Hug, yes, please. 

Khemet gets an update from his diplomats and changes his plans for the day.

The Star-Eyed might get mad at them well before they fully tip their hand.

He sits down in his brand new demiplane and pulls out a diamond and focuses his mind on someone who has been dead for nearly two thousand years.

The last thing Urtho remembers clearly is - standing alone in his office surrounded by a mess of maps and plans and papers on every surface, the evacuation was complete - or as complete as it could be - and Ma'ar's army is nearly on top of him and he remembers hesitating until the very last second, he doesn't want to do this, he wants it to be ending any other way, but he's made his bed and now he has to lie in it and he's left himself with no choice - 

- and he remembers calling down a Final Strike, setting off every safeguard in his Tower in a single blinding instant, it's terrifying and awful but it doesn't hurt - not physically, anyway, the anguish and regret is another story -

- he remembers dying -

- and now he's somewhere else. 

It's a sparsely decorated room with windows against one wall, opening out to a forest. If you're paying close attention the lighting in the forest seems off; it isn't sunlight.

He's lying on a comfortable couch.

"Urtho," says the man who is sitting in a chair across from him. "You have been dead a very long time, but eventually a method of returning the dead to life was invented. Your magic doesn't work in this place because some people are dangerous, in the confusion of returning to life."

He knows he's dead. The rest - doesn't make any sense. 

Urtho lies still for a moment; the strange voice is telling the truth, his magic doesn't work, not even mage-sight. 

He sits up, slowly. Mostly he's very confused, he's not really parsing anything past the first few words. "Is this - is this what comes after death, then?" 

He repeats himself, levelly.

It continues to not make any sense.

"Who are you?" Urtho says, wonderingly. 

"There are worlds other than Velgarth. I am from one of those worlds. My god grants me the power to raise the dead; many gods in my world grant this power to their followers."

Urtho stares at him for a long time. 

"If you know who I am," he says, slowly, shakily, "then you must know what I have done. Surely - there were more worthy people to return to life than me." 

This makes the strange man who raised him smile sadly. "Well, I mean to get everybody, eventually. Few names are remembered from your era in history; yours is one of them, and you'll know others."

"- What...do the histories have to say about my actions...?" He probably shouldn't ask but he can't help it. 

" - this is going to be difficult," he says, quietly. 

"Eventually people were able to reconstruct what they believe happened, though they may have gotten some things wrong. They believe that the shock of your Final Strike, and of the triggering of the safeguards on the tower, created magical instability. Then, one of your most powerful weapons was deployed against your Enemy - with an open Gate nearby. The shock propagated through the Gate network and was compounded by the existing instability, and the resulting cataclysm killed almost everyone everywhere. Magic didn't work properly for years, maybe decades. The land was ruined and made uninhabitable. It has been two thousand years and it is still twisted, in many places, by the magic. Almost all records were lost, and no civilization like Tantara has ever arisen on the face of Velgarth again."

Urtho's expression goes more and more frozen over the course of the explanation. 

"I - I cannot - no - I did not mean..." He can barely speak. "Why did you bring me back. Why." 

 "The world makes it very easy to die for one's mistakes, and very hard to live with them. I would like you to live with them. I would like you to help us relearn what was forgotten and rebuild what was destroyed."

Urtho's lips move silently for a while, his expression flickering through a dozen different shades of distress. 

"Did any of my people survive," he asks finally, dully. "I - tried - to make sure they would be far away, safe... Did any of my gryphons...?" 

"Some of them, if they were far enough away. Their descendants remember you as a hero."

"- Really? I find that rather hard to believe." 

"I was kind of confused by it too. They all think Ma'ar started the war, that's part of it, and then part of it might be the influence of the Star-Eyed goddess, who helped them retain the memory of her intervention after the Cataclysm and who really really hates Ma'ar, which may have influenced her framing."

Urtho blinks at him. "I - that is not fair to his memory, he did not mean... It seems so pointless for Her to hate him thousands of years after his death." He bites his lip for a moment. "Are - were you going to bring him back as well?" 

"He handled that himself. One of his methods of securing his own immortality survived the war. He returned."

Urtho looks horrified. He's speechless for a moment. 

"...I should have known," he murmurs, half to himself. "He spoke of such dark magics even as a young man..." He's visibly deeply disturbed by the concept. 

Well, the reality is probably about as disturbing as what he's imagining so that's fair enough, really. "I know him. We fought together against a great evil in my world, and won, and are now at work trying to undo the damage the great evil did."

"Oh." Urtho looks confused for a moment, and then shakes his head. "He did always care so deeply. He wanted so badly to fight the evils in the world - too badly, he was too willing to commit evil himself, to call it necessary..." Shudder. "Has he learned any wisdom, at least?" 

"Yes, I think so. He said of the war that if he could go back in time he would have surrendered at once; it wasn't worth it."

"Did he really say that?" Urtho slowly brings a hand to his forehead. "He must have felt so betrayed, I did not dare give him any warning - and he still kept trying to parley until the end. I - should not have started a war I could not end. I was right, it seems, it was my greatest mistake..." 

He starts weeping, quietly, and somehow with great dignity.