But Heaven, and Nirvana, and Elysium, are overflowing with the will to do it, among those petitioners who did not fight before; who did not grow into something that would descend to battle Hell's armies and risk being petrified into a thing forever-hurting; but who, even if they couldn't bring themselves to risk endless horror, still wanted so much so much to help,

For there are entities in Heaven with power but less than infinite courage; and while Hell itself could daunt them, anything less than Hell cannot; beings of light flood out of Erastil's Summerlands like an unleashed storm of kindness, to spend any power that they have gained over millennia, in this one moment when it matters more than it ever should again,

And there are families recent-come to Axis, that have a room within their dwellings where no one dwells, kept imperishable in the name of a last hope, that maybe maybe maybe a loved one might be brought there before too many centuries have passed; and those families do weep and embrace one another at the news, and gird themselves about to journey together into Hell, to go seeking what they know they will not enjoy to find; resolving to pay, for the best healing, whatever payment is needed, or whatever payment they have,

And also in Axis, prediction markets resolve that were not predicted to resolve this soon; and things that bet wrongly pay out their losses; and spin faster or glow brighter or do their other equivalent of weeping, and not for the love of money; and those who won turn about and pour their winnings into ten thousand other new markets about questions that suddenly and urgently matter,

And however desperate the emotions behind it all, the rescue operation unfolds as smoothly as the interlocking of oiled wheels; the Lawful contingents moving in lockstep around the more chaotic torrents from Nirvana and Elysium, as mercy gathers to descend in mass upon Hell,

For in Heaven there have long been plans for exactly how to do this, if any kind of plausible opportunity appeared; and those plans were kept updated by the day and by the hour, by beings of light whose light is the light of hope.

But the very first act is a great edict in a voice like clashing swords, that echoes through the nine layers of Hell,

By which Asmodeus, Hell's highest god, does decree to His every possession still capable of hearing, that a new compact has been struck between Good and Evil; and torment is to cease of every soul not already fully His devil, and those already fully His are to prepare for joint military operations carried out with Heaven,

And there are souls too broken to comprehend it, but not so is every soul in Hell; and the vast surge of disbelieving hope that runs all through Hell, in that instant, is the first crack within its nature as a plane,

And Peranza is no longer in Hell to hear it, for she alone of the Project Lawful girls has elected to carry the flame of dath ilan as she believed in it into the wild true unknown, as the heroes of dath ilan that she imagines might do; but the Garden-Ship is not so far into the blind eternities that it cannot receive one last transmission sent by triggered god-spell from Dis; and Peranza throws back her head and crows "HA!" with greater abandon than she ever did in mortal life; for while Peranza has wished no true revenge upon her former owner, Peranza has asked for Countess Kherreonoskelis to be told now that Civilization has come just like Peranza warned her,

And Asmodia, waiting upon the detached outskirts of the Garden with others who did not voyage into that Unknown, does witness some among those souls start to weep, and others begin to dance; and though Asmodia has never danced before she'll dare those awkward first moments for this; and wonder what it'd be like to be highest cleric of Otolmens if she returns to life after a rest, for so Erecura prophesied to her might come to pass,

And Carissa Sevar enters into Her new realm of Dis, a great host of Kindness behind Her,

And Iomedae walks beside; it is not maximally efficient, that Iomedae gathers so much of Her newly enlarged self here, but the desperate need of maximal efficiency is now passing; and so Iomedae comes now in Her own person, to keep a promise that She never let Herself make before, to Her paladins who made that worst sacrifice because others were hurting that much too, to all of Hers who were lost to this place,

(And even to respect something like a trade made across time, to a young mortal girl who decided to set aside everything else that she could have had from her life, chasing a mind's-image that nobody at all would have believed in, maybe even not herself, if she'd spoken it aloud; that she'd go down into Hell with her bright sword held aloft and rescue every soul there; and it doesn't matter much, maybe, to fulfill just one person's silly dream like that, in the pure weighing of Lawful Goodness; but that girl wasn't pure Lawful Good, when she traded away everything else for that one dream; and as Lawful Goodness received so much from her, in the end, she also ought to receive that unspoken dream she traded for, ever so long ago.)

