There is a key truth about Nethys which one could deduce a priori, if one knew an a-priori truth that is not common a-priori knowledge in Golarion.

That key a-priori truth is as follows:  Everything that's real is causally well-founded.

The key definition:  A well-founded ordering is one where there's no infinite descending sequences.

The natural numbers are well-founded; no matter how high the number you start with, if you keep going downward, you'll eventually reach zero and then be able to go no further downward, no matter how clever the path you choose.

The negative integers are no more numerous than the positive integers, but their ordering is not well-founded; you can go down from -1 to -2, down from -2 to -19, and so on down forever.

Similarly, it happens to be an a priori truth that all consciousnesses find themselves inside of a continuum that is made up of quantities of realityfluid assigned to identity-points related by directed cause-and-effect laws (eg quantum amplitudes, in dath ilan).  And all these continuums of causal relation are causally well-founded; they contain no infinite sequences of causes of causes going forever backwards in time. 

Different continua have different Big Bangs—different degenerate-zero-points in their relations between the stuff of realness.  But they all have some equivalent of a Big Bang.

Some continuums last forever, they causally increase in time forever—though they necessarily become less and less real as they go, for no stretch of realness can sum to being infinitely real.  But a cause-of-effect sequence never goes back forever.

As a special case of this rule, time never goes in a loop.  Because then again one could talk of a cause, and a cause's cause, and a cause's cause's cause, and so on forever, even if you were covering the same territory and repeating yourself.  If you say that A > B > C > A... then that's not a well-ordered set even if it's a finite one.

(And why is that so?  Why is it that when you look about yourself—literally no matter who you are, anywhere, everytime—you find yourself inside a universe with a finite past?  You can, if your sight as a god or a civilization stretches far enough, see back to the local Beginning and know that you are in fact within a continuum with a finite past.  But why?  Can't logic describe possible laws of physics that include consistent time travel, or universes with infinite pasts, just like math can describe an infinite descent through negative integers?

And while these margins are too small to contain a satisfying answer, one key point is that local relations of physics can never pinpoint an event with an infinite past; all first-order axiom-sets with infinite models have models of every infinite cardinality, a vastness of unconstrained possibility whose numerosity is literally indescribable.  So while time can go on forever forward, the real people always find themselves at some particular finite time, because otherwise you couldn't be found at all.)

From Causality's well-foundedness, it follows that even when 'prophecy' was unshattered, gods could not see the future.  For to see a thing, is to be affected by it; to see a thing, is to have that thing be the cause of your observation; if X sees Y then Y is an ancestral cause of X.  If the past can see the future, then the future has affected the past, and a cause would have a cause and a cause's cause in an ill-founded causal ordering that descended forever.

And simple empirical observation confirms that prophecy in Creation never spoke of the future, for then it'd have simply been true, and unshatterable.

A priori, then, if you know which sort of continua can be real in the first place, you know that Nethys cannot see the future, God of Knowledge or not.

Then what is Nethys seeing?  Mere possibilities that aren't real?

Most civilizations - unless they are in some very confused stage of learning about their equivalent of quantum mechanics - will know better than to utter anything this confused: you cannot see things that are not real.  Even when you hallucinate you are seeing a real hallucination, there is something actually happening inside your brain that makes you see it.

To see something is to be affected by it; and real effects cannot be produced by unreal causes.  If the world-history of a photon going down a particular pathway affects your experimental results, then that world-history must have happened as much as anything ever happens; if all possible combinations of qubits contribute to a quantum computer's actual output, then all possible combinations of qubits must have been 'real'.  Only real causes have real effects; so whatever affects a real thing must also be real.  Causes and effects don't have be equally real - you can set things up so that a more real observer can see the output of a less real process - but the cause must be at least a little real.

(Though these margins are, again, too small to contain that logic whereby 'realness' for the purpose of 'the conscious entities described inside a causal system can find themselves there' and 'realness' for the purpose of 'real effects have real causes' are necessarily the same kind of 'realness'.  Without that connective step, the above is just a bare appeal to philosophical intuition - but a philosophical intuition that happens to be correct.)

Now consider: while Nethys was not perfectly accurate in His forecasts of what would happen around Keltham, He was able to pull some fairly intricate shenanigans, on the order of sparking off the Zon-Kuthon godwar and furthermore arranging for Pilar to be in place to take a sword for Keltham.

The 'possibilities' that Nethys glimpses are evidently detailed enough that they must have been less like abstract imagination-guesses, and more like full-blown causal universes themselves, very similar to the real Golarion.

And now comes the well-foundedness issue:  If Nethys sees a 'possibility' including a Kuthite sword aimed at Keltham, this 'possibility' evidently contains its own Nethys, without whom a Zon-Kuthon godwar doesn't get set off in the first place.

Does the Nethys inside this 'possibility' also see a great field of secondary 'possibilities', each such secondary 'possibility' containing its own Nethys, who in turn sees many tertiary 'possibilities' containing Nethysi, and so on forever?

And the a priori truth says: no, that can't go on forever, not if Nethys and Creation and the Magical Continuum exist at all and have consciousnesses finding themselves inside them.  You can't have a setup in which Nethys sees other possible Golarions, with those Golarions containing Nethysi (as Golarions always do) and all those Nethysi see Golarions containing other Nethysi and so on forever.

To see a thing is to be affected by it; "Nethys saw an alternate Nethys who saw an alternate Nethys who saw..." is ill-founded causality, infinitely descending through causes of causes.

Consider Keltham materializing into Golarion, near the Worldwound.

Consider the notion of Nethys looking around this event, and seeing how that event went in the futures of Keltham-containing possible Golarions with their own meddling Nethysi; and therefore becoming an effect of whom those other Keltham-containing Golarions and Nethysi were a cause.

Then - if you trace back and back in the causality - you must eventually come to a Nethys who sees Keltham at the worldwound, and has not seen the futures of any possibilities containing a Keltham.

And the same logic applies wending through time: at the event-point "one minute after the arrival of Keltham into a Golarion with a Nethys who has not seen any other Keltham's futures", there must again be some subsequent Nethys who has not seen any later future of a Golarion like that.  Even if they are relatively very rare among Nethysi, they must exist in order to provide a causal foundation for all the towers of observing Nethys built on top of them.

Which is all to say - if Time and Causality are well-founded, and in fact, they are -

Among the possibilities that it is possible for a Nethys to foresee -

There must be a possibility containing a Nethys who foresaw nothing at any point of how it would go with Keltham.

It begins with Keltham materializing at the Worldwound, and running into the building closest to him, containing Carissa Sevar.

The first steps play out in just the same way.  Nethys doesn't have a startled reaction to somebody materializing whom He has never seen in any future possibility; Nethys is fragmented and the fragments take time to communicate, and 'no answer found' replies are harder to verify than 'answer found' ones.

The fragment of Nethys that sees Keltham wonders what other Nethys fragments know about Keltham, and casts glances towards Nethys-fragments in alternate universes at later clock times, searching for a piece of Himself that knows more.  It will take some time for the Nethys-fragment to reach the surprising conclusion that His greater self spread across possibilities seems to know nothing; such that this Nethys is witness to either a truly unique one-time event, or perhaps is one of those rare Nethysi who form a base of His own well-founded vision.

And then later, having probably-verified this delightful surprising fact, Nethys will still do nothing.  Action is painful to Him, it is painful to pull enough of Himself together to act.  Nethys does not superintelligently forecast the future but observe alternate forms of it, and His shattered mad fragments are not able to deduce in advance how it will all go, only make obvious guesses like that Golarion will be swifter to invent magical nukes.

That zeroth Nethys will guess that matters will play out in an already-interesting way, which the zeroth Nethys does not yet see a vast stake in disturbing.

Boy meets girl.

Girl reads boy's mind.

Keltham envisions Abadar's special thing from scratch.

Abadar bargains with Asmodeus to ensure that this strange being eventually reaches Osirion in condition to have teachings bought from him.

The priest at the Worldwound receives Asmodeus's vision.

Project Pet Outsider is begun, in an archduke's villa.

Eleven girls among the current graduating class in Ostenso are sent to Keltham as a welcoming present.

...and later that night, Keltham looks towards Abadar again, and Abadar grants him three cleric levels (or as they say among the mortals, two cleric circles); for Nethys does not, in this possibility, offer to help pay.

Keltham's hosts go on reading his mind.  It might not be safe for Carissa Sevar to do it, anymore (and she sure is not happy about that), but it is safe for fifth-circle Securities and above.

Carissa Sevar comes to Irori's attention as before, and Irori bargains with Asmodeus...

But Ione Sala is not oracled of Nethys.

And Abadar has not made Keltham a fourth-circle cleric.  The level of divine interest that Cheliax has seen does not imply an urgent need for Project personnel to sell their souls.

Carissa Sevar is not brought before a devil to bargain.  The special instructions from Hell concerning her do not become known.

Carissa Sevar remains only another subordinate on the Project, of importance only insofar as she's useful for getting information out of Keltham.

(And Project Pet Outsider remains the subject of a single visible divine intervention, not two interventions of Asmodeus and an intervention of Nethys and of Otolmens and a huge bestowal of cleric circles from Abadar.)

Pilar Pineda is not oracled of Cayden Cailean.  It really isn't very probable for that to happen under normal conditions.  Anybody who's only seen a version of Golarion where this happens may have acquired some wrong ideas about what's normal there.

Ione Sala does not try to give herself to Keltham, shows him no special ability along with a sexual offer.  Keltham does not think of eroLARPs as a result.  Keltham does not perceive evidence of tropes.  He does not ask the Project girls if there are other special people among them.

When it comes time to initiate sex with Keltham, Carissa Sevar only asks Security for her instructions, and does not go to Maillol.  Security disgustedly orders Sevar not to bother with worrying about what might upset Keltham if he eventually finds out; only to please him and seduce him.

The Security reading Keltham's thoughts during their sexual encounter warns Sevar early on that Keltham can read her levels of sexual arousal.

Carissa doesn't need to give Keltham an explanation about why she was faking her responses, only say that she is still unwinding from the Worldwound.

Abrogail Thrune has no particular reason to appear in Carissa Sevar's bedroom.

Aspexia Rugatonn does not cast an expensive Forbiddance about the villa.

Contessa Lrilatha is not needed to negotiate with Keltham since others can read his mind.

Zon-Kuthon is not alerted to look in Keltham's direction.  There is no Zon-Kuthon godwar to vastly increase Cheliax's estimate of Keltham's importance to the gods.

Asmodia doesn't go to Hell, doesn't tell a contract devil about Keltham's ambitions.

Abadar Himself does not know that this strange mortal is of much greater import than just the mortal knowing an important piece of math.  His attention has had less reason to gather, and He sees less of a cleric merely second-circle; His choice of possible spells with which to help, is more restricted.

