And now Pilar is resting; she is tired, after her last set of misadventures, even wearing a +6 Belt of Mighty Constitution that takes her total Constitution to 22.  Pilar has had an unreasonably large number of Events happen to her, in a really unreasonably tiny amount of time; even taking into account the part where Pilar got tossed into the Maelstrom a couple of objective-days ago and time just happened to be running faster there.  She couldn't have been in there more than a week, really.

She made a friend, in the Maelstrom; that friend is dead, in the way that outsiders die, forever and beyond resurrection.  All too obviously in retrospect, that outcome was planned by the same divinities or 'tropes' arranging this whole operation.  For Pilar had known and thought that she would be resurrected, that she was just having an Adventure; she wouldn't have been under enough stress to level, if she'd had only herself to defend.  She needed to open her heart to a friend, which Pilar did because that's been made the key to her power; and that friend needed to be placed under true threat, to motivate Pilar to really fight.  And Pilar almost almost won, but she didn't, maybe because deep in her heart she still thought it was all a story with her victory foretold.

So now Aaeme'nagh is dead forever, slain by its own vengeful slaves who didn't appreciate its mastery at all; and Cayden Cailean would probably consider that end well-deserved and Good on net; and Asmodeus wouldn't care in the slightest so long as Pilar's leveling ended up serving His interests.

Pilar has fought and fucked and casted and fought, and after that last "adventure" it is not feeling as fun anymore.

So now Pilar Pineda is resting, in her own demiplane that she made.  Her last lost battle and its aftermath, on top of all her previous misadventures - and probably an increasing amount of siphoned divinity in her - has brought her to the eighth circle of an oracle's power, also the fifth circle of wizardry via mystic theurgy.  To create the demiplane she had to take off the Splendour headband and put on an Intelligence headband, for that takes comprehension and not just power; but with that boost she did it, and the Permanency to make the demiplane lasting was strangely easy after.  There's no minimum caster circle to make a demiplane Permanent, you just need an unreasonably large amount of diamond dust; and that, Pilar has.

Also after reaching that fifth circle of wizardry, she went to a juncture of leylines, knocked out a grizzly bear and dragged it over and sacrificed it with a blade bought of Fommok Madinah.  Now there's also Permanent Arcane Sight about her at last, despite her unsaleable soul.  And Permanent Tongues though not non-dispellably so, and Darkvision and Aura Sight and Enchantment Sight and See Invisibility.

And now Pilar rests, in her own permanent demiplane.  It's not very large or decorated, yet, but it's the famous thing that people like her do, once they can.

Aspexia Rugatonn is still mightier than Pilar, if neither of them take the other by surprise and neither can use magic items or allies and both are prepared for battle.  Aspexia Rugatonn is mightier than Pilar, as is Abrogail Thrune wearing the Crown of Infernal Majesty, or Razmir or Felandrial Morgethai, or Gorthoklek, and Nefreti Clepati is her superior in every dimension; but not many others in Golarion.

None of these important facts have been communicated to Cheliax.

Pilar has been walking around for some days with the equivalent of an artifact headband she cannot take off.  Days are a long time, at INT 21 and WIS 19, if despite your best efforts to keep yourself extremely busy you sometimes have time to think, and Keltham out of dath ilan once taught you such children's knowledge as might in Golarion make you be relatively a Keeper.

She has understood what she'd been too stupid to see before, for all its obviousness; she knows who "Doomlord" is, and why Keltham had all of his stuff.

There is some vast story winding around her, and she has not grasped its ending or its purpose.  She knows that Cayden Cailean considers it worth dying for.  She knows that this story's meaning is not accomplished by delivering however-many diamonds to the Church of Iomedae, that Keltham out of dath ilan calculated how to synthesize after he donned an Intelligence headband.

She knows not how this story goes, but she has a guess about what becomes of Pilar Pineda in the end.

"Incandescent foil.  Queen assassinated by ilani weapon and kidnapped from Hell, Crown not recovered.  Military moving to defensive posture.  Any advice or aid?"

She knew, on some level, and also explicitly, that she might be awaiting some Sending like this.

Pilar Pineda speaks back without much tone.

"Midnight quill.  No advice.  No Snack Service response.  I plan to don artifact headband.  Tell Rugatonn not to trust me afterwards without oaths.  Pineda out."

Snack Service has been silent, now, for a long time.  Pilar does not need its hinting nor even any sourceless knowledge, to do as she does now, after hearing the Sending; it proceeds from her own will.  Splendour 26 is a lot of will.

