"Neither of us thought of it."

"Are there any questions I should be asking that would illuminate more of the causality here?  Close your eyes and think before you speak, then tell me that you sincerely tried to do so."

She thinks as she is bidden.

"Why Snack Service didn't stop us from doing that.  It stopped other mistakes that would've injured your interests."

Keltham doesn't say anything to that; perhaps it's a question that somebody at INT 29 would have considered long since, if at WIS 27 they dared to think of it at all, thought their own thoughts controlled sufficiently for it.

"Describe the entire procedure used to generate my children in as much detail as you remember.  Maybe there's some security flaw in your randomization, transparent to me but not to you.  I am still trying to think of a way out of this."

She does, in every last bit of possibly-relevant detail she can remember, all of it, all of it.

"You evoked your disaster too well, Abrogail Thrune.  I have no marginal hopes left; the matter is simple enough that I would have seen it already if I was to see it at all."

"Is there anything else you'd say to me before I destroy Cheliax?"

"Please don't?" she says, and permits her voice to crack, as is real.  "I beg you?"

There are tears that she lets come to her eyes, as she hasn't allowed forth since she wept that earlier time in Hell, just in case it's enough to satisfy Keltham just in case just in case -

"Can you say without the devil contradicting you that you care about one single person there who's about to die, rather than the effects on yourself if they do?  Call it curiosity."

"No single person there, but the country of Cheliax - is my own child."

"Symmetrical tragedies are prettier."

"What would dath ilan think of this?"  She asks because she truly does not know, and therefore it's a path that might be real.

"That I should do what I've decided to do, if I'm going to do it, and not tell it to you, or show it to you, or watch you hurt about it."

"Have I taught you hate, then?"

"All of it that I now know."

"Spend it on me, who did you the harm, and do not slay my child, I beg you, buy me from Hell as Cheliax's ransom, I can be made to hurt and serve you in ways far more satisfying than watching a country just die."

"You hurt me in too stupid a way for that, Abrogail Thrune.  This isn't the ending where you join my harem.  You didn't earn that one.  It's your ending where you betrayed Asmodeus and got removed from power, and if there's anyone to rescue you from Hell's deserts it won't be me."

"You are displaying a very great and tyrannical dominance, and Evil, for someone who isn't fated to -"

"A boy can learn hate, being stung of a wasp.  He can learn the desire to pull the wings off that wasp, wish to watch it writhe on the ground while it dies."

"It's not the same feeling as wanting to fuck that wasp, or have any kind of extended relationship with it, even the kind where you torture it for longer.  It's just a wasp, in the end."

Keltham turns the mirror that he holds, then, again, to show Cheliax against the curve of Golarion.

"YOU WILL LOSE CARISSA FOREVER IF YOU DO THIS!  SHE WON'T EVER FORGIVE YOU, YOU WILL NEVER BE REUNITED!"

"Already lost her," says Keltham's voice, "but you did ruin a lot of Carissa's further work persuading me into not going down this road, so long as it turned out I didn't have children."

"I suggest, Hell, that you not ruin this one too badly in the next few weeks.  Sevar is busy now, but when her future self has a moment She may wish to buy Her own conversation on this topic, and She'll pay less if the conversation is just screaming and the breaking is already done."

"As for me, I'm finished."

There are lights appearing in the territory of Cheliax, and expanding, one by one.  The light that appeared over Egorian was first, and brightest.

She screams with everything she has, for the same reason that anything being tortured screams like that, not just because it has no choice, but because it has the tiny shred of hope that if it screams loudly enough the torture will hear and stop.

When there are no lights left in Cheliax and no green either, only a great patch of smoke-cloud slowly starting to spread out from its borders, the scry ends.

She stopped screaming when the last of Cheliax had been scoured with white light and orange fire, for there was no hope left then that Keltham would be satisfied one second sooner.

In the presence of Keltham her minders were contemptuous and beyond that unreadable; devils don't beg, even if you have something they want very dearly, and devils don't weep, even as everything they have ever worked for turns to ash before their eyes. 

In his absence Abrogail's custodian turns on her with a fury that quite plainly won't be satisfied with any amount of torture. "Anything else to say while you can speak, contemptible pathetic thing who manages through sheer incompetence and disobedience to serve Asmodeus's enemies a thousand times better than you ever served Asmodeus?"

There is nothing.