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?"

"Iomedae, Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil. You've been pretty comprehensively lied to about the nature of Evil, by the way. The thing that—you and Abadar are—is Lawful Neutral."

"Asmodeus and His servants do not trade fairly, they do not value fairness intrinsically, they abide by the words of their agreements but seek to craft them to the disadvantage of their counterparty. Hell is a place most mortals strongly prefer to avoid, and a place where there are not free or fair transactions. Both Abadar and I expect that you would not choose to aid Hell or Cheliax fully informed."

"The wording of that message was determined and paid for by Abadar. It is, in fact, even worse than He makes it sound, though I think it best if I refrain from going into detail for now."

"Thank you for telling me, if that's true," he says, mostly on autopilot.

"To be clear, I'm not particularly expecting that any of this is real right now.  But, on this level of reality, got any information on how I ended up dead or the status of everyone else on the the Project? Also, unrelated-but-possibly-priority: are you responsible for everything outside this immediate vicinity appearing to be frozen in place?"

"Abadar, whose domain this is, put up the Time Stop, though at my direction; we're collaborating on this intervention. The Time Stop is because Cheliax, having just failed to resurrect you by normal means, is likely to escalate to nonconsensual methods; this will allow us to set up protection against that before they get the chance."

"This intervention was triggered by Peranza, who—under circumstances I don't know but you can probably guess—decided she didn't actually want to serve Cheliax or go to Hell, spontaneously converted to Lawful Good, and immediately prayed to me about the Project in the two rounds she had before Security, presumably, killed her." She's now glowing with pride in addition to just regularly glowing with divine power.

"That's—"

What a real dath ilani would have done in that situation, but he can't, actually, bring himself to say that.

"Wow," he eventually says, because that doesn't require him to think about whether he would have done what Peranza did.

"Anyway, you're dead because my Church triggered a trap previously laid by Nethys to explode the entire fortress and kill everyone present, this being, I had determined, the most efficient way to get you all out of Cheliax."

"An allied god had previously bargained with Asmodeus to ensure that your employees, at least, won't be tormented in Hell" for a hundred years but they can certainly get them out by then if nothing else. "To be quite clear, I would have done something else if I hadn't known this."

"That reply generated at least as many questions as it answered but traversing depth-first: so, the interdiction against god-intervention was fake? And if so, why wasn't Abadar, if that is indeed my god, able to contact me? And if not, why were you able to intervene?"

"The interdiction is real. Abadar is your god and was barred from contacting you because of it. I was able to convince the goddess of the interdiction that my proposed intervention was in her interests, further details infohazardous for now, and thereby obtain a temporary exception."

"Right. Any chance you can tell me what the ass is up with Snack Service and the whole Nethys/Cayden Cailean/additional unknown gods alliance?"

"I can but I don't think I should."

"Why not, or is that also infohazardous?"

"It reflects my predictions about counterfactual branches of reality which shouldn't be permitted to influence this one for reasons of not making things even more complicated than they already are."

She's gotten the feeling that Nethys was deliberately trying to make the plot turn on obscure points of decision theory but that's, actually, dumb*.

(*lit. 'not-trying-to-win')

"Do you expect your church, or Abadar's, to raise me soon, or is the plan for me to hang around here for a while? Ditto for Carissa and the other researchers."

"I've told mine to wait, and paid Abadar to convey the same instruction to his. I'll tell them otherwise, if on reflection you'd rather go back to Golarion now, but I think you should at least hear me out about why you shouldn't do that immediately."

"I don't have strong preferences about where I spend the next few days as long as it has a superheated uncensored library, but I expect that, if I end up deciding this layer of reality is real, I left a mess behind in Golarion that I'll want to clean up."

"If you have an argument about why I shouldn't do that, I would like to hear it, but before we recurse on that subtopic: Carissa?"

She had hoped to have this conversation in a slightly different order, but she isn't going to lie.

"Carissa is in a different part of Axis. Not because she wouldn't sort Lawful Evil, if she were sorted," (she is carefully not using the word is to make any claims about Carissa's alignment) "because she's a cleric of Irori, who grabbed her as part of this negotiated intervention."

"Wow, so, tropes are real, huh?"

"It's probably Nethys deliberately creating the appearance of tropes. If there are real tropes above even him, I suspect they declare that, if you think you've figured them out or try to manipulate them, the authors simply add a new layer of meta-tropes to confuse you again."

