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.

Soul-structures like that lie close to the heart of Her domain; the smallest fragment of Herself would see it and also know the consequences. People like that can potentially be great allies to Good. But somebody close to Iomedae's own way of thinking, in that regard, is also potentially much more dangerous than a typical cleric of Abadar. Thinking efficiently is close in thought-space to thinking lethally efficiently.

Iomedae as a mortal paladin of Aroden did not like to kill people, especially not ones who'd go to Evil afterlives, but she was very very good at it when she deemed it necessary.

And though Keltham arrived in Osirion with protective deontologies, he was a kind of mind that would dare to trust himself to recalculate his deontologies if he found himself in a different universe - as would Iomedae herself have so dared, when she was a mortal paladin of Aroden, if she found herself in a sufficiently different place.

It is not lost on Iomedae's fragment that a true Outsider, arrived from a world that knew less Evil, might have set in an emotional and moral equilibrium much more horrified by Evil; and in that case, one simple way to end the Evil afterlives is by destroying Creation, if you can.

She expects that Keltham will not lightly take that option, that he would prefer to ally with Iomedae to save Creation rather than destroy it, if he trusted that alliance to succeed. Iomedae would also destroy some imaginable universes, if She could, and didn't have better options for fixing them. But Keltham, in her estimation, would take the destructive option more readily than She would, destroy universes that She would try to save. It is a parameter that also varies within Her paladins, and between those who can and cannot become Her paladins.

If Keltham makes a pact with Ahriman or Charon - if he seeks to travel into the deeper Abyss to treat with the qlippoth - if he becomes harder to see in the ways of those touched by the Outer Gods - or if Keltham chooses some not-really-evil way to make himself Evil or Chaotic, moves within one alignment step of Rovagug - then the splinter of Iomedae will know at once what that means and why. It is a cache hit for Her; there have been times before when people broke with Her and tried the obvious paths for destroying Creation.

The Iomedae-splinter has done Her planning for that contigency in advance. She estimates from vision that Keltham, if he decides Creation must end, will not be happy; it will set pieces of himself at war within himself. One doesn't need to be broken by pain, in order to coalesce around that pain in a way that's high-tension, that might reconsider its choices if it found happiness; not necessarily in the way of having made a mistake, but in the way of mortals being able to coalesce around their feelings in more than one possible way.

So an obvious strategy would be to lay a trap for Keltham outside of his veiled fortress, put him into a position where Her followers could clearly otherwise destroy him, as would then be in Her own interests; and accept instead Keltham's oathbound parole, probably given with his own desperate relief, to work with Her instead all his days. Iomedae has done that before, very rarely, with mortals valuable enough that She can allow Herself the effort to save them.

She mostly does not expect this to happen. The thing about the class of possibilities where Keltham tries to destroy Creation is that, in the Iomedae-splinter's estimation, they require Keltham to be an idiot.

Her splinter's usage of the concept is precise, not the derogatory mortal form; She does not think 'idiot' just when some mortal is doing something She doesn't like. Keltham, in this hypothetical scenario, would be an idiot in the sense of pursuing a clearly suboptimal strategy, where Her vision suggested he had adequate intelligence and mental skills to know better. Keltham has invited one of Her followers into his veiled fortress, like some sort of sensible person who wants to check what Iomedans have to advise about things; and one of Her followers would definitely know better.

People have made pacts with Ahriman and Charon before. They've traveled into the deep Abyss to treat with qlippoth before. They've made pacts with Outer Gods before. Ninth-circle wizards have tried all that, and Creation is still there.

Prophecy's recent breaking increases Golarion's danger-density by two or three orders of magnitude, maybe, but not enough to compete with all the rest of Creation since its founding. In the great beyond there are obscure planes with obscure dwellers, gods in whose domain lies secrecy, div lords and daemon harbingers with their own fragments of foresight, ninth-circles with demiplanes they've put outside of time and prophecy's usual flow, who might want to destroy Creation - if Creation was that easy to destroy.

The way that pain and loss at times leads ex-Iomedaens to try to destroy Creation, is that they start thinking that, if you turn from Good to Evil, from Law to Chaos, if you throw away all your scruples, so great and dramatic a sacrifice must negate everything common sense says about why that plan wouldn't turn out well in real life. It has to work, if you sacrifice enough; if you do something as dramatic as throwing away your Goodness or your Law, reality has to see your pain and determination and be moved somehow; it has to be worth something, after you paid so much. Mortals sometimes think like that, when they break with Her.