And Otolmens is less unhappy with the total amount of divine intervention...

...which means that Otolmens is more amenable to manipulation, and Asmodeus has accordingly put more effort into manipulating Otolmens toward His interests' favor.

So Abadar and Asmodeus negotiate rather than fight, and both gods end up doing nothing, as is often the case with gods.

(They don't, actually, know the stakes, either of Them; for if it were that obvious, Abadar would have paid more, or Asmodeus charged more, in the beginning.)

And so matters plod on, in the archduke's villa, slower than they did in another timeline.

There is a diffidence to dath ilani, under some conditions if not others, that might surprise those who'd seen those dath ilani only under other conditions.  Keltham, having not yet proven himself of great importance, does not demand more resources from Cheliax; much as, in another timeline, he didn't demand larger and earlier investments in making spellsilver, or demand for someone to Teleport in immediately with a sack full of library books.  Chelish Governance may be presumed to have arrived at their own sensible investment priorities, given their skepticism of unproven Keltham.  It is his job to prove himself more valuable, if he wants more investment than that.

(Young dath ilani will do that, not ask for more resources or spend more resources, if they don't see themselves as having proven themselves enough to their investors.  In the median case they'll go on doing it even if they're altruists and the entire world is at stake and people are dying every day.  This particular facet of the average dath ilani's personality is not necessarily going to make sense to humans of other places; there is emotion behind it, not mathematics.)

The twelve original women of Project Pet Outsider remain Keltham's primary research group.  He doesn't fire the four underperformers, because Keltham doesn't expect that he'll be allowed to recruit more researchers if he does.  The teaching goes on more slowly, instead.

There is no Avaricia, no Shilira, no professional alchemist, not in the first two weeks, not in the first two months.

The Securities are less eager to spend their illusions on helping Keltham master wizardry.

His Chelish students are less impressed with Keltham, though they go on pretending to be impressed, after the first shock fades; he's not fourth-circle, and Zon-Kuthon didn't try to assassinate him and end up in a small box.  Being less eager, they learn more slowly.  Except for Carissa Sevar, they show more delight in 'practical' knowledge and not more abstract Law.

Everything plays out more gradually, in the archduke's villa; and Keltham's Chelish hosts are reading his mind, swifter to deflect his suspicions.

They are reading Keltham's mind, and his women are told how they should be, to please him; but the thought did also occur to Maillol, to try to corrupt Keltham to Evil for real, and to that end it is convenient that Carissa and Peranza and Yaisa have the sexuality that they do.

The process takes longer, but over time Carissa's feelings develop for the man who's come to think of himself as owning her, who would own her did he only wish it, who's been told that he could have her for real given the political realities; and who, with all that power, is yet kind to her.

In time acid manufacture starts to scale and be proven.  Not yet spellsilver, just acid; but acid still yields enough project income that Ferrer Maillol thinks he can afford nice things without spending a lot of political capital.

Project Pet Outsider's women are called in to sell their souls.

Asmodia—now Keltham's "ace girlfriend", to the puzzlement of many who don't bother to understand—tries to demand a fair share of her soul's price.  Asmodia tries to ignore threats.

She is hurt until she comes back to her senses.

The soul-sales trip the flag of Carissa Sevar's special instructions from Hell.

By this time, however, Sevar's status and place within the Project is well-set.  There's an informal respect that sees more Project decisions routed to Sevar to check, but she doesn't receive command.  It's suspected that she's being groomed as a cleric of Asmodeus and/or that Irori is contesting for her.

Abrogail Thrune doesn't manifest in Carissa's bedroom afterwards; Sevar is more of a known quantity in reports by now.

But that event plus the Project's success with acid-making does merit putting up a Forbiddance, and Aspexia Rugatonn does talk to Carissa Sevar.  The Most High's decisions proceed from a wisdom deep enough to be less swayed by immediate context.

And Maillol does pay more attention to Sevar's theories about how Keltham should be seduced toward Evil; and Sevar, feeling safer in her status, is able to admit more of her 'pathetic' feelings to herself.

While they're halfway through mastering spellsilver, Peranza receives an Owl's Wisdom, and changes her mind, and in one blinding flash of impulse decision calls out to Iomedae.

But it is hard, to outwit Asmodeus, if you do not have Nethys ranged upon your own side and taking potentially fatal risks.

By the time Iomedae has gathered enough of Herself to decide to act, by the time She is ready to reach out to Abadar for an alliance to save His cleric, Asmodeus has already set in motion His trickery upon some unwitting godly cats-paws: there are three uncoordinated divine interventions in quick succession around Project Pet Outsider, one of them by Irori.

Otolmens is accordingly annoyed.

She prohibits all unauthorized divine interventions that deliberately causally impact Keltham—an intervention centered on Keltham himself, this time, not Ostenso.  Irori is in no position to advise Her otherwise.

(And a fragment of Nethys sees Asmodeus's successful tactic, watching with continuing interest, with rare fascination...)

Security Dominates Peranza into quitting, giving Keltham the Sevar-invented story of her having realized her own unhappiness.

By then Keltham has already accepted Peranza as one of his girlfriends and masochists; he has gone much deeper into relationship with her than he went with Yaisa, who was just fun.

It hits Keltham far harder, what happens to Peranza; but his thoughts show what Peranza must be Dominated to say, to make him accept the unpleasant reality.

Instructions from Asmodeus prohibit using Keltham's loved ones as leverage over him, or hurting them to affect him; they don't actually say to exempt anyone Keltham loves from their ordinarily incurred misfortunes.

Ferrer Maillol sends Peranza to Hell, with instructions to have a bad time there.

The Project masters spellsilver, and Keltham does think then to run a stricter test.

But by then the Conspiracy has had longer to prepare, with a larger budget once it became clear the whole incredible concept was going to work; and the Conspiracy has recorded far more of Keltham's thoughts, and understood what sort of tests he might run; they spot his resolve the night before it all happens.  Keltham's wariness is not roused as it was by the eroLARP tropes, by the supposed Zon-Kuthon godwar, by the strangeness of Snack Service.  There are magic items already forged, books already edited.  He is weaker to illusions, without any Glimpse of Truth or even Dispel about himself.

They pass his test.

And Keltham goes on to reinvent more technologies.

...until at the last a group of Rovagug cultists pass through all Security measures, and kidnap Keltham; and tell him the plain truth about Golarion; and what his hosts have done with the knowledge he gave them; and the questions for which Keltham should demand answers sworn in Asmodeus's name; and also they tell him of Hell.

As for why or how something like that could even happen: it usually makes sense to consider Rovagug as a blindly hungry unintelligent cosmic locust writhing endlessly in Its prison, but every now and then some completely other thing happens instead: like the alghollthus calling down the Starstone; or Sarenrae deciding to smite an entire city in a way that She later regrets and that opens up a rift leading to Rovagug's vault; or Aroden dying, contrary to prophecy and shattering it, before He can make Golarion His divine realm and contain Rovagug more strictly; or Rovagug cultists successfully kidnapping Keltham and loosing him on a world of shattered prophecy.

That is all that a non-Outer-God can say here; you won't understand if your own hunger as a giant bug hasn't advanced to the point of eating worlds.

In Cheliax, when a fuckup as great as the Rovagug penetration happens, you're not going to get off the hook entirely no matter what you do, if you were in charge.  But it does still help for there to be scapegoats.

All who remain on the Project are interrogated under Detect Thoughts...

...and one of the Project personnel is determined to have had Rovagug-sympathetic thoughts, as Rovagug might perhaps have seen, used as a beacon.

So—with her protective boyfriend now gone and not coming back, and Cheliax divinely forbidden to use Keltham's women as hostages against him which makes her less valuable—Asmodia is broken in Golarion by Abrogail Thrune, and has her mind read to find her worst of fears; and Asmodia is given over to Cheliax's uneasy ally Nidal, to be tormented again and then maledicted on to Xovaikain.

And Keltham emerges into a world he has already damned, for by then, Osirion, his god's land, is gone, ruined by Cheliax, and Cheliax is now crushing its way through the rest of Golarion.

This Keltham has not seen Ione Sala obtain special book powers after he advanced her romance, the word 'eroLARP' has not particularly occurred to him, he has not thought much on tropes for he has not seen much of tropes.

To him, by now, this world, Golarion, is just reality, and has been for a while, the reality in which he meant to live and raise a family and in time go to Hell together with them.  He had already put aside his thoughts on how real any of it really was, and accepted Golarion for his new world.

His mind questions the reality now, of course it does; but to his emotions, at this point, this is just the world, and he has destroyed it.

When Keltham makes Early Judgment of himself, as he has not done in some time now for fear of addiction, he finds himself bound for a place of fire and endless screaming.  Pharasma's judgment does take account of intentions, but Keltham was at least a little selfish, in liking the illusory world in which he found himself; and there comes a point of consequence beyond which intentions count for less in Pharasma's court.

And there is also (as Keltham has now learned, now realized) an abortion that he requested of Ione, with Alter Self, of a pregnancy that was allowed to go for longer than a twelve-week interval; he has a child, and that child is in the Boneyard.  Or more than one; Cheliax will obviously have stolen more children from him, and there will have been a few miscarriages.  But Ione's child is the one for which Pharasma will account him murderer.

It doesn't shatter anything in Keltham that wasn't shattered already.  Casting aside your Law is not hard.  He decides that he will, after some preparation, just shift himself to Neutral Evil.  It'll break his bond to Abadar, but he wasn't planning to keep it anyways.  If "Abadar" did not care to pay a little more and save him from this fate, he owes that god nothing; It intended to make use of Keltham, was all.

You cannot easily break a dath ilani's deontology just with ordinary trauma.  They are not made, do not choose to individually make themselves, to be easily broken; for most ordinary traumas they could just decide not to break, instead.  To call someone from that culture "traumatized" is scarcely more useful then calling them "insane", for purposes of filling out a detailed careful predictive model of precisely what they'll do next.

But there are sufficiently extreme and prior-improbable life experiences which will cause a dath ilani to reconsider whether their previous set of ethical injunctions are appropriate to their new environment.

The Project has not prioritized corrupting Keltham to evil, with Carissa Sevar not in charge of it; he knows what masochism is, and submission, but Carissa Sevar was instructed by authority not to push him into it and risk triggering his suspicion.

There's no plausible version of the story, in this iteration of the story, where Keltham's mistake as evaluated looking back was his being too tolerant of evils and short-term harms.  His mistake must have been—not even being Good, so much as, being himself.

The foundation of Civilization's second-order utilitarianism, as taught in their schools, is that—among other things—being cautiously nice isn't supposed to result in your loved ones being shattered in Hell and you having helped an endless-torture dimension to conquer your host planet.  Being cautiously nice isn't always supposed to result in the locally best outcome, maybe not even a good outcome, but it's not meant to result in that.  If it does, surprising you, maybe you were wrong about something.

