He's in Absalom, it seems and if something's a little off - if there's a building missing from the skyline here, or a new addition there, or - yes, that old fort outside the city walls definitely had one fewer tower last he can remember - well, there's an obvious hypotheses.

Huh. That wasn't supposed to happen. Maybe once he figures out what went wrong, he can be the first wizard to crack interuniversal travel. 

In the meantime, he'll hop over to his tower at Diobel and see what's there. 

The spot in the general vicinity of Diobel where he has a tower in his universe is empty.

There is a tower about a hundred feet north, though. The ley line's a little out of position too.

Alright. He'll wander over. What kinds of spells does this place have up? 

To his arcane sight, absolutely none!

And the ley line runs through this other tower?

Of course!

Yeah no it's magic. Does True Seeing get him anything? 

There's a thin slit in one of the walls, and the words "LEAVE A NOTE" in Azlanti painted above it, all masked by an illusion - other than that the tower's stone exterior seems to be real. There's a scrying sensor over the door, and an invisible stalker hanging out nearby watching him.

He waves at a stalker, then conjures some paper and ink (he's also carrying some, but it would be undignified to be seen needing to reach for them). "I am a traveler from another universe. In my world, I live about a hundred feet down the hill, and since we're counterfactual neighbors, it only seemed polite to call – Élie Cotonnet." The note's in Azlanti. He'll deliver it by mage hand and head back to the city. 

Élie has barely made it back to Absalom when he notices an illusion spell - invisibility, looks like - headed in his direction.

Ooooh, does it have a letter? 

It does! Carried an imp, which volunteers to wait around for a response.

Élie Cotonnet,

That's a rather extraordinary claim. Do you have anything which might support it? I beg you to pardon my skepticism, if it's unwarranted - I get a great number of letters making extraordinary claims, and most prove meritless. If you have no evidence for this particular claim which can be conveyed in writing, but wish to prove that you are at least worth an hour of conversation, you could inscribe half the spellform for a limited wish in a return letter - regular ink would suffice, as I hardly need it for my spellbook.

 

-A

It's been a very long time since he's gotten a letter signed A. 

....It could be her. Alfirin did choose the location of the Diobel tower. The handwriting – might be similar, it's hard to say. 

He inscribes half the spellform for Wish. If it's her, she'll know. 

The imp takes it and teleports away.

And, a moment later, quickened disjunction

- So it's not a polymorph, nor an illusion, just a man who is not undead and by most reasonable standards too young to know wish.

"OK, you have my attention. Did someone set you up to this or is it real? I will know if you're lying, I don't recommend it."

"Alfirin," he says agreeably. "Or do you prefer whatever name you're going by in this life? Either way, I certainly know better than to try lying to you."  

"...this life?"

If he's lying he's very good at it. And he knows - or at least guesses - that she plans to reincarnate. And said it out loud. In the middle of a crowded street.

"Perhaps we should have this conversation somewhere else."

...she hasn't reincarnated yet? Or, more likely, she doesn't want him to think he knows she's a reincarnation of an ancient evil witch. In any case – 

"Agreed. I'm sure you have something more private than a standard Private Sanctum?"  

If she agrees she's confirming that something he's said spooked her. And the only thing he's said is implying that in his world she's lived multiple lives already.

But if he's legitimately a 9th circle wizard - well, that would be surprising enough in its own right that being from another universe is - still extremely unlikely, but maybe not disqualifyingly so.

"I don't usually take strange men there, but I can make an exception for one as strange as you. Do you have a plane shift ready?"

"Certainly." 

Well, she's not going to hand him a tuning fork, but he can bring them back when they're done talking, if they're both still alive.

The demiplane she shifts to is a bubble of force, filled with magical darkness to bring the intense glare from the bubble's exterior down to merely the brightness of a sunny day.

"Alright, master Cotonnet. You clearly have me at a disadvantage. You started this conversation. What do you want."

"You know, I'm not exactly sure. I'm from the year 4712, I was doing some experiments with inter-universal communication, and the answer to that question really depends on where and when I seem to have found myself. 

I really do live about a hundred feet down the hill from your tower. You picked the location, actually. The version of you I know is – well, among other things, she's a very old friend of mine."

"Very old friend? You implied that she lived multiple lives, are you also immortal?"

"Goodness, no, I'm thirty-two. But the time we've known each other has held more than its fair share of happenings –  " sometimes literally – "and besides,  you really did reincarnate into the body of childhood friend of mine, which I think counts for something. – I forgave you for that, incidentally. Even if you could have told us sooner." 

"It seems like, if someone were inclined to steal people's bodies and not make this clear immediately, they probably would not be the sort of person who was inclined to come clean later.

...I'm sorry about your friend."

"I wouldn't advise you not to take the actions that will, predictably, lead to her death. It would cost too much. But I'm sorry, too." 

What is this man playing at.

"...Wait, did you say forty-seven twelve? So you're from the Age of Glory. And I'm there, supposedly. What am I doing, besides reincarnating in people's childhood friends?"

And suddenly he sounds very sincere. 

"Alfirin. Is this your first lifetime?"

Does she trust him, just because he sounds very sincere? Well, it is her first lifetime, not just in the case where she steals people's bodies to reincarnate, but also in the case where she doesn't. First and only, in that case. It's not really acknowledging anything if she just says -

"Yes. The year is 3825, if you haven't had the chance to learn that yet. There's a war on, Taldor against Tar-Baphon."

If she's not lying – and it would be an odd thing to lie about – then the timeline's right.

"I know. You win. I had to fix the seals on his prison recently, by the way, and I've got some suggestions for design improvements." 

"As for the Age of Glory – Aroden returned. Or he tried to. Immediately afterwards, he died. Prophecy shattered, a portal to the Abyss swallowed what used to be Sarkoris, a hurricane which hasn't shown any signs of abating in the last century drowned northwestern Garund, the Lung Wa empire collapsed – and servants of Asmodeus conquered the nation of Cheliax, which they've been ruling so as to damn every soul inside it. You've been trying to take it back. A little over a year ago, we did."

"None of that is the important part." 

She thinks there were rather a lot of important parts there. Some of them - if this is all a fiction - that seem to be aimed at upsetting her in particular. Her god dead, her homeland overrun by demons and Iomedae's by devils -

...It seems to hang together, though, and she hasn't detected a hint of duplicity, 9th-circle wizards do not under ordinary circumstances appear out of the blue and he's dressed like one, at least, in an expensive-to-fake way.

It sure seems like either this man is an honest time-traveling wizard from the not-so-glorious Age of Glory, who sought her out now because he befriended her a thousand years in the future or - he's an archdevil - Geryon, maybe, this sure sounds - heretical - or something else with an archdevil's skill at deception and ability to undispelably impersonate an ordinary human archmage.

"What, then, is the interesting part?"

"There's a certain proviso in the contract Asmodeus made with Mephistopheles regarding his obligations to monitor Golarion for signs of Rovagug's escape. If Asmodeus should default on those obligations, he cedes control of Hell. Obviously, he didn't expect this to come up. Monitoring is a very cheap intervention – as long as prophecy obtains. 

If it doesn't – well, it would take much more of an active presence on the Prime Material. Say, a country's worth. He fought very hard to stop us, but – when Asmodeus lost Cheliax, he also lost Hell. 

I'm telling you all this because I know you well enough to say with confidence that you'll agree: if it's really 3825, the thing I want is to break prophecy eight hundred years ahead of schedule."  

"...Oh. Yes, that does sound like the interesting part. Does Iomedae successfully ascend? If not I think I should get her now - I guess then you might not know who she is, she's commanding the crusade - but if she does I'm not sure, being involved in this might - constrain her actions there - maybe in ways that are worth it but we should think about that."

"She ascends." So this is before the messy breakup, he doesn't say. "I'm sure she would be a great help to us – she was the last time – but I'm not sure that telling her now is wise. She'd still be a paladin of Aroden, and I'm not sure that breaking prophecy requires his death – but I'm not sure it doesn't, either." 

"She'd renounce her vows, for this - or, the ones that can be renounced, which include the oath of service which is the only one that would constrain her from killing him -

But if she's going to successfully ascend by default, we should think carefully about bringing her in. She might not be able to cooperate with this, as a god, or - might not be allowed to become a god, if she's planning for this."

"We don't have to decide right away. In fact, we almost certainly shouldn't, since I have no idea how to break prophecy and we'll want Tar-Baphon out of the way first in any case. 

Of course I want to help with that. I'm – not especially good at keeping secrets. The Iomedae I know would accept it if I swore verifiably that to the best of my knowledge she would agree that concealing what I know is in our mutual best interests, but I'm not sure if that's because she's just like that or because she's a Lawful god." 

