"Carissa promised me she'd make a reasonable effort to do something about that, and said she thought she could, though she said I couldn't know the details."

For a second there's just sheer disbelieving silence in the throne hall of Cheliax.

"I thought you stronger than to have been that brainwashed, that quickly, if you can still talk this coherently at all."

"I'd have believed her even if she hadn't sworn to me that she didn't expect that my own expectations were too optimistic, and that she wasn't concealing those details primarily in hopes I'd make a mistake that benefited her.  She's Carissa Sevar, not Asmodeus, and soon all Golarion will learn what that means."

"Now let us be about our necessary business, Most High, for I have a great deal of work to do.  And a planar binding to perform on one of Hell's most recent petitioners."  Abrogail nudges the decapitated head of the former 'Terthule II' with one foot.  "This isn't, actually, escaping me that easily."

And by the end of that day, in near-competition with how fast spies and rumors can spread news across Golarion, the country of Cheliax will send out messages, by ambassador and also by other means, to announce the peaceful annexation of Cheliax into the Sevarian Empire.

The Sevarian Empire realizes this trend might worry other countries.  The Sevarian Empire strongly suggests that the delegates of many countries come together to negotiate a new, more stable international order.  The Sevarian Empire is eager to engage in peaceful and lawful negotiations with such countries as may know Law, in order to achieve more mutually beneficial outcomes for both parties than might have been achieved without such negotiations.

That said, the Sevarian Empire is Lawful Evil and fully intends to conquer weak and vulnerable territories like Wanshou used to be.  The Empire may annex any countries which don't negotiate a guaranteed place in the new world order, including aspects like contributing to Worldwound defense; and including satisfactory guarantees on points like exit rights for their citizens if they want to move to a Sevarian country instead.  Nidal is a fair example of who might've been next if Cheliax weren't already busy digesting them.

This arrangement is the product of negotiations between Carissa Sevar and Keltham of Elsewhere.  Keltham's own part in that arrangement is that he will not protect countries that do not come to the negotiating table and negotiate reasonably there.  Pilar Pineda's part can come as a surprise to anyone who insists on being silly.

As a good-faith gesture of their own cordial participation in the new international equilibrium to be negotiated, the new Cheliax is voluntarily adopting a temporary moratorium on Maledictions pending other negotations.

...absorbing Cheliax into the "Sevarian Empire" is going to get a LOT of entities paying attention who were not paying quite that much attention to the earlier fight in Wanshou, and who'd dismissed the "Scientific Revolution" as a one-off import of extraplanar knowledge about spellsilver alchemy.

One might, possibly, worry that a public takeover of Cheliax was a risky move for Keltham to allow Carissa Sevar to make.  Most attention will be aimed at Carissa Sevar, but it's also going to get a lot of people - and liches, and ancient dragons, and gods - taking Keltham more seriously than before...

It was ultimately more an intuition than anything else, by which Pilar made that call: that they were entering an endgame unseen by Nethys, and that the game's nature was not to be winnable by timid play.

That it mattered to have it be seen, and also mattered to have it be true, that Cheliax on the eve of war suddenly turned its sword's aim from opposing Good to opposing Evils, and ceased from the worst of its cruelties.

That it was worth doing, above all, for the sake of that thread of painful disbelieving hope that would run through Golarion like a hitch in the world's breath.

But exposing so much capability does involve, unavoidably, a chance that a certain deity will finally have enough information to figure out the plot.  And then -

Carissa Sevar now definitely has His personal attention, yes.  Annoyingly, that doesn't give Him very much information, in this case.  He compacted not to peek through Otolmens's veil; and if a mortal stays Mind-Blanked outside that veil, even her having sold her soul to Dispater does not allow Dispater to read out her thoughts without more effort than Asmodeus cares to pay Dispater to exercise.

But it's obvious enough that Carissa Sevar is playing this game on her own behalf, as is not wholly to Dispater's benefit, who in turn is not entirely aligned to Asmodeus...

...and that's entirely fine, as Asmodeus considers His aesthetics.  But Carissa Sevar had better be benefiting the tyranny in all this.

Aspexia Rugatonn will carefully scrutinize, with the aid of Gorthoklek, every significant order that Abrogail Thrune conveys.  Sevar is not weakening Cheliax in any drastic respect except that Osirion's Scientific Revolution is gaining steam while it prances about uninvaded; and Sevar has promised clear evidence to be delivered shortly that Keltham had the capability to defeat Cheliax's military if that invasion had actually been carried out.

Sevar has also promised, and begun maneuvering for, negotiations whereby the Keepers of Asmodeus will be placed in power and responsibility over all greater ilani weapons, as those inventions are inevitably discovered - though the Keepers will swear to carry out Otolmens's purposes alone, when they act in that capacity, without tricks or favoritism or any manner of shenanigans whatsoever.  It will be argued, truthfully, that only Asmodeus's rigors can suffice to train those who could actually be entrusted with such a duty, among those very few mortals well-suited to Asmodean rigor.