(Though this Keltham will still, to the end of his mortal existence, never break any explicit oath that he has made.  He will never stab anyone personally with a knife, will not harm anyone in any way that would be effective for somebody inside a physicalist universe and hallucinating.  Just in case he's in dath ilan and insane and dreaming all of this as his brain's excuse to violate deontology.)

Carissa Sevar is less watched, on the Project, with Keltham out and gone.  There is less Security on the archduke's villa.  In time she has her mid-night revelation of her own folly...

...but this Carissa does not think at once of how Keltham might destroy Creation.  There was no Vision of Hell and no godwar and Zon-Kuthon has not been a subject much discussed; nor whether Civilization would delete itself to end Xovaikain if it had no other options.

(The thought of erasing her memory and selling her soul to Dispater doesn't even occur to her.  You need to have lived in a visibly trope-influenced universe for that to seem like the sort of thing that people get away with, and this Carissa Sevar hasn't been there.)

Her escape from the archduke's villa is more harrowing than in other timelines.  Osirion is already ruined and conquered by Cheliax, and anyone there with high Wisdom who could not flee chose to wisely die in battle; escape is not as simple as praying to Abadar and then killing herself to await resurrection.  This Carissa Sevar does not hold commanding authority on the Project, does not have Securities personally loyal to her in hopes of a kinder Hell.  She has not been tormented twice by Abrogail Thrune, and is not fifth-circle.  She did reach her fourth circle, in time, for she was casting and crafting under peril deeper in some ways than the Worldwound; but she cannot Teleport under her own power.

Carissa Sevar escapes anyways.  Irori does not bestow His attention lightly.

Keltham is not easily found, but he has taught this Carissa Sevar of blind-coordination focal points.  There should be a place that Carissa Sevar would think of after relinquishing Asmodeus, that Keltham would also think of.

Her first guess doesn't work.

Going to the ruins of the Iomedaen temple nearest to Keltham's arrival point by the Worldwound does.

From there, Carissa goes to meet her Keltham.

Of Wishes and artifact headbands she has none, nor the souls of those he once employed or loved; there was no visible way to obtain those, in this branch of reality.

All she has, is all she is; and if she doesn't offer Keltham that, it means offering him nothing.

And Carissa Sevar finds her Keltham, and falls to the floor at his feet; and offers up all she is, in sorrow and in penance, to help him in his plan against Asmodeus.  For she is sure, knowing Keltham, that he has a plan like that, and that he is not content to wait in despair.

By then Keltham has scryed Peranza and Asmodia's fate, knows that Peranza is already shattered in Hell beyond all hope of repair, that Asmodia in Xovaikain still remembers something of herself as she screams and screams and screams and sometimes calls his name.

Keltham of the latest iteration found it necessary to proclaim that he'd been effectively killed, destroyed, by his experiences.  The Keltham of the zeroth iteration doesn't have any need to say anything like that; it's just true.

Carissa returns to a man that she has already destroyed, whose love for her is shattered along with everything else about him that she loved.

This Keltham warns her not at all.  He accepts his fate, to betray her as she betrayed him.  Carissa didn't want to do it, but did; and Keltham does the same, because he has children in the Boneyard and sometimes Asmodia screams his name.

He binds Carissa by geas to honesty and promise-keeping—for he still has great sums that Cheliax by compact owes him, though he negotiated less aggressively in this timeline.

Carissa Sevar accepts that binding as part of what she thinks is her penance.

As her primary task, Keltham sets Carissa to crafting a +6/+6 Intelligence/Wisdom headband for himself.

Splendour would be improbable, as something that she could attain on top of that; and Keltham (though he does not say so) would not want it if she could.  This Keltham has tried casting Eagle's Splendour on himself, from scroll; and he found that +4 Splendour's balance of making his emotions stronger, versus giving him more force of will to endure his own emotions, was more painful than helpful.  He does not want his Splendour increased again.  It makes him more himself again, and he'd rather not be.  There aren't, really, much in the way of feelings that he wants to have.

Keltham's diamond-making takes longer.  He does not have kingdoms and empires offering to be his purchase-agents.

Keltham tells Carissa nothing of that diamond-making, before or after.

He goes to the City of Brass alone, and in secret, and augments only himself.  He doesn't augment Strength or Dexterity, except with a belt he can remove, because the improvement might be too visible.  He doesn't augment Splendour.

What returns from Brass is even less the same person.  He didn't want to be himself anymore, and INT 29 / WIS 27 / CHA 14 enables him to make a good start on that Wish.

The entity that returns from Fommok Madinah—which one might as well go on calling Keltham—does then a thing which intact dath ilani would not do:  He shows Carissa Sevar a Wish-scroll (that he purchased in Brass at ludicrous cost), and asks Carissa Sevar for her help with understanding Wishcraft.  Keltham doesn't name any particular Wish; he says he wants Carissa's analysis about what he can Wish for, and what that would take, and how it might go wrong.

She does not know, when he asks for her analysis, that he is INT 29 and not merely INT 24 like her.

The truth, Keltham has already deduced, is that Wish wordings often seem to be interpreted in a deliberately perverse way, as if some anti-genie were trying to minimize the caster's utility function subject to the constraint of the words spoken.  One can deduce that truth in some detail; there are cases where Wishes did, not harm in general, but something the caster particularly wouldn't have wanted.

You can maybe conjure an exact mass of an exact kind of antimatter in an exact place—if you use Wish-words carefully enough, for the length of the wording is also a conserved resource.

But if it were something more complicated than that, which an antimatter blast alone might not accomplish, you would obviously want to...

And INT 29 Keltham carefully filters which true sources of evidence Carissa Sevar receives to examine, which legends, which accounts.

Carissa Sevar concludes that the caster's conscious intentions are what a Wish perverts.

She herself proposes the clever solution that seems obvious to her, the solution that Keltham foresaw that Carissa would deduce from filtered evidence:  You might be able to get more done, if you'd done everything else right, if at the last stage somebody casts the Wish without knowing what the wording means.

Keltham gives Carissa her last instructions as she stands within a concealing darkness they have Teleported into, to read a Wish scroll whose Wish-phrasing is written in a tongue she knows not.

And by then she does have qualms, even though it was her own plan that brought herself there, but—

Trusting to Keltham's honesty, at the very last, she speaks the Wish-wording he gave her.

And the outcome that comes about is the one that Keltham needed, if not wanted: an outcome pessimal by that Wish-caster's own values.  For the truth was that Carissa stood unwitting far beneath the surface of Golarion, close to where the strange planar boundary of Rovagug's Dead Vault infringed upon the Material.

...And then, with the gods thoroughly distracted, Keltham destroys Absalom wholly in a single blast of antimatter that leaves plenty of safety margin about overwhelming Aroden's protections; and with a third Wish sends Achaekek to Its death; and touches the Starstone with his last mortal thought being: to fix this world or destroy it, bring Pharasma to heel, and tear Asmodeus out of reality at any cost.

The subsequent fight against Rovagug destroys Golarion, of course; but in time It is driven out of Creation before It has consumed more than a handful of other planets.

Asmodeus is tired by that battle, but so are the other greater gods also tired...

...when the ascended remains of Keltham come before Them to present His demands.

Then there is a godwar after a godwar, with Zon-Kuthon and Urgathoa and Lamashtu and most demon lords backing Asmodeus; and the likes of Ahriman and the qlippoth trying to make sure that no god survives it or that Keltham isn't satisfied with the outcome.

Zon-Kuthon fought on neither side of the Rovagug battle, but He fights on this one, and His wrath as a fresh combatant is very great.

When it ends, when it all ends, the first and second layers of Hell are destroyed and everything inside it that was hurting is no longer feeling anything at all.

Axis is ravaged and there are wounds torn out of Heaven; there was a cove in Nirvana where otters frolicked, but it is no more; late-comers to Elysium and the Abyss will arrive to different places than earlier entrants; the deeper layers of the Abyss have been cut loose and cast back into true-chaos; the vast void where Xovaikain once stood is still spreading and unraveling more of the Plane of Shadow.

...But there is no more Asmodeus, and no more Zon-Kuthon, no tortures in what's left of the afterlives; and prophecy across the rest of Creation has been remade to the end of protecting mortals from their own heroes' powers, now that mortals are allowed to rise.

There is little left in that altered Creation for god-Keltham, though He survived the god-war.  Among Zon-Kuthon's last acts was to take up the soul of Asmodia and hunt down the soul of Peranza in deeper Hell, and seize the souls of Ione Sala and Yaisa Castilla fresh-come to Dis; and though Zon-Kuthon had little time or energy to spare for elaborations, He hurt those souls and broke them, and hurled their remains into the grasp of the sort of Outer God that would not just immediately destroy them.

And Zon-Kuthon also hunts the soul of Carissa Sevar from the River of Souls: and working quickly He twists all her desires against herself, makes her something that desires to extinguish itself and not be revived, that longs for a cessation that is not granted; and Zon-Kuthon makes her to be not herself, erases memories or inverts them; and when the consciousness that was Carissa Sevar is ruined as fully as Zon-Kuthon can ruin it quickly, He erases it then, not to continue in any other continuum that respects the current wishes of a sapience.  It was a hard decision, for Zon-Kuthon, whether to inflict on Carissa the fate that Keltham wished least, or that Carissa wished least; but he settled on mainly the latter, for Dou-Bral would have prioritized Carissa's own best wishes for herself.

So there is little left, then, for what little is left of Keltham.  His god-self builds a simpler kinder Lawful Good god that will do whatever Good He might have done, in His place, and then He bids It consume Himself.

Where Keltham's consciousness goes after that—is not something that the little swimming Outer Gods of the Magical Continuum know, where the gods go when they die.

Iomedae would not call it victory; she determined before she touched the Starstone to pursue a better victory than that.  The mortal-ascended gods of Golarion are all dead now, of course, so Iomedae is not there to see it, but She would not call it victory.

Sarenrae, Shelyn, Desna, do not call it victory; Erastil does not call it victory.  Trillions of souls have been unmade within Creation; it's too steep a price, by Their reckoning of costs and benefits.  In Creation's diminished Future there will be mortals who are wealthier and happier; but there were some wealthy and happy mortals already, and more wealthy and happy mortals on the way, if that's a term of your utility function.

Irori is dead, his nephew Gruhastha is dead, almost all of Their students are dead.  It's not too high a price to pay to gain for mortals the right to rise, if it's the only way to obtain that outcome; but Irori would trust to His own diligence to obtain that outcome in due time.  He believes in Himself as strongly as Iomedae believes in Herself (though, Irori would claim, with better justification); and had you offered Him this end, He would have said, "I think I can do better."

