"Child," says the flesh golem.

Asmodia startles up from her scrap paper, the current pages covered with less interesting and powerful numbers than pages previous, along with new notation she invented that probably doesn't make any actual sense.  She didn't have time to check whether it did.  Fifteen minutes isn't really much time to think about anything.

P( e4 ◁ e3 ◁ e2 ◁ e1 )...

"Most High," she says, and hurriedly rises up so she can prostrate herself.

She's going to have to give the Crown back now.  She's been trying not to think about it.

"Rise."

"Security.  Give her a Fox's Cunning."

Even as it speaks, the husk of the Most High moves to tap the rising Asmodia with an Owl's Wisdom as well.

Kindness?  Don't be absurd.  Both spells will still wear off.  The plan simply calls for Asmodia to remain intelligent and articulate while speaking to the reincarnate Aspexia Rugatonn.

Even so, as the Crown of the Most High is lifted from Asmodia, she can feel herself diminishing, the awareness-of-Asmodia shrunk, the force of personality and Splendour that drove her vanishing like so much smoke.

She does not protest, and perhaps die; Asmodia has somewhat to live for in Golarion now.

And Aspexia Rugatonn is once more.  She ceased to exist only briefly, saving perhaps some uneasy dreams.

"Did you, in your own opinion, have a productive hour and forty-five minutes?"

"I expect Sevar to be impressed once I have had time to explain to her," Asmodia states.  In this, she is confident; she will be very surprised if Sevar's assessment does not back it up.  "I solved seven problems that Keltham left to us, the seventh was the key to the game of deceiving dath ilani as I had thought it would be, and we made some progress on the most urgent issues of that game with myself wielding that fragment of the Law of Probability, which I had completed myself as mathematics from Keltham's hints in words."

Encouraging if true.  That Asmodia evidently believes it is not of very much weight; she shall see what Sevar says of it.

"And your last fifteen minutes?"

"I suspect I failed at your problem.  It is possible I could do something given more time, which I do not expect to receive."

Asmodia says it without very much fear; she has made a lot of evident and verifiable progress on what was said to be the more important problem of the two, and she was told she wouldn't be harmed if she showed prudence.

"Oh?  Failed?  How so?"

"I tried to think of clever solutions to the posed problem using the Law of Probability, but everything I thought of that way ended up seeming stupid to me, like something that wouldn't save the three-year-old in the dungeon in reality.  In reality, the only solution I can see is 'just actually follow your instructions'."

"Give me an example of such a clever solution, which you then rejected."

"I tried to invent a new notation, which I'm not sure makes any sense, for the probability that one event leads to another, and leads to another, and leads to another.  You'd want to, if you could, keep to the paths of high probability, where, if one thing happens, something else must inevitably follow after that, in order to make you easier to steer.  But if you disobey your instructions to do that, that makes you harder to steer.  So it boils down to following your instructions again.  It's the job of the adult calling directions to steer you onto more predictable paths, not yours."

"If the child in the dungeon was more than three years old and could talk with the adult beforehand, or you could talk with the being who has almost no time to talk with you, you could arrange in advance for them to know that you would, if you didn't know what to do next, pick the path where you thought everything from there would be more predictable to them, if you thought they could see that path at all.  But if they don't know you'll do that, you're making their job harder, not easier."

"A somewhat older child comes to you and says that the important thing is to try to understand why you were given the instructions you were, so that you can obey them more effectively.  How do you respond?"

"If the adult thought you'd correctly figure out your pathway, from knowing the adult's goal, they'd have just called out the goal to you, not the instructions."

"Child.  Do not fear."

"Security.  Leave us."

The first lesson of Hell is to obey, but being instructed 'do not fear' sure doesn't make obedience easy.  With the Splendour still in her, she might have been able to muster the drive for it, but it is gone and Asmodia is not what she was before.