There is an equilibrium implied by the existence of truly deadly weapons, which Hell's elite understands better than Golarion's mortals have previously needed to know.  On Gorthoklek's own analysis, Cheliax is not being maneuvered into a position that will cripple its ability to serve Hell later.  Sevar is executing some non-obvious correct maneuvers to position Cheliax for that long game, which Gorthoklek would not have been permitted to reveal if Sevar had not made them.

Which isn't to say that they ought to trust Carissa Sevar for that reason.  Carissa Sevar is obviously - this is blatant from Gorthoklek's viewpoint - playing some game against intelligences of divine level, which is to say, against Cayden Cailean or Asmodeus or both.  Sevar is playing that game competently, and has honed her policy to yield no evidence that she is breaking with either Good or Evil - and as for whether it's Evil or Good from which Sevar is trying to hide her allegiances, all not privy to her purposes are left with their prior odds.

Most probably, if Gorthoklek takes obvious inferences at their face value, Sevar is not committing herself fully to Good or Evil; she is waiting to demand a further compact with Hell that she deems her fair share of Evil's gains, and will demand more of her desiderata, possibly sentimental ones, at that time.

Or Sevar may know well that she's irrevocably cast her soul's fate with Hell; but could be trying to deceive Hell's other minions about whether that threat has power to move her, in hopes they'll tread more cautiously and generously around her.

It's an analysis that would be more reassuring if the new Carissa Sevar were not 3 INT ahead of Gorthoklek - though even in the worst case of ilani transmuting diamonds, Sevar must be much less Wise.  But still.

Aspexia doesn't like the part with suspending Maledictions.

It really comes down to that, in the end.  All of Aspexia's instincts are shrieking to her that ending Maledictions is much more something that Good people invent clever lies about when they're pretending to be Evil than that Evil people think of doing to deceive Good, and if that's a ploy by Carissa Sevar to fool somebody else then it's also working on Aspexia Rugatonn.

The aspect of Asmodeus paying attention is not quite able to understand all that his most favored squirrel is thinking.  But He understands of Gorthoklek that Carissa Sevar is not being allowed to play Cheliax into an untenable position, that Cheliax can be taken back from her if she oversteps herself, and that's most of what He cares about right now - that if Sevar betrays Hell, it is her and not Cheliax who will regret it more.

His position has fluctuated wildly, these past months, but it still appears to be notably ahead of where it started - namely, with Cheliax facing down Galt and Andoran as serious opponents and trying to hold on to the remainder of its diminished territory, and Zon-Kuthon as an ancient rival for Lawful Evil's final throne.

Asmodeus isn't going to get this one; even if a larger fragment of Him is paying more attention, the matter is too contrary to His nature.

The truth is not in Sarenrae's nature, or Desna's, or Abadar's, for Them to read through from only glances.

But there's one non-allied god whose nature it matches all too well -

Iomedae was already paying attention; not literally as much attention as She can, but as much as She can afford.

Iomedae has been paying attention since the start of a godwar under mysterious circumstances, in which Zon-Kuthon ended up sealed and Iomedae obtained His vault's key.

She paid more attention after Cayden Cailean's anomalous actions against Her intelligence network in Cheliax - actions by one Good god against another, at the behest of Nethys.

When Peranza called out to Her, Iomedae learned that Keltham, a mortal from outside Creation bearing precious knowledge, was the trigger to set all those events in motion. She coalesced Herself then, and considered many possibilities. Then Her greater self set out conditional response patterns for Her splinters, abstract reflexes wiser in many ways than a mortal's full deliberations.

(A more knowledgeable civilization might have the metaphor of a not-overly-deep function approximator, trained on a dataset that was itself produced by something greater and smarter than a mortal.  A god-splinter can predict and act with insight greater than any mortal; but only if it is, in some sense, usual insight, as seen from an inhumanly broad perspective on what is high-probability.  A god-splinter's performance degrades as events go out-of-distribution; there's a certain sense in which a god-splinter is not ultimately as smart as a very smart mortal - though even then, there are kinds of classic mortal errors that a god-splinter just doesn't make.)

When Keltham left Cheliax for Osirion, Iomedae's fragment spoke to him at Abadar's behest; and caught more detailed sight of Keltham than She has of most of Her own paladins. Mostly, because She expended the energy to see him; but also because Keltham had, even as he spoke to Her, decided that the Evil afterlives would stop existing.

There is a way of thinking like that, which is not a grand speech to convince an audience, nor a performance of certainty to convince yourself, but only the decision to walk those possible roads through time. Iomedae sometimes tries to gesture at this concept to mortals through the doctrine "Iomedae is the goddess not of fighting against Evil, but of victory over Evil", even though you can't get victory just by declaring yourself in favor of winning.