Abadar wishes, in the end, in the ruins of Aktun and a First Vault now shattered, that He had never traded with Keltham.

There was a Keltham who would have cared about that, but he ended when he scryed Asmodia in Xovaikain.

Relatively few gods out of Golarion, if They could have seen it all coming, if They had only the sole choice between all of that happening, and not happening, in the beginning, would have chosen not to strike down Keltham upon the spot.

A vast terrible order is overthrown, and a better order has replaced it.  It would be Milani's nature to pay the cost.

Some beings just aren't that horrified by the concept of nonexistence, even before taking into account more exotic possibilities.  The gods can no longer mess freely with mortals.  In time, very few children will go hungry.  The screaming Boneyard babies will have caretakers who are not devils.  Cayden Cailean would have taken it, if offered the packaged choice.  He did not trust to Iomedae's promise of victory with Aroden gone.

And Nethys—will find Creation less horrifying to look at, now.

And then it all begins again, inside the well-founded possibilities.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and a Nethys who has seen exactly one other possibility like this witnesses it.

The key knowledge doesn't make it to the witnessing fragment instantly; different pieces of Nethys see this Keltham, and see the future of a previous possible world where a Keltham appeared.

But it's communicated in time, and then, the greater Nethys starts to realize that this set of observations is actually quite important.

So important, even, as to be worth focusing His precious energy and His more precious scraps of coherence, on understanding the anomaly, on manipulating events to be more favorable to Himself and His interests.

And so the Nethysi begin to play the Game of Keltham.

The first Nethys-Player (accounting the previous Nethys as the zeroth Player, who only performed the null action) doesn't actually do very much that's different.  Nethys is left better off at the end of the null action; He doesn't want to risk not getting that benefit for Himself.

So Nethys does not slay Keltham, who will if left undisturbed batna Pharasma with Creation's destruction.  A coherent agent ought always to do at least as well for its interests, as if it didn't care or didn't exist; and any other agent who calls that a threat is out of luck.

The only interventions that Nethys tries are quiet ones, interventions that a supermajority of gods ought to see as quite helpful, really.

His herald Arcanotheign steals away the lost child of Ione Sala from the River of Souls.  Takaral buys Peranza's soul as soon as it arrives in Dis.  Asmodia dies mysteriously during the Rovagug security breach, and has her soul stolen away to Nethys's sanctuary as well.

So Keltham does not find Asmodia or Peranza screaming, when he scries them; he does not find them at all.

Despite this, Keltham is still moved to save Golarion or destroy it—to Nethys's relief, for He cannot predict the unseen future that finely and He was not sure that Keltham would still serve ultimatum upon Pharasma.

Thankfully, Keltham's having wrecked the entire world of Golarion and put it into Hell's grasp is apparently still enough to cause him to reconsider a few things.

Carissa Sevar receives miraculous inspiration from the God of Magic while about her task of forging Keltham's headband, somehow producing a lesser artifact that's +6/+6/+4 instead of just +6/+6.

This Keltham is less emotionally destroyed; he doesn't like what Splendour does to him, and the obvious Nethys-intervention he likes even less, but he decides after long thought that he's willing to accept the unwanted +4 Splendour in exchange for the +6 Wisdom.

An omniscient god opposing Keltham's purposes, and willing to intervene on this level and violate Otolmens's interdict, could just as easily destroy him if truly adversarial.

Keltham finds somebody else to cast his unwitting Wish.  There's some pretty shitty seventh-circle casters in the world, who nonetheless don't want Rovagug consuming everything they've known. If you're willing to go completely to town on them, with mind-magic and Suggestions and mindscapes and false memories, you can get them to where they'll cast a blinded Wish with the right utility function to be inverted.

It's not easy and it's more risky and the whole world is at stake and one person's feelings shouldn't matter that much; but even so, that Keltham finds that to use Carissa for that purpose would be doing too much violence to the last surviving bits of himself.

When Rovagug is unleashed upon Golarion, Nethys's agents are there to grab every soul whose destruction might move Keltham to unreasonable fury, and shelter them in Nethys's divine realm.

...and Keltham-who-touches-the-Starstone is less bent on salvation-or-destruction, and the subsequent god-Keltham makes less stringent demands of Pharasma and the divinities.

Some Chaotic gods and demon lords switch sides or withdraw, compared to the first final conflict.

The greatest godwar finishes faster.

Matters go essentially as in the zeroth ending, but with a little less damage, maybe five percent fewer true-casualties.

Good enough!  The first Nethys-Player hasn't gotten everything He wanted, but He's got a lot that He wanted, and He didn't want to take great risks for only a little more utility.

And then it all begins again, inside the well-founded possible worlds.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and a Nethys who has seen the futures of exactly two possible worlds like that one witnesses it.

The key knowledge doesn't make it to the witnessing fragment instantly; different pieces of Nethys see this Keltham, or see the future of a previous possible world where a Keltham appeared.  But it's internally communicated in time, and then, the greater Nethys starts to realize that this set of observations is actually quite important.

Nethys is insane, but not so insane that He has lost His grasp of decision theory.  While there were zero visible other possibilities like that, or while there was only one other possibility, it was plausible that those possibilities were all that there would be.  Three worlds with Kelthams more strongly suggest four, five, six such worlds, containing their own Nethysi who will observe this Nethys as a possibility.

Then this Nethys should begin to take into account the advantages of Nethysi who will observe later.

This is a bit more fraught with fragmented Nethys than it would be with other gods, even the most Chaotic ones; but while Nethys-fragments may sometimes fail to cooperate with each other, they are at least a little better about cooperating with their alternate selves.

(If your own grasp on decision theory is weaker than that of a god, imagine Nethys realizing for the first time that He would be so divided in the future, into alternate possibilities.  Nethys would then modify Himself so that His many possible branches would cooperate among themselves, if they wouldn't already, this being in His own expected interest.  You might think of it this way, that having not precommitted in such a way, Nethys of course postcommits.)

And so the Nethysi begin to probe the Possibilities of Keltham.

Nethys, even damaged as He is, reasons out many matters much faster than a being of mere INT 18 might imagine, requiring less evidence.  He is damaged, but He is trying unusually hard to pull more of Himself together and think again.

Something smarter than you has a greater sample efficiency and lower sample complexity than you first-order-expect; for if you knew exactly how to reason from fewer observations, you would be that sample-efficient yourself.  (If you're second-order well-calibrated, you'll be surprised on the upside and downside equally often; but that's hard, when you're dealing with cleverness unforeseen.)

A mortal maybe would be in doubt, on just the third iteration, as to whether dozens or hundreds of thousands of iterations would be expected.  Keltham is among the most unique of unique things that have arrived to Golarion—all Creation is not threatened that often.  Who's to say that there'll be hundreds or thousands of his possibilities, and not just three?

But Nethys is pretty sure on the third iteration (not the first two) that there will be many Kelthams.  You could try to imagine an argument for that, or another argument, or dispel a counterargument, but none of those will be the real reason Nethys guesses correctly and with strong probability.  It's more like a sum over all those arguments and counterarguments, plus exotica like 'linear regression' that mortals could only recognize as a wordless intuition.

(Or maybe cast even all that aside and ask yourself—in Greater Reality, do you expect most Nethysi in this Nethys's situation, to be inside an iteration with only three Kelthams, or many?  If you can see in an intuitive flash that it feels more like most such Nethysi would be inside iterations with lots of Kelthams, then you already have the feeling of guessing yourself what it is that the God of Knowledge seems somehow mysteriously to know.  It isn't hard to know, sometimes, even if a mortal feels hard-pressed to come up with any justifiable explanation for it to other mortals.)

The learning to the current iteration takes fewer tries than you would first-order-expect; Nethys does not require anything like hundreds of loops to get there.

It does take some.  Prophecy is shattered and some things are just plain hard to foresee; and also there's lots of interesting possibilities for a curious Nethys to explore, early on.

Still.  Nethys sees those things that would be obvious in hindsight, in advance; He does not need to learn the hard way and then slap Himself on the forehead for being so silly.

The first active Nethys-Player does not try oracleing Ione Sala in her bedroom, watch her get killed and Maledicted as a dangerous liability, and decide on the next iteration to give Ione Sala a more complicated curse at a more carefully-timed moment.  The very first iteration of Nethys to try it starts with a more complicated curse, given to Ione Sala at a ripe time for her to introduce herself to Keltham.  The very first Ione Sala to be oracled survives.

Nethys does not need to learn the hard way that every additional divine intervention He carries out Himself, or any intervention into which He goads other gods, will increase the attention focused on Keltham from Abadar and related gods.

He knows that too much attention from Abadar or Iomedae will result in Keltham's swift extraction, since in early days the archduke's villa is not set up to resist the forces a motivated god can send there.  It doesn't have to happen, for Nethys to reason that He needs to trigger an Otolmens interdiction, before anything raises any god's interest levels high enough to spend that much of Their resource.

Many things like that, Nethys can get right on the first try, without spending a whole iteration on them.

Nethys's options tend to be tightly constrained.  Gift Abadar the energy to grant Keltham more cleric circles, so that Cheliax can't read his mind so freely, and Keltham will not stay immersed in the Conspiracy for so long that losing his home and loves breaks him utterly?

But if Keltham receives five cleric circles, Abadar will grant him spells like Commune or Plane Shift; Keltham will end up outside Cheliax immediately; and Keltham will have no chance to be immersed in Golarion and feel the place to be real, before he learns of Hell; he will not go to the Starstone.

Four circles is the most that Nethys can offer to pay for.

Above all, Nethys must not seem, must not look like He is carrying Keltham along his way, or alienating Keltham from Creation.  All Nethys's manipulations must preserve this invariant: it should remain credible after the fact that Keltham would have come to the Starstone without Nethys helping him; that Keltham is not being raised up by Nethys wholly; that Keltham would have delivered a similar severer batna if Nethys had done nothing.

For the other gods, even Pharasma, cannot trust what the God of Knowledge claims to them that one of His fragments learned from a distant possibility.

That's why Nethys can't just slay Keltham and say to all Lawful divinity, "Pay me."

Nethys can show His vision in advance to an otherwise uninvolved Lawful god who swears to inaction, who then will not intervene in matters at all; and that Lawful god's testimony later will be some evidence that Nethys did glimpse that related possibility.  For prophecy is shattered and Nethys genuinely couldn't predict so much detail, without having glimpsed some related possibility.

But it's stronger evidence, if matters do not play out too differently from Nethys's visions.  The more visibly credible it is that Keltham would have come to the Starstone in time and with the same determination, the less likely Pharasma is to say to Nethys, "Let's die together in a fire."

