"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."

Cayden Cailean's manifestation raises His eyebrows.  "That's rather more a Chaotic Good way of looking at things than a Lawful Evil one."

"Calculated to appeal to your domains.  Yes, explicitly calculated before I asked, I did not make up the reason afterwards."

"It's not so much the phrasing of the demand as the thing you demanded.  The part where you've come to dislike having your life controlled, rearranged, and moved about by a greater Power, if you don't know the ends to which you're being used."

"I think a lot of Lawful Evil people would start to have feelings like that if they were being inexplicably moved around by fucking Cayden fucking Cailean."

"Definitely!  Many other Lawful Evil people would feel the same way, in your circumstances, because sorting Lawful Evil doesn't mean you lack a Chaotic side.  There's a myriad shards of desire, in a human being, and the alignments and allegiances you hold are patterns that stick a few of those shards together, grown strong enough to run your lives for a time.  Even I have a Lawful side, an Evil side, left over from what I was like before I touched the Starstone.  My Good and Chaotic aspects are strengthened, compared to when I was mortal, but not so much as to drown out everything else."

Pilar frowns again, trying to track this, see implications.  She didn't think for more than a resentful moment that Cayden Cailean was just taunting her; she knew well that there would be a point.  "Because the Starstone gods are different?"

"Did you know that Norgorber lives in Axis?"

She hadn't, actually.  "No, why - what - why would He want to, isn't He Neutral Evil -"