And had any greater god paid the price of a lesser peek at Keltham's surface thoughts, during the month after he arrived in Osirion, They would have found that his thoughts were mostly on the details of the Scientific Revolution, on what he needed to teach to pay back Abadar's investment in him.  Even when Keltham dealt with Lawful Evil sellers, to buy scrolls and items, he thought only in quickly-suppressed flickers about why, having already decided what; like a fragment of a god, set on course by a greater self.

(It was a needless precaution, in the end; reading a mortal mind really is not a routine activity for a god.  The ancient gods have a hard time understanding mortal minds unless the mortal's thought lies very squarely within Their domain.  It's easier for once-mortal gods, but those can rarely afford the energy.  Even had Keltham been thinking to himself openly, no one would have seen -

- except Nethys, of course.  Or any other god that Nethys-fragment chose to inform, if that part of Himself had the sanity for that.)

And then, from Osirion, Keltham went to Ostenso, a place where gods were forbidden to intervene.  And within Ostenso, a further smaller fortress, about which Otolmens set a protective veil to lure the understandably skittish anomaly back into containment (as Otolmens saw those matters).  For most gods to peer past that veil, They would have needed to spend great efforts; and a younger god would've needed to coalesce and go in person, meaning the god would need to be suicidal.

She did spend noticeably less effort on thinking about Keltham, after that, since there was a decreased probability that She would be able to do anything about him or for him. She focused more of Her attention on managing his impacts.

Then Keltham gifted some blurrily-perceived vast amount of wealth/power/potentiality-for-Good to three high-leveled wizard followers of Iomedae, on behalf of Her church; who were temporarily forbidden to tell the rest of Her church or pray about it to Iomedae.

It wasn't, actually, sufficient precaution to prevent Iomedae from perceiving the event, when some of Her faithful thought that Keltham had given them the key to victory over Evil in Golarion and maybe even many planets beyond. Trying to suppress your emotions, and not think too excitedly about that prospect, doesn't actually avert Iomedae's attention. She's not the goddess of being excited about victory over Evil. If you're just going to do it and not get excited about it, that counts too.

But Iomedae is being careful in how She updates on that leaked observation. If Keltham is honestly trying to give Her church a great aid in its purpose, despite what he sees as a risk of that act triggering Iomedae to some unwanted-by-him action or realization - but he is daring to help anyways for Goodness's sake - then Iomedae will... just let Keltham give Her people that gift? And not let that trigger any adverse actions by Her, unless She'd have arrived at the same conclusion by another pathway, so that Keltham is not disadvantaged by his goodness? It's frustrating to Her how often Good seems to feel the need to treat adversarially with Good, but She at least knows better.

Her splinter doesn't fail to note that Keltham's attempted concealment of his gift seems possibly related to Cayden Cailean shutting down Iomedae's spying apparatus in Cheliax. But even having observed this, it doesn't fall into an obvious greater abstract pattern for why. Why would Good fight Good instead of negotiating?

The Keltham from her vision was dealing with pain, loss, confusion, doubts about whether anything around him was real. Those are major predictors, in mortals, large parts of who they are and how they choose. Where righteous conviction guides mortals to try to discard those parts of them, it tends to guide them very badly. And so those are worrying, where she saw them in Keltham, no matter how much skill she also saw entrained about evaluating what-are-the-consequences independently of how he feels at the time.

Iomedae has seen previous cases of people who were previously more congruent to Her, becoming less congruent as they decide that Her church is not doing enough - that Lawful Good is inconvenienced too much by its binds of Law and Goodness - whereupon they go off to do things that don’t work, to do things that trade badly between resources-now and resources-later, to make it harder for Good to cooperate with Good. That is a known pattern to Her, and pain and loss can trigger it.

But to give the church of Iomedae some great gift, is not usually what former-Iomedaens do if the need to defeat Evil drives them to break with Her church. It does sometimes happen that somebody driven to extremes keeps enough Good or Law to mitigate his own harms if he can. But more usually, when former followers of Iomedae turn against Her or Her church, for having thought too much on Hell, they turn more dramatically against their former companions. Or the rarer ones who'd still give some vast wealth they'd come across to Iomedae's Church, wouldn't try to hide the fact from Iomedae; they'd be sharp about it in Her direction.

The other explanation of Keltham’s behavior is that he thinks that the matter in which he is engaged is one in which She cannot or will not aid him, and he prefers for some reason not to negotiate about that. And…it is not impossible that he has evaluated that correctly. It’s not a matter about which a mortal would usually be correct, but the Keltham she spoke to, shaped as he was by his anguish, was in fact also thinking clearly about whether he could destroy the Evil afterlives, had a habit of trying to think-clearly on factual questions even if they touched dearly on things that mattered to him.