She can't even speak.

"Well, I am sorry.  I don't like pulling anybody off a way that they chose for themselves, even if some might call it a favor, if they didn't ask Me to do them any favors.  I'm not a god of compacts, and I'm sorry about putting you in a position where you'd get offered something you wanted enough to trade all the rest of that away.  I am not a god of redemption, and I regret doing that to you."

It's strange, how much the presence of Cayden Cailean impacts her less, now, than did the presence of Dispater.  Pilar has now intuited something of the way of gods, from her uneasy dreams when she sleeps; she can guess that no casual splinter of a deity could stand before her bodily manifested, and speak to her in an ordinary tongue.  She knows this seeming man must be, if not all of the true Cayden, a very large chunk of Him.

Cayden Cailean feels no less like a god, to Pilar, than that time she felt Dispater direct His ire at Snack Service.  And yet she is not moved, or moved but too little.  In Dis then she felt like a stone in a hurricane wind, caught in its full force but too heavy to blow away or even tip over.  Now she simply feels like - like the god Cayden Cailean, directly manifested within Elysium in nearly the fullness of His power - is a thing that is large but not overawing, like a castle or a mountain.  You can look at a castle and know it's larger than you, without feeling that you have to address it respectfully.  Even if Cayden Cailean bent His full anger towards her, Pilar can somehow feel, she would be able to withstand it.

"I suppose I can't say," Pilar says, because at Splendour 26 it takes a lot to make you unable to talk, "that I never asked for this.  But I never wanted to end up like this, even if I asked for it after you killed my family and told me to become a Power if I wanted them back.  The old Pilar would have screamed and fled, if you'd told her that she'd end up as an eighth-circle caster talking disrespectfully to a god.  How much is really left of the person I used to be, at this point?"

"Sounds like more of a moral question than a factual one, if you don't already know the answer based on self-observation.  I may be the wrong god to ask, either way.  I became a god while I was too drunk to think clearly."  The materialization of a charming, leather-armor-clad man holds out a hand to Pilar.  "Shall I teleport us to somewhere more comfortable before your Fly runs out?"

She cannot find any sane reason to answer 'no'.  Not even saying 'no' just to be contrary, for that itself would be too Chaotic Good and give Cayden Cailean too much satisfaction.

She holds out her hand to the Swashbuckler in wordless response.

A moment later they are standing together in a natural tavern, a cave-entrance open to a larger and mostly-unseeable forest in which night has fallen and the colored light of three moons is visible in the negative shadows cast by trees.  Within the natural tavern there is a ledge of stone like a natural bar, and soft-looking mushroomlike growths like natural chairs before it; by each mushroom-chair is a bush that grows bell-like transparent flowers with flat bases, as you could obviously pluck and use for glasses.

Behind the natural bar is a thing that looks half plant and half animal and not particularly sapient, a floating balloon of transparent bark or skin half-filled with liquid, with a nipple at its bottom that could serve as a spout.

It is all lit by a fire that burns in a wall-nook of the cave-entrance, like a natural fireplace.

"I'm not going drinking with you," she says flatly.  At this point Pilar doesn't even know the bounds of what her curse can accomplish if she gets drunk and throws a party, but she sure is not doing that a third time.

The Swashbuckler sighs.  "I know.  It's not easy to get really actually drunk in My true self; and it isn't in My nature to invite somebody to the sort of drinking party where only she will be made inebriated.  One of several downsides of being a god that I did not actually think of before I went for the Starstone on a dare."

"So we'll have some mild alcohol that won't really affect either of us, with your Belt of Mighty Constitution, and agree to just decide to have the sort of conversation we might have if we were both a little tipsy."

"What's the entire point of - this whole pretend tavern business, why not a real tavern -"

The form of a leather-armor clad human male, with ordinary sword at his side and leather boots of no magic in particular, does nod to Pilar at this, his lips touched by a brief charming grin.  "It's the dream at the heart of Elysium - that you don't need to hire loggers and carpenters to build a tavern and its furniture, you don't need to grow barley and malt it to make ale, you don't need to be Lawful and organized and get told what to do, or worse, have to tell others what to do, in order to get the nice things that require Lawfulness within mortal Golarion.  You just have to go exploring with some friends and find a cave somewhere that works as a tavern."