"She tries pretty hard to be a Lawful god even while she's still mortal. She'd accept it."

"...The thing is, I'm still not entirely sure I accept it. It's actually quite hard to rule out that you're Geryon, or Mephistopheles, or some similarly powerful trickster-demigod, which is not something that's usually worth worrying about until the person in question is trying to convince me to kill Aroden. So I propose that - first you let me dominate you, which will let me rule out some things short of an archdevil, then I release that spell and you plane shift back to Absalom and wait there while I pay a great deal to the temple of Abadar for a miracle where their god looks at you very very closely and commits to doing absolutely nothing with that information beyond telling me whether you are, in fact, as you claim to be."

"I can't say I'm happy about that, but the last time we did this together Mephistopheles spent two years pretending to be your pet bard and we only found out after we made him the king of Razmiran. 

– It was much less of a disaster than you'd naively expect, but I'd still like to act in ways that would prevent it from happening again. I do want assurances about what you'll do while I'm dominated." 

"I'll have you tell me truthfully whether you've been honest so far, and explicitly confirm key details of your story, and cast a ninth-circle wizard spell to verify that you in fact can. And nothing else, unless additional questions occur to me in the next couple minutes which I think you would, if you're telling the truth, endorse me asking and getting an answer to that I can be more sure of."

"...And once I know that you aren't Mephistopheles, I am going to want to hear that story in a lot more detail."

"That's acceptable to me – and there isn't all that much to tell. You know, he's a very good actor." 

"I hope that I have had no personal experience of that." dominate monster. She can feel it land - there are ways to trick that but he doesn't have an enchantment foil up, and the less common ones - that she's heard of at least - take a great deal of specialized training, mostly incompatible with being a practicing wizard who reached ninth circle.

"So now, please repeat your name, and where you are from, and the important details of the time after Aroden's prophecied return." The dominate is at the moment compelling honesty and nothing else.

"My name is Julien Camille Élie Cotonnet. I'm from Galt, currently resident in Diobel and Isarn and some assorted demplanes, in the year 4712. A great deal of important things happened after Aroden's prophecied return and I can go into more detail on any of them if you like but, most relevantly – Aroden died, prophecy ceased to function, the Worldwound swallowed Sarkoris, and Asmodeus conquered the empire of Cheliax for Hell." 

"And the key events of 4710-4712?"

"Let's see. My companions and I closed the house of oblivion – I don't remember if that one exists in your time, it's a portal to Abaddon that was starting to become a serious problem in Thuvia.  The king of Cheliax was assassinated by his niece. We pushed the borders of the Worldwound back past Drezen. We killed Razmir – Evil archmage pretending to be God in a little kingdom east of Lake Encarthan, had something to do with the runelord of wrath. Cheliax opened a permanent portal to Hell and started raining nemesis devils on the Galt-Druma border and brought back the four pharaohs of the ascension and sent some Urgathoa cultists to unseal Tar-Baphon, so we dealt with – all of that – that was one day – accidentally leveled their capital when we closed the portal. Galt and Rahadoum launched a counter-invasion. We closed the Worldwound. There was a very, very bloody week.

And then we won. Mephistopheles deposed Asmodeus. You're the queen of Cheliax now. They're drafting a constitution. I finished making an artificial witch patron which currently only grants Remove Disease as a hex but I'm working on giving it other spells. 

– Presumably there were some other things that happened that I was less directly involved in. In my defense, it's been a very busy couple of years." 

"What ninth-circle spells do you have prepared, and do you have any open 9th-circle slots?"

"Disjunction, Time Stop, Teleportation Circle. Yes." 

Well, no disjunction here, Élie might break the demiplane. Teleportation circle will fail to do anything without a second caster, but - she'll be able to check that it is, in fact, a teleportation circle. He'll cast it, then.

- and that's a genuine teleportation circle. Good. "Have you made any attempt to deceive me since making contact in this time?"

"I have not." 

She would have been shocked if he said otherwise - really very little point in trying to trick her like this if he didn't have the ability to undetectably fake being dominated but you have to ask anyways, or people will try things. She dismisses the dominate.

"Now, you plane shift us back to Absalom and I'll meet you, say, at the site outside Diobel - tomorrow morning? I don't expect Tilbun will have a miracle prepared for sale today, Nethys' high priest might but I trust my ability to bargain with Abadarans better."

"There's an outside chance Nethys's high priest will give you a better deal because she thinks I'm hilarious and is fond of my children. 

... Obviously the one I know is a completely different person from a thousand years in the future in an alternate branch of reality, but I've found things like that matter less for them than for most other people." 

"And Nethys might - have more to gain from prophecy breaking - But Nethys is, as conventionally understood, himself broken. I don't know that I would trust an assurance from Nethys via His priest to not use the information He gained apart from passing it on to me, at least not as far as an assurance from Abadar via His to the same. I'm worried the gods are all obligated to protect common interests - like prophecy - and I think I can buy Abadar's limited nonintervention but I don't know about anyone else."

"That's all true – though Lawful gods might have more commitments to protect prophecy – really I'd prefer not to tell any of them. But I can't think of anything that would, from your perspective, be a better alternative." 

"I'm afraid that I'd have to view any convincing arguments for settling for some less extreme measure as coming from Mephistopheles. I know it's a risk but - Abadar's priest will be able to tell me before I make the specific request whether the confidentiality I'm asking for is available, and if it's not I'll look for other options."

And she holds out her hand for the plane shift. She can't imagine there's much more to be said when she's determined to be unconvinceable.

It's what he would do in her situation. He'll take them back to Absalom without protest. 

After a conversation with Tilbun - yes, the sort of miracle she's hoping for is something Abadar can do, purchased nonintervention and all - then teleport back to the staff meeting that she left in the middle of when she got Élie's letter.

"I need our miracle-grade diamond, by tomorrow morning, and I cannot tell you why. It is important, and I am very sure that if you had all the information that I do you would agree that this is a good use of it."

"Good one," Karlenius says flatly. "Had me for a second there."

"Do I look like I am joking."

"You just need to wave the diamond in someone's face, or are you using it?"

        "You trust her to bring it back?"

"Yes I do, if she says she'll bring it back."

"Using it. I expect to be able to acquire another diamond on less short notice and can pay it back, but this particular stone I intend to use."

"Tar-Baphon could easily have orchestrated something that looks to you like an emergency, so you'd leave us without one."

"Can you explain why you can't explain in more detail -"


"I'm sure someone in Absalom will sell you one, if you're willing to pay for it -"

"What interest rate are we talking about for this loan which no one else in the world would make you?" asks Pereza, not that anyone seems to hear him.

Iomedae stands up. "Give us a moment, please."

- they'll step out, with varying degrees of apparent objections but not a trace of actual disobedience. 

And now she has to talk to Alfirin, which is terrible, but - Alfirin gets worse around other people, and she doesn't do that around Iomedae, and -

"There is information I have, and if I tell you or you rederive it or maybe even suspect might result in much worse outcomes, by my values and yours. I am not concealing an intention to take an action that I believe you would disapprove of, if you had full information. I can tell you more if you insist, I think there are some relatively safe things to tell you, but in expectation every piece of information I give you now causes significant harm."

- well, that does kill dead many of the questions she would otherwise have asked.

Ultimately it's not as if Alfirin couldn't have stolen the diamond, if she'd set her mind on it for some reason, and - and she really doesn't think Alfirin would do that.

"I need to check if you're in your right mind. An antimagic field, and - and also you're going to need to take all your magic items off, I don't know what artifacts you've run into along the way and - thought it better not to mention -"

"Sure. Call someone in." She starts removing her jewelry, then stripping, because she does not wear very many nonmagical clothing these days and - Iomedae really should not be confident that Alfirin could not hide an artifact-strength magical aura on her undergarments.

Iomedae is not confident Alfirin couldn't do that. She just couldn't bring herself to actually say it and knew she wouldn't need to. 

She ducks outside the command tent to Telepathically call someone for the antimagic field. Returns. 

She waits for the antimagic field and then, when it's up, stops to think for a few minutes. In case she was, in fact, being subtly controlled.

"...I understand the reasoning I was following before. I think the core of it is valid. None of it seems obviously invalid. I can't check all of my reasoning for exactly how likely I was expecting different outcomes to be but pessimistically adjusting my previous estimates - It's still a good use of a diamond and I should be able to tell you more tomorrow."

She takes a deep breath. 

"I trust you. I hope that this is - whatever you're hoping it is."

If it's not - she'll be able to tell Iomedae everything, and be judged then. She thinks it was worth the gamble, even if she loses.

She doesn't say that, even though she thinks it's safe, because she has not taken the time to really work out in detail what it is safe to say and what is not, and once said words are difficult to unsay. She hasn't worked it out because - that will take hours, at least, more likely days, and she should do it with Élie, who, if real, seems likely to be a very bright individual with a lot more context than she has.