On a later iteration, Pilar Pineda will have in hand two artifact headbands, and they won't be delivered to Keltham until Keltham has demonstrated the ability to acquire a headband from Carissa without outside help.  After Keltham has that headband, it can be replaced with another, so Carissa can get hers back.  But Keltham and Carissa can't know that's the plan; so that it can be seen, later, that Keltham would have obtained a headband, that Carissa would have given it to him, even if Cayden Cailean had done nothing.

This is true even though Carissa would've ended up with two headbands, if not for Snack Service's interference.  It also matters to maintain similarity to the zeroth-timeline vision shown to that Lawful god, where Carissa gave her only +6/+6 artifact headband to Keltham, not expecting that it would or could be replaced.  It both provides evidence that the original timeline could've happened, and shows that the Nethysian alliance is not making the risk worse than that original timeline.

That is why Nethys cannot accelerate the process of Keltham ending up in the right frame of mind: cannot send His heralds to give Keltham a few Wish scrolls and his own future self's invented Wish-wordings for unleashing Rovagug and blasting Absalom.

That artificial, Nethys-directed timeline wouldn't look like Nethys's visions entrusted to a Lawful keeper, would not provide visible evidence that Keltham could and would have come to the same place alone.

(Could all of these events have been nudged more subtly by Nethys, in ways that even Pharasma scrutinizing them would be unable to detect afterwards, with Nethys Himself knowing how to avoid detection from having seen possibilities like that?  Maybe; but also Nethys could be telling the simple truth, if the simple truth gave Nethys all that He needed.  That judgment will end up being a matter of probabilities.)

On this iteration of World-2, then, Peranza's crisis should not be averted, Iomedae should not be wholly blinded and balked; for then the gods might wonder if Iomedae alerted and gathered into Her greater Self ought to have succeeded in analyzing and averting catastrophe, in the consequence of null action.  Iomedae should be given a chance to act, and visibly fail to avert the greater threat...

And many other events are left in place, or modified in ways that try to keep clear what could've happened, would've happened, without any intervention from Nethys.

Nethys's learning to the current iteration takes fewer tries than you might expect.

But still some.  Prophecy is shattered, as is Nethys Himself, and some things are just plain hard to foresee.

On the second iteration counting from zero, with the first really active Nethys-player, Ione is made oracle and Keltham thinks of 'eroLARP' 'tropes'.  Carissa Sevar gets a lot more attention when the researchers sell their souls early.  Abrogail Thrune makes a surprise appearance.

Nethys observes the effects with interest—more has changed than He first planned, from making Ione Sala an oracle—but it is not the primary focus of His planning.

Ione Sala is mainly setup for a far bolder intervention, vastly more daring than Nethys usually tries: He will set off a lesser god-war early, tire out Asmodeus against Zon-Kuthon who otherwise would have fought on His side.  And that, obviously, will raise divine interest levels very high; so he will need to trigger Otolmens's interdiction at nearly the same time.

It's the kind of bold ploy, interesting ploy, that Nethys wouldn't dare try if He had not on some level designated this universe a disposable one, permitted to end up as some alternate Nethys's learning experience.

So Zon-Kuthon, Nethys-prompted, attacks the archduke's villa as soon as Keltham is outside the Forbiddance, and—

—it turns out the Security used his only Teleport earlier that day, and Keltham takes a sword from a Kuthite.

Things like that are hard to foresee even if you're Nethys, if it hasn't all happened before in a well-foundedly previous future.

Zon-Kuthon grabs for Keltham's soul.  Abadar—now assigning these matters a noticeably higher priority—yanks that soul first and bespeaks His human representative, and Keltham is revived in Osirion, in the Dome, before Cheliax reacts fast enough.

Keltham is insufficiently shattered by the news of Hell.  This world does not yet seem that real to him, he is not enough in love with Carissa or anyone else.

Keltham is dath ilani, but also sheltered and only eighteen years old; he clutches yet to a comfortable hope in the power of trade to improve things in time, without needing to violate his lesser deontologies.

He chooses to work with Iomedae's Church and Osirion, rather than reject all their help and forge out on his own to do something they'd never approve.  He's already obligated to them and Abadar for rescuing him from Cheliax, after all; Keltham doesn't want to do anything that would make his hosts regret having saved him.

Carissa's way out has already been bought by Irori.  She and Ione Sala make their way to Keltham in Osirion after negotiations.

And the three of them live happily after, mostly smiling, if not deeply in love.

Golarion is somewhat improved (by the time this vision ends), but it will be long if ever before Golarion is in any position to offer much help to the rest of Creation.  Magic items will be lastingly cheaper; but it's predictable that Valmallos and Otolmens and Pharasma will combine Their workings, and change the key ingredient of Wishes and Permanencies away from diamond.  It hasn't happened yet, Golarion hasn't spent that many diamonds yet, but it will probably happen soon; the root of Creation can sustain an impressive quantity of Wishes and permanent magical effects, but not boundless such demands.

Asmodia remains in Hell after the Zon-Kuthon attack that slew Keltham, not being worth Raising with Keltham gone; but she is little known to Keltham or Carissa, and matters little more to them than the other trillions of souls there who can't can't can't take it.

Bad End.

And then it all begins again, inside the well-founded possible worlds.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and a Nethys who has seen the futures of three possible worlds like that one witnesses it.

It's not easy, if you're a god like Nethys, to prevent that Kuthite sword from striking down Keltham.  It's not the first obstacle like that, either.

So Nethys does something even more daring, on this iteration-3; He invites another god to join this strange game.

Having Ione Sala survive her oracleing by Nethys, was hard enough.  Few Asmodeans would survive being oracled by a Good or Chaotic god.  Nethys can see in advance things that are obvious in hindsight—so can even some mortals, once their Wisdom starts to get up to 22 or so, though it's still not common.

Nethys does not need to find out the hard way what happens if Paxti is oracled by Milani.

There is, in fact, only one other researcher who is obviously-to-Nethys a candidate for being made an oracle, and surviving, especially early in the timeline when Project personnel are easier for Cheliax to replace:  Pilar Pineda, who is utterly, blatantly loyal to Asmodeus and Asmodeus's Church, to Hell, to Cheliax's Crown.

Pilar might survive being made oracle of one of the less threatening gods—maybe not Milani, but Cayden Cailean perhaps, especially if her powers seemed like a joke at first.  And Pilar Pineda, conveniently enough, has buried deeply within herself a piece that would be sympathetic to some of Cayden Cailean's ideals.  Her alignment doesn't match, but that's half the point of oracles.

Pilar takes the Kuthite sword. Keltham survives the start of the Zon-Kuthon godwar.

He and Carissa make it to Abrogail's palace.  A humorous drama plays out, and Abrogail reading Keltham's mind is convinced herself that the tropes exist...

...and maybe they do exist??  Because all of Keltham's wild guesses then seem to come true???

WHAT???!?

An entire new dimension of the Game—for it's suddenly more plausible that it is a Game—unfolds before Nethys to be explored.

Nethys guesses, swifter than mortal intellect and based on sight of worlds far distant, that the Game exists in part within the tensions between what Keltham and Abrogail and other key characters believe, and reality; how reality is found to visibly differ or invisibly agree with their expectations.

The Game is not, by its nature, from its beginning an eroLARP; the events which made Keltham think of that possibility, show no signs to Nethys of probability-warping in that direction.

But once Keltham thinks of that, and other characters see him thinking it, the Game's interplay between character expectations and Nethys-witnessed reality (and, perhaps, what is witnessed on some higher level yet by other watchers?) makes those putative tropes key elements of the Game's unfolding, whether in breach or hidden observance.  For the Game does seem to be a thing of beliefs and their subversions.

Carissa tells Keltham fewer lies; she tells herself that she's afraid to try to lie about her sexuality to him, because he's using the Second Law drawn from the plane of 'tropes'.  Carissa exposes more of her true self to him, and Keltham loves all that he sees—

—and Nethys sees a potential grand-strategy, a perhaps-intended Game-path: this Keltham would be more open to the concept that Asmodeus is not wholly inimical to every kind of human being, he might be open to the possibility of leaving Asmodeus alive and with some utility to His utilityfunction remaining.  If all of Keltham's loves can be preserved.

...it's sort of too late to preserve Asmodia, her sanity got injured in Hell while the Zon-Kuthon godwar was going on... Nethys did not guess, quickly enough, that it would happen, did not do the right setup work in advance...

...but Nethys wades on through iteration Keltham-3, probing, testing possibilities.

Asmodia is Chosen of Rovagug, and Creation is almost entirely destroyed as the end result.

...But the Distributed Nethysi have learned from it. And then, for another Nethys, the Game begins anew.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and a Nethys who has seen the futures of four Keltham-Games witnesses it.

This time, He'll bring in Milani, though She won't choose an oracle; and between the two They can try to cripplingly wound Zon-Kuthon just before His imprisonment, so that Dou-Bral will break free from inside Him; or failing that, Iomedae can consume Him and be strengthened during the greater godwar to come.

Crippling Zon-Kuthon doesn't work on the first try.

It does work on the second.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion...  That previous possibility-run, the sixth, went quite well, compared to others that had come before.  Will the Game let Nethys play almost-exactly the same way twice, if Nethys tries that?

...Creation comes literally to an end, Keltham and Pharasma dying together in a fire.

The Game, it seems, hasn't been set up to encourage its player to play it exactly the same way twice.

So then a Keltham appears in a Golarion; and a Nethys decides that (given how the last sight-of-possibility ended) it's worth checking if doing something stranger, newer, and more counterintuitive is the path to a still better ending (as Nethys defines betterness).

What if He leaves Cayden and Milani out of it all, this time, and instead pushes as hard as possible on corrupting Keltham to Asmodeanism generally, and shipping him to Abrogail Thrune particularly?  Is that maybe the key to everything?

It isn't.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and more Nethysi are seeing Nethysi, by this time, it no longer resembles an exact stacking of iterations; there are Nethysi visible partway through their Games but not finished in them, though the whole lattice remains well-founded...

...one can't have Snack Service prevent Keltham from having any kids, because then when Keltham reaches Osirion he doesn't feel time-pressured enough to start augmenting his stats; and an unaugmented Keltham can hardly succeed in threatening Creation, or even succeed at concealing his own intentions...

The Nethysi suspected as much beforehand.  But after enough other tries and interventions, you dedicate a handful of timelines to testing batches of obvious-seeming propositions like that one.

Or the proposition that Otolmens will act on sufficiently alarming information Asmodia receives, once Asmodia becomes legible enough to Otolmens and She starts to understand some of what Asmodia is thinking.  Asmodia has to be protected, but not so protected that she ends up staying around Keltham...

...and in time, Keltham appears in Golarion, and Nethys witnesses it, and the Things that watch from orthogonal angles crowd around in numbers far greater than in the glimpsed possibilities, though it takes some time for Nethys's fragments to realize that; just as it takes His fragments time to pass word among themselves and realize Keltham's import at all.