The Keltham that She saw in vision would not break in that direction. The Keltham that She saw, if he had devised some standard mad wizard-scheme scheme to end Creation, would pause and ask himself "Why is Creation still here if it's that easy?", and do more research first. Even if he couldn't rule out every slivered chance at success, he wouldn't chase futilely after tiny chances. Taking into account that later-Keltham made gift to her Church, the Iomedae-splinter strongly estimates that later-Keltham would ask "If all the people like me joined forces with the Church of Iomedae instead and accumulated our efforts over the years, instead of dying futilely and individually in the pursuit of some tiny chance of destroying Creation, would this in realistic expectation lead to a better outcome?" and notice that the answer was "yes". Obstacles to asking yourself questions like that are also obstacles toward donating vast wealth-power-potency to the Church of Iomedae.

The Keltham that She saw, even if he decided that he preferred that Creation not exist, would only try to destroy Creation if he thought he could actually pull that off.

The splinter of Iomedae has cached that destroying Creation is difficult, and has cached that even mad-wizard negative utilitarians know it's difficult if they're thinking at all clearly.

The present time in Golarion is unique, among planets, for that Golarion contains Rovagug and that prophecy about it is shattered. But the splinter of Iomedae concerning Herself with these matters puts very low probability that Keltham would try to unleash Rovagug. Losing the one planet where prophecy doesn't function, and where conditions have conspired to enable an unusual number of mortal-descended gods, would be unfathomably costly to Good, and to the inferred interests of Keltham. It wouldn't work to destroy Creation, unless Asmodeus or some equally powerful coalition backed Rovagug...

...and the Keltham that She saw would not accept partially destroying Creation, if he went down that road.  A partial destruction that leaves large sections of Creation and Hell intact, would not be victory; and that is something the Keltham she saw would not lose track of, not for any amount of desperation.  If he commits to a drastic action he will estimate that actual victory lies at the end of it, and his desperation and sacrifice will not have figured into that estimation process as positive factors.  His deontology is not for sale at the price point of failure.

So, even conditioning on the line of possibility where Keltham would prefer to destroy Creation, the most likely outcome in the Iomedae-fragment's current evaluation of that broad class of possibilities is this:

That if Keltham decided that he preferred Creation gone, Keltham then retreated to his fortress while he looked for ways to destroy all of Creation, ways that would actually work in real life; and so far, Keltham correctly assesses that he hasn't found any pathways like that; and when he finishes out that due diligence, he'll join with the Iomedans on fixing Creation instead of destroying it; and be less at war within himself, and be happier.

A generalization of this scenario is in fact the Iomedae-splinter's primary guess: Keltham has retreated to his fortress - after making sure Osirion was boosted enough to prevent Cheliax from taking over Golarion immediately - in order to properly verify all he's been told is happening, and orient to Golarion, and do something like due diligence on literally everything; and until that's done, Keltham isn't trusting anything whatsoever this time, and doesn't want any gods able to mess with him in any way.

To the Iomedae-splinter's way of thinking, this would be an incredibly reasonable thing to do. The boy She glimpsed in Osirion could easily be one Owl's Wisdom or Fox's Cunning away from thinking it. Iomedae-the-mortal spent years investigating Aroden before committing herself completely to His service.

The true and Greater Iomedae would have guessed better. It is not actually a puzzle that would stump a god coalesced.

Had Iomedae seen Keltham in vision, before coalescing into Her full self, that added knowledge during Her coalescence would have been enough for Her full self to figure out everything - for the exponential thicket of possibilities to collapse and one possibility to stand out - not just Keltham's psychology, but the existence of an alien web of not-prophecy surrounding him.

Even the earlier moment (of which She also caught sight, there having been no effort or oath to conceal it from Her) where Keltham tried to work out Wish-wordings with one of Her clerics for destroying all of Cheliax, would have been enough for Greater Iomedae to consider explicitly whether Keltham held other and greater destructive secrets, knew truths that should be permitted only to Pharasma and Otolmens.

Gods are able deducers, but not superb observers of the Material; many truths of physics are gated behind microscopic observations that no mortal has yet devised instruments to capture.  So gods would not know those truths automatically, without an effort; and being visibly the sort of god who makes that effort might get Them killed.

