Azalea nods. "That makes sense," she replies. "I don't even think you were wrong, to reject Pharasma's right to decide what is good and what is evil. It is important for people to figure out what is right for themselves. But ... sometimes we can be right for the wrong reasons, and those wrong reasons leak into other decisions."

Gordy and Squash trade uncertain looks. "It sounds like that paladin really had an effect on you," Gordy says to Gord.

"We did things everyone told us weren't Good. The Sarenrites agreed that freeing slaves was Good, but they said killing slavers in the process was Evil, and they hated thinking of conscripts as slaves because they didn't like noticing they weren't willing to help them. The Iomedaeans thought you had to accept surrender, but they executed all the demon cultists who did surrender, until they had made surrender meaningless. The Desnans promoted free travel, but they defended the Wardstones and wouldn't take in demon refugees." 

"Everyone had an excuse. No-one valued individual freedom above all else. And no-one wanted to help us."

"Maybe we could have convinced some of them. But there's always a balance, between words and swords. We knew we weren't using words to take us as far as they could before we resorted to swords. Because when there's someone right there and you have to rescue them in the next hour or not at all, you can't afford to spend that hour trying to convince someone else to help you and fail nine times out of ten. You can't - bet that in the long term you'll help more people by cooperating, and use that to excuse not helping the people in front of you right now."

"Maybe now you know, or you think you know, that we could have convinced others more easily than we thought. But we didn't know it then. We did the best we could, and that's not a mistake or something to regret."

He has a valid point! Gord is being too melancholic, and spending time regretting things that weren't really his fault. 

"I want to see it for myself," he decides. "To visit all the people I met and helped, or couldn't help, all the places that used to be so horrible. To see with my own eyes what we've built, and find anyone who still needs my help, and figure out what I still need to fight for."

The three of them share a look.

"Azalea, how can we find someone if we don't know where they are? We have names and faces but some people might be using different ones now."

"You're not used to the new world yet! Azalea, can we have some Sendings, and can you trace where they go if the recipient doesn't know where they are exactly?"

"We can give everyone Discern Location now! As long as we also give everyone free access to Mind Blank."

"I should show you all how to request spells on your own at some point, but yeah, here are some Sendings," she replies. She grants them each a Sending and sets it up to be automatically replenished when they use it. "I'm not going to trace where they go, because people like privacy. And some people have actually disabled Sendings being able to find them because they don't want to be bothered. But you can just ask your recipients where they are and if they want you to visit they can tell you."

She sighs and shakes her head. "Our normal messaging system lets you attach teleports to messages, so that you can seamlessly invite someone over. But we haven't gotten metadata attached to Sendings like that yet."

"I didn't mean to ask you to find them if they don't want to be found, I meant could you help if they want to be found but don't know how tell me where they are precisely enough to teleport. Like, 'come find me, I'm somewhere in the Eastern Worldwound, there's a big mountain next to me.'"

"Oh! Yes, that makes more sense. I should definitely figure out a more seamless way for that to work in the future, but for now I'm happy to trace the Sendings," she replies.

Sendings still take ten minutes to cast, and still can't be quickened, not with all the mythic and magical power in the world. Valmallos is of the opinion that if people want a better Sending, they should spend a mortal lifetime researching it like their parents before them, even if they do have infinite Wishes and time dilation and safe demiplanes for experimenting and free resurrection if anything goes wrong and are going to share it with all of Creation the moment they succeed.

Valmallos doesn't have much that He values, in this new and reshaped Creation, but what little He has left He values all the more. If you're not satisfied, you can go invent a way to find absolutely anyone in Creation based on a vague mental intuition using your nonmagical field, and leave His precious magic alone.

So one Gord begins to cast, while the other two work out the best wording to use.

Ten minutes are a very long time, in the new Creation.

The coalition of the gods stands triumphant. It swells with Neutral powers, those who want to make their voices heard while Creation is being reshaped, and those who just want to join in on the fun.

They come to Abbadon, where the remaining Horsemen cower in fear. They evacuate Awaiting-Consumption, and none dare to bar their path. 

They come to the Shadow Plane, to free all those who do not truly wish to suffer, and to resurrect all those who do not truly wish to be undead. 

They come to those parts of the Abyss that are nearest Creation, where petitioners arrive and turn into demons, and those where demons have since spread. The Abyss is infinite, but the demons are not. It will take some time to track down all of them, a very long time perhaps to track down the few who spent their lives running as far away as they could, but most of them can be found quickly; few demons and few demon lords are isolationists.

