"It won't be necessary to consult me on such petty matters," Finnean says, with the faint verbal aura of an eyeroll. "I'm a sword. Moreover, I'm your sword. Fight the Abyss and don't stab children with me; my other preferences are somewhere between few and nil."

She smiles at I'm your sword.

"Very well."

She sheathes him so she's not just wandering around with a sword.

("Don't stab children with me." She would never stab a child! … Then again, she "would never" stab her unarmed liege. Well, at any rate, this probably won't be a problem because she doubts that the angel sword would like to be used for this purpose either. That's three entities opposed to stabbing children! So there!)

Okay, where's someplace that she can summon an undead monster horse without disturbing the peace.

The village is exactly as active at "night" as during the "day"; it's just different people outside at a time. A Neather outside is mending her fishing net.

There's a good amount of cavern, and there's branching off-tunnels; she can probably do it in one of those, if she can find her way back alright.

Miko's confident in her ability to not get lost, yeah. Especially if she stays close enough to hear the quiet hubbub of the village.

Once she's satisfied with the amount of space and privacy she has:

"Ashrider, I choose you!"

A roiling cloud of ash and smoke hisses from her Pokémount Ball and resolves into the shape of a Beaʃte. It shakes its mane.

It looks exactly like a spooky undead palette swap of Windstriker.

"Miko."

"You can talk?"

(She almost says now at the end of that sentence. She bites it back. Just because the horse knows her name and looks like her paladin mount doesn't mean anything.)

"Yes. Or. You can understand now?"

(Ashrider doesn't feel particularly different from… before. It's pretty sure it used to be able to communicate with celestials, at least.)

Miko can feel that, a little. She had a low-bandwidth empathic link with Windstriker, too. This one feels different, though, and she's not sure if that's because they've both changed or because Ashrider is just a copy.

"Now?" she says, because anything else would feel too hopeful or too accusatory.

Horsely nod.

"I remember riding with you before. I remember when you stopped being a paladin. It hurt."

It nuzzles her.

"When you died they said I could visit you. But then… you were going somewhere else. So I followed."

"Oh. I'm… I'm sorry."

Ashrider shakes its head.

"I chose to follow."

The nightmare looks around.

"Do we get to ride together again?"

Miko still isn't sure that this is the same mount. It could just be some undead thing with all of Windstriker's memories.

But.

Isn't Miko just some undead thing with all her memories?

"Yes."

She hugs its neck.

The rest of their conversation is brief. Ashrider doesn't remember anything after choosing to follow Miko's soul; she summarizes what's been happening to her since she woke up. Eventually, she sends Ashrider back to… wherever fiendish blackguard mounts go when they're not on summon… and returns to the village.

She considers looking for Lann. She remembers that he said Wenduag would likely come to argue with him tonight. She decides to return to her tent instead.

As a paladin, she received her spells in the morning. This was typical of her home realm. Good-aligned divine casters received their spells at dawn; Evil ones received them at dusk. An asymmetrical advantage, perhaps, but one everyone had more or less gotten used to.

The gods of Golarion are different. They collectively agreed to grant all spells at dawn. This is because Golarion's gods are, universally, entities capable of that form of cooperation. In some ways, even the most Chaotic of them is more Lawful than the most strictured monk. (Cayden Cailean might argue the point, but he spends more on not being that kind of Lawful than many gods spend on having an archpriest, and considers himself well-served to do so. The exception that proves the rule.)

Anyway. All of that is irrelevant, because the source of Miko's power is not that kind of entity. She feels the hot black ember buried at the core of her soul flare to life at what would be, by the hour-candle she doesn't have, 2:30 AM.

The interface is more streamlined than the one she received from the Twelve Gods. (It's certainly more streamlined than Thor's. The Northern Pantheon never were a paragon of efficiency.) She can express her need for any spell she knows herself to be able to cast - and, since she can see her own spell list, that's any of them. She can also... relax that ineffable muscle, in some sense, and allow the power to flow into her as her patron believes will be best.

Which would be more convenient if she had any knowledge of who that patron was and if they were aligned with her in literally any capacity.

… Yeah, trusting in the Twelve Gods worked with the Twelve Gods. She's going to do this manually.

The priority, since she can only use Lay on Hands on herself and her mount now, is loading up on positive energy healing spells. If she chooses only those, that'll give her two Cure Critical Wounds, three each of Cure Serious Wounds and Cure Moderate Wounds, and four Cure Light Wounds. She contemplates leaving one slot open at each level to her patron, but she still knows nothing about them.

Plus, some of the spells that aren't insanely Evil look pretty cool.

If she finds, at the end of the next day, that she picked her spells poorly, she might consider letting her patron pick. Maybe.

She's still got rather a lot of night to fill.

This is making her miss the paladin bedtime. And being able to sleep. She should get her hands on some sort of study material tomorrow, or maybe a copy of Finding Plot Holes For Dummies.

Well, no time like the present to get in touch with whatever might remain of the Sapphire Guard.

"Finnean?"

"I haven't gone anywhere," he drawls.

Snort.

"When you cast Sending, does the recipient automatically know who you are?"

"No idea!" he says cheerfully. "I haven't tested it very thoroughly, you know. Care to find some cave-dweller to find out with?"

She starts to weigh how much time this would take against how much she values two extra words before she remembers that she has several hours to kill and looking for someone to experiment with will actively aid her in this goal.

"Yes, I think that would be a good idea. Also… what is the name of the city on the surface? If I've been told what it is, I've forgotten already."

She pokes out of her tent and starts looking for someone who's free.

"Kenabres. It was a rundown little riverside village in my time, but the strangest things happen when the world mostly ends..."

The Neathers are still as active as ever. Here's one steadily gutting a basket full of fish. (Many of the fish are horribly mutated.)

… She belatedly thinks she must understand, now, what Terendelev meant when she said that the demon invasion hadn't gotten any more urgent in a century.

"Good evening!" she says to the fisher. She does her best to ignore the horrible mutations.

(Does it help if the fishwife is also horribly mutated? Because she is.)

"A good what?" she blinks. Then she grins. "Oh, ye must be one of the surfacers! Accounts for the swords too, now I looks at ye... What d'ye need, dearie?"

She does not stop skeletonizing fish at any point. Her efficiency is truly impressive.

(Well, she really hopes there's some sort of Remove Enchantment for the Neathers. But she at least thinks that she can talk about as normally as she did with Lann and Dyra.)

"That’s right. I'm testing if the spell Sending notifies recipients who is messaging them."