....All right, fine, that would probably work. In principle. 

The logistics would have to be so heavily overdetermined, to get past the bad-luck-interference, and it would matter more than anything else has ever mattered in mortal history that he got it right on the first try, because yes, the thing he's thinking of right now is making a god, one that is as much like himself as a Velgarth god can be, and the stakes are absurdly high, and it doesn't even feel real yet, and his body is trying to get started on a panic-reaction about the concept of it anyway, which he steps on as hard as he can because he has, like, thirty seconds left, and needs to finish checking some mental math. 

He really doesn't like that math! He wishes he could hand it back to the universe and demand that it go think about its mistakes and then give him better math. 

He thinks he has it right within an order of magnitude, though. No, he's a lot more sure than that; the unknown factor is Carissa, and that's enough of an unknown to pin quite a lot of hope on... He needs to find out as much as possible about the details of her plan in Golarion, and the details of the guesses she made about Keltham's plan, and there has to be a better way, hastohastohasto the current state of the world is unacceptable but so is that math– 

Except that he still has a few seconds left on Owl's Wisdom, and so his mind catches that thought, and holds it up to the light, and it's an ugly answer but it's not, really, surprising, that he already knows what decision he would make. He can tell himself that it makes a difference, if he can get them back later, but he would do it anyway. 

He gives Carissa an anguished look, and then the Owl's Wisdom runs out; he can still, mostly, hold all the insights and patterns-he-recognized and theories and numbers in his head, but his mind is no longer relentlessly generating them at top speed, and also he's incredibly exhausted, and on top of all the agonizing realizations, the strain against his compulsions is really starting to hurt. 

Well, that doesn't look like someone who had some nice epiphanies about how much good he's done in his life.

He can collapse and have feelings later. 

"I would like to take five to ten minutes and write down some things," Altarrin says, his voice mostly level. "Then I will give back your headband, and - I will have a great deal to explain. In the meantime do you need anything." 

To go home and have Keltham hug me and tell me he won't let me die.

"No."

The compulsions object more strongly to him writing things down than they did to just thinking, and he's running lower on mental reserves to handle it graceful, in a way that's more about his incredibly unsettled emotions than having enough working memory to step around it. Usually he doesn't have problems like this at all; he can construe 'loyalty to the Emperor' narrowly and 'loyalty to the Empire' broadly, and 'loyalty to the Empire' supercedes loyalty to the Emperor in his person (though during his absence and his frustrating sojourn at court as Shakari, it had inevitably flipped the other way, and he had to burn years of political capital on getting it changed back without making it obvious that this was his agenda.)

As it is, he's - having trouble accessing a headspace where the Empire feels like anything other than a mistake. Which, it turns out, makes it much harder to calmly write about plans to fight-or-negotiate-with-or-both the gods while framing this as fundamentally loyal to the Empire's interests. 

He has to do a lot of circumlocution and his notes are more scattered and disorganized than he would prefer; he probably couldn't do it at all without the headband, but he is slightly worried about whether these notes will still even make sense to his diminished self. 

It might not be a disaster if he has to wait until tomorrow when Carissa can cast both enhancement spells on him, or later when she can make him a headband of his own. He actually feels much less time sensitivity around Carissa's safety, now. She knows how to be predictable and legible and thus safe to the Empire, which he suspects means she won't start showing up as a threat in the gods' Foresight until and unless she changes those intentions and actually lets herself think again, the way she must have when she had her own set of awful realizations.

(The awkward part is that he needs her help, and asking for it - trying to ally with her at all - is almost inevitably going to put her in much more danger...) 

Altarrin continues to look vaguely distressed while he's taking notes. After exactly ten minutes - he's not quite done but he gave his word - he returns the headband to Carissa. 

(It doesn't actually feel much like dying. More reminiscent of the next awakening that comes after dying.) 

He doesn't say anything at first, because he has a pounding headache and putting his thoughts into words seems to be temporarily offline. 

The obvious guess is that his loyalty-compulsions are in fact a problem. She can Dispel them, probably, but she doubts she can dispel them while he's awake and can stop her, and she doubts she can ask his permission; any competent geas like that would prohibit permitting its modification. 

"My lord," she says. "If you will, I'd stay the night, and we can speak - and you can borrow the headband again - in the morning when we've both rested" and I can prepare Dispel Magic.

This is somehow not the response Altarrin was expecting, but since he has no ability to read her thoughts, and currently limited ability to think his own thoughts, he isn't managing to parse why. 

"That - sounds wise." Though he's not sure how he is possibly going to succeed at sleeping. "Should - say a few things. First." 

Actually, it's tempting to ask her if she has her own spell to read his mind, that sounds vastly easier than explaining out loud, but there are way too many unknowns for it to be a good idea. He doesn't, in fact, fully trust her. He just doesn't see a better option than working toward trust with her because the alternative is murdering somewhere between five and five hundred million people for power he's not thinking that thought right now it's too hard to reconcile with protecting the Empire. The second problem is that, if he's right, she is currently as safe as anyone else in his Empire - safer than the Emperor - and she's particularly thoroughly safe from any kind of god-nudged human enemy action for tonight if she stays in his rooms. But if she learns what he knows in the wrong order, and when he's not in a good state to talk her through the rest of it, and she starts making her own plans and forming intentions, maybe with the Owl's Wisdom spell, she did prepare it multiple times - 

- then it's not impossible she might alarm the gods enough that They would expend absurd quantities of divine coincidence-nudging to collapse the roof on their heads. Or something. Which is probably all right, she's hard to injure and he has well-honed reflexes, but he's also not at his best, and it's stupid to notice that something is a survival risk and do it anyway. 

Focus. 

