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"The only thing necessary [...] is for good men to do nothing."
      -- Edmund Burke Abridged

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Time:  About a week later.

Place:  The Imperial Palace in Egorian, capital of Cheliax.

This aerial view shows the side of the Palace that contains the Majestrix's quarters, including some rooms with windows and even the occasional exposed balcony.

All such are guarded by a permanent wall of force.

The surrounding aerial volume is patrolled by a species of keen-eyed flying devil with natural arcane sight and invisibility detection, lest anyone be so daring as to seek a glimpse of Abrogail Thrune in her nightgown, or maybe observe her in meeting and read her lips.

Forbiddance, wall of force, patrolling devils: these are the standard precautions taken in accordance with such security mindset as Cheliax has developed, pertaining to known and customary threats at their technology level, magical level, and accustomed levels of opposed intelligence.

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Also in the air above Egorian is a Tiny Translucent Sphere.  Even a keen-eyed and arcane-sightful devil has negligible probability of spotting it; the floating glass bead is small, clear, weakly magical, and not that close to the Imperial Palace.

(ai art)

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Let's take this moment in time to talk (as one often does) about IOUN stones.

IOUN stones look like simple floating colored shapes, unless you use Detect Magic on them, in which case they look insanely complex and maybe even paradoxical.

The spellforms they maintain behave like continuous spell-like abilities of living magical creatures, like something alive is maintaining a spellform that couldn't be held together by any static shape or cycle of magical forces, only by an organism that perceives and reacts.

IOUN stones circle above their wielder's head through any amount of gymnastics, and dodge blows as if they were alive; if you own more than one, they'll form themselves into pretty aerial patterns.

Outwardly they look like simple gems.

Inwardly they're filled with tiny three-dimensional magic-channels of surpassing complexity.

It's an obvious-to-Golarion-artificers hypothesis that IOUN stones are alive; and were (given known Azlanti habits) created by some horrifying sacrifice of intelligent lives and maybe even souls.  That the tiny intricate channels are there, not to maintain the outer spellform, but to imprison the essence of some living thing that does maintain it.

And yet no known divination shows any hint of necromancy about IOUN stones: no life, no soul.

It's a slightly-less-obvious hypothesis that some mysterious quality of animation or sapience was transferred into IOUN stones, extracted from an animal or a soul the way that the potency of spellsilver can be burned into things that are not spellsilver.

An awful number of awful experiments have failed to make any progress on this hypothesis either.

Not being stupid, plenty of wizards have thought of the possibility that both obvious hypotheses are just plain wrong.

Maybe there's some kind of living-magic effect that you could create with those intricate magical channels? and that is what navigates the IOUN stone's flight and maintains its spellform?

Nobody's ever made progress on figuring out this hypothesized Living Magic either, as might be the key to many different rumored aspects of Azlanti artifice.  Given the vast intricacy of IOUN stones, it doesn't look like an overwhelmingly promising thing to figure out by poking around.  Every artificer whose thinking gets that far dreams of finding the earlier prototype of an IOUN stone: something which (on this general class of hypothesis) maintains some much simpler form of Living Magic that you actually could understand, and maybe then you could decode the more complicated spellforms.

Carissa and her ex are not the only beings with INT 29 ever to examine ancient Azlanti IOUN stones.

They are, however, the first ones to do so already having some idea of what a 'low-tech computer' might look like.  And the first ones to do so having built their own Magical Simulator of Magical Physics, which gives them (a) actual experience in magical analog signal processing, and (b) the ability to simulate unseen magical interactions in some detail.

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To be clear, the Tiny Translucent Sphere is very barely an IOUN stone.  It does not fly around its wielder through all combat circumstances, but only floats in a single place relative to the (rotating) planet.  The only spell effect it maintains is a special weaker case of Prestidigitation.  It could not restore itself after a Dispel.

You couldn't say it was reverse-engineered from an Azlanti IOUN stone, so much as re-engineered from scratch after looking at the partially decodable surface features of an IOUN stone for very loose inspiration.  Maybe the best metaphor would be somebody designing an Analytical Engine from scratch, after staring at a computer built from vacuum tubes and managing to decode key abstract concepts but not the actual software.

- and yet, in the final analysis it's fair to say that Carissa Sevar went and made a literal fucking IOUN stone, the first one to be made since Azlant fell.

Many artificers over many centuries have regarded this as the dangling ultimate capstone achievement of mortal magecraft, short of the differently-unreachable realms of artifacts.  But once you've actually built your first IOUN stone, you can see that it's really just a baby's first step into an unimaginably vaster realm:  The space of Azlanti artifice is just the space of 'all other magic items', once you move past the realm of statically constructed magic items and into those that cast a sense-compute-motor loop to model and maintain a dynamic spellform.

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The spellform of the Tiny Translucent Sphere could be analogized to a stripped-down Prestidigitation, receiving small-dimensional input commands from a simulated wizard.

First, the Tiny Translucent Sphere maintains approximately the same station, relative to the Palace in Egorian or rather the rotating form of Golarion; it resists lesser wind currents over its quite small surface area, maintained by Prestidigitation's pound of force.

Second, when activated by a light pressure of magic cast through a scry, the Tiny Translucent Sphere changes the refractive index of light in a lens-shaped volume nearby.  Further light pressures of magic through the scry will rotate and shift that refractive lens.

Finally, the Tiny Translucent Sphere - this part took no additional effort at all - has a magical signature that is unique across Golarion and a number of neighboring planes.

Which is to say:  The Tiny Translucent Sphere acts as a combination scry anchor and telescope for purposes of scanning across the side of the Imperial Palace containing Abrogail Thrune's quarters, with windows and balconies shielded by a permanent wall of force.  You could use the IOUN Stone of Peeping to verify her presence, read lips if you focused closely enough and were sufficiently good at reading lips, maybe even get a glimpse of her walking around in a nightgown.  Whether you wanted to do that, of course, would depend on your utility function, and your purposes, and your plans.

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Aspexia Rugatonn now walks those same halls, decorated in what another place would call 'doompunk', appointed in gold and crimson more than red and black, with traces of Imperial purple never permitted to overshadow Hell's colors.  The ignorant commoners of Cheliax are sometimes reassured "It's not that Cheliax serves Hell; rather it's Hell that serves Cheliax" but this is a lie and everyone of sense knows better.  Hell is far greater than Cheliax, and for a great Power to serve a lesser one is contrary to the Chelish state religion.

Aspexia Rugatonn is heading for a meeting with Abrogail Thrune, pondering, as she walks, the best way to share certain major recent news: a surprise from the distant Chaotic Evil land of Wanshou.  It could be seen as hopeful news, is the problem.  One of the few aspects of trope-reasoning that Aspexia is confident she's understood, is the notion that a hope once spoken aloud in front of a viewpoint character cannot come to pass, or at least not come to pass exactly as it's spoken.  Some of Keltham's spellsilver plans worked as he intended, but that was only possible because of the Conspiracy; things were not really going well for him by his current lights.

(Aspexia Rugatonn has, of course, considered the possibility that she herself is a viewpoint character; considered it, and discarded it.  Her thoughts simply are not as dramatic as the thoughts of the trope-girls like Abrogail; and the story has not so far seemed interested in tormenting her the way it torments Abrogail.)

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In a chamber on that side of the Palace sits Queen Abrogail II, contemplating a recent report of her own; though at present she is just looking up from that report to gaze upon the Grand High Priestress of Asmodeus, whose attendance upon herself Abrogail has demanded.

(ai art)

Abrogail is not even striking a pose, here, this is just her resting queen face.

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"You said you had news of Keltham?"

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"So I infer."

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"I continue to imagine that such news was supposed to come to me, before you; not the other way around."

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"That would require you to understand what you're seeing.  You have not the Cunning to understand or even notice Keltham's handiwork, or Sevar's for that matter.  Your underlings even less."

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The quality of their interactions has been strained, of late; but if you don't know how to take that in stride, in Cheliax, you are not long for politics in the country.

"Tell me of it, then."

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"That discussion may consume some time.  We should dispense with shorter matters before then, if you've any small reports to make or little questions to ask of me."

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"As you will, then."

"I'm concerned with how you remain un-assassinated."

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"People have been saying that about me for a while."

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"Be serious.  I'm worried that Keltham hasn't killed you yet.  He has not much time left to do that before your child quickens with soul.  It's possible Keltham hasn't figured things out at all.  But with you staying so much in the Palace, he may not have had an easy chance to -"

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"If I leave the Palace under unusual conditions, if I make myself an easy and predictable target for temporary assassination, Keltham may deduce exactly what I'm doing and why!  Asmodia was your own pet; did you learn nothing from her?"

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Her voice is a bit dry.  "I am not sure I so trust all this complicated reasoning, that I wouldn't give Keltham a shot at killing you some easy way.  Instead of prompting him to, perhaps, crater all Egorian for it.  We should not neglect the ordinary form of the game while we chase this - absurdly elaborated one."

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"I suppose I could stage some affair that leaves me exposed at a predictable place and time.  Whereupon Keltham, if he is truly Wished and headbanded up to INT 29, will deduce exactly what I'm doing and why, and maybe even that you were the one stupid enough to order me to do it.  Would that make you happy?"

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"Perhaps.  I will think on it." 

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"How goes your training of the would-be Keepers of Asmodeus, as holds you back from so much other valuable work in time of approaching war, on only the word of a Chaotic god?  Are there any hopes vague enough to be told me?"

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She frowns.  "Vague enough?"

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"If it's mysterious to me and not too hopeful, if the audience wouldn't know what you're talking about, that shouldn't prevent things from going mostly as you plan."

(Abrogail Thrune is not aware of how her own desperation to know - to be back in the loop on things - to be told anything, or for that matter given some hope of regaining her story-relevance and pride - is skewing this judgment.)

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"Matters with the Keepers of Asmodeus go about as well as could be expected."  It would lack dignity if Aspexia Rugatonn cackled evilly; she hasn't done that since she stopped adventuring and went into administration.  Also, of course, she'd never show that much emotion in front of Abrogail; and also also it'd probably be too much hope to give her.

Matters with the Keepers of Asmodeus are going at least as well as could possibly have been expected.  Only the shadow of Cayden Cailean's involvement, that He somehow expects to benefit from this alongside Asmodeus, would hold Aspexia back from breaking into full-scale maniacal laughter if she were in private.

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"You can probably go slightly less vague than that.  Are Asmodeus's Keepers all sixth-circles?  Has one reached eighth-circle?  Are they a significant-enough military force to matter?"

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"Asmodeus has granted all of them His second circle, which is as much and more than any sane person would have hoped for.  All who've reached the second circle of wizardry are now training in mystic theurgy beside."

Which is another thing that Aspexia would laugh about maniacally under better circumstances.  Who would have thought that Intelligence, properly trained, could become a Wisdom bonus, to make for Asmodeus a cadre of wizard-priests?  Her eventual successor may have power enough to go toe-to-toe with Nefreti Clepati without two eighth-circles backing her up about it.

"But," Aspexia continues, "if twenty second-circles, of whom fourteen are training as bare-apprentice mystic theurges, are a military key to victory - the path is hidden from my sight."  Even if ALL TWENTY OF THEM would choose Hell over Elysium.

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"You're almost smiling."

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"You would almost smile too, in my position.  I've gotten them started on intrigues and backstabbing each other for pride of position, the stronger bending the weaker to their uses, and they are scrupulous about never doing so in a way that inhibits their group productivity."  Aspexia Rugatonn doesn't know why all this teaching matters, but it's so satisfying that she's not doing much questioning of Snack Service's claim that it does.

"Any good news from Korva Tallandria, that wasn't so good it had to be kept from you?"

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Abrogail now deeply regrets having ever entangled herself with that woman, as now chains Abrogail to her management.  Abrogail had meant Korva to run the program for injuring Keltham with his asked-but-unwanted 144 children, but Korva's desperately-concealed revulsion at the thought was such that Abrogail doubted the tropes of forcing Korva to do what had been meant as a gift to her of satisfying revenge...

And as later attempts soon proved, Korva Tallandria seemed to be made desperately unhappy - Korva didn't voice it, of course, but it was unconcealable in her thoughts - by almost any possible task that Abrogail presented for her consideration. 

Abrogail's actual conclusion is that Korva is the walking emotional disaster that Keltham thought she was, that he in fact correctly identified her trope; and that Korva will remain an emotional disaster until Keltham somehow wins her back over, and fucks it out of her or beats it out of her or whatever he is supposed to do.

"Tallandria guesses that at her present rate of progress on diamond chemistry, she might in the best case be able to produce her first specks of diamond dust in another month or two, and greatly scale the process around a month after," Abrogail answers.  Every task Abrogail suggested had just made the jilted trope-girl tie herself into a tighter knot of unhappiness and self-hate, until finally Abrogail had left Korva to her own choice of tasks; and that had been what she'd picked, even before the news out of the City of Brass.  "Tallandria's alchemical investigation says that diamond is primarily a crystal of Element-6, the key ingredient of coal, possibly adulterated with some further element or quality that her spectroscopes can't detect yet.  If there is no hidden ingredient to it, she expects that the right use of heat and pressure should be able to form purified Element-6 into diamond, given that it seems to form naturally in the ground to be mined and what Keltham said of such 'geological' processes; but she guesses the synthesis results will come out as diamond dust and forming large pure crystals will prove much harder."

"Tallandria is skeptical of Keltham's maybe-capability to mate smaller diamonds into large ones.  She guesses that without knowing the exact crystal structure, Keltham shouldn't be able to Prestidigitation-alchemize two diamonds into one larger diamond, no matter how cleanly-cut their matched surfaces or if he's able to work within a vacuum. It didn't happen naturally when Tallandria tried it, nor when she attempted obvious blind manipulations of 'potential energy surfaces'.  Tallandria remembers, and transcripts agree, that Keltham at INT 18 said he couldn't think of any simple way to find crystal structures without advanced technology out of Civilization, specifically generators for ultra-tiny light particles and very fine detectors for those."

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Aspexia doesn't bother to comment anything along the lines of 'Unlimited diamond dust for Permanencies seems enough to win this whole war', whether Cheliax obtained it first or Osirion did; this is obvious to both of them, along with the fact that they shouldn't take a few extra months to wait.

"It seems some evidence against the image of Keltham's apparent doings reported by Hell out of the City of Brass, I suppose, and the image of his purchase orders for smaller diamonds in Golarion.  I'm not Asmodia to say how much evidence in numbers."

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"It's the sort of thing that a smarter Keltham would enjoy bluffing us about; that seems more than probable.  The probability that he could actually do it - Tallandria thought she'd have put 5% on it, if the question hadn't immediately made her think it more probable."

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"I do presume you've instructed Tallandria that if she does have some unexpected breakthrough, she is to conceal it from you and report it first through Church channels?"

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"Naturally," Abrogail says with considerable bitterness, all carried by the word itself rather than any slippage of tone.

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"And the status of the rest of Project Lawful?"

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"Doing no better or worse than I expected.  No great breakthroughs in chemistry since last you asked; no new information of Keltham's stolen from the Scientific Revolution beyond what we've spied already."

"Meritxell, Yaisa, and Gregoria, are all being maintained in a state that should fall well short of Keltham needing to rescue them.  Tallandria seems unalterably miserable; I've had her research section moved somewhere that Keltham seizing her wouldn't do as much damage."

"Maillol is not recovered, and will probably not recover fully, but I'm keeping him in best condition to be held as negotiating-material against Sevar, whom I read as possibly caring about him.  Likewise those Security besides Olegario who were most loyal to her; and that useless fool whom Sevar rescued from my dungeons.  We are not instructed by our Lord to hold no hostages against Sevar; and she earlier stated that the Lawful Evil form of 'decision-theory' should concede it no threat if you're the sort of person who'd enjoy wrecking somebody that Sevar cared about, but might refrain from doing so if paid."

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"Careful.  That seems perilously close to stating a hopeful plan aloud; in fact I would say that you've gone and said it."

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Abrogail's lips press together thinly, but she makes no reply to this.  "Any news of Pilar Pineda that I'm permitted to know about, since that, too, is now apparently being routed through your offices?  It can be good news so long as it's sufficiently enigmatic and confusing, remember."

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"I expect many of the reports I'm receiving are false.  Either that, or Pineda has gotten herself into an amount of salacious trouble that I would have sincerely thought required time dilation."

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"It's probably that second one."

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"If they're all true, Pineda has gotten herself into way more salacious trouble than I expected even taking into account that she's a trope-girl."

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"I'm sure people end up saying that in 'eroLARPs' all the time.  Are there any new major political implications of Pineda's deeds, that I should know in order to do my job as Queen?"

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"Pineda was spotted in Wanshou.  In other news, the elder kraken who ruled that land has perished, and Wanshou's new government has declared themselves Lawful Evil now, with a state flag depicting a great city amid flames.  Quite the remarkable decision for a land claimed for the last century by Chaotic Evil, though they declare themselves strictly independent of Cheliax if not Hell."

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The words are no lie, but they are very finely sliced.  It's the sort of thing that the Queen genuinely needs to know about, that Wanshou has been claimed in the name of Hell; that's going to affect her affairs of state.

Aspexia wants to try and see if it's possible to keep from Abrogail the news that Pilar's involvement was merely her self-prophesied kidnapping, in a scandal leading to the downfall of half of the Wanshou government's ministers...

...almost immediately after those ministers had been appointed...

...by Carissa Sevar.  Who had come to Wanshou's small mortal government amid their ruined capital Numijaan, presenting herself in Archmagi's Robes, with IOUN stones orbiting her head; claiming that she in single combat slew their former ruler Zhanagorr; whose vast eyeball, scorched and ruined, she cast down before them as a proof; and proclaiming that She now claimed their country in the name of Hell, to be ruled by and for Her cult; and that any within Wanshou who reached at least Neutral Evil from Chaotic Evil, and did Her service in life and called Her name in death, would have their souls claimed by Her.  Exactly one former governing-slave of Zhanagorr did challenge Sevar, but he died upon the spot and without Sevar having turned her head in his direction.

Sevar worked upon a gate of ruined Numijaan that had faced Zhanagorr's waters, setting in place prepared ornaments but enchanting the whole; a gate, she said, to sear the exact words of her compact with Asmodeus onto the skin of any who walked through; and none could join her government or lead in her cult who had not walked through.

Sevar then departed without fanfare, her appearance having lasted less than an hour.

'If Teleports were free', as the saying goes, quite a lot of Lawful Evil people would already be in Wanshou, Rugatonn doesn't doubt.  As it stands, an impressive number of Lawful Evil indivduals who can afford Teleports have appeared in Wanshou; and some of those were appointed by Sevar to be its new government answerable to herself as sovereign, in the name of Hell.

...Only half of those ministers, however, had political careers that survived Pilar Pineda's advent shortly after: posing as a Sevarist, young, beautiful, seemingly innocent, exuding timid submissiveness and frightened sexuality.  Witnesses interviewed by a Church agent afterward reported a level of seductive appeal more often associated with literal succubi than with Splendour 21.

That Pilar was promptly kidnapped and abused by some of the new government leaders is not what caused the downfall of the ministers responsible - Wanshou's new government is Evil.  Rather, apparently, those ministers were inept kidnappers and got in each other's way rather than sharing, which proved them to be bad at coordination and operations work.  Pilar, it is said, revealed her true identity as She-Who-Bears-Cake and told all her kidnappers to resign; and threatened the remaining ministers that if they didn't do better at Lawful Evil, she'd come back and get kidnapped again.

Some of the disgraced ministers hesitated to obey (the story continued) but in that very moment a roar had resounded as the capital was attacked by one of Zhanagorr's spawn; whom Pilar slew, and then provided condiments for its roasting and distribution to the citizenry.  The disgraced ministers had obediently resigned, then, after Pilar returned and eyed them meaningfully while hefting a bag of salt.

All this news should basically not be possible to keep from Abrogail, unless the tropes can prevent Abrogail from hearing, somehow.  Aspexia is curious to see if they do.

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"How nice of you to fucking tell me, Rugatonn.  That's going to be so much fun to navigate in international relations, especially on the swift heels of Pineda's doings in Korvosa.  I suppose we're invading Osirion anyways, and that takes us past the point where Cheliax can present itself to even the most gullible countries as not being an expansionist threat.  But it would have been nice if the more distant lands had deluded themselves for longer into thinking that only our immediate neighbors stood in danger."

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"I told you not that long after I heard."

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Abrogail's lips press together bitterly; that it's deliberate doesn't make it any less her true emotion.  "I cannot rule like this, Rugatonn!  I can hardly think like it!  It is stifling to the point that I might as well be a statue myself, for all the good I can do!"

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"You know," Aspexia remarks conversationally, "I have never been able to understand, on some deep level, why it is that mortals - other than myself, of course - find themselves compelled to think so many harmful thoughts, as will bring them injury or discontent.  I just don't think thoughts like that, haven't my whole life.  I've never truly understood why others don't do the same.  You are not Wiser than me, but you are Wiser than I was when I was twelve years old and doing better than this.  Have you tried to just not think those thoughts, and also not feel stifled about not thinking them?"

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The Queen does not dignify this with a response.  "Those were all the lesser questions I had of you."

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"And I of you.  Now what's this news you said you had of Keltham, that should have proceeded through the Church before it came to the Queen?"

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The Queen lifts the sheaf of papers in her hand.  "I pray this report about the recent Whisperwood incident was routed to you literally at all?"

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"Matters of the Dark Tapestry are reported to my office immediately, yes."

"- you believe Keltham was involved in that?  To what end?  Stranger things happen daily in Golarion, and we can hardly attribute them all to Keltham's hand."

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Her voice is a pleasant one, now; and in truth a little of Abrogail's injured pride has been restored.  "You, and your underlings, are all idiots.  I will summarize this report, in case the general trend has been lost within the details."

"One.  A mad cleric, posthumously identified as Vediss Halurexis, kidnapped a Chelish farming village and brought them to the Pillar of Palamia in our northwestern Whisperwood.  The sacrifices were bound and enshrouded in darkness and silence, but one among their number was a tiefling of devil's line who could see through deeper darkness; hence, supposedly, our apparently accidental reception of this report."

"Two.  Vediss Halurexis shattered the Pillar of Palamia, previously thought to be a monument to some unknown god, with a great explosion of flames whose description does not particularly match any known spell signature.  The idiots who produced this report failed to consider that chemistry might be a means of producing this explosion.  I have commanded Project Lawful to examine the Whisperwood site, to see if they can detect any useful residues that can hint to us about how we could make our own great explosions."

"Three.  A huge horror from the Dark Tapestry bubbles up from the ground: a great ooze, forming and reforming hands and teeth and faces, and mouths presumably gibbering blasphemies that were silenced."

"Four.  Before the gathered villagers can be sacrificed, an as-yet-unidentified person in the uniform of Chelish Security appears.  The apparent Security approaches Vediss Halurexis without attacking.  Halurexis attacks with a quickened spell once the mage is near.  Halurexis's head explodes."

"Five.  The gathered sacrificial villagers hear a male voice informing them that rescue has arrived but they will wait in protective darkness and silence for a time, as there are heretical affairs going on outside."

"Six.  The strange mage flies above the horror from the Dark Tapestry and engages in several inscrutable activities.  They included casting flashes of light and trying to drop animal sacrifices onto the horror in different numbers and groups.  Our apparent witness thinks he remembers seeing early on one flash, one flash, two flashes, three flashes, five flashes, and a similar pattern appearing among the animal sacrifices dropped down.  Does that pattern signify any particular Dark Tapestry eldritchness to you?"

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"Not that I've been told of.  I'll inquire of Gorthoklek."

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"Mm.  I suppose it's possible you might be telling the truth about that.  In any case."

"Seven.  The mage eventually gives up on whatever ritual or bargaining he was trying to perform, if that's even what was happening, and spends nearly an hour casting an incredible variety of different attack magics on our Dark Tapestry horror, using items and scrolls for it, increasing in their magnitude and spell-circle over time.  The Dark Tapestry horror writhes and throws its bubbling self about, probably screams unheard in voices that would drive mortals mad, is little damaged by the spells and regenerates the damage swiftly."

"Eight.  The mage finally destroys the Dark Tapestry horror with another vast explosion.  Still guised as a Chelish Security, he unblinds and frees the gathered sacrifices, informs them that the day's events will no doubt be classified a secret of Cheliax, and commands them to go home and say nothing of this.  He throws down some silver and a few gold coins, saying that he's not troubling himself to distribute it but he does expect all there will receive and keep a payment for silence; and states that the consequences of running their mouths will be left to their imagination."

"Nine.  The next day, our single witness tiefling heads into the nearest town and reports."

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"I suppose I see the connection to Keltham's chemical secrets, now that you've pointed it out, in the form of great explosions that a tiefling villager's description couldn't identify as spellwork.  I still don't see what purpose Keltham would have in -"

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"If we believe our tiefling subject's eyes - then who the fuck else would have access to that quantity of scrolls and magic items and would use them to run inscrutable experiments on a horror out of the Dark Tapestry?"

"And if we don't believe his eyes, only Keltham would think of casting that illusion or falsifying that memory."

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Aspexia doesn't, quite, think in that way herself.  It isn't really a compliment to notice that Abrogail Thrune seems able to put herself in those shoes.  "I see."

"And - do you know the purpose of all that?"

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Abrogail Thrune laughs.  It's high and bitter, it might perhaps, be tinged with a touch of madness, if her Splendour permitted any such thing to enter her voice, which it doesn't.

"Oh, I know what we're meant to think.  The same way we were meant to think that Keltham has a means for aggregating lesser diamonds into greater ones.  Unless of course that simply is what Keltham was about, in the City of Brass, and he didn't bother to conceal it from us because he thinks there's nothing we can do."

"Things out of the Dark Tapestry cause fear.  They cause horror.  Even a very prepared mind will still feel that fear, it is said; you must find fighters and wizards with high Wisdom to gather about you and conclude the fight quickly lest they all go mad.  Who fights a horror like that for an hour, casting spells of increasing power, when they evidently have the means about themselves to kill it more quickly?  Why?"

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It takes Aspexia a moment to get that, and then her eyes widen very slightly yet visibly, so vast is her dismay.

For wizards and sorcerers to deliberately put themselves in a situation that outwardly seems painful and scary, but is ultimately safe, in order to increase their power - does not in fact work.  Otherwise everyone would do it.  Abrogail Thrune staked her life when she went to Hell, forfeit if she could not reach at least the fifth circle of sorcery, so that she would be frightened enough despite having deliberately put herself into that situation.

As for putting yourself under sufficient stress via exposing yourself to a powerful horror from the Dark Tapestry; well, the obvious reason why not everyone does that, is that you would go insane.

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"I quote from the Project Lawful transcripts:  'Civilization would cheat.  They'd figure out exactly what mental state somebody had to be in to absorb extra magic like Carissa did during her date with Abrogail, and then some sixth-rank Keepers would go into that exact mental state on purpose because they could just do that, and very very quickly Civilization would have its own powerful wizards.'  End quote.  He told us, back when he was more naive, exactly how a person like him thinks about the problem of only being a first-circle wizard, showed how much disdain he had for the thought of his Civilization needing to earn power the hard way.  Put yourself under the right kind of stress, into the right mental state, and channel sufficient magic from enough items and scrolls; that's how he thinks of it, and all our lifelong struggles a meaningless ritual we go through because we're dumber than he is.  Is he now fifth-circle, to match his rival and lover Carissa?  Ninth-circle, with Sevar finding her own way of it?  Who the fuck knows?"

"Or."

"Of course."

"That's all just what he wants us to think."

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The thought occurs to Aspexia that perhaps Keltham tried his clever idea, spending increasing amounts of money on casting from more powerful scrolls, but by the time he was done he was, say, only second-circle and starting to go permanently insane despite his alien disciplines; so he slaughtered the horror and went on his way.

It even matches Aspexia's understanding of tropes - it would be humorous (she does understand humor, especially cruel humor) if Keltham went to all that work, maybe did himself some permanent damage, in order to gain one caster-circle he could as well have gained from harder longer study.  And a fine joke if Abrogail then became unduly terrified of him too.

Aspexia doesn't say it out loud; it's a hopeful thought, so it must be kept from anyone who might be a viewpoint character.

Or on the other side of things - also an overly hopeful thought - maybe Abrogail remains unassassinated because Keltham has already gained greater interests than Cheliax; maybe greater than all Creation, if the tropes operate on scales larger than that.

Maybe the story's ending, from Golarion's perspective, is that Keltham simply pursues his own inscrutable purposes from now on, in a way that leaves world politics untouched?  It would be a beautiful blow to Abrogail's mighty pride, if Keltham's pride deemed her beneath its own notice.  Maybe he has reached the ninth-circle indeed, now, and the report was accidental from his perspective, and none of it is about Abrogail in the slightest because she isn't that important.

To Aspexia, at least, it seems like this would be a nicely dramatically resonant 'ending' to the story, which really does give her some substantial hope for it being true.  If Keltham is in some sense smarter than just INT 29 implies, he may be so intelligent as to be, in an odd way, harmless to Asmodeus's plans for Golarion, having outgrown the mortal concerns that once led him to meddle.

"Is there anything you believe we ought to be doing about it, if you're right?" Aspexia says aloud.

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"If he's now fifth-circle?  It makes no difference I can understand.  I can't see the plot which depends on Keltham being fifth-circle in his own right rather than using scrolls or hirelings.  If he's gone over to the upper end of ninth-circle magic, and can cast Wishes in his own right from an unlimited supply of diamonds?  Then our planned assault on Osirion, which approaches by the day, is doomed even if Keltham would not destroy all Cheliax to halt it."

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"It's a hopeful thought and so I wouldn't usually speak it to you, but you can't have missed that Keltham might have arranged that play intending you would conclude that -"

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"Fool.  Keltham would know that, did I find myself deciding to stay my invasion for reasons traceable to information Keltham might have chosen to give me, I'd question if that decision might have been intended; and not actually stay my hand from Osirion, without first, for example, asking Keltham to demonstrate his ninth-circle power.  If he was actually ninth-circle and wanted me to not invade, he could do it that way directly; only hinting at it implies his actual weakness."

"Therefore he is not doing it for hopes that I'll refrain from invasion, for if I found myself refraining from invasion on that account, I'd thereby know he'd planted the information to that end; and so, since I will not refrain from invasion, I go back to wondering if he is in fact ninth-circle, or if he planned my receipt of the information and it is meant to accomplish something else."

"You lack talent at using Cunning, Rugatonn, for all that your headgear grants you a little more than you were born with."

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"My Wisdom whispers to me that such intricate reasoning seems risky.  I sometimes reason as if gods can predict our choices, since often they can; but when I reason so, I reason in fewer steps."

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"It would not be reliable thinking if we were trying to ravel anyone else but Keltham or perhaps now also Sevar.  They might miss some step of that reasoning that I have reasoned they would use.  But Keltham has grown up in an entire society that makes legend and custom of games like these; he will not miss any step of the reasoning, and therefore my reasoning over his reasoning is reliable.  And he knows that I will not miss it, for he taught that subject explicitly and he knows I have read his transcripts.  There is no consistent story where Keltham tries to scare me off from invasion, for he knows that, in the moment of my deciding not to invade, I would thereby know that had been the purpose of his bluff.  So whatever is going on, it is not that."

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"Perhaps he's doing it to drive you mad with worry and make you less useful to Cheliax, since that seems to be the result being achieved."  Or maybe Keltham is tormenting Abrogail for his own sadistic amusement, in preparation for returning to claim her as vengeance-bride and torture-doll; he's intelligent enough by now to have thrown off the chains that dath ilan lays upon its peasantry.  But this yet again is a hopeful thought and should not be spoken aloud before Abrogail.

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"That presumes there's something I would figure out, of danger to him, if I'm not given other things to worry about."

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"Isn't that a hopeful thought?"

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"Not for these purposes, no.  It sets up a mystery whose answer the audience hasn't heard yet."

"- this situation is not tenable, Rugatonn.  You may be wise, but you are not smart enough, to ravel these puzzles in my place."

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"And you're not smart enough either, and less Wise than I.  We will keep the command structure as it is."

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"It is ultimately my decision."

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"So it is; and I've just informed you of which decision is the correct one."

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Abrogail doesn't give her the satisfaction of snarling.  "This is madness.  Cheliax cannot possibly win like this, with its greatest mind cowering inside a prison cell with imaginary bars.  Better that I should take all the knowledge and decisions back into my own hands, and trust that the tropes will reward a real fight more than these pathetic attempts to manipulate them."