The demon lords cannot resist the fixity field, even in their own lairs. Some cooperate, Nocticula and Baphomet chief among them, bargaining to be left to rule their domains and their few willing followers. Others, like Pazuzu and Deskari, choose to fight to the end, and ally against the gods as they once did against Desna. It changes nothing; one by one, they are captured and moved to safe containment, and all the demons are separated, and prevented from hurting each other.

Lamashtu is the only true god in the Abyss. She cannot win a fight, but She can refuse to engage in one, once it is clear She is losing; and it is not in Her nature to negotiate, or to submit. But She cannot stop the gods from taking over Kurnugia and combing its vastness for every last demon, every lost soul, and lifting them to the safety and the love of Sarenrae's embrace.

This is the measure of the strength of Good: they no longer need to kill their enemies to achieve their goals.

And they come, also, to the worlds of the Material plane. But the gods are bound by intervention budgets, and cannot rescue these as they do the Inner and Outer planes; and they do not wish for the Cherries alone to bear the burden of rescuing forty-seven thousand planets.

The non-Lawful among them can decide to ignore the agreements, for there is no longer a god-coalition that would enforce them. But to do so would be to forsake Their Lawful allies; to leave Them forever barred from interacting with those worlds, and with everything those worlds influence in turn, until Heaven and Axis become mere curiosities, leftovers from a bygone age; until all who can break their Law do so, to take part in a greater Creation, and only the Lawful gods are left behind.

The godtreaty that established intervention budgets can be abrogated, Lawfully, only with the unanimous consensus of all who signed it. Abadar being one of them, they must also pay a fair price to all who abode by it, and who would now be harmed by its repeal; even those who are not Lawful.

This gives the Neutral Evil and True Neutral deities a stake to bargain with, which They can use to negotiate terms of surrender.

Urgathoa bargains for the intelligent undead of Creation not to be destroyed, as Pharasma would wish, or raised as living creatures once again, as Sarenrae would have it. Those undead who wish it, and consistently affirm their desires, are allowed to remain as they are. But no more undead may be created, for Pharasma too must be appeased; and very few of the allied gods endorse the creation of suffering creatures, even if those created endorse their own suffering.

And for Herself, Urgathoa asks for a space outside Creation, an empty space, once more worlds have been found besides Cherry's; where She can breed and Her children can spread without end, monitored by the other gods to ensure She does not hurt anyone, but not bound to obey Their laws beyond that.

The prisoners and the tortured shades of Xovaikan are rescued; but Zon-Kuthon has many followers who inflict pain on themselves, willingly and with delight, although they mourn the loss of others to torture. And He is an ancient Lawful god, Who must agree for the intervention budgets to be no more; and beloved of Shelyn, Who hopes Dou-Bral can still be rescued, now more than ever.

Zon-Kuthon will not accept terms that forbid Him to ever acquire new followers. But He agrees to restrict Himself to recruiting from the velstracs, competing with the demagogues for followers by refining His art.

This agreement shall hold until all the velstracs are His (for they too are forbidden from making more of themselves). By then, the Good gods plan to have something better to offer Him.

They come then, at last, to the mortal worlds of Creation. To all the places and to all the people that They watched in near-silence, whose suffering They saw and were unable to help, almost since the day Creation began. 

They tell them many things. Not all of the gods talk in words; not all of them understand all the mortal races. But each of them has something to say, to all the sufficiently-aligned mortals that They can perceive; and to all those They cannot as well, for the gods may now help each other without counting the cost. There are no creatures in Creation that some chain of gods and of mortals cannot reach, cannot perceive, cannot talk to.

Happiness, they tell them. Peace, and Flourishing. Life, and Health, and Love and Beauty and Friendship, Knowledge and Trade and Invention and Progress, Striving and Growth and Fulfillment, Justice and Fairness and Duty, Truth and Law and Freedom. 

And a thousand things besides, promises and well-wishes and requests and bargains, sent to trillions of sentients, some of them as alien to a human as the gods. None of them can hear or understand all of the messages, not right away. But at the very core, repeated by everyone, and made understandable to every thinking being, is the message -

You won't suffer, ever again.

You don't have to be alone, ever again.

We want you to flourish, and if you hurt no-one else, we'll stop at nothing to achieve it.

We are Good. And you can be too.

The Ruby Prince Khemet III is in a meeting receiving a report about expected tax receipts when it happens.