When Security, to her own eyes, is gone, Aspexia Rugatonn soundproofs the room, and then speaks in a voice that trembles slightly.

"Am I being mocked?"

Hearing the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus ask 'Am I being mocked?' is very high on the list of things one hears just before a death begins that lasts for months.

Asmodia, despite her most recent instruction, is too terrified to think, let alone speak.

"- not by you, child.  I won't hurt you.  Don't be afraid."

Aspexia smashes one hand into the wall beside her.  Stone cracks, her hand does not.

"Am I being mocked?  This is what it takes?  This?  There was no mathematics in that, whether incomprehensible to me or otherwise!  There was no brilliant Law she had uncovered!  The asexual out of Keltham's tropes is just able to answer anyways, because she is favored of the tropes?  Half my life I searched, and that is the answer?  The only answer, I now have little doubt, after seeing it, that I am ever to receive?  Do the tropes think it wise to mock me so?  Do they think I cannot find a way to injure them in return?"

Asmodia does not move, does not speak, but she thinks, Wait, did I get it right?

"Yes, child," spits out Aspexia Rugatonn.  "You answered as rightly as anyone except myself has ever answered.  You answered perhaps better, for in all my shrieking specific corrections at others, over, and over, and over again, I never once managed to articulate in words the principle that if Asmodeus had thought you able to pursue the greater goal from knowing it He would have told you that goal and not the specific instructions."

"If any seventh-circle priest of Asmodeus had answered me so, I would have appointed them my successor upon that very spot, had a first-circle cleric so answered, I would have taken them as apprentice, and now - and now -"

"What you have is not teachable.  It is not Law.  You have it because you are Keltham's asexual, not because you are his student."

"And you are not loyal to my Lord.  Do not bother denying it.  You could never take my place, even had your soul not already been bought away.  You fear Hell, your one wish was oblivion in its stead.  So in time I will die, and leave instructions to my hapless successor to consult you on all such matters and never once trust you, and if you do serve faithfully you will be granted Abaddon at your life's end as you wished.  Rejoice, for you will receive all that you ever wished for."

"I -"

"I did use Law, though?  Or - something like that.  I think."

To Aspexia, Asmodia's detected thoughts are flickering between presence and absence in a strange way, as if she is with augmented self-discipline quashing some deadly thought over and over again, fast enough that it never manifests at all.

Asmodia's visible thoughts include that she might not want to spend her life as the next Most High's advisor, that she'd rather teach and be rewarded as greatly - or rather rewarded more, since the gains to divide would be higher - and that Asmodia does think this ought to be teachable, though you might have to start with mathematical talent far above average for a priest of Asmodeus.

It does not take more than an instant for Aspexia Rugatonn to master herself.  "Speak on," she says, sounding emotionless in lieu of many possible emotions.

"Keltham doesn't talk to us constantly using numbers.  Maybe if he was speaking in his native tongue, he would, he often complains of how poorly suited Taldane is to thinking.  But when he was illustrating the Law of Probability to us in lectures, and needed an example with numbers for that, he had to reach back days earlier to an event that occurred when he asked Ione for a book.  If he was thinking in those terms every minute, he wouldn't have needed to reach that far back.  But he is still a dath ilani even when he isn't using numbers."

"Thinking using the Law and the Law's numbers reshapes even the thoughts that you just think in words, with no numbers at all."

"When I talked about the adult telling the child the goal, instead of the instructions, I was thinking, in the back of my mind, about - things I'd tried to write to myself in the notation that probably doesn't make sense - about paths of probability from one thing that happens after another - and I was thinking, the adult could just tell the child about the last thing in the chain, and not the steps there, if the child had - the right version of the thing that describes the steps."

"I don't think... no, I'm sure I couldn't have answered you that way before I met Keltham, even wearing your crown.  I would have - invented clever things in words, and tried to see if one of those was what you wanted.  Not tried to invent clever math, and seen that all the clever math failed.  It's easier to see when math is bad."