You don't become a wizard if you have trouble falling asleep. 

It's a very fundamental constraint. Sometimes you'll be in a besieged fortress in the far north, where the sun lingers for months in the sky, and the air will never quiet with the screams of the dying and the roars of explosions, and you can sleep and regain your spells and continue being useful, or you cannot, and the second category doesn't live long. 

Carissa does not remember ever having had trouble falling asleep, at the Worldwound, but she's having trouble now. 

 

She's been lying here with her eyes closed for nearly two hours, trying not to think too much, trying to save for the morning all the problems she hasn't solved. It's not really working. Not that she's successfully thinking; she's just unsuccessfully not-thinking, lying here shortcircuiting all her thoughts one by one but not getting any closer to sleep. She's obviously not going to make further progress on figuring out how the project should proceed from here without some kind of reset, and yet she can't pry her thoughts off for long enough to even slightly rest. 

 

 

 

She does have an Owl's Wisdom left.

 

Eventually, in exasperation and vague awareness that the effect of this is almost definitely not going to be 'a cure for her insomnia', she traces her fingers near-imperceptibly against her thigh, and casts it. 

 

Still without opening her eyes, Carissa Sevar takes a deep breath and thinks.

The first immediately obvious thought is that she hasn't been doing that. Thinking, that is. She's been - managing the project, thinking down all the paths that look likely to immediately bring it down in flames, revisiting Hell's orders and checking whether she seems to be making progress on them, entertaining and rejecting new bits of Asmodean theology, keeping track of all the pieces she knows of on the board and the possibility of pieces she doesn't. 

This feels different from that, and not because she's wiser; this is a motion she could have taken at any time in the last month, and didn't, because - 

- why?

Does she on some level think that Ione is right, that the truth is something she cannot bear up under, that she'll shatter like Peranza and throw everything away at once for nothing at all? That would be a reason not to think, if she believed that. It'd be a reason not to think now, either, since that's - still a risk. More of a risk, even. It was true yesterday that she was not in danger unless she betrayed Cheliax outright, that if she merely went up in flames they would try to repair her. They have less reason to do that now. If the Security observing her now -

- a thought she wouldn't have had yesterday, a dangerous thought, but -

- are they reading her mind right now? She's fourth circle, conventionally she'd be expected to detect an attempted divination nearly half the time, against Security. They could have someone more powerful on it, of course, harder to detect, but if Cheliax wants to read her without her noticing she's not a softer target than Keltham, and they had him mindread only rarely, as a significant commitment of resources. And it's the dead of night and for the last several hours she's been uninterestingly attempting to sleep.

Suddenly it's unbearable. She needs to think. She can be judged for the resolution of those thoughts, obviously, but she can't be judged for all their intermediate steps or they won't go anywhere, they'll wilt under surveillance. It was one of the things Abrogail wanted to teach her, to think even when her superiors were listening, and she'd thought she'd gotten better at it, but - but now it's like there's a wall in front of her and she can feel herself flinching away from scaling it. 

The Owl's Wisdom only lasts eight minutes. There is no point in wasting some of them on agonizing over a decision; she may as well make it right this second.  The probability that they're reading her mind seems low, less than one in twenty.  She is, actually, with a vague lurching sense this is risking more than she's ever risked, willing to condemn that Carissa so all the other ones can scale that wall. And as soon as she thinks that she's climbed it, in her head, and is looking out at all the thoughts she's never dared to think.

She doesn't have time to revel in it. She needs to figure out what she's trying to accomplish, what she's Chosen to accomplish, what is possible to accomplish from here, so she can get it done.

- is she chosen by Asmodeus? What actual probability would she place, between being of Asmodeus's choosing and being someone else's, with Irori as the likeliest candidate? It.....seems like she did not, in fact, possess the skills necessary to run the conspiracy, which is some argument against Asmodeus having chosen her, though not a very powerful one since He wasn't stipulated to have a stunningly clear understanding of human nature anyway - but surely Asmodeus's interventions cannot have been pointed at this. This is a failure, a catastrophic one. She isn't sure what her mistake is - willfully turns herself away from trying to find it now, there'll be time for that later -

Does it serve someone else instead? Presumably Asmodeus would not have, even for a high price, put the selection of another god in power over His project. Though He could have been too confused to have a guess about whether she'd do better or worse than anyone else, it could've been part of the tangled web of commitments that brought Keltham here and brought Cayden Cailean on board -

- she can sense already that she's turning her mind in the wrong direction, thinking about questions Owl's Wisdom will help her with only a little, not-thinking about the ones right in front of her. Even knowing that, even making that explicit in front of her, it still takes additional effort, to make herself drop the what-do-the-gods-want question.

