(Abrogail thinks of herself as the person in Cheliax whose job it is to have vision; any vision at all, really.  She gives more credence than some people in her government that some critical part of dath ilan's power is not teachable as Law but simply something in their blood.  Getting some of Keltham's children for Cheliax - and doing that before this operation blows up and he leaves, if that is something they prove unable to prevent - is a priority she is annoyed by others largely neglecting.  She planned to Detect his Thoughts on that subject so long as he was here.)

"Probably going to see if this is the sort of godwar that kills fifteen percent of the world population before I bring my kids into it, at the very least.  I don't know this place well enough, as yet, to understand what world I would be giving to my children."

Though at least, Governance continuing to pressure him about that, mildly suggests that they're not just teleporting sperm out of his epididymis... well, no, it probably wouldn't survive in the uterus's acidic environment if not mixed with protective seminal fluid, though maybe you could put it directly into the more basic environment past the cervix?  Not grabbing the results when he gets oral sex and inserting into vaginas under cover of invisibility, anyways.

Though if they were doing that, they'd be clever enough to go on exerting the same amount of social pressure on him afterwards so he wouldn't get suspicious.  But mostly, it sort of seems like Cheliax doesn't really have the optimizing spirit that would do either.

"We can - I hope - wait for the godwar to end, which at least some of our theological advisors seem to think might happen very soon.  We are all literally praying for it."

"Keltham, please do consider that if the attack from Nidal had managed to kill you in a way that doesn't allow resurrection - it's not easy but they must have had some goal beyond just inconveniencing us temporarily - then there would be very little of your ideas left, and none of your blood at all to build on them.  Golarion would stay as it is for possibly a very long time.  Yes.  I know.  I'm being Good."

"Yeah, you are," Keltham says. "My children are not something I'll give away to Good, that's a me-decision and mine alone."

He knows, even as he says it, that it's the sort of thing he might think better of with an Owl's Wisdom.

Well that's not great news about his spiritual progress either.  Can they give him something really valuable to do with second-circle spells such that he doesn't start using Owl's Wisdom on himself more?  Sevar's problem, she supposes.

Paracountess Isidre Astrid Asgavan Thrune rises from her chair, and gives a sober bow to Keltham.  "Isidre Thrune," she says, "Isidre of House Thrune, Isidre of the royal house, Paracountess Isidre, all those names are mine alone and will reach me.  Do send a message to Isidre, if you think you might want to meet the Queen for purposes of seeing if she's worthy of your Carissa, or if you become sure that you'll never want that.  In the latter case, I'm not really sure what to do besides - siding with the Queen's advisors again."

"For whatever it's worth, I've known Abrogail since roughly the day she was born, and I think Abrogail is worthy of Carissa and they would both be a good experience for each other."

"Understood.  Thank you for continuing to be a very smart person in Cheliax, and for all your hard work running around behind the scenes trying to optimize things."

"Ah, that said, before you go, can you point me in whichever direction I should go to get back to Carissa."

"I expect you'll have an escort waiting outside, and they'll either take you to Carissa or take you back to your quarters and take a message to Carissa; I don't actually know where she'd be or what she'd be doing right now."

Abrogail Thrune departs the room, her outward form continuing to appear as the sober middle-aged woman; her inward self being, as usual, Abrogail Thrune.

That's an unauthorized lie, Carissa thinks against her better judgment, and then thinks much louder that she does not have ANY CRITICISMS AT ALL of the Queen.

She would like to just turn right here and go see Sevar who's right there, even if just for one glimpse at the look on Sevar's face.  But if Abrogail starts an interaction now, it might take more time she's already overborrowed; soberly speaking, she needs to get back to her endless war councils if she doesn't want Gorthoklek coming after her again.  She usually manages to make her life not be like this, she is not usually the poor little dutiful Abrogail she depicted to Keltham, but it's harder to avoid becoming her during the first days of a war.

...is there a 'trope' a Queen can 'manifest' to cause herself to have shorter workdays, somehow?  She probably shouldn't think about that; Keltham's early thoughts did suggest that this might be a road leading to actual insanity.  Sevar should try it first.

Carissa Sevar very shortly after receives this parchment message:

One.  I have other duties now and will deliver a transcript later.  It will not be as useful as you hoped.  Most thoughts of Keltham regarding his pattern-sight rested on incomprehensible ideas that I think Golarion does not possess.  Some ideas that made it through those inscrutability-heavy sections were disturbing to the point where I must consult Aspexia before I share those with anyone who has her thoughts read as often as you.

Two.  You know what you did.

Three.  Listening to your thoughts is becoming more painful than amusing.  You are not saving yourself any trouble by sending your thoughts scurrying in frantic circles every time I come up in them.  You are who you are, you can't actually hide it from me, and you'll earn however much suffering that earns you.  Lose hope, give up, and endure.