Some time earlier, before her stat increases, Pilar did think to herself that what they all had been envisioning as a "Keeper" might actually be more like one-quarter of a child of dath ilan.  They did mock Keltham's obliviousness, some in Project Lawful, seeing about him the simple pathways of thought that he could have taken to dispel the illusions about himself.  But at the end, when Keltham realized that he was doubting, he made a mildly determined effort to pierce through illusions and put his perceived reality to a real test, one that might actually destroy it, if it was false.  Keltham found no decisive error; only insufficient evidence of the sort that should have been there, to support his reality if it was reality, and a sick feeling that something was wrong; and then he looked back and reinterpreted in the light of small hints about where the problem might be, and destroyed his own world of his own will; and didn't hesitate or try to hold onto anything when it all fell apart.

It's not - Pilar is certain that Keltham would say, if asked - it's not the performance of a true Keeper out of dath ilan, not even close; they would not have been led astray even for moments, by their own hopes and fears.

But it's not something that any of the self-proclaimed would-be "Keepers of Asmodeus" have been observed to do.

There is a dread in Pilar now, an intuitive intimation; she can guess that her own thoughts are winding around themselves in tension and conflict, somewhere out of her mind's willing sight.  Putting on the artifact headband would probably be enough to set it off, the godwar inside her own mind.  But there's a simpler course than that, a lesser trial even than fool Keltham essayed when he tried to destroy the reality about himself.  If she cannot do even this small thing, then she couldn't call herself a would-be "Keeper" or aspire to be one quarter of a dath ilani child.

She knows where she might find her doom, there is a place she is more afraid of than other places, a person she fears to confront and a question she dares not ask.  So Pilar will just go there.

Pilar draws forth from her storage a tuning fork.

And she Plane Shifts.  She's not sure of exactly where she's going, aside from the general plane, but that's fine since Plane Shift isn't very precise anyways.

ai art

Elysium is as it was before, last that Pilar was here.  She is in some section of winding narrow canyon in which the stony walls are covered in flowers that burn with a warm golden fire, and are not consumed.  The sky is visible, far far above where the canyon-walls of stone cut out.

The flowers that burn and are not consumed do mind her of the garden-conservatories that her lover Befutig showed her in the City of Brass, and regret stabs at her heart, for everything that she'll never have, never do.

But she accepts reality, immediately, for that is what Keepers are, and the purpose to which dath ilan made them: to realize not eventually but now.

Pilar looks about herself, but there is no one here to greet her, and this narrow canyon is ill-made for meetings.  So she casts Fly, divine magic in imitation of wizard magic, and rises up up up and up through stony walls and gold-glowing flowers, until the blue sky of Elysium widens in her sight like a mouth opening to swallow her.

Beyond the sky's mouth, when it has closed around her, lie the tops of many deep winding canyons, like a vast maze, extending out of sight to where haze clouds further vision.  If those lost within were not already dead, and could not fly out nor climb up, they would have to fear starvation or the thirst-death long before they emerged.  Probably someone would come, though, if those within cried out loudly enough in boredom; not because there is a watch laid on this place, but just because somebody would be in earshot, and whoever heard would be friendly.

Pilar reaches deep within herself, then, to the well from which she draws her divine spells, from which Snack Service once spoke and is now silent; and she cries out with more than voice:

"CAYDEN CAILEAN!  CAYDEN CAILEAN!  I CALL YOU, I INVOKE THE DEBT YOU OWE ME BY GOODNESS'S WAY, FOR ALL THAT YOU'VE DONE TO ME AND ALL THAT I'VE DONE FOR YOU!  IF ANY WHO HEAR MY VOICE DO CALL YOURSELVES ALLY TO HIM, BID HIM BE HERE AND NOW!  CAYDEN CAILEAN, CAYDEN CAILEAN, CAYDEN CAILEAN!"

"You don't, actually, need all that -"

She turns in midair and drives her fist into his face with all her strength.

Yes, she knows this isn't going to help; she is doing it anyways.

"Ow," He says, as He does every time this happens, having obligingly given Himself a face real enough and with nerves enough that He feels as much physical pain as He still can, for whatever it means to Him now.

(He's sometimes granted an additional cleric circle for that act, coming to Elysium and punching Him in the face, as is common among His more promising priests and even more so among His priestesses.  But saying that won't help either.)

"That wasn't even for me," she says coldly.  "We haven't even gotten started on me.  That was only for Aaeme'nagh.  You put fucking Snack Service into my fucking head, and that isn't even the tenth worst thing you did to me.  You've taken literally everything from me.  My family, my career as a Chelish wizard, all my mortal bonds, every part of the mortal destiny I would've had, my one Pharasma-given life, even my -"

How strange, that she can't say it, that last fatal acknowledgment.

The manifestation of Cayden Caylean rubs His jaw, thoughtfully and as if wincingly, where he was punched by a mortal soul so stuffed with power that it now trembles on the verge of least divinity.  "Sorry about that?" He says.

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."