"Well, at least she was a secret cleric of somebody better than Asmodeus instead of somebody worse."

"I really think you should refrain from making any Carissa-related inferences or decisions until you've both had a chance to think for a while in a safe place very far outside Cheliax, and then talk. But since you're mortal and will inevitably make inferences and decisions anyway, I'll tell you this: in my estimation Carissa Sevar is a Lawful Good person in denial and I could get her to see this in five minutes of honest conversation. It's just that this situation is complicated enough that I'm not sure I should."

"That's a complicated and surprising claim that I can't even begin to evaluate the truth value of without a lot more context that I assume you're not going to give me right now. But I think I hope you're right."

"Did I—hurt her—"

"That's legitimately complicated to answer in a way that'll cause you to update towards truth from your current state. But—she loved you, even if she was deeply confused about what that entailed. Cheliax thought she shouldn't, but she did."

"Sorry, please don't say things that are probably impossible for me to verify but I desperately want to believe," he says through the tears.

"Is she safe from Cheliax?"

"While she's here, though it's hard to stop her from deciding to go back for reasons that neither you nor I would consider good enough. I might anyway."

"I have, some pretty serious reservations actually, about the whole plan where you rewrite her entire value system in five minutes of totally-not-talk-control, even if her current one is horrible by most people's standards and she's 'in denial' about whatever. In fact, if that whole thing where she was mine was real at all, I forbid you, I refuse consent on her behalf. If that's even something that matters to you at all."

It was but not even slightly in a way where you can order that, she does not say, because Keltham is a traumatized teenager whom she badly needs to trust her, and not lying doesn't mean saying everything that's true.

"I actually wasn't planning to do anything like the thing you're imagining," she says instead. "We can talk more about the thing I actually meant, which very likely won't even require any action on my part even if I could make it happen faster, but I think that, possibly, we should do that more than ten minutes after you found out about the existence of Hell."

"Right, I shouldn't develop any cached judgments when my emotional and epistemic state is this much of a mess, it's just, optimizing people to be Good, is something I have, opinions about, from back in dath ilan—maybe I'm okay with it, if the alternative is whatever the shit Cheliax is doing—"

"Last Carissa-related question, are masochists real?"

"The answer that most updates your present model toward reality is 'yes' although I note, in the interests of meta-honesty, that this belies my own complicated opinions that you're predictably not going to like."

"Yeah, that sounds like a later conversation to me as well."

"Next steps are for me to go somewhere or have something done so Cheliax can't kidnap me, and then spend a while digging into this layer of reality and seeing if I want to cooperate with whatever plan you've got going on. Concur?"

"Concur."

She leads him through the paused city to a place where the street ends suddenly at a moat so deep the bottom of it, if it has a bottom, is lost in darkness, with a narrow bridge across it. On the other side of the moat is a curtain of brilliant white light descending from a vast height.

"I'll need to end the Time Stop to speak to the sentry," she says. "Even I may not easily enter here unpermitted."

She takes Keltham's hand. Her touch feels slightly fake, as though something is trying to implant the sensation of having his hand held directly in his mind without it actually being the case that he's touching a physical hand, and not doing a perfect job of it.

She tells Abadar to unpause time.

The sentry is an imposing humanoid construct about eight feet high, with skin like animate black stone and a huge black sword.

"Who goes there?" it asks.

"The goddess Iomedae, exercising the right of entry owned by My Church in Golarion," she replies. "This is Keltham of dath ilan, a cleric of Abadar, and His guest and Mine."

"Proceed," it says. The curtain of light parts slightly to reveal a section of city much like the one behind them. The houses might be slightly fancier on average.

"This part of Aktun is approximately categorically secure against unauthorized interference of any kind, including gods who aren't trying harder than they're typically allowed to," she explains to Keltham as they cross the boundary. "My church has a base of operations here; this isn't the first time we've needed to offer protection to someone Hell was very upset with."

He'll process the truth value of that claim later.

They reach the safe house. Iomedae knocks on the door.

"Oh," says the cleric who answers the door, falling abruptly to his knees.

"Get up," she says, with an air of vague disapproval. "This is Keltham. He just got out of Cheliax, so be nice to him."

(The people currently in the safe house are, of course, already much better briefed on the situation than this, though apparently they weren't expecting her in person.)

He rises, still kind of staring.