"Are we done?"

"Yes." 

She'll get her the diamond. 

And the next morning she can check that Élie is at the Diobel tower and - bring him with, actually, he'll be easier for Abadar to locate if she can just point - and go to Abadar's temple in Absalom. The miracle she would like to request is that Abadar Look at the two of them, and confirm for her that:

(1) This man has treated with her fairly,
(2) That he has not deceived her,
(3) That he is not - and this part is important - the archdevil Mephistopheles, nor the archdevil Geryon, nor any other archdevil, nor demon lord, nor in fact anything at all besides an unusually impressive human from unusually far away.
(4) To the extent possible for Him, that Élie is not mistaken about where he is from.
(5) To the extent possible for Him, that Élie is not mistaken about The Important Parts of what he told her. She's not going to tell Tilbun what The Important Parts are, but Abadar should be able to see it. It's not that she doesn't trust Tilbun's word not to act on that information, it's just that it's Very Very Secret and she trusts Tilbun's ability not to act on that information less than she does his god's.

And then, she supposes, if (1-3) are true, to confirm for Élie a reciprocal set of facts, since that seems more fair and Abadaran.

And do absolutely nothing else with any information He gets from this interaction.

And then Abadar barges into her mind without much delicacy, and Looks through the whole of her and leaves behind four declarations of TRUTH and one declaration of MOSTLY TRUTH - because Élie is a little more than a mortal human, the same way Alfirin is a little more than mortal, or Iomedae is a little more than mortal - and a headache that, for all she's heard about this before, is worse than expected.

Under the pain, though, she's happy because - it isn't all a lie, prophecy can be broken and Asmodeus can be toppled, and if the Age of Glory isn't what she expected she's not sure that it's worse.

She takes Élie's hand and plane shifts, not to her best hidden demiplane but to her gardens which can be dark so that they can rest for a few hours - half a day - before planning anything complicated. She meant to ask Tilbun how many teleportation circles they would need to sell to get a replacement wish diamond but rather forgot.

And then late that evening, they're feeling well enough - and impatient enough - to go somewhere very bright, where prophecy and foresight do not work very well at all, and talk.

"So. Prophecy breaks when Aroden dies - and that's probably not a coincidence but not necessarily causal and even if it is that could go either way - and then as soon as Asmodeus doesn't have a country on the Material, he loses Hell. It seems like - the big thing we need to get right is Prophecy breaking, but we also need deal with some smaller matters like Tar-Baphon and making sure Asmodeus can't get the foothold he needs before we actually break prophecy."

"Tar-Baphon, I'm not too worried about. By default, the shining crusade triumphs in 3827. I'll want to start figuring out how to break prophecy in parallel, since right after the crusade might actually be the best time to do it – there's not another point in the history of Golarion with as many powerful adventurers broadly aligned with the interests of mortal beings all in the same place. I'm not sure if Iomedae should ascend first. On the one hand, since she succeeds by default, we might not want to change the starting conditions too much. On the other hand, infant gods have to spend time consolidating their power, and she might actually be more useful against Asmodeus as a mortal paladin. 

Also, my companions and I did win this war the first time we fought it, and that was after Asmodeus had a century to dig in. I expect that my wife and – you, actually – are trying to find out where I went, and I'm reasonably confident they'll succeed, but I can start working on it from this end as well if it looks like they're stuck.

I'm most concerned about what else might happen. There were a lot of catastrophes in 4606. Ideally we'd be prepared to evacuate whole countries at very short notice. Realistically, tens of thousands of people are going to die.  – It was millions, the first time, but I think if we know what's coming we can prevent the worst of the chaos and starvation of the years after." He's not going to insult them both by pointing out that there are trillions of souls in Hell.

"...and the next time you ask a god to call, warn me first." 

Of course she'd be looking for him. He described them as friends, and if Iomedae vanished to a different world she's sure she'd be trying to figure out how to get her back as soon as the crusade was stable. And it sounds like they were at peace, when Élie vanished from his time.

"I did warn you! I told you I was going to ask Abadar to look at you very closely! Possibly I should have warned you about the headache, but I thought you'd already know."

"...Probably the most important thing to do, now, is to figure out what the best use of Iomedae is, since how much we can tell her influences our contributions to the crusade as well as our ultimate plans. I think the main reason we might not want to tell her and ask her to delay her ascension is if we think we can win on the material without her and - having her as a god is more useful in the long run and we don't know if her ascension would be successful after prophecy broke. Related to that, are there any more ascended gods besides her?"

"No. ...Not yet. 

I think we can win without her." 

There was something in that 'yet' - Élie? His wife? Future Alfirin? A yet-unmentioned companion? She's not sure which and it doesn't seem important for their situation.

"So - we let her ascend, as normal, and we don't tell her what we're planning. I think she would accept that but her advisors would be very unhappy about it and it would make our alliance with the crusade more strained. Especially if we want to use their resources for our project - or the cleanup after. I'd rather we figure out something we can tell them that's - first of all true, I can't reliably get a lie past her and if you can't reliably get one past me then you can't either. True, and convincing enough to win their help, and sufficiently uninformative that neither Iomedae nor anyone who might have doubts about murdering their god will guess that that might be involved."

"I'm from the future. About a hundred years before I was born, Cheliax fell to the rule of Hell. I fixed it. I'm not saying anything more about the circumstances in which it occurred, including the exact century, because now that I'm here I'd like to prevent it from happening in the first place and while I'm doing that I don't want to give Asmodeus or his servants any clever ideas." 

"...That'll do it. Be quite alarming, justify a lot of secrecy. True, and they'll notice that we're not giving the whole story but that's explained. Simple enough that it shouldn't slip,even if we keep it up for months."

"...I want to do a teleportation circle. I mean - I want to do one for Archbanker Vakkad, in exchange for a wish diamond, because I owe one to the crusade. But also I've never cast one before that actually works - I tried what I'm sure are all the usual things with bilocation et cetera - "

"Oh, it's terrific fun. Requires too much complicated dynamic spellwork on both ends for bilocation to work, but if you're willing to put the time in you can build permanent termini. We're building a network back home."  

"...You can make it permanent? Is that a variant of the common permanency spell or is it built on specialized magic items? If it's items are they permanently linked or reconfigurable - "

"... I think I endorse spending time on this right now, because you are a friend of my future self but I don't actually personally know you all that well, yet. But maybe you'd rather we get acquainted in the course of winning the shining crusade and breaking prophecy."

"Very unwieldy, specialized, non-reconfigurable magic items. I'm working on improving them.  'Magic item' might actually be giving you the wrong impression – I adapted the design from a Tien ritual working – 

I'd think being able to move troops across a continent in hours would be useful for winning the shining crusade. I have a few other ideas along those lines, but they might want to wait until I can meet the rest of your war council." 

"Shall we do that now?

- I would, all else equal, prefer to talk to Vakkad first and get that diamond, probably on the promise of a future teleportation circle after the church has had time to set up enough goods to flow through it. Not for strategic reasons, exactly, it's kind of petty but there's - well you'll meet him soon enough and I aughtn't bias you."

"A permanent set would take months without my usual staff, and they're expensive. If you just mean casting the spell – where could we do it that's really surprising?" 

"Yes, just one casting. Presumably Absalom to - Somewhere deeply inland in Tian Xia? I don't know what the major cities there are, I haven't had a chance to visit the continent. Yet."

"Oh, you'll get there. Probably they haven't moved too much."  

"You are going to be constantly teasing me with your greater knowledge of my own life story than I have, aren't you."

Plane shift?

"Sometime I have to tell you about this spell you invent to turn people into books. Useful, that."

Plane shift! 

Tilbun, with a little more explanation, agrees to lend them a diamond now in exchange for a 200-minute portal between Absalom and Changdo in a month when the Abadarans have had time to sort out which goods they want to send each way. She sends Iomedae notice, that she'll be back shortly with news and a guest, so that she can get the other commanders assembled while she and Élie wrap up negotiations with Tilbun and teleport over.

She glides into the tent, tosses the diamond to Iomedae, and drops a +1 longsword in front of Pereza.

"That's somewhere around four thousand percent interest per annum and if that doesn't satisfy you I give up."

Private Sanctum.

"I would like to introduce Élie Cotonnet, ninth-circle archmage from the future. Yes, I checked, he's not Mephistopheles, that's why I needed the diamond. I'll let him explain the rest."

"I'm very pleased to meet you in person! As a person? Of course, whether we've met at all really does depend on your definition of meet, since I don't go in much for organized religion – oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself – "

And he will explain how he got here, that Asmodeus conquered Cheliax, that he was born in Galt when it was a Chelish province, that he and his friends took it back, and that for hopefully obvious security reasons he doesn't want to talk too much about how things got so bad in the first place.