What's the thing she's looking away from.

 

(Like opening your eyes to stare directly at the sun...)

If humanity could overthrow Asmodeus they obviously should. She was using this fact about the world to make predictions already, on some level, even though actually thinking it feels like falling off a cliff she can never, ever climb back up. It is in the interests of Asmodeus to enslave humans; it is not in the interests of humans to be Asmodeus's slaves. It is worse for them than many of their other options; of slaveowners, even assuming the rest of the gods are precisely that, Asmodeus enjoys tyranny, enjoys cruelty, enjoys subservience. A master who only wanted the products of their slaves' work would be kinder. Carissa, when she only wants the products of her slaves' work, is kinder. 

A month ago Carissa believed that Asmodeus would conquer all those other gods. Even narrowing down to the worlds where that wasn't a lie all along, Keltham changed it. Now, whichever power wields Keltham will win everything. She knew that. She said it aloud, in strategy discussions - that if Keltham made it to Osirion and Cheliax wasn't able to wipe it and him out, then Cheliax would be defeated. Keltham thought that Civilization could perhaps directly win a war with Zon-Kuthon. Now, there's no question in her mind, he's planning for Civilization to go to war with Asmodeus. 

 

Asmodeus might win.

Asmodeus is not obviously going to win. Abadar, too, is an ancient god. And Irori has something to do with this, she doesn't really actually believe that Asmodeus warned her off him just because he was a good example of what not to be. And Nethys sees everything, and intervened here, and it probably wasn't because He really likes explosions, but because He really likes Civilization -

- she's racing away down a single thread of possibility and she doesn't have time for that. She has eight minutes. Seven, now. Seven minutes to become a Keeper become Carissa, figure out what she wants and what she has to do to get it.

Whose side is she on? 

Well, who's the winning side?

If Civilization can beat Asmodeus 99% of the time, then Carissa wants to be with Civilization and not Asmodeus, even assuming Asmodeus destroys her in the worlds where Civilization loses. If Civilization can beat Asmodeus 1% of the time, then she was on the right track before and wants to be an archdevil. Chase those probabilities down to the middle, figure out in what range 'can Civilization beat Asmodeus' produces a change of plans -

If Civilization can beat Asmodeus 40% of the time she does not want to throw in with Civilization. That's too many worlds in which - she's destroyed, for one thing, one thing she cares about a great deal, but also where Hell goes on existing as it is. This should be reassuring, since it's (probably, tentatively) a conclusion she's on the right side after all, but something feels strange about it - 

- and one of the many directions in which her thoughts are simultaneously racing is suddenly highlighting itself as important - if Civilization can beat Asmodeus 40% of the time, and Civilization and Asmodeus both know it, they shouldn't fight. They should agree on an arrangement where they get what they want in proportion to how much they win. In a couple worlds they screw that up and one or the other or both gets destroyed -

- there's something terrifying and awful and not-Carissa, not part of the person-concept she thinks she's recklessly plunging towards,  about setting aside worlds like that, about being willing ever even in her own mind to think something like 'some worlds get destroyed' without pausing, but she's in a hurry right now -

- anyway, in a couple worlds they screw up, but mostly they settle. Mostly, a Civilization with the power to possibly-defeat Asmodeus at all makes Hell more Civilized to whatever degree it has the power to possibly-defeat Asmodeus, and that is, from Carissa's perspective, a good outcome from 'moves it slightly more Civilized' all the way up to 'reforms it entirely'. So unless she thinks the chance Civilization will defeat Asmodeus is very low, she sides with Civilization. 

...she does not think it's very low. Not with Abadar and Nethys and Irori and all the good gods favoring Civilization not to threaten Asmodeus but for their own reasons. A threat Asmodeus would ignore, a threat doesn't lend itself to the outcomes she wants, but Abadar wants Civilization for the sake of His own values and the good gods mostly will too, unless she's gotten herself very confused about what Good is in the course of lying about it constantly. 

So Carissa is presently on the side of this fight which she wants to be weaker; the side whose greater strength gets her less of what she wants. 

Six minutes. 

