"It's allowed," Abrogail murmurs.  She is walking through corridors of the palace in Egorian, swiftly, and there is no one visibly to witness them; these corridors have all been cleared.  "Rest, rest, rest, if you faint in this moment that is fine.  Sometime I'll tell you of how I reached the sixth circle of sorcery before I executed my compact with Asmodeus; it was much like this, but harsher.  I needed to grow faster, so I traveled to Hell directly for it.  You will not be broken, when you wake; something like this cannot break you."

"you - this - to make me stronger -" 

And then trying to hold everything together, make sense of it, even hear it, is too much, and she closes her eyes, and her sobbing trails off as she sleeps.

Nobody's going to interrupt her if she wants to sleep for a While.

When Carissa Sevar wakes, she'll be in that same aftercare chamber in which she was trapped the last time she was being forced to take her time and recover, white walls with green vines climbing them to relieve the whiteness, in a soft bed with clean sheets and a rather large tray of sweet things set out beside her, and some more substantive foods wrapped in preservation-spells.

Her spellbook is there, and a resource-spellbook from which fifth-circle spells might be attempted.  Also gold, silver, steel, gems, mithril, and what would have been a few thousand gp worth of spellsilver before Project Lawful began and is now less costly than that.  If she wants to do a little idle crafting.

Also the deed and title formally declaring her a Para-Baroness of Cheliax.

She cries, and eats, and cries, and pets the spellsilver but does not actually try to make anything with it, and tries to estimate how long it's been from how much her hair and nails have grown. Perhaps it's been a month. She thinks it hasn't been two. 

She falls asleep again. 

She wakes up screaming; her voice is croaky and weak and barely there. She cries, and eats more sweet things, and intends wholeheartedly to take the fifth-circle spellbook and try it but falls asleep again before she does.

Some time later she succeeds at determining that she's not, quite, fifth circle. 

She's close. She can feel how close she is, she can feel the spell all-but-come-together in her fingers, she can feel that magic moves more readily for her than it did when she first reached fourth, or even when she finished the geas earrings, or even when she started this punishment. 

It takes her a full several hours to work up the wiill to stick a note under the door asking if she can go back, as she has not yet succeeded. 

Abrogail Thrune will return to her, then.

"You're an utterly ridiculous woman, do you know that?" she says without heat.  "Even I did not try to go back to Hell when my will at last failed, there; not even to be ninth-circle after my compact."

....why not, Carissa thinks immediately, though she does restrain herself from saying it.

"Because it was actually that bad.  And because I knew my own limits, and that to test those limits was to risk myself and my intended rulership of Cheliax.  Cheliax needed me to ascend the throne much more than Cheliax needed me to be ninth-circle when I did."

"You aren't quite that important, but you're getting there.  You could go back, Carissa, without breaking, but Cheliax can't spare you that long, not even for your fifth circle.  When things have quieted, eventually, we'll send you off on a proper adventure; with due incentives around success and failure, since you need hardly fear death."

There's a blankness where several of Carissa's normal emotional responses to that would be. "I understand," she says quietly. "You - think I wasn't entirely in error, then, in the approach to Project Lawful?" It'd become a fixed point, in the worries/hallucinations, that since that had failed she would not be allowed to try anything like it again.

"I would have told you so, but I worried you'd find something else to fret about instead, in that mental state.  Your next choice might not have been something where I could tell you definitively afterwards to stop being silly, or refuted it by simple deed.  It is better to be able to clearly dismiss something your mind circles around, like that, for so long and under that much stress."

Is Abrogail justifying herself to her slave? No, she wouldn't feel the need to . It's something else. 

"I will stop being silly," she says. "I - if we aren't at war with Osirion already, if it doesn't look hopeless - well, then, I think I can outplay Keltham, so long as we have a plan for him to not explode the whole country."

"You need to learn how to wield pain as I do, Carissa, to produce true Keepers out of Cheliax."

"And no, you do not get a situation report until you're more recovered than this."

"Well, too late, I've inferred already that Keltham hasn't blown up Cheliax."

Abrogail flicks her in the forehead, what somebody in another country might consider painfully.  "I will punish you for that insolence, dear.  Eventually."

"My time here is more limited than I'd like.  The war with Nidal is entering its last days, with most of its territory already consumed by us, and you would not believe how much administrative labor is associated with gaining territory instead of losing it like my uncle did.  I don't predict you want to be a landed Baroness, but you could be one did you wish."

"Depends who under, I think, and whether they'll let me do ilani experiments."

"The Crown, in this case.  I'm reserving some appropriately Duchy-sized chunks of Nidal in case I want to award them, in due time, to deserving souls who are not that deserving yet."

"Then I think I would like that, though it's hard to say for sure, in the absence of a situation report."

"You understand that you won't actually have time to run your Barony while managing Project Lawful, and that the best person that can be found to manage it for you, in your stead, will be horrifically incompetent as you see it?"

“I am starting to get the sense that that fact explains the entire world and I’d better get used to working with it.”

Sevar, unfortunately, still has no idea.

 She takes a lot of naps and has a lot of nightmares. She doesn't need to eat, but she does anyway, for the uncommon sensation of a taste in her mouth that isn't blood. 

Her voice comes back. The crying gets more sporadic. At about the same time her common sense comes back and she seriously questions why she spoke that way to Her Infernal Majestrix.

She tries the door, after it's been five days, mostly just out of curiosity.

It opens.  A Security outside immediately comes to attention.  Possibly he's terrified, but if so, he's good enough at his job that it's hard to be certain.

Oh no before she made this choice she should have had a plan for what she was going to do. She can't just close the door and go back in her room, she'll look like an idiot. 

"Accompany me," she says confidently, and strides off in a randomly chosen direction.

He catches her wrist, but gently.  "Queen's orders, there's limited places you can go and I must accompany you.  Where are you headed?"