At the bottom of the parchment is a set of punishment codes describing a moderately severe half-hour session in a temple torture chamber, requiring it to be taken at the recipient's choice of time sometime over the next three days.

Lose hope, give up, and endure. 

Easy to do about anything except MAYBE TURNING INTO A STATUE but impossible to do about THAT because not existing isn't the kind of thing that can be endured. 

The last Fox's Cunning wears off, leaving her feeling vaguely groggy except well aware this is just what being her - enhanced with a headband, even - is normally like and that soon it'll feel normal again. 

She hurries back to Keltham's room so she can evade having to explain why she was out.

When Keltham reaches his bedroom, he glances in a direction and stops moving, then crosses to stare out the window, exposed to its palace courtyard and therefore ultimately the outdoors.

It's raining really hard.  The winds have picked up too.  The roses on the rosebush outside are looking bedraggled, there are rose petals being windily whirled about in the water puddled in the ground.

"How much of this does it take to destroy significant fractions of the food supply?" Keltham says, his voice quieter than usual.  "Is only this much maybe - the sort of rain you get at least once a year anyways?  This is a fairly stormy day for the city I grew up in, but we had those days now and then..."

"If the crops are already gone, just tell me, don't temporize."

"It rains like this sometimes anyway, in Cheliax, so Cheliax won't have lost the crops yet. There might be places where it's causing more of a problem, if they grow different things, if it's supposed to be the dry season there, but - even there, I don't think it's too late, not after a day."

Please let it not be too late.

Keltham realizes that his eyes are starting to water.

He didn't mean - to hurt anyone - by coming here - by being in Golarion -

Let alone kill, kill, fifteen percent of the population, even if they get afterlives, that's still, kind of, bad -

Yes, he knows, he gets it, this step was literally unavoidable in any solution, he's not stupid, he gets that, anything bringing hope into this world would have set off Zon-Kuthon -

The thought eases the ache in his eyes, but not enough.

Does Carissa's gendertrope-substitute tell her it's okay, for her boyfriend to cry in front of her, as his own gendertrope tells him that if you can't cry in front of your girlfriend you can't cry in front of anyone?  Or is it all mismatched madness and insanity as things always are in Golarion, men told to do one thing and women who can only love them if they do something else?

"Does it help the gods fight, if we pray to them?" Keltham whispers.

" - the general understanding is that yes. Only - a very tiny bit - but it'll be everyone in all of Cheliax, and lots of other people too -" if the Good countries aren't just rooting for Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon to destroy each other - "and it does matter, if it's that many." 

And she puts her arm around him and leans on his shoulder, because it seems like the thing to do. 

He puts an arm around her as well, holds her tight.

"Is there anything more to it than closing your eyes, thinking of your god, and hoping that they win?"

" - what I was taught in school was that you imagine your god is trying to draw a better world in grains of sand, on the ground, and you're one of the grains of sand, and you want to be light enough to find your way to where you're needed, but tenacious enough that no wind can rip you away, once you're there. ...I don't know what parts of that are essential and what are just the closest you can get little children."

"Light enough to find your way to where you're needed," Keltham whispers, "tenacious enough that no wind can rip you away once you're there."

It could almost be a dath ilani poem from some layer of some virtue, though he does not know which virtue it would correspond to.  There is a spirit in it that is not in any poem he can remember having heard before, something that comes to it from the way that it is a relation between a mortal and something larger than that, being trusted.

He closes his eyes and imagines it, he doesn't bother with imagining a better world drawn in grains of sand, the better world his god draws is drawn in grains of people, agents all over the world interacting with each other.  Their actions scattered and uncoordinated, for now, stepping on each other and hurting each other, for now, but there are other actions they could take instead that would make all of them better off, fairly.

He imagines himself as one of those grains, one of those people, and if this was going to be a realistic metaphor he should be a special one, maybe, except that right now he's not.  Just one of all the people in Golarion hoping for this war to end quickly, and contributing the tiny little action that is cheering their god on; if they all do that, they'll all be better off.  Keltham visualizes a grain like any other, to represent himself.

Light enough to find your way to where you're needed.

Tenacious enough that no wind can rip you away once you're there.

It's not his comparative advantage, no, but if almost everyone in Golarion is doing their part, right now, he can spend fifteen minutes doing his own.

Carissa closes her eyes and prays for Asmodeus to win. 

It's a sincere prayer, obviously. She does not like Zon-Kuthon and she believes in the project Zon-Kuthon was willing to blow up everything in order to oppose. 

She's definitely some flavor of heretic at this point. She isn't sure what flavor. She assumes they're mostly monitoring for whether she's about to betray the project, and she's not, she believes in the project with as much conviction as she can recall ever having felt for anything that isn't the continued survival of Carissa Sevar. Which is also served by the project succeeding. But there was a set of stories meant to point people like her in the right direction, and she knew they were lies, and now she had to face what specifically they were lies about, and learn a new set, which are also lies, but lies better suited to the position she finds herself in now, and -

- she knows she can't handle the truth. She knows that even in dath ilan there's the concept not everyone can handle every truth, she knows it's possible to learn the Law even when many truths are hidden from you. But she's slightly worried that until she invents evil dath ilan thinking herself everything'll ring a bit wrong, not quite crafted for a mortal mind in the particular fragile place Carissa finds herself in. 