Everyone in the room disappears. His ministers, his brothers, his Risen Guard, over twenty people vanish at the same instant and he has seen no magic and did not feel himself shake off a spell.

In matters of state security, the protocol is clear and it is also clear why it is the correct protocol: with no information there is no better choice to be made, and the safety of the Pharaoh is paramount.

Quicken (rod) plane shift to his private secure Lawful-aligned demiplane; the only other tuning fork is stored in the Osirian embassy in Axis. Step into the Lawful Neutral forbiddance.

Unlock the door with its magic key, speak a password (obscured by a permanent mage's sanctum), step into the Lawful Good Forbiddance on the other side. Close and lock the door.

He is now behind the best defensive wall that would fit into the budget estimated as a fair price for keeping the Pharaoh safe. He is already wearing all his protective items and he cannot cast Mind Blank from scroll.

The protocol does not require escalating immediately to a Miracle. Besides, he is not sure what miracle he would ask for. There is another Abadaran cleric on Golarion who can cast a Miracle, hopefully with more information.

He uses the shell of sending whose other half is in the central guard-room of the Palace. There is no response.

He uses the shell whose other half is in the backup emergency security facility of the Dome. There is no response.

He uses his last shell, whose mate is in the embassy in Axis. "Marquis", the codeword for his demiplane. "Ojan, Merenre, Narmer, everyone else in room vanished. Like Wishnapping, but I saw no magic. Blue, Red", the other two shells, "not responding. Investigate, advise. Starting Commune, interruptible." If they need to reach him sooner, they can plane shift to Golarion and teleport into the Dome and then plane shift into the demiplane; this sounds very unsafe but he does not know what is going on and he trusts the judgement of the security experts he employs much more than his own.

Thankfully, they reply. But he doesn't have another shell and a regular sending would take ten minutes. He is now cut off.

He begins casting Commune, desperately trying to come up with a question tree.

Menas is a typical Golarian human, which is to say he is a slightly-literate farmer. He owns a little freehold near Oppara, with olive and fruit trees, and a share in the village's wheat field. He is married and has two young daughters, and a milk-cow.

Like the Ruby Prince, he cares deeply about the yearly taxes. Unlike the Ruby Prince, he cannot forecast the expected tax rate ahead of time. Taxes are a thing that happens, like storms and disease, each in its season.

He is tilling the vegetable patch where he'll plant peas and cabbages when

he suddenly finds himself elsewhere.

The vegetables are gone, replaced with a carpet of flowering clover. A cool breeze dries the sweat on his face, despite the fact that the courtyard he finds himself in is no more than ten or twelve meters across. Stone walls rise three meters into the air on all sides. A large oaken door is barred on this side, as though to suggest he could lift the bar and leave the courtyard.

The sun shines down from above just as it had on his garden, falling across a spread of fruit, bread, and cheese. In front of it is a letter, gently waving in the breeze. A fountain burbles at the center of the courtyard, and a small building stands behind it, the door open invitingly.

"This is all for you," a voice informs him. It is sourceless and androgynous, but it sounds gentle. "The letter contains more explanation. Touch the circle at the top of the paper if you want the letter read to you."

Aaaah?

Did he just die and go to Heaven? 

This definitely doesn't look like Hell, not that he really thinks he deserved that, but - he doesn't remember dying, what happened - is his family - was his little Themis watching him out the window again, did she just see him die, is his family alright -

- he rushes desperately to the door and tries to unbar it.

The bar lifts with no problem and the door swings open, revealing a corridor leading away. The corridor is lined with arches, each leading to a visibly different place.

There is a city built with gleaming metal, sparkling in the sun. People walk through the streets, calling words made indistinct by the distance. There is a cool forest with a burbling brook. Birds chirp in the trees. There is a normal looking village surrounded by fields, and an indoor area lit with magical lights.

If he continues down the corridor, he will probably be able to see into more of the arches. If the corridor has an end, it's not visible from here.

The city is very strange looking. It makes sense that a Heavenly city would be grand and immense and - he doesn't understand what half the things he sees even are. Cities are complex and strange, the one time he went to Oppara he kept losing the way back to his inn and finding himself in scary twisting alleys and - he doesn't have time to figure anything out, right now, he can't waste any time he has to know - 

He runs through the door into the normal-looking village and towards the nearest person he can see.

"Hello," says a man. He's sitting on the porch of one of the houses, re-reading the notes that got handed out to the hastily-assembled volunteers. "I'm Alec. You must be from Golarion?"