(Some fragments of Nethys have come to know, and the rest of Nethys dissipated much of His power and sanity on restraining those.)

So then for Iomedae's splinter, the guess that Keltham might possess truly deadly knowledge is not something that would follow from his being observed to improve spellsilver refining. It is not a usual element of a cached pattern. Nothing about Keltham's arrival and subsequent events, seen only from the Iomedae-splinter's angle, suggests this situation could have an unprecedented impact upon all Creation. It is not transparent to Her, not much suggested by those events, that Keltham's arrival in Golarion constitutes rolling a new kind of dice that have never been rolled in Creation ever before.

...also you'd expect that Otolmens would notice, and destroy in body and soul, any mortal working out detailed mathematics for how to destroy Creation; that Otolmens's own veil wouldn't block Her own sight; that She was more than powerful enough to peer through a Mind Blank. Iomedae's splinter doesn't know that any such mathematical insight is possible; but Her cache-hit on that general class of internal question is that, if it were possible for a mortal to destroy all of Creation just by being very clever, it would be Otolmens's domain to notice the mortal in the process of being that clever and squash them.

Her greater self might have spotted the flaw in that cached answer with respect to Keltham, but her lesser self has not. From the perspective of the greater self which laid down those cached answers, that violation would come at the end of improbability layered on improbability, inside an exponentially vast space of other improbabilities that aren't any less probable than that.

...and so Iomedae has not coalesced again.

Her previous ten minutes of coalescence were vastly expensive to Her interests, and not only in Golarion. Iomedae's will and Her care was temporarily withdrawn from many places, more worlds than a young god should really be trying to help; there are countries, small ones, on little planets that don't amount to much, which now stand in danger of falling to Evil as the price of those ten minutes of real thinking. There's a reason She hadn't done it in a century. Greater Iomedae updated many of Her policies, in those expensive ten minutes, not just Keltham-related ones. So the expected utility of pulling Herself together again, so soon after, is much less.

And so Iomedae's decision, to not pay the costs to think really hard about the question - as understandable, as predictable as that decision may be - is the only decision that ends up -

New update!  Iomedae's most powerful followers are praying to Her, asking if She wants to commend them to any particular path about... you know... this entire Cheliax thing.

Should they be, like... backing Carissa Sevar, here, so she can become a new Lawful Evil god of a less awful section of Hell.  Or should they be negotiating in good faith with the new Cheliax, which has voluntarily proposed a regularly updated reassessment of Worldwound contributions that will automatically take into account Cheliax's newfound wealth of spellsilver?  Or should Good be backing factions from out of the old Cheliax, in order to foment internal strife and stop Carissa Sevar from conquering all the parts of Golarion that don't negotiate treaties with her?

They know Iomedae almost certainly can't afford to answer them, but, nonetheless, they have so many questions.

Her second reaction:

Iomedae is not as encouraged as a mortal might be, by how Cheliax is potentially positioning itself for positive changes, or at the stay order on Maledictions. It looks overtly Good, better than the mortals realize, probably better than Hell's local emissaries realize; but minds at Carissa Sevar's Intelligence level can play effective games of deception against gods. Past a certain threshold level of intellect, the masquerade is just correct and even a substantially smarter mind can't pierce through it.

And that leaves you with your priors. It's not lost on Iomedae that Carissa Sevar would be a probable improvement as a new Lawful Evil god, but Iomedae cannot see a plausible pathway for Carissa Sevar to fulfill her cult's announcements and promises.

The Church of Iomedae will be instructed to treat Carissa Sevar as no more trustworthy than Asmodeus, and to relax no vigilance against Cheliax, unless and until Lawful oaths about shared purposes and straightforward coordination are offered them. If Carissa Sevar wants to work with Good on anything she can say so to Good directly, INT 29 should really be enough to figure that out.

...even a fragment of Iomedae splintered, however, will not fail to notice that She is incredibly confused about how this Cheliax situation could have developed out of the Keltham situation. That trajectory is not a short sentence in the language of paladins, probably not in anyone's language. This is not how probability is supposed to work.

Her first reaction: WHAT.

Okay, but is Iomedae about to coalesce?  How close is She to deciding to coalesce?  Even if She doesn't do it now, if She was nearly on the verge of it here, this won't be the last startling news that She gets -