How long do petitioners "live"?

Here's an interesting question for U_K or anyone else who wants to take a stab at it: how long do petitioners live for?

The idea here (laid down in earlier editions of D&D) is that petitioners eventually become so in-tune with their deity that they effectively merge with them - in other words, the deity absorbs the incarnate soul that is the petitioner, which helps to reinforce and strengthen them (the same thing happens to petitioners who didn't worship a specific god, and are on a plane of matching alignment...which in the IH series makes them petitioners of a given sidereal, I suppose).

My question is, how long does it take for a given petitioner to reach this state - from when they arrive in their deity's divine realm to when they merge with their god, how long is this process?

I know that one can say "it's however long you want it to be in your game," but Ascension gives us rules for most everything else, so I don't see why we shouldn't have them for this too, even if only as a guideline. Presumably, the time it takes a petitioner to reach this state is dependent on the power of the deity - e.g. the stronger the god, the more time it takes to reach a state of understanding regarding their nature.

I should note that Ascension doesn't seem to support this idea that petitioners are absorbed by their god. That said, I think it makes sense simply because, beyond the rules for divine retinues - if petitioners are eternal, unable to even be destroyed so long as their god lives - over time they'll "flood" a divine realm in never-ending numbers, even beyond the retinue rules.

Hey Alzrius mate!

Interesting question. My inital thought would be that they merge with the realm at the point where the deities retinue would otherwise overflow/exceed their power to maintain. With newer petitioners replacing the oldest ones in that capacity.

The book states that there are already more petitioners of most gods, than the ones that actually manifest. The number of existing petitioners listed is based off the capacity of the deity and his divine realm to sustain their physical forms, not the number of dead mortal followers that god has.

I'm partial to the idea that, however, instead of heavenly realms being places where ALL the dead followers of a given god go, that they're more like the Greek Elysium or like the astral domains of gods in 4e, wherein only the choicest followers that the god prefers are granted a stay. The rest can just go to Hades/the Shadowfell.

In the 3e campaign setting I'm working on, there's two main outerplanes, The Tower and The Pit, which loosely correspond to upper and lower planes... except that The Pit is simply the eternal dumping ground for everything divine-related that the gods don't care about. So abominations are thrown in there, excess petitioners are thrown in there, divine servants of dead gods are thrown in there, etc.