Iomedae recovers first. "Well. Welcome. I'm Iomedae, Knight-Commander of the Shining Crusade, this is Commander Marit, Commander Karnelius, Quartermaster Pereza, General Arnisant. My condolences on your world. Is there anything we can do to help?"

"My world was fine when I left it. What I want is to make sure that the same thing never happens here."  

"Anything we can do to help with that?"

He probably shouldn't say that the followers of Iomedae weren't much help the first time. 

"Not obviously. I know the events that most proximately enabled Asmodeus to take power, but not what caused them. Until I've learned more I really am reluctant to discuss it further. 

In the meantime, winning the shining crusade can't hurt." 

"Well, we're doing our best about that. - and should probably rethink some strategic concerns, actually, if you're expecting to be around to help."

"Magic's advanced some in the past millenium, so I should sit down with some of your wizards and figure out which spells I have more effective or lower-circle versions of – Fly off the top of my head, and I'm sure there are others. Of course, Alfirin and I can do teleportation circles. I don't know if you have mundane supply issues, but I've got a spell that does mass manufacturing and I've been working on applying it to magic item creation. And it's possible that I know more about the nature of the enchantments on Gallowspire than anyone else alive. I had to fix the seals on Tar-Baphon's prison lately and we had some time to talk, he's gotten lonely in there – I am very very sure I'm not currently being dominated, I've died and had myself resurrected since just to be safe. Nothing else immediately springs to mind." 

This leaves the crusaders somewhat speechless.

"....should I expand on any of that?"

"Can you say more about the spell that does mass item creation?" Pereza says. "Can you do - armor? Weapons? Horseshoes? Cooking pots? From what materials?"

"Any of those. It can handle any raw material, though it struggles with more than one material at a time. Up to 200 cubic feet of material per casting, when I'm casting it."  

"You can make weapons from - dirt? From stone? And they'll be - metal, and of good make?"

"Oh – no, it would have to start out from the raw metal, it just replaces the labor. I mostly use it for textiles, paper, and pocket-watches."  

"The crusade is always in need of armor and weapons and wagons. Less of textiles and paper and pocket-watches, though of course we wouldn't turn down clothing. Does it do shoes?"

"It does shoes."  

"Incredible! We would love some shoes. And - I don't want to increase the number of men under arms if the increase in supply options might be temporary, but if it won't be, we should really have half again as many men."

"It's a sixth circle spell right now, but I'll teach it to as many of your wizards as can learn it. I'm also sure it could be more efficient, getting down another circle is one of my ongoing projects – maybe the one I should prioritize right now."  

"- there's something very profoundly cheering, about thinking how much magic will get better in hundreds of years of invention and discovery, even in a timeline that it sounds like was terrible and we must avoid. I have no guesses how you should spend your time, but salute you."

"It is – and still, it's so much less than what it could be." 

Another thing he probably shouldn't say: he's slightly surprised she cares.  

If she notices him thinking it she doesn't indicate this. She'll catch him up on non-secret facts about the current crusade situation, then? They're just north of Urgir, which they've invested but not taken and probably won't - it's a dwarven sky-citadel with a hundred thousand orcs living there -

- aiming to get here by winter, of which the major logistical difficulties are this forest and the total lack of places to stop. 

Yep, he knows about the orcs, they're still there. What makes a place suitable for stopping?

Shelter from the elements, walls, and storehouses.

He assumes they've tried the obvious things, like making the forest not be there? 

"We'd have to wait for summer, and keep the Tyrant's agents otherwise busy, unless you mean something other than 'burn it to the ground'."

Well, burning it to the ground would be on his list of options, forests in Ustalav are generally hazardous to human health. But failing that, is this a problem that can be solved with enough teleportation circles? 

"To bypass the forest? Sure. I was about to suggest Marian Leigh. It's unorthodox, but with circles we wouldn't have to worry about supply lines - "

       "I like it," says Marit.

" - might work, if we had the Teleportation Circles," says Iomedae. "It's a - fairly catastrophic position if anything goes badly wrong -"

And she closes her eyes to think. She's not as smart as Alfirin, just good at - breaking things into pieces, and thinking about the pieces, and reassembling them into -

       "If we have two Miracle-grade diamonds I like the plan; with only the one I don't," she says after a few minutes. "Tar-Baphon's aims while we're there are very obvious; he wants to fence us in, and he wants to take as many chances as all his power permits him at our ninth circle wizards, because if he succeeds with either one then he has Teleportation circles and we don't, and because he can't expect to win without pulling that off."       

" – We should pretend for as long as possible that I don't exist and Alfirin cracked it with bilocation." 

"...I wouldn't believe for very long that Tar-Baphon had cracked it with bilocation, he will not be fooled for very long by the suggestion that I did. Which isn't to say we shouldn't try to keep your existence hidden as long as possible, but if we expect that deception to hold we need to build it up - time stop might make it more believable but that's an expensive bluff - and we'd have to leak it deliberately, since I doubt he'd risk scrying the teleport locations..."

" – I just remembered. The tomb of the Pharaohs of the Ascension has a demiplane where time is sped up by a factor of ten, it's almost undefended, and I've got a tuning fork. For if we ever need to do anything impossibly quickly."  

...Have Marit and Karlenius ever seen her smile before? Probably not.

No! They haven't!!

"All right, all right, why don't you take Alfirin tomb-robbing and we'll think more about how to make Marian Leigh work."

He turns to Alfirin. 

"Whenever you're ready." 

"I was ready as soon as you said 'time is sped up by a factor of ten!' "

She'll take his hand for the plane shift.

Plane Shift. Mass Planar Adaptation.

– because the space they're now in is absolutely flooded with positive energy. 

Other than that, it looks like an ancient Osirian temple, complete with alabaster columns, bas reliefs of scarabs and ibises and cwering slaves, and, in the center, a sinister-looking black pyramid. 

"So... are they all buried in there? It doesn't look big enough from here but that's not prohibitive."

"Oh, no, the rest of the tomb is outside this demiplane. ...The pyramid does expand to full size, though. We had to stash the thing in Axis when we started using the place to keep some Urgathoa cultists from getting it, so I haven't had much chance to play around." 

"What does it do, other than get big?"

"Controls the features of the demiplane. Probably drives you irrevocably mad if you touch it. I'd be able to say more, but someone disjoined my permanent Arcane Sight." 

"I am sure you would have done the same." Possibly has done the same from the look on his face. She is so curious about this friendship that she suspects involves rather more hostile ninth-circle magic than most friendships do. "We can get some diamond dust and put it back."

"In the meantime I recommend we keep a safe distance." 

"Mm. Does something bad happen if we don't? How'd you - we - get it to Axis?" She still has her arcane sight and can take a closer look.

"Not that I know of, but it was made by the Pharaoh of Numbers so my assumption is that every time we interact with it there's a slight chance it awakens the planet Aucturn from it's ageless slumber. It's hard to say. Maybe it makes you better at calculus! 

We – you, actually – scooped out the floor to a depth of 10 feet with adamantine blades and lifted it with the cat eidolon from the elemental plane of shadow you grafted onto your granddaughter's soul."  

"That raises several more questions than it answers but possibly the most urgent is - why is the planet Aucturn in an ageless slumber? I assume if it woke up that would be...bad... but I thought it was just a rock!"

"At some point I really need to sit down and establish what was and wasn't known a thousand years ago! Aucturn is an alien demigod from the darkness between the stars whose very visage inspires  men to genius and madness.

It might also be a rock. It seemed fairly rock-like when I visited, but then I was only there for a couple of seconds." 

"I see. That sounds like - something to deal with eventually."

"...So, what exactly do you have against Iomedae? Or Her future church?"

"Oh. ...That obvious?"

"To me. And to her. And probably Marit. Karlenius might have missed it and Pereza and Arnisant most likely did."

"Ah. Well, I've offended plenty of Her clerics, and if She's anything like them, She'll live. 

There are two ways I could answer your question. One comes from my brain, and I think speaks well of me. One comes from my heart, and doesn't." 

"I don't think there's a person in the world who never feels something in their heart that speaks poorly of them."

"Yes, but I do try to form grudges on the basis of reason and not things that happened to be emotionally salient to me a decade ago." 

He's not going to comment on whether they're still salient now. Alfirin can probably read him anyway. 

"Don't we all? I -

I won't hold it against you, if your opinion of Iomedae right now is not fully rational, and comes from personal reasons and not just purely strategic ones. But if you only want to tell me rational reasons - I won't hold that against you either."