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"You tried your hand at tropery, calling on them to witness your tryst with Sevar; and that went miserably, to all our costs.  You were given your one chance at this way of thinking, and you failed it."

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"And you are succeeding?"

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So far as Aspexia knows, Cheliax has had no further disasters brought on by hubris, which is really a lot of what Wisdom buys you in life, she feels.

"That's a foolish question to ask out loud.  What do you expect the tropes to do to me, if I go and answer yes?"

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"I am beginning to fear that you are too ignorant to recognize whatever stupid disasters you are blundering into, that I am not being told about!  You heard the report of the Whisperwood Incident and didn't recognize Keltham's hand, or his purpose, or his person!  You haven't figured out that it was Sevar and not Pineda who slew Zhanagorr and claimed Wanshou for Hell!"

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(Well, that answers that, at least.)

It hasn't been lost on the Most High that Abrogail's been put to unusual-to-her travail this last month, not free to pursue her usual plans and plots and whims; forced instead to wait on a child growing in her belly and Keltham's possible destruction of Cheliax, while Carissa Sevar's doings and Aspexia's own paltry plottings are kept from her.

Aspexia is, for a fact, starting to worry that the Queen may be going mad of it, being permitted little or no important action.

As the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus, it falls to her to deliver solace in such situations.

"Is this truly all it takes to drive you unstable?" Aspexia says acerbically, letting some of her real contempt creep into her voice.  "One month, living as a literal queen in fine palace, only you have to contend with a few unfamiliar uncertainties and aren't allowed to meddle as you feel like it?"

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"Don't fucking patronize me, Aspexia.  I'm not a child in need of some motherly cruelty.  The aspect of this situation that is giving me difficulty isn't the lack of action, it's trying to play the game against fucking Keltham, who I suspect of falling barely short of a Dark Tapestry horror himself in terms of his effects on others' sanity.  Sevar's doings at least make sense.  This report of Keltham - is it a record of a true event that reached us accidentally, or sped along only by tropes?  Is it a report that Keltham permitted and intended to reach us?  I can't analyze the plot just by comprehending its obvious effect if I believed it, because Keltham hails from a world of over-intelligent madlings where my imagination of that intended effect would just be the first layer of his own intended plot.  Calculate the consequences of that?  He expects me to do that too!  And I can't guess how many layers deep he'll think I'll go!  He's from a world that plunges their children into false realities to toughen them!"

"There must be, there must be some Law to govern it, but Sevar is lost, Asmodia is lost, Avaricia and Meritxell and Shilira are not trope-touched and haven't the skill, Tallandria has twisted herself into a knot that's fucking useless for any plots more diabolical than diamond chemistry, Gorthoklek won't give me any useful answers unless I ask exactly the right question, and you are fucking useless because for all your vaunted dealings with divinities you seem to have no concept of what it means to fight someone, fight something, that -"

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The math that Abrogail Thrune lacks is not actually all that complicated; it's just the notion of a mixed strategy in an adversarial equilibrium.

Once you've fixed a probability distribution over your adversary's probabilistic models of you, there's some mixed strategy that brings maximum expected dismay to all the probable people your adversary might be, given (your beliefs about) how they're unsure of what the reality is, and unsure of how many layers deep you might go, correctly modeling that you'd randomize in choosing layer depth in order to make the problem as hard as possible for (their beliefs about your beliefs about) their intelligence to solve.  Just answering "one level higher than you" only works if you can predict them perfectly, and also they can't predict themselves.

Once you phrase it that way, it's obvious that any deterministic rule would make things too easy for the adversary, if they correctly guessed that you'd reason that determined way.  And conversely, once you realize there mustn't be a deterministic rule for determining the number of layers in a deception, the notion of a mixed strategy follows quickly.

Really, when you put it that way, it makes you wonder why Abrogail Thrune herself did not work it out.  She is not less Cunning, as measured by Detect Thoughts and raw Intelligence, than those mathematicians who first worked out the notion of randomized fixpoint strategies of adversarial games, somewhere in dath ilan's buried history.  So why didn't Abrogail Thrune solve it herself?

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Let's take this moment in time to talk (as one often does) about the notion of conflict between entities of asymmetrical intelligence.

Such conflicts are a surpassing theme of dath ilani literature, usually with the smarter entity starting out with the worse position in resources, and having to overcome that through wit that the other side failed to anticipate.

And because there are buried warnings in that same literature, it's emphasized also that the conflicts between humans of shared culture are only a small special case; what matters more than disparities in time-local thinkoomph are disparities in cumulated thinkoomph.

When you get into a contest of intelligence with one of your contemporaries, it's really two tips of one iceberg that are fighting each other: you and they are each the inheritor of a roughly equally vast body of ancestral thought and literature, and then they did a little bit more thinking of their own on top of that.  Even if you're exploring some entirely new territory to your shared culture, you'll be coming in with similar concepts of math, science, how broadly and basically to think.  (At least, that's how it is in dath ilan where people wouldn't just not learn probability theory, or the litanies of known heuristics and their exploits; there, most people do start out with a common broad base of basic knowledge.  Dath ilan, in the course of making sure that everyone gets all the boosts they can, does tend to eliminate that source of variance in advantage.)

Abrogail Thrune wearing the Crown of Infernal Majesty is decently smart as an individual.  She didn't invent the notion of mixed-strategy equilibria in layered reflective deceptions from scratch, or solve for that equilibrium, because it's surprisingly hard to invent that sort of thing if you have literally zero hints; literally surprising in the sense that people would be surprised by it.  (Most dath ilani would be shocked out of their heavily technologized shoes to learn how late in their history probability theory was invented, far after the dawn of agriculture, and even after the dawn of gambling as turned out to have motivated the question.)

Nex and Geb had each INT 30 by the end of their mutual war.  They didn't solve the puzzle of Azlant's IOUN stones... partially because they did not find and prioritize enough diamonds to also gain Wisdom 27.  And partially because there is more to thinkoomph than Intelligence and Wisdom and Splendour, such as Golarion's spells readily do enhance; there is a spark to inventing notions like probability theory or computation or logical decision theory from scratch, that is not directly measured by Detect Thoughts nor by tests of legible ability at using existing math.  (Keltham has slightly above-average intelligence for dath ilan, reflectivity well below average, and an ordinary amount of that spark.)

But most of all, Nex and Geb didn't solve IOUN stones because they didn't come from a culture that had already developed digital computation and analog signal processing.  Or on an even deeper level - because those concepts can't really be that hard at INT 30, even if your WIS is much lower and you are missing some sparks - they didn't come from a culture which said that inventing things like that is what the Very Smart People are supposed to do with their lives, nor that Very Smart People are supposed to recheck what their society told them were the most important problems to solve.

Nex and Geb came from a culture which said that incredibly smart wizards were supposed to become all-powerful and conquer their rivals; and invent new signature spells that would be named after them forever after; and build mighty wizard-towers, and raise armies, and stabilize impressively large demiplanes; and fight minor gods, and surpass them; and not, particularly, question society's priorities for wizards.  Nobody ever told Nex or Geb that it was their responsibility to be smarter than the society they grew up in, or use their intelligence better than common wisdom said to use it.  They were not prompted to look in the direction of analog signal processing; and, more importantly in the end, were not prompted to meta-look around for better directions to look, or taught any eld-honed art of meta-looking.

So Nex and Geb weren't really, in the end, that much smarter than their societies; not least, because that society and its cumulated thinkoomph didn't tell them to try to be any smarter than their society.

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The real cautionary warnings in dath ilani literature, then, are woven into stories of meetings between humans and aliens, not conflicts between one human and another.  Aliens with a culture a thousand times as old.  Aliens from a chronologically younger species but that think faster.  The real disparities in cumulated thinkoomph would appear in meetings like that.

You can imagine (and dath ilani authors have) an individual alien so smart that it doesn't need to learn about standard openings and ploys in Go (a game that exists in many places), it doesn't need to come from a culture that plays Go, it can just play out possible games in its head for a few hours and be superior to every human player at the end.

You can tell stories about how, if you yourself have higher thinkoomph individually than your opponent, but your opponent comes from a society of greater cognitive depth, you could perhaps try to move your conflict to some new territory that your enemy's society knows not; and beat them on conflict-grounds of fluid intelligence, having moved out of crystallized known facts.

Conversely (the stories go in dath ilan), if you are facing a terrifyingly smart opponent who is but for the moment more ignorant than you, you had better be ready to try to fight them on grounds that you know better, and defeat them very quickly before they can learn from experience much faster than you would learn from it.

There can be stories about how one side has greater depth of cumulated thinkoomph, and fluid thinkoomph not inferior to yours - minds of the same level but with better technology including mental technology - but the side with better technology is outnumbered and ill-resourced.

There can be stories about fighting aliens that have greater cumulated thinkoomph and greater resources and equal fluid thinkoomph, and your one advantage is surprise; you have time to prepare with your lesser resources, and you can choose your battleground, but you must make all your moves without alerting them, and once you strike you must win very quickly.

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As for a story where the opposition has greater fluid thinkoomph and a far greater depth of cumulated deep-thinkoomph and has had time to acquire roughly equal resources and holds the advantage of surprise - well, what would be the literary point?

It wouldn't even make a good sad story about a desperate doomed battle.  If the truly smarter agency has had time to think and prepare and plan, it's not going to battle you at all.  It's not going to attack you through any channel you've thought of, unless your knowledge of that vulnerability still leaves you helpless to defend it.  The smarter agency is not interested in fighting you if that can be avoided.  It would rather just win, in a way that doesn't make a good story.

If you get a chance to fight - if you get a chance to act - the alien is doing it wrong.  There does come a point of wisdom beyond which an agent does stop doing it wrong; or at least, stops doing it wrong in ways that sufficiently smaller agents can understand in advance as wrong.  If there's extrauniversal forces that want things to be dramatic (dath ilani authors, for example), they'll have to content themselves with picking a dramatically suitable moment for the instant win to occur, or maybe focus on the aftermath (if there is one) - at least if they want their stories to be taken seriously by the Very Serious literary critics.

And if you had to derive a single cautionary message from all that dath ilani literature, about what-if you end up in the position of opposing an agency of greater current and cumulative thinkoomph - and you do not have the advantage of surprise - and you do not have greater resources - that message would be -

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A short time ago, Abrogail Thrune was observed in the presence of Aspexia Rugatonn.

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Some swift final preparations were set into motion.

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They are now completed.

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At some distance from the Imperial Palace, a hovering rocket ignites, very quickly accelerating towards nearly the speed of sound.  It's harder to keep a projectile stable over the speed of sound; and by the time it nears the Imperial Palace, it will already be moving faster than the reflexes of anything that could stop it.

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"- is -"

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No mortal hand could guide the rocket precisely enough, to the point where it's now been targeted, given the turbulence of the rocket's wake and the way that tiny errors would amplify.  So the fine steering is being done by an analog magical processor inspired by the navigators on Azlanti IOUN stones, as hinted at by a more cumulated civilization's concept of a "guided missile".

The rocket approaches the wall of force guarding the palace, and a Disintegrate already in the process of going off completes at just the right time and destroys the wall of force.

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"- smarter -"

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The rocket crashes through a window at nearly the speed of sound; at nearly the same instant, a Dispel completes on a half-ton of low-quality high explosive previously under the effect of a Shrink Item spell; at nearly the same instant, that explosive detonates even as it expands back to normal size.

This explosion has been targeted to launch the Crown of Infernal Majesty out of the Imperial Palace into the air over Egorian.  Not on an exact precalculated trajectory, you can't do that with explosions at this magitech level; but the vector between the Crown and the center of detonation has rendered it predictably the case that the Crown will get launched in a known rough direction.  A certain person has just Teleported into Egorian to watch from that direction, ready to spot the magical signature of the fast-moving major artifact and move to grab it after.

Abrogail Thrune and Aspexia Rugatonn have impressive resistances and saves and protective magic items, none of which mattered any more than the Palace's security precautions mattered.  A half-ton of explosive going off in the same room isn't a combat attack, it's just you being dead.

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- don't.

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(ai art)

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It's not her first time dying, not her first time waking in Hell in company of the devil who holds her soul as custodian for Asmodeus.  But along with everything else it means that the Crown of Infernal Majesty has been abruptly removed from her; it's that, more than the shock of being dead, that she struggles to recover from, in that moment of surprise.


(And because of that, she doesn't think, fast enough, to think all of the things that she could have thought -)

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Those devils that deal at all with mortals in their tedious unpolished form are not held in particularly high regard among devils; mortals are, after all, paving stones in expectation and mostly in practice, and those torments and betrayals that can be visited on stronger and more interesting beings are more sophisticated, more impressive, all-around better, than those routine, boring, and limited torments that can be attempted on the recently-dead without destroying any hope of further use from them.

There is another reason why such devils are held in less regard, and it's that they have to pretend the mortals are interesting and important and impressive, at least a little bit, to lure those mortals into signing their souls away, to give those mortals a tiny fragment of a line with which to trick themselves into believing they matter. They can call the mortals worthless worms, of course, but they have to do it in a tone that concedes that this great devil is here, after all, treating with them. Mortals love that. 

 

Abrogail Thrune II is generally to get a warm welcome, on arriving in Hell, because her presence is likely temporary, and her loyalties need to be permanent. Abrogail Thrune II is certainly smart enough to know that the greeting she gets on arriving to Hell, with hope of resurrection, is nothing like the greeting she'll get when she falls to them forever. But still, she's a mortal, and like most of them she thinks she matters, and feeding that little delusion of hers is critical to not losing her entirely. 

 

So the senior contract devil in possession of Abrogail Thrune's soul pauses in his conversation when Abrogail Thrune arrives, much as it galls him, and turns from the beings that actually matter to the disoriented shell of this mortal, and says, "well, well... I take it this one wasn't on your schedule?"

He's reading her mind, of course, in case she has the expectation she won't be resurrected and he can drop the farce, or in case she's in a mood where he can light her on fire and then claim later it was for her own good really.

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Her sorcery is not about her, a gaping hole in place of what is, at eighth circle, more a part of herself than her own hands -

- schedule.  Devil talking to her.  She's dead.  Being dead... wasn't on her schedule?  That doesn't sound right.  Aspexia was just worried that she hadn't been assassinated -

Keltham.

Keltham killed her.

She doesn't even know how.  Didn't feel it.  She was in her own palace.

Clever boy, thinks the part of herself that, without a whole coherent mind in control of it, thinks such things, remembered condescension mixing with a touch of actual admiration.

But does that count as it being on her schedule?

"It's complicated," her mouth says regally.

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"Tedious mortal complicated, or is there something in your latest complications of interest to Hell? - actually, think of that but don't speak."

Someone's attempting to scry them. It is trivial enough for a devil to shut down a scry on his own person or his own slave, but not obvious he'd care to; perhaps these are Abrogail's allies, and serve Hell, and if not, well - Abrogail's enemies can see her in Hell, if they like, and if they look again next week and she hasn't been resurrected, what they see will be a great deal more fun.

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Interest to - Hell?  Her life has been so enormously complicated that she doesn't know where to start (isn't prioritizing in this scrambled state), with 6 INT missing from herself all the endless complications feel like a ruined tower collapsing down into a heap of stones.  Her mind goes to the most-recent complications, possible layers of what Keltham could be trying to trick her into believing, about whether he leveled from his fight with a thing from the Dark Tapestry, about diamonds and the City of Brass (no, Hell already knows about that, Hell was first to inform Cheliax), she's not supposed to think about hopeful plans because then they can't come to pass the way she hoped them, only that - somehow seems much stupider, in her own stupid state, Aspexia can't be right about that, she suddenly feels -

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He takes her hand, then, and crushes it within his own until he can feel the bones break, but with his expression focused. "I am your custodian; you have been commanded to think."

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It helps.

But not instantly.

Seconds go on ticking while she focuses on the pain, lets it wash through her and remind her that she is failing to impress; one second, two seconds, half a round, her thoughts collect -

Aspexia Rugatonn was there, is she dead too, yes because the attack wouldn't have been timed like that otherwise, does Keltham have something planned to stop Aspexia's Resurrection and her own -

If all Keltham wanted was to see his child dead, she should be resurrected soon.  Minutes, though, not rounds, because with both her and Aspexia dead, the protocol calls for resurrecting Rugatonn first.  Not as a power struggle between Church and Crown - well, of course there's always a power struggle, but in this case it works out to a common-sense answer and a tiny flow of political capital - Aspexia can cast True Resurrection herself, if she happens to have it prepped, it might save a scroll -

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Let's take this moment in time to talk (as one often does) about the theory and practice of counterassassination security in Cheliax.

In Golarion generally, the vast majority of heads-of-state are defended primarily by custom, by inertia, by the country's sovereign not actually being important enough to be worth defending against the equivalent of one person with a distance-targetable projectile weapon.  Security-through-nobody-actually-bothering-to-attack-you-all-that-hard-or-creatively is the most popular kind of security.

The Queen of Cheliax, Abrogail Thrune II, is one of the rare exceptions to this rule.  From the standpoint of, say, the Church of Iomedae, Abrogail Thrune makes Golarion significantly worse just by existing, and if she stopped ruling Cheliax her replacement would probably not be equally creative and dynamic.  Iomedae's Church would pay a lot of money to any creative person who managed to kill Abrogail Thrune in a way where she didn't come back; or, better yet, to anyone who could take the Crown of Infernal Majesty permanently off the board.

So Abrogail Thrune's personal security model centers around the presumption that the attacker's primary goals, and the primary negative outcomes that Cheliax wants to avoid, are:

1)  Somebody taking Abrogail Thrune down in a way that True Resurrection, or at ultimate need Miracles and Wishes, cannot fix.  Soul Bind, most obviously, and then getting away with the soul-gem.  Just having a daemon-worshipper Maledict her to Abaddon would not suffice; if you are willing to pay enough you can Wish back a Maledicted soul.  If the body was destroyed, you can Wish up another body first.  You'd need to do that before her soul was eaten, but unless you are really dawdling about this there will likely be time.  Similarly, to have a daemon consume Abrogail Thrune in the process of an assassination would require quite a lot of time during which Cheliax had not caught up with you.  Still, it wouldn't do to let Abrogail Thrune - or her soul gem - get Teleported onto the front doorstep of the House of Oblivion.

2)  Getting the Crown of Infernal Majesty permanently out of Cheliax's reach, presumably out of the reach of Hell and Asmodeus.  This isn't going to be easy; Asmodeus can definitely see the Crown wherever it goes.  Putting the Crown into a bag of holding and tossing the bag into a portable hole, which usually suffices to lose a thing forever in the far distant Astral Plane, is not nearly going to suffice here.  But if you can get the Crown to Heaven - that might do it.  Even if Asmodeus could pay Heaven to get it back, the payment would be huge enough that the injury to Evil would be vast; paladins would offer their souls for it; and in the aftermath Abrogail Thrune would no longer be Queen, or much of anything at all.

All of this points to a security model that centers on keeping Abrogail Thrune where she is rather than alive.  The Queen is not without her defenses, over and above the crazy levels of protection from the Crown of Infernal Majesty; but this is because while the Queen is alive she can better stay in one place, and defend her Crown and her soul.  Defending the Queen's life isn't the point the same way.  That's a Raise Dead issue, or at worst a True Resurrection, or at real worst a matter of Wish and Miracle.  So long as she's not inside a gemstone.

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If the assassination is taking place outside the Palace, the threat model, then, is an attacker who has a plan for making off with a gem containing Abrogail Thrune's soul, or with the Crown of Infernal Majesty, or less likely kidnapping her living body.

The full details of Abrogail Thrune's security entourages outside the Palace would be lengthy; and, of course, heavily classified.

But a primary element of her personal Security is that Abrogail Thrune's entourage will be decorated with Telepathic Bonds and Status spells.  Someone on the other end of those will be in telepathic range of Gorthoklek, who will promptly Greater Teleport in - not to that exact location, as will obviously be Teleport Trapped by at least one side of the security game; Gorthoklek will Teleport in above and dive quickly.

(Abrogail Thrune does sometimes appear in a place without heavy Security - life would be less fun for her, otherwise - but when she does, she goes Mind Blanked and never ever lets it form anything resembling a predictable pattern.  The one Competent Security on her personal guard invariably tears her hair out anyways.)

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Abrogail Thrune's counterassassination security model has also obviously considered an attack on the Queen inside her Palace's Forbiddance; there's just way too much weird shit in Golarion for it to be realistically possible to keep everyone out of a place.

The advantage to the attacker, in this case, will be that Abrogail Thrune will be less prepared than when she ventures outside, without a dozen protective spells that are too bothersome or too expensive to constantly redo.  She also will not be able to immediately Dimension Door or Teleport away, because of the Palace's Forbiddance.  Gorthoklek cannot immediately Greater Teleport to her side.

The attacker's primary disadvantage is the Forbiddance; and the security model assumes that the attacker's primary goal is getting outside of the Forbiddance, carrying a gem with the Queen's soul or her head still wearing the Crown (or both).

Permanent walls of force are Very Expensive.  One-time walls of force, rather less.  If the Queen's Status indicates that she is severely injured or dead while inside the Palace, multiple layered walls of force and several other complicated measures will spring up to enclose the Palace Forbiddance almost immediately.  Other security measures are then invoked with the aim of sweeping the enclosed volume inside the countermeasures before they run out of time and come down; against an attacker determined to hide and ride out Cheliax's supply of temporary enclosures.  (An attacker trying to hide probably has the Queen's soul gem; the Crown should be impossible to hide.)

Of course Security has not failed to consider the possibility of the Forbiddance itself being taken down, by a Dispel from Nefreti Clepati or a Mage's Disjunction.  Could the attacker also have cast a Teleport Trap before then, in case Abrogail Thrune tries to just Teleport right out?  If it was some other sovereign being targeted, then maybe, but a Teleport Trap allows both a Will save and Spell Resistance; an 8th-circle sorcerer wearing the Crown of Infernal Majesty is probably fine here.

Again the details of measure and countermeasure would be lengthy; but one very pragmatic countermeasure is that if the Palace Forbiddance goes down while the Queen is inside it, Gorthoklek teleports to her location and then scries for Aspexia Rugatonn.

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Wishnapping is a whole entire other class of threat.  Almost nobody besides Abrogail Thrune needs to worry about it.  It's just too expensive.

If you are Abrogail Thrune, or somebody else worth well more than a hundred thousand gold pieces to kidnap, the first elementary precaution is to be Mind Blanked whenever you're out of a Forbiddance.

But as for a Mage's Disjunction or a Nefreti Clepati Dispel being levied on a Forbiddance, while you're inside it, and a Wish following immediately after -

Well, then, if you're Abrogail Thrune, you laugh.  Involuntary Wish-movement allows both Will-saves and Spell Resistance, and Abrogail Thrune wearing the Crown has plenty of both.  Even without the Crown an 8th-circle sorcerer still gets a heck of a Will save, and Abrogail Thrune's luxuriously spoiled aristocratic upbringing has granted her something of an extra-strong Will save on top of that.  A circle of a hundred noble Efreet could all Wish for her to be moved, one after another, and Abrogail Thrune would not move did she choose to stay; the Efreet are not such mighty casters, after all, even if they have a strange affinity for Wishes.  You'd have to render her unconscious outside a Forbiddance and take off her Crown, and if you can do either of those things, you can just take the Crown.

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With all that said, it isn't realistically possible to prevent anybody from ever killing the Queen.  The primary pillar of security there is that resurrection is in fact a thing.  For this reason did Abrogail and Aspexia believe that Keltham ought to not have too much trouble assassinating the Queen, so long as Abrogail occasionally appeared outside the Palace at a predictable place and time, no matter how much Security she brought with her and even if they were not instructed to leave gaps.

...Of course, then, another obvious thought is that you could first assassinate Abrogail Thrune in a very normal way, and then hire a Lawful Evil spellcaster to resurrect her; or even with some work and the right set of lies, get an Asmodean to cast True Resurrection from scroll, aimed at Abrogail Thrune while she was vulnerable in Hell.

To prevent Abrogail from giving her consent for resurrection unwittingly - or her asking the devil who holds custody of her soul to do the same - there's an obvious sort of setup that involves a Greater Scry spell and a Message through that scry (as can be enacted much more swiftly than Sending), containing a password telling Abrogail that the upcoming resurrection is an authorized one, and naming a randomized exact number of rounds before that resurrection.

Depending on how badly things got fucked up when the Queen died, and especially if Aspexia Rugatonn is also dead or if there's an ongoing Security penetration, their True Resurrections may take place within the sort of tiny unambitious demiplane that isn't too insanely expensive to stabilize with a Permanency.

That resurrection isn't the priority, though, the priority is securing the Crown of Infernal Majesty - and oh there's all sorts of complications involved in Abrogail Thrune trying to prevent anybody else from putting on the Crown during that process!  Especially if they happen to have maybe executed a compact with Asmodeus, or if they're a Thrune; or maybe a Thrune in disguise who's secretly executed a compact... 

The only reason why that resurrection should happen shortly, if nothing has gone wrong, is that the resurrection process doesn't depend on the Crown-securing process.  The rez can proceed in parallel as soon as the process for trying to get Aspexia Rugatonn to do it fails, and the find-Rugatonn process is on a sharp time-bound.

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- but if all Keltham wanted was to still his child - he would not have tried, probably succeeded, in killing Rugatonn at the same time.  That's - Abrogail doesn't see it yet, the reason, but there must have been a plan -

A flash of disoriented horror and dismay, would Keltham take the Crown - to cast into Heaven, or wear himself - no that's madness, it would have been Carissa, obviously Carissa, surely Carissa, as the motive power, she'd never let the Crown be thrown into Heaven like garbage.  If, with Abrogail dead, Carissa compacted of Asmodeus can lay her own hands upon the Crown of Infernal Majesty - then Carissa wins, obviously, if she can prove her continuing Asmodean loyalties to the Most High beyond all doubt, and has strength enough to force skeptical eighth-circle wizards to kneel to her.  And otherwise there will be a horrific mess -

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None of this is very interesting, if you are a devil; mortals can have their mortal power struggles. He dismisses the scry with an irritated flick of his tail; whether it is Abrogail's allies or her enemies, they've seen enough, and squeezes her hand further as it seems to be salutary so far. "You may speak aloud," he says. Sometimes mortals can think more clearly that way.

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And then suddenly, Abrogail Thrune is somewhere else!

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Wishes don't obey all the usual rules for resurrections, which is why they can beat Maledictions and in some cases temporarily infernal contracts (if the contracted didn't die of old age).

But Wishes do get Will saves, if they try to resurrect you without consent.  Even in death, some pissant Efreeti cannot just yank Abrogail Thrune back to life against her will.

And a petitioner in the afterlife who does not consent might also be assisted by the authority of that plane in resisting.  Usually would be, if that plane wants to keep that petitioner.  Hell can't go around Wishing its enemies out of Heaven for funsies, or vice versa.

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But there were three Wishes remaining, of fifteen Wishes bought with a soul; and if you are a damned petitioner making a Will save against a pit fiend, the usual rule is that the pit fiend wins.

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Abrogail Thrune is currently looking up at an expressionless pit fiend towering over her!

And alive!

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And Greater Cursed.

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He can't just do that!!  Abrogail gets a Will save!  She should've gotten a Will save!

And why can't she move - why can't she cast - why does her mind suddenly have this awful hollow empty feeling where her drive, her core, should be, to call down flame and ice -

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The procedure for revival via Wish, if you need to beat some unusual impediment to resurrection using a tremendous amount of money, involves using one Wish to recreate the body and a second Wish to revive it.  (Though the first Wish, in this case, could just be carried out in the City of Brass, before going to Hell for the second.)

Thinking about it, this implies a phase of the process where a lifeless Abrogail Thrune body is just lying there all vulnerable-like.

Before revival her lifeless body was bound in fetching-looking chains of magical steel, and also this new body comes pre-equipped with the following magic items:

Amulet of Held Person:  Casts Hold Person on the wearer.  Prerequisites:  Hold Person, Bestow Curse, Craft Wondrous Item.

Crown of Splendourlessness:  -12 to Splendour, as if subjected to Greater Bestow Curse.  Prerequisites:  Greater Bestow Curse, Craft Wondrous Item.

Tiny Sword of Will Save Failure:  -10 to all Will saves.  Prerequisites:  Greater Bestow Curse, Craft Magical Arms and Armor.


(Note:  Missing prerequisites can be bypassed with an increase in crafting DC that is beneath INT 29 Carissa Sevar's dignity to acknowledge in any way.)

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Keltham, who does not seem to be bothering to speak to her paralyzed form - nor to the pit fiend - unceremoniously picks her up with obviously augmented Strength; slings her over his shoulder; and hauls her quickly out of the iron room, exiting from there to what's clearly Avernus, the first layer of Hell.  His moves are Hasted, not in the fashion of somebody who fears the consequence otherwise, just someone who doesn't want to waste time.

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It is hard to think, in this state.  She was fifteen years old the last time anyone trained her to operate with Intelligence, or Wisdom, or Splendour cursed; and then Abrogail was not cursed this terribly.  It is the sort of training that she just did not dare keep up later in life, it would make her just too vulnerable.

Feeling impressed, feeling scared, those are both emotions she should not let herself feel without deciding about it, but there they are and it is much harder than usual to grind down everything that ought not be part of Abrogail Thrune.

Her mind does manage to make the connection, once it sorts out the bodily feeling that she's already wearing a cursed amulet and cursed crown, that Carissa Sevar must be working with Keltham on this or at least fulfilling magic item orders for him.  Abrogail's mind, looking around for anything allowable to think, decides that this means the Crown wouldn't just be given to Heaven; Sevar wouldn't allow it.

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He passes through a Gate that opens for him, into what looks like an unfamiliar demiplane; speaks a password, crosses a marked boundary.

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She can't move.  Can't cast.  Can barely think.

When she looked forward to playing the game of thrones against Carissa, or maybe against a Lawful Evil Keltham someday, she did think it would be later; and that she would get a chance to make a move, in the game, rather than getting no chance to act at all.

(Her mind does not let itself think any thoughts like 'lost the game' or 'not queen of Cheliax anymore'.  There are all kinds of ways that she could still end up being Queen after this.)

(There's no thoughts like that, but an awful sinking pit in her stomach; for Abrogail Thrune hasn't Splendour enough to cast one cantrip, now.)

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He casts a second Greater Curse upon her, from scroll, and then a third; duplicating with those Curses the effect of the cursed magic items already on her.

And then a fourth and final Greater Curse, one that would seem nonstandard even to Aspexia Rugatonn; whose purpose Abrogail Thrune simply cannot read, in the gestures he is making to tell the Curse what it should be; casting it over a longer period than ordinary even with gestures Hasted.

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She would protest, say something, persuade him somehow, maybe ask the seductively frightened question 'What are you doing to me?', if she could speak and had Splendour.

 

If this doesn't end well, it's all Aspexia's fault for insisting that Abrogail wait paralyzed and frightened in her palace instead of playing the game like a sane person.

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Keltham lays that final curse upon her, as she lies helpless to resist.

He then moves out of her field of vision, leaving her bound and paralyzed upon the flat surface of what appears to be a gray-lighted simple demiplane; though to be sure, in Abrogail's state, she could not see through an illusion maybe even of an ordinary wizard, and never mind one cast from INT 29.

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She could not feel herself failing her Will save, cannot tell what the curse is doing to her, she feels no more stupid or crippled than before.

But even with 6 less INT than usual, even with an utterly crippling 18 less Splendour than usual, Abrogail Thrune is not hollowed-out enough not to wonder why they're leaving her conscious at all, nor fail to question whether she's actually unattended -

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The Hold Person from the Amulet wears off, though she's still chained.

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Okay haha no she's not stupid enough not to think that they'd hold her in such disregard as to leave her conscious and unparalyzed just to show Hellish contempt; it'd be an unnecessary risk.

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...Detect Thoughts.  They've left her alone to see if she thinks anything interesting once she thinks she's alone.

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She has 6 less WIS than usual and her core is hollow and empty; if anything that almost saves her, that her INT is collapsed along with her WIS, and that there's so much more internal suffering to distract her.  Her mind literally fails to prioritize all the things that she'd least want Keltham and Carissa to know, just like she had trouble prioritizing for her custodian devil any thoughts like 'this might just be the first stage of Keltham's plan'.

