"But, of course, I guess Iomedae kinda is that, for Golarion—"

"—sorry, I didn't think I'd ever be homesick, but—"

"Iomedae's Church does have the concept that we—shouldn't pick up burdens we can't carry. It does also have the concept that everyone can carry something, and should."

"Yesterday, I'd have said that that's a level of excessive Good that you wouldn't even find in dath ilan."

"Today, I—"

"Dath ilan just didn't have, problems, on the scale that Golarion does even without Hell. If we did I think we'd think, more like that."

"Although depending on what the problem was exactly, the Keepers might decide to instead do something like quietly siphon off 20% of the smartest people to work on a secret project and not tell any of the rest of us about it at all. Actually, given that something in dath ilan's past warranted screening history, I'd bet that we did have a secret project like that. But I didn't know what it was about and wouldn't have wanted to."

"Iomedae said that, when you got to that point, you should put on the artifact headband and try to figure out what dath ilan was hiding. But I think She was envisioning you taking longer about it."

"So, first of all, this implies that Iomedae knows what dath ilan was hiding, which, how."

"Second of all, no, I'm not putting on any Very Fancy Headbands just yet."

"That's fair. Anyway, I didn't mean to keep you, if you're still meaning to go to the library."

"I also don't mean to keep you but this is library-relevant: if you liked Breaking Strain you ought to read History and Future of Humanity. Aroden's holy book; the god is dead but the words are still true. I suppose some of the 'Future' parts may have been obviated."

"Thanks, I'll check it out." With the suspicion due a book specifically suggested to him rather than one he chose randomly from a library with thousands.

And so he'll go to the nearest Bank of Abadar to get a short-term loan backed by his shares of Project Lawful in Golarion (and also leave a message for Carissa who is supposedly also in Axis and will presumably need money at some point too), find the largest library in this secure district, and spend several hours reviewing this universe's entire everything. And then, at some point, read Aroden's holy book.

The History and Future of Humanity does not superficially resemble a dath ilani book. Premises and conclusions are not rigorously separated. There are relatively few numbers, although there are some citations of other books (now mostly lost) in which more explicit data can supposedly be found.

One might, however, get the sense that the author could have written a dath ilani book had he wanted, which is not a sense one gets often in Golarion.

The person who wrote this book had INT 35 / WIS 38 / CHA 31. If someone who could have been a Hero of Civilization had been born in Golarion instead, spent thousands of years trying to fix it, incidentally invented many of the methods of rationality along the way, cognitively enhanced themselves another half-dozen standard deviations beyond the smartest people to have ever existed in dath ilan, and then written a book optimized to inspire the broadest possible audience of Golarionites, it might have looked something like this. Well, it would have been this, or else Tomes of Memory.

Some of this may be lost on Keltham, who still has no idea what an INT 10 person is and isn't typically capable of. But there are plenty of people as smart as Keltham in Golarion, or special in other ways, and History and Future is written for them as well. It wasn't meant to make dath ilani of them—dath ilani are weird along several dimensions that Aroden wasn't optimizing at all. But it was meant to be one of the foundations of a faith in which someone could grow up to be Iomedae.

(There would have been others after her, if all had gone according to plan.)

A Conspiracy at Golarion's observed competence levels couldn't have written this book on short notice. Probably not on long notice, either.

A god could have done it, maybe, though this is probably only a step short of "maybe an alien superbeing is comprehensively controlling my sensory inputs", as is a proverbially unproductive level of paranoia in dath ilan.

(There is, actually, a dath ilani novel in which a character correctly comes to this conclusion and has to do something about it, but it's a little too Ill-Advised to have been on Keltham's reading list.)

Also, Keltham is in fact confused about how Golarion manages to be the way it does if it had even one person like that in its history.

Oh.

Right.

Asmodeus killed Him.

Of course, only the Church of Asmodeus explicitly claims that, and a reasonable prior is that they're lying. Not that it isn't predictable, separately from who's claiming it, that Asmodeus would have opposed Aroden—it's just that this should also have been predictable to Aroden Himself. For Him to have non-counterfactually died requires Him to have been wrong about something critical—not that Asmodeus would oppose Him, which would have been obvious. Perhaps He thought that the ancient gods of Good were truly aligned with mortal interests, and they were not; perhaps He thought that Pharasma would not trouble Herself to prevent such a drastic alteration to the existing equilibrium, and She did; perhaps—

It doesn't, actually, matter. What matters is that, in fact, the plan "build Civilization in Golarion" has more-or-less been tried, and—

Mythic Time Stop.

"It was Milani."

"Flaming ass, lady, you've got to stop doing that."

"Indeed. It's very expensive."

"It wasn't Asmodeus, or any of the ancient gods, that betrayed Aroden. It was Milani, because she saw, at the last second, that it would break prophecy, and before you showed up I'd have said she got the math wrong, but now, I'm not sure."

"Any chance you could prove that?"

"You could ask her. She wouldn't admit to it falsely; she'd die for it, if the wrong set of gods found out. You'll find her keeping the lights on in what's left of Aroden's domain. She didn't, actually, want to kill him. Just thought it would be worth it."

"Mostly that response just creates the meta-issue of whether I believe that."

"It's actually very difficult for mortals to come to the justified conclusion that they should trust a god, starting from scratch. I spent the first decade of my paladinhood on it, with Aroden, and I'm afraid the process isn't very compressible."

"The larger issue here is that I can predict what I would have concluded, if you hadn't shown up at the exact right time, and the fact that you did show up at the exact right time, expending by your own admission considerable resources to do so, suggests that you're trying very hard to steer me out of that conclusion. There's a school of thought that I should just regard this whole conversation as hostile interference in my decision processes, even if the information you're providing is true, and just do the thing I would have done anyway."

"There are lots of terrible reasons to try to destroy the world but that is among the worst."

"I know! I don't actually adhere to that school of thought when the thing in question violates my deontology! It's just that I am, like, aware of the Law of Filtered Evidence."