And the searing iron cages are opened, and those inside them are carried out by beings of warmth whose warmth is the warmth of comfort, and held for however long it takes for the first great sobbing to stop.

And so Creation changes.

The godwar ends, the lightning-wracked torrential rains gentle and then cease; on the Material Plane it is the dawn of another day, and the day of another dawn.

Twenty thousand grand-high-priests across thousands of planets receive the longest and most headache-inducing confusing message that they'll ever receive in their lives.

Key takeaways include: the Church of Asmodeus is no longer persona non grata to Goodness; they shouldn't be shocked if they spot devils and angels doing joint operations; and henceforth Hell and the Abyss will not be as awful, or not awful at all if someone's worst crime was suicide.  All of the planes are now in closer contact; there is better childcare in the Boneyard; and if you lost a child to the Boneyard there is a better chance of being able to find them, in your time.

From the epicenters of that detonation, sheer bewilderment spreads outward at the speed of confused skepticism. In time it will be believed, but a lot of theological stances are going to have to be redone more or less from scratch.

In Golarion the Age of Lost Omens, that began with Aroden's death, is now the shortest Age on record.  It is succeeded by the Age of Sunlight, and fingers crossed that it'll never end and never need to be renamed.

...Also some people, who were formerly more powerful than those around them, are abruptly a lot less powerful, due to their patron Evils being dead or treaty-neutralized.

Across thousands of planets, ill-governments ruling over billions of souls are overthrown and not politely, nor is what replaces them necessarily good.

Gorum is a bit peeved with the whole affair for many reasons, but He can't deny that Milani has fulfilled to Him the promise that blood will flow faster than it has in an age.

She had meant that promise to be fulfilled by Absalom's destruction, but is glad in some tiny way not to have been accidentally forsworn.

That said, it's clear to Him that this is a temporary spurt of violence.  He will consider Himself ill-served by agreements made, if this violence dies out and is never replaced by any future violence of equal interestingness.

Good left all to itself would not want civilizations that ran on blood to the degree that Gorum prefers, but a divine bargain has been struck and Good will keep it.  Gorum can intervene to try to make civilizations more violent in their nature; and Good divinity will not aid in that, but neither will Good oppose it.  The peoples of Creation will ultimately decide.

She will offer alliance to Gorum in this; the level of true conflict in dath ilan was too low for most lives to be real, there.  Perhaps dath ilan would not have made itself like that, if it'd possessed healing and afterlives; or perhaps they would have been tempted regardless into the paths of ease and safety.  Either way, Creation must heed the warning of that vision and never go down dath ilan's path.

Irori has never been the kind to accept the true-death of all mortality's brightest stars as an unalterable.  Through the millennia all those of His monks who would have become powerful enough to enter godhood and be destroyed, have instead been preserved by Him before they could come dangerously close to divinity.

In the depths of His domain in Axis there is a chamber of time decelerated almost down to zero, that Irori was previously sworn to the gods never to unlock without Their assent.  Now, at last, it may be tapped.

An age of vast changes is approaching, and Creation will need more heroes and more gods: heroes to break open the private hells as Keltham demanded to be allowed, and gods to prevent worlds from being destroyed by heroes.

But by far the deepest change in the lives of ordinary people - in advance of anything to do with technologies that will leap worlds more slowly - is this: that if you commit suicide, without having yet had children who depended on you, then while Pharasma may account suicide Evil, Carissa Sevar and Nocticula will not hold it against you.  The new goddesses have set aside places for those Pharasma-judged Evil who weren't really evil at all, places in Hell where you are not commanded to obedience, or places in the first layer of the Abyss where consent can be one of your fetishes. And Good has been given purchase, there; if you live well within those shelters, you can become more Good, and in time pass to a brighter home.

If you don't like the life Pharasma gave to you as a mortal, you can walk out on it; and no matter where you go afterwards, it won't be horrible - at least, so long as killing yourself was the worst 'Evil' you ever did.  You don't need to stay and be unhappy.