Well, what shouldn't she be thinking, right now -

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She absolutely shouldn't be thinking that question.  Obviously.

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Ha.  If she was Carissa, she'd already be thinking exactly the thoughts that would be advantageous for her captors to observe her thinking -

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Okay THAT was not a smart thought to think while Carissa was possibly reading her mind and maybe being reminded of some things to possibly get angry about.

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Abrogail Thrune humbly acknowledges that Carissa Sevar is much better at this important life skill, which Abrogail, in her spoilation, has not had due chance to practice after she took the throne.

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Standard advice about beating Detect Thoughts - during that transient pleasant interlude while your captors haven't yet gotten around to torturing you until your will is broken, or also cursing you with -12 WIS so you have a four-year-old's self-control - is that you find something to think about, rather than not think about.  It's fine if it's something horribly fascinating.  And in the back of your mind, you have something else to not think about which is not as ruinous - Abrogail's passwords, maybe, such as a would-be Queen might need - actually she does not want to share that with Carissa either.

That time she noticed that some part of herself was glad that Carissa was having fun.

There's a thing to try not to think about.

Or tropes - not thinking of any hopes where the audience might watch her thoughts - she has some practice in not thinking that.  So she can carefully not think any tropey hopes, even while trying to focus her actual thoughts - on -

The two times she's had sex with Carissa?  Would that make Keltham jealous, or aroused, or angry, would he take revenge on her in - in a useful way, in a way that means she wins - no she shouldn't think that, it decreases the chance that Keltham -

How strange, she actually does not want him doing that to her, breaking her pride as a woman, not even if it's useful.  She would have thought that it would be a more sexual thought than that, to her, being wholly overcome by a man.  Maybe it's the aching hole in her Splendour, that it takes stronger feelings to be that more interesting Abrogail.

Well.  If she really would hate it, that definitely increases the chance he'll bother to humiliate her, if the boy has gained any manhood at all.

Romance novel tropes -

Surely she cannot be taken, subdued, conquered, this easily, this cannot be the end for her, just like this, it lacks drama -

(That's a hopeful thought, Aspexia has forbidden her to think those -)

No!  No it's safe to think that.  It's a vague hope - and Keltham or Carissa or both are reading her mind, and now their character viewpoints matter - if she thinks 'it can't end for me with this little drama' and they believe it's the end for her based on their specific plans and this is true, that doesn't fly as drama.

Something unexpected would happen from their standpoint, something would shake up the story -

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She waits, then, her body tense, now that she can move any muscle at all.

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Obviously and as any sane person would expect, nothing happens.

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When her lungs start to hurt, she realizes she was unconsciously holding her breath and lets it out.

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There's a rumbling cold chuckle, and then a pit fiend - the same pit fiend who was leaning over her before, as you can recognize if you've had enough dealings with devils - leans over Abrogail once more, and picks her up much as Keltham did, though with far greater Strength.

...it is possible, it is imaginable, that the lesser Carissa Sevar within Dis might have failed to negotiate any explicit compact-term along the lines of 'When I use my Gate back, the pit fiends are not allowed to follow me, invisibly or otherwise.'  It is not the sort of thing you'd imagine a pit fiend to bother doing, if it wasn't an effortless cruel-prank to play while you were right there.  Or the lesser Carissa might imaginably have thought - especially if she feared her own true loyalties - that a faithful subject of Asmodeus ought not want to impede a pit fiend, if something mattered that much to Hell's third tier of nobility.

Hell does like its little games, you could say, especially when it comes to granting Wishes that are the least bit interesting.

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HAHAHA YES SHE DID IT, SHE FINALLY DID IT, SHE DID A TROPE

no that's definitely a bad thought, that's hope, now what terrible thing happens to her as a result of thinking that, also why is she worth a pit fiend's trouble to rescue -

Abrogail knows the answer almost as soon as she thinks the question.  This isn't about her.

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The pit fiend turns to where Keltham now stands visible, rumbles in Taldane, "Where is the Crown of Infernal Majesty?"  It doesn't add any threats, possibly because threats are a superfluous part of speech when the sentence is spoken by a pit fiend.

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Keltham replies to it in Infernal with unchanging expression.  "You stand on territory governed by compact recorded by the erinyes Lrilatha, between Keltham of Elsewhere, and Asmodeus the Prince of Hell, and Otolmens the Preserver of Creation."

He is holding up a sheet of parchment inscribed with ornate Infernal letters.  Abrogail can hardly crane her neck to see it, and she is no longer smart enough to memorize the contents at a glance if she could.

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"I am forbidden to take from this place what is yours," the pit fiend's voice replies in that same language.  "What you win from mortals and devils may be yours, but this sold itself to Asmodeus, and is Asmodeus's.  I so rule."

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"This is a matter between myself and two gods, and neither I nor They designate you as arbiter in how Asmodeus's part governs you."

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The pit fiend's voice deepens; there is a tangible power to it, when it speaks.  "And yet I am taking this back to Hell, and that is reality, and there is no meaning for you in considering any other possibility."

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"Then perhaps I shall leave this place, and tell Lrilatha why, so that Asmodeus can explain to Otolmens how and by who Their ongoing compact with me was broken, as I judge it."

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"Where is the Crown of Infernal Majesty?"

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"In a safe place.  I, who was cleric of Abadar, had meant to offer that Crown to Hell at a fair price; to that price I will add the return of what you now take, and a penalty."

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"The price of disrespect will be extracted from you in due time."  The pit fiend with its power strong about it pulls the cursed crown from Abrogail's head, the magic yielding without visible effort to it; pulls the cursed amulet from over her neck without damaging it, strips the chains from her and also the tiny sword woven into her hair; and drops them upon the ground.  "Here is all that is yours."

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"Placing her where she could be retrieved by me, after a ruling by an agreed arbiter, would guard against Asmodeus being irrevocably foresworn to the god who guards all Creation."

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The pit fiend does not dignify this with an answer, but turns and strides out of the Forbiddance Abrogail was brought inside, to the edge of the demiplane.

There's the sensation of the pit fiend plane shifting, then plane shifting again, followed by the sensation of an ordinary Teleport.

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Abrogail does not know where in Dis she has been brought, but it is easily recognized as a fortress of Dis to anyone who has traveled there.

The pit fiend hands her over to a lesser devil that guards the gate, of that fortress; if there are instructions spoken they are conveyed telepathically and not for mortal ears to hear.


...this is probably, still, on net, a good thing; the pit in her stomach has fallen only half as deep, now.  She doesn't know what Keltham wanted of her, and he might be able to buy a disgraced Queen with the Crown; she is not escaped from his grasp, if she matters to some plan of his.  But whatever is to follow, Hell has much more of an interest in Abrogail Thrune still being Queen of Cheliax when it's over.  They'll extract a price in pain, for her failure; but pain is something she knows how to bear, even if it can't be borne, you just go on.

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She is carried swiftly and uncaringly through places of flame.  When her living form chokes once too often on the air, despite a fire resistance she was given early on, she's hauled aside to some unfamiliar higher devil who bothers to lay a more comprehensive protection on her.

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She wishes that someone would undo the curses on her.  She does not ask it aloud; this is Hell.

There - cannot have been a way that this is all part of some other plan by Keltham and Carissa, can it - the mysterious fourth curse laid on her - maybe she's set to explode curses should really not be able to do that and Keltham has no reason to so offend Hell.

The thought that the pit fiend actually violated a compact, by taking her, that this could be Keltham's plan, is mulled for only a few moments before being rejected as utterly impossible.  Mortals may make mistakes like that; greater devils whose actions reflect fully on Asmodeus simply would not make that mistake.


It's only as she's thrown into what seems to be her final destination, a slave's holding cell of that fortress, where a mortal could live for a time if for some strange reason they were not being killed, that the thought finally occurs to her:  Discern Location remains a thing in Golarion, Mind Blanks are expensive, and fighting Gorthoklek is risky.  If the goal is to take Abrogail Thrune out of the game for a time - then arranging for her to be held in Hell, while Keltham seeks an arbitration, could be superior to placing her somewhere that you'd have to pay to defend from Hell.

...if that's all Keltham is doing, it will be good news, so she had best not hope it.  She wishes, in fact, that she had never thought of that plan, so that it could have come to her as an ironical surprise.  But her thoughts are less controlled, now, and now it is too late.

She needs her Wisdom back, and her Intelligence, and enough Splendour that her mind stops fucking whining.  If any devils nearby are reading her thoughts and are annoyed about all this fucking whining, Abrogail understands if she gets hurt about it, but the whining will only actually stop when somebody dispels these curses.  She is possibly the leading expert in Creation about whether you can quickly and easily hurt low-Splendour mortals for whining inside their minds, in a way that makes their minds stop whining, without just completely breaking them, and the answer to this is no.  Obviously she'll have to be hurt too, for whining, you can't get out of hurting by needing special treatment instead; but she doesn't want her mind doing this either, and her own best judgment is that the mortal's mind will keep whining until somebody dispels the low-Splendour curse and then presumably hurts her for requiring special treatment like that.

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The horned guard at the door turns, irritably, after a bit of this, and says, "that, done by Hell, is an intervention in Golarion should you return to it, which Hell cares not to pay for; get a grip on yourself, or don't."

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She tries, and doesn't particularly succeed about it, with Splendour too low to cast a sorcerer's cantrip.  She hates herself and knows that this too is probably annoying the devil.  It would be nice if Abrogail was one of those relatively more tolerable people who do stop mentally whining when they're hurt, but she's not, Abrogail is the sort to never whine in the first place because she accepts it as her place to overcome adversity or die, and everything that makes her that Abrogail has been crippled by losing 18 Splendour her mind is fucking doing it again.

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The horned creature, without even any visible irritation, says to another "it needn't be conscious", and then there's an excruciating stab of some long, needled claw, and then darkness.

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....and then, elsewhere, a more luxurious elsewhere with screaming faces writhing at her from the floor, with both her custodian and a different senior devil present, there is consciousness again.

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She realizes within moments, taking stock of herself, that she's at +4 INT and +4 WIS relative to her pre-Crown baseline, the recognizable feeling of the standard spells or some minor infernal variant of them.  There's a thin headband on her skull that's likely giving her +6 Splendour back out of -12 cursed and -6 Crown-lost.  She could cast lesser sorceries like this, if not Teleport.  Knocking her unconscious didn't exactly give her the equivalent of a good night's sleep, and her body feels stiff in a way suggestive of having been left in a heap for longer than one night, empty in a way that suggests hunger magically fed.

The senior devil is a Bdellavritra, a three-headed worm that by reputation is intelligent, wise, charismatic, and excels at cruelly manipulative schemes.  With some lesser part of her wit restored, it takes little time for Abrogail to deduce that this meeting must concern Keltham.  Also somebody's thrown a black cloak around her, which implies that either Cheliax or Keltham might see her; no devil would care.

"I'm functional," Abrogail reports briefly, and awaits requests or explanations.  She has lost far too much pride already before Hell.

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And the devil gestures, and with the gesture takes down an illusion concealing a scrying mirror, a very nice one. "Your testimony on some matter is required, and my oath as to what your testimony is."

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At +4 INT and +4 WIS, Abrogail Thrune would probably figure out which matter, given a minute, if she were just given one minute to think.

She's not told in advance what she's to be questioned about?  So somebody can see her reactions, so she doesn't have time to invent a story, according to negotiated conditions?  But even at this little Splendour she can control herself.  Does that imply that it's just her testimony to be transmitted and not her thoughts?  How would that end up relevant to a bid by Keltham to have her returned to him?

"Required under what authority?" she says, making her voice and expression empty, for at this Splendour she will not essay an active deception.  "Few compacts with Keltham were signed by me or in my name; and my compact with Asmodeus does not require me to obey all Hell's orders so long as I serve Him well through Cheliax."  Will it violate an oath if she lies?

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"If I command you to answer, answer." Implicit, of course, is that one would answer truthfully only if that were commanded.

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"I'll obey."

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Then they'll put through the Greater Scry.

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Keltham appears within the mirror, glances at the apparent camera location, and casts from scroll a Greater Scry of his own.  His eyes within the mirror focus then on the two devils, and don't particularly seem to see Abrogail - not in the fashion of ignoring her, but in the fashion of Abrogail not being visible to his scry at all.

"Is the living mortal Abrogail Thrune II, who was born to that name and compacted with the god Asmodeus and once signed a compact with myself, present nearby and ready imminently to be interrogated by you, in accordance with that agreement made between myself and Hell one hour and thirteen minutes earlier in the mortal realm?"

...there's only stars and blackness visible behind him, in the mirror, in the scry radius around him; and there's something wrong with those stars, they are too many and too bright in the blackness for him to be standing silhouetted against ordinary night.

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"Yes," says the devil, bored.

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With enough INT and WIS she sees those too-bright stars and makes the connection, where Keltham must be, what must be below him, and her heart almost stops; she knows then, she knows the question which Keltham is going to ask of Hell, and why he expects that Hell might answer, and she knows he'll demand they read her thoughts and swear to it -

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"I plan to ascend to godhood shortly, and expect to succeed about that plan.  I am checking whether there exists a mess in the mortal realm that I need to clean up first."

"If the matter I speak of is not resolved to me with surety, I will use knowledge out of Elsewhere to utterly destroy the entire territory of Cheliax, as my default action in ignorance; as I would have done simply to be sure, had there been no way whatsoever to confirm the matter from Abrogail Thrune or Hell.  You are now being offered an opportunity for an outcome which is not that."

"The blood of dath ilan is adept at finding creative paths to destruction, in a way not fully captured by measurement spells for Intelligence and Wisdom and Splendour.  If anyone has stolen children from me, they will when grown present some additional danger to the continued existence of Golarion and perhaps larger regions than that."

"I suspected Cheliax of having stolen children from me by way of substitution plots of Abrogail Thrune, Willa Shilira, and Jacint Subirachs, all of whom I have already slain.  I am concerned that perhaps more children than that have been stolen from me."

"If Asmodeus's instructions sent by vision to Ferrer Maillol, not to take hostages against me, have been obeyed diligently rather than cleverly and dancing around the edges, those instructions interpreted generously should have covered that contingency, for any child of mine permitted to be ensouled might be hostage against me.  I have taken Maillol and read his thoughts under interrogation and confirmed that this would be in the uncertain edges of Asmodeus's instructions; more hopefully, from my perspective, he recalls no such question being asked of him, as any sensible person would surely have done.  However he also recalls his mind being read by Carissa, and I cannot rule out the event that he was asked this question and then had his memory erased about it.  Nor, for that matter, can I rule out that Abrogail was enough of an idiot to not ask him, or to dance around the edges of Asmodeus's instructions, as she certainly did with respect to many other potential hostages that she claimed were not really hostages."

"I therefore ask you to read the mind of Abrogail Thrune and confirm to me that I have no children of Cheliax remaining and known to her nor in the least bit suspected by her, now that she, Willa, and Jacint have been killed.  Or, if there were other children stolen of me, I would have Hell and Cheliax swear satisfactory oaths to see all pregnancies ended swiftly before they can be ensouled.  I will pay for costs incurred there, as a salve to Hell's pride, though it would be greatly in your interest to do so even if I paid nothing."

"I will see this matter on an oath-assured path toward satisfactory resolution, or else burn all Cheliax to ash, before this scry ends."  Keltham holds up a lesser mirror to the scry-node, angling it so that it shows the land of Cheliax far far below him, upon the curve of Golarion where it floats in space.

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no no no no no NO NO NO NO

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"If we are inclined to give you this assurance, we will do so before this scry ends," the devil says, and turns to Abrogail, looking, now, substantially less bored. "Have you assurances of interest to this Keltham, your majesty?" The title is, of course, mockery; they weren't using it when they thought she was the Queen of a powerful and capable Cheliax.

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"I have not -"

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"I am unassured by her words and only satisfied by what you swear in Asmodeus's name were her thoughts."

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Her thoughts?  She tries to bend them, of course she does, she has never given Keltham any children other than the one she held within herself, now slain by him before it could be ensouled -

(Scattered his children wide, priestesses and wizards and noblewomen; a few where not even Church or Crown knew where to find them, peasant women taken anonymously and returned anonymously and told to keep silence, and some of those beyond Cheliax's borders -)

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"Do the means exist to identify all those in Cheliax, or all those in any specific duchy of it; or who would that question be asked, if not you."

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Yes, of course, they kept records -

(But not complete records, for they wished to ensure that the story would be irrevocably a tragedy according to dath ilani tropes, so that having ensured a dath-ilan-unhappy ending they could then work further to make it the specific kind of dath-ilan-unhappy they wanted; they tried to make it impossible for Keltham to retrieve all his children no matter how hard he tried, impossible even for Cheliax to retrieve them, leaving no pathway or possible twist of the story by which it would all have a dath-ilan-happy ending after all -)

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"Who kept the records?"

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The task was delegated to a fifth-circle of Asmodeus by herself and Aspexia; records would be within the Palace Forbiddance in Egorian, probably in a section that deals in secret project records.

(nothing written down or recorded about the extra babies, they weren't that stupid)

(doesn't think about how Aspexia Rugatonn thought it was fine, because there are no excuses, no defenses, but there sure is a pre-thought about how that is a defense she's not trying to offer Hell)

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Then the devil will state to Keltham, that Abrogail has thought of a secret project, for which records are contained within the palace in Egorian, and that Hell will accept Keltham's payment for their trouble in pursuing every woman in those records, and ensuring that his children never come to be. 

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"You did not swear that Abrogail Thrune expected there to be no child of my blood unknown to me, that is not recorded in those records."

"You did not swear that these were her thoughts that she thought to be true, rather than thoughts that she thought deliberately."

"You did not swear that she had no other thoughts that negated those you described to me."

"Unless you have far better cards in your hand than those, you do not have the option-resources to trick me about this.  That wouldn't have worked on an INT 29 four-year-old.  The deception you tried was one that I'd visualized in toto as a possibility before I contacted Hell to open negotiations; it corresponds to a class of scenarios where I have some children in those records and some unrecorded children."

"Is there another set of records to trace those other children?  Unwritten memories of them?  Near-deterministic procedures that could be re-run to reproduce trajectories from a small set of possibilities?  I would like to not destroy Cheliax, here.  What exactly has Cheliax done, and is there any way it could be salvaged if we all cooperate?  Even if you cannot think of one, perhaps I can."

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"There are some children not in the records, and some of them outside of Cheliax entirely. You will have to destroy all of Golarion, if this is how you are so moved to act. Hell will gladly receive them; people often repent, in their old age, so calamity is not often our enemy."

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Keltham's face doesn't change expression.  "If I destroy Cheliax, some people go to Hell today, fewer people go to Hell later, my later dealings with Asmodeus are more fraught, and I'd need to delay to do something about the Worldwound once Cheliax can't help fight it and the Worldwound isn't needed to occupy Cheliax.  I've already had this argument with Carissa Sevar and she's smarter than you and has more complete information."

"My function for whether it's worth destroying Cheliax to destroy some number of unrecorded children there, given that I have a second number of untraceable children outside it, is a complicated one.  Tell me those two numbers straight.  Tell me the complete details on what Abrogail Thrune has done, in case I can think of a solution not apparent to the devils containing this negotiating-information."

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Then the devil will turn to Abrogail, and ask these numbers.

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She, herself does not know the exact numbers; unreported is unreported.  Based on - the broad orders she gave, the resources she assigned - there should be around five times as many children within Cheliax as without; and the fourth part of Keltham's 144 children will have gone unrecorded.  She - did say that there should be exactly 144 at the end, because tropes and irony, so - the officers that she designated to do this, should be able to reconstruct the exact numbers inside and outside Cheliax, if asked - probably - though there were three Modify Memory scrolls that she designated to be used, there.

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This the devil will report, this time adding that Abrogail Thrune II did not think thoughts contrary to these, and that she believed what she thought was true.

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His expression does flicker, barely, when it's said that he was to be given exactly 144 children.

"I'd speak to Abrogail Thrune directly, with her words made meaningful by your prior assurance that you'll speak out if her thoughts contradict her spoken words.  Perhaps she'll have something unforeseen to say that implies I should not destroy Cheliax."

"There is a thresholded binary outcome here and it is not presently leaning favorable to you; you should seek to expose me to complicated unknowns that stand a chance of changing that outcome, even if you cannot foresee their exact impacts, so long as they do not seem net negative in the presence of other unknown unknowns that might also save you.  If that goes against the grain of a devil who seeks predictable paths, we may negotiate whether you could bind a superior devil to the secrecy and information-nonuse conditions, and ask them for authorization; this is not the right time for the narrowly-thinking way that the lesser ranks of Hell deal with uncertainty."

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And does Abrogail Thrune, with this assurance made, have anything to say for herself?

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If she knew words to dissuade this Keltham from this path, she would have thought them at the devil already!  There are no brilliant strategems in her, that might outface this Keltham. Only horror and sickness in her that she cannot recall ever having felt, for never in her entire life has her future looked this dark.

Abrogail Thrune considers, as very few other people in Cheliax would even think to consider, telling Keltham that she's sorry; Abrogail has met more foreigners than the average Chelish citizen.  But she does not foresee it ending well for her, it wasn't like she injured Keltham by accident and regrets the harm to him, as might lead one non-Asmodean to forgive another.  She sincerely regrets the harm to herself, to her interests, maybe even to Cheliax; her feelings toward Keltham are poisonous hate and horror.

She considers begging, groveling - it wouldn't help, is the thing, even if he wants to see it, he wants to see it and then he wants to see her anguish as Cheliax is destroyed, in those cases.  Or should she try it, even if she doesn't expect it to work, because it's not sure?  Is that the message he was giving her, when he spoke it to a devil before her?  If so, she will do it, because - people often want vindication, the proof of their triumph and rightness and superiority, and it's worth gambling on the tiny chance he'd be satisfied -

"If you want me to beg, grovel, I will, and mean it, the only reason I'm not already is that I'm not sure what you want and I don't want to annoy you instead," Abrogail says.  Her face shows the real horror, her voice bears the anguish that's there.  It's not a familiar mode of thought, to her, but she does know what torturers look for in a victim.

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"Why did you do that?  The actual cause and reason."

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"A miserable, foolish attempt at trope-manipulation.  I had thought it would make the story a tragedy from a dath ilani perspective, irrevocably and whatever else happened, so that we would not need to fear - some twist leading to what the tropes would call the story's happy ending."

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"And that was, as best you can recall at this intelligence level, the actual first thought you had about it?  No thoughts about how it would be amusing to give me my 144 children in a way I didn't want, and then you thought of the trope-manipulation reason afterwards?  I demand that you stop and think about it, and then tell me that you actually tried to recall the memory."

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She does as he bids, but when she closes her eyes and recalls - it is the reason, she thinks.  "It - is the reason I did it that way, the only reason I scattered children where I could not find them - I did think, before then, that your children would be good for Cheliax."

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"No thoughts about how it would be funny, even, to make it exactly 144?  You will stop and think and try to remember before you answer; you will tell me that you've done so, that the devil speak forth if you lie."

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And she does, and says, "I knew it for a cruel irony, but it was the tropes I had in mind, for that irony, not you.  I don't think - I ever imagined your chagrin, on learning of it, as I'd have done if," it had been about you, the foolish boy, "I'd been amusing myself to think of your reaction.  The thought I had about you was about dath ilan's tragic ending, where you turned to Evil, and rose high in Cheliax, and how you'd embrace our children then as your own."

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"If anyone had bothered to ask me about the tropes you were trying to manipulate, I would have warned them that a dath ilani tragedy isn't about the triumph of Evil over Good.  It's about the triumph of erroneous reasoning and ill-coordination over everyone."

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"Why didn't you query Maillol?  How did Rugatonn let this happen?"

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"Neither of us thought of it."

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"Are there any questions I should be asking that would illuminate more of the causality here?  Close your eyes and think before you speak, then tell me that you sincerely tried to do so."

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She thinks as she is bidden.

"Why Snack Service didn't stop us from doing that.  It stopped other mistakes that would've injured your interests."

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Keltham doesn't say anything to that; perhaps it's a question that somebody at INT 29 would have considered long since, if at WIS 27 they dared to think of it at all, thought their own thoughts controlled sufficiently for it.

"Describe the entire procedure used to generate my children in as much detail as you remember.  Maybe there's some security flaw in your randomization, transparent to me but not to you.  I am still trying to think of a way out of this."

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She does, in every last bit of possibly-relevant detail she can remember, all of it, all of it.

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"You evoked your disaster too well, Abrogail Thrune.  I have no marginal hopes left; the matter is simple enough that I would have seen it already if I was to see it at all."

"Is there anything else you'd say to me before I destroy Cheliax?"

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"Please don't?" she says, and permits her voice to crack, as is real.  "I beg you?"

There are tears that she lets come to her eyes, as she hasn't allowed forth since she wept that earlier time in Hell, just in case it's enough to satisfy Keltham just in case just in case -

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"Can you say without the devil contradicting you that you care about one single person there who's about to die, rather than the effects on yourself if they do?  Call it curiosity."

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"No single person there, but the country of Cheliax - is my own child."

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"Symmetrical tragedies are prettier."

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"What would dath ilan think of this?"  She asks because she truly does not know, and therefore it's a path that might be real.

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"That I should do what I've decided to do, if I'm going to do it, and not tell it to you, or show it to you, or watch you hurt about it."

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"Have I taught you hate, then?"

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"All of it that I now know."

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"Spend it on me, who did you the harm, and do not slay my child, I beg you, buy me from Hell as Cheliax's ransom, I can be made to hurt and serve you in ways far more satisfying than watching a country just die."

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"You hurt me in too stupid a way for that, Abrogail Thrune.  This isn't the ending where you join my harem.  You didn't earn that one.  It's your ending where you betrayed Asmodeus and got removed from power, and if there's anyone to rescue you from Hell's deserts it won't be me."

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"You are displaying a very great and tyrannical dominance, and Evil, for someone who isn't fated to -"

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"A boy can learn hate, being stung of a wasp.  He can learn the desire to pull the wings off that wasp, wish to watch it writhe on the ground while it dies."

"It's not the same feeling as wanting to fuck that wasp, or have any kind of extended relationship with it, even the kind where you torture it for longer.  It's just a wasp, in the end."

Keltham turns the mirror that he holds, then, again, to show Cheliax against the curve of Golarion.

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"YOU WILL LOSE CARISSA FOREVER IF YOU DO THIS!  SHE WON'T EVER FORGIVE YOU, YOU WILL NEVER BE REUNITED!"

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"Already lost her," says Keltham's voice, "but you did ruin a lot of Carissa's further work persuading me into not going down this road, so long as it turned out I didn't have children."

"I suggest, Hell, that you not ruin this one too badly in the next few weeks.  Sevar is busy now, but when her future self has a moment She may wish to buy Her own conversation on this topic, and She'll pay less if the conversation is just screaming and the breaking is already done."

"As for me, I'm finished."

 

There are lights appearing in the territory of Cheliax, and expanding, one by one.  The light that appeared over Egorian was first, and brightest.

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She screams with everything she has, for the same reason that anything being tortured screams like that, not just because it has no choice, but because it has the tiny shred of hope that if it screams loudly enough the torture will hear and stop.

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When there are no lights left in Cheliax and no green either, only a great patch of smoke-cloud slowly starting to spread out from its borders, the scry ends.

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She stopped screaming when the last of Cheliax had been scoured with white light and orange fire, for there was no hope left then that Keltham would be satisfied one second sooner.

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In the presence of Keltham her minders were contemptuous and beyond that unreadable; devils don't beg, even if you have something they want very dearly, and devils don't weep, even as everything they have ever worked for turns to ash before their eyes. 

In his absence Abrogail's custodian turns on her with a fury that quite plainly won't be satisfied with any amount of torture. "Anything else to say while you can speak, contemptible pathetic thing who manages through sheer incompetence and disobedience to serve Asmodeus's enemies a thousand times better than you ever served Asmodeus?"

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There is nothing.

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Right! Then they'll get to what Hell is best at, which is torture.

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If they mean to sell a coherent conversation with it to Carissa Sevar later, it will be very unsatisfying for them.  Living mortals are easier to break mentally, and you have to heal them too.

They could torture it more if they took the curses off it.

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They don't take the curses off. It turns out you can hurt someone very badly anyway, even if they're still alive, even if you need them intact later, and Hell knows how to do it. When she's in too fragile a state to torture further they have her watch the former nobility of Cheliax arrive in Hell and be crushed by it. It's not that she cares about any of them as individuals, of course, but she might recognize herself in them, and in their always-erroneous optimism that Hell would see them as special.

They don't let her sleep. They hurt her if she manages to sleep anyway. It makes it hard to keep track of time. 

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(This about Abrogail Thrune:  She didn't think about what awaited her in Hell, for a different reason than usual: she knew that in Hell she would no longer be Queen of Cheliax, and this seemed to her awful enough that other features of Hell would be beside the point.  Maybe if she could be queen of something else, but that, she knew, would not be possible for a long time; at first she'd be reduced in status below the least child of House Thrune and maybe below a Chelish peasant.  Is that not terror enough?  What need for the fear of pain?  She fought in Hell to reach sixth-circle that she might become Queen, and that hurt but she won through it; and Abrogail thought herself suited to Hell, then, by the infernal blood that ran distant in her veins.  To the extent she made up her own theology about it, she told herself that if souls were allowed to remember nothing else, they'd be allowed to remember how they had served Asmodeus well.  And that if Abrogail built up Cheliax into a great and stable empire before her life ended, then that memory, at least, she'd be allowed to always have with her: that once she served Asmodeus better than any devil not at least a Duke of Hell.  And before then, she'd shine as brightly as she could, and enjoy her moment as Queen to the fullest, and not fear what came after...)

 

Abrogail knows, with the sparks of reason and lucidity that can reason through anything at all, she can see plainly that what happens to the dead nobles of Cheliax is much much worse than what happens to her living self; and she knows that their fates are what awaits her.  If it was only this bad and never got any worse than this, for eternity, then she could endure it; if she was dead and un-cursed and had more Splendour than this, if not her Crown, she could endure it.  But it does not get only that bad.  Hell is wantonly destructive, even towards the nobles and wizards whom any sane person would see as having value worth preserving.  It is not that devils don't understand how to torture better than that, it is that they do not care; if you grind souls into paste to be reformed over thousands of years, you get some devils at the end, so that result is good enough.

It doesn't take Abrogail very long at all to realize that she was wrong, not to fear Hell.


She doesn't think it was very long.  She doesn't know.

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There are a few, it is shown to her eventually, who get better, but not because they served Asmodeus better; why would Asmodeus care about that? If they get better, if they will remember their name, it is because they bargained for that in advance, and Abrogail Thrune, of course, didn't. 

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It's like her mind goes blank, at first, seeing it, hearing that, she believes at first that she is dreaming, hallucinating.  All her life Abrogail Thrune has been told that was not on offer from Hell, that Hell never offers that no matter how a summoner pleads with them no matter what is offered Hell, that any stories about it are lies and bait to get somebody to the point where they hopefully summon a devil only to find their soul already damned -

- no, not told, not told by devils, not sworn to her by clerics, she was never told that only given the overpowering impression her whole life that it would be catastrophically pathetic to even ask and the answer would certainly be no and Asmodeus would never compact with her, she would never be Queen, if she made such a pathetic hopeless fearful request -

- why -

why, why deny her that, when she was the greatest of all Asmodeus's mortal servants -

- it would have cost them so little more, to offer her that bargain, she would have been - more faithful - why give it to these PATHETIC WORMS, this SLAVEMASTER, this SLIMY COLONEL, and not to HER, if it wasn't against Hell's principles -

- why this, trick, that seems so, small, and petty -

- because that to Asmodeus was fun.

 

Abrogail does finally scream, then, and try to attack her tormenters, with bare fists and teeth for she has no sorcery.

It is of course the only time she ever tries.

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Some time later they heal her, and tap her with something that lifts some of the haze of fatigue (though not the curses), and tell her that she might, at least, try to look like a good investment which won't break immediately, advice that they then make more difficult to follow by dragging her painfully, by her hair, up several flights of sharp and burning stairs.

 

She feels the presence of whatever being is at the top of the stairs before she sees Them.