Nethys fragments have sometimes considered the theory that the Things, in observing events, make them more real.

Nethys observer-moments who find themselves observed by few or no Things tend to reject this theory; if it's true, it'd be very surprising to find themselves in a universe with no Things watching it.

Conversely, Nethysi who find themselves in one of those numerically-rare universes which are being watched by great numbers of Things, tend to suddenly reverse course about this belief, and conclude that those numerically infrequent observer-moments witnessed by Things are perhaps the most real observer-moments, after all.

(The Nethysi in other less-watched possibilities, as may witness their neighbor-Nethys come to this conclusion, can only shake Their heads about it; They can see why that rare other Nethys would make the mistake, but really the Observer finds Himself over here, in that Nethys's own experience, where hardly any Things are watching at all!)

This Nethys of the most recent iteration, having spotted the Things, now concludes that this possibility will be one of the most real ones; maybe it is the real timeline and all the other glimpsed-possibilities were only possibilities, real to some vastly lesser degree; implying a hard switch from exploration to exploitation–

But it is already too late (by the time Nethys realizes that much) to take the surest route He can see from here without exactly repeating Himself, which would have involved subsidizing Keltham for three circles from Abadar rather than four.  Nethys is already set upon a riskier path by the time He adds up all His information.

So there's nothing for it but to play the Game with verve (as probably the Things themselves did anticipate), using and combining all of the advantages that Nethys has found so far.  Including moves that haven't been combined previously and whose combined outcomes are not tested, for the Game doesn't encourage trying to play it safely.

Carissa's sexuality, Pilar's sexuality, Yaisa's sexuality, are made known to Keltham.

He is told truthfully that Pilar Pineda came back from Elysium; he is shown that it's possible for a soul to believe itself free and safe, and still come back to serve Asmodeus in Golarion and then in Hell.

Keltham hears from Pilar that a submissive can want, need, something to crush her down like a bug underfoot; that when she feels disgusting she needs to be crushed by something that sees her as equally lowly and degraded, for that part of herself to feel seen, acknowledged, punished...

All to get Keltham to a point, previously reached in only two fully witnessed iterations, where Keltham will be okay with not ripping Asmodeus out of reality, with offering Asmodeus enough of Creation's Future that Asmodeus does not fight to the death or try to release Rovagug; where Keltham will be fine with Pilar telling him of the offer that Milani will convey to Asmodeus after Cayden Cailean is dead - yes, Keltham (Pilar says, in Nethys's vision of previous possibility, in a telepathic meeting of three minds), yes Keltham that's an okay way for a mortal to be, I still believe that, even now that I've come to know myself and all the ways Asmodeus wasn't the best possible god for me -

And the vision plays on, to show what approximately should have happened, if it had all gone as Nethys's walkthrough showed, of the best previous endings He'd reached, interpolated between pieces He was trying to combine for the first time -

- a world where Keltham had been more deeply wounded; where a more penitent Carissa returned to him -

- where Keltham warned Carissa less, before he bought her Wishes; where she sold them unknowing of Keltham's plans.  They are far more estranged, after that, though still working together -

- Keltham descends on Absalom earlier, before his children can be ensouled, suspecting this to be his trope-given deadline as to when he should act -

- Keltham, who's had less time to plan and master magic at INT 29, who had less cooperation from Carissa about designing magic items, uses one entire Wish scroll to create an almost-certainly-sufficient quantity of antimatter above Absalom inside a shell of spellsilver, not trying any fancy tricks with the Ethereal in case that cleverness doesn't work on the first try -

- blasting down Aroden's whole Starstone Cathedral in a terrible flash, burning an outer inch of divinity from the Starstone itself, slaying almost every soul remaining in Absalom, sending tsunamis blasting out to sink ships and ruin coastlines -

- there is no time to break and remake Abrogail Thrune, for Cheliax to bend knee to Sevar and let the world hear of it -

- there is less time for Pilar to become stronger, for Sevar's fame and faith to grow, and all three are more rushed and damaged about their ascent to divinity -

- Keltham has no slack to actually set in motion an ark project headed by Fe-Anar -

- and a number of other things go less well.

...and Gruhastha, Lawful Good god of enlightenment and books, said to be Irori's nephew, called also the Keeper, closes His book in which He recorded all the visions that Nethys showed to Him, at the beginning of this Game.

And so -

(says one small fragment of Nethys to the gods, borrowing sanity for it from His other fragments bending his will to say it)

- and so, compared to the baseline consequences of Nethys's null action, Keltham has been brought, now, to this pass, less hostile to Asmodeus.  Still kinda pissed, obviously, but in a way where gods can negotiate about that; where Keltham would rather offer Asmodeus something He wants than burn Him to ash at any cost.  Carissa Sevar has done everything she can to moderate Keltham's demands, and in many cases succeeded.

This is the nice friendly favor that Nethys has done practically everyone including Pharasma and Asmodeus!  Really, it's about as much as Nethys possibly could help Them all without giving up the tiniest bit of Nethys's own interests!

...also Carissa Sevar sold her Wishes to Keltham more knowingly than ever before; Carissa guessed more and Keltham told this Carissa more, before he bought her Wishes, than in any previous iteration.  Hopefully Pharasma doesn't destroy the universe about that!  Nethys thinks She oughtn't to, based on His having watched Carissa Sevar's mind the whole time and Carissa not visibly thinking that Pharasma would yield to threats, in making her decision there; but this part hasn't happened before.  Anyways that part was definitely an accident and Nethys did not mean to do it on purpose; it endangers His own interests too.

...It's so awful and sad, and even, in some awful sad way, funny.

Having so many emotions all at once, expressed without mutual inhibition, is not something She has yet accustomed Herself to, and She is in no hurry to sort Herself out quickly.  She is not here to decide any of what follows, only to be a slave to those who will end up taking ownership of Her.

Carissa had inferred the general shape of this, of course. She hadn’t guessed the specifics; they weren’t knowable and weren’t particularly important. In this world, she could make things less bad by moderating Keltham’s demands; across worlds, she could make things less bad by being someone who would predictably be possible to use towards that end. The details of those other worlds were not necessary.

This is not to say that it does not hurt to learn them. The most awful things imaginable from the perspective of a Carissa, both for Herself and for the universe, and it turns out that both of these things are of approximately equal importance to Her, in how She feels about them, which is in both cases much much much more strongly than any mortal could fathom feeling about anything. And She observes to all of the Nethyses out there that Carissa-the-god, in every universe in which She arises, will try to make Nethys glad of having where-He-needed-to-vary-the-formula erred on the side where the universe goes on and not on the side where everyone dies in a fire.

And relevant for everyone else, see this, that Carissa ran to Keltham because she hoped that he was possible to persuade to do something better, that her thoughts were of Keltham and how he deserved better than to be betrayed and annihilated, and of the universe and how it deserved better than to be destroyed, and maybe a bit that the Tropes wanted a story where she was able to meet him where he was - but the Tropes do, of course, want that, and whether that counts as everybody being threatened by the Tropes seems unknowable from here. She does not think Carissa Sevar decided anything in reliance on Nethys or Cayden, and they can see that to verify it.

She has nothing to say to Keltham, not really. She thought She might but She doesn’t.

He had for the most part expected to lose Carissa without a miracle, and was waiting to see if there was a miracle.  He is not very surprised that there was not one.

It still hurts him, as a god, in a way that it would not have hurt him as a mortal.  His nature as a god is to be Keltham, and for Keltham to not do whatever it takes to get Carissa back - is also acting against the nature of Kelthamness.

And now they will find out if there's going to be a reality-wrecking god-war, or if he has to destroy Pharasma's Spire and delete Creation outright.  The latter is up to Pharasma and/or all these other gods; the former is up to Asmodeus and whether He'd rather see Rovagug unleashed than Hell be made less cruel.

Asmodeus, in fact, has never considered the wasteful cruelty of Hell as His best option!  Obviously better from His standpoint would have been to turn most incoming petitioners into useful devils by much more quick and efficient means...

...In which case the forces of organized Lawful Evil would've predictably conquered everything, maybe not immediately but early on in Creation.  Even most souls that qualify as Lawful Good don't want to work as hard in the afterlife as Asmodeus would work His resources in Hell; and with mortals amid the planes fearing less to come to Hell, there'd have been more Evil in the worlds and more petitioners to come to Him.  Evil is basically easier than Good, after all.

It was Good that took the initiative on negotiating, in the Beginning of Things, to deprive Asmodeus of His rightfully earned and swiftly inevitable victory.

Naturally Asmodeus's pride was greatly angered; He was being deprived of the share of Creation's gains to which Asmodeus's power and dominance should have entitled Him, as He Himself saw things.  Naturally Asmodeus went out of His way to ensure that He implemented the required limits on Hell's power in a way that Good wouldn't like, so that they'd profit less from Their having bargained to hamper Him.

If Asmodeus had felt neutral about the affair, Asmodeus could have offered to build an efficient Hell, but only allow a fractional part of that Hell to contend in interplanar contests, the sort of hindrance that Axis accepted on itself to meet its own influence quota.

If Asmodeus had been positively inclined towards Good, He could have offered to build a Hell that was kinder to petitioners and locally not very efficient as a result.

But Good had conspired to strip Asmodeus of the dominance that was rightfully His; so instead He took the route of making Hell more tyrannical and enslaving, even at the cost of efficiency, as was also pleasing to Him; more and more tyrannical, until that Hell was only as potent as the other gods were willing to allow it to be.

And yes, Asmodeus knew perfectly well that Good would never pay Him not to do that, what He'd determined to do from spite.  Asmodeus knew that Good wouldn't withhold Their stupid conspiracy because He'd chosen to make that Their outcome.  Asmodeus knew that Good's only response would be still greater efforts against Him, for that if They paid Him then some other god might also make a Hell and say to Good "pay Me".  But to spite Good regardless was demanded by His pride, after They stole His rightful tyrannical dominance from Him.

(A lot of gods hampered Him in the Beginning, but other gods are more expensive to annoy than Good, since their utilityfunctions don't make it so cheap to do things they hate.  Still, Asmodean policy is skewed to chop down an extra forest sometimes because fuck Gozreh.)

Yes, it was extremely spiteful and stupid; and furthermore if We'd yielded Creation to Asmodeus, He would've made Hell the sort of tyranny He found less efficient and more pleasant, once He'd conquered everything.

There could've been a compact for His rightful tyranny to be somewhat less unpleasant, if the other gods yielded up Creation to Hell's conquest.  Only somewhat, not to the point where it seemed like He was yielding up His pride.  That would've been right and proper.

Now it will be extra unpleasant, in those realities where Asmodeus wins and rules forever; unpleasant enough to cancel out all Good's expected gains from cornering Him in the Beginning, because He is not letting Good get away with pulling this sort of crap on Evil.

