- oh, okay, that's one of the best possible possibilities. She can feel some terror of what Keltham is up to now draining out of her. 

She offers a hug, wordlessly.

He'll... hold off on deciding to feel comforted about that until he's actually apologized.

"Right, so.  Remember why I started thinking, way way back, that there might be a hidden cleric of Zon-Kuthon somewhere in the villa?"

"...because of the thing you couldn't explain to me because it had too many prerequisites."

"Because we thought that Ione's prophecy might have triggered the attack, and that Zon-Kuthon had eyes on that."

"But not eyes on me, which is why they didn't know to look for me outside the villa."

" - right. Oh. So - once all the girls who were in the villa were cleared -"

"It couldn't possibly have been you, Pilar, or the Security who was with us."

"...well, no one else thought of that either."

"Yeah, 'cause I told everyone it involved mysterious inexplicable 'trope'-based reasoning and everyone gave up on questioning it."

What is the dath ilani Evil answer, here. 

"It was a silly mistake. If I'd believed you incapable of those, I guess I'd be changing my mind. I notice you haven't hit me for any of my silly mistakes."

"Nothing's coming to mind, that you've done, which is that silly."  Keltham leans into her a bit, though.

"I at least need to inform Jacint of the update Security-wise.  In the increasingly incredibly-unlikely-seeming eventuality that there's a 'trope' in play, we could somehow have missed a Zon-Kuthon stealth cleric among one of the other girls present by Ione.  Not you, not Pilar."

"How much of an apology is it to her and Governance, how do I give an apology like that in Cheliax?"

What a good question. It's not an apology to a superior, which she knows how to give; straightforward, precise, not earning further punishment by being extra trouble to correct. Apologies to trade partners aren't... a thing, if they didn't notice the mistake that speaks poorly of them, it's not on you. She can't say that. "Uh, I'd just tell her what you believe now, and that you think this should've been possible to catch sooner, and are willing to repay expenditures that happened because you didn't catch it sooner? If you are. Once you start making money, obviously, not now."

Ow.  Still, his own fault for it.  He'll go make that apology now, then.

Subirachs receives this apology graciously and with perfect Bluff, asks Keltham to send in Sevar a few minutes after he's done for more post-Queen checkup - she needs to compose a quick report to the Grand High Priestess first, about this - and shoes him out.

Subirachs then silences her office and screams at the top of her lungs for half a minute, after which she feels only slightly better.

Part of her is wondering if now rechecking Sevar would show that she is not any more a hidden cleric.

What this means about Keltham and 'tropes', Subirachs can't begin to guess, she gives up, she has nothing to do except compose a report to Rugatonn and await instruction.  Subirachs already sent off a report last night about the actually fairly alarming contents of Sevar's thought transcript, and was instructed in return that she should probably treat the continuing growth of Sevar's and Keltham's feelings as an unalterable fact of reality and try to arrange so that all roads leading there must inevitably lead Keltham to Asmodeus and Sevar away from Irori, which is not the most operationalizable advice she's ever received.

Carissa comes in for her post-Queen checkup. She looks better. She still feels off-balance but in a way she suspects will just be a permanent feature of her life. She has actually had fewer nightmares about being turned into a statue since it actually happened to her; it feels, in a way, like it was a bad nightmare, and one she now knows can never happen for real.

That said she is aware she's in line for a very serious punishment at this point and she's scared of that in a way she did not used to be scared of punishment.

Not quite fully recovered, but getting there; fit for all but the fullest of full duties.  Probably still not somebody who ought to be tortured right this minute, if the Queen of Cheliax's painstaking work is to be treated with the respect it deserves, and in fact, rather stringently commands.

Apart from that, Carissa looks like somebody who thinks herself due for severe and painful rebuke.  "Your fear is showing," Subirachs observes.  "Is it for your feelings with Keltham yesterday, or have you erred or transgressed in some other way than that?"

" - possibly, but it's that I have in mind. I - didn't expect this, and I understand why Asmodeans aren't supposed to indulge it, and I - am only afraid of failing in my duties here." Which isn't true, but should be.

"The Grand High Priestess has already told you that the improbability of your entanglement with Keltham and its escalation bespeaks the intervention of something with at least a shattered fragment of prophecy; 'tropes', or Nethys, but nothing else known to us.  We are hoping that Asmodeus is aware of this, benefiting from it, though we are frightened and unsure; in the end we do not wish to smash whatever this is while our Lord seems to be perhaps being making use of it.  If, indeed, it can be smashed by anything at all short of our Lord's direct assault, when it holds a fragment of prophecy and we do not."

"Only Aspexia Rugatonn is authorized to wholly reshape or destroy your feelings for Keltham, should that seem the wisest way.  I am not."