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Carissa Sevar upon Her throne

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Carissa Sevar, or whatever share of Her attention is here presently, twitches her fingers, and some of the curses on Abrogail melt away; her Intelligence and Wisdom are enhanced as with the minor spells for that; she has whatever self-possession she ever possessed. 

"I want it understood," she says, in Infernal which Carissa Sever was actually always terrible at speaking, "that my disappointment with you is as great as Asmodeus's. And yet it has room to grow, still, if you don't yet understand where you went wrong."

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Then she does not have any time to feel relief, however desperate.

"I should have asked Maillol" shouldhaveaskedMaillolshouldhaveaskedMaillolshouldhaveaskedMaillol

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"Indeed. You could also have asked the foolish little girl I once was what Keltham would think of it; I would have recognized, I think, that there was danger there you couldn't seem to fathom."

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"I would have ignored you and failed Asmodeus still."  Hell has had little opportunity for what they called 'real training', but such false pride as Abrogail once possessed has long since been smashed out of her, every bit of it, nor is she still under the impression that she can lie.

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"Indeed. The only hope for Cheliax, I think, was that someone worthy would rise to rule it. No one could have saved you from yourself, not while Cheliax still lived and you were still her Queen; and now it can be done, but who would bother?"

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"Only one who still had use for her."  The words are pathetic, but it's beyond improbable that She is not reading Abrogail's thoughts, so She already knows the one tiny shred of hope that isn't crushed in Abrogail, that - a goddess would - not be grateful, certainly, absolutely not, She owes Abrogail nothing but pain and Abrogail knows that - but maybe She would be - reminiscent, nostalgic; Abrogail only ever used Carissa, during their mortal time together, but she hurt Carissa in ways that made her stronger - could certainly have treated her far worse - maybe would have treated Carissa far worse, if Carissa did not seem to Abrogail to have a use to her, but Carissa is, was, Carissa was and is something of value - something beautiful, even, and Abrogail was not wasteful not wasteful like Hell -

(Abrogail's thoughts are obviously going to keep running around this point indefinitely until she is spoken to again.)

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"Stop it. You did as you wished, and I'll do as I wish. If there's anything in you I have a use for, I'll find it; but there might not be. 

A thing I have noticed about Asmodeans, which I dislike, which tends to make them nearly worthless to me, is that they care only for what they rule, who must cower before them. You will never be the queen of Cheliax again; you bargained foolishly, and have nothing of Hell; so what are you? What use would you possibly have?"

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It has not really occurred to Abrogail before, in her life, that she has anything that is not being Queen of Cheliax.  Her place in the tyranny is who she is.

But if she gets asked that question under these circumstances, she will think very fast, or as fast as she can in her state, and shift her entire viewpoint around to that of a Lawful Evil goddess who once was a priest of Irori.

"Experience in politics, in ruling, in plotting with and against nobility, in defending against Iomedae's plots, in reshaping people, seduction and the bedroom arts, eighth-circle sorcery - you know the important things I can do, I think -"

What else what else what would She not already know about until Abrogail thinks it - she's commanded the production of romance novels, had an advice column, but that is not important -

The thought comes to Abrogail that she is also one of very few people in Golarion who has experience in trope-manipulation, but no sooner does this thought come to her than she wishes it had not.

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Carissa lights her on fire, but not with any visible irritation, and after a moment she lets it die out. "I know, now, how this story goes. You barely feature in it, except as you touched on me, and except, perhaps, as the reason Cheliax is not the center of my empire. If you are useful, it'll be as someone who would not have made any of the major choices you made in your sad little life."

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"I am very eager to become her," Abrogail says; there is no reservation in her mind at this moment when she says it.

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For some reason, she seems to think this is funny; she half-smiles, at it. "Are you. Well, then, come here. I have decided to test Myself to see if I can make something useful to Me of you, and if not you can die and go to Hell properly."

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No thought other than obedience even crosses her mind, when Abrogail 'comes here'.  This is literally what her best-scenario looked like, that she would be painfully reshaped and tested and set some task at which she might fail, by Carissa Sevar and not by wasteful Hell.  Abrogail played it out in her mind enough times, in Hell, that she doesn't let herself feel even a shred of goddess-annoying hope, to be crushed down with some task she really can't do at all.  She'll obey, is all; she is ordered so she obeys and that's all that's here nothing else.

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"I'm not Asmodeus. 

I plan to just build constructs for matters that just require uncreative obedience.

 

Which may of course, include any ruling of countries I find myself wanting to do in the Material Plane, and definitely includes any fulfillment of complicated godnegotiated conditions I want done in the Material Plane, but it doesn't include what I want you for. You will be grateful, and apply yourself, and offer Me all that you are and all you can learn to achieve, and we will see if there is anything in you, anything pain can shape you into, that's worth saving."

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It's the last that she hears of her new Goddess for a while; and what follows is in some ways less pleasant than Hell.  Because - while Hell does not let you stay passive and suffering, Hell definitely makes you participate in your own torture and breaking - Hell at least doesn't demand that you think about complicated problems at the same time.

It is still, clearly, much much much better, to the point where some tiny observing thing in the back of Abrogail's mind is surprised that the Goddess did not make it worse for her in order to test her loyalty.

...things as bad as Hell probably just - aren't compatible with actually shaping people stronger.  The awareness in the back of her mind says that this of course is something that Abrogail Thrune once knew, when she herself was a shaper; when Abrogail Thrune set Carissa to forge +6 headbands for herself, she could not have been hurt any worse or any more frequently without it impinging worse upon the quality of her work or her learning of speed.  Abrogail is being pushed as hard as she can go, not as hard as she can hurt without breaking.

There are problems and challenges in ilanism, as set down by an intellect that had obviously solved the entire thing for Herself but was far less certain of how mortals could be taught any of what She now understood.  There are math problems, there is Abrogail being forced to fight with bare hands as monks of Irori do and being trained some tiny bit in that, there is always adequate sleep.  Any failure is punished, but if it really was too hard and anybody reading your mind would've seen that, the next problems are easy enough to fall barely at the edge of achievability.  Some problems are just outright impossible, but not in the way of somebody torturing you, more in the way of a Goddess who isn't paying you Her entire attention and sometimes has a hard time simulating or remembering what it's like to be only INT 16.

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Sometimes Abrogail wakes up a little smarter, or a little more durable (particularly if there's a hard day ahead), or a little wiser. The only thing Carissa seems uninterested in granting her more of is Splendour.

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Abrogail has had a few of her stats enhanced by Wishes, mainly Splendour but also some droplets of Cunning and Wisdom as well; she can tell the difference between Wish and spell.  The first time she realizes that she has become more intelligent, she kneels by her thin bedroll and prays to her Goddess with her eyes squeezed shut, astonished and contemptuous at herself for how it is taking actual effort for her not to weep.

Even a Goddess does not spend Wish-tier interventions on something She expects to fail and be thrown away.

When later Abrogail realizes that she is also become more durable, as is a subtler thing to observe, she is astonished again, to the point of being puzzled; and says aloud "I notice that I am confused" and thinks as quickly as possible because if she doesn't think right away it is entirely possible that she will thereby fail a test and be punished; but, even having so thought, she is yet confused, besides the obvious point that her Goddess probably really does mean to keep her, and has some genuinely important use in mind for herself.

This realization ought to be met by fiercer efforts, not weaker ones, if she ever wants to be allowed any shred of hope again or considered worthy of any reward; and somewhat to Abrogail's own surprise, she can try harder, with excitement as well as fear in her.  Or maybe it's just the extra Constitution.

When she's been boosted enough times to notice that her Splendour doesn't go up - Abrogail has been trained enough, by this point, that she will wonder openly to herself, rather than in the back of her mind, about whether it's difficult/impossible for her Goddess to enhance Abrogail's intrinsic Splendour past the +5 that it's already been Wished-up to.  Her Goddess has made it clear enough by now that She does not appreciate fawning praise, or Abrogail not daring to think thoughts about Her possible limitations...

Carissa Sevar was the same way, as a mortal; Abrogail has not forgotten her past.  It really didn't take all that long for Abrogail to make the leap from the Goddess's preferences to Carissa Sevar's preferences.  You learn to make leaps quickly, to at least think of the thought, when failure hurts immediately.  The hard part wasn't in seeing how the Goddess / Carissa Sevar might be like that.  The hard part is trusting in Her; for it requires remembering hope, after Hell.

 

She wonders sometimes how long it's been, since the first phase of her Hell ended for her.  There is always enough sleep, but it doesn't always come in eight-hour chunks - or however long constitutes a full sleep for her; she isn't fed often enough not to be under some manner of Sustenance effect.  Questions not explicitly prohibited are allowed, in the service of the Goddess; you can always at least ask what questions are allowed.  When Abrogail realized that it might be only her own fear holding her back from asking, from knowing, she did ask whether she was permitted to ask: how long it had been, how much time remained, what use the Goddess intended to make of herself.  And she was told, then, that those questions were indeed prohibited; but she was not punished for asking if they were askable.

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(It'd be astonishingly wasteful to improve someone in the manner of a Wish, one drop at a time; one would either invest up front in a full sequence of five Wishes, to do as much for them as magic can do, and then carefully curse them back down, or else have diamonds flowing like water from a spring, and think nothing of spending them; or else be entirely beyond the limits of mortal magic.)

 

 

 

Abrogail is summoned before the Goddess for an audience, her first in some unmeasured time.

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She goes, wearing a thin +2/+2/+2 circlet that she was granted not long ago.

Abrogail has by this time deduced that the Goddess's magic obeys some of the same limitations as mortal Wishes, about how far it can go, which in turn increases the chance that she was originally amped to +5s and then cursed back down, if the Goddess knew in advance when She first laid Her plans that Abrogail would be adequate to them.  Possibly the Goddess, or K̵e̵l̶t̷h̴a̸m̸ if he also became a god, did indeed crack diamond chemistry; and Abrogail was at some point subjected to the ministrations of Efreet, here or by being transported temporarily to the City of Brass while she slept, to save on the Goddess's interventions or even Her true effort.  It's only one hypothesis among many, but she considered it explicitly; it doesn't hurt to consider many hypotheses, if you trust yourself more to evaluate them, and that is the sort of mental habit that might have saved Abrogail-Thrune-who-was a very great deal of pain.

There is a different kind of pride about her, now.
It cannot replace what she lost.
But it is the kind of pride where she actually does accept that she brought that loss upon herself.
She could list out every one of her reasoning errors, one by one.

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"A puzzle for you. If you could go back - to Cheliax, had Keltham spared it - what would you do?"

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This sure is a horrendously painful question!  Abrogail's mind very quickly turns to considering it without holding back, especially from the most painful thoughts; failing a challenge like that quickly leads to actual pain, even when it is not the Goddess personally asking you.

Thinking quickly is not thinking sloppily; the first thing that Abrogail does is mentally set up a list of desiderata and internal questions.

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Things her Goddess wants:

- To claim all of the souls in Cheliax, which under Her compact with Asmodeus requires either reconquering a Cheliax that otherwise wouldn't be held by Hell, or conquering three-quarters of the rest of Avistan in Hell's name - actually her Goddess probably just wants souls, in general, so Cheliax should take as much territory in Hell's name as possible or support the Goddess's other worshippers in doing so.
- Her Goddess is - probably? 80% probability, mark as further query to Goddess - unhappy with the way Hell wastes souls in general and not just what was going to happen to Abrogail; her Goddess probably doesn't want souls going to Asmodeus except by way of Her.
- To straighten out the ridiculous fucking mess of Asmodean politics and replace it with Evil that's actually Lawful.
- Actually now that she actually thinks about it, her Goddess obviously aims to conquer all of Creation and convert it to Her own ways, and a hypothetical Cheliax that still exists is useful to Her because it can serve as a springboard.

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Things she wants, her Goddess permitting:

- To be Queen again
- To be Queen again
- Her Goddess said she'd never be Queen again, does that mean this desideratum should be struck
- If it's an impossible painful imagination then she's probably supposed to imagine the painful parts
- To be Queen again, and wear the Crown of Infernal Majesty once more; and have back her Palace, and all that was hers within it, and all those who obeyed her and all of their respect, and fine sheets as comforted her and hours of her own to spend as she pleased
- She would obviously not use that power in ways that displeased her Goddess, such as breaking people for her own amusement rather than to make them stronger from it
- Is there anything she can think here that pleases her Goddess and is also actually true
- She would want, even for herself, to keep this new pride alongside her old pride, and not be an idiot, and go on practicing in the skills that her Goddess was having taught to her.
- There is - a tangle inside her, that she knows and admits she cannot resolve in seconds without risking resolving it wrong - about how she always even as Queen felt herself to be surrounded by idiots, and she wished for Something Else even at the cost of doing some unsensible things, like personally visiting Carissa in her bedroom; but it was not fundamentally a problem solvable in an Asmodean country.  It is solvable, required to be solved, in a Sevarist one.  Abrogail would do something about that, as would also please her Goddess.

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Already-known questions:

- Is she allowed to be Queen or is this something her Goddess forbids?
- Does she get the Crown back, ditto.
- Can she call upon the Goddess's power?  Was diamond chemistry solved and used to enhance herself, does she get a diamond supply and if so how much?
- Is Cheliax in any kind of near-term hypothetical mess that needs resolving as soon as she shows up?
- In particular, does she hypothetically need to take back the throne from another who now holds it?
- Does it stand in danger of imminent destruction by K̵e̵l̶t̷h̴a̸m̸?
- Are there other Goddess-aligned countries to keep in mind besides probably-Wanshou?


Abrogail can go on from here to make up plausible background settings and sketch out a plan for what she'd do immediately upon arriving in hypothetical Cheliax that still exists, if her child were not dead; but she will pause (quite briefly) to see if her Goddess has corrections for Abrogail's current thoughts on background settings and desiderata.

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"You could suppose that the Crown and throne would have fallen to another," she says, absentmindedly; she often has the air of being mostly somewhere else, as a goddess of course would be. "And you could suppose further that I have no particular interest in aiding you, with diamonds or any other way, though I would probably ensure you weren't unenhanced and stupid; you would suppose that if Cheliax does stand in danger from Keltham, that is not your job to plan for."

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It doesn't make - any sense - and therefore a spark of hope flares up in Abrogail that she cannot allow, because it will distract her from her actually assigned problem, and indeed might've been designed as just that sort of endurable torment.  

Take back the Crown and throne - there's only three Thrunes who are plausible candidates for it.  She picks a best guess: Calantra Thrune.  How long have they had to entrench themselves - a forbidden question, Abrogail will make up 'two months' because that is about how long it feels like since she went to Hell, after a best-guess correction for how her experiences probably warped her sense of time to feel like longer -

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"Try two weeks."

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That - legitimately does not seem like an amount of time she could actually have been here while Cheliax went on existing, the torment has been fucking with her sense of time but not that much - so the hypothetical wasn't real after all - but time dilation could be a thing if you're a goddess? - but Carissa Sevar would not have ascended immediately after Abrogail died -

- she has spent too much time hoping.

Abrogail's thoughts turn back to the posed problem, which now seems more likely hypothetical:  Calantra Thrune has held the Crown and throne for two weeks, could perhaps have tried to set up her own new trusted Security for fear of Abrogail's return, but that would come with its own vulnerabilities - if she is not specifically expecting to defend against Abrogail, she will not have done anything so sensible as setting up an entirely new Palace with its own Forbiddance and entirely changed imperial guards -

Which is, in fact, approximately what it would take to prevent Abrogail Thrune from being able to kill a pretender and put on the Crown, a rather simpler condition than most assassins face, and that was true even before Abrogail was enhanced...

Can she still wear the Crown?  Abrogail has at the very least betrayed Asmodeus in the depths of her own heart, by now, she is willing to entertain possibilities where Asmodeus does not get to have His fun, as she herself was no longer to be allowed hers... then again, those terms do obligate Asmodeus as well, she is not obliged to go on serving Asmodeus in that way, if Cheliax is no longer hers by compact and has gone to another after her death... but then in this scenario she must not name herself Queen, nor demand Cheliax as hers by right of compact, and would maybe be foolish to wear an artifact that Asmodeus made.

Well, kill Calantra and take the Crown at least, Abrogail doesn't have to wear it, and doesn't have to call herself Queen either.  But then the situation with the Church of Asmodeus becomes fraught.  How would Aspexia or her successor react, to Abrogail returning and claiming Cheliax in the name of Hell but under Carissa Sevar?  Taking power in that form would run a risk of the Church-Crown conflict becoming real, Abrogail would need much more in the way of internal allies before making her move, it would not just be a matter of slaying Calantra and putting on the Crown and claiming to everyone that things had gone back to normal.

Where would the Keepers of Asmodeus fall?  They would not have become a significant military force in two weeks, but their opinions might sway Aspexia, and Abrogail now speaks more of their language than before.  More of Aspexia's language, for that matter.  By that same understanding Abrogail is unfortunately pretty sure that she cannot offer Aspexia better prospects than Asmodean Hell.  Aspexia, if she is not sent to Asmodean Hell herself and preliminarily broken by it, can simply refuse to think any thought implying that she should not serve Asmodeus.

All of this might be noticeably more straightforward if Cheliax were under the right sort of threat; for then Aspexia or her successor would have little choice but to accept Abrogail under the Goddess, if they wanted Cheliax to stay under Hell at all... but Aspexia would ask Abrogail to swear she had no hand in making that threat, or that it was in Abrogail's interests to do in any case...

 

Abrogail will continue to think about this for a while, if not interrupted, queuing up questions like whether Aspexia is still Most High in this scenario, or if there are any pre-existing threats that would force the Church not to make too much fuss right then.  There is pain, in all of it, but she sets that aside, and tries to tell the part of her mind wondering if the hypothetical scenario is a real one to shut up or at least not consume so much attention, even as that voice gets louder inside her.

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A gesture, and the now-familiar feeling of getting smarter - Splendour also - 

 

- "I have encountered an interesting opportunity which would require your knowable loyalty."

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This is clearly IT, but - Abrogail doesn't - doesn't see -

(Cheliax?)

"I cannot immediately see any realistic conditions under which I'd betray You, when I expect salvation from Your ownership and my alternative is Hell," Abrogail states honestly, setting aside all whirlwinds that threaten to roar inside herself.  "Someone would have to convince me that You were planning to send me back to Hell, or that -"

Abrogail pauses, and reflects on whether she'd go obediently back to Asmodeus, if Hell compacted to stay her torment.

...Asmodeus has burned some bridges with Abrogail, in fact, by setting her up for that fate in the first place.  "Hell cannot easily bring me back by offering me an afterlife even more to my liking than Yours," Abrogail states more confidently, "unless there are other strong conditions in their offer's favor.  And if You saved me from Hell and gave me all You've given me, predicting that I'd serve You in this even if given a chance to betray You, then I would not depart from that prediction even to become an archdevil."

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"A better answer than you would once have given Me.

I am not fully satisfied.

 

You dare hope that I am not just toying with you, that Cheliax is not gone; or that if it is gone, I could return you to a moment, or a world, where it lives.  But if so, then in that world Carissa Sevar has not ascended and not saved you from Hell - yet - though you've seen a true glimpse of what it would be for you, when you died again."

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Time travel?  That's - maybe it only became possible with prophecy broken, but - and ilani knowledge - but - but - she'd obviously give anything, everything, but -

"Is it permitted that I ask - if You are toying with me."

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"You may ask."

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"Are You toying with me?"

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"Oh, definitely."

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Abrogail has always been foolish, never stupid.  "Am I to be sent to a Cheliax that lives, and an unascended Carissa Sevar?"

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"The first Suggestion was: 'this is reality, and there is no meaning, for you, in considering any other possibility." 

 

And as she says it, the curses remaining fall away, the one that suppresses Abrogail's Will save, the complicated fourth curse, and Carissa sits there, plainly more beautiful than Abrogail, more powerful than Abrogail, more wise and dangerous and capable than Abrogail -

- but not a god. 

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She can feel Carissa Sevar's mind reading her own, now, and without having to think too much about it, knows better than to dare try to cast her out.  They will be ready, very very very ready.

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But Abrogail knows where she is, now,

remembers if not the person she was then still that one key,

gathers her strength of personality about herself,

gathers herself about herself,

and

makes

her

fucking

Will

save.

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And she's in an obvious demiplane, the nice kind with grass beneath her feet and dirt beneath the grass, and a bright white aboveness like somebody blended yellow Sun and blue sky together,

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and Carissa is there, apparently unarmed, in a robe of the archmagi and draped with a dizzying array of expensive and unfamiliar magic items, crowned in the artifact Dis gave her, watching Abrogail with amusement and curiosity.

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There's a lot of thoughts and feelings running through Abrogail, right now, and if no one with the power and temerity to compel her is making her think them through quickly, she will not force them to heel quite as fast as she did when she was more afraid.

 

 

 

"I presume you are ready to swear to me regarding the truth of what would have become of me in Hell, of what you think you know and how you think you know it, regarding that; and likewise regarding that Hell does offer scum better treatment if they bargain for it."

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And such assurances Carissa can provide, because 'what actually happens to people when they go to Hell' has been something of an urgent priority for her, and by this time they've made secret information-purchases on many, many related questions. She did not deceive Abrogail, as to what would have happened; only as to whether it did. 

 

She does not know, not for sure, not without seeing it unfold before her, whether she's made someone trustworthy, out of Abrogail; someone who would betray Asmodeus for a goddess who, technically, hasn't ascended yet. Abrogail will have to think about it herself, with the clarity that almost no one in the world could bring to bear on the question, if she wants to ever leave this room. 

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"Are you sufficiently prepared to kill me at any instant that I can have some tastier rations and think about it?"

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Carissa just laughs.

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Earlier:


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When the Sending comes to her across the planes, Pilar Pineda is resting.

Snack Service has been silent, now, for a long time.  It hasn't even been directing Pilar into trouble; Pilar has found that sense in herself, fragments of knowledge/direction appearing from time to time.

Pilar Pineda hasn't needed anyone else's push, to get her into trouble, she got into all the trouble she made for herself out of her own will.  Pilar Pineda has still not put on her artifact headband, but she's put on her headband of +6 Splendour.  Splendour 26 is an awful lot of will, as willfulness goes.  Pilar Pineda hasn't needed any other push at all to get herself into trouble, despite her increasingly desperate efforts to be more sensible than that.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!"

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

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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.

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"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.)

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"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.

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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.

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She can't even speak.

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"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."

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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?"

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"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?"

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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.

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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.

ai art

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"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.

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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."

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"What's the entire point of - this whole pretend tavern business, why not a real tavern -"

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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."

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"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.

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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.

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She casts Mage Hand, when Cayden's done, to fill her own glass from the same source; she's a wizard, not a milkmaid.

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"Cheers," says the Swashbuckler, and lifts His glass to Pilar.

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"Fuck off and die," says Pilar, and doesn't tip her own glass to him before she drinks from it.

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"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."

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"Die for the divine crime of vastly exceeding your rights to intervene in Golarion, or die so that I can finish consuming you?"

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"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.'"

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"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?"

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"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."

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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?"

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"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?"

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"You're a very strange god."

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"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.

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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."

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

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

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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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?"

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"Did you know that Norgorber lives in Axis?"

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

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"Because Axis is a nicer place to live than Abaddon and Norgorber is selfish."

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"And the Powers of Law allow the god of crime to hang around in their home plane because..."

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"They are lawful, and proceed by due processes of law.  Nobody has proven Norgorber guilty of any crime in His entire life, either as a mortal or a god, so they can't kick Him out of Axis without breaking their own rules.  There's a reason that criminals worship Him."

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"I see.  And Iomedae has a hidden Chaotic Evil side and goes on secret dates with Nocticula?"

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"Iomedae is almost pure Lawful Good, by Her own choice."

"Touching the Starstone is like consuming the corpse of a god, in terms of the underlying mechanics.  You don't embody some domain to the extent that the universe recognizes you for that and grants you divinity.  You get stuffed with enough power that the universe recognizes you as clearly some kind of god, and you end up with a domain.  Going that route means you get more of a choice, if you know it's coming and plan ahead."

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"You're not explicitly saying that I have that choice coming," she notes.

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"It's a possibility.  Nothing is guaranteed, in the visions that Nethys showed Myself and Milani."

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"Milani?  Wait, then Asmodia wasn't joking when she said she was Chosen of -"

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"Asmodia ended up getting blessed by Otolmens, which is what We were steering for.  There's possibilities Nethys showed Us where Asmodia ends up working with Milani.  In other possibilities she ends up on the side of Rovagug, and that We definitely wanted to avoid."

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"Look, I'll just ask straight out.  What's up with that entire weird business?  Why are the trope-girls even a thing, why do we exist?  Can I hear the actual truth or at least what Ione knows?  I won't use the information in a way that hurts your interests."

"And yes, I can guess it would be easier to understand after I put on the artifact headband.  I'm asking now anyways."

Once she puts on the artifact headband, Pilar can guess, she will not perceive herself as having any real choices; she will know the way ahead, and do what maximizes expected utility, and it won't feel like much of a choice.  The choice to put on the headband is the last choice she'll make, in some sense; and she wants to know, before she does, what it is she's last-choosing.

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"It's genuinely not easy to explain.  It's the sort of thing that even gods can understand only in metaphors, and you don't have those metaphors."

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"This does not surprise me.  So, are we all inside an 'eroLARP', or -"

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"Dath ilan's eroLARPs, according to Keltham, have paying player characters and paid non-player-characters, both assigned background stories.  The player characters act freely not knowing the story's possible ends, and the non-player-characters act in secret conspiracy to keep overall developments on course for a satisfying ending."

"We're not inside one of those.  At least, not so far as I can tell.  What we're inside instead -"

"In some worlds, according to Nethys, there are games that are like magical books, books containing choices.  You go to the store - a metaphorical store, because books like that aren't physical enough to be contained in a physical shop or handed over when you buy them - but you go to the metaphorical store, and you buy a metaphorical novel-game.  You metaphorically read it, and you get to the point of the book where the novel-game offers you a choice, and you choose an action at that choice-point, and then new pages appear in the novel-game and you keep reading."

"In some worlds, the artistic idiom of the novel-game is manifested in their versions of dath ilan's 'computers', with illusions of people's heads talking and text flowing, and players who 'click' to make choices.  In other worlds, a novel-game enchants the player into feeling like they're inside the world it describes, and if the novel-game is cursed you might die there for real."

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"And we're inside one of those magical books?"

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"We're not actually in one.  It's just a metaphor that you can understand without putting on the artifact headband.  Or to the extent you could say we're inside one, it's because the idiom of the novel-game is one that's repeated in many different forms across many worlds Nethys can get information about, which is part of why Nethys guesses it might be a good fit for something that's happening around and above us."

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"And the gods are the game's players?"

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"The metaphor starts to break down at that point.  A novel-game has only a single player, who is also its reader, who is also the customer who bought that copy of the novel-game from the store that decided to stock copies.  That's not what Nethys thinks is happening with us."

"Milani and Myself did most of the carrying out of actions, at the choice points that Nethys told Us about, according to options and instructions that He left to Us.  In the game we're all inside, Nethys is the closest thing to a player, because Nethys is the one who can see the game as a game - view the alternate possibilities and decide which one to go down.  But what He saw was not exactly the one true future, and reality has been getting further and further away from any of the possibilities that He told Us about."

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"So Nethys is the player.  Who's the reader, if that's not the same Person?"

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"I did not understand that when Nethys tried to tell Us about it, and I would advise against you asking Him even if He could answer in mortal speech."

"One aspect I did understand is that the metaphorical book-readers - the Things that watch us, who are probably watching us right now and here - are responsible for making the novel-game real; or rather, the novel-game would be real to some tiny degree no matter what, but the Things watching over Pharasma's Creation make it more real.  In one sense, the answer to any question that asks why we're here, why we find ourselves here, gods and mortals alike, is that it's a kind of event that's interesting to Things who in observing those events make them more real."

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"Well, that's disturbing.  If I know too much about this do I go mad and start trying to summon Yog-Sothoth into Creation?"

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"According to Nethys, the Things-That-Watch are much vaster than Yog-Sothoth and flatly wouldn't fit inside Creation.  Any one of Them is larger than the entire greater universe that contains Creation and all of the Outer Gods we know as a tiny bubble.  The Things are not small enough, weak enough, or comprehensible enough to be the sort of entity that mortals can successfully glimpse and go mad about.  The most familiar thing Nethys could identify in His glimpses of Their continuum was an alternate universe's version of Aroden, who managed to make himself look useful enough that one of the Things copied him out of his native world and made him a fragment of the Thing's own mind to be a voice in Its deliberations.  If one of Them wanted to interfere in this realm, nothing we did or didn't do on our side of reality would make the tiniest bit of difference as to whether They could."

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"Very reassuring, good to know, I'm sure I'll sleep better knowing that."

"So those are the metaphorical readers.  Are they also the ones who bought the novel-game at the shop?"

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"Nethys isn't sure what bought this novel-game at the store, in the sense of Their being the entities with 'economicdemand' whose 'utilityfunctions' determined that a novel-game like this one would be stocked at the metaphorical store.  In one possibility Nethys saw that had a stat-boosted Keltham reasoning from things Nefreti Clepati was telling him, that Keltham said there was more than one Customer and more than one 'utilityfunction', combining their buying-power and trading with each other."

"At least one Customer wanted Keltham to have a romance, and is responsible for Keltham appearing in a place and time and possibility where tropes could happen around him.  At least one Customer probably isn't happy about the direction the future is currently headed for the mortals in Pharasma's Creation, and wants to disrupt the future that would otherwise come about for us; or, rather, is acting on behalf of other Entities that feel that way.  But the Customers' mode of action is complicated by how changes in Their 'purchasingbehavior' also redirect the Things' attentions from one novel-game to another."

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"The - Customers - want Keltham's Civilization to get built here?"

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"We can guess at least one Customer prefers the result of throwing Keltham into the mix, to whatever would have happened otherwise, or whatever the Things would have paid attention to otherwise.  They may or may not care whether or not the outcome is Civilization; They might be trying to avoid an unusually bad-to-them outcome rather than trying for an unusually good one.  They might be buying something much stranger or more complicated than that.  Nethys can't see centuries ahead with prophecy shattered, and We have little evidence about the possible long-run outcomes of the novel-game."

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"Does it makes sense, in the metaphor, if I ask who runs the store that offers games for sale?"

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"Those would be the Entities that contain the branching and latticed realities within which Pharasma's Creation is a tiny bubble and Outer Gods swim like pet fish in a courtyard pond."

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"And mortals like me, I suppose, are just - not even pet fish, not even gamepieces, but just tiny letters on an enormous page?"

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"No, actually."  The man in leather armor smiles slightly.  "You, Pilar Pineda, are the novel-game's author."

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"'And then, a +6 Belt of Physical Perfection materialized within her hand'... nope.  Didn't work.  Nice joke, had me actually going for half a round, but what's the actual author-Entity like?"

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"I'm not joking.  Selecting a book to carry in your shop, reading it, even playing it like a game, isn't the same as writing that book.  Who determines which pages of the book will follow, after Nethys advises Us of His choice and Snack Service carries it out?  The player can choose the option to have Snack Service tell Pilar Pineda about the Osirian adventuring party that's going to appear in the Skymetal Sword inn.  But what actually happens after Nethys advises that choice?  How does Pilar Pineda respond?  What does she think, feel?  Who writes every word that she speaks, composes her lines of dialogue?"

"Pilar Pineda does."

"The Customers have desires about the novel-game which determine that this novel-game is a good one to carry for sale, in the store stocked by the Shopkeeper of Golarions; Nethys advises Us how to make the game-player's choices; strange vast Things watch it play out, and in watching make these events more real.  But as for the one who writes the novel-game, who crafts Pilar Pineda's every thought and word, who determines which choices by the game-player lead to which outcomes, she indeed is none other than Pilar Pineda.  And Carissa Sevar, and Keltham, and Asmodia, and Ione Sala, and Peranza, and Meritxell and Yaisa and Abrogail, and Elias and Ferrer and all of the others."

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"It seems to me that these larger events had a designer who wasn't me.  None of us chose the way that - that our choices fit together to make all of this happen.  The novel-game's author had to - at the very least, some author had to arrange for particular people to end up in Ostenso wizard academy - even if I didn't get a vision myself, somebody had to -"

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"The Shopkeeper does not start with a Golarion, and put carefully chosen people together by sending visions - or so I'm told.  It selected a potentiality that would become a novel-game when Keltham got added to it at a particular place and time, which then caught the Things' attentions, and the Customers care about what is made more real as a result.  You are all the authors of your own lives, but there are vastly many possible books that can be written that way.  The shopkeeper's role is to select a few of those many possible novel-games, collectively written by authors like you, to be carried for sale in its store."

