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. 

It was a productive day. She reviewed all of the ongoing projects, made some predictions, congratulated the people who had the best ones. Reviewed the Security reports on all the new people until she could at least recognize their faces. Went to Asmodia's room, even though she's not a crime scene investigator and wasn't going to find anything, and to the acid vats, even though she's not a crime scene investigator and wasn't going to find anything. Learned that her new minion had been cleared by Security as loyal and not enough of an idiot to be actively contemplating fucking up his second chance. 

Made a bit of spellsilver, for old time's sake. 

She didn't sleep last night. She stayed up all night finishing Pilar's headband. That should make it easier to sleep tonight, she's pretty sure, that's how sleep works.

She has not sat down and thought hard about.what Cayden Cailean wants, or about the work she's taking over from Asmodia, the work of explaining what it is to obey Asmodeus so that Aspexia can teach her successor who will almost definitely not be Subirachs. She's too tired, too unsettled, too uneasy; she should drink some tea tomorrow morning and then work on it, with a fresh mind, thinking about it because she desperately wants to know instead of because she's trying not to let her brain go somewhere else. 

Is that what she's doing?

She's been lying here with her eyes closed for nearly two hours, telling herself she'll solve those problems tomorrow. 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 anything important 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 hung, and not yet cast. 

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.

She's sad that Asmodia's gone. It was avoidable. She's sad that Maillol disappointed her. It was - well, it might have been avoidable. She's sad that she had to get pulled away before she hit fifth circle or for that matter sixth circle. 

Subirachs thought it'd be good for her, to come back to a disaster, to have to correct it with fire and lash. Subirachs was correct about that. It was good for her. She feels like she's grown more in the last day than in - well, most individual days, of the last four months, though it's had some really exceptional days.

She should try to make progress on Aspexia's problem-of-obedience-to-gods. It seems a good thing to set the new ilani on, if she has progress she can evaluate theirs against, and not if she doesn't. 

She looks for the next thought, and her mind comes up empty. That's all there was. Nothing else to think about. No heresies, no secret realizations lurking, no courageous defiance, not even a properly thorough failure analysis. She's made so much progress, on not being a muddle, on not being made almost entirely of pieces that she shoved under her surface. She's an Asmodean and she's respected and she's feared and there's nothing at all clawing its way towards the surface of her mind, tightly squirreled away from her self-awareness. There's nothing inside her that she's hiding from. 

No. No, that can't be right. That's not how people work. She can't have succeeded, at becoming someone who has nothing dangerous to her Asmodeanism hidden inside her. It just has to be hidden deeper. 

But trying to reach deeper turns up the same thing. She's not Carissa Sevar of four months ago, not a muddle full of desires and ambitions, who would at least, right now, be writhing with guilt over hurting people, fretting about whether that Security was somehow Neutral Evil actually, grieving over Keltham. She wasn't sure if all the work she was doing really did anything, and now here's an answer: it did. She's a much, much better Asmodean. There is less of her waiting to burst out from behind her walls than she imagined. 

....and where that should have been satisfying, it's actually not. Maybe that's the only real heresy left hidden inside her, that it feels terrible and wrong to realize how far she has come. 

She has eight minutes of Owl's Wisdom - less, now -- and that's not what she was hoping to find when she used them. But she can feel that the mental motion she's doing - keep looking, keep looking - isn't getting anywhere, so - so if she needs another angle, an angle she perhaps ill-advisedly pressed out of herself - she can't just try to look harder for heresies inside herself. 

Where do you keep important things, if you don't bury them?

All right, Carissa Sevar of four months ago, Carissa Sevar who was less ilani, more muddled, Carissa Sevar who'd gone less far down the road commanded - what is your assessment, here - what do you think -

The first immediately obvious thought is that she hasn't been doing that.

Thinking, that is.

She's been - managing the project, punishing the traitors, hurting people until they respect her, flirting with Abrogail, thinking down all the paths that look likely to immediately bring the project down in flames again, 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 four months while not actively being punished, 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.

They can, in fact, still trap her in a box and leave her making headbands. She wouldn't even have to be much less valuable than she is now, for that to be the thing to do with her; Pilar is right. Mostly you can't enslave people and get them to make you magic items, it's not the kind of work you can usefully get out of people with pain, but you can get it out of Carissa with pain. Abrogail knows that. 

Abrogail wouldn't do that to her. she knows she's an idiot about Abrogail and on principle she should assume that this is a deliberate thing Abrogail did on purpose. 

Anyway. 

That would explain the not-thinking, if she's worried she'll break and be useless.

She's not sure that's why. She kind of suspects that it's, instead, because when she looked at herself she wouldn't like what she saw. An obvious part, a necessary part, of becoming a slave of Asmodeus instead of a person; people don't tend to want to be slaves of Asmodeus. You have to hit them from exactly the right angle. Why dwell on it? 

And then there's the fact that Abrogail will read it, and, huh, maybe that's doing something strange to her thoughts, possibly. 

. - in hindsight maybe actually -

-the processes that do their work coming up with Carissa thoughts have been working diligently in the knowledge that Abrogail reads her thought transcripts.

Mostly this has served to her benefit - when she thinks something before Maillol and Subirachs, she says it, to be corrected faster if it's wrong. And she has been warned against stuffing things into the back of your mind rather than letting them be refuted, so she dragged them all out, to be refuted, until they stopped appearing at all. She is impudent, before the Queen, and she is tolerated because Abrogail can see her own handiwork, that taught Carissa to feel things, and to offer them up where Abrogail could enjoy them and, if necessary, punish them. 

- that's not quite a right frame, actually, but there's something to it, mark it as half-wrong and keep following it -

Carissa started drawing out her thoughts and speaking them aloud, and she became freer and more ambitious and more happy and more alive -

- and some of her thoughts went away, and her mind is silent, when she looks for the things it is hiding.