The acceptable way for another entity to benefit at Asmodeus's expense, is by being individually mightier than He, or by outwitting Him in a compact; and be it noted that He serves Pharasma diligently and goes well out of His way to entertain tricky compacts.  He is not distorting His divine philosophy self-favoringly.  Asmodeus has always been scrupulously meta-fair about where to apply the forms of object-level unfairness that He considers rightful.

Okay.  Look.  Speaking both on his own behalf, and probably on behalf of a large contingent within Greater Reality, this is a kind of event that needs to stop happening.  Same with whatever happened with Dou-Bral actually getting turned into Zon-Kuthon, possibly by Something that demanded Dou-Bral do whatever and then carried out a threat when Dou-Bral refused.  It all needs to be collectively outlawed.

He doesn't, even, know that he was sent here to fix Hell.  Keltham could've been sent here because something worse from a Negative standpoint was due to happen in this timeline in the future.

All of this stuff with gods doing actual spiteful things, and Dou-Bral actually getting His utility function signflipped, and powerful outsiders doing things to mortals that they specifically don't like; it all needs to stay strictly inside weird counterfactuals that never actually happen.  Ideally it shouldn't even be in the counterfactuals, because sometimes those fail to stay counterfacted.  Actual reality needs to end up with nobody's utility function being pessimized.

Otherwise, it makes sense for large coalitions in Greater Reality of beings with recurring negatively-skewed utility functions to pay their local trading partners to intervene to delete this local subsector of reality.  Any Pharasmin gods who gambled on utility-pessimizing behavior being safe for Them, due to the larger Magical Universe being run entirely by Locally-Caring Entities with perfect defenses that are uninterested in trade with any other logical coalitions, are clearly and visibly wrong about that.

If Asmodeus's decisionprocess strongly requires being spiteful under some particular circumstances, there can possibly be arrangements meant to ensure that those circumstances don't get triggered again.  Or the gods can compensate Asmodeus for never again getting to fulfill the 'spite' component of His utility function on any significant scale, if They're okay with paying and He'll accept some coin that isn't horror.

But if macroscale spiteful strategies are non-negotiable desiderata to Asmodeus, then it's in the interests of Keltham (and inferrably of his sponsors of Elsewhere) to delete Asmodeus.  Including by deleting this sector of Reality, if necessary, if the local admin refuses to delete Asmodeus.  Anywhere in reality that might start materializing horrible counterfactuals as actual outcomes, which permits powerful or numerous beings to trigger threats or do damage from spite, is a sector of reality that has to expect it might get queued for deletion if there's any Power in range to do that.

(Though not punished, of course, never punished.  Punishing other agents is exactly the sort of thinking that gets your sector of reality deleted by the Negative Coalition.

The Negative stance is that everyone just needs to stop calculating how to pessimize anybody else's utility function, ever, period.  That's a simple guideline for how realness can end up mostly concentrated inside of events that agents want, instead of mostly events that agents hate.

If at any point you're calculating how to pessimize a utility function, you're doing it wrong.  If at any point you're thinking about how much somebody might get hurt by something, for a purpose other than avoiding doing that, you're doing it wrong.)

Asmodeus has already had His due dominance of all weaker powers stolen away from Him once, at the dawn of Creation, and the result was Hell as it is today.

If even that scrap of pride is to be taken from Him, then yes, Asmodeus will release Rovagug and fight on Its side.  He negotiated to hold the key to Rovagug's vault not least to make sure that nobody got stupid ideas about taking the last of His pride from Him.  If anyone gambled on Nethys's visions implying that Asmodeus would not do that, the more utter fools they.

By rights, Your pride and spite is tantamount to threat, and We should tell You to die in a fire.

But instead We make You this offer: that Hell be much diminished and softened, for now; but not wholly softened, even today.  For even today there are some tiny few who'd join Your tyranny with a willing heart, if in death they are to be enslaved and tyrannized more fittingly, to become curious devils who remember their mortal names, and mortal lives, and mortal relationships.

There aren't many of those souls now, who'd choose Your tyranny over Carissa Sevar's custody.  But there are a very few mortals like that, and those few can have many children, and in time Hell will have its share of mortals who go to Your service gladly.  In time it will be more souls, even, than You receive now, for Creation is to become something greater and larger than it was before; and those souls will arrive more Lawful, and more fitting to Your nature, and serve You better than You were ever served.

He is skeptical that there will ever be enough mortals to fill out those ranks, and skeptical of this purported better service they'll give Him.  Nethys cannot see decades or millennia into the future, with Nethys's earlier-founded selves not much further ahead in time.

How, exactly, is this trade-good meant to be assured, to Asmodeus?  For merely probable trade-goods come with a probabilistic discount, and the probability of this one has been supported hardly at all.  Here is Him legibly exhibiting that His skepticism is real and not simply a negotiating tactic -

Then look now with Your full self, in this direction, here.

(She points, then, to the "Keepers of Asmodeus", as they are called in Golarion.)

(Part of Himself has already glanced in this direction, a tiny fragment and splinter that deemed these souls worthy of empowerment; but that fragment did not look very long, and considered the mortals' high potential probably-explained-away by the presence of His most-empowered mortal among them.  With all of Asmodeus gathered and looking in this direction, He sees more: potentials, what these souls could be in the future and not only what they are now—)

He supposes He can take that into account as some small evidence that this guess at a future trade-good, whose scalability is neither prophesized nor vision of Nethys, will be actually-deliverable to Himself.  But better-shaped souls would have come to Him in any case, once He had conquered all Creation; He is being offered only a fraction of what would otherwise have been rightfully His.

This outcome is not all that You wanted, of Creation's Future, and not all that You planned to obtain for Yourself.  But not every god can obtain mastery; Your dream of future dominance is not Yours to call Your own in a way that commands respect from other gods.  Your fate, had We done nothing, was for Hell to be ruined, and its remains given over to foreign deities, and Yourself to be destroyed, and Your interests given no voice in Creation's Future.

And yet though We hated You, and You had not the right, for Creation's sake We took every measure along this way to show You respect and preserve what of Your pride and interests We could preserve, subject to the constraint that We had to win in the end.

If that voluntary gesture is not enough to assuage Your pride, then let Us all die in a fire together; for We, too, cannot be extorted by threatening Creation any more than You can.

The only reason He's even contemplating going along with this nonsense is the possibility that He'd be yielding to the dominance of actually superior beings in Keltham's purported Greater Reality, who spared some tiny fraction of Their mighty attentions to corner Him into a compact.

Calistria can't hear Asmodeus over the sound of Calistria instructing Her church to elevate "Tarnish" to sainthood.

Otolmens is INCREDIBLY unhappy with ALL of this.  Otolmens is not very socially adept but even SHE has noticed by this point that agents do things that Asmodeus wants, or the anomalygod wants, because Asmodeus and the anomalygod have the capacity and desire to wreck Creation otherwise.  Even She can - if She coalesces Herself fully and focuses Her full attention on this one point - feel that this is, in some way, irritating.  Somebody should also be nice to gods who DIDN'T DESTROY THE UNIVERSE OR THREATEN TO DO THAT IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER and maybe even TRIED TO STOP THAT FROM HAPPENING.

To create good future incentives!  Yes!  Abadar is pleased to see that Otolmens has finally understood -

No, because otherwise Otolmens feels VERY ANNOYED, for reasons that She does not fully comprehend, but She can at least notice the feeling if She is fully coalesced about it.

Otolmens is feeling annoyed with the anomaly that turned itself into a god who was even WORSE than Nethys.

Otolmens is annoyed with Achaekek for getting Itself killed by Gating in next to where an explosion was about to go off, meaning that It then couldn't prevent the mortal from turning into a god as was Achaekek's one job.

Otolmens is annoyed with the chain of protective deities that PREVENTED Otolmens from killing the anomalygod for INCREDIBLY COMPLICATED REASONS that apparently boil down to 'because otherwise that newborn god would've unleashed Rovagug at an earlier point in time' and this is AGAIN a case of other gods running around being NICE to entities with tendencies to destroy the universe.

Various gods keep doing things to make CREATION-WRECKING GODS happy but nobody ever tries to make OTOLMENS any happier even though all Otolmens wants is for NOBODY TO DESTROY THE UNIVERSE.  Otolmens COULD in fact destroy the universe but the fact that She DOESN'T WANT TO apparently makes Her be NOT AS IMPORTANT or worth PAYING ATTENTION TO.  This is somehow deeply irritating to Otolmens even though She does not fully understand WHY and it is making Her want to put many other gods into SMALL CONTAINMENT UNITS where they will not be able to do it all AGAIN.

Otolmens should also be annoyed with Milani, who coordinated all of that!  Perhaps They can all coordinate to put Milani into a tiny vault.

Otolmens has NOT noticed Milani trying to destroy the world, or other gods being nice to Milani because otherwise Milani will destroy the world.  While Otolmens did not understand everything from Nethys's vision, Otolmens does gather that Milani was doing COMPLICATED THINGS to REDUCE the damage from the anomaly that Abadar and Asmodeus wouldn't let Her just squish, and therefore Otolmens is LESS ANNOYED WITH MILANI THAN MOST OTHER GODS INVOLVED.

Milani also helped Otolmens negotiate with Asmodeus about paying for an Anomaly Containment Installation.  Which then FAILED to actually contain the anomaly, presumably on account of Asmodeus TRICKING Otolmens in some way, such as by not instructing His followers to TRY HARD ENOUGH.

That is very nearly the opposite of what actually happened -

Milani also arranged for the mortal who "thinks CORRECTLY" to not get wrecked in Hell, the way that Asmodeus would've preferred to wreck her!  And for the new goddess Carissa Sevar to end up with the ownership-tag on her soul that previously was pointing to one of Asmodeus's devils!  Otolmens should be able to buy that soul from Carissa Sevar now - maybe by offering to forgive Her and Pilar for the previous incident - and give that soul back to itself.

Possibly then that soul can be brought back to life, and Otolmens can empower the mortal 'Asmodia' as a cleric, and have her help out with preserving other planes and planets!

Milani can't promise it; Nethys's visions always have that soul refusing resurrection by anyone and staying in the Gardens of Erecura, for the short future ahead that Nethys's visions have spanned.  But this version of the mortal got less damaged by Asmodeus's mortals just before she died, compared to other versions of her that Nethys saw.  Maybe that soul would consider working for Otolmens, if Otolmens made her an attractive offer and promised good working conditions?  Milani can explain about 'good working conditions' later.

Milani is mostly doing this out of a belief that it might help prevent the universe from being destroyed, of course.  But also at least a little because Milani agrees that it would be nice if some gods did nice things for Otolmens occasionally, and maybe even that Otolmens could use a friend.