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Pilar thinks about this for a bit.  Not for very long.

"It's... strange.  I've been told these vast secrets, larger you say than the entire greater cosmos containing Creation, and yet I feel like I have learned absolutely nothing of use."

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"One of the great truths of existence, or at least our tiny part of it, is that the deepest, highest, most hidden secrets of divinity, are completely fucking useless to everyone including the gods."

"Possibly not the part where, if Keltham's right, people blotted out of existence in one place will continue, a few myriadfolds less real, somewhere else.  That would be important if it was true.  But seeing Keltham materialized here tells Me nothing about that, however convincing the evidence may feel from Keltham's perspective.  There's only one way to find out for real, and it'll come to Me shortly."

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"You're not afraid to die, die for real like outsiders do?"

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"Being a god isn't much of an adventure, is the thing.  My mortal self thought like it would be a fun adventure to try for the Starstone, but he failed to consider what sort of adventures a god might then have if he succeeded.  Once you've daringly risked your divine social life on trying to score Desna and Calistria for a threesome, there's not much else courageous you can personally do that won't get you immediately extinguished or turned into Zon-Kuthon."

"I made the world a better place just by being there and choosing clerics, and it wasn't like I was suffering, so I stuck around.  But if I can do more good by dying, and possibly going on to a next greater adventure, it's not in My nature to regret that.  You don't go for the Starstone on a drunken bet if you're the sort of person who holds the same horror for true-death that Carissa Sevar holds, or Iomedae for that matter.  Nethys's notes say there are more distant Golarions where Carissa ends up as Her cleric, can you imagine?  I'd regret not seeing the future of this world, how it all ends up; but wherever I end up, it'll be someplace that can see this Golarion, so with any luck I'll still find out how it all went."

"And even if I don't go anywhere - there's so many souls every day that go to Abaddon, not just in Golarion but in all the Material planes; and so many more than that, who suffer for a time in the Abyss and then perish again.  It's not, really, like a god's true life is worth so much more than theirs.  There's more consciousness in Me than in a hundred mortal souls, maybe, but not ten thousand."

"So if by sacrificing Myself I might be able to put an end to Abaddon as it is now, the Abyss as it is now, and above all Hell as it is now - then fine, good trade."

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Her throat seems to have swollen shut; she cannot speak.

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"Which brings us to the real topic from the beginning.  You're here to hear your last temptation."

"Even though you already know what it is, and you already know your answer."

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Her throat seems to have swollen shut, or so it would be convenient to believe.  She cannot speak, or rather, would like to not be able to, she knows she could speak but she doesn't and her thoughts are winding into a tight frantic loop of horror, no no no don't say it don't make it real let her go on pretending pretending for longer even though she already knows she knew when she came here...

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"You can't speak the words, because if you speak them they'll become real.  No, I'm not reading your mind; Dispater sealed it against even gods, unless I put in enough effort that He'll notice.  Some part of Nethys sees through that, but it's not talking to Me right now.  A different piece of Nethys knows what a possible Pilar thought, Nethys told Me of it; but what Nethys sees in advance of it happening can only be a possibility, and sometimes it's not right."

"Still.  This is what, according to Nethys, Pilar Pineda in one possibility was thinking, or rather, not letting herself think:"

"That your sin and flaw from the beginning, is that you thought it would be better if the people who want to go to Hell, could go to Hell, and the people who want to go to Elysium could go to Elysium."

"You wish that Asmodeus were different from how He is.  You want to also know your master's affection and caress, and not only be crushed down by correction and punishment."

"You were kinder to the other students at Ostenso academy than you should have been, and in your secret heart, even now, you don't feel that was wrong.  You feel like a bad Asmodean for having done it, but feeling that you were wrong to do it, isn't the same as feeling that the deed itself was wrong.  You've never truly felt that a single act of kindness you carried out was wrong in itself, only regretted that you were being a bad slave for doing it."

"What lies in your secret heart isn't even the respectably edgy kind of Good where sometimes you feed an unwilling paladin to locusts to protect other people.  It's worse than hidden Goodness; you, Pilar Pineda, deep down in your heart, are nice."

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"From the beginning, Snack Service was made out of a piece of Myself, a bit of Nethys, and Pilar Pineda's own not-actually-very-repressed best wishes for everyone."

"You actually started acting less nice, once that voice in your head was outside yourself, and you could call it Snack Service, and say to yourself that it wasn't you, you weren't that, you were a proper Asmodean being tormented by a voice of kindness talking inside your head.  Taking that excuse away from you is why the voice is silent, now."

"The truth is that your 'curse' was mostly you, all along.  Throwing surprise parties for people isn't My domain.  It's not Nethys's domain.  It's what Pilar Pineda would have done if she'd grown up somewhere other than Cheliax.  And deep down, you've always known that."

"You'd give every sad person in Creation a hug, if you could."

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"It's not exactly what's on offer.  There can't be any absolute promises, either, because by now we're off the track of any exact possibility that Nethys has seen - or at least, any that Nethys told Us about.  But the main stakes still look to be in play, and Snack Service wasn't lying when it said that you were being used for your own interests, not against them."

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"All right, you fucker.  Tempt me."

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"See, now you've gone and asked for it."

"One temptation, coming up."

The dying Swashbuckler drains the last of His flower-glass and pitches it into the pseudo-fireplace, where it shatters and begins to burn.

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Elsewhere and not exactly at the same time:


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Ione Sala, sixth-circle oracle of Nethys and still but a second-circle wizard, does now walk the planes once more, again in company, not quite the same company she had last time.

She sends a thought through a Telepathic Bond, one that can slip through a Sevar-modified Mind Blank spell made to be permeable to only divinations that Carissa Sevar has cast.  (It is still an eighth-circle spell, and not one that could be revealed to any outside eighth-circle-wizard; so it is cast each time via Wish, by an increasingly shocked efreeti who did not realize quite what service she was agreeing to in Golarion.)

What is it with you, ships, and fire? she sends.

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Fe-Anar has of course never in his life encountered a ship before, much the less a ship on fire, much the less caused problems thereby. He doesn't bother pointing this out. Nefreti Clepati is just like that too. She has enough of a handle on it - on what is real here and what is real somewhere else Nethys can see -- that she's only annoying on purpose, but Ione doesn't even have that much of a handle and might well be annoying by accident.

Just throw some diamonds at them and let's go find a new ship, he sends back.

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...while keeping firmly in mind, this time, that we are in the Elemental Plane of Fire and if you encounter a ship that is already on fire, it is probably supposed to be on fire and you should not try to put it out.

In Ione's defense, Nefreti only warned her to make sure that Fe-Anar did not set any ships on fire, without making it clear to Ione that there was a generalizable issue there.

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All right, but if somehow that works out horrendously it's entirely your fault.

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Ione will pay over a small amount of platinum to pay for the damage caused - no diamonds being required, here; Fe-Anar does not seem to have a strong grasp of concepts like "negotiating the price downward, even if you currently have more money than that, rather than appearing conspicuous by throwing money at a problem until it goes away".

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Then they'll go on looking through the City of Brass -

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Fommok Madinah. Some people don't speak Ignan but everyone Fe-Anar's been interacting with recently has Tongues and so no excuse. And even if you were to insist on translating it, 'City of Brass' is a horrendous one, and the popular supposed close-translation, 'Devouring City', hardly better. It's Fommock with an ɤ, not an ɤ̞ -

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- for anything resembling a planar ship that could sail the Maelstrom, keeping an eye out for quintuple-Wish-sequence sellers along the way.

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Their path crosses the form of what appears to be an old woman in white, wearing something like a blindfold made of old and rusted metal, leaning against a brass post of a great brass building.

As the two planar travelers pass her, she lifts her head, and if not for the rusted blindfold her gaze would point at Fe-Anar.

"You will not find in this city what you are seeking here," says she in Ignan.

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"What," Fe-Anar says automatically, "anything I think of seeking?"

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Possibly a slight trace of a smile flickers on the old woman's lips. "I spoke of what you are seeking. Not of what you have sought or will seek."

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"Right," says Fe-Anar, slightly disappointed as this implies much less power to manipulate the markets of the City of Brass. "Who are you and why should we care what you say?"

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"To you, I will seem at first like a strange entity who knows too much.  Your business is secret, and you will wonder if I know even more.  I will say that I know you mean to buy thirty Wishes, and you'll think that I could have guessed this by tracing the paths of the six travelers who came to this city before.  I will say that I know you are looking for a ship that can sail the Maelstrom, and you will think that anyone who was spying on your current trip could have learned this.  It will still concern you, and so you will care what I say."

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"Well, then, say it, we're in a hurry."

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"You're looking for a ship that can sail beyond the Maelstrom into the primordial chaos that lies outside Creation.  And you are not seeking to do this only from curiosity or an exploratory spirit or from chafing under Pharasma's restrictions.  You fear that Pharasma's Creation might end, for reasons ultimately springing from that same anomaly which enabled you to obtain so many diamonds; and you are trying to live on, to ensure that something born of Creation survives."

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All right, he's paying attention. But he's annoyed about it.

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Ione is a lot more concerned than that, terrified even.  Nefreti didn't warn her about this and Ione does know, by this point, in a general sort of way, that things have gone off-track from what was Supposed To Have Happened.  And Fe-Anar has less Bluff than zero somehow, and is now visibly Paying Attention in order to clearly inform this entity that its guess was correct.  About a piece of information that Nethys and His allies have spent some really incredibly extraordinary efforts to keep confined only to beings who won't or can't use that information.

Outwardly, Ione will not look terrified, or annoyed, or bone-horrified, about any of these things respectively, because Ione has more Bluff than zero.

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"In honesty, I know more.  All of that, is only what I could and would have guessed even if I knew no more.  It is only what I would have predicted and foretold in any case, through my having considered in advance how Creation might end or how others might seek to escape its ending; and having always kept a watch on the City of Brass, with certain agents."

"To notice when someone seems like they might be buying too many Wishes, in those planar markets that sell those - to set watch upon those purveyors that someone might wrongly imagine could sell an ark in which to flee a dying Creation - if I had to make the reasoning sound reasonable in mortal terms, I might tell that story."

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You deal with it, Fe-Anar says through the telepathic bond to Ione. I have already expended all my tolerance for Nethysians.

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I'll try, but I think it's focused on you, and I'm sure it's not a Nethysian.

"What more do you know?" Ione asks it.

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The old woman goes on addressing Fe-Anar.  "Even if you could find here a vessel to sail the Maelstrom, it would disintegrate within hours once exposed to the blind eternities beyond.  To truly escape Pharasma's grasp is more difficult than you realize.  I tried, in my own time.  To forge an ark like that is a millennium's work for a god; and even then, to endure beyond Creation it must be protected by somewhat of those energies that underlie creation itself."

"If I did not know more I would say to you, that I did not think you had all the resources required to it, but that I considered it worth my time to inquire."

"If I did not know more I would say to you, that even if I concluded that you stood a chance, the price of my own knowledge and aid was not only my own place among the refugees, but that I and my husband would take with our chosen people, and we would also lead in that expedition - so I would demand, for there are greater resources required to this work than diamonds."

"In fact, I do know more.  But I must play out how things would have gone otherwise."

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"Right," says Fe-Anar, with genuine irritation now, "then, I'd say that I don't believe you and you're wasting my time, and that I don't care at all what the gods say is impossible, because the word of the gods isn't worth the paper it isn't written on, and that you can come along if you're useful but you're not in charge of a damn thing, because I'm not going to all this trouble just to obey some new equally tedious god."

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"And I would smile a little, then, but briefly, before I told you that I knew where to find the ark you will not find in this city."

"You being already from Golarion, I would not need to explain the Starstone to you.  I would ask instead if you had the strength to pass the lesser of the Starstone's two tests, and reach the Starstone in its Cathedral - as have many previous souls who touched it and were never seen again."

"But those are the less impossible requisites.  The energy that sustains Creation can be found in Pharasma, in Pharasma's Spire, above all in the Seal at the base of the Spire, and in very few other places.  I'd inquire of you where you meant to lay your hands on it."

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"I can't fathom why I'd answer any of those questions, or for that matter why you'd ask them."

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"And I'd reply that I was, possibly, interested in having you join with me to escape Creation - or less probably, that I might join with you, though that would require you to have greater resource than I expected.  But that I was interested in fairly weighing the measure of our contributions, with neither of us seeking to dominate the other by force."

"If you can escape Creation entirely without my aid?  Then I and my husband are but two would-be passengers upon your vessel, prepared to pay any fair price you ask and submit to any lawful governance; and we know others interested as well."

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“Right, well, you’d have said that if you thought some thing you don’t think, and that’s about as much as I want to talk about things you don’t think.”

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"I wouldn't be saying all that if there wasn't a reason.  My time is valuable to me, as yours is to you.  But I'll offer price for trying to answer as you would have answered; even as my less-knowing self would also soon have offered you payment to continue conversing."

The old woman reaches into her shawl-coat, slowly, unthreateningly, and takes out what looks like a bar of metal, coated lightly in glass by some means.  "Two pounds of spellsilver still holds some value even in Golarion.  I offer this as payment to continue this conversation, as my other possible self would have done the same."

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....he holds out his hand to take it. "Well, I suppose having noticed one might want to escape Creation, and also that while it'd be hard to survive outside it it probably isn't impossible, puts you a cut ahead of most people I'd hire, but I'm not joining any projects run by mysterious strangers who think that instead of Pharasma we should have them."

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"As much as I wished to leave Creation," the old woman answers, "I would not have cared to take my chances on a vessel all of mortals without any divinity to aid them.  Gods are like ship-caulkers and wainwrights, to an undertaking like that.  But not all gods are so noxious, or so it seems to myself.  If Desna or Abadar had been the keystone of Creation then I would not seek so much to leave it."

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"I don't have any grievances with Abadar -- or rather, the ones I have are all very personal and specific. Desna can be helpful if She wants, but wouldn't, I think, announce that She were actually in charge, and if She did then that's not being helpful and She can leave."

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"For a long time we will be a tiny ship of order in a sea of chaos, and most islands we happen across will not be friendly nor trustworthy.  It's not as bad as mortals are led to think from interacting with only the spawn of the Far Tapestry that Pharasma doesn't trouble Herself to keep out; for those alien things that'd speak to us in plain numbers and trade us knowledge have not been permitted entry to Creation.  But it will still be long before anyone has an option of leaving our vessel without their soul immediately dissolving, and where disagreement cannot be resolved by exit it must be resolved some other way."

"Someone or something must be in charge.  Had you meant not to appoint yourself and also not appoint any other, my estimated chance of your success would plummet sharply."

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"Of course I'll be in charge!"

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"None of the Powers I know, that might otherwise take an interest in buying passage or aiding your journey, will submit themselves unconditionally to a mortal captain.  Mortals are simply too changeable, from a Power's perspective.  Abadar, if He led, would be a known quantity, He would not change from the goals and methods He had already demonstrated.  Even from the perspective of those Powers that were once mortals themselves, it is just not possible to know a mortal well enough to trust them wholly; whatever you have seen of their past, mortals can change."

"Did I and my husband lead such an expedition, we would not ask any allied Powers to submit themselves to us unconditionally; there would be a contract to which Powers were signatory.  Have you composed such a contract of passage?"

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"Perhaps you should go make your own ship, then, for all your Powers, for I'm not wasting my time in the doing of favors for beings that cannot regard mortals as worth bargaining with, and if I have agreements, they are for people whose company I might desire."

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"I am here and bargaining with you, am I not?  And my husband has never held himself too good to bargain with mortals, and has treated with courtesy all those who sought him with that intention, whether they were weaker than himself or mightier.  Nor have I asked you for any favor I haven't offered to pay for, and my husband shares that spirit."

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"Then I might write you a contract of passage, and you can see what you make of it."

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"Perhaps.  I'd worry that as you stand now, it might not be a contract I could swallow.  I'd think that perhaps you'd value my possible contributions more dearly, once you failed to find any great ship for sale here that could sail even the lesser Maelstrom, or after you'd verified how the Maelstrom grows more corrosive as you steer towards the edges of Creation."

"But there is one cautionary omen that must be given you immediately, if you mean to undertake this quest and be its hero."

"Buy only twenty-five Wishes this day, not thirty.  Do not augment your Wisdom."

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"Hard no," Ione says out loud.  She's increasingly worried about where exactly this thing is trying to steer Fe-Anar, and though she has nothing terribly clever to say, she wants to check what happens if its attention is directed more toward herself.  "Nefreti Clepati specifically warned me to make sure he didn't somehow end up with augmented Intelligence but no Wisdom, no matter what kind of tricks fate seemed to be throwing about that.  Nefreti Clepati is a ninth-circle of Nethys, and she knows things that gods don't."

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"Nefreti Clepati has only one trick and she uses it for everything.  If something is happening that's unparalleled in her visions, she's as blind as an ordinary god after prophecy's been shattered.  You should aspire to better, young oracle, and not rely so heavily on your master's guidance."

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"I think I have enough Wisdom to be getting on with," Fe Anar says, cheerfully enough.

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Oh HELL no, Ione says into their Telepathic Bond, still taking pleasure every time she uses the word as the curse that it should be. Fe-Anar, don't you think it's alarming that the incredibly suspicious entity is requesting you not to augment the one stat Nefreti said to make sure got augmented, and that stat is the Trickery Resistance and Awful Mistake Avoidance stat?

And Fe-Anar is weirdly willing to go along with that, Fe-Anar WHY, Ione doesn't even know why she should be panicking but she clearly should be!

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It's absolutely suspicious, he says cheerfully back to her. Quite possibly we shouldn't do it. But it wouldn't surprise me very much to learn that this careful game you all are balancing in fact falls apart if I see through it, in which case I definitely want to do that but can believe that this minute isn't the most convenient possible time.

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When these Telepathic transmissions have ceased, and only then, the old woman speaks again.  "Wisdom is also closeness to divinity, and distance from divinity can also be a resource.  You will need all you have of that resource, when the time comes to spend it."

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"See," he says, "I really like that explanation, which is why I don't trust it at all."

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And NOW Ione is trying to figure out the chance that the 'old woman' who's presumably a divinity or a herald or something is able to snoop on their Telepathic connection, maybe even their actual thoughts; or if she's just reading past Fe-Anar's not-so-great Bluff - Sevar did warn them that the Selectively Permeable Mind Blank might not ultimately be as solid as the original complete Mind Blank; it's mainly meant to resist standardized Discern Location from a distance, not divinities staring at it up close -

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Fe-Anar isn't even considering whether she's able to snoop. Obviously she is. There are a lot of beings that can do this kind of thing (Ione's one of them) and it's always exactly this annoying; he appreciates that in this case Ione's getting a taste of her own medicine.

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"Indeed.  But it is not in my interest to tell you all of my knowledge that you could benefit from, while you still seem little to esteem my aid.  I do have my pride as you have yours.  I don't say that you could never sail beyond Creation unassisted, given time enough to build your own vessel and somehow lay hands upon the energies of Creation.  But you are not conducting yourself like a person who has no time limit on his endeavor; you are here hoping to buy a planar ship already-made, instead of building one special to its purpose.  You mean to flee Creation and you need to do it soon.  That you cannot do without allies, any more than I myself could do it alone."

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"If you want to deliver a lecture on how to flee Creation, I promise to act appropriately overawed at your genius so your pride can be assuaged; it must be difficult, being prideful and unable to assuage your pride merely by actually achieving things."

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"I've no use for your or anyone else's fawning; I've heard far more than enough such, from those who mistakenly think I care to hear it.  But to have one's contribution undervalued is a troubling thing, for it implies a corresponding lack of repayment; and the same, if the payer seems too much to overesteem the coin in which I am being paid."

"Mouthing words of praise is easy.  I want something harder.  I want the respect you give your shoes."

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"If you have something valuable to me, I'll pay you for it, and respect you for it; if you have something of great value to me, I'll pay you well for it. If you don't, then I won't."

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"I am not something merely of great value; I am something that is necessary for your long journey.  I do not, realistically, think that you could find another pair of shoes like myself."

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He shrugs. "So?"

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"There are things you discard the first time they seem troublesome to you; a merchant with valuable goods but who does not seem to treat you respectfully enough for your taste, or who asks you for pay in an unfamiliar coin.  There are things you cannot discard, like your shoes upon a long journey.  If your shoes could speak, it would be well to make compact with them before you set out."

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"Look," Fe-Anar says, "I spend a lot of time around mysterious powerful people who are omniscient or are uncannily perfect at guessing exactly what to say to you, or are arguably gods, or some combination of those. They're lovely people, sometimes. There are some of them I wouldn't strangle even if I could. But one picks up some habits, when there are all kinds of powerful things that know too much around speaking vague prophecy instead of handing you a contract they want you to sign, and the main thing you learn is that you can actually just not let them do that and spitefully die in a fire instead.

Maybe that's what you'd call the thing-you-spend-when-you-get-wiser, where you replace that simple and eminently workable rule with whatever gods do among each other. Maybe it's something you have no comprehension of. I don't know. I don't care. I have said I'll pay you; I meant it. If I give my word, I'll keep it. But I will happily die in a fire rather than acknowledge some vague unbounded obligation to excessively powerful things that want to push me around. If I can only have my trip conditional on knuckling under to such beings, that trip is of no value to me; there are no gains from trade to peaceably split.

I would, in fact, take off my shoes, walking across the Worldwound, if my shoes started telling me what to do, because I just don't care that much about dying and I do care a lot about not being easy to manipulate.

If you want to make a deal, offer one. If your deal sounds worse than dying in a fire -- and many, many, many things sound worse than dying in a fire, when they're offered by smug entities that know too much -- then I'll die in a fire instead. If your advice is to make a compact, tell me what you're offering and what you want to be paid for so that we can write the godsdamned contract."

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The old woman nods.  "As you now speak more plainly to me, I'll speak more plainly to you.  I was a farrier's daughter before I was a mysterious powerful anything, and I'm afraid to simply appoint you captain of the voyage and obey you because you strike me as in some ways incautious.  You offered insult to the mysterious powerful thing, saying, 'It must be difficult being prideful and unable to assuage your pride merely by actually achieving things.'  That's the sort of rashness that a farrier's daughter watches men die for."

"I also know more than that, but it's knowledge that I received under contract and that I don't want to use because that imposes additional terms on me unless I could have succeeded otherwise.  I'm telling you that because it's something you disclose to somebody with whom you want to build a firm relationship; the sort where you aren't simply wearing your magic items hidden, to manipulate them; the sort where you worry they'd resent the hiding afterward, if they learned.  I am being more cautious around you than you are being cautious around myself, and on the proposed voyage we would have to be cautious around things from the Far Tapestry."

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"The task we've set ourselves isn't one cautious people set themselves. But if you have advice on not being manipulated by beings from the Far Tapestry then that is among the advice I'd pay you for and follow, if it was any good."

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"My husband is wealthy enough that mortal coin means nothing to me.  The pay I seek is a healthy working relationship, in which we either have terms of alliance, or I don't expect to die if I submit to all your orders."

"But I can give you two pieces of advice like that, to be repaid in the coin of real respect, or even a down payment toward compromise.  I won't set the price in advance, only ask you to be fair, once you've determined the goods' worth."

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"I'm listening."

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"First, this:  To the things from the Far Tapestry you are a sort of mechanical contrivance whose levers they are prodding, looking for triggers.  To bind them on a level where their words bear any relation to reality, rather than being pure manipulations, is only the first step with trading with them; after that they will be looking for truths that fix reality, true things they can say that move you; and they have more freedom in it than you imagine, because what they say affects what is true.  It bears some resemblance to the art of self-fulfilling prophecy, which the young oracle beside you has barely begun to explore."

"From the perspective of the Far Tapestry, anything resembling a swift emotional reaction is an alien - to them - shortcut through your mind's pathways, which they will try to exploit towards self-fulfillment.  Had I wished to ruin you, using the arts that they would use, I would have - without warning, and with a carefully established previous frame of insufficiently-concealed contempt - prophesied to you that your pride would be your flaw and your downfall, that you would hold yourself too great to heed the counsel of wise elder beings like myself that could have saved you.  I am not using the exact words I'd have used, if I were trying that myself; but with the right choice of wordings, intonations, contexts, I could have spoken those words and thereby made them true.  I could tell you that your reluctance to compromise would destroy you, in a way that made it sound like I was sincerely contemptuous about the fact but maybe also didn't know as much about you as I thought; and you'd think 'hah, I'll show her, then' and refuse to compromise and so seal the truth I'd predicted."

"Dealing with creatures like that is, in fact, unpleasant, and I would recommend leaving such negotiations to my husband."

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"I do realize that, and I'm not so easily played, but I'm happy to leave it to your husband, had I any reason to think I could trust him or you."

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"You're less easily played when you're in a mood to carefully reflect on things, perhaps.  I can already predict about you that you are not always in a mood like that, and see some of how I'd steer you to not be in that mood at the key moment when you heard my words.  To be a kind of thing that has changeable, responsive moods makes you, from their perspective, a strangely vulnerable sort of thought process; they can consider how to attack every kind of mood you can be prodded to enter, rather than you being in one constant mental state with a more limited set of self-fulfilling claims."

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" - sure. And thank you, I guess, for not doing that, if you're in fact not doing that, and if that's what you're fishing for. I notice we're not talking about why I should trust you."

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"We cannot yet form the bonds of trust as trust should be, until you know more about me than it's to my own advantage to reveal now.  And you will become smarter than this, and later wiser.  If you came to trust me too quickly now, you would notice then.  That would be an ill start to the voyage."

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"Well, then, I'm not sure we have much more to say to one another."

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"You know more about me than at the start of this conversation; and I know more about you that I am allowed to take into account. That the process does not complete immediately does not mean there has been no progress."

"But I'll move on, then, to my second advice, which is more of a tangible offer."

"I would guess that Nefreti Clepati has seen you in alternate possibilities, and has seen some of your possible fates.  Learning of those might enable you to break free of them, rather than others using them to move you about.  I will give this oracle girl a private message to bear to Clepati, though it cannot yet come to your own ears, by which I mean to motivate Clepati to tell you what she has withheld.  That is my next offering to you in this relationship."

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"Well, I won't turn that down."

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The old woman turns then her head toward Ione, and speaks apparently in plain Taldane, though it is also evident that Fe-Anar does not hear.

"Brace yourself and show no reaction to my words."

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Oh that's not a good sign.

"I'm braced."

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"You made an error, in opposing my interests here, in seeking to warn that man against me."

"It's not to my interest to let Creation be threatened, if I don't think I have a chance to escape Creation.  Having learned this much, in this way, if I failed to come to alliance terms with this man, I would eliminate the threat to Creation after I'd investigated it.  There would be no constraints on how I used that knowledge, which I'd have learned regardless."

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Ione Sala shows no outward reaction.  Her heart is hammering inside her, though, for she's finally thinking and yes, that should have occurred to her, and even more it's occurring to her that Fe-Anar himself would be ecstatic if this being did exactly that.

"Understood," Ione says.

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"I'd know from having seen him for only two minutes that his pride is his fatal flaw.  He is not ready to lead a voyage out of Creation.  He is not ready to hear how unready he is."

"There is something in the nature of Creation or perhaps what lies beyond it, that makes mortals to matter in it at all, as we wouldn't otherwise expect to be true.  For that reason I consider it a running concern that perhaps a voyage like this one can only succeed if it's a mortal to begin it and drive it, a mortal who hasn't been turned into a full hand-puppet of gods along the way.  But he is unequal, at present, even to the simpler requisite of coming to reasonable terms with me about my aid.  He wants to be sole captain of the voyage and rule it alone, and it is possible to put him into a mood where he does not want to hear from his advisors.  I would not, at present, want to go with him, as he is.  So Nethys's gamble ends here and poorly, unless Nefreti Clepati tells this man everything pertinent she knows about his fates and his dooms, and that enables him to grow beyond those."

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"Understood."

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"My price for my aid to Nethys in this matter, is that Nefreti Clepati tells me anything she's glimpsed in other possibilities about a power that can control space, or make portals of a vast scale; any such tale, however distant from us, might give me a hint about where to look for a power like that somewhere in Creation.  Success there would also make this a more promising voyage.  And you need me to decide, in the end, that I'll gamble on this being the right moment to go into a greater exile."

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"I'll convey that, though I can't speak for my master.  How is Nefreti to contact You?"

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"She knows me.  So will you, as soon as I decide the matter is no longer a secret from you.  And that's also a helpful act toward him, for it's better that people begin by seeing me as I am, for good or ill, and only afterward consider the distorted stories of me."

The old woman turns back to Fe-Anar, speaking this time again to be heard by both.  "I will be waiting here in Fire where you found me, if you later become more desiring of my aid.  I'd offer to send some small minion with you, for your convenience, but I don't expect you want that."

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"Doesn't really sound convenient, no. I'll think about what you had to say, though rather little of it was about how concretely to do a project like this one."

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"If you could somehow lay your hands upon the energies that sustain Creation, the mathematics of them have been the study of an ancient silver dragon who dwells in Kenabres.  I'd help you more if I could, but while I yet dwell within Creation I am constrained by far too many oaths and pacts and treaties and considerations."

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He nods, because all the things he can think of to say are sarcastic and that's just bad incentives when she's actually being mildly helpful.

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Outward sarcasm would mean nothing to her; only the underlying realities of his attitude matter.  But that he cares at all what she thinks, and restrains his pride in any way, is progress.

"I say also - in case it should matter to you - that I have not truly been here in person, though this form does resemble me and I have been speaking through it quite directly.  Approaching you in my true person without asking your permission about it would not have been courteous."

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He figured. Gods tend to be notable to be around. "I thank you for the courtesy, to whatever degree courtesy is how your decision was motivated."

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She smiles slightly, and folds her hands into her lap.  Though the metal blindfold is still on her, there is an air about her as if she'd closed her eyes.

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Cheliax, at a point in time later than it was before the text earlier said 'Earlier:':


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The developing situation in Cheliax is complicated, and of course fraught, and it could hardly be otherwise.

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First Abrogail Thrune was assassinated along with Aspexia Rugatonn inside her own palace, which is the sort of thing that happens from time to time.  Then Abrogail Thrune was Wishnapped out of Hell, which happens less.  Worst of all, the Crown of Infernal Majesty was lost.

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...and then two days later that Crown was ransomed back from Keltham, now styling himself Keltham of Elsewhere.

Foremost, the Crown was exchanged for Cheliax locating every last woman it could find from its secret ilani breeding-program: and giving those women a choice.  On the one hand, a Polymorph-abortion before their children could be ensouled.  Or alternatively, going to Osirion to be made statues, possibly for quite a while, until Keltham or his chosen delegate declared that Creation had become a fitting place for dath ilani children; or else decided that the children must be aborted after all.  In either case those women would afterward be made very rich and free to go where they wished.

And secondmost in exchange of the Crown's return, the Chelish state and Asmodeus's Church, were to make no further effort in person or by proxy to locate or retrieve Abrogail Thrune.

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So now, Cheliax can infer:  Given that Keltham seemed to know about the breeding program in the first place, Keltham almost certainly knows he has remaining children in Cheliax.

Keltham knows he couldn't get them all.

Keltham, evidently, cares about his prospective children a great deal.

If you had higher Intelligence and Splendour than Wisdom, you might conclude - after a deadline of probable ensoulment had passed, and Keltham had not destroyed Cheliax already - that this meant it was okay to invade Osirion now.

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You would not have wanted to look at any earlier point like you were about to invade Osirion.  Keltham might not have liked that, and you wouldn't have had those definitely-not-hostages yet.

So you would not be ready to invade immediately after the deadline passed, because you couldn't visibly prepare before that.

But once that deadline had passed, you would start carrying out Cheliax's previous plan, to then begin readying its forces to invade Osirion.

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So the first complication of the present situation, then, is that Cheliax is now visibly gathering its forces for war.

Obviously Cheliax hasn't officially made any announcement that Osirion is the target.  That part is not spoken outside of the most tightly secured chambers, lest any spy should hear it and make official report.

But that's only so spying empires can potentially pretend not to know, and choose not to take official notice.  Everyone knows that if Cheliax is invading anyone, it's almost certainly the home of the Scientific Revolution.