"The rational answer – I should preface this by saying that some members of the church of Iomedae made enormous sacrifices for our victory over Hell. They've protected Avistan from demons and orcs and undead for hundreds of years. The world would be much worse without them in it, and some of them I even like. 

But Her followers want Her to be much more than that. They like to insist that she's the goddess of defeating Evil, but, judging by Her works – which are all I have – she's not. She's the goddess of not losing to Evil, and that's a very different thing. She has two nations, Lastwall and Mendev, and the both of them fight every battle like it's the shining crusade. They're very useful if your problems look like mindless hordes of slavering something-or-others threatening innocent civilians. They're both about fifteen percent paladins by volume. Almost everyone in them is Good, and almost no one in them is free, and almost nothing in them will ever change. 

I don't think it's possible to win the real war like that. If Hell could be defeated by building a big enough army, someone would have done it by now. I do believe, very strongly – not that Good will triumph over Evil, but that all that reasoning beings share which is not Evil is stronger than that which is. Everything we have – not just our compassion but our selfishness, our desire for safety and love and wealth and comfort – pushes us away from Hell, because Hell wants to destroy everything which makes existence bearable.  The stronger mortals are, the closer we are to victory. And the best way for mortals to become stronger is to build a society in which every generation desires to better themselves, to improve on the works of their ancestors, to share their knowledge freely with their descendants. A nation like that could be greater than Azlant. It could have dozens of wizards like me. 

And it can't exist in a place whose highest ideal of service is to fashion yourself into a helpful tool in the hands of your Goddess. The best Iomedans are wise, kind, brave, diligent people who worry that thinking too much is bad for unit cohesion. The worst are Hellknights who got lucky. But, you know, still nice to have around. 

The answer from my heart – and I did tell you it was less flattering – 

Is that we Galtan rebels needed Her desperately and She abandoned us. 

I can't forget watching men and women who desired nothing more than the  salvation of every soul in Hell, who fought their whole lives for it, expecting no reward, men and women who worshipped the Inheritor with their whole hearts – see their goddess condemn them because they couldn't fight cleanly enough. And I watched them keep fighting afterwards. 

Of course, we all did great and unnecessary Evils. I never minded when Her servants told us so. But they never gave us any other working way  – the Terror could have ended if only we made peace with Cheliax and let thirty million of our brothers and sisters be damned. The Terror might have been possible to stop even if we didn't, I wanted that, I fought for that – but She simply withdrew Her hand. 

The best man I ever knew was Her cleric, and he renounced Her, not because he did not love Her, but because he believed  that Galt's freedom and the freedom of Cheliax mattered more than all the other simple things paladins like to do with themselves because they're willing to risk their lives but not their immortal souls. He was right. He was Evil when he died, and he was right. The troops that retook Cheliax for humanity didn't come from Vigil – Her capital – but from Isarn. We would never have been able to wage war against Asmodeus without the armies of Galt. Lastwall never tried for a hundred years. And my Galt still isn't free except from Hell, it's a military dictatorship, but She doesn't care, does she, she's got two of her own – 

– So of course She was right, by Her own values, to have condemned everything we fought for. She got what She wanted.  But if I ascend, it will be because I want to become the kind of god who could embrace the people she gave up on. I want to be that part of Good which asks that each person bring their will and their insight and their reason, not their unquestioning obedience – which wants friends, not servants – 

I know I'm being unfair. I'm not twenty years old anymore. I'm sure She did the best She could with Her limited resources. 

...And it's probably for the best that when I was young and desperate and expected to die every day, and knew that I would go to the Abyss when I did, I never for a moment believed that Anything or Anyone would offer me hope or comfort. That if we were going to make a world where all reasoning beings weren't Good but happy and strong and free, we would have to do it our own damned selves. It made me a better man and one day it might make me a better god. 

It's still hard for me to look her in the eye when she hears what happened and offers me her help."  

"...Oh. I -

oh."

"So... the answer to your rational objection is Aroden, I think. I don't know what She will be like as a god but - it sounds like the thing you want Her to be is Aroden. And we already have Him and I don't think we need two. And - it makes sense that Her church would be - lacking, there, after Aroden's death."

"...And the answer to your heart is - I don't have one. But I can see why, in eight hundred years, I am your friend."

"I know very little about Aroden. Maybe you're right.

I hope we don't have to kill him." 

"I don't know how much I'll change, in the next eight hundred years - maybe this won't communicate very much, but -

He's my god. The only one I found acceptable, the only one who - was even close to a god that wanted what I wanted from the world. And He was close enough that I'm willing to follow Him, pray to Him -

I hope that too. I hope so very much. I'm not going to hesitate, though, if that's what it takes. I love Him but - I love His domain more, I guess. Humanity."

This place isn't quite secure enough for Élie to mention that the version of Alfirin he knows is planning to flood the ethereal plane with positive energy to make divine intervention of all kinds impossible. She can probably tell that it communicates a lot.

"I'm not sure what I think of that – Aroden being the god of humanity. I like humanity well enough, but I'm certainly going to try being lots of other things now that I have the time. Does he have something against other reasoning beings?"

"Well His church isn't exactly going around telling us to enslave all others. I think it's synecdoche. For - mortal persons, at least. I expect He might say that He has a greater concern for mortals than for other beings, and that Outsiders already have sufficient backing among the gods. I would buy that He has something against alghollthus."

"Cheliax – the Cheliax I grew up in – has exclusively non-human slavery. I like to make the distinction." 

"...Ah. That - sounds like what you'd get, if you took a part of Taldor and let it be governed by Hell. It's definitely a part of human - mortal - nature, that some are going to want that. And it's a direction Aroden's faith could be corrupted, if His church weren't actively pushing in the other direction - actually maybe I give His church too much credit, I don't know nearly as well what it's like in other places. Here, I'm surrounded by Paladins who need regular reminders that some humans are ever evil."

"And if you disagree with them, it must be because you've been misled?"

"Oh, no, they usually come to their senses on the possibility of evil humans when they see the altar to Norgorber - I don't, actually, worship Him ever but He's the second ascended god and - anyways. I'm sure if I were wiser I'd antagonize them less."

"I don't know, sometimes I think it's good for them." 

"Oh I fully agree! I never said that a wiser Alfirin would not antagonize them at all. But sometimes I take it too far, because I could get away with that, because until today I was the crusade's only Archmage."

"...I think a greater dispel from either of us would take off most of these protections, actually. Did we try that and fail, in the future, or will we come here before getting ninth circle?"

"Very much the latter."

Greater Dispel Magic. Greater Dispel Magic.

"...and that should be safe. Or, at least, it has no protections other than itself - I'm still not entirely sure how to operate it yet and probably sufficiently improper operation kills us horribly."

"Probably it does something worse!"

He does not sound remotely reluctant to start messing with it anyway. 

Wizards above fifth circle are the same everywhere, even in the future it seems. The two of them can get started on figuring the pyramid out, and if it takes them a whole week they'll still be done by tomorrow!

Then they will learn that 10x is the plane's maximum time dilation, though it can be adjusted down, and figure out how to turn off the positive energy effect, and generate a little river delta with bullrushes and date palms and man-eating crocodiles, and activate the feature that enhances all spells related to summoning outer gods, and quickly deactivate the feature that enhances all spells related to summoning outer gods.

It's been four and a half hours sidereal. Should they check in on the crusade? 

She'd be delighted! She'll just adjust her expectations for how much they've probably done on the outside, if they've only had a few hours instead of a day and a half. Plane shift! Teleport!

Iomedae beams at them. It's hard not to be cheerful about having two archmages. If some tiny part of her feels, instead of glad, jealous that Alfirin finally has a true intellectual peer who seems to personally dislike Iomedae, well, when she's a god she won't feel that way. 

"How'd it go? I think we can swing Marian Leigh. My current favorite plan is actually to lay a bit of a trap for Tar Baphon, since we're not going to fool him about having two archmages for long - Teleport fourteen hundred men in to clear the city, let the High Priest of Pharasma loose with a Miracle for them. I think he'll guess that I think I can supply a garrison there overwinter and do raids in his territory out of season, but if he doesn't guess that the other guesses are that there's something there I want, or that it's a trap, both of which suit me fine. My bet is he watches until he's pretty sure he's counted all your spells and then drops in to crush us. If instead he drops in to crush us right away, different Miracle. If instead he lets us take the city, we put the Teleportation Circles underground and maybe do get away without him knowing how we're supplying for several months."

"Pharasma has a high priest? I suppose she would, these days. Can we trick him in the other direction – keep popping in and out of the demiplane, spell refresh every 2.4 hours, make it look like there's a whole horde of us?"

"That gets him panicking and it could be enough information to help him to guess it. I'd be happier about only using the demiplane occasionally, squeezing out an extra spell refresh when we can pretend we were just at a lucky point in our sleep cycles.

