"It couldn't hurt, though I do want to have some care for the time so perhaps something short."

He'd just been planning to use Blai's speech, but now that he thinks about it that might just mean Blai would try to copy him rather than speaking from the heart.

"Alright. This is part of a famous speech from Andoran's revolution — just part of it, not the whole thing, even if we weren't short on time I don't have most of it memorized."

He stands up straight and clears his throat.

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph..."

His voice is clear and confident. It swells with pride and hope when he speaks of the prospect of victory, indignation when he speaks of the evils Cheliax has inflicted upon Andoran's people, determination when he speaks of what is to come. He punctuates it with gestures, chosen carefully to draw out moments of particular intensity rather than haphazardly to fill space. This sort of expressiveness would be very unusual in Cheliax outside of an opera house, but it seems to come naturally to him.

"You don't need to be quite that emotional about it. But he's got the right idea."

How can this possibly have gotten worse. Maybe if he discovers credible information to the effect that Hell involves lots of public speaking he can redeem his counterpart after all Worldwound treaty.

"Really, the most important thing is that you sound confident. Everything else would be nice, but it's alright if your first speech isn't perfect."

"I think attempting to sound less like I am giving a report will make me sound less confident unless my Eagle's is bizarrely good today for some reason."

He nods. "In that case it might be best to focus on getting you as confident as you can. Do you want to try going through it a few more times, so that you can be sure you're prepared when it actually comes time to give it?"

"Technically, no."

But he will do it anyway.

Sosiel feels a little bad about this, but he has Blai run through his speech a few more times until it seems like he'll be ready to actually give it.

"Is there anything else either of us can help you with while we're here?"

"I should probably catch up with whatever non-speech things Miss Dendiwhar wants to familiarize me with most urgently. Thank you for your help, Songbird."

"Good luck. I'll find you in the audience so I can cast my spells on you."

He leaves.

"How much do you already know about the history of the Crusades? Is there anything I should make sure to cover?"

"My history education was not good. I know more about the Shining Crusade than any Mendevian one by a long shot."

She laughs. "Well, I'm afraid we haven't been nearly as successful as Iomedae was, but maybe you can change that! Would you rather I start with a summary of the other four crusades, or Drezen's defenses as of the time when it fell, or something else?"

"A summary of the other four sounds good."

"Alright! So, the Worldwound opened in 4606, right after Aroden died. It was a lot smaller back then, but even so the demons overran Iz pretty much right away and started going after the rest of Sarkoris. But there were a couple reasons they couldn't just teleport everywhere on Golarion. First of all, you need to have some sort of information to do a blind teleport, even a Greater Teleport, so they couldn't just hop over to Nerosyan like it was nothing. Second of all, teleporting in the Wound isn't totally reliable anyway. Third of all, and probably most importantly, the Lung Wa empire, over in Tian Xia, sent a whole bunch of ritualists to do a ritual to disrupt their teleportation — it didn't work perfectly, it didn't totally block anything the way the Wardstones do, but unlike the Wardstones it affected the whole area, it wasn't like a wall."

She pauses for a second to catch her breath.

"But, the problem was, it didn't last forever, and it was starting to wear off. Meanwhile, Lung Wa had totally collapsed, so they couldn't just send us more ritualists. So in 4622, the Queen called together as many people as she could from four continents to help, and angels too, and that was the First Crusade. And so they went to fight, and they killed a whole bunch of demons, and drove them back as far as they could, and — by 4630 they thought they'd won. And so they set up as many fortresses as they could in the Worldwound area, to try to make sure that if any more demons came they'd be able to catch them on their way out, while they figured out what to do next. Any questions so far?"

"...when you say they thought they'd won, you mean they thought they'd reduced the Worldwound to a - manageable garrison? They weren't under the impression that they'd closed it or that no more demons would attempt the crossing?"