"...I realize that our - local problems, with afterlives and - gods - may be - more pervasive, and less tractable, than I had hoped. But - less time sensitive, I think. I understand if you prefer not to take my word for it but I am much less worried about your safety in the short term." 

(He says it without making eye contact, with his expression and the way he's holding his body sort of hinting that his mind is not really in the room with her.) 

This isn't really him, on her current best guess of the situation; it's whatever shape he had to take to not break the loyalty-compulsions. She has sympathy for that, but it's not worth talking to, really. "I understand. We don't need to make long-term plans now. I'll stay here with you, and we'll rest, and tomorrow you can tell me whatever you think I ought to know."

He can tell that she isn't really listening, or isn't taking his words at face value - which, to be fair, he was expecting based on how she was thinking before and also just on her incentives and information state, obviously she doesn't trust him.

Something feels different about this, though. He's not succeeding at pinning down the edges of that confusion - it's kind of awful, actually, knowing that he could have done that easily with Owl's Wisdom in place, and now he can only see the bare fact that he should be doing that and is failing to - 

- he is, realistically, too tired to figure out what's going on with Carissa, let alone to navigate the upcoming conversation.

"That makes sense. Do you - need anything else to be comfortable here, if you are staying the night?" He vaguely remembers that her Ring of Sustenance partially replaces sleep. "If you sleep less than me, there are books I can offer you - not as large a selection without leaving the bedroom, if you do want to walk around the rest of my suite that is almost certainly safe but it would be safer in the long run if you - make it look as though we did more physically intimate activities here than we in fact did." 

"Understood. Do you want me injured? In Cheliax no one would think much of it if I wasn't, but we have better healing."

That...would probably be more informative or useful if he were less exhausted and had access to a Thoughtsenser relaying. Altarrin still makes a mental note, for background on Cheliax. 

"No - the general perception of anyone spying on my personal quarters is that I am not - at least not consistently - interested in that sort of thing in the bedroom, so it would not be suspicious." 

"Then I will have no trouble in making use of my time when I wake, and will not trouble you."

Altarrin still feels worried that– ...but it's not going to be helpful, what he wants - the implicit goal that still feels unsatisfied - is for Carissa to feel that she will not be in danger based on her thoughts, and that she is among allies, neither of which are even straightforwardly true. 

He tiredly points out where she can get herself water (and more wine if she wants it, for some reason, though that would be surprising), and the attached lavatory, which includes a bathtub with running hot water, and his bookshelf. 

His room does only have one bed. It's very large and this won't be the first time that one of his 'guests' has stayed the night and he's used to it. 

...And he's desperately curious what Carissa is thinking, but she probably isn't going to start thinking it while he's still awake and interacting with her, and - in fact one of his realizations was that it's loadbearing, for her, to feel sufficiently confident that her thoughts aren't being read. So hopefully she has some way of checking that he's asleep and confirming the thoroughness of his shielding, and....he'll find out in the morning what she concluded. 

He finds the energy to change into his nightclothes (without any sign of self-consciousness). "Good night," he tells her, and settles himself on his side of the enormous bed. 

Does he sleep under magical protections that'll interfere with Dispelling his compulsions.

...Yeah, definitely.

His native shielding apparently never goes down even in his sleep. To Detect Magic, it looks like it wouldn't completely block a Dispel Magic, but might interfere.

He's also wearing, like, six different talismans, mostly as various kinds of simple jewelry. They provide multiple partially-overlapping protective effects that, between them, are going to thoroughly block most kinds of magical effect from reaching him; a 9th-circle spell might have enough raw power to brute-force its way past his shields, but a Dispel Magic won't. 

Well, this is going to be inconvenient. 

....sleep first, figure out whether she has any route to accomplishing this goal in the morning.

Altarrin will still be asleep by the time Carissa wakes up; he lacks the benefit of a Ring of Sustenance, and usually sleeps about seven hours a night, but he's actually slept very little in the last 36 hours, and has just pushed his mind much harder than he usually does. 

His sleep is not untroubled; he's tired enough not to fully wake up, but he's restless. 

With the benefit of sleep this intractable-seeming problem indeed seems much less complicated. 

She prepares her spells with the goal in mind of potentially assassinating the Emperor of the Eastern Empire. Better to be prepared than unprepared, and you don't need a very high probability of that to want to prepare for it. She takes some extra hours about it, because she can't help trying for fifth yet again, but in the end settles for a good array of spells useful for her goals.

When Altarrin wakes she'll be unsuspiciously in a corner, reading more history books.

He wakes up - instantly checks all of his surroundings with mage-sight - and through sufficiently-accumulated habit, doesn't react violently to another person being near him. He trusts his past self to have been sufficiently paranoid and cautious about who he allowed into his bedroom at all, and after that, whether he was comfortable actually falling asleep in their presence.

It takes a second or two more to re-orient and remember who, exactly, he invited to his suite last night, and why he let her stay the night - 

- it is overall not a very happy set of realizations to wake up to. 

Doesn't matter. 

His mind is working better, now, but he stirs and yawns and stretches first, before actually addressing Carissa.

(And wishes he could read her mind, right now he feels half-blind without that, but he can't reliably slip a Thoughtsenser past her magical perceptions and general paranoia, and - that's not the shape of interaction he's wanting to aim toward with her, anyway.) 

Carissa is so innocent and not dangerous at all. Just reading a book, over here.

Altarrin sits up. 

(She's doing something right now that - isn't quite being in the room with him, and/or isn't quite letting herself have her own thoughts and goals - but it's different at least from what she was doing last night. He thinks.) 

(It's a little frustrating how the Owl's Wisdom spell kicked in and made him suddenly notice all his mistakes and feel stupid, and yet now that it's worn off, instead of rolling all that back, he just feels even stupider.) 

"...Right. Do you– is there anything you need, before we continue the conversation that we left off last night?"