"How unbelievably sad.  No wonder Rugatonn said she'd take Abaddon over Elysium."  Pilar floats over to the stone-bar, rests her weight on a mushroom-chair, yanks one of the flower-glasses off its stem, and slams it down hard enough on the stone-bar-surface that it shatters with a pleasant tinkling sound.

She plucks another flower-glass, and sets it down more gently, this time.

A gesture from Cayden Cailean sends the shards of the shattered flower-glass flying into the natural fireplace-nook, the fire there flaring as the not-glass begins to burn.  "Tradition," he says, with no more explanation than that.

One of His hands plucks a flower-glass of His own.  His other hand pulls over the floating balloon of liquid, to milk some of its juice into His glass from its bottom nipple.

She casts Mage Hand, when Cayden's done, to fill her own glass from the same source; she's a wizard, not a milkmaid.

"Cheers," says the Swashbuckler, and lifts His glass to Pilar.

"Fuck off and die," says Pilar, and doesn't tip her own glass to him before she drinks from it.

"If that's all you came here to ask of Me, this is going to be a quiet drinking session," He observes.  "I've done as much fucking off as anyone ought to, and you already know that I've scheduled Myself to die."

"Die for the divine crime of vastly exceeding your rights to intervene in Golarion, or die so that I can finish consuming you?"

"I'd dispute that I exceeded any such thing as a right to intervene in Golarion.  I didn't break My sworn word to anyone either.  Long ago I was shown a treaty and told that I'd die if I didn't look like I was predictably going to abide by it, so I abided by it.  The fun thing about that arrangement is that, given the right prompt from a planet of shattered prophecy, you can suddenly decide you're willing to die, and say, 'Fuck that treaty, I'm doing what's right.'"

"And I suppose you don't care about the general reckoning that might trigger, with all of the Chaotic gods who can't be trusted any more now that prophecy has shattered?  Or is this entire Keltham and Snack Service business meant to - prevent that godwar, somehow?"

"You're not quite on the right road there, though you're near the right town.  Keep in mind that one of the options that the gods possess, if it looks like they're otherwise headed for a massive godwar - not just a little godwar like in the wake of Aroden's death - is for them to wipe Golarion's solar system clean of life, and declare the whole Rovagug-affected volume off-limits to all deities.  Prophecy still works in the rest of Creation, so long as Golarion-originating events aren't allowed to disrupt it."

"Aroden's death and prophecy's shattering doesn't automatically mean that Chaos gets to have its own way with everything.  The other gods can see the predictable ways that changes the balance, and respond in advance."

Pilar frowns minutely, too distracted in this moment to use any of the arts she's learned over the past couple of weeks for having facial expressions that non-Chelish people can read.  She'd be lying if she said that she wasn't feeling a chill go through her, a coldness, a reminder of how high the stakes almost certainly have to be, and how much a tiny insignificant dot Pilar Pineda is within it, weighed up as a person rather than a future goddess or (perhaps greater yet) a trope-girl.

For lack of anything clever she can think of to say, she gestures around at the whole tavern.  "This - isn't the actual center of Your divine realm, is it?"

"I don't really have one, apart from Elysium generally?  When I wandered Golarion I never quite understood the point of wealthy people who owned houses, when one large Bag of Holding can carry everything needful wherever you go.  What would I do with a divine realm?  Buy a lot of fancy stuff and keep it there?  Pen up My followers having one long intoxicated orgy in that particular place forever?  Who'd sign up for that afterlife?"

"You're a very strange god."

"Not at all.  I'm a very normal god.  It's all the other gods who are the strange ones."  Cayden smiles as if He's said something deeply wise, and takes a meaningless drink.

She takes another small drink from her flower-glass.  It's flavorful and tastes hardly at all like it's tinged with experimental medical disinfectant, but it's not as good as what they serve to favored customers in the City of Brass.

"Well, how about if you break a few more treaties, and instead of my getting pushed around for vague reasons, you just tell me plainly what's going on.  Not after I put on the artifact headband and end up halfway a god myself.  You explain yourself to the little mortal while she's still got some of her mortality left."