Like cresting another hill, or climbing another wall, bringing into view another vista of thoughts she had not been allowing herself to think.

Carissa Sevar does not actually personally like torturing people very much; she does not find it very fun to abuse them, or be cruel to them. She doesn't strongly prefer enslaving fire elementals to paying the fire elementals; when deciding whether to tax peasants to the brink of starvation she'd want to check if that even increases expected tax revenue in the long run. 

This is relevant to whether she's a good Asmodean. It's a character trait she's held at some distance, fretted about, vaguely intended to change, because she can't become a duke of Hell if she's not Asmodean enough. It's a character trait she has also, vaguely, on some level she certainly wasn't conscious of, taken pride in; she's practical, she's only evil because evil is pragmatic. There's a sense in which some part of her is tracking whether she is sympathetic, to herself if no one else, a sense in which she's not Zon-Kuthon, and is glad she's not Zon-Kuthon, because it's okay to be Carissa and not okay to be Zon-Kuthon. 

This fact about her is barely relevant to whether she is Lawful Evil, which she definitely, unambiguously is. She harmed people ruthlessly and without thought, carefully blanked their fates out from her calculations about how to achieve her goals. She gave punishment orders while mostly fretting about the complexity of giving punishment orders. 

She condemned Peranza to be eternally tortured as an example to everyone else. She actually feels - something - about that, now that the whole thing fell apart a single week later.  She wouldn't have done it if she'd known the whole thing would fall apart a single week later. It does, actually, feel like too high a price to pay for a week. And she could have contrived to keep Peranza alive a little longer, if she'd had 'keep Peranza alive a little longer' in her goals, if she hadn't been careful not to. She doesn't want Peranza to be eternally tortured. She just ordered it. Because? 

- and her thoughts splinter -

- because it was going to happen anyway. Because she wanted to impress Abrogail. Because she was hurt and betrayed, by Peranza betraying them after she'd specifically tried to give them as many outs as possible not to do that. Because she was scared of this happening again. Because she'd said she would. -

- none of which, suddenly, feel at all like good reasons, except 'because she said she would', and she could have not said that. No one made her say it.

Keltham has probably had Peranza scried by now, he probably knows. Even if he could have forgiven everything else, he'll never forgive that, nor should he. It's - she has an intuition for Keltham - it's unforgiveable in a way most of the rest is only very very difficult to forgive. People should not end up worse off because they tried to help him. People ending up eternally tortured because they chose Civilization, tried to defect to it -

- he'll burn down all of Hell just for that. 

 

And I could have said that to Abrogail. Could have told him that for that reason they should not do it. And then it would not have been done. 

 

Five minutes.

Why didn't I? 

It wasn't even strategy, wasn't even a calculated decision that it in fact served their interests to send Peranza to Hell and hope Keltham never found out. It was that she had set to a blank wall, in her mind, every merciful or compassionate or anti-eternal-torture impulse, lest she be Ione, constantly insisting that it served the project not to hurt people. It'd damage her credibility. 

No, worse than that, actually. She thought that it might damage her credibility and then she never thought about it again. One thing to conclude that as an explicit calculation, to weigh it each time and dismiss the decision to speak up, each time. She didn't do that. She crossed off that area of thought as un-Asmodean and declined to think it.  Suddenly the fact that her thoughts were being read and very much used against her feels like a thin excuse; you've already lost, if you can't think. She should have tried, instead, thinking. 

She can feel tears welling behind her closed eyes. No. Unacceptable. They're much likelier to mindread her if she's doing anything of note rather than apparently sleeping. The grief and horror and - you could call it self-hatred but it feels far more comprehensive than that - 
 
- her self-recognition as someone whose stupidity and shortsightedness and cowardice caused irrevocable harm to everything she cared about, the realization that she is a failure by every criterion she might have thought to hold herself to, and that everything she did was bad, and that it would have been better if she'd just the instant she met Keltham stabbed them both -

- or, you know, let's not waste precious seconds down the incredibly stupid path of martyrdom fantasies, the instant she met Keltham gone to the Church of Iomedae, also stationed at the Worldwound, not a trivial trip but they'd have been protected by the treaty while they went -

- a thing that she wanted very badly to believe for the last month was that she had no choice, that everything was inevitable, but it wasn't inevitable at all. They'd have Dominated her the second they read her mind, fine - they were not reading her mind every second. At any time they weren't she could have killed herself, and Osirion would probably have resurrected her in ten minutes flat. 

