...

Nethys says "Pretty butterflies?"

(Nethys did not expect to have to hold Himself together this long, did not expect He'd have to hazard His mental stamina for so long a march.  Some element of the web of Nethys-fragments meant to spy on Iomedae's thoughts and convey those legibly to the Alliance has lost focus.)

Aspexia Rugatonn is permitting herself to stay awake too long in her vast bed of Asmodean grandeur, thinking about how much she doesn't like all this, instead of just ordering her own mind sharply to behave.  She also has an instinct that it will be dangerous to order her own mind to stop thinking about this.

She really doesn't like the moratorium on Maledictions.

Aspexia sees the rationalization.  She sees the excuse.  Pushing Cheliax in the direction of some cheap Goodness will assist in the spread of Sevar's legend and cult and her eventual ascension.  Which, yes, serves Sevar more than Hell, but Sevar no longer lawfully answers to Rugatonn about that; only Dispater can bid her otherwise...

Swearing off Maledictions is undeniably an efficient way of producing a public shift in the perception of Cheliax under the Sevarian Empire.  It gets them to maybe consider that Cheliax might be starting over, that Carissa Sevar is on their side, to want that to be true.  It lets people hope...

Just like Aspexia Rugatonn is being allowed to hope, herself, that their hope is a lie.

And Aspexia Rugatonn realizes, then, why she is afraid.

If Aspexia's wavering grasp of 'tropes' is at all correct, then neither of those obvious hopes can be realized in the form that they are hoped.  Not Aspexia's own hope that Sevar remains aligned to Hell's interests, nor the hopes of Good people everywhere in Golarion that Sevar has brought Cheliax's Evil to heel.

So the hope can't be real, nor can it be a lie, either one.

And that's a contradiction.

Which means that the whole appearance of Carissa Sevar playing a game for her overlordship and divinity, serving or betraying Hell to that end, with Cheliax as her playing-piece...

"This is also not reality," Aspexia Rugatonn murmurs to herself.  And even as she says it, she knows deep down that this is so.

But she is not an ilani, and she does not know what to do after she says that.

The part that isn't real is, in its own way, very straightforward; and the mask over it is being done correctly, such that the only way to guess it would be on pure priors.

If you looked at that complicated situation developing around Cheliax and trusted your lying eyes, you would get the impression that Carissa Sevar was playing a close and clever and complicated game, concealing her real intentions from at least your side and possibly all the sides, setting in motion some very long-term strategies - strategies spanning a timescale of months, maybe even years.

You would think you had that much time to think, that much time to plan.

Anyone who made that mistake and took their leisure would have no chance to act at all before the endgame began.

And then, it begins.

Turn now to regard the city of Absalom (in this age called also the City of Lost Omens), on the southeast coast of the Isle of Kortos, where the Starstone was raised up from the sea and closed up in the impenetrable magical fortress of the Starstone Cathedral...

Of which it is said that the alghollthus called down a poisonous remnant of an unborn world, meant to strike upon the rival human civilization of Azlant; the ancient moon-goddess Acavna moved Golarion's moon into position to intercept the missile; but instead the missile shattered into thousands of pieces while continuing toward Golarion; and the missile's fragments pierced Acavna and killed Her; and then Her brother Amaznen, god of knowledge and magic, sacrificed Himself to neutralize the alghollthu magic upon those fragments and prevent them from destroying all Golarion; and the fragment now called Starstone fell into the sea; and eventually Aroden found that fragment, and it turned Him and several other people into gods.

Ah, Golarion?

Yes, dath ilan?

There are elements of this story that make less than total sense to someone isekaied in from a physicalist civilization, trying to visualize out the entire process, step by step...

Actually, no.  That's understating the case.

If something that strange was written in dath ilan, it would be inside a children's-book; and you would realize that the real answer was meant to be sought out by young adults, when you were old enough to notice Problems with what had been claimed by the children's-book in your bedroom.

(The children's-books of dath ilan are not visibly author-signed, and never attested-to by any specific grownup, nor gifted to you by specific adults; they're just there in your bedroom, when you grow up.  And if you ask your parents they'll truthfully tell you that they didn't put the books there.  And your parents never speak to you of anything that you read in a children's-book; for those are children's books, and only children speak of them to each other.

As the saying goes in dath ilan, trying to raise a child on only true books is like trying to train a statistical classifier on only positive examples!

And furthermore - as is so obvious as to hardly need stating after the original proverb - having all the true books be written in a nonfiction voice, while all the untrue books are written in a fiction voice, would be introducing an oversimplified hyperplanar separator that would prevent a simple statistical algorithm from learning subtler features.)

...That's not how things are done in Golarion.

Indeed.  But someone who did grow up in dath ilan sure will notice when the Starstone book story sounds very very odd.

So what's wrong with the standard story?

...It's hard to decide where to start, but one has to start somewhere, so:

Start with the notion that the "remnant of an unborn world", having shattered upon contact with Golarion's moon, which a god had moved into position for interception, was not thereby successfully deflected.

Things that hit a moon hard and break into fragments don't usually stay on the same trajectory after that, narrowly enough to hit a planet.  The width of Golarion in its moon's sky is only 0.01% of that sky's angular area.  You cannot randomly hit a planet, starting from a moon, if the course is at all perturbed.  This story requires the Starstone to be strong enough to blow through the moon, trajectory unperturbed, while shattering into a thousand pieces along the way.

One would also normally think a space missile could be deflected more easily than by moving a moon to intercept it, even if some goddess has an especially easy time moving around moons.  If a ballistic space-missile is coming from far enough away that you have time to move a moon into place for interception, at any reasonable speed a moon should attain, you could apply a much lighter deflection earlier in that missile's trajectory.