He's been getting martial arts retraining from Security, all healed now but he's still feeling a bit psychologically worn, and for some odd reason his brain returned an answer of "Asmodia" when queried for who he wanted to snuggle after that.  Probably relatively quiet going-to-sleep snuggles, if that's okay.  He doesn't know if that's something that would interest her and it's obviously okay to say no.

Sure.

(It's - probably not quite the same as Keltham having been through a torture session, and seeking her out afterwards - that, she feels instinctively, would be crazy high up on the Chelish Relationship Escalation Scale - like well past the point where the Church arrests you for being in a relationship that healthy - but -)

(Fuck it, she doesn't know.  Whatever.  Either the tropes have fated them to fall in love or they haven't.)

He doesn't say much.

She holds a warm thing in her arms, big spoon to his little spoon this time, and wonders whether her future self will try to sabotage it all, if it starts looking like Keltham is actually heading towards Hell.  That's probably what being in love would mean, right?

PL-timestamp:  Day 20 (16) / Long Night

High Priest Ferrer Maillol will speak to you now, Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer.

(It's not a request and doesn't sound like one.)

She has no particular idea what he wants but one doesn't mess with High Priests; that's not a title one got two weeks ago because Project Lawful's handing authority out like candy.

She goes in.

This place is very cold, and very flat, and has no particular distinguishing features.  Miles away there is smoke in the air, as from a chimney. 

Farther miles away there's a big soap-bubble force-field kind of thing.

Worldwound. 

She's not in fact an idiot. 

She is confused. There's a Forbiddance. Someone could have knocked her unconscious and carried her outside it. Or it could be an illusion. Well, trying to will away an illusion is cheap. She looks at the ground in front of her, closely. Tries to disbelieve it, to brush aside the magic standing between her senses and reality. 

While she does this she curtsies, perfectly, just in case she's standing in the High Priest's office.

She hopes she's standing in the High Priest's office. It is miserably, horribly, cold.

It is in fact an illusion, obviously, but a sufficiently high-level one that Lady Avaricia can go on feeling horribly cold for a while.

"Welcome to the Worldwound, Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer, heir of Girona County.  Three weeks ago I ran an installation here.  Miss it quite a lot, in fact."

"Serving out a tour of duty here is something that excellently tempers a Chelish citizen.  Makes you wonder why your mother didn't send you here, really.  You could have learned so many valuable lessons."

"Do you know why your mother didn't send you here, Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer?  Why most noble children don't get sent here, as would be, in my own opinion, immensely beneficial to the Chelish state?"

Because it's horrible and full of demons and peasants. 

She has a feeling she should not voice that guess. 

"We'd die like flies, High Priest. It's well known that a young noble in a situation where they plausibly might die by freak accident always will."

"Your mother can certainly afford a resurrection spell, if you die like a fly once or thrice.  But if you want to act stupid about it, go ahead.  Just means the conversation takes a bit longer.  Cold's not bothering me."

"I'll be astonished if you're not thinking that the real answer is that this place is beneath you."

"That, in fact, is why the Crown doesn't instruct the nobles that they've got to send their children here before they can inherit.  It'd serve the Chelish state, but not the Church.  It wouldn't be good for Asmodeanism."

"Do you believe you already understand why not?"

"It would teach Cheliax's leaders the habits of peasants, drudgery and idiocy and mindless obedience. I am not persuaded that serves the state, let alone the Church. I think people are best ruled by their superiors, actually, and it's not all in the blood."

"They tried sending noble children to the Worldwound, back when.  It was an obvious enough idea for preventing Chelish nobility from going the way of the weak, useless fops in other countries."

"Problem is, this place doesn't kill noble children.  It breaks them, in a way that even True Resurrection and Greater Restoration can't fix."

"To be specific, it breaks their pride."

"Pride has always been the one of our Lord's domains that I've understood the least.  My specialty among our Lord's concerns is tyranny, and that alone."

"I genuinely don't understand what He sees in people like you.  Never have.  Always seemed to me like I could eat a pile of raw meat and vomit a more useful tyrant than most Chelish nobles."

"One thing I'm sure of, though.  Whatever it is that the likes of you possess, it's not real pride.  Not what our Lord really wishes mortals were like, just some seed or shadow.  I can't imagine that a proper devil reshaped to our Lord's will could have their pride broken by the Worldwound."

"But then, not every child of nobility has their pride irrevocably broken by the Worldwound, among the ones who do get sent there, punished or cast away.  The vast majority of them, yes, but not all."

"Maybe you'd be one of the ones whose pride the Worldwound couldn't break.  No more than it could break a devil reforged in Hell to our Lord's true will."

"Can you guess how the Worldwound breaks children with false pride, child?"

"The living conditions are miserable, and everyone around you is a peasant, and even if they're impressed at first they stop being so, if you can't actually hurt them, and then you pick up the habits of peasants," like I said, "and end up no better than other people."

She wouldn't dream of correcting a priest about theology but she thinks that if you think of it as 'pride' you already have a problem. The thing you want is to be superior to other people. Not smarter than them, necessarily, or richer than them, not necessarily possessed with authority over them, just worth more than them. She is worth more than other people; pride is just knowing it.

"Even the noble children of Cheliax, as far beneath Hell's standards as they fall, are not that weak in their pride."

"The Worldwound breaks pride by being real.  Run into a superior force of demons, you've got to flee, doesn't matter what arguments you invent for why they're beneath you, they don't care.  They don't argue with you and win, they don't strut their contempt as they ignore you, they're just straightforwardly trying to kill you."

"It's that lack of caring, that breaks the noble children.  Not the way that other people make a point out of ignoring them.  The way the world around them doesn't notice their existence on a fundamental level.  The demons don't give a shit, the cold doesn't give a shit, the work shifts don't give a shit.  You can survive them, but you've got to change to survive them on their terms."

"Learning to survive at the Worldwound is like waking out of a dream, Lady Avaricia.  Like seeing through an illusion."

"And for most noble children, it turns out their pride was just part of that dream."

"Can we send my sister there?"

For all that he reacts, you could get the impression that she tried speaking to something that doesn't care about her existence at all, like the cold that her senses tell her is freezing her to the bone.

"You understand why I'm taking my valuable time to tell you all this, kid?"

I, too, am surrounded by peasants, and a situation that I can't command to be less annoying. 

"I assume you'd like me to make a more interesting mistake than that, because it'll be useful to your project if I learn to be commanded by peasants without becoming one."

"Project Lawful is far more lethal and unforgiving than the Worldwound.  One accidental word that gets Keltham looking in the wrong direction is as deadly to Cheliax's interests as a full Worldwound breach, except more irreparable, because we can't just teleport in the army to fight it back."

"That deadly stray word doesn't look as lethal as a five-story fire-spitting demon.  That's a problem."

"I don't give a flying fuck about whether you make it out with your pride intact.  The moment your mother handed you over to Project Lawful, your usefulness to the Church as a proud heir to Girona County was finished.  You come out of this as a Duchess, or you end up as a heretical future paving stone."

"Wake up, kid.  Keep your pride in the process, lose it, whatever, the Church no longer gives a shit.  Seemed like a priest ought to tell you that, since maybe you'd been told differently, at some point."

This really does not seem like the kind of lecture one argues with. She waits to see if he has more to say.