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The next element of complication is who now sits upon the throne of Cheliax.  Imaginably, one could try to hold the throne open against Abrogail Thrune's return; but then far too many people would try to seize it.  Cheliax must have a single clear ruler, at all times, but especially if war is about to begin.

When Abrogail guessed that Calantra Thrune would most likely be next to rule the Chelish Imperium, she made that guess based on mistaken premises having to do with time-travel.

Calantra Thrune is sensible, cautious; older than Abrogail was when Abrogail assumed the throne.  Given the apparent circumstances, Calantra has opted to back the throne-bid of a cousin instead.  Abrogail is not abandoned by the Church to Hell, she is ransomed away from Cheliax's rescue.  For all anyone knows, Keltham could decide to send Abrogail Thrune back the next day.  If Abrogail II is really gone for good, Calantra suspects her cousin's reign may not last all that long anyways; most Chelish reigns don't.

There are things you ought not to do if you are determined to keep your head attached to your shoulders for very long, and one of those things is seating yourself upon the Throne of Cheliax, in the throne room that was Abrogail's, while Abrogail Thrune still exists in any form that might take offense.

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Then the new Infernal Majestrix, now styling herself Terthule II though that wasn't her birth-name, is no coward whatever else you might say of her.

Her new position is, of course, fragile; all the more so because Terthule II must avoid letting her reign appear fragile at almost any cost, including that she must avoid the appearance of being concerned about the appearance of fragility.

Terthule II has conducted no systematic sweep of Abrogail II's loyalists, because a number of former Abrogail loyalists are too valuable to be easily disposed-of; Abrogail II's visible fondness for somebody tends to have been unfortunately correlated with their competence.  For that matter, an evenhanded tally of the pro-Abrogail faction would have to include, for example, Aspexia Rugatonn, who while on constantly fractious terms with Abrogail II did dislike her less than previous monarchs.  If you sweep the Abrogail loyalists, but leave visible holes in the sweep corresponding to people you don't dare kill, that makes you look weak.

Terthule II, then, has not conducted a sweep of only the weaker Abrogail loyalists, given that she cannot sweep them all.  The appearance of indifference to them can also serve.

But there are many unimportant personnel responsible for maintaining the Majestrix's personal quarters (mostly repaired after the attack by some greater ilani weapon); and it was easy enough for Terthule to make their palace-service more difficult and demanding.  After which it is only natural that Terthule sent off to torture, or took a few moments to personally punish, those personal servants of the Queen who failed in their work.  Among those already excruciated to death are several souls whom Abrogail II was said to favor, among her personal household.  It serves to perform that Abrogail II is never coming back.

This does have the effect of making a lot of other competent people, whom Abrogail II might have arguably visibly favored in some way, a little nervous about Terthule II.  Really the fact that Terthule II isn't purging tons of competent people is something to be said in her favor as a Chelish monarch, even if she's refraining from it during an incredibly tense situation on the verge of war.  But it's the sort of internal peace that could change on less than a round's notice.

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Another, stranger source of complications in Cheliax, is that somebody has been casting permanent symbols of healing within Asmodean temples - starting with those at the Worldwound, and then in the primary temples serving major Chelish cities.  This mysterious benefactor of Cheliax has left no calling card, set off no alarms that anyone remembers, and demanded no payment.

This is a rather significant act, one that in some ways shifts balances of power -

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Really?  In that case, one wishes to know why it wasn't done earlier.

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All right, then, some background:

The inability of Evil clerics to channel positive energy for wide-radius healing is one of the key disadvantages of Evil; especially when it comes to large military operations, or the economic productivity of whole countries; especially Evil countries that don't conduct themselves in a way where they could just hire clerics of Abadar or Pharasma to channel healing.

If you look in an academic magical textbook for beginning practitioners, it will tell you that symbol of healing is a 3rd-circle divine spell, and that like most symbols it is among the rare spells with a doubly-stabilizable topology that can be made Permanent.  If you look up a standard list of known spells that Permanency can perpetuate, you'll see the entry for symbol of healing lists the caster-strength of Permanency required as late-5th-circle, and a weight of diamond dust that in current markets costs around 10,000gp.  (The actual weight is greater than the weight of a Wish-diamond; but a Wish-diamond requires a single large diamond, and that's much harder to find than an equivalent weight of diamond-matter-of-any-size for a Permanency.)

So - given that this trick works at all - why don't large Evil cities already have their own Permanencied symbols of healing, then?

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That is a good question!  First, of course, one checks the basic economiclogic to make sure the businessplan would consistencycheck.  How much could a symbol of healing earn, in an Evil city - how long would it take to earn back the 10,000gp price?

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The sticker price on a 1st-circle priest casting Cure Light Wounds is 10gp, or so you'll usually be told.  Naively, you might think that a symbol of healing bestows an effect at least that powerful; so by using it on 3 subjects per day, you could earn back the Permanency price within a year: 3 people/day * 10gp * 365 days = 10,950gp.

The first issue with this business plan is that 10gp is only the price if you are a foreign merchant, or an adventurer, or you look visibly rich.  If you're an ordinary townsman of the faith, Cure Light Wounds runs more like 1gp.

The second issue is that channeled healing, in towns that aren't too purely Evil to offer it, doesn't sell at the same price as Cure.  It's not that channeled healing is significantly weaker, but that it's used by more than one person at a time, which means that it runs on a schedule, which makes it less convenient and particularly less medically convenient.  The price of Cure Light Wounds is driven by the value of having a cure cast on you right now.  The product-market fit of channeled healing is for injuries that aren't urgently life-threatening:  Burns, deep cuts, broken bones.  It's the want of that cheap lesser healing that has the citizens of Ostenso going about with visible scars or poorly healed bone-breaks, but mostly still alive.

In most cities with channeled healing, it ends up costing somewhere around one silver piece.

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Then for any Evil population center large enough that there's 300 people per day who need minor healing, a symbol would pay for itself in one year.

Does Ostenso qualify?

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Yes.

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So why doesn't Ostenso already have a healing symbol?


...Hm.  If one's priors are already updated on light contact with Golarion, one would consider such non-economically-driven answers as:  "Because Evil religions don't much prize innovation or economic sensibility" or "Because Evil rulers don't consider it on-theme for Evil cities to offer cheap healing, and they're not the ones living with the consequences".  Or the general loan-interest rate in Evil countries could be over 100%.  ?

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Dath ilan is learning!  For many temples to Evil gods, that would be a sufficient answer.  But Asmodeanism does laud cleverness, and souls pledged to Asmodeus must fear Hell's own vengeance if they violate a compact made in Hell's name; His temples can borrow at some of the lowest interest rates in Golarion.  And if the Church didn't think of it, the Crown would.

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All right, why are there so many people in Ostenso with visible scars from not-healed injuries?

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The root of the answer is that symbol of healing is a divine spell, and permanency is an arcane spell, and it must be the same hand that casts the spell and the permanency.  Divine magic in general does not always mix easily with arcane magic, and divine healing especially is troublesome.

That Razmir's 'priests' can successfully heal their parishoners, without visibly using Infernal Healing, is unusual; if any wizard with early-Sevar-level Spellcraft could create a Ring of Cure Light Wounds as readily as Sevar made her Tiny Swords of Glibness (also for a spell no arcanist could stabilize), what Razmiran's priesthood could do would not be exceptional enough to fool anyone.

In fact, a lot of sensible educated people in Razmiran shrug and accept that, in real life, Razmir's priests probably just worship a god and get spells from Him.  Because why go to all that trouble and do something nearly impossible - namely using arcane magic to imitate divine healing - just to put on a supposed lie that doesn't obviously benefit Razmir that much, compared to Him just saying that He's a ninth-circle wizard rather than a god?

It's a lie that works because Razmir is mixing arcane magic and divine healing on a level that most 9th-circle wizards can't.

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Which all sums to this:  If you want to make a permanent symbol of healing, you would realistically want to be a mystic theurge who could channel a wastefully large amount of divine power to imitate a 5th-circle arcane Permanency, not just a random 5th-circle wizard who got promoted by fiat of Asmodeus to clerichood and cast the symbol from scroll.  You'd also need to spend years studying divine healing spells and their interactions with the arcane; or alternatively have something like INT 26, and maybe also a tutor who understood the physics of magic on a level more commonly associated with gods.

The complete list of known spellcasters like that is "Nefreti Clepati", and Nefreti Clepati does not care to make permanent symbols of healing and sell them to Evil churches.

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...or rather, that was the complete list before.  Pilar Pineda has mostly stayed out of contact with Cheliax after leaving Project Lawful, and she vanished from scries entirely after Abrogail Thrune's assassination.  But it is known that Lady Pineda has become a mystic theurge; she displayed that much capability while rescuing a Chelish Worldwound fortress from certain death under a choking demonic smoke.

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Which brings us to the complicated part!  Even if Abrogail II had still occupied the throne, granting symbols of healing to only Asmodean temples would have been a politically fraught act.  A loyal Chelish subject ought to also provide some symbols of healing laid upon banners to be carried about by Cheliax's military, and maybe put them up in some Crown offices as well.

One aspect of the current balance of Chelish power between Church and Crown is that all the serious healing is done at Asmodean temples; but most lesser healing is done by 1st-circle wizards casting an Infernal Healing, far more numerous in Cheliax than elsewhere.

This balance has now been wholly upset, and not in a way where any Crown offices got any permanent healing symbols of their own, even though they could just as easily have been granted to wizards or nonmagical state offices.

In the further context of Terthule II's new reign, this behavior could be interpreted as Lady Pineda - favored of Aspexia Rugatonn, and believed to be on friendly terms with Abrogail II - deliberately snubbing the new regime in favor of the Church of Asmodeus; which is the sort of appearance that every single other power in Cheliax, even Aspexia Rugatonn, has been trying to avoid.  Any appearance like that might set off internal conflict, with a war with Osirion on the horizon, that either the new Queen or the Most High or both ought to be cross with you about having started.

...Or you could take the impending Osiran war as a fine time to push forward the Church, since nobody wants to set off an internal conflict about your pushing.  If you were sufficiently unworried about how the new Queen would take it.  Very few people would be that unworried.

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“The minister for national affairs should mind that it could also be Clepati,” offers Xulia Cantibari, newly promoted advisor to the Queen, “relying on the fact that our doubts about Pineda’s loyalties might inspire us to permit it, where such an intervention, were it openly Clepati’s, would generate considerable suspicion.”

    “Pineda hasn’t denied it.”

  “My understanding is that  - owing to mismanagement under the previous monarch - Pineda offers no routine accounting of her actions either to Church or Crown, which is why we cannot ask of her if, and why -”

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 "Is anyone being assigned to the duty of analyzing the possibility that this benefits Cayden Cailean, and if so how?  Or are we abandoning that as a bad deal?"

   "My understanding is that Pineda's final reports indicate her as having acquired the capability to act entirely for her own benefit, meaning we can't assume that any particular action of hers is meant to benefit Asmodeus or Cheliax at all."

         "It clearly does increase Chelish military potential, if only because we can recall more clerics from the Worldwound and our cities while incurring lesser consequences.  I don't think any gods will be confused by a cover of Pineda not rendering direct military aid, which further weighs against her choices having a divine source or reason -"

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Terthule II lifts a hand, and all quiets at once.

“Never mind Pineda,” says Terthule II, who of course minds Pineda immensely but can’t look interested in calling her to account; she might not answer, and that’d be disastrous. She’s asked people separately to figure out what remains in Cheliax that Pineda might care about, and how it might be credibly threatened; early reports say that Pineda's immediate family is dead and unreachable, but one of Pineda's few disciplinary infractions was about granting too much fame to Paxti of Borras, a former classmate, during a sensitive intelligence operation. “Whether it’s Pineda's her hand or another, we ought not to rely on it for wartime logistics, in case it’s then withdrawn; beyond that, any scheme that strengthens Asmodeus strengthens Us.” Obviously false, but no one’s going to call her on it. “Pineda’s loyalties will become apparent when we go to war; most loyalties do.” And that’s quite enough on this dangerous topic, time to steer for - “Summarize, Timoteu, the state of those preparations.”

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Cheliax's stocks of high-level consumables, scrolls and wands and potions, had been depleted by conquering Nidal; those would have taken time to replenish from only internal sources, and Cheliax is not as rich in high-level casters as in low-level casters.  The obvious alternative is to buy those items from foreign suppliers, using the newfound spellsilver riches, but many of Cheliax's usual military suppliers are currently balking at supplying Cheliax directly.

This is inconvenient but not fatal; any sanction on foreign trade that isn't obeyed worldwide is more for show than for impact.  Cheliax has offered higher prices to those suppliers that will still sell to them.  The former clients of those suppliers, outbid, will turn around and buy from the suppliers that are making a show of snubbing Cheliax.

"I estimate that we're at 70% of attainable military potential.  80% in one more week, 90% two weeks after.  That reflects our supply of consumables; our warriors and casters are as ready as they'll ever be.  With respect to recalling Worldwound forces," now that the new healing capacity has increased their efficiency, and realistically also gambling on Lady Pineda's demonstrated willingness to reinforce a Chelish Worldwound unit in distress, "we have acquired sufficient Greater Teleport scrolls to retrieve up to thirty high-level casters and fighters from the Worldwound without that impacting our assault potential immediately after."

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A military advisor standing behind him clears his throat. “Your Majesty, I would recommend we move immediately. Those weapons that we’ve witnessed deployed by Osirion or those allied with it are a problem and they’ll be more of one in more time. This is the best moment to strike at them. We should adjust our objectives in line with our combat power, rather than delay.”

  “So which objectives does our lord minister recommend we abandon? Clepati? The project sites? The city? A weak attack weakens us.”

“Our aim is destruction, not conquest; a weak attack weakens them, and their counterattack weakens us precisely as much as they’re capable of, which will be more next week.”

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This is the conversation Terthule II was angling for, without being too obvious about her desires. There’s nothing like a good war for securing one’s throne. She intends to preside over it with sober, mature deliberation, statesmanlike as Abrogail could never be bothered to be. “Are there those who’d advocate for further delay?”

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There's a surprisingly loud click and nearly simultaneous snick.

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This is the sound made by an adamantine spring, unwinding under incredible tension; and the sound made by an adamantine blade that sweeps forth and returns almost instantly back.

 

Anyone who sees at mortal speeds will see only that blood sprays forth from Terthule's throat, and she stops talking and looks puzzled for just a moment, before her head falls off her shoulders in another gush of blood.

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Abrogail gracefully catches Terthule's head before it hits the ground, removes the Crown of Infernal Majesty, and heaves the rest of Terthule's body off the Throne of Cheliax before seating herself down there, uncaring of the latest set of bloodstains.

There are things you ought not to do if you are determined to keep your head attached to your shoulders for very long, and one of those things is seating yourself upon the Throne of Cheliax, in the throne room that was Abrogail's.

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"I assume," Abrogail says aloud, glancing at the current royal guard members, who are looking just as decidedly neutral as everyone else in this room, "that you have secret instructions to summon the Grand High Priestess in such an event as this, considering my recent circumstances."  She leans to one side upon her throne, flinging one boot-clad leg up on the throne's arms, the very picture of seductive relaxation.  "Be about that, if you must."

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Aspexia will come there swiftly.

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Accompanied by adequate reinforcements, should they be necessary.

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Everyone who is none of those people will be saying absolutely nothing.

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"You have not donned the Crown of Infernal Majesty."

A tiny feeling of relief (entirely about Cheliax's prospects for competent governance, and which Aspexia was not in any case acknowledging in the slightest) vanished upon the instant that she saw.

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"It's... very tempting.  But you will be pleased to hear, Aspexia, that I have finally learned not to do what I shouldn't."

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"Has Sevar broken you to her service, then?"

They are none of them stupid.

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"It's different when an ex-priestess of Irori does the remaking.  I am strong enough now to rule without this Crown."  Only a +2/+2/+6 three-quarters-circlet that she wears, small almost to the point of being invisible beneath her hair, and leaving her forehead clear.

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There are uneasy shifts at this, the royal guards meeting each other's eyes, not daring quite yet to take up combative stances against Abrogail Thrune returned.

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"If you intend to try taking Cheliax from the grasp of Hell, even if only so Sevar can reclaim it in Hell's name, there will be a fight about it."

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It's an obvious stratagem and the one that Aspexia would expect.  It's the one that Abrogail expected: that Sevar would send her back to liberate Cheliax from Hell's grasp, make it true that the country was now ruled in its own name and without Asmodeus's compact.  So that Sevar would receive all the souls there, after she claimed Cheliax back from Abrogail's hands, in Hell's name.  It's the stratagem that would make sense of why Carissa Sevar did not simply return wearing the Crown, and claim Cheliax directly.

Abrogail still doesn't know why that was not the plan, but she has her orders.

There is, however, no need to say that right away.

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"Sounds like an expensive fight."

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"I see you have undergone insufficient torment to cure your optimism."

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"You could have been slain upon this spot, Gorthoklek, having come to this place not fully prepared for war.  I too would have died, but I would be resurrected afterwards, and you, utterly destroyed.  The ilani philosophy of weaponry is still being revised to incorporate and counter magic, but it isn't designed with an aim of giving the targets a chance to fight back, or act at all, really."

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Gorthoklek is already defended now against a weapon of such potency as slew the Queen and Most High before.  And there are more pit fiends in Hell, should it come to a greater war against ilani-spawn; did Gorthoklek fall here, the next pit fiend after himself would not die so easily.  He does not say as much, of course, but instead this:

"Do you intend to try to take from Hell a country that Asmodeus has compacted for and claimed as His own?"

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"Not if there's a less expensive alternative."

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A number of people are currently strongly wishing that their general status and deportment permitted them to run away, very quickly, sometime around now.

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"Are you betraying your compact with Asmodeus?"

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"I died and the country of Cheliax was bestowed on another Thrune.  I need not regard current events as falling under the rubric of that compact."

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Could Aspexia win?  Definitely, she reckons, if Abrogail does not dare to don the Crown - unless Abrogail is more backed by Sevar and Keltham than Aspexia expects...

Aspexia finds that she is reluctant to open battle, no doubt because of how disastrous it would be for Cheliax either way.  Aspexia will not give in to threats from a lesser power, for only that reluctance; it is the Asmodean way to give in to threats only from greater power.  But she will make an attempt to avert a costly outcome, even if those watching might misinterpret that as a sign of weakness, in a contest where appearances matter.

"Abrogail.  Come to your senses.  Asmodeus still owns your soul, and I don't see Him particularly happy about this matter, even as a threat that you then don't carry out.  If Sevar has broken you too badly to see it -"

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Abrogail interrupts her with a brief, cold chuckle.  "Carissa Sevar showed me what awaits in Hell; for myself, for the others here.  Accurately."

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"You cannot be serious.  If any of that came as a surprise to you, I have catastrophically overestimated your wisdom and indeed your sanity."

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"Would you swear to me, Aspexia, in Asmodeus's name, that Hell takes anything like care not to wantonly ruin those souls whom we believed, trusted, to have made themselves valuable?  Instead of just having whatever cruel fun strikes their whim, and making a few devils out of what remains?"

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"I think that Hell effectively keeps its secrets on such matters, including from the likes of Carissa Sevar; and serves Asmodeus well in all that we cannot see."

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"Hell has carefully engineered the impressions we hold of it, without ever making us any promises.  It carefully manages what mortals see on their trips to Hell, if they've any prospect of returning, and never swears us any oaths.  Of course I trust Sevar's sworn probability estimates above that.  Any sensible person would." 

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"Sevar is not privy to Hell's hidden truths, nor can they be bought, nor scried.  For Sevar to swear that she's guessed a thing is still nothing more than guessing, even if she dresses it up in numbers."

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Rugatonn surely does not think that Abrogail can be unbrainwashed upon the spot; or if she's modeling Sevar accurately, knows that Sevar would not have sent Abrogail here in a persuadable state.  And Abrogail knows that Aspexia Rugatonn cannot be turned from her own course.  Least of all could any debate move Gorthoklek.

What Rugatonn must be contesting, then, are the opinions of the high officials and palace Security wizards uneasily watching all this.

This handful of Chelish powers cannot decide any large military-civil conflict, they have not the numbers or combined potency.  But they are informative; the next batch of Chelish powers might not arrive to any different opinion, if these few backed Abrogail here, or Rugatonn.

"Carissa Sevar has now reached INT 29, and mastered every scrap of Law that an INT 18 child could contain out of another world, and extended it.  If Sevar is not yet a god, she is close enough that the likes of us cannot predict in which direction she'll be mistaken relative to a god."

"But you're worried that Sevar's sworn guesses are wrong, for all that you say you don't know Hell's truth yourself?  Or you think yourself sure that an INT 29 ilani is making errors and in a particular direction?  Fine enough, then, Gorthoklek is right there.  He can give us his own oath about anything I say that happens to be false."

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"Hell decides for itself what to say, or not say, and to be moved by such a taunt is beneath a pit fiend's pride.  So I answer on Gorthoklek's behalf, for if he answered at all it might be to destroy you."

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"You need hardly be INT 29 to understand that Hell makes the decision of what to keep from us for reasons that include leaving the pathetic deluded mortals to their delusions, when those delusions lead them to serving Hell more eagerly than they'd serve if they knew the truth."  Abrogail's voice is clear now and cold.  "Matters of Evil and pride may proceed of Asmodeus, but matters of truth and reality are of Law.  It was stupid in the first place for the mortals of Cheliax to trust to their fates in Hell while only guessing what those fates were.  It was not a sane or Lawful arrangement.  If our dues in Hell are to be the foundations of our loyalty and the Chelish state, if we're to work all our lives to improve our fates, let those fates be known to us and not guessed."

"If Sevar is wrong about that, let Gorthoklek swear that Hell originally decided to not swear to us regarding our fate in Hell, for a primary and decisive reason other than that we mortals were thereby too optimistic, and more eager than we would have been.  That ought not injure his pride by much, if Hell has any legitimate reason for secrecy."

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"That rather sounds like Keltham's style of reasoning -"

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"I mark that attempted change of topic, and that Gorthoklek remains silent."

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"Is there even anything left of Abrogail Thrune, or am I only speaking with what Sevar put into this flesh after it was put into her by Keltham?"

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"Carissa Sevar was Chosen of Irori, you know, as I was Chosen of Asmodeus.  Irori doesn't really go for that sort of thing.  I am given this because it made me stronger."

"And also, I'm afraid you're worried about the wrong puppetmaster, Aspexia."  Abrogail looks down at the Crown of Infernal Majesty with entirely-honest wistful regret.  "The other reason I haven't put on this Crown is that, if we do come to an agreement, the Keepers of Asmodeus will need this overpriced headband more than I do, for their training."

 

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"You've gone over to Snack Service."  None of the absolute horror in Aspexia Rugatonn's voice is the tiniest bit feigned.  As promising as Asmodeus's Keepers seem, she's never forgotten for one second whose project that was.

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"I understand that Sevar's come to some arrangement with that alliance's representative, yes.  I'm not intelligent enough, Lawful enough, or trusted enough myself to know the details."

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"And is Sevar on Asmodeus's side, in this?"

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"Don't be absurd.  Sevar is on her own side, as is the way of Lawful Evil.  And I'm on my own side; it's just been shown to me that my best interests lie with her."

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"She tortured you until you -"

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"Of course.  She is Lawful Evil, not Lawful Neutral.  But she didn't break me in any way she couldn't repair afterwards, because she isn't your kind of Asmodean."

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"My kind of Asmodean?  I am the one who defines -"

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"It's only heresy until it becomes orthodoxy, Rugatonn, and remember that you too will come to Hell in time."

"Enough of this.  You don't know the true stakes on this gameboard - and neither do I.  So let's negotiate about the parts our lesser minds can understand."

"Gorthoklek might have been destroyed by an ilani weapon, and upon my being resurrected I could have taken Cheliax from Hell, though with great strife and loss.  And then I'd give Cheliax into Sevar's hands, to rule in Hell's name again; and souls here who cry her name would be hers to own, in Hell after Her ascension.  Except," Abrogail turns now to look deliberately at the watching royal guards, "those already soul-sold to Hell, who are excluded from Sevar's compact with Asmodeus.  Whom Sevar has separately compacted with Dispater to be able to buy from their current owners in Dis, with the approval of Crown and Church."

"So as an alternative to the road that needlessly costs Hell - Cheliax could submit itself to Carissa Sevar as its Empress, with myself as her viceroy, styling myself Directrix.  The worship of Sevar, as a destined future goddess of Hell under Asmodeus, will be legalized and encouraged by the state if perhaps not the Church.  Those worthy in Cheliax will still go to Sevar in due time.  Perhaps through emigration to Wanshou; perhaps after She's taken three-quarters of Avistan in Hell's name, backed by an unweakened Cheliax.  The Church will give its approval to Sevar's buying of those who've already sold themselves to Hell, if they please her or seem to hold promise."

"Neither Church nor Hell shall try to interfere with Sevar's rulership of Cheliax for three years, so long as it stays within the bounds of reformed Asmodeanism; nor will the Church protest certain changes away from the more wasteful and self-destructive of Cheliax's current policies.  On Sevar's own oath that she expects all those changes together to increase the number of souls that come to Hell eventually, compared to what would have come about if she did nothing at all."

"You do not trust me, of course, and I do not trust you.  But we both aspire to Lawfulness, and Gorthoklek actually is Lawful, and neither of us wishes to expend Cheliax's strength in a conflict between us.  Lawful beings need not waste their strength so, if they both prefer doing something else.  That we do not trust one another, that we do not have the same goals, these are obstacles that we are both incentivized to pay some little costs to overcome.  It isn't even hard, for us, being Lawful and knowing one another for Lawful.  We'll set up cutouts in Cheliax's command structure whereby I or Sevar cannot just betray the country to Good, or whatever it is you fear we'll do with it; and your and Gorthoklek's oaths, somewhat severer than those you've made before, will properly forbid the Church to use those cutouts to take away our country."

"It's an offer that works for everyone, really.  You should all be grateful that Sevar is the sort of Lawful Evil who'll give you the chance at it."

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"Mmhm.  And the coming war with Osirion?"

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"In a word, no.  Those preparations will prove useful, but we'll conquer where the Empress says we conquer, and Sevar will take care of talking it through with Keltham first.  I am not going to tell you any details of what would happen to us otherwise; you might not believe the plain truth about what They can do... before seeing evidence that will be demonstrated in some little time."

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There are many uneasy glances, then, among the sort of Chelish powers present who are not mainly thinking about running away.

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"Snack Service made mention of the Keepers of Asmodeus needing to be ready before we attacked Osirion."

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"It would have been truthful given what It knew, expected, at the time.  Carissa Sevar has altered Cayden Cailean's plan; let Him pray that she does not alter it any further."

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"I frankly fail to see how any of this benefits you.  Asmodeus would still own your soul, and He seems unlikely to be pleased with your concept of loyalty.  Dispater Himself could not sell you to Sevar even if He wanted to.  You will never come to her hands in death."

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"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."

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

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

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"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."

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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.

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...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...

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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 -

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 -

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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.

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(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.)

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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.

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It was the most visible to Her that Keltham would ever be again.  Shortly afterward he severed himself from Abadar, and donned magic items that made him more expensive to read.  Gods can read through those anyways, with an effort; it does not mean that a young god like Iomedae can spare the cost.

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.

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(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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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...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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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...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.

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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 -

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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.

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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.

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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 -

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...

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Nethys says "Pretty butterflies?"

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(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.)

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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.

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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.

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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...

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"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.

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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.

 

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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.

 

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

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

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And then, it begins.

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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...

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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.

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Ah, Golarion?

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Yes, dath ilan?

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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...

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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.

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(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.)

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

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

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So what's wrong with the standard story?

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...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.

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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.

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Isekai protagonists from science-worlds likewise know what happens when planets fail to be born.  You end up with asteroids.  They aren't especially poisonous.

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Then there's the notion that Acavna waited around in place near the missile collision site, or missile exit site, to be hit by fragments large enough or fast enough to kill a goddess, which She didn't see coming and dodge.  Again as science protagonists know, when you are dealing with moving moons around, and distances on the scale of planets, it is really hard for anything to hit anything by accident.

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Possibly there was an original missile approaching at near-lightspeed; and when it collided with the moon, that sprayed up so many massive fragments that 0.01% of them hitting Golarion would still have ended life on the surface...

But that doesn't square with Amaznen needing to sacrifice Himself to neutralize magic on those fragments.  If secondary ejecta had been the primary threat to Golarion, they'd have been an unmagical threat.

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You'd furthermore think that the alghollthus, if they were able to steer such a hypothetical hyperkinetic missile at all, would have known a missile at that energy would utterly destroy Golarion's crust including themselves if not intercepted.

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Also if the alghollthu magic upon the fragments was potent enough to lay Golarion waste in its own right, apart from the fragments' kinetic energy, and required Amaznen's self-sacrifice to neutralize - then why should the alghollthus not lay that lethal magic directly about Azlant?  Why put it on a distant incoming asteroid first?

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And furthermore - though this is not a physicalist area of expertise, it comes up if you just visualize out events and think about them - supposedly Acavna's divinity stuck to those fragments that killed Her, one of which was the Starstone, which then reached Golarion and became individually able to create gods on the order of Aroden.

Aroden was the strongest of mortal-ascended gods.  Hitting Acavna should not create thousands of fragments all of which could then create Arodens.

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Arguendo:  Possibly all of Acavna's divinity stuck to the Starstone and not to any other fragments that killed Her?  Maybe it was that exact fragment that struck the final blow?

Counterarguendo:  Maybe, but then that's another weight of burdensome improbability required to make the whole story work.  One also notes, as an isekai protagonist reading through other stories of gods' deaths, that it is not usually said that the weapon that kills them retains their divinity.

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Also also, if either of Amaznen or Acavna did willingly sacrifice themselves to meliorate the blow - why did They do that?  To briefly extend the lives of those mortals living upon one planet, until they came to Pharasma slightly later?  It's a strange trade for an ancient god to make, and Amaznen and Acavna are said to have been Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral respectively; neither Good.

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...Anything else?

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Oh, all kinds of things, if dath ilan were to list out everything unusual whether or not the improbability is obviously relevant.  For example, it's said that Iomedae's helmet melted during Her ascension but remained intact enough to become a major artifact, the Thorncrown of Iomedae.  There's no artifacts like that said to be tied to Nethys's or Irori's ascension.  This doesn't obviously tie into any other anomalies, and doesn't seem intuitively shocking given the basic premise that the Starstone ascends things that get physically close to it, and dath ilan is not actually going anywhere with this observation; but if you're trying to actually think about a puzzle you will write everything like this down in one place.  If dath ilan forced itself to make up a guess about this random possibly anomalous fact - something something Starstone treats divinity in a way that makes spatial proximity matter to an unusual degree?

Any real scientific puzzle will contain a large number of extra pieces - and in advance of the solution, you don't know which pieces are extra.

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So what does dath ilan think actually happened?

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Lacking direct observation, you would probably have too many hypotheses and too little evidence to narrow them down.

You might speculate that the currently-known Starstone was the whole original 'poisonous remnant' rather than just a fragment.  If there were fragments, they might have been from pieces of moon, blown outward along a similar trajectory after the original Starstone blasted straight through the moon at high velocity.

You could theorize that the Starstone was aimed from the beginning to pierce through Golarion's moon toward Golarion - rather than Acavna moving the moon into place, and in futile error - and that the Starstone killed Acavna through Her connection to that moon.  Possibly Amaznen tried to save His sister-deity and the Starstone sucked the power out of Him and killed Him too.

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This hardly seems certain.

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Yes yes, it's admitted speculation; but it's often wise to start by trying to develop any consistent speculative model at all, if you're trained and confident in your own ability to throw out any pieces or wholes in which you later spot a problem.

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Mmhm.  Well, keep speculating, then.

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Maybe the alghollthus tried to catalyze the Starstone's 'poison' with their magic rather than having the power to create a weapon like that from scratch.

Or maybe, the alghollthus had nothing to do with the entire matter and were only blamed afterwards.

...Or maybe it wasn't the whole alghollthu civilization, but a particular band of alghollthu mages influenced by Rovagug, like how Rovagug is said to have infected a Sarenrite city built far above the Dead Vault.

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Why blame Rovagug?