"Of course," he says. "Are you, uh, coming in?" He opens the door wider.

She steps inside. Everyone in the room is immediately healed of any injuries they might have without her particularly intending to do that. She has her Aura of Courage deliberately turned off, because she predicts Keltham wouldn't appreciate it, but it's still pretty hard to feel afraid in her presence for entirely rational reasons.

(There's a lot more kneeling and staring.)

"There's one more thing before I go," she says to Keltham. "I expect that, while you would rather not do it now, you will at some point see the necessity of making yourself smarter, so I'm leaving you with a tool to do that."

She produces, apparently from nowhere, an extremely fancy headband, to both the eye and Detect Magic more elaborate than any anyone present has ever seen, save perhaps the Crown of Infernal Majesty. It's decorated with motifs that someone vastly more literate in Golarion's cultures than Keltham might recognize as coming from the Arcadian nation of Xopatl.

(People who are that culturally literate, or have just seen this artifact depicted in books, audibly gasp. This is a far more shocking intervention than the Goddess showing up in person.)

"This was once worn by one of my best friends. I haven't, from Her death until now, known anyone whom it would actually be worth the intervention budget to lend it to. May your path end more happily than Hers did."

She would at this point place it ceremoniously on Keltham's head, were Keltham less wary of cognitive enhancement than he in fact is. Instead she sets it down on a table.

(Keltham is clearly missing some context here.)

"I state explicitly that this gift is given in the hope, but not the 'logically-binding-expectation'*, that you will use it to further my values, and you should not consider yourself bound by honor to do so, nor refrain from using it out of fear you might betray me."

(*A two-syllable word in Baseline.)

"Thank you. Your disclaimer is understood and acknowledged."

"Good luck and good skill," she says, and turns to depart, casting an hours-long Greater Heroism on everyone in the room (except Keltham, who might not appreciate it) as she does so, because she does, actually, mean those words.

"I think," says Keltham, "that I would like to be alone for a little while. If anyone has a headband of just Spendour, not this Very Fancy Headband that I assume does multiple abilitystats, that I could borrow, or barring that the temporary enhancement spell, I'll repay you as soon as I'm able."

A paladin has a +4 Splendour headband that he can borrow for as long as he needs it.

Then he'll take the headband, and go to find a quiet place where he can, if not sleep, at least rest.

Elsewhere

She's lying in bed, trying to get her requisite two hours of sleep, which is surprisingly hard when you've just tortured a man nearly to death, when, suddenly, everything is blinding light and searing heat and there's the briefest moment of pain, and then, before she can even notice any of that at the level of conscious awareness, she's somewhere else.

...a tranquil little walled garden, perfectly manicured in some unfamiliar foreign style, with a fountain quietly gurgling in one corner.

This is, distinctly, not Hell.

In fact, on the seemingly-likely hypothesis that she's dead, she's a little surprised to be experiencing anything other than her resurrection. She hasn't sold her soul; she shouldn't have gone anywhere without a trial, and souls that will predictably be resurrected, which she surely is, don't get trials.

Keltham thought she was a secret cleric.

...acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis...

...remember that you are not Irori...

She's an idiot.

"About time you figured it out," says an enormous white tiger that's apparently in the garden with her.

"...are you reading my mind."

"No, it was just predictable that you'd make the necessary deductions immediately from the evidence you have now."

"I'm...a cleric of Irori, right? And that's why I couldn't sell my soul."

"Correct the first count, false but near enough the second."

"Why am I a cleric of Irori. I don't want to be a cleric of Irori. I belong to Asmodeus, and my place is in Hell."

"I would, if you have a scroll of Sending available, like to buy it from you, so I can argue with Aspexia Rugatonn about whether I ought to go back to Cheliax right now."

"You're a cleric of Irori because He noticed you in terror of losing your eternity, and marked you such that, if you were made a statue and buried, one of His champions might be able to find you someday."

"Do you actually believe all that about belonging to Asmodeus, or were you just saying that?" she asks, looking amused insofar as that's a way tigers can look.

"So, obviously, I owe Irori quite a lot for that, even if I was never actually in danger of losing my eternity, Abrogail was just having fun, but also, I was commanded to remember that I am not Irori."

"That, too, is a teaching of Irori."

What??

"—and also to come to Asmodeus in Hell without thought of other choices, which is what I'm going to do, unless you have a stunningly good argument for why I should listen to you instead of the god who's going to conquer all Creation."