If we scare him too much, I'm worried - we still don't have a way to necessarily win the war in another three days, sidereal, and he can just - let us win a lot of battles, contribute nothing himself, trade occupation of most of his country for time and use that time to learn about the demiplane and pick a time that's inconvenient for us to try to take it away."

"I don't suppose the future ever did find his phylactery, or have any leads?"

"None. I'm sorry. We were planning to get to it, but it's been a busy few years."

"I can only imagine. But that means it's not obvious from the god-angle either." She looks thoughtfully at her maps. "If we had no choice but to try to take him down inside three sidereal days what would you try?"

"I'd want to know more about his strengths and weaknesses – there are a lot of details about him that didn't survive. I do know how it happened in my timeline."

"...Gods. You're right that we do need a plan for that but we should try very hard to avoid using it. Skip most of the conventional war and bring all our best straight to Adorak. See if, for the cost of a wish or two we can turn one of his servants - we could maybe, with a couple wishes, steal Taldaris' phylactery and use that as leverage - and then three sidereal days can be a month's worth of spells for our top casters and maybe that's enough. In broad strokes."

"How did it go down in your timeline?"

"Does your General Arnisant have an artifact called the Shield of Aroden?"

"Yes."

"Tar-Baphon tries to summon Arnistant's heart into his claws, probably using a Wish. The spell hit the shield and shattered it. Instead of the heart, Tar-Baphon ended up with a fragment of the shield, which merged with his flesh and burned him with holy fire. It weakened him enough for one of the Arodenite priests to hold him in Gallowspire long enough for the Great Seal to be put in place." 

He doesn't remember which of the generals is Arnisant or if he's in the room now. Either way it seems unnecessary to add that he doesn't survive.  

" – I'm sorry. I wish it was something easier to replicate." 

"...That also, uh. Sounds like the sort of thing that gets into the histories and is not, strictly speaking, true."

"Either way it's not really something we can aim at on purpose. - is it told that way in my holy book, I was really planning not to have any lies in my holy book."

"Just that way, that's how we know." 

"I withdraw my objection, assuming that you intend to, as a god, adequately chastise any of your followers who embellish the holy books to tell a better story."

"Well, I should presumably be taking significant input from Elie, since he knows how it went last time" and doesn't seem pleased, "but I sure intended to not let anyone embellish!"

"I know how it sounds, but I do think the account is reasonably accurate. At least, it also has the embarrassing failures, which I take as a good sign." Which he does respect, personal opinion of the church of Iomedae aside. 

"If we have any embarrassing failures still scheduled I'm sure we'd all love to hear them in advance."

"I'll tell you if it looks like you're steering into any, but I have to imagine the course of the war will be rather different from here on out." 

"Embarrassing failures after I ascend are also in scope! Presuming - actually, I should have asked this first - should I do it?"

"I don't know the alternative, but I certainly think so. The interests of reasoning beings in this world seem much better served for having your church in it." He has his issues with her, but that's not one of them. 

      "You were in doubt," says Marit, a bit teasingly. 

"Apparently Hell rules part of Taldor for a bit! I - assume from how Aroden's been doing that things move slower than they intuitively feel like they ought, that the points of leverage are more distant and more annoying, but - but it really does feel like things shouldn't get worse - and now we're disrespectfully close to speculating, Elie, I'm sorry, we'll stop that."

The Mage's Private Sanctum that encompasses their tent admits Arnisant, who'd been out in the field. 

         "Elie says," says Karlenius, "in his timelineTar-Baphon tries to summon your heart into his claws, with a Wish, and the Shield shatters and strikes Tar-Baphon and sticks in him and that's how we win."

" - how specific," Arnisant says. "I'll do my best, of course. Not only are there worse ways to go, it's hard to think of better ones. ...you'd better make one extraordinary statue of me afterwards."

         "One? I'd say at least ten. And I will personally ensure that the statuists are working from portraits from when you had a hairline."

"All right, heroes and martyrs, glad we're all having fun, I've just signed you up for so much work on teleport logistics and it all needs to be in downtime so Tar-Baphon doesn't suspect anything."

"Oh, I was just here to grab my ...backup amulet," says Arnisant, at that, "I'll be back out in the field."

        "Oh, I see how it is," Marit calls as Arnisant departs. "We will die for the cause but not bookkeep for it."

                         "The true slogan of the crusade," Pereza says. 

"Hey," Iomedae says, "I do at least as much bookkeeping as dying."        

"Pereza, has Curiosity ever disappointed you with his bookkeeping?"

"Not once, Archmage. If I had to have him or the Knight-Commander, for the bookkeeping, I'd pick him in a heartbeat."

"But for the dying you'd pick me."

"Well there you go. Delegation. My bookkeeping responsibilities are fulfilled."

He wonders when Iomedans lost their sense of humor and gained the concept of a modern general staff. 

"Curiosity's your familiar?"

"Yes, a fox, I leave him at the Diobel tower when we're on the march so I suppose you haven't met him yet."

"He might have good advice for my Félix, who's hopeless with accounts. Better he's home, though, I need him to supervise things there while I'm away." 

"Will you even be away for more than an instant? Is there some reason that you couldn't return to the moment of your departure? I suppose you might not know..."

"I have no idea how this works and feel I ought to assume it'll be maximally inconvenient. ....I suppose if it's too long I might have to invent time travel." 

"A famously solvable problem! Hopefully it won't come to that."

"If we're hitting Marian Leigh before winter I want - two weeks to try to scrounge diamonds out of people and figure out the Teleport logistics, which I think will succeed with you either on diamonds or on holding down the fort," she says to Alfirin, "but be difficult without one of those. I assume you have already written down or otherwise transmitted all Elie's important knowledge of progress and also of the Church of Asmodeus's shit so that, should he die here and turn out to wake up in his Clone back home, we don't lose everything?"

"We're definitely responsible archmages who did that instead of spending two days figuring out how to use an ancient artifact made to channel the powers of entities too strange for mortal minds to comprehend." 

"Uh huh. Okay. Please, in the name of progress and knowledge and humanity, tell Alfirin whatever the world would be most impoverished by not knowing."

"Right. That seems important.

...About those diamonds, Tilbun traded us one for a promise of a teleportation circle in a couple months and I suspect this trade is repeatable."

"Get me four, and I think we can end this next year."

"We'll see what we can do!"

"If we're not hiding that I exist, I'm confident I can make it happen." 

"The advantage of the plan where we take Marian Leigh in two weeks is that we probably show our hand that day, but in the course of beating Tar-Baphon quite badly, and if we don't then we can keep it under wraps until spring and give him not all that much time to actually respond."

"Perhaps we should see what Tilbun can loan us, then we don't have to show Élie's presence just to get the diamonds."

"You might ask him how he feels about a permanent teleportation circle between Absalom and the largest city in Tian Xia." 

"Somehow I doubt his willingness to loan us wish diamonds is going to be limited by our ability to pay if we survive."

"Well, of course you will be able to truthfully tell him you are sensible archmages who have taken all reasonable precautions against assassination and absolutely didn't go into a demiplane of the Pharaohs of the Ascension to meddle with things beyond mortal comprehension."

"Of course we will! The things were perfectly comprehensible. Eventually. Mostly."

"It's perfectly safe! I've probably spent over a year in there all told and I'm just as sane as I was when I started – as much comfort as that might be." 

"Huh. Maybe I should pick up this 'wizardry' thing. I looked into it once but they told me I might have to wear lighter armor and that was the end of that."

"I'm going to make it easier. One of my projects back home." 

"Incredible."

"You can say that when I've done it." 

"Ah okay. Run of the mill, then, really. I'm not impressed at all. Come back when you have it working and I can cast Haste all by myself."

"Oh, that I can do now, if you give me six months and the materials to rebuild my arcane engine. The hard part is mass producing them." 

"...That sounds like the sort of thing that we, as responsible archmages, wrote down all the details of over the last two days."

"All the details might take more than two days." 

" - you do realize, though, that's - that's bigger than the Crusade."

Yes he does but he's going to be humble about it.

"It only does Remove Disease now. Once per person per day. I'd have to do a lot more work to adapt it for other spells, and it breaks about every other week." 

"That's not the hardest spell to get a casting of but still pretty incredible." It's also not classically considered an arcane spell. "After this meeting we should make sure you're not the only one who knows how to do it, or at least that it's written down somewhere. We've got time."

"I'd make you go around with a bodyguard until then except it'd - pretty much have to be Karlenius, and he and Alfirin politely despise each other."

          "I am very grateful for the Archmage's work on the Crusade," says Karlenius. 

"As I said. Do try to stay alive until we have all your precious future knowledge, and ideally even after that."