Except, maybe, advice for little children about prayer. Slightly adjusted advice, no one ever told Carissa Asmodeus was trying to craft a better world. That's still true. It's true to Keltham, too, it landed, meant something, and she can worry later about what that means for the plan where they seduce him into Evil, it seems just as important to their plans that they find the bits of their own teaching that feel true even to dath ilan. 

She imagines herself a grain of sand in the grand designs of Asmodeus, and strives to be placed where she'd needed, and fierce in remaining there, no matter what interference of other gods or other grains of sand, and hopes that Asmodeus can see, from where he stands, something beautiful and right and strong and Lawful that can be built of mortal building blocks.

Zon-Kuthon is losing too quickly.

Zon-Kuthon is a god; and depending on how you count it, either a very old entity, or something built out of the corpse of something that old.  He models reality, therefore, entirely in probability distributions.  He has no mortal heritage of any other way of seeing.

When this war began Zon-Kuthon formed a probability distribution over how long the fight should take, and gambled on a chance to drag it out long enough to ruin the crops and visit misery on a generation.  But He is losing too fast, in the unreasonably far tails of that probability distribution, especially given the further information He now has about the war's participants.

The external-demigod-assembling fragments that Zon-Kuthon deliberately set to reunite with Himself quickly and early in predictable locations, to act as tests of the theory that all His longer-buried fragments are being hunted and destroyed somehow, returned to Him.  And yet Zon-Kuthon... does not have an ominous intuition, He was never that mortal.  He has rather the hypothesis that Nethys is opposing Him, that this is the reason for His losing too quickly, and the implication that, if so, His longer-buried external-demigod-assembling fragments will be gone.

He randomizes, then, with far too much power, in a way that Nethys can of course see but should not be able to foresee with prophecy shattered; and based on the result makes an expensive calculation of where something will be while its trajectory is still complicated; He focuses much of Himself someplace it is not at all convenient for Him to be, losing ground in the war as He does; and there He finds that His external-demigod-assembling fragment that should have been flitting through that location is gone.

He knows, then, He understands the betrayal and that Nethys it was who worked it all upon Him from the beginning.

And what does Zon-Kuthon do, when He is betrayed?

Mostly, of course, Zon-Kuthon does what serves Zon-Kuthon's longest purposes of pain, misery, terror, mutilation, woe.

But if there were a tiebreaker between two strategies - if there is some little thing that Zon-Kuthon can do along the way - 

Then Dou-Bral, if He had been so betrayed, would have done some last thing He could to work vengeance on His betrayer.

And all that Dou-Bral was, Zon-Kuthon is not.

Nethys is betraying Him?  Of course He is.  How amusing.  No doubt Zon-Kuthon will be the first of many.  Zon-Kuthon then will tell nothing to the other gods of how Nethys has begun the series of downfalls that will inevitably lead to Their own destruction, destruction more complete than Zon-Kuthon's mere sealing.  Whoever currently thinks they are Nethys's ally will find themselves mistaken; Zon-Kuthon can guess, of course, that Nethys is probably trying to side with fellow gods who also once were mortal, but Nethys being Nethys, the road that has been started down is one from which Nethys is unlikely to be able to turn back.

It is not a certainty, obviously, this beautiful vision.  But the probability is one to gamble on; and a better gamble than the one where Zon-Kuthon announces Nethys's sins, in which case there is not much chance at all of lasting damage to the world and misery to the gods.

He will go into the vault, then, for a time, and say nothing of Nethys's betrayal.  Zon-Kuthon has been exiled once before, after all, and it did not last.  Evil stays contained less long than one might hope.  If Nethys brings enough ruin to the gods, the vault will last even less.

Zon-Kuthon's pieces begin to gather into the vault.  They will not slay Him; they need Him to counterbalance Asmodeus yet.

There, there, there, and there.

Four simultaneous expensive and exhausting strikes, delivered with extreme calculation, striking where not many gods can see, destroying four key subassemblies whose encrypted nature is that they pin the true center of Zon-Kuthon, landing just as the vault door is almost sealed shut.

It is possible that this will kill Zon-Kuthon.

It is also possible that Dou-Bral is still in there somewhere, and will be able to free Himself at last.

Either way, the process will take a while.  Nobody is liable to notice, or reason through that it wasn't just a result of divine combat, if Zon-Kuthon's clerics lose only their ninth-circle spells at first.  It will be longer yet before His clerics lose their eighth-circle spells as well.

It's going to hurt Zon-Kuthon the entire time He's dying, which isn't particularly desirable, but is also an acceptable price to pay.