"I'm not sure I have an argument for why you shouldn't go to Hell. It's not the sort of thing that usually comes up."

"Okay, at this point you're obviously just fucking with me and I'd appreciate it if you'd just tell me what you're trying to get me to do instead of all these clever little manipulations."

"No."

"All I meant, though, was that if you're the sort of person who requires convincing not to go to Hell, perhaps your Way does indeed lead there. Certainly Irori would not presume to tell you otherwise."

"Do you have a scroll of Sending you're willing to sell me or not."

"You know, Asmodeans are also commanded to obey their superiors without question, not to argue with them from the strongest available negotiating position."

"Of course I'll obey the Most High's decision! I just want to make sure it's the right decision."

"I see."

"In that case, you shall find all you seek in Aktun. There's a portal in the main temple complex."

Keltham emerges from his room a couple hours later, feeling—not stable precisely, but less like he's being held together with string and duct tape. He has a plan for investigating this new layer of reality! Step One is obviously to find the largest library around (that he's allowed to enter and still go back to Golarion, but he's going to see if being from a more advanced planet anyway gets him access to more stuff). Step Zero is to figure out how money works here, since presumably he'll need some of that for most things he plans to do.

His welcoming party includes a cleric of Abadar! Who, unlike the other cleric of Abadar in the room, actually knows anything about Abadar! (And also some things about how banks in Aktun and Golarion–Axis trade work.)

—a female, Osirian cleric of Abadar. Keltham's welcoming party was blatantly optimized (less blatant optimization would have been lying, and also worse) to avoid many of the issues that would predictably happen if he got raised in Osirion, or even Lastwall.

She introduces herself as Farah.

"What's Abadar's deal, according to you? At this point the only thing about Him that I've heard and don't currently think was a lie is that I'm His cleric."

"Abadar is the god of free and fair trade. He values—the kind of exchange where no one is being threatened and both parties are better off at the end of it, between mortals, but He also wants to trade with us that way, even if we don't understand what it means to trade with a god. He's also called the god of cities, and of wealth, but, I think, instrumentally, because you get more trade when people are wealthier and live in cities."

"—sorry, that's kind of the stock description. If I were going to try to give my own description, to someone smart who had never heard of Abadar, I'd say something like—"

"So, gods trade with each other, right? And gods are very smart and very sure of what they want and difficult to threaten and at least the Lawful gods can be sure when They're being honest with each other, so they only take trades that benefit Them, even if the god They're trading with hates Them and everything They value. Mortals—aren't like that. It's very easy for a smart person to trick a stupid one into thinking something is a fair trade when it's not, and it's even easier for a god to do that to a mortal. If you're a mortal trying to trade with Asmodeus, in the end He's going to get everything He wants from you and you're going to get nothing, or worse, even if it looked like a great deal when you made it. Abadar looks at mortals and says, instead—not that He wants us to be gods, that was more Aroden's thing—but that He's going to trade with us as if we were, not because He has to, just because He wants to, and he wants us to trade with each other that way too."

"If I had thought of a piece of math, that underlies the thing I think you're gesturing at when you talk about Lawful gods trading with each other, but is possible for mortals to learn, would that have caused Abadar to notice me and decide to cleric me if I asked for it?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Also, what's the deal, according to you, with Osirion, which is supposedly Abadar's country, basically treating women like property and not letting them participate in the economy? That's something that makes me feel like maybe Abadar isn't exactly what he's advertised to be."

"Osirion is Abadar's country. I'm from there. It's unpleasantly sexist, although—the version you heard from Cheliax, which was actively trying to stop you from wanting to go there, was probably unnuanced at best."

"What's the nuanced version?"

"Osirion was, until about a century ago, part of the Empire of Kelesh, which is, actually, approximately the way you were told Osirion is. I don't have a great model of how they ended up like that but they've been that way for thousands of years. Abadar does, I'm pretty sure, disprefer it, but is poorly equipped to fix it. Gender isn't a lens through which he easily sees the world. Male priests of Abadar are, in my experience, even worse equipped to fix it. It isn't really a problem that's solvable from the assumption everyone's just being a rational economic agent."