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Abadar was taken by surprise at how the Age of Darkness ended Zon-Kuthon's exile, so some prophecy-breaking force was involved at some point.  And if Amaznen and Acavna did willingly sacrifice themselves, maybe it wasn't to save mortal lives; maybe it had more to do with Golarion being Rovagug's cage.

That in turn suggests that an unmeliorated Starstone strike would have benefited Rovagug, or that the gods feared it would.  Maybe the missile was 'accidentally' aimed at the Dead Vault?

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...But the main point is just that the thing that is written in most books, can't possibly be the true story; and that's obvious as soon as you try to visualize the process step-by-step.

And you might also suspect, if what was written in books seemed obviously wrong, that there was some reason the real answer was hidden - though the general state of disrepair in Golarion epistemology, from the standpoint of the isekaied physicalist, is such that even this guess is very tentative!  The myth-composers could just be that invalid.  But still, you'll go looking for truths that are not only overlooked but concealed within the Starstone, faced with a story like that.

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It begins in the City of Lost Omens, with a casting of the spell Mage's Decree, by which a wizard can make themselves heard for miles around, all through a city...

 

 

 

 

 

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"This is Ione Sala, oracle of Nethys, apprentice to Nefreti Clepati.  Stand by for extremely urgent instructions in three hours; prepare to convey or translate those immediately."

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A lot of predictable ruckus follows!  Those who didn't understand the original words (in the language there named Taldan, called also Common in Absalom) shout for translations.  People who've lived their life well enough to stay ignorant of wild rumors are even more confused, and inquire after context.

Many wise and proactive people will panic early, to avoid any later rush; and start heading away from the Starstone, since earlier rumor held that's where shit would go down.

Certain others, however -

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“- that’s illegal, eighty thousand pounds in fines, she can bargain it down if she talks to the Primarch,” says Cassdra Eliomole instantly. The nice thing about violations of this specific city statute is that you can’t really contest that they happened. (Guilty parties can of course teleport out, but it’s the rare high-level wizard who will accept being permanently blacklisted from Absalom’s shops and libraries and mage academies.)


The nice thing about this specific violation is that the wizard even named themselves, unless they are naming their ex-girlfriend to get her in trouble, which is the sort of thing wizards frequently come up with, thinking themselves cleverer than they are.

  “- do you suppose it’s true, though,” says Mesich Aspexxon, her secretary, who has cooperatively gotten out the paperwork to be delivered to Sala issuing the fine and explaining how she can contest it, and is now filling it out with today’s date, the time, the investigating authority, the statute violated, and the source of the information by which Sala was identified as a suspect (“testimony to all Absalom”).

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I mean, there’s the prophecy, right, and Ione Sala’s that Chelish Nethysian. She might know if the prophecy’s true, and the city to be devoured.”

“You can’t trust a Chelish person, and you can’t trust a Nethysian,” says Cassdra, with absolute surety. “So any sound a Chelish Nethyisan makes is just so much wind whistling through the streets, and we’re going to fine her for it.”

  “Well at minimum,” says Mesich, “I think we’ve got to think of who’s delivering the notice, you know, if she’s in a fighting mood, considering that you can’t trust Chelish Nethysians.”

…that is a complication. Cassdra bites the end of her pen.

 

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The Office of The Public Interest, which handles the frequent and often impressive misconduct gotten up to by the high-level adventurers of Absalom – anything not appropriately handled by the city watch and the option of dumping some idiot in the drunk tank or the gaol – is the province of the First Spell Lord of Absalom, who is responsible for regulating the Arcanamirium and ultimately all spells cast within the city.  However, the position of First Spell Lord is currently held by Lord Gyr, of House Gixx, the Primarch of Absalom, who's not in fact a caster, but assigned himself that position anyways.  He's not in Absalom right this second.

The next most obvious person to storm in, given the implied threat to Absalom, is the Second Spell Lord charged with Absalom's magical defense:  Lady Darchana, of House Madinani, who also happens to be archdean of the Arcanamirium (though at seventh-circle she's not actually the most powerful arcanist there).  But Lady Darchana has long been on fragile terms with Primarch Gyr, both as his obvious rival for the true mastery of Absalom, and also about the snub of her not being named First Spell Lord.

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    Mesich finishes the paperwork. “- Darchana?” he asks quietly.

“No, we can’t,” says Cassdra. “Gyr will rightly consider that entirely inappropriate - and think, she might declare that this represents a real threat to the city, which she of course will vanquish in his absence -”


      “Then you’ve got to contact him!”

“I am doing that!” Cassdra is applying his seal to her incident report at this very moment. Gyr resents, and is usually shielded against, Sendings, but he has some astoundingly fast carrier pigeons. He’ll hear of the problem in plenty of time.

—----

 

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“I should really do something,” says the Lady Darchana, contemplatively, to her familiar, a specialty pug named Tiffany. “Why, the girl implies a threat to the whole city exists, and I can’t imagine the Primarch competent to handle it alone!”

  “And yet,” Tiffany says, “one imagines he will hesitate to ask the Arcanamirium for the help he so obviously requires of it.”

“Well, he’s going to have to bestir himself to request our aid sooner, rather than later.” She fixes her hat in her reflection in her bedroom window. Through it there’s a courtyard visible. The wizards of the Arcanamirium are, well, Teleporting. Out. It’s not that they won’t come to Absalom’s defense if necessary, but one can come to Absalom’s defense just as well from several hundred miles away, and, well, there is the prophecy, and even if one puts no store in the prophecy there are panicked people who do and will suddenly pay very well for a ride out. “I heard he’s out of town.”

  “He has that house in the country,” Tiffany agrees cheerfully.

“You know, I think it speaks very poorly of him, that he didn’t delegate the defense of the city to me in his absence, in light of recent events.”

A servant timidly sticks her head around a corner. “Yes?” says the Lady, graciously.

    “My lady, are we - leaving?”

Us? Why, no. The Primarch may leave the city to incompetents while he vacations in the country, but the Arcanamirium remembers its duties, and doesn’t fear them. Why, I’m going to go apprehend that troublemaking Sala myself, as soon as the Primarch asks it of me.

 

 

 

There’s a demiplane we evacuate to in the case of threats to the city, with an access point under the wine cellars. You can get your family, if you’d like, so long as it’s clear you’re being very silly and that I’m not perturbed in the slightest. ”

    “Yes, my lady.”

“And so long as you are sure to repeat everything you overheard about the Primarch.”

    “ - yes, my lady.”

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Cassdra presses her paperwork on the process-server for Public Interest, once the carrier pigeon has taken wing. “Do go and serve her notice at once, if she’s still in the city. I’ve raised the fine to three hundred thousand pounds, on the grounds that she caused mass panic and probably dozens of deaths of trampling down by the docks.”

  “You can take the Asmodeanism out of them, but not the Evil,” Mesich says gravely.

He shouldn’t’ve said it in front of the notice-server, who is blinking very rapidly now. “She’s not a murderer,” Cassdra says impatiently. “She’s not even a renowned adventurer. She’s a self-important vandal with one sixth-circle scroll. A dime a dozen, really. By the time the Primarch sees her she’ll be very apologetic, I don’t doubt, and in any event all you’ve got to do is serve the notice.”

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Ione Sala can be located readily enough, if Office of Public Interest has magic that can do that, or if they correctly guess Iona Sala would be near the Ascendant Court and ask around if anyone's seen her.

The young woman in question can be found grimly vanishing away whole bookshelves of books from a library in Iomedae's Temple in the Ascendant Court near the Starstone Cathedral.  Ione Sala reads Neutral Good, and she's sworn an oath to Nethys to give back all the books that she's now taking into her protection.

Acolytes are rushing about her, in the way of people who are trying to get everything valuable out of a temple.  Priests and paladins are nowhere to be seen.

Ione Sala will accept the fine notice without blinking, fish a correspondingly large diamond out of her pocket, hand it over, and tell this minor functionary that she's extremely busy and he needs to get out of everyone's way NOW.

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He departs as rapidly as possible, thinking uncomplimentary but not false things about wizards, Nethysians, and Chelish people, desperately trying not to lose the diamond or be observably in possession of the diamond.

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"I think we ought to give due consideration to the theory this has something to do with the prophecy," Afsel Kellaris says, in the emergency meeting convened to discuss Ione Sala's actions.

"I was worried someone was going to waste our time with that," Jepata Eres, his immediate superior, says. "Of course it's related. Sala made it up for attention a while ago, and is escalating now. But the first wasn't true prophecy, which every schoolchild knows is broken, and the new one isn't either."

"It could still be, you know. Not prophecy. Prediction."

"But why, I ask, didn't you say 'prediction'? Because it doesn't sound as dramatic as prophecy. Ione Sala predicted and then caused panic and mass death in our city. That's the problem we're facing, and if it were up to me she'd hang for it four or five times."

"The thing I was trying to say was, maybe she knows of, I don't know, some unsealed ancient horror -"

"If she knew anything real and were actually interested in helping us prevent it she'd tell us what she knew. She's an adversary; she doesn't care about this city; nothing she says is trustworthy; nothing she claims merits consideration." Jepata's tone is one of finality. "The thing killing people out there isn't prophecy, it's panic. We need to get the city guard into the streets, impose a curfew, keep people home, or we'll have another trampling incident worse than the Steertrack Races -"

"With all due respect," a man objects from across the room, "you're not going to like desertion rates if you order the guard to their posts right now."

"What's your suggestion, I overlook the desertion and hope they sheepishly return to their posts tomorrow, and let the people trample each other into the bloody mud?"

"No, but you've got to reassure them first! People need to know that we looked into Sala's claims and there's nothing to worry about! We need to get our own counter-message out there, telling people that we've stepped up monitoring of threats to the city and there are no signs of any problems -"

"Oh, are there not?" someone else interjects, relieved -

" - well, I haven't heard of any, and I'm sure it'd have been shouted to the rooftops if there were -"

"You can't ask the Guard to go back to their posts while they're terrified for the lives of their loved ones. You've got to assure them that there's nothing to worry about."

"Yes," Jepata snaps, "someone already said that. I'm working on it. A message to all city watch - the rumors have been examined, they are false, there are no risks to the city, no one in city leadership is departing -"

"Departing is dangerous!" offers Afsel, reorienting to the new priorities. "The ships might be sunk, Sala might be feeding people into the mouths of pirates -"

"Excellent, yes," Jepata agrees. "Departing puts your family in grave danger, what's safe is keeping them home, Sala's claims have been decisively refuted - yes?"

"Yes," everyone agrees.

"The best way for the populace to be safe from the panic is to remain in their homes.  We'll send more of the city guard to the Ascendant Court -"

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"I'd say it's the Docks district that needs 'em," offers somebody who is not at all suspicious and is totally supposed to be inside this room.  "Some people are fleeing the Ascendant Court, but that's their own foolishness and it'd serve them right to return and find their homes robbed.  It's the docks where there's fighting, fighting that might spread -"

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It takes them half an hour to draft and authorize an announcement using Mage's Decree, to counter Sala's absurd misbehavior and assure the people of the city that all is well. Most of that time is spent quibbling over wording. They don't get many words, and a number of people want a say in what they are. By then, the city guard has been largely deployed to the docks to manage the masses of people desperately trying to board boats; the rumors that are flying assert that everything from Zon-Kuthon to returning Aroden will be showing up, or maybe that the island will be swallowed into Hell.

But that's not to say that it's too late for the announcement. There are many homes whose residents are bitterly fighting over whether to flee or to stay, many people trying to persuade an entrenched relative or agonizing over whether to spend their entire fortune on a Teleport, many people nervously peeking out into the streets and taking the temperature of things. Many people who want to hear from their city government and know what they should do.

The statement eventually agreed upon is, "Remain in your homes. Sala's claims have been examined and disproven. No danger exists. All deaths have come from panic. Protect your families: stay home."

The minute it is approved, it is passed on to a wizard who was able to prepare the Mage's Decree spell in the last half-hour.

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As the wizard is in the middle of casting, his spell is disrupted by a pineapple pie being smushed into his face.

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The Arcanimirium has a higher percentage of fifth circle and above wizards of any wizarding school on the face of Golarion, but that's still only around ten percent; with all of them out selling Teleports or fleeing the country it barely feels less crowded.

No one has dared asked the Lady Darchana what she plans, but people are hovering lest she happen to say it offhandedly.

She's not an idiot. Nethys is playing at something, and Nethys likes big explosions, so whatever Nethys is playing at is plausibly catastrophic. Warning everyone and then doing a big explosion would be in character. The assurances she's heard from the city government are meaningless.

Of course, reacting strongly to warnings of catastrophe is a great way to be easy to manipulate, and to be on the wrong foot for catastrophes coming in from an unexpected direction.

     "My lady?"

"You fear that our deaths are coming and want me to order an evacuation but are perfectly aware it is as likely as not to serve our enemies," she responds without even looking who spoke. "You can stop asking. I don't know what I'll do, but none of you have useful input."

      "Pineda's been spotted. Interfering with the city in their efforts to reduce panic and get everyone to stay home."

"The whole nation of Cheliax should have long since been burned off the face of this benighted world," Lady Darchana says with feeling.

       "Does that mean we're not evacuating? Since they want us to?"

"Would you shut up?"

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She is surprised, and dismayed, and even disappointed, when Her priests in Her temple in Absalom ask Her for guidance about the Nethysian demanding that the temple be evacuated. She makes the obvious inferences: Some persons adjacent to Keltham, and maybe Keltham himself, are going to go for the Starstone.

This is good news, because the Starstone isn’t Rovagug. It’s bad news, in that the Starstone also is not ‘Keltham goes to Lastwall, and meets people whose convictions are like his but have settled around them into a shape humans can endure’, and in that Keltham is reasonably likely to die attempting this.  She alone would not be capable of saving him, even if She would, nor does it seem likely that Cayden would be sufficient - but perhaps She’s underestimating Him, or underestimating Keltham. She has seen Keltham in vision; whatever Keltham is doing here, he expects it to succeed despite all obstacles that he knows about. It may still be hugely ill-advised, or worse, intelligently contrary to Her purposes. But Her fragment's guess is that Keltham's purpose is unlikely to be worth expending Her very scarce resources to prevent.

She tells Her people to evacuate civilians, since they’ve gone and conveniently made this a single bit of information to transmit to them and they can probably save enough lives to make it worth it.

And She pays the situation more attention, and watches over it for a time; but in the end She decides not to draw together enough of Herself to participate in a fight when someone touches the Starstone -

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And that's the last important decision that Iomedae needed to prove She would make.

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Iomedae!  Emergency situation that the fully-informed fragment of You has been apprised about!  This information is given to You under the condition that -

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...And so when the time for Ione's second set of instructions comes, Absalom's citizenry is braced for possible panic and significantly pre-fled; while having not really panicked yet, in the way of people who are hoping for news which isn't too bad.

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The first time Ione Sala tries to cast again from a sixth-circle wizard scroll, she cannot do it, for her fingers tremble and the spellform is not unfolding well and it takes all her dexterity to avoid wasting the scroll.

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This possibility has also been foreseen, by common sense more than by divine intervention.  There are other scrolls to hand, money being of no object at all anymore, and Ione Sala casts a Heroism upon herself before she continues.  It's not ordinarily what you think of as an aid to casting from scroll, but it helps if you are frightened.

And then Ione Sala speaks again.

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"Magewar in ten minutes.  Enormous lethal radius around Starstone.  Start running NOW.  Avoid mage-works.  Dismiss outsiders.  Don't go ethereal.  Don't look back."

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And then there's panic in the streets.

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...At least among the sort of person who did not correctly foresee that they'd probably hear something roughly this alarming, update early on the evidence they'd predictably get later, and start moving away from the Starstone before the actual announcement was made.

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In fact, something like four-fifths of the people managed to make that update, got their valuables and their family, shared the news with friends who didn't speak Taldan, locked up their things, and evacuated with the genuinely cautious public order of people who don't want to look stupid if in fact nothing happens.

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And now there's panic in the streets, but those streets can mostly hold the least Wise seventh of the local subpopulation running around screaming.

Though even then you've got the one in twenty persons who are staying in place, or maybe even heading off to try looting a home; because they're even less Wise than that, or prouder, or just plain stupid -

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"Hiiii everyyyyyone!  It's Pilar Pineda!  Sorry we had to hold the fight here, but everyone needs to run away now!  Abscond!  FLEE!"  The voice cries that command, flee, in one language after another, with a blood-freezing cheery note that is impossible to ignore.

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"I, Carissa Sevar, wish to avoid deaths so numerous that the River of Souls overflows and loses some forever.  You can help by not being among them."

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"I'm Keltham.  What you're about to see is a warning explosion one thousandth as powerful as the lesser forces to be unleashed here."

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One ton of fuel-air explosive ignites in the air over the Starstone Cathedral, creating an enormous CRACK and a vast billow of fire.  There isn't actually any standard spell, even Meteor Shower, that creates an explosion quite that large; it looks like ninth-circle wizards getting ready to fight.

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And there are, still, people so incredibly smart and skeptical that they'll stay around and try to loot a house or two.  But not enough of them to overflow the River of Souls and get eaten by astradaemons if they all die simultaneously, which is the part that matters.

Others do pray to their gods about the affair, and divine attention now gathers toward Absalom.  But there is no ancient god who decides to collect more of Themselves and focus a truly vast attention on the Starstone Cathedral and surrounding planar spaces, while nothing has yet begun for real; and that is the only choice those gods make that ends up mattering.

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And then it begins.

 

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He is about to cast a spell, from scroll, that is considerably beyond what he ought to be able to cast, even at INT 29; and it is very important that this spell go off correctly.

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He draws on his familiar gloves of Use Magic Device, now improved to +7 and specialized for scrolls.

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He casts from scroll upon himself, Bestow Insight:  Use Magic Device.

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And he casts Prayer upon himself, from a scroll bought of a Demon Lord's worshippers.

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And then so fortified, he casts Greater Heroism -

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So fortified, casts Moment of Greatness -

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Casts Moment of Prescience -

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And at the very last, casts Wish.

 

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In a different possibility that was foreseen, that Nethys had warned of, if things had gone according to plan, a Keltham acting with less time to prepare would have taken the shorter surer route: simply detonated a vast explosion above the Starstone Cathedral.

Keltham would (in that vision-of-possibility) have directly Wished antimatter into existence on that spot, in sufficient quantity that he could be reasonably sure that Aroden's Starstone-protecting fortress would be blasted down on the first try.

It would have been futile, then, to warn anybody but Teleporters to flee Absalom imminently.  The coastlines of nearby countries would have received that warning.



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What eventuates instead is a shiver in the air of Absalom, an anti-chill, a sudden heat that isn't tangible.

Walls of force around Absalom, whether around a high-lord's palace or deep in a mage's tower, suddenly flare and shatter with shrieks of cracking magic; continual flames flicker, and some go out; a dozen different kinds of specialized magic and magical items fail, and some of those explode; a third of the mage-towers of Absalom are now in some distress; many lesser magical watchers and guardians scream and clutch at their eyes, though there is nothing visible for mortals to see; and some greater magical guardians within the Ascendant Court are charred to glowing ash where they stood.

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But the real sight to see (if you are foolish enough to be looking back in that direction) is the Starstone Cathedral upon its formerly unreachable island, in the middle of a pit that nobody can cross except under their own power.

All at once the walls and roofs of the Cathedral, the pinnacles and minarets, flash into searing light, impossibly bright, as if the Starstone Cathedral stood beneath some alien sun that had exploded, though there is no explosion visible -

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You obviously cannot just walk up to the Starstone by going through the Ethereal plane where it borders upon Golarion's portion of the Prime Material.  Aroden has thought of that.  An apprentice wizard would think of that.

It follows, then, that the Starstone's containing installation must have defenses that extend into the Ethereal; guessably, most of that installation just extends into the Ethereal directly.

So detonating a ten-kiloton antimatter explosion on the Ethereal plane, instead of the Prime Material, will perhaps destroy what guards the Starstone, and leave the material city standing; so you could hope.

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The pinnacles and minarets are charred and charring, as the first flash fades, but they stand -

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He has, a very few moments earlier, cast his first and only Wish from scroll, to conjure a significant quantity of antimatter inside of a high-vacuum space.  He did not use all that antimatter at once.  Rather, that antimatter was divided up telekinetically and allocated to magical containers.

There will be significant divine attention pointing to Absalom now, and while gods are large rather than fast they are not reliably slow.  So while he is not skipping directly to the most powerful explosion, he is not waiting six seconds between actions either.  The first explosion was more of a test than anything else.

The next Ethereal detonation is equivalent in energy to fifty thousand tons of high explosive.

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A number of people who ignored Ione's emphatic instructions, and 'looked back' after the first flash, now have eyes that are scarred by the light that reflected from nowhere; and some of those will not be able to afford third-circle cleric healing.

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The Starstone Cathedral is in flames, it is wounded, but it has not fallen -

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Two hundred kilotons.

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A wizard sobs and cradles in his arms the familiar who was burned, over and over, by some invisible force, feeling the last life depart upon some final unstoppable blow.

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The Starstone Cathedral now lies blasted seemingly open -

But one cannot enter into its heart yet, nor scry it.  There's still twisted space and planar obstacles there.  Some magic like that does not pose any bar at all to material forces passing through the Ethereal, and therefore cannot be destroyed merely by nonmagical explosions in the Ethereal.

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Of which, if you're familiar with a long-built-up sequence of thought about ilani weapons, there is an obvious sort of thing to try: set off an Ethereal twenty-kiloton explosion inside a jacket of raw spellsilver.  Magical forces are complicated, but some of them considered in isolation are simple.  Accelerating spellsilver sufficiently, as in, to a significant fraction of lightspeed in less than a microsecond, will produce an intense pulse of a potent magical force that interacts with other magical forces.

That is:  The adapted principle of an EMP bomb.

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All spells interrupted in mid-casting fail, some explosively.

Every magic item and permanent effect in Absalom makes a Fortitude save against destruction, with DC proportional to inverse-square distance from the hypocenter.

The Arcanamirium's evacuation demiplane is cast loose of its portal; retrieving those teachers and students and servants and families will require over five hundred Plane Shifts or multiple Gates.

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A reclusive wizard who lived in his tower with his secluded family, shielded from hearing any Mage's Decrees until the first ethereal blast disrupted his mage-works, was in the midst of evacuating his remaining family: a spouse, a four-year-old daughter, a two-year-old son.  His Teleport is disrupted just as it goes off, and they end up forty miles off target, downward, in the nearest liquid pocket inside that volume of Golarion's mantle.  They die very quickly, and not all to the same afterlives.

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...It could seriously have been a lot worse.


In fact, it will shortly be worse.

The way to the Starstone now lies open.

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One person Teleports nearby, and flies down, and makes to touch that Starstone, whose surface is now glowing hot and lightly scarred but seems still wholly intact.

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No final trap stops that person.  Perhaps all such traps are also ruined; or perhaps Aroden could not foresee whether anyone who'd gone to these lengths would be His foe or His friend.

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Then that person will touch the Starstone, a strange exultant smile upon her face, as a vast flood of transfiguring, transcending energy flows into her unresisting soul, expanding it, beginning to transform her mind to a stranger and vaster and fragmented perspective -

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And then she's gone.

From a tear in space, moving almost too fast to see, impossibly fast for something so huge, comes forth a titanic nightmare of blood-red armor, whose thin stalking legs are like tree-trunks of polished chitin.  Its eyes are volcanic fire.  Its movements are as silent as the finest assassin, and complete within a fraction of a second.

And the entity who dared to stretch out her hand toward divinity is slain, having become godlike enough that her death is final in body and soul.

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(So end all who survive Aroden's barriers meant to stop most aspirants from destroying themselves wholly: save that one paladin protected by Aroden Himself after extensive godnegotiation; or that lucky swashbuckler who only staggered into the Cathedral on a dare, too drunk to understand godhood even as it came to him; or that thief who came into the Cathedral intending to steal a piece of the Starstone, who touched it with a chisel held in gloves, and tried to the last to free himself as it activated.  That was one path to getting past Achaekek, if anyone was wondering: to never want nor intend the divinity you gained.)

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He does not spare a moment to mourn the friend he has just lost, the cheerful cultist of Rovagug.  Sarcini's true-death was predictable, so all those feelings were felt by him at the moment of making his last decision leading here.

There is not any hate in him, when he triggers a one-kiloton antimatter explosion in the Material Plane.

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The buildings of the Ascendant Court die in blast and fire; many once had magical defenses, but those are now gone.  A number of mortals are also dead, and many more are severely injured and will die very soon.  Some of them had adventured enough and gained enough vitality that they will survive for a time with their eyes burned out and skin melted off, still with breath to scream for healing that isn't coming.

But the River of Souls isn't overflowing, and that's the part that really matters.

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The Assassin God is there fully gathered and all in Its body, what you'd ordinarily consider a good opportunity to slay a god.

But Achaekek is special, the enforcer set against overreaching mortals.  Achaekek cannot be slain by mortal weapons period, nor the greatest of mortal spells, nor any other force out of mortality within Creation.  That is not a matter of ordinary resistances but of Achaekek's divine purpose and domain.  A one-kiloton explosion is not, in fact, the most powerful blow that 9th-circle wizards have tried against It; you will so learn if you delve sufficiently deep into legends.  You must be at least a demigod to hurt Achaekek for real.

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But it is possible for Achaekek to be moved, by a sufficiently ludicrously powerful but mundane impact; sent hurtling by an explosion along a roughly predictable vector -

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And the Starstone claims another divine victim.

There is born then, around the Starstone, a greater and far more terrible glow; Achaekek's splattered energies are drawn toward it, pulled inward as if by the gravity of a Sun.

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And now the gods are focusing a great deal of their attention, upon this place; for one of the most ancient of divinities is dead.

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There is nothing to distract those gods, for Keltham has not unleashed Rovagug.

Keltham has not unleashed Rovagug as his distraction, and to exhaust Asmodeus in battle against Rovagug rather than let Him release It and fight in battle on Its side.

But Keltham did mean to release Rovagug, as was in his own interests, if nobody made him a better offer.  And since Keltham did intend that sincerely, and not in any hope of hearing a better offer, it became possible to make him a better offer.

 

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Appearing in the heart of a fireball that hasn't faded, but whose first great blast and force is spent, Pilar Pineda throws her whole form upon the searingly glowing Starstone; touching it not with a tentative hand but with her whole skin, being naked but for a crown out of Hell.

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And the greater gods and gods of Golarion feel that touch, as they felt the last hand to lay upon the Starstone; as they felt the last beginning of a god's birth.  But this time, they know, there will be no Achaekek to stop this -

So all those gods do turn to stare at her, at this one being born; and they see that she is being born into Lawful Evil.

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Asmodeus would usually slay any Lawful Evil would-be ascendant.  He wants no additional competition from true-gods, or from Powers of Hell that He has not personally promoted to Their places.

This case is unusual.  Asmodeus has not been able to make out very much of certain events ongoing in Golarion; much of those squirrel-affairs have been illegible to the lesser fragments of Him that watched over the tussling.  But without having gathered more of Himself and reflected, without time to think beyond moments of first reaction, He can see, or remember, these facts:  That this soul had sincerely venerated Him in the past and as the proper tyrant over itself, though its feelings are less legible to Him now; that it was chosen to be oracle of Cayden Cailean; that it's consumed much of Cayden Cailean's divinity already; that it was a highly favored slave of Asmodeus's own most-favored slave; that it is yet Evil-predominant, but contains more superposed Good than it did before it started consuming Cayden Cailean; that it is very Lawful for a squirrel, though with prominent Chaotic streaks likewise grown...

...and He can sort of see what might be a legible intent to serve Him and be tyrannized by Him, if this squirrel becomes a god - and not in a way where that's meant to be conditional on Him helping it ascend.  But His sight of that intent is vague as yet, and there could be all sorts of compact-gotchas within the vagueness.

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It is His estimation that something significant is afoot, and that this isn't all of it. This novel and worrisome destruction in Golarion will swiftly inspire many negotiations and interventions; perhaps this ascension was the ultimate aim of that destruction, or perhaps there is more coming, in which case He doesn't want to expend His resources now on this fight when a fight of far greater significance may lie ahead.

He will not bestir Himself, then, unless someone intends to pay Him; the weak godling can live or die as suits the interests of others.

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And Urgathoa sees, but does not care, for in this matter there is not yet obviously food-resource to be glutted nor the prospect of resource being taken away; and so, like Asmodeus, She withholds for now Her hand;

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And Lamashtu, who was once demon lord and is now a far more terrible goddess, decides that Hell and Lawful Evil need no more power, that may be turned against the Abyss;

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And Gorum holds nothing personal against this aspirant, He enjoyed her assault on Absalom and her ambush-slaying of Achaekek was beautiful; but the world has more than enough Law already, thank you;

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And Sarenrae, who smites also Evil, turns Her attention here, to suffer not this empowerment to pass;

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And Desna, the most ancient power of Chaotic Good, does likewise turn an uncommonly vast and cold gaze upon this place where a new Power of Lawful Evil seeks to be born -

- and recoils, in shock, in horror, for what stands between Her and that one's destruction.

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You shall not pass while I live, Cayden Cailean sends to all those gods, and places all that remains of Himself between Them and Pilar Pineda.

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And Iomedae...

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Is not there.

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Earlier:

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Iomedae!  Emergency situation that the fully-informed fragment of You has been apprised about!  This information is given to You under the condition that that it will be used to benefit Your interests without harming Keltham's interests!  We bargained with Keltham to give him a less destructive distraction instead of him releasing Rovagug, and You're it!  If You act at the right time You'll be able to get away with something You couldn't otherwise do!  Gather all of Yourself, at once, and then -

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Now:

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When last treaty was made between gods, Iomedae swore not to open Zon-Kuthon's vault, nor to connive toward freeing Zon-Kuthon.

The agreement doesn't, technically, say that Iomedae can't do this, which is not something that even gods would have foreseen Her doing.  This scenario required several sequential then-unseen implausibilities, and if you negotiate about every combination-possibility like that, you really will end up negotiating too much.  Gods are large, but not large enough to defeat combinatorial explosions.

The gods would have expected, if Iomedae gathered Herself and went inside the vault, that Zon-Kuthon would promptly eat Her; for She is smaller and younger and would be to Him as a snack.

But what actually happens -

 

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Long ago, at least as mortals count time, a young human girl knew (it was not really a matter of deciding) that the right thing to do was spend all her life trying to fix everything everywhere.  And some time after that, she knew the right thing to do was become a god and go on trying to fix everything everywhere; though she didn't think that, even as a god, she would live to see it fixed...

A furious blaze of light, shining brighter than it did in Heaven, enters into Zon-Kuthon's vault where a great Evil lies wounded and helpless.

Some other possible god of paladins might've found this part difficult, contrary to Their domain; but Iomedae never was the god of fighting Evil.

 

 

She falls on Him like a mouse nibbling into a comatose elephant.

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OKAY WHAT NO HE SUDDENLY HAS LARGER PROBLEMS, NAMELY IOMEDAE IS CONSUMING THE WHOLE POWER OF AN ANCIENT GOD—

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She doesn't see how Iomedae can get away with this, but has little choice but to back Her once it's begun—

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Even if Iomedae somehow survives this, it will trigger new divine treaties about Golarion's broken prophecy and divine opportunism, which won't be to Chaos's advantage.  But if this is Cayden Cailean's last wish, though She doesn't understand it, then to defend Iomedae She will also go—

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Lawful Evil, Lawful Good, what care I?  You may go about your conflict there, while I take care of this Lawful Evil nascent here.

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Still no.

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You think you can stop Me, jumped-up mortal?

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I know that I can stop You for long enough.

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The lights of godwar flicker on in the sky over Absalom, focused on Absalom, turning day into a greater and more terrible day; even as fire spreads outward from the ruins of the Ascendant Court.

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And Pilar Pineda lays upon the Starstone and—

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She is

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She is in many places—

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She dreamed of this, Snack Service showed her

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Showed her—her own thoughts, somehow, as if all of this had happened to her before, in some forgotten life that Snack Service somehow remembered—

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She had known this—she had prepared for this—she is Pilar Pineda Pilar Pineda Pilar Pineda was once a single person and is now some strange fractally shattered mirror-of-herself, expanded and also broken, must pull herself pull herself together—is not large enough, to pull herself together—

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She needs more power—

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(The draining of divinity is a motion that Pilar Pineda has practiced some little bit—)

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The Starstone glows, the buried awful core at its center pulls, and Achaekek's death pours toward it and flows also into Pilar Pineda where Her mortal shell still lays, making of Her something that is greater than Cayden Cailean or Norgorber became, greater than Iomedae as She previously was.