 

Four minutes.

At the beginning, had she dared to look at Keltham and think the thought 'does this change Asmodeus's inevitable victory? since it obviously does, how do I in fact feel about Asmodeus's inevitable victory?' she could have won the war for Civilization. 

She didn't, because she was not the kind of person who had thoughts like that. She was the kind of person who smiled at him and took his hand and delivered him to the church and lied instinctively, impulsively, before she had any concept of alter-Cheliax, because she knew in her heart that the Hell they were all condemned to must not be looked at, must not be closely contemplated.

She does not like that person, that person who is her, that person who she feels she is looking at for the first time. She does not see any excuses for that person - or she sees them, but they're all weak, pathetic, insubstantial, the excuses you make for someone you dare not try to hold to the only standard that actually matters. Almost anyone more idealistic than her would have been maledicted long ago, sure. But someone with her same values, but slightly more awareness of them - slightly more ability to stop and catch fire when everything changed -
- that person could have done it, and so there's no excuse for not doing it, there's nothing sympathetic in it, there is not even the excuse that she was irretrievably condemned to Hell because she wasn't, there's no points for having required what in hindsight was plainly the combined Splendour of many of the most powerful people in Cheliax to manipulate -

 (- that thought links up with a distant thread of thought dropped earlier. The way Aspexia Rugatonn spoke of Irori, the way Subirachs did - is predicted, by it being Irori who was the reason Carissa could not sell her soul. It makes more sense of the last month than other theories do. She should have been sure sooner.)

Osirion knows that she has not sold her soul. Keltham must know, by now, what she is, what she did to him, how easily she could have done otherwise. He must hate her, and he must -

- be in so much pain -

- Keltham. Keltham Keltham Keltham and now it's only with tremendous force of will that she's keeping herself from sobbing. She loves him. She loved him. He did know, instantly, the magnitude of what it meant, that he was here, and he lit up delightedly, at the thought of mutual benefit, gains from trade, prosperity, sharing, all the things she tried to twist to dust in his hands because it'd serve Asmodeus. She loves him less, she think, than she did when he arrived, and it's because of what she made him, what she spent every waking minute with him sculpting him into. She saw something beautiful in him, something that ought to build a whole human civilization, and she tried to hollow it out and make all the beautiful parts of it feel futile to him so he'd consign himself to ruling over some cowed slaves instead. She's not sure if it was a stupid thing to try. She's not sure if it could never have succeeded. But it wasn't what she wanted, it wasn't what he deserved, it was a wrong to him far greater than murdering him would have been, it was a wrong enabled by the fact that she loved what she was destroying, and she did it, and basked in praise for doing it, and -

- he loved her too, he thought she was clever and ambitious and wanted to strengthen him, wanted to help him, he thought he had an ally, he would have overturned every stone in Golarion to find her petrified body, he would have ripped apart the world for her, and she took that, the only no-strings-attached gift anyone ever gave her, and used it to destroy him, to lie to him, to betray everything that mattered to him. She took the thing he was most afraid of, and did it to him; she took something he should have had really and honestly, and gave it to him poisoned.

Three minutes.

And a different, clearer part of her head:

It's not the kind of thing you can apologize for. It's not the kind of thing you can ever set right. It's the kind of thing that will be awful, always, forever. So what are we doing here? Why are we staring at this particular terrifying yawning hole? If we stare at it long enough maybe we'll decide we might as well just go be an eternally tortured paving stone along Peranza; that won't help either. Actually it'll probably hurt Keltham further, just slightly, if he scries and looks. Step over the yawning hole of horror. You did that; you can't undo it; it can't be forgiven; it'll never be okay. What are we doing next?

Sensible.

She can't do it, though. 

She can't step over it. She can't step away from it. Not - not after less than a minute of thinking about it. It does sure seem like the kind of thing that's unforgiveable, like Peranza that way, an awfulness that simply is always and forever at the core of everything Carissa has done - 

- but what if it's not. 

What if she fixes it. 

She admittedly cannot at all think how. But it seems like the kind of thing you ought to think about for at least a minute, even if you don't have much time before Owl's Wisdom wears off, even if a single excessively-tense breath could mean the end of your worthless meaningless awful life.

What if she owned Peranza's soul. Well, then that would fix it. She doesn't own Peranza's soul, and she doesn't have a way to get it, but sometimes it's better to start with a solution and then reason backwards, if the thing that feels impossible is the situation being solvable at all. 

