OTOLMENS, LISTEN.

I have good reason to believe that if Keltham continues along his current course, enabled by Your interdiction, he will come to prefer the destruction of the world and have the resources to achieve this with substantial probability. I request permission for an intervention aimed at Not This.

Does the intervention consist of SQUISHING the anomaly?

No, and the information I provided was conditional on it not being used against My interests, which I do currently consider to include the so-called anomaly, whose name is Keltham, not being murdered. I do, however, expect My proposed intervention to reduce the probability of the world’s destruction in the following ways—

Ugh, FINE.

Otolmens does, actually, trust Iomedae.

(Iomedae is someone who, very predictably, will never take action towards destroying the world. Less predictably than Otolmens; unlike Otolmens, it is possible for Iomedae to prefer the world not exist—if She were just a little less sure of ever fixing Hell, that would do it. But She would not, even in that case, actually destroy it, this being, or so She calculated, the best shape to be across all plausible worlds.

And in this particular case, Her probability of saving the world without substantially risking its destruction is still way up from where it stood the day before Keltham appeared in Golarion, even if it's dropped every day he's been in Cheliax.)

She is, as it happens, very well prepared for this. At a causally-isolated site in southeastern Andoran, just outside the nonintervention zone, is a team that knows everything She does about the current situation, conditional on not using it without Her authorization, and has had the past two months to make plans about it.

Go, Project Lawful 12A, she sends to Her cleric there. It's all She needs.

The Queen of Cheliax barges into the Fortress of Law, blazingly furious.

(It does, actually, occur to the Security guarding the gate that it's irregular for the Queen to Teleport herself, or to go anywhere without an entourage. It's just that you see a lot of irregular shit on Project Lawful, and also something apparently happened that required Gorthoklek to get called in earlier, and he doesn't, actually, want to do anything as ill-advised as demanding Her Majestrix pass a security check when she's this visibly angry.)

She walks into the library.

"Assemble the entire staff of this project in this room in five minutes," she tells the Security there, not bothering to raise her voice; she should hardly need to.

They depart to do that.

And when they're gone, she walks over to the still-sleeping Ione Sala and—

—cuts her throat.

And then climbs into a Bag of Holding as quickly as possible, before she actually dies.

It's not meant as a DETERRENT.

It's meant as an EXPLOSION.

A flood of energy rushes back down the channel connecting Nethys to His oracle and obliterates everything within several miles of the Fortress of Law, which is, thankfully, mostly surrounded by forest and ocean.

He Plane Shifts from the Astral to his private demiplane, takes off his amulet of Malediction (completely irrelevant to the fate of his immortal soul, but an important capability better kept in reserve), and dismisses the Alter Self.

The exact circumstances in which that set of tactics is useful is actually, in the scheme of things, quite rare, but if one needs to get into a secure location in Cheliax, execute a single pivotal act, and get out, Cheliax really has no counter, except to be an entirely different sort of place with a different sort of Queen.

Keltham finds himself, without really remembering how he got there, on what might be a platform at a vast central train station, an enormous room with golden sunlight streaming from windows in the vaulted ceiling dizzyingly far overhead, surrounded by the bustle of a crowd of a hundred species.

A little ways away there's a steampunk-looking creature made entirely of gears, rather less—organic—than most of the people here, that appears to be giving directions.

Oh.

It's beautiful wait shit he died. He does recognize the aesthetic of this place from Early Judgement, if not the specific location.

Another Nidal attack? Well, Cheliax will probably resurrect him pretty soon; nothing he can do about it from this end. In the meantime, maybe he can make some headway on TALKING TO HIS GOD.

He walks over to the steampunk-looking creature. "Hi, is this Hell?" he asks.

"...no," says the creature, whirring with concern. "This is Aktun, divine domain of Abadar, in Axis, the Lawful Neutral afterlife. If you think this might be Hell then you may, perhaps, have some comprehensively false beliefs about reality."

(The language ey's speaking is, on closer inspection, not Baseline, just closer to it than anything spoken in Golarion.)

"You appear to be a cleric of Abadar," ey says. "Were you aware of this?"

"Aware that I was a cleric, yes, of Abadar, no," says his core-fallback-routine as the rest of his brain falls into an abyss of horror.

Because it's, in fact, superheated obvious, what he's been not-seeing all this time, now that the remaining bits of evidence, are right in front of his face.

"Don't—don't say anything else about Hell for now," he says, over the sickening feeling that he already knows everything he needs to. He just needs to mentally live in the world where that might not be true, for a little while longer, because right now he doesn't know what will happen to him when he can't anymore.

(He gets, about this time, a wordless sense that Aspexia Rugatonn, Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus, is trying to resurrect him, and he swats it away, more out of numb reflex than an actual, conscious, decision, that he's not going back to Cheliax or seeing Carissa ever again—)

"I think you should come with me," says the gear-creature.

And then the world around Keltham just stops, the bustling crowd frozen in a moment in time.

"Actually, I'll take it from here," says a woman who wasn't there before.

"And who are you, exactly?"