Jacint reaches out a hand then, and strokes Carissa's cheek.  "But if you have reached the point where you are feeling guilty, and knowing yourself worthy of punishment, out of your own faith," she says gently, knowing exactly how much fear she must be causing, but aiming to make it more than simple fear, "then I think I would be remiss in denying that to any faithful Asmodean.  Is there any transgression you've committed, about which you've come to so feel?"

Carissa really needs to do something about the new phenomenon where her internal monologue gets all drowned out by a rush of internal screaming. 

"It is not - a necessary consequence of my feeling love for him - that the thought occurred to me that I could tell him we should leave. I shouldn't have. It should be possible to endure whatever feelings without contemplating betrayal. It should not be possible for me to think of."

"And if I did not correct even that - how would you feel about that?  Be honest, Carissa; your answer here might not much determine your punishment, or perhaps not in the direction you expect."

"I don't know, High Priestess! Maybe you don't care because it's not like it'd be hard to stop me, except Dis doesn't think I'm that interchangeable. Maybe you don't care because there's a plan, in which case, all right, I don't need to know the plan, I just don't want to fail it. Maybe - this is something I'm wrong about like I was wrong about how many people want to be perfected in the purifying flames of Hell, where almost no one does because we don't teach it right, where there's actually a massive epidemic of people contemplating treason and I didn't run into it all that often at the Worldwound only because most people are too broken to send to the Worldwound lest they immediately wander off and join the paladins! If the answer is that this isn't surprising, and doesn't portend poorly, then - that's good, I guess, for the mission - but this all feels like applying far too much cleverness in the wrong direction. Obviously you have to punish contemplation of defection so people stop it. ....but we don't know how, do we, we don't know how to make the rest of us into Pilar -"

"Stop, Carissa.  You are letting your thoughts run too far ahead with complications," Jacint says, with a soft smile backed by enough Splendour that even Sevar might pause before concluding that, no, it wasn't sincere.  Trying that hard to send the false message still sends a message in its own right.  "The Queen, I was recently told, also now suspects that only Pilar will be able to become a true dath ilani out of our project.  Why?  Because the Queen thinks that among the important qualities of her own competence is that the Queen does not go about constantly terrified of thinking the wrong thing.  It was part of why she felt it necessary to take her time to remake you, that she'd noticed your thoughts collapsing under the pressure of being read so often."

"That part of the Queen's work is not something I mean to undo.  Nor even threaten, not today while her work is still recovering itself into its new shape."

"But do you understand why Pilar could do it so easily, this thing with which you struggle so?  It's not that Pilar never thinks thoughts she knows might incur punishment.  It's that, having thought such things, she knows her transgression, and desires to be punished to expiate her guilt.  Not, necessarily, successfully corrected so that the thought never occurs to her again.  Just punished.  Pilar might wish for that correction, but she knows that only Hell has that power, and that for Hell she must wait."

"Would you still be afraid of punishment for your admittedly severe transgression of thought, if you asked yourself how much punishment would be required to ease your sense of transgression and make matters right between yourself and your faith, and did not ask yourself to what extremes you would need to be tortured to break you and remake you to correct and erase the thought forever?  Answer honestly; I can have your thoughts read, if I like, but these words I think it important for you to speak with your own lips, whatever they may be."

Carissa is being entirely honest, terrifyingly vulnerable, doing everything she can to give the Church what they need to know to fix her. 

"....I don't know," she says. "I hadn't - thought about it that way - what does it serve Asmodeus to punish me if it doesn't fix me, in what sense ought my guilt be eased if I haven't stopped being someone who could make the error again -"

"Stop thinking about yourself, Carissa.  Think about Pilar instead.  How does it work for Pilar?  I expect she is not too displeasing in Asmodeus's sight, as mortals go, and she is firm in His purposes."

"She's - pleased to be punished because - it's the right order of the universe? Because as long as there's someone over her to punish her, then - it's more bearable to be a mortal and flawed in the ways mortals are?"

"When her superiors punish her, Pilar then knows for certain that what she did has been deemed wrong, and ought not to be repeated, and that we have the power to inflict that pain on her confirms to her soul that we are her superiors.  She does not need to be certain of our infallibility, to trust us so; it is wrong because we say so and we are Asmodeus's appointed tyrants over her.  The reason why Pilar even needs us to be a good Asmodean, when her faith is already stronger than our own, is not that Pilar would flinch too much to punish herself if she decided all her own punishments.  What would break Pilar if she stayed in Elysium is that she could never feel certain of her guesses about what is a wrong thought, wrong act, if she had nobody like us above her with the power to punish her will-she-nil-she and thereby make something be permitted or forbidden with certainty.  Once we have spoken, she need but obey, and if there is fault from there it will not be hers.  For this reason, among others, did she return to us from Elysium, I think."