If she owned Peranza's soul -
- not just Peranza's soul - 
- if she owned the souls of every person affiliated with Project Lawful, every person who could possibly now or at some future point be in Hell because of what was done to Keltham, and ensured that all of them had a nice Abadaran wonderful afterlife -

- well, seems like the kind of thing that might be forgivable, then. 

 

Two minutes. 

...what is this 'forgivable', what's it suddenly doing featuring prominently in her reasoning processes, what does it want and where did it come from. Carissa's self-concept is not that she wants to be forgivable. 

So what does she want?

To not have harmed Keltham; to have dealt with him fairly by his rules, where interacting with her is something he'd have done with full knowledge, where it left him better off, where it didn't harm him from any angles he wasn't expecting. For Keltham, thinking back on it, to be glad he landed on Carissa Sevar. 

Well that seems flagrantly, utterly, absurdly impossible, but it's better to have a specific impossible thing than a general pit of impossibility, maybe. 

What else does she want. 

For Civilization to exist and be credibly able to beat Asmodeus in a fight so he instead concedes and stops having Hell. Well. Stops having Hell the way it currently is. You could have a Hell that was all right, but it'd have to be very different. 

Okay, some tiny fragmented slightly hysterical fragment of thought says in a cheerful shrill voice, so, you buy everyone's souls in Hell and then you build Civilization and then Keltham is better off for having met you. Problem solved. Go do that.

She can't build Civilization. She isn't strong enough. She can't do it in Cheliax, because Cheliax can't do it; it'll be obvious at some point that the thing Cheliax is building inherently cannot possess Civilization's strengths. She could - speed up the project elsewhere, if any project elsewhere would have it, which it wouldn't, and if she had any way to get out, which she doesn't. 

- doesn't she? 

Now that she looks at it clearly it seems pretty likely that Irori purchased for her the option to leave. She doesn't even need all those plans about committing suicide; it is likely that 'permitted to travel outside Cheliax as if she sold her soul' is Asmodeus's communication of the fact Irori secured her right to leave. And anyway she could suicide, right now, and Keltham would raise her. Forgive her, no. Ever want to speak to her again, probably not. But raise her, and offer her an Atonement - 

- the thought of an Atonement is itself somehow sickening. She probably qualifies for one now, what with being so full of blinding grief and horror and regret that even though she'll definitely die if she cries she's having a hard time not doing it, but an Atonement wouldn't change anything except her alignment. It's not real. The problem with this situation is not that Carissa Sevar, who deserves it as comprehensively as a person can deserve it, will go to Hell.

- a different part of Carissa overrides that line of thought, which does not look productive. If atonement is useless, self-flagellation surely is too. Back to the more useful line of thought that prompted it: she can leave, if she wants, by dying. 

She doesn't want to leave. 

She wants to rip the universe out by the roots and replant it where it was supposed to be growing. Or at least think for another few seconds about whether there's some way to do it. 

The stupid thing is that she could probably have Peranza's soul, if it'd occurred to her a couple of days ago she might want to be able to play for it. She has options on the newer students; Peranza can't be worth that much anymore; she could perhaps have called in the favors to purchase it. Or sold her own soul.

 

Oh.

 

Well, there's a solution to her problems. She could sell her soul for the souls of all the other project members - no, because Hell knows Keltham has an option on it, and will exercise it, and also that she's worth a lot less now that the Project's collapsed - or even if they don't know that yet, Carissa does, and she's pretty sure devils have a sense specifically for whether you think you're getting one over on them, something more than just really high Sense Motive, some way to cheat -

 One minute.

Carissa now has two specific problems, which is better than having a single massive general problem. Of course, she also now has a minute left to think. Specific problem one, she's now totally an irretrievable heretic and that's going to have catastrophic effects as soon as someone notices. Specific problem two, her soul is no longer valuable enough she can sell it to redeem all her errors. These seem like problems that could in principle be solvable together, if she could think of some way to stop being an irretrievable heretic in the next minute, but that's, uh, not the direction her thoughts are currently pushing her in. She can't unwind what she's realized, and there's no Asmodeanism on the other side. 

 

 

And then the plan comes to her all at once, fully formed, and the only thing to do is -





That's when she's unceremoniously dropped underground in the catacombs of Galt 15 years earlier.