Remove Disease is a third circle cleric spell where he comes from. Easy enough for powerful adventurers to get a casting of, maybe, but far too expensive for almost everyone else – and the Alfirin he knows isn't the sort of person who'd just forget – 

Unless the spell was cheaper, when Aroden lived. 

"Back to the demiplane, then? There isn't much that can kill me there. Except the pyramid. And maybe the crocodiles." 

She would volunteer to bodyguard him herself except for the thing where he doesn't like her. 

"Well. Watch out for crocodiles."

"We will." plane shift?

"...OK so in case you hadn't guessed Aroden grants a second-circle remove disease. Also it sure sounded like you said arcane engine?"

"Tien wizards can cast Remove Disease as an arcane ritual, that's how I figured it out. I –

– I'd always wondered why some god didn't do that. It seemed so much more important than everything else." 

"Well. Now you know."

"...I assume that future-me told you I can hang cleric spells. Given that she apparently told you everything else."

"...If I know what you're referring to then that's not what you are doing."  

"If what you mean by that is that they don't work on their own, sure, I had to make a tiny braindead god to get them to actually have any effect when cast. But my process involved studying cleric spells until I could hang them myself. Some of them, at least.

...I was thinking I should maybe write that down too. So that if I irretrievably die - which I very much hope not to do of course - maybe you'll be able to work something similar into your engine. Hand out the ability to cure wounds or raise dead or the like."

" – other way around. My engine is based on your tiny braindead god." 

"Aha! I'm flattered, I think."

"...Will you be terribly offended if I ask if you think you might ever want to kill me. For good."

"It seems very unlikely. The reason I know so much about you mostly isn't because of what you told me directly, or the years we spent adventuring together. It's because – I think I mentioned the spell you invent for turning people into books. When my wife and I found out that you had taken over our friend's body – and you'd been manipulating us for years, at that point – we used it. And I read it. And we decided, after that, that we trusted you enough to turn you back. 

The version of you I know is not a Good person. I don't agree with all of the decisions she's made, I don't share all of her goals, and frankly I find it extremely concerning that political circumstances will force her to once again become a mother. But I decided a long time ago that I wanted the world to have her in it. 

Any particular reason you're asking now?"

She thought he might have done that.

"Because it sounds like your arcane engine does not require you to kill sixty-five people to create it. And is maybe based on my eight-hundred-year-stale recollections of how I did mine in the first place, I burned all my notes and was never planning to do it again - And if my fresher memories can help you get it working faster or stop it breaking every week I would like to help. Even if it means giving you technical details on my immortality."

"You found a way to deliberately obscure the memories before you reincarnated. Even you don't know how you did it. But –  I guessed it was something like that.

Let's make it worth it, shall we?"

It was already worth it. But they can make it more so.

"Yes, let's."

"...Maybe not here, though. I'm not sure this work is safe while there's still prophecy." 

"Mm? Why not? I know why I hid my original work from prophecy, but - I was also not slowing down my work by a factor of ten to do so."

"You have a tiny braindead god which can grant one wizard very powerful spells. I have a tiny braindead god which can grant many wizards weak spells. Together – we might have something less tiny, or less braindead, or at any rate very very uncomfortable for the powers that be. 

Also, I have it on reasonably good authority that it was for similar work that Azlant was destroyed." 

"Well I suppose that settles it.

... I would prefer if we could, first, either replicate my more elaborate anti-prophecy setup here or speed up my other demiplane. On the other hand, my model of Iomedae is saying sarcastic things about messing around more with the fabric of space and time before preserving in some form your irreplaceable future knowledge."

"Is it more complicated than flooding the plane with positive energy? Because we can probably just turn up that setting." 

"Oh, I think a flow of positive energy is more effective than a static level, that demiplane has wide gates to the positive and negative energy planes at either end so it gets a strong energy current passing through - and the actual energy levels are much higher than they were here when we arrived. That might be overkill, it's hard to test because I don't actually have god-level prophecy myself."

"My best guess is it's easier to do that here than it is to speed up your demiplane by a factor of ten, but you're probably right that we should be responsible archmages first." 

"Well, I don't know, you said in the future we brought the pyramid to Axis! Sure, it might not be as stable now that we've been making a bunch of changes, but -

...right. Responsible archmages. Why don't we work on recording safer things today-subjective, and then I'll go tell Iomedae that for safety and security reasons we're going to need to spend actual-days on some of it."

"If we must – spells we have better versions of in the future is the natural place to start. Now, I know a wizard's spellbook is a very personal thing – " 

"Are you saying future-me never showed you my old books?"

"Future you's mostly using artificial witch familiars – but, no, she hasn't." 

"Well yes, of course, if she were using my old books I wouldn't expect her to show you! How about we swap, you look through mine for spells that look obviously out of date and I look through yours for spells that look new and exciting."

"Sounds like a plan! Just a minute, I need to disable some safeguards – " 

So does she! She was not born yesterday. A few minutes later, with the safeguards disabled and Élie warned about the symbol of death on page thirty-seven, they swap spellbooks. She is obviously getting the better end of this deal, because Élie has eight hundred more years of spell development in his.

Yes, yes, yes, and he believes that it's fundamentally good for wizards to share their knowledge with each other for the sake of progress in their mutual art, so who's really coming out ahead? 

Is it, by chance, the aggregate of all of humanity reasoning beings?

Oh he meant himself. But also that! 

"...Your magic missile is better? Nobody's made any advances to magic missile in three thousand years!"

"Really? But it's so intuitive. ...Why do you have a spell to make corpses decompose faster?" 

"That's why everyone was so sure it couldn't be further improved! It really is quite elegant now that I see it, though -

...Oh I don't think I've ever used that one, actually, I just picked it up off of a vampire and copied it. I assume he used it to, you know, hide the evidence. Because throwing them in a river was beneath his dignity or something."

"Some of these you have in the future but not as wizard spells. Some of them I didn't think existed as wizard spells." 

"...You really should have asked future-me to share with you sooner. I think she would have, unless you're a very good liar."

" – I wasn't entirely joking about it being a very personal request. And you're a very private person – thought you did share your witch spells with Naima freely enough. 

Maybe I should have asked. I suppose it's a good thing I never had the urgent need to, uh, curse everything within a one mile radius to eternal darkness." 

"...You're still in the vampire section."

"He must have been a very prolific vampire!" 

"Oh I'm sure he didn't develop all these himself, probably copied from other vampires or Tar-Baphon or any of the other undead spellcasters clever enough to not let me get my hands on their spellbook.

- fabricate is quite clever, by the way. I love what you did with this bit, here - "

Yes he is very very proud of it does she have opinions on how to get it down to fifth circle, which he's already proven is theoretically possible, future her agrees but she's busy ruling a kingdom just at present – 

Hmm so it looks like he copied this part here from major creation but she thinks she's got - yes, she's got a variation of that spell from a wizard in Kelesh that's a bit more compact, it's not enough to change the circle so she never thought very much of it - It shouldn't be enough for fabricate, either, on its own, but it should help -

Oh, that might work – although he doesn't want to rely on the major creation infrastructure too heavily, since he'd like to make the spell work for magic items too – 

Does he even expect to be able to do that, with a fifth-circle spell? She expects that'd have to be a much larger variant...?

Not really at fifth circle, no, but he's hoping he can develop a base structure that scales neatly to greater and lesser versions. Any other surprising magical advances? 

Nothing quite as surprising as the magic missile; his fly is a little better, a couple more spells have permanent versions, and of course new spells she's never seen before like phantom chariot but those could be spells that exist and she just hasn't happened to encounter yet. Anything surprising in hers, besides the braindead-god spells and the ones that no reasonable living person would ever have a use for?

She has spellcrash, which he knows of but hasn't been able to personally track down. Also a lot of cool-looking enchantments which are of no use to him personally. 

"I suppose I never did ask, what's your specialization?"

"Conjuration, initially. Though the kinds of things I do have since gotten stranger and more specific." 

"Enchantment, at first, and - otherwise the same, yes. I think that happens to us all, after a point."

"I was really a teleportation specialist, at the beginning. Possibly because I spent so much time trying to escape from things. And that's how I got into making tiny braindead gods – that and your influence – since so much of it is figuring out planar linkages. 

I've always been useless as an enchanter, though." 

"I wound up focusing pretty hard on enchantments early, they were very helpful for - avoiding notice, and then getting out of Sarkoris - and then of course I spent thirty-odd years of my life fighting a war against a horde of undead, where most enchantments are useless."

"I wish I had more that was useful for fighting undead. There's just what I know of Gallowspire – and, actually, I might be able to reconstruct some of Nex's notes on lichs, I did get to leaf through them at one point. My headband gives me eidetic memory, but so far the retroactive recall isn't perfect and that would have been before I made it."  

