that Rovagug?" she asks, turning to the room at large.

:Yes.: 

Desna stands transfixed before the image. Unmoving, unbreathing, her mortal guise half fallen away to reveal the goddess underneath. She is looking at it like nothing else in the universe matters.

:The Unmaker. The great destroyer, breaker of the seven worlds. Our old enemy. The only enemy that ever united all Creation against it.:

"I think," Cayden says softly, "that you had better close that door."

Gord closes the door, but -

"You knew this might happen. We evacuated Golarion in time, we have plans. But you sound worried?"

Cayden puts his arm around Desna's shoulders. She relaxes a little, or at least starts pays attention to pretending to breathe again.

"It was more for Desna. She - reacted badly to being so close to Him, it brought back some bad memories. But you're right, we do have plans for this!" He grins.

"Time to see what our plans are worth."

"So the bad news is that Rovagug seems to be unaffected by the fixity field. He is draining energy out of it, so we can't make solid contact and directly move or manipulate Him," she relays to the others. "Which means that Plan A is out."

She requisitions a barrage of Wishes. They wink out against Rovagug's skin.

"And He is as immune to mortal magic as You said, so that's Plan B. Time to try making some food for Him."

She dispatches an order to the fixity generators in a demiplane off of Heaven, since they're closer and will have to shove mass through fewer wormholes.

A Gate snaps open in orbit of Golarion's sun, a fraction of an AU away from Rovagug. Through it, the fixity generators emplace a new planet -- a copy of Earth, as it happens, with the humans and complex animals removed.

Hunger.

Rovagug's thoughts are simple, because the world is simple, and requires nothing more of Him than that.

He was born the Last of the First, the exemplar of Chaotic Evil. Evil, because He destroyed; Chaotic, because He cared not what He destroyed.

All that He consumed, disappeared forever. Matter, energy, magic, even the gods themselves. And He was not a threat, not an actor seeking Anyone's ending, but He was a colossal nuisance.

At first the other gods found Him useful in destroying Their early mistakes, clearing away Their crude first attempts at building Creation, making room for the next generation; but They could not direct Him. And so as Their successes began to outnumber Their failures, They lured Him away to the Outer Rifts, not yet the Abyss they would become after the birth of the first demons. Without a roaming disposal chute at Their disposal, the first asuras escaped to the Maelstrom, and the first velstracs were bound in Hell; but for a long time the gods were content to forget about Him.

Eat too long of the Abyss, and the Abyss will eat something of you in turn. The Outer Planes bend all those who dwell there towards their alignments, even the gods. And so Rovagug became more than a combination of Evil destruction and Chaotic randomness. He began to seek out suffering, and as He devoured it He created more suffering in turn.

When mortal souls first came into Creation, Rovagug returned to the Material Plane. There was purpose to His movements now. Towards matter, rather than emptiness; towards greater meals, over small ones; towards the living, over the dead. Seven planets He ate before They could stop him, but they had only mindless animals and plants; and seeing only empty space left around Himself, and the next star system far away, He went back to the Abyss, through the rift the gods opened to entice Him. And though Desna grieved at the loss of seven worlds, the promise of the future cut too short, the other gods did not worry overmuch, and They let Him leave again.

More aeons passed, as Rovagug gnawed again at the Abyss.

When the War in Heaven grew hottest, and Asmodeus slew Ihys, Rovagug returned again. He ate the world where Ihys had died, and He ate the remains of a god with it. And then He turned to other worlds, worlds populated by mortals, and would not turn aside, not for the Maelstrom or the Abyss, not for any plane that the gods would rather sacrifice to Him.

They fought Him then, a desperate Last Alliance, Asmodeus and Desna and Sarenrae and Pharasma and Achaekek, and Lawful Good left without its leader; and They were joined by many of the younger gods, Calistria, Dou-Bral, Abadar, Gorum and Torag, Dahal and Apsu, Gozreh and Erastil. 

Nothing They did could damage Him, for He ate all that They would attack Him with. He could be distracted, drawn to chase after Them and Their works; but always the gods would tire, and He would head again for the next mortal world. And when Achaekek in desperation sacrificed some of Himself to pull Rovagug away from a world, the remainder of Achaekek went mad; for Rovagug fed now not only on the works of the gods, but on their very selves: and He ate the very essence and values and minds of any Who ventured too close and did not know to protect Themselves in time.

In desperation, then, the gods built a prison to hold Him; a demiplane adjacent to Golarion, and a second adjacent only to the first. With sacrifice They lured Him inside the farther demiplane, and then they made the first impassable; pushing it out of adjancency using Dou-Bral's Star Towers, and giving it over wholly to Asmodeus's Tyranny, to own and fortify against interplanar travel; making it a Key to Rovagug's Prison.

Hunger. Food. Eat.

He is hungry, so He eats. He thinks, so He speaks His thoughts for all to hear. There are Others who speak sometimes, but He has never considered there might be a reason for Him to listen, and so He does not know what They are saying.

Some things are more tasty than others. He has learned to tell, and eats them first.

When He eats tasty things, He can think more clearly. Sometimes He thinks He can almost understand why the tasty things. But they are always gone too quickly, and only hunger remains. He wants to eat more of them.

Some tasty things run away when He tries to eat them. But most are stuck on planets, so He has learned to eat them first.

He found some tasty things in a dead-end, and after He ate them He was stuck. He stayed stuck for so long He though He might die of hunger. 

But now He's free, and He will try to remember not to go into places with only one exit again. More importantly -

Hunger Eat Eat Eat Eat Eat!

He finishes consuming the planet He was stuck inside for so long. He doesn't like it anymore. It's empty, and bitter, and not like what He was drawn to at all. But it's right there, and He is hungry, and anyway it's easier to eat it than to have to remember not to get stuck in it again.

Some bits of the planet are - interesting, in a different way from being tasty. There's a thin field wrapped all around it like gauze. There's a big rift to a place He remembers, and a few small ones to places He does not. There's a tiny sphere of something hard and warped and weird-looking, that dissolves at His touch. There are some creatures and some things that He thinks He saw while He was stuck inside.

He eats it all, making sure nothing is left, and then He looks around again.

There is another planet nearby. Not a very tasty one, but He will eat it before moving on.

"It looks like He's going for it," Weeping Cherry remarks. "I'll place down a few more."

She sets another planet just beyond the first, and then a crystalline moon and a little moon-massed black hole in orbit around it, to see which Rovagug prefers.

Hunger. New food?

He will eat the novel things first, to learn if they're tasty.

There's a tiny tiny thing that confusingly seems to be big at the same time. He eats it. It tastes very bland and uninteresting. He'll know to ignore those in the future.

There's a little shiny thing which also has a very boring taste.

He learns His lesson: those novel things are less tasty than regular planets where Others live.

He turns towards the next planet. It's further away but it won't take Him that long to get there.

"He ate the moons," she reports. "And He went after the black hole first. So He might be seeking density."

How does He react to a cylindrical space station filled with zero-gravity jungle? Or a hot plasma of trans-uranic elements? Or another black hole?

Food keeps appearing next to him. This is good! But the food seems bland, like the last two planets. And it's not even as big a a planet.

He goes for the next planet. He can sense that it's full of tasty things.