 

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- He may have been wrong about which of His problems is bigger.

Asmodeus is not slow to notice when gods are moving against Him. The timing of this is meant to divide His attention or limit Him in responding, to one or both exigencies.

If He doesn't intervene on the baby godlet (and He's still not sure whether He'd gain from crushing it or preserving it), He perhaps loses; if He doesn't intervene to stop Iomedae, He surely loses; and perhaps both events are a distraction. But identifying that as the situation doesn't save Him from making the call about which to address.

...He can at least fire off some large offers of payment to various Lawful entities aimed at 'make other things stop happening', to limit the damage His distraction can do to His interests while He crushes Iomedae, which really needed doing anyway.

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And Cayden Cailean dies, manifesting at the very last in the form of His mortal self as He was when He touched the Starstone, standing over the Starstone in that same place; holding His rapier crosswise in hand, as though to protect Pilar Pineda.

 

And then He crumbles away.

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The power that was in Him begins to be sucked back to the Starstone; but the vast flickering shadow of the Mother of Monsters descends to consume that, consume His corpse, feast upon the dead as was always Lamashtu's way—

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I think not.

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It is the voice of something more powerful than Cayden Cailean ever was; a goddess who bears about Herself the portfolio of Lawful Evil, a portfolio within which Achaekek's and Zon-Kuthon's deaths have made great room.  And Acavna's domain of Companionship, and a trace of Acavna's defensive battles now transformed to a yielding endurance; and Cayden Cailean's last gift to Her, that is His domain of revelry, and of lust; and from dead Zon-Kuthon the domain of sadomasochism, but a different kind than that practiced in Nidal.

But she is goddess first and foremost, not at all of enslavement, but only of being a slave.

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Lamashtu knows then that it is too late to defeat this newborn god without great cost.

She does briefly engage Pilar Pineda's concentrated true self, in hopes of dealing Her some lasting wound while She is young and stupid; but Pilar Pineda proves to be a difficult goddess to scar, if not hurt.  So that fragment of Lamashtu's attention sniffs and goes upon its way.

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But then another comes to that place, where the Starstone floats upon a sea of lava that is all that remains of the Starstone Cathedral—

(even as Pilar Pineda's body fades away and into Her, leaving behind that crown, formerly a lesser artifact of Dis, which that body wore into transcension)

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Carissa Sevar comes forth in crown and belt, and attired also in concealing flames of her own power; it is the least of her concerns, that she wants this moment to be depicted truly if any depictions survive, but it is yet one of her concerns.  And if there are other thoughts or emotions that she has, they are not outwardly visible, and any future religious iconography suggesting otherwise will be heretical for that it is a lie.

And she too lays down her mortal flesh upon the Starstone.

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It is at this point that a number of gods start to worry that Golarion may have an issue.

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(And while there are both Evil gods and Good ones that turn away from besieging or defending Iomedae; while Lamashtu turns back Her attention upon the ruined Cathedral, and calls out to Urgathoa and allied demon lords as well; it is the Neutral gods, drawn away from the vault's siege to try to halt all these unnegotiated ascensions, whose rerouting ensures that Iomedae will not perish quickly.)

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The gods come, then, to destroy this next god being born into Lawful Evil.  There is too much unplanned divinity and balance-upset originating out of this place in Golarion; if this event were in Their interests it would have been negotiated so.

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Not one of You shall harm Her.

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Divine blows fall upon Pilar Pineda like rain, then.

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And She suffers, and withstands, and She hurts terribly but She is not broken; for that is Pilar Pineda's nature as a god and a good slave.

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Carissa Sevar's journey toward godhood goes slower than that of Pilar; she's trying to absorb more power and is starting out without being already overstuffed with divinity.  She has more time, then, to focus some fragment of her attention upon sending divinity flowing through herself, purposefully, into the crown that she wears, which once was a mere lesser artifact of Dis.

And before her mind grows enough that it must divide, with her last biological breaths, Carissa Sevar performs her last and greatest feat of mortal Spellcraft, the completion of a true and major artifact.  Correctly.

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And then 'she' becomes 'Her', and Her attention fragments.

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You cannot, as a mortal, structure how you'll splinter, on ascending to godhood. If you could, new gods would not be so utterly vulnerable and helpless; things as weak as a newborn god are not generally all that weak. But to be splintered, when you were previously mortal, is to lose all the patterns that directed your mind towards your aims, to be made up of terror and eagerness and loneliness and grief and thwarted plans, all separately, with no guarantee each element will remember that it's meant to coalesce.

Having prepared in advance, having been very wise, having made of yourself something more coherent and more careful than a mortal generally is, helps; but not enough that you could ascend under fire and expect not to die.

Carissa is shaped, all through, for this, and still half the fragments of herself will have hardly any recollection of what they are, or where, or why.

But they know that they might die, if they don't pull themselves together quickly. That's not a truth she memorized for just this one occasion.

And there is not a single fragment of Carissa Sevar which would accept that it might die.

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Her pieces begin to pull together, partially, piece by piece, and as they do, She begins to claim Her portfolio and define Herself as a god.  Lawful Evil is in that; and also, freed from Zon-Kuthon's grasp, loss and pain, but the surviving of it; from long-lost Amaznen, artifice, knowledge, magic; and even from Cayden Cailean, traces of competition and resolve -

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—but there's a problem, now, which is that Pilar Pineda may be stronger than Cayden and not already exhausted, but She is really really not at all experienced at being a god or fighting godwars, and Carissa Sevar is getting larger and more distributed than Pilar can protect just by standing all the way around Her—

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He is dead—

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But Cayden was told how it would go—

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And before then, He—

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Does it matter, when people pray to gods?

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Does it help Them, when They fight?

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It is commonly thought that it does help, some tiny bit, so that if many people pray, maybe that helps enough for a god to notice.

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And through all the taverns of the world and the wild words that drunks dream up, as is His domain, a rumor was spread—

—though also there were other rumors, contradictory or less alarming ones or naming earlier or later times, to make their way to high officials and those charged with officious panic.  But once a time was set and communicated to His representative, then to His true flock and all the ordinary people of Golarion beyond Absalom, to them this tavern-rumor was spread—

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That at a certain hour and a certain day,
There would come the next godwar,
A flickering of the sky visible by day or night,
And the meaning of that godwar would be this:

 

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That Carissa Sevar
(—have you heard the word about her, that she freed Wanshou from the great elder kraken that ruled it since Aroden's death, and gave it better government; that Cheliax's Queen suddenly bent knee to Carissa Sevar as her Empress, and Carissa Sevar at once began to rein in Cheliax's worst excesses—)
would ascend to godhood on that day,
under the star of Lawful Evil,
and other Evil gods would try to slay her,
for that if she won,
she would rein in Hell,
and create an alternative to horror,
not a paradise, still a place where real evil would be judged,
but where souls would not be shattered for their sins;

and even those already in Hell, whom you fear lost there,
from suicide, from exposing a child they couldn't save,
would then be rescued and given succor—

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And of course it isn't believed.

Who would believe it?

It's not the sort of thing that anyone repeats because they believe it.

Godwars don't occur on schedule.  Prophecy is shattered, and much of the point of prophecy in the first place was to avoid godwars.

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but if—

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Some people have heard about Carissa Sevar's supposed compact with Asmodeus, and even if you believe that, the compact definitely doesn't say anything about Carissa Sevar being able to save souls already in Hell.

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but if—

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There's no way that Asmodeus would ever allow it.  And there's no way that an ascended mortal could ever take Asmodeus.  Iomedae isn't that powerful, Irori isn't that powerful—

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Not yet, but Iomedae is more powerful than She was six seconds ago.

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Irori had always meant to accomplish such feats with the aid of His students, after inspiring others to also ascend.

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There's even a ridiculous version of the rumor that has Carissa Sevar somehow doing something about Abaddon and the Abyss!  No respectably cynical person would ever let themselves be seen believing it for a second!

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There's souls less lost than that, who frequent His taverns; the respectables can be left to their cynicism.

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But it's really not believable!

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It does not need to be believed.  Only to be heard.

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...So the skeptics repeat it, they describe what it is they are skeptical about.  Thus the rumor is heard, and spreads.

And unlike most such rumors, it is concrete and falsifiable: it foretells a sign, which is the sky-lights of a godwar, and it names a day and hour.  Even those untrained can appreciate that kind of epistemic courage.

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Don't believe it?  Fine, don't believe it.  Cayden Cailean is not a god of forcing people to believe things.  Only tell your friend (your friend, not the authorities, there will be many other rumors to reach spies alongside that one); say it to your friends in the same drinking session that recounts lewd stories of the orgiastic rites practiced by Sevarists in Kelesh; laugh about those stories, but laugh with them also about the story that names a day and hour to look up to the sky and hope.  You don't believe it, but surely many others do; and won't they feel stupid, come the day, ha ha?


Even a god as weak as Cayden Cailean can work a phenomenon like that on Golarion - for some short time before being caught - if He's willing to spend down His strength on it to the danger point, and sentence Himself to inevitable death for treaty-violations.

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So almost nobody believes the tavern-rumor.

Yet many carry in their heart a burning coal that refuses to resolve itself completely and burn out.  And some such do hear that rumor, and think, in some tiny part of themselves:

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But if—

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And the rumor says that when that day and hour comes, Carissa Sevar doesn't ask you to promise her your allegiance or your soul in death, she doesn't ask that you turn away from your own god forever—

—only asks your best wishes, your faith, your hope, your prayer, only for a few minutes, if you lost anyone you loved to somewhere they'd rather not have gone, if there's anything in you for them that isn't full despair, if you read of Aroden and mourned His dream of a world better than this, know that even the gods have their trials and Carissa Sevar will soon face Hers; and all you can do for Her in Her trial is pray that She ascends, to harrow Hell and Abaddon and Abyss—

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And then the day and hour comes, which few were fool enough to even mark,

When the awful light flickers again in the sky, visible even by daylight in those parts of the globe that hold day,

And a hundred million mortals who heard, who laughed, who scorned, who didn't want to feel even one spark in their hearts and be predictably disappointed later, look up, to the sky, and see—

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Even then, they mostly don't believe it.
But it doesn't hurt much, doesn't cost much, to spend a few minutes in prayer, if it's true.

Because if—

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Yet among those who felt a spark of hope even at the rumor, there is born then a blaze of desperation:

The replacement mayor of a town filled with justifiably sullen tieflings proclaims an emergency moment of prayer;

An emperor on another continent, who knows himself for damned, orders every major city within Teleport distance of his mages to worship Carissa Sevar;

A priest of Sarenrae from further yet who stayed up past midnight to see, now rings frantically the bell of Her temple, to summon Sarenrae's faithful to pray to a Lawful Evil goddess, just in case, just in case;

A nine-year-old boy, whose father told him his mother went to Hell, kneels by his bed and sobs for Carissa Sevar to save her;

His father is busy gathering cattle in to the fold, and he cannot delay in that work, but he weeps and prays to Carissa Sevar all the same.

 

 

It's all that almost everyone on Golarion can do, those mortals who know anything at all of what's happening, if they don't just want to stand and wait in the hour of their own doom.

 

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Carissa Sevar finds the fragments of Herself / the fragments of herself find Her, and She is whole then, and a god.

It's with mixed emotions (perceived more clearly in their parts, Her parts, than ever before) that Carissa sees the gods have not done the last thing They might have done to stop Her, have not destroyed Absalom, or even Golarion, where it stood behind Her.  There was a sense in which that path being probable would have been a very bad thing; if that was an outcome expected by Nethys, Keltham and the others would not have attempted this strategy, and Golarion would have been destroyed by Rovagug. 

But also They are all off the path Nethys foresaw, as is even clearer from where She now stands; and perhaps Golarion could've been destroyed helpfully, not as Keltham's distraction but to preserve Creation. From what She knew when She ascended, it was possible. And She'd hoped for it, and it is not so.

 

She is reaching now for a glimpse -

- and then for a whole and stable view -

of the god-negotiated levels of the world -

- She sees how Nethys and Cayden and Milani have been twisting and bending those alongside the mortal layers of reality to bring them all here to this, and She doesn't see any ways out, now, though of course She looks -

The mortals are still praying to Her, empowering Her in a way that's injurious to their own interests on one level, and also part of a greater strategy that leaves the people of Golarion better off, and also asking Her to do something She deeply wishes to do but which is not in this instant Her first priority.

She spares little of Her attention to her feelings from Her other priorities, but even a little of a coalescent god's attention is a great deal, and She could not be coalesced if She was leaving parts of herself behind.

So Carissa Sevar mourns / and nods across time / and accepts a debt to be repaid -

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And in mortal Absalom, the Starstone is visibly much diminished in size and brilliance; for Carissa Sevar has seized of it almost all the power that Aroden did not take for Himself, and nearly all of Achaekek's remaining energies beside.

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Keltham comes forth, then, laid around with protective spells so that he will not immediately evaporate in Carissa Sevar's mere presence; and he lays his hand upon what remains of the Starstone.

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NO.  Absolutely NOT.

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In a way, Carissa Sevar is more aligned to Otolmens than any other god's purposes here.  Otolmens should have been allowed to squish Keltham, and everyone else should not have stopped Her.  And yet, straight through Her as a fact that does not change, an oath she swore / time-crossing decision that she made, standing halfway between mortal and goddess, because the alternative consistent pathways through time were even worse:

I will not let you destroy Him.

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More and greater gods, then, answer with larger pieces of Their attention when Otolmens Herself adds to the call, for this whole business is becoming quite worrying.

Their blows rain down on the goddess Carissa Sevar, seeking to extinguish Her piece by piece wherever She shields Keltham.

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Carissa Sevar is above all the greater goddess of survival at any price, and to extinguish any piece of Her own selfhood would take a divine effort more serious than this.

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He channels some of his attention, while he can, into the crown worn by his mortal form, that was prepared by spellcraft of Carissa Sevar to accept divinity into itself: and into that crown, by Keltham's will, as he wears it along his journey to godhood, he places as much of dath ilan's knowledge as he can place, to be used by a wearer out of Golarion with whom dath ilan might have touched fingers; not someone like a dath ilani, but someone on their own pathway toward a greater whole that dath ilan once hoped to join someday; an assistance to help other worlds along their own ways, to become themselves and not a copy of dath ilan, as dath ilan would also have asked of him;

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And the crown awakens as an artifact, and knows of itself that it is the Flame of Civilization, to kindle in another place what burned elsewhere, though they be different fires that light;

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As Carissa Sevar placed into Her own crown, greatest of the three, Her comprehension of Law and Spellcraft and magic's hidden order; tinged by her strength of will, and her fierce determination; to be wielded by one who chooses, with that knowledge, to protect souls and worlds from destruction; and that Crown awakens and reflects upon itself, and knows that it is the Light of Consciousness that must never be extinguished;

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And final of those three is a crown once worn by Pilar Pineda, which device is also now a person, and that crown knows herself for the Warmth of Friendship; and that crown is not Snack Service, for Snack Service now is no more, but she bears Snack Service's last best wishes, and some of her imaginary personhood, and some of her power.

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But soon enough Keltham can no longer try to channel divinity into his artifact-of-ascendance, soon enough He also falls into fractally shattered dream and ascends—

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But it is over more quickly, for Him; He is making Himself into the least powerful god who can do a single task.

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And Keltham claims for Himself this divine portfolio:

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He is foremost the Neutral god of Kelthamness, with domains of 'being Keltham', 'staying Keltham', and 'becoming more Keltham',

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But also He is the god of being in one place and then another; and god of things being made of math; and somewhat the god of silent death, since that part of Achaekek's essence was like right there and it seems potentially helpful.

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It can weaken you, to try to be that strange and specific as a god, but Keltham does not need to be any stronger than He is become.  One task only lies ahead of Him.

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And when Keltham has finished ascending, and vanished about His purpose in Creation,

After the deadly focus of the gods shifts elsewhere,

 

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There teleports into the ruins of the Starstone Cathedral a wizard who follows Iomedae, who was oathbound to Keltham for a time but no longer, to gather up the three artifacts called Warmth and Light and Flame.

The three crowns don't form a set and you cannot wear them all at once to gain ultimate power.  They are simply there to help.

And Iomedae's wizard gives a wondering sad look to the remnant of the Starstone, now dimmer.  The Starstone is no longer defended, but anyone who touches it now will be destroyed, if they have no gods to defend them in their ascension.  Reaching the Starstone was never really the hard part in the first place, if anyone is that much the fool.  Once this Cathedral was defended at least against some gods, if not the likes of Asmodeus or Achaekek; but now that is no longer so.

And so Carmin departs to Lastwall, setting an illusion of warning glyphs in the air there before she goes, accompanied by warning animations; lest any touch the Stone and true-die.  Lastwall will return, perhaps, with greater troops than this, to claim the Starstone's remnant and make the reckless hear at least a disclaimer first.  But to muster her fellow Iomedaens will take time, now that she is no longer oathbound and her secrets are secrets no more.

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So the Starstone, or its remnant, now lies alone and quiet, but for the seethe of lava and crackle of flames that will take long to subside—

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The air beside the Starstone parts into the form of a Gate.

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And from that Gate, Fe-Anar comes forth,

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And an old woman,

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And her husband.

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Huh!  That hasn't happened before—

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—but Nethys is the only god who sees, and His splinter can speak of it to no one, for there is present a Power in whose domain lies secrecy.

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And Fe-Anar touches to the Starstone, with his bare hands, three great diamonds, which Fe-Anar now at INT 30 has comprehended and prepared and enchanted; for which sake Dispater yielded the greater part of His personal treasury of spellsilver, accumulated over millennia, simply to burn as much magic into those three diamonds as they could hold;

Those diamonds were already made lesser artifacts, and now into them, begins to flow the last of the Starstone's fossilized godhood, transforming them into greater and divine artifacts;

And all this is done, not to make those three diamonds powerful, for none of that is power;

Rather, it has all been to make them a container of true power.

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And She who was once a mortal soothsayer, called then Aerecura, before she stole divinity of Pharasma Herself,

Begins to glow with a white-golden light.

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And he ascends towards godhood as slowly as he possibly can, fighting to hang onto every shred of his mortality with every scrap of his raised Splendour, pouring the last of the Starstone's captured divinity through himself and into the artifacts that are now becoming themselves; even as all of his augmented Intelligence is entirely devoted to making and completing the three Containers of Radiance, to capturing and holding and structuring what Erecura now gives back and shines forth,

 

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(ai art)Fe-Anar creating the Silmarils, Midjourney 4

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And there is even mortality left in Fe-Anar, he is only half-way to divinity, when the Containers are complete;

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And before Fe-Anar can lose himself and become a god, Dispater raises His mace of office; and with all His might, bellowing a vast roar that echoes all through Absalom, He smashes the Starstone.

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That cannot be concealed, and many gods turn their attention from Zon-Kuthon's vault to stare back at Absalom again in sudden and considerable alarm.

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And Fe-Anar who has become something more than he was,
not from having touched the Starstone, but from learning the truth of his own character,
gives a brilliant imperishable Radiance to Erecura and another to Dispater,

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(All three of the bearers having been bound around with a vastly carefully-composed oath of mutual interest and thorough honest cooperation, whereof which Dispater has sworn from sixty-six different angles that He has not tried and will not try to pull anything sketchy or unexpected,)

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And she-who-was-Aerecura, much diminished but still not just an ordinary god,
reaches into the shattered Starstone and draws forth the indestructible awfulness that lies at its center,

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the cysted remnant of a stillborn universe, of a flawed and failed Creation,

a thing of indeterminate size, at once light enough to hold, and heavy enough to bore through a moon,

 

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and the awful green brilliance that shines out from it sure looks poisonous, and would dissolve even a god if they were unprotected by the Radiance that stabilizes Creation,

but the three of them hold Radiances, and they withstand it.

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Dispater opens another Gate then, and in that dread green brilliance it seems to gape wider than even a god's Gate should.

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And the three of them pass through that Gate to a place that should have been less simple to reach, into the heart of the Gardens of Erecura.

There was a great golden Ship buried beneath those Gardens, but it need not be raised; for now there is a better alternative, that was also prepared-for.  All those who'll go have stayed, and those who'll stay have gone.

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Erecura raises the hand holding the Starstone's poisonous center high, even as Her other hand grips a Radiance;

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green brilliance flows about Her form as though She wore a cloak of it, twists about Her head in twin pointed vortices; and the local distance metric deforms around that power, light wavering and distorting and showing glimpses of gaps into starlight through the haze in which She's cloaked;

 

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And with a huge crack that echoes through nine layers of Hell, She rips out the Gardens of Erecura from the fabric of Dis;

 

 

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Fe-Anar has by then comprehended somewhat of how to wield the Radiance of Stability, and he lays it about himself, blazing protection to match and neutralize the poison;

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And Dispater lays one of His hands upon the green brilliance, while Radiance flares white-gold about His other hand that He may not die; and Gate after Gate after Gate begins to gape impossibly wide about them.

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There is an ark that is leaving Creation, before it might perish; and those who have longed through ages to leave it, now come to pay their oaths of passage to the captains.

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Now at this point, every sensible god will finally panic:

 

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They will coalesce Themselves wholly, forsaking all other matters, and turn Their entire attention toward whatever triggered Erecura to do that:

 

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For to the ancient gods it is a known fact about Erecura's exile, that if Creation itself is seriously threatened, Erecura may break Her exile for a greater exile: may flee Hell and flee Creation, with Her stolen energy and any others She chooses to protect with it, sith that any tiny remnant of Pharasmin Creation might survive.

 

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There's a difference between interesting and important moves being made within your divine game, which is how it is for three new gods to arise or Iomedae to consume Zon-Kuthon; versus gods realizing that They personally may be about to die, along with all those things in which They hold Their value.

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They don't need to know the specific alarming details, to panic.  They are gods, and it has become predictable to Them that They will learn alarming details later.  They gather Themselves now, They are ready to spend vast desperate resources now—

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But by the time They are paying that much attention, all Their real chances to intervene, now lie in the unreachable past.  By the time They finally notice the true danger, all of the critical events are already done and over.

For the way of fighting all the gods at once, if you insist on doing that, is to make very sure They have lost before They awaken to Their danger and act, at all.

The moment when the gods finally panic has been scheduled, and it comes after it is already too late.

 

 

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A lesser god looks up from where He stands near the base of Pharasma's Spire, that is the foundation of the Great Beyond; He has passed in a flash by distant suns and the surface layers of planes, and hidden away encapsulated strangelets and other catastrophes, whose dead-man triggers are in Golarion where prophecy is shattered; and near about the base of Pharasma's Spire there are now hidden the frozen potentia of thunderbolt singularities and relativistic death waves, true-vacuums and single-quarks and assorted other kinds of physics disaster.

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(He didn't actually know that he'd be able to do it, even in his last mortal minute.  He'd read some nontechnical gruesome-stories about physics disasters as an overly interested child, he had that much reason to know that possible ways existed in principle.  But while still mortal he carefully avoided thinking about physics disasters in any mathematical detail, or whether his future god-self could implement them with divine magic, just in case those thoughts would have been legible to Otolmens.  He touched the Starstone in a leap of blinded faith, on that last step; trusting that his future self would solve those physics problems, given that dath ilan solved them and that he knew all the base equations.)

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And now He sends to all the ancient gods to whom He is not utterly opposed, and to all the once-mortal gods whose address He can see, and to Pharasma Herself, this legible thought:

 

Coming before you as an envoy sent of Elsewhere, but foremost in my own person and purpose, I have placed my death-grip around Creation's throat.

There is too much pessimization of utility functions going on inside this subregion of Reality.  I consider it better ended, than continuing as it is; for so would wish those souls in Hell that still can think; and my own unshared and unshareable experience suggests that those consciousnesses ending in one place would continue in another.

That's my batna.  Let's negotiate.

 

 

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And to Pharasma Herself, privately:

 

A message from a tiny little mortal named Tarnish, who You thought could never do You any injury and whom it was safe for You to ignore:

Fuck you.

 

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There are many thoughts and conversations that happen then, simultaneously, at a pace that mortals could follow individually but not in parallel: gods are not fast, but they are large.







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....no.

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Abadar is not one of the gods that is ever near desiring the world’s destruction. For one thing, He couldn’t do it, not when the many many many people who trade with Him have done so since the beginning of time on the premise that He wants, that He uses His strength to bring about, cities, prosperity, invention. But even if no one had ever traded on such a premise, He would never do it, because in all the vastness of Creation He perceives almost entirely things that should be, people trading, people building, people inventing.

And He says to Keltham: I aided you, when you came to this world, in the hope that we could trade peacefully, and I did not believe then that a mortal with your shape would use the value I gave you to act so much against my interests; if this is what you do, then it would be better if I had permitted Asmodeus to ruin you. By the value that I gave you, that permitted you to thrive and gain this much capability, I ask that you not.

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If you are looking on the level of gods you can see it, how Abadar's message strikes at a gaping wound inside Keltham's shape, damage not dealt by any external force but where Keltham dealt Himself that wound by acting against His own nature.

But what is left of Keltham retains its structure and does not change its conformation around the wound as He responds:

There are sentients in Hell, and I knew I could not be Yours anymore, even to that conduct of my trades.  I left You when I knew I could no longer uphold Your flame-light of civilization, and afterward I tried to give You all I could of what You had hoped to buy from me.

 

 

I am sorry.

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Desna offers that She will do all within Her power to find the world-wanderer's lost home, and return Him there; He does not need to stay within Creation, if He finds its shape inimical.

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You cannot touch dath ilan to place me there, and even if You could find a writeable copy, it is too late.  I would no longer fit there as god or mortal.

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Creation is vast and what lies beyond is vaster yet.  There are other places, and in some of them Keltham could be happy!

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If my personal happiness was my greatest desire in the end, I would have chosen that path much much earlier.

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🗡 appreciation of Keltham's angry determination to overturn Creation's order 🗡

🗡 approval of Keltham's deeds as a mortal on behalf of Osirian women 🗡

🗡 expression of attraction to Keltham as a new male deity, flirtatious expression of interest in having a pleasurable fling with Him 🗡

🗡 coy emphasis that Calistria does not make this offer to male deities very often at all 🗡

🗡 sensuous eagerness to work with Keltham on some OTHER form of vengeance and power-overturning which is NOT THIS during aforesaid fling 🗡

🗡 self-prediction of horrible painful revenge* against Keltham if He actually carries out any large-scale destructive acts against Creation 🗡

(*)  🗡 it's not meant as a threat 🗡 it's meant as REVENGE 🗡

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You do not, so far, live up to Your reputation for subtlety.

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🗡 Calistria possesses deep comprehension of when subtlety is appropriate 🗡

🗡 and when it is not 🗡

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It is common for people to want to destroy their enemies because they don’t really comprehend them, because they cannot see any good in them or do not realize about themselves that they would stop if they did see. Almost everyone driven to the horror of true-murder is, in some sense, lying to themselves, refusing to see a sacred thing they’d be unwilling to destroy if they could see it.

Sarenrae’s first hope is that Keltham is making, by his lights, an angry and wounded and bitter mistake, like people do, and that now that He's a god He might be able to understand new truths that’d make Him not want to destroy Creation anymore, in which case She will expend an astonishing amount of resources conveying all of that information immediately.

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Keltham does not try to conceal Himself from any Good god's inspection, and it will be obvious to Sarenrae that (though He is truly wounded) He is not a shape that could be changed by that revelation, that everyone else's existence is as intensely real as his own.  Most of His hesitancy about destroying Creation is held within His doubts about whether everyone else here is equally real.  If He were certain that every paving stone in Hell was just as real as himself, that Creation was continually producing new souls and sending thirty percent of them to Evil afterlives and all those people were real, He would be all the more driven to end this.

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Seeing this, She grieves, and has little more to offer the crisis.

Obviously She favors ending Hell, if anyone was wondering. And yes, should any souls be displaced by present events, from Hell or for that matter from anywhere else, Nirvana has space to take every one of them.

(Nirvana sends a lawyer to every Boneyard trial, to argue that everyone has Neutral Good in them. This results in Nirvana getting a number of souls that may have Neutral Good in them but are, you know, not conventionally Neutral Good, or at all people you’d want to have wandering your paradise. The isle that houses them is not, in fact, infinite, but Sarenrae while She still possessed any power at all would not let it be false, that there was space in Nirvana for everyone, that it would turn away none of them; She would die making it true, should it ever come up.)

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(Some Evil gods have probably considered whether it would be funny to make Her do that, but it’d take a truly ludicrous number of souls.)

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(...And if Pharasma's sorting were subverted on that scale, She would likely object.  A few mostly-Evil souls won by Sarenrae's isle doesn't seem to bother Pharasma, any more than the tenth that many souls who end up Maledicted: they're a statistically small fraction, and both varieties of soul end up Good and Evil, in time.  But wholesale relocation of mostly-Evil dead to Good planes probably would impinge on what the gods guess to be Pharasma's own priorities; or at least, some of Her rare interventions seem to have been aimed at not-that, long ago in the Beginning.)

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Asmodeus is, predictably, not going to give into a threat even if that kills Him; mostly that makes entities not try it. And this is, obviously, the work of Iomedae, who He knows does not want the world to end, and so no one will give in. If, bafflingly, She’s arranged for a sufficient coalition to side with Her, well, Asmodeus too can play the game of doing things-against-His-interests-that-harm-the-other-party-more, if that’s the stupid game they’re playing; He’ll release Rovagug and order all the souls in Hell shattered before any saviors can reach them.

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Iomedae is busy eating Zon-Kuthon but not too busy to make legible that She has done absolutely no acting-against-Her-interests at any point, ate Zon-Kuthon on Milani’s claim it was a good idea for Her, and opposes the destruction of Creation! Very vehemently! She was guessing that Keltham would be crushed on ascension; She would have impeded Keltham Herself, if She’d possessed unencumbered knowledge of His plans and if She’d expected that no one else would stop Him.  She requests that Asmodeus act with such scraps of civilization as are in Him and not spitefully destroy everything while they figure out if there’s something else to be done instead.

(She can actually see now of Her own unencumbered knowledge how this ought to resolve, from the logic that threads through everything that has happened so far, but She’s not going to tell Asmodeus that. Because She hates Him.)

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Sarenrae also requests clarification on the obvious point here where this was clearly orchestrated by some parties – they can identify themselves if they want or She can think for slightly longer and She’ll figure it out – who were not allowed to do things like that, and who presumably don’t want the universe destroyed, and who should have known that that is precisely what they were bringing about.

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Of those gods that hovered around Keltham, who were once-mortal enough to understand key parts of what has happened, Irori knows He may be the only one who can and will speak.  He does not understand fully; He is coalesced and trying to think as quickly as He can, but gods are large but not fast and He has not solved it all yet.  He does not know why.  But He knows Who.

Nethys.  Cayden Cailean.

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And Milani, and He's not convinced not-Iomedae.

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There is an exchange then of information, among the gods, gathered to confront this threat to all Creation; in the parts of Their wills not bent on probing Keltham's causal surface to sway Him to another path by any possible input.

Irori yields what He knows, taking responsibility for what must have been His part in bringing Carissa Sevar to this pass.  Abadar gives it away, as a partial payment towards that owed for His protecting Keltham.  Asmodeus selectively releases all of that information and only that information which damns that which is good.

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And They consider it and think, and in time speak to Milani, in voices that are one and many:  Sarenrae and Slandrais, Gorum and Abadar, Gozreh and Onos, Erastil and Dahak, Asmodeus and Desna:

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Your faction repeatedly intervened to protect Keltham, empower Keltham.  None of You would have preferred that Creation be destroyed rather than continue unchanged.  You would have no motive to preserve and empower Keltham if We did not yield, so yield We must not.  And You must certainly have known that We would not permit Ourselves to be threatened by proxy, and that Creation would be forfeit.

Explain the actions of Your coalition, Milani; and We hope that it is not the last explanation We all hear.

 

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Our interests ought not be injured by Our caring for them.  We should do no worse out of these events than if We had been incapable of any action; We should do at least as well, in expectation, than if We had cared for nothing and done nothing.

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Then to understand all these events, You must understand what would have been the result if We had all done nothing.

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This, then, would have been the consequence of Our null action—

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