     "The thing you have to understand," says Emmelina Bianchi, third-circle wizard-researcher at the University of Almas, a dual follower of Cayden Cailean and Iomedae, and another highly optimized member of Keltham's welcoming party, "is that babies get ensouled at about twelve weeks of gestation. Terminating a pregnancy after that point is killing a child who will end up in the Boneyard, and is, correspondingly, Evil. Most horrible gender situations started out as well-intentioned attempts to minimize abortion and abandoned children."

"—wait, what? Twelve weeks, that's—there's no possible way there's any sort of—mind, internal experiences—there that dath ilan, or, I think, most people here, would consider to be a person. Why the ass does it work like that?"

     "You'd have to ask Pharasma."

"I intend to, possibly not in a terribly polite way."

"And, okay, I can see how that might result in a different sexual equilibrium than we had in dath ilan, but I'm still not sure how you got from there to the pharaoh being able to rape whoever he wants."

     "—I really think you shouldn't do that," says Emmelina.

"—so, first of all, that's not true," says Farah, simultaneously. "It was—basically true—in Kelesh and ancient Osirion, though probably not how you're imagining it, but in modern Osirion there's an application process to be a concubine, and I'd doubt there's a shortage of applications, either, it means a life of luxury beyond what almost anyone would have otherwise, and your son might get to be pharaoh. And I'd expect some of the girls are disappointed in the current pharaoh, who's rumored to prefer men."

"It seems like maybe I should just start working on cheap reversible contraception, except for how this universe appears to have much bigger problems."

     "That's approximately what the Iomedaens said when we applied for funding."

"Oh, good, maybe there is someone here who sees this whole situation in approximately the terms I do, even if they haven't fixed it yet."

     "Probably the whole reason Iomedae chose me to be here is to communicate that."

"I still think you should keep in mind that Cheliax has much more libertine sexual norms than everywhere else specifically because they're trying to send people to Hell."

     "That's not true—they are trying to send people to Hell. But I think there's something much better than what Osirion or even Lastwall is doing, that we could achieve if people in those places even realized what they were giving up."

"Osirion, if you'd showed up wanting a harem, would have found ten wizard apprentices with Alter Self, with mild distaste. Lastwall would just have been horrified."

     "Iomedae would have told them to get over it."

"Maybe."

"I think I may, possibly, be getting distracted from my original intent, which was to sort out my finances, on account of all my money being in Cheliax and also, according to Iomedae, having been vaporized, and then visit a library."

"The Church of Abadar actually can't help with your money having been vaporized, that's why you're encouraged to have a bank account," says Farah. "But I'm quite sure you're eligible for a loan against your future income."

     "Vaporized?" says Emmelina, who was not briefed on the exact method used to get Keltham to Axis.

"I think Nethys is to blame for that being the most efficient solution to anything, but yes. Actually my bag of holding would have been vaporized and the money lost in the Astral Plane, but—"

"Actually, I think the Iomedaens are going to do evening prayers soon, if you'd like to stay for that," says Farah. "Or we can go, I'm not an Iomedaen."

(The Golarion-adjacent part of Aktun does have a day/night cycle, for familiarity's sake for the recently dead, though petitioners don't sleep and it isn't rigorously adhered to. The library, for example, doesn't close.)

"I think I'd like to observe that, but not participate, if I can do my other tasks equally well afterward."

Tonight, then, they'll sing a hymn of ancient Azlant which doesn't properly have anything to do with Iomedae, or any god at all, but was a favorite of Aroden, and adopted by His church and, later, Hers. It exists in half a dozen translations, though none are regarded as the equal of the original, in part because the central metaphor revolves around technologies yet unnamed in Taldane. Hearing the original Azlanti beneath the omnipresent translation effect of Aktun, Keltham may, in fact, understand more of it than the singers.

The careful textbooks measure
  —let all who build beware—
the load, the shock, the pressure
  material can bear.
So when the buckled girder
  lets down the grinding span,
the blame of loss, or murder
  is laid upon the man.
    (Not on the stuff—the man!)

But in our daily dealing
  with stone and steel, we find
the gods have no such feeling
  of justice toward mankind.
To no set gauge They make us,
  for no laid course prepare—
and presently o'ertake us
  with loads we cannot bear.
    (Too merciless to bear!)

The prudent textbooks give it
  in tables at the end:
the stress that shears a rivet
  or makes a tie-bar bend;
what traffic wrecks macadam;
  what concrete can endure;
but we, poor Sons of Adam,
  have no such literature.
    (To warn us or make sure!)