"Ooh, eidetic memory on a headband. I'd love to get a look at it some day, though I doubt I'll be able to replicate it myself for a while. I haven't really started serious magic item crafting, yet."

"Not yet? After thirty years?"

"It's been a very busy thirty years! And I've had some other research projects! I was imagining I might get around to it this lifetime, but I've been prioritizing cracking true resurrection."

"I wonder how you built your little god without serious item crafting experience! There were a lot of crossover skills, for me." 

"Well, I can show you how. Once we've got more privacy here. Maybe it'll turn out that when I start trying to make artifacts it'll be easier than I expect, if a lot of the skills from making a god transfer."

"Are we done with everything that doesn't require more privacy, then?"

"Well, we could write down a bunch of the less critically secret history. But I think we might've picked all the low-hanging magical fruit that doesn't involve forbidden secrets that apparently caused the ruin of Azlant." She sighs. "Probably the responsible thing to do would be to do it in the other demiplane. I think we could get this one to be that secure in less time but - that would involve more experimenting with the pyramid. And Iomedae's right that that does have a small chance of - irrecoverable harms - I'll want to warn her, if we'll be multiple days sidereal, and make sure they've got a way to reach us in emergencies."

"I can write down all the Crusade-relevant notes here while you talk to her." 

"I'll see you in - however many hours it winds up being."

Plane shift, teleport.

The Crusade has survived their absence. Iomedae's out on the front, fighting the rare thing that's stupid enough to let her. 

She can inform a page that she has some things to discuss with the Knight-Commander, in the command tent, when convenient.

The Knight-Commander cannot exactly be seen to reliably respond instantly to these requests but she is not generally all that slow about them. 

"How'd it go?"

"It's been going well, so far, but - there's some things that Élie doesn't want to discuss in that demiplane. I have one that's more secure, we'll record it all there, but we won't be able to use the time dilation. So it'll probably be a couple days on the outside. Sending won't reach us there, very reliably. I have a spare tuning fork in case you need to get one of us for an emergency."

- she nods, and reaches out to take it. "Risky?"

"Perfectly safe, we're probably mostly just going to be writing things down - I suppose if Tar-Baphon or some other enemy has caught wind of something they might desperately gate or wish in and try to kill us, but we're not in any more danger from that than we would be normally."

"You're uncomfortable with Élie."

" - he's uncomfortable around me! Which is entirely his right; I don't need to know, and haven't contemplated, the details implied by what he said earlier."

"Mm. He is, and he doesn't hide it well, but I think he would prefer not to be. He talked to me about it, some, and - You and Your church made some decisions that he understands, and agrees were the right decisions especially by your values, and which happened to hurt him and people he was close to a great deal. They were doing a great deal of evil, for the sake of freeing themselves, and there came a point where You and Your church stopped supporting them. It seemed like You'd abandoned them, and - he was just a kid, at the time. It left an impression, even though now he knows it was more complicated than that."

"I think he'd rather not still be holding this grudge, and he'd rather not act on it or - have you avoiding him because of it."

" - that's fair. Uh, I'll offer to bodyguard, next time it strikes me that the two of you might need it, though days of secret experiments probably isn't that. And if you want to invite him for a meal, Tanat did a mansion, today, because of the blizzard; we've got plenty."

"I'll do that, then. I think you'll like him, if you get to know him better, but maybe that's just that I like him terribly much and you tend to like most people better than I do."

"I expect I'll like him! Even the grievance with me makes me like him, really."

"Of course it does! Usually it's only me and Marit who can find it within ourselves to have complaints. And Pereza if the bookkeeping counts." And Curiosity but he's not really being fair.

"The Emperor is full of complaints! ...it's just you and Marit with the good ones, though. What kind of food should we have the house spin up for your new friend."

"Does food change, very much, over time? I've never actually thought to look into that. He's from Galt but maybe all the foods he'd find familiar haven't been invented yet! I suppose if they haven't he's the sort who'd be happy to sample historical cuisines just for their historical nature." And she'll list off some dishes of the sort that the rich imperial officials in Galt eat.

"I'll see it done!"

Alfirin will check the time, to make sure her sense of it isn't too misaligned, and rejoin Élie in the Pharaoh's demiplane.

"Alright. They have a tuning fork to reach us in emergencies, and we are requested for dinner in - about an hour if we spend it there, half a day if we spend it here. I told Iomedae in pretty broad strokes about your more personal objections to her future church, she was going to spend the next five months courteously avoiding you otherwise. I guessed that you would not mind and I hope I was not wrong about that?"

"Is she generally in the habit of avoiding people just because they seem to be concealing the fact that they don't like her very much?"

"Well, she thought you'd rather not have to interact with her much. And - you're important, and out of context, so - not causing additional tension was a priority.

Also on some level I think she didn't really know how to handle it. Most people like her."

"If I'd wanted her to be on tiptoe around me, I'd have said so. I was trying to be polite because I didn't want that.

I'm glad you said something, it sounds like it would have been an awkward five months."  

"Oh yes, dreadfully so." Not that she has not caused dreadfully-awkward five month stretches all on her own on occasion.

"I'm thinking we might want a telepathic bond for dinner, just because I have the context and might be able to spot - if you're about to say something like 'Cure disease is a third-circle spell'"

"That's a good idea. You're more conservative about these things than I am, anyway, and I think until we're in the secure demiplane we really do want to be as circumspect as we possibly can."

"Mhm. Speaking, of...?" She holds out her hand.

Plane shift. 

And the two of them can compare notes on tiny braindead gods for an hour before it's time to return to Golarion.

The Shining Crusade command is gathered in one of the larger dining rooms, with a spread of Galtan noble foods, talking. "- what's your excuse?"

         "For being single?" says Marit. "Why, that my love is given to the crusade, and what woman would choose a life of coming second in my heart?"

                   "Plenty of them!" says Arnisant. "Hundreds!! Probably thousands!"

There's an invisible Nondetectioned air elemental spying on them all from under an armchair in the corner.

(It's fine. Marit just likes keeping people on their toes.)

Marit's caster level is lower than the one on her see invisibility. She glances at it, then at him to confirm, and gives him a wink. She's not going to spoil it for anyone else.

By now, he's got his permanent arcane sight back. It takes him a moment to notice the auras of illusion, abjuration, and conjuration underneath them, another to figure out what they all do, and a third to realize it isn't a serious attempt to spy on a party of this level. 

He'll flop pointedly in the armchair and scan the room. 

"I do worry about this in terms of teachings of the church, actually," Iomedae is now saying. "If character runs in the blood like the knack for wizardry, and I'm not sure it doesn't, then it'd be a fairly spectacular mistake to have Knights hardly have children. And it seems potentially culturally corrosive, or something, to say 'well, the men should, it's a lot less trouble for them' -"

"It feels like a sort of freeloading," says Karlenius. 

"You should do an experiment. Take a few hundred knights, tell a third of them to have children they don't raise, another third raise unrelated children, and the final third raise their own."

It's not obvious (to people with the sort of sense motive normally found in humans) if he is joking. 

Iomedae has better sense motive than that, and doesn't want to be a scold while they're all joking, so she sets aside some genuine horror at the idea of using power like that.

"Ah, why didn't I think of that!"

            "Seems like it might be hard on morale," says Marit.

"Morale? What's that, a kind of turnip?"

"Are we still talking about just the men here? I imagine that women bearing children on crusade would also have effects. Though maybe this is the sort of problem that can be solved with lots of horrifying necromancy, or at least transmutation - "

"Nex has these incredible artificial womb things in his demiplane, but he wouldn't let us take any of them back." 

...You did not tell me you talked to Nex in his demiplane!

I thought it was implied by the fact that I visited and successfully got out! 

"Oh, Geb totally lets you take his home as long as you ask nicely," says Marit after the shocked silence has really stretched on a while. 

I thought he was dead and his demiplane cracked open at the turning of the age or something! Or that someone found a bunch of his notes, you never actually said you went to his demiplane before!

"See, horrifying necromancy. Told you so."

"Do you happen to recommend reproducing your Nex-related adventures?"

"Getting there required tools which I didn't invent – " you did, a few lifetimes back – "and can't easily recreate. And if I could, I'm not sure I could reproduce the conditions under which he was willing to let us go. 

He has a billion people in there. Domestic afterlife setup and everything. Everyone's sort of unsettlingly placid but otherwise it's quite nice." 

" -wow. 

That's - in a sense terribly admirable and in another - do they know what it's like out here?"

"If he's not willing to let people come back that does - complicate any plans to go there. What do you mean, with specialized tools, can you not get there with a gate?"

Is the reason you could leave related to prophecy breaking?