"Yeah. They knew it was still open, they knew there would sometimes be more demons, but they thought they could handle it, and that most demons wouldn't be stupid enough to try it. It might be easier with a map, hang on—"

She retrieves a leather-bound book from among her possessions and opens it up to a hand-drawn map on the third page. "This was published in 4632, by one of the soldier-priests who'd fought in the First Crusade. He got tired of drawing maps pretty quickly, so there's only a few dozen like this."

The map claims to show the area around the Worldwound. Little fortresses dot the area that's now inside the Wardstone lines, and there are even a few settlements marked in places that are now decisively on the Abyssal side of the area. Some areas are still explicitly under demonic control — even the First Crusade never managed to take Iz — but the area labelled as corresponding to the main rift is much smaller than the modern borders of the Worldwound.

"That's a lovely map, thank you. What was the proportion of fortress management at the time, who controlled these?"

Nurah can answer in detail! Back in those days Mendev was doing much more of it themselves, and Cheliax (a flicker of sadness crosses her face for a moment) much less, seeing as it was in the middle of a civil war, though this fort was nominally Sarkorian and there were a few countries with their own fortresses that have long since folded their forces in under Mendev...

Eight years later, in 4638, they had several problems at once. The largest rift quadrupled in size overnight, swallowing up the nearest fort and everyone inside it. Demons started pouring out of several of the smaller rifts, which had previously been relatively quiet. Some of the most powerful demons had managed to threaten weaker demons into forming up into something vaguely resembling organized groups, if much less disciplined than even the worst Golarion armies. Drezen fell. At some point around that time, Baphomet started playing a much more active role (the exact timing is disputed). Eventually, the Second Crusade managed to pull itself together enough to stop the demons from entirely spilling out of the Worldwound, and the Wardstones were placed; the crusade was declared 'victorious' in 4645, in the sense that the demons hadn't managed to overrun anywhere but Sarkoris. The modern version of the Worldwound treaty was negotiated during the Second Crusade, and Cheliax and Irrisen took responsibility for the northern and western borders in its aftermath. (She pauses again to answer questions.)

By 4665, when the Third Crusade was called, Mendev's biggest problem was infiltration by demon cultists and others with similarly nefarious intent. Contemporary sources make reference to the idea of 'purifying' the ranks of the Crusaders. Unfortunately, many of the people involved were much more focused on making sure they didn't risk any cultists slipping past than on making sure they didn't kill innocent bystanders; the Queen called it off after just three years. 

In spite of the fact that Mendev continues to throw cultists like nobody's business that seems like plausibly the right call in a country where you can't count on it being common knowledge that burning at the stake is inhumane and that Iomedae doesn't accept mortal sacrifices.

The Fourth Crusade was launched in 4692 after a demonic force, led by the powerful balor Khorramzadeh, overran a Wardstone fort along the Mendevian border, in one of the places where the constraints of the terrain meant the Wardstones were already more thinly placed than usual, and started using the breach to push into Mendev and hit Wardstone forts from the Mendevian side of the line. Mendev was able to repel the incursion, recapture the fort, and move some of the other Wardstones around so that that part of the barrier could be defended again, but its attempts at levying a counterassault ended in failure. 

And that brings them to the present!

"Do you have any advice for me at this juncture?"

"Sure!"

Nurah turns out to have quite a lot of opinions on things that past Crusades have done wrong. Most importantly, he shouldn't assume that the demons are stupid, or that they'll never be able to coordinate — "it can seem really tempting to assume that, because a lot of times it's true, or because they're all Chaotic Evil, or because they tend to be totally obsessed with things that don't really match what mortals want, but they've been working together since at least the Second Crusade, and sometimes they even manage to come up with a plan that isn't terrible!" But she also has anecdotes about people who failed to adequately protect their supply lines, or who made plans on the assumption that the nearby Hellknight fort would cooperate without actually checking with them, or who somehow managed to fail to notice that one of their captains had been killed and impersonated by a succubus cleric, or...

(She will go on in this vein for as long as Blai likes.)

"Uh, to be clear, I have in fact served at the Worldwound for the last two decades, I know the basics of how the area functions, only crusading specifically and Mendev's peculiarities are new to me."