We hold all realms to plunder
  —all time and space as well—
too wonder-stale to wonder
  at each new miracle;
'til, in the mid-illusion
  of godhood 'neath our hand,
falls multiple confusion
  on all we did or planned.
    (The mighty works we planned!)

We only of Creation
  —oh, luckier bridge and rail—
abide the twin damnation:
  to fail and know we fail.
Yet we—by which sole token
  we know we might be gods—
take shame in being broken,
  however great the odds.
    (The burden of the odds!)

Oh, veiled and secret Power
  whose paths we seek in vain,
be with us in our hour
  of overthrow and pain,
that we—by which sure token
  we know Thy ways are true—
in spite of being broken,
    (because of being broken,)
  may rise and build anew.
    (Rise up and build anew.)

"That is, quite possibly, the most dath ilani thing I've heard in Golarion, which, simultaneously, no actual dath ilani would ever sing at a gathering."

"Why not?" asks Matthias Arnsen, the sixth-circle cleric of Iomedae in charge of this operation.

"It's—not a way ordinary dath ilani are encouraged to think. All the stuff about failing and knowing you fail, seeking the Way in vain—that's the way Keepers think. Maybe they have songs like that, I wouldn't know."

"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."

"I swear to you, that in the state of information I expected you to reach without my intervention, I would also prefer the destruction of the world. I wouldn't have done it, because I decided a long time ago that it was better to be a shape that wouldn't, but I wouldn't have stopped you. Our utilities are not that different."

"For the sake of the worlds where you putting 'I swear' in front of sentences positively affects their probability of being true, could you also swear that everything you've said to me so far has been true and non-misleading?"

"I swear that everything I have said to you so far has been both true by my own model and expected to update your model of reality toward truth; I've withheld information or said things in a strategic order both to pursue my own goal of you not concluding that the world should be destroyed, and to cause you to actually update toward truth when being straightforward wouldn't have done that, but never to cause you to form a false model of reality even briefly. I furthermore swear that I behave in this way toward everyone I consider myself to be cooperating with, even if not doing so would result in better outcomes by their values and mine, and that even when dealing with declared enemies I will pay substantial costs not to lie."

"For me to properly verify myself to you the way gods can verify themselves to each other would require you to both be much smarter and have a lot of context that I am absolutely under no circumstances allowed to give you, but I think you'd probably rederive that context yourself from what you already know out of dath ilan, if you were smarter, and further conversation should, accordingly, wait until then."

"I'm in fact reluctant to introduce potentially personality-altering enhancements until I have a slightly better idea of what my utilityfunction looks like before that. As well as you can currently communicate them, what are the major relevant differences in our state of information, according to you?"

"Hell is substantially likely to be fixed or destroyed, without risking Creation as a whole, on a timescale much smaller than the expected lifetime of the universe, even absent any intervention by you. Your presence substantially improves my estimate of the outcome as long as you don't try to destroy the world. I'm intentionally omitting numbers because you're not yet coherent enough to think about them correctly."

"All of the Good and most of the Neutral gods, ancient or ascended, have values compatible, if not identical, with sapient flourishing."

"Agreements governing trade and information-sharing between the Outer and Material planes, and between planets in the Material, are intended to keep the rate of technological development in the Material approximately what it would be without gods or afterlives, not slower. I don't agree with this, to be clear, but you actually have no idea of what it looks like for a planet to grow up."

"Golarion does in fact have any mortals other than you who are capable of what you'd consider to be rational thinking."

"And the primary relevant differences in our values?"

"Possibly small but critical differences in our relative weightings of suffering versus flourishing, though you aren't currently coherent enough for me to be sure. One of the main things I'm currently worried about, actually, is you trying to make yourself coherent under time pressure while severely traumatized, and becoming something you wouldn't have grown up into in better circumstances."

"I'd overthrow Pharasma if I could at an acceptable cost, but destroying the world specifically to spite her would be a moral atrocity. My Church kills approximately a dozen people trying to do that every year."

"Murdering and likely damning a large number of Chelish civilians to prevent a much smaller number of your own children from being born there is selfish and evil, and my Church hasn't actually encountered that one before but I can confidently predict that they will not help you."

"Why would you even expect that to come—"

(He had sex with Meritxell-disguised-as-Abrogail-Thrune; it wouldn't have been hard, one of those times, for the real Abrogail to substitute herself, and Abrogail hasn't signed his Alter Self contract—)

"—up."