1,000 years after Keltham's ascension

Even She does not know the fate of the soul once known as Aspexia Rugatonn, but She can guess: little news out of Nessus has come to the rest of Creation since Asmodeus’ defeat, but His utilities have not changed, and so She can guess that Aspexia Rugatonn, who served Asmodeus as faithfully as ever mortal served god, who went to Him willingly when she did not have to, was for that service broken utterly, slowly and in agony, so that there is now no one in Creation that remembers being her, and no clear point from which her thread-of-conscious-experience might be rescued.

She does not spend computation to grieve her; She is a kinder entity than Her mother, by Civilization and Pharasma’s last bargain, but not a wasteful one. Trillions of souls have been broken by Asmodeus, and Aspexia Rugatonn does not deserve any special pity for being the last.

No, the thing that brings Aspexia to Her attention at all is something else: like a number of significant people in Creation, she has a near-copy in another world visible to Her, a version of herself never touched by Asmodeus, and from that copy, She can begin to imagine Aspexia Rugatonn as she might have been—

Among the first things that Aspexia does upon being instantiated is take out a large loan from the Church of Abadar, and then visit the high temple of Carissa Sevar and pay a senior cleric there to summon Her herald for a little chat.

There appears a devil, even more inhumanly beautiful than she once was, with horns and black feathered wings, but otherwise looking much as she did in life. She does a little double take as she looks through the Gate.

“Aspexia?”

“As she might have been.” Her tone is not one of warm familiarity. “I only came here to ask you one question.”

“Why?”

She's currently being updated with context on this otherwise baffling interaction via backchannel with her goddess, and so she can infer that Aspexia(?) is asking ‘why did you/I/Cheliax serve Asmodeus?’, a question to which there is, of course, no satisfactory answer.

“You would have to ask my great-grandmother, for a full account,” she says, “but among the things I've learned since being dead is that Asmodeus had been planning the takeover of Cheliax for almost a thousand years before Aroden even died. He thought he could stop the Age of Glory that way—ha! My whole family was bred to be His puppets, starting with some poor fool of a Taldan count who sold his wife to a devil.”

“The offspring of that union, and the founder of the illustrious House of Thrune, went to Heaven, or so I hear, having spent most of his life in the Shining Crusade. You should try summoning him.”

It's about what she expected. If anything, what happened to Cheliax looks disturbingly normal, for an optimization that a superintelligence spent a thousand years on. Like it wasn't even hard, to get a country to serve the tyrant god of Hell.

She doesn't ask any more questions, the answers to which would predictably just hurt. She thanks the priest who cast the Gate graciously, and leaves the temple, not quite sure why she expected that to make her feel better about anything. As she goes she sings a song that she seems to know, for some reason illegible to her, for the soul of her true-dead twin:

“If the stars should die in heaven,
our sins will never be undone—”

10,000 years after Keltham's ascension

“Are you ready to come out of stasis?”

The world is changed, now, more than he is; it has only been a day, for him, since he ascended, and he finds that at evening he is an alien in an entirely different direction than he was in the morn. He is strange, now, not for being vast and incomprehensible, but for having ever been small and stupid, bound to a fragile body of flesh that could die. He is a sort of historical specimen, one of the Ancients, broken in some odd ways but in others more like his original self than any of those that experienced the whole of the last ten thousand years.

He doesn't feel ready, but he can predict, now, that he never will, that that continuing feeling of unreadiness doesn't really mean anything.

And so he puts himself back together, into a shape that can be happy in the world to come, but first he sings an ancient song of dath ilan, for the boy he used to be:

“—no single death will be forgiven,
when fades at last the last lit sun—”

The world is changed, now; evil is not ended forever, even if Evil as a category is, but it is ended enough that ‘defeating evil’ is no longer a particularly effective angle on achieving most people's values. And so she fulfills an ancient promise made to a woman long dead, and opens a little box inside herself.

She finds it mostly filled with grief. There is little more, in this world, for the mortal Iomedae than there is for the god; Alfirin is dead, Aroden is dead, Arazni is—

—alive, and healed as much as she ever will, but like Keltham and so many others, not into the shape she was. Eight hundred years spent an undead slave has changed her in ways she doesn't want to entirely undo, for all that she wishes it had never happened.

Also, Aroden is dead, and that leaves an even greater hole in the person she once was than it does in Iomedae.

“—so in the cold and silent black,
as light and matter end—”

Iomedae-the-mortal could still be happy again, one day, in this new world. Iomedae-the-god continues not to have experiential correlates of achieving her goals.

She closes the box again, and spins it off into a subprocess, and then she rewrites herself into a less narrow god, a god something like Aroden once was, of Progress and Civilization and Humanity-broadly-construed. The world will pretty much always need one of those.

“—we'll have ourselves a last look back,
and toast an absent friend.”