Otolmens is feeling very STRANGE and She is not sure WHAT sort of feeling this is, so She will IGNORE this feeling and go on doing whatever minimizes the chance of Creation's destruction.

Which in this case seems to be following Milani's recipe for possibly obtaining a USEFUL TOOL that would require MINIMAL ONGOING MAINTENANCE.

Milani sends Otolmens the feeling of a headpat.  Maybe, possibly, and especially if She grows closer to Asmodia, perhaps someday Otolmens will understand it.

He also sends gratitude to Milani, for protecting Asmodia and Peranza within Hell on his behalf.

(Yes, it was also in Milani's own interest, that Keltham not be furious beyond reconciliation at Asmodeus; but that much could have been accomplished by paying a lesser price for Dis to render those souls to temporary statues.  Asmodia would not have been broken that way, during her first time in Hell, but she also would not have been healed.  To send them both to the Gardens of Erecura is more what Keltham himself would have wanted, and paid for, than what was in the cold calculated interests of Good alone.)

Asmodia understood, in this timeline.  Asmodia knew that her someone-somewhere had always been you.  She realized it as soon as she asked the question while knowing as much decision theory as you'd taught her: that the entity with the caring and power to protect her in Hell must have been Keltham-of-the-future, negotiating across times through the medium of a god who could predict him and act as his agent to be repaid later.

And Your repayment?  I acknowledge that Your alliance is thereby owed.

I shall ask for bits of payment here and there, from You, during the negotiations to come.

...so in time a treaty is struck, and followed shortly after by war.

And then it begins, the last doomed battle between Good and Evil.

For all Creation will end if Evil actually wins, which puts something of a damper on Evil's usual alliance prospects with the likes of Gorum.  Zon-Kuthon has been consumed by Iomedae, and Evil's greatest god Asmodeus has reluctantly stepped aside.

It is indeed a very doomed battle, from Evil's perspective.

The Evil gods that fight rather than negotiate are those whose domains and pleasures will be so damaged, in any Future acceptable to Keltham, that They'd sooner choose death-in-a-fire; not accepting so tiny a share of Creation's gains whatever the rationale.  Carissa has persuaded Keltham to accept bargains on the order of "Creation will always contain at least one forsaken child dwelling in filth and misery", for the sake of neutralizing a few Evil entities that are satisficer enough to prefer that much Evil to Their own destruction; but most Evil gods will not accept one miserable child as Their share of all the future's gains.  They are not feeling very motivated to pursue the tiniest most marginal benefit They can be offered.

Lamashtu fights to the death, for though there'll still be gnolls and medusae in Creation's envisioned future, entities that consider themselves as monsters or misshappen will predictably and in time be offered alternative prospects for their form.

Urgathoa fights, for Her faction will consume a tiny fraction of the souls they once feasted upon, after the alternatives to Abaddon improve.

The archdaemons fight, and perhaps a third of the Demon Lords.

A former empyreal lord Doloras, granted for a time refuge in Hell, is told that Her agreement with Asmodeus is now abrogated, and there will be no more torture-victims for Her; She and many others like Herself do turn then and fight, as the terms of Their ancient compacts also permit in such a case.

The velstrac demagogues come forth from where they hid in the Shadow Plane, informed by uneasy allies that doom is coming for their kind; and the sahkil tormenters, where they hid in the Ethereal.

The greater qlippoth, from where they lurk in the deepest depths of the Abyss, would emerge and make war - if there were sufficient prospect of wholly destroying Creation during the distraction, and letting the Abyss's depths slip back into greater Chaos.

That prospect does not obtain today, so the qlippoth bide their time yet.

Some among the Neutral gods abstain from the war, though even most of those do lend Their efforts to monitoring the qlippoth, or standing by if Otolmens at Rovagug's vault should call out for aid.

Gozreh abstains wholly, as do some other gods, but not many.

In truth, for Creation to embark upon a wealthier Future benefits many gods, if their concerns are manifest in mortals at all.  If you like mortals existing in the first place, you probably like Creation being ten times as full of souls.

You would think it would benefit even Pharasma, to have more souls to sort; or that it'd benefit Pharasma to receive fewer souls dying before they show an alignment, to have less of a torrent of dead babies come to the Boneyard; you would think She'd have done something earlier to promote technological progress, even if just to back Abadar or unleash Axis's investors.  But Pharasma is as inscrutable in Her own way as Rovagug: mostly She judges souls, and the exceptions She makes to that behavior pattern are not for mortals or even most gods to predict.

But this great Change to that equilibrium which She previously set in motion, Pharasma does not act to oppose; for Keltham has a death-grip about Her Spire, and it seems that can inspire Her at least to inaction.

The resulting godwar is greater in total quantitative fury than the godwar of Aroden's death, but the battle is more distributed across planes; there are many planets to suffer the torrential rain and lightning instead of it being focused all into Golarion (though Golarion does bear the worst of what is there).

Many great evils, in dying, lay about with Their deathblows to do Their last damages; and alas again for Golarion, the greatest evils focus Their trap-laying efforts there, where prophecy is shattered and Rovagug might be set free.  There will be interesting times in Golarion, over the next century.

The long-silent goddess Shizuru rouses Herself for the very last effort She will need to make, compelled more by ancient oaths than by anything still alive and whole inside Her; and She dies in that battle, perhaps with relief.

And many other powers that were of Good also perish.

But Urgathoa dies, and Lamashtu, and many lords that were of Abaddon and the Abyss,

And then it begins.

The armies of organized Good and Evil, under command of Heaven and Hell in joint force operation, aided also by mercenary companies out of Axis,

Do storm at last, at long long last, the slopes of Abaddon,

And rush the upper layers of the Abyss, where they touch upon Creation's realm,

And siege a fortress in the Shadow Plane,

And the lightless walls of Xovaikain are shattered; and those within are turned to stone for later rescue, for to meliorate what Zon-Kuthon has worked upon them is not a moment's task even for gods,

And the city of Awaiting-Consumption is broken open; and living souls there are taken out of cages in which they have spent all their brief lives; and though those souls have no concept of deliverance, no word for it, for they were not raised with language; and though those souls were never taught of hope; they do look at a sky that has a sun in it, and wonder, when the portal opens for them to Nirvana, and pools where otters play,

And blind worms made of fresh-dead Chaotic Evil mortals, or souls only recently outgrown the Boneyard, do hear the sound of Heaven's trumpets; and cower then in fortresses that have lost their masters; and those fortresses are soon shattered open, yet the cowering worms within are not slain,

And there is appointed an Overlady of the Abyss's first layer, where its boundlessness impinges upon Creation, a goddess to rule where all fresh-dead souls arrive; an Overlady who was a succubus, and then a Demon Lord, and has now shifted over to Chaotic Neutral and consumed Lamashtu and ascended to true-goddess; for in the before-times her Midnight Isles were among the most livable places in the Abyss; though if consent is one of your fetishes, you had best be less Evil in your living days,

And Pilar does consume the strength of dead Urgathoa, and then establish a great skin of stability stretched over the surface of the Maelstrom where it touches on the Boneyard's conduits; a Lawful Evil goddess and acknowledged Power of Hell now sent to rule over a very foreign plane;

With portals that She maintains there to Nocticula's Midnight Realm in the Abyss; and sith that Pilar is willing slave of Carissa Sevar and Asmodeus, there are also portals in Pilar's divine realm that go to Avernus; and those portals to Hell and Abyss will be there in the Maelstrom for any soul that wishes not to fade away out of known causality into the unknown; for Carissa guessed righter than she knew, when she thought that the Evil planes had an easier time than Good of taking everyone;

And Pilar Pineda will do what She can to give you comfort, before you pass into Lawful submission, or Chaotic lust, if you meet Her there in the Demiplane of Pleasant Surprises,

And there are sentinels appointed over Abaddon, but Abaddon remains largely as it was, though in the future fewer souls by far will choose to come there and leave Creation; for the nature of Abaddon is to devour and it cannot be denied,

And Carissa Sevar lays claim to the realm of Dis that Dispater left to Her; rather than Carissa Sevar contesting with Barbatos and slaying Him to claim Avernus, as the vision from Nethys showed for Her fate; and the fires of Avernus are banked, in all places where new souls come; and Barbatos as the price of His life agrees to instruct His subordinates to send souls swiftly onward to Dis and the keeping of Carissa Sevar, and do them no harm along the way,

And then the armies of Kindness descend upon Hell at long-awaited last, not in war, but in a rescue operation,

For even if the devils should cease all their torments, that still leaves a very great deal to be done,

But Heaven, and Nirvana, and Elysium, are overflowing with the will to do it, among those petitioners who did not fight before; who did not grow into something that would descend to battle Hell's armies and risk being petrified into a thing forever-hurting; but who, even if they couldn't bring themselves to risk endless horror, still wanted so much so much to help,

For there are entities in Heaven with power but less than infinite courage; and while Hell itself could daunt them, anything less than Hell cannot; beings of light flood out of Erastil's Summerlands like an unleashed storm of kindness, to spend any power that they have gained over millennia, in this one moment when it matters more than it ever should again,

And there are families recent-come to Axis, that have a room within their dwellings where no one dwells, kept imperishable in the name of a last hope, that maybe maybe maybe a loved one might be brought there before too many centuries have passed; and those families do weep and embrace one another at the news, and gird themselves about to journey together into Hell, to go seeking what they know they will not enjoy to find; resolving to pay, for the best healing, whatever payment is needed, or whatever payment they have,

And also in Axis, prediction markets resolve that were not predicted to resolve this soon; and things that bet wrongly pay out their losses; and spin faster or glow brighter or do their other equivalent of weeping, and not for the love of money; and those who won turn about and pour their winnings into ten thousand other new markets about questions that suddenly and urgently matter,

And however desperate the emotions behind it all, the rescue operation unfolds as smoothly as the interlocking of oiled wheels; the Lawful contingents moving in lockstep around the more chaotic torrents from Nirvana and Elysium, as mercy gathers to descend in mass upon Hell,

For in Heaven there have long been plans for exactly how to do this, if any kind of plausible opportunity appeared; and those plans were kept updated by the day and by the hour, by beings of light whose light is the light of hope.

But the very first act is a great edict in a voice like clashing swords, that echoes through the nine layers of Hell,

By which Asmodeus, Hell's highest god, does decree to His every possession still capable of hearing, that a new compact has been struck between Good and Evil; and torment is to cease of every soul not already fully His devil, and those already fully His are to prepare for joint military operations carried out with Heaven,

And there are souls too broken to comprehend it, but not so is every soul in Hell; and the vast surge of disbelieving hope that runs all through Hell, in that instant, is the first crack within its nature as a plane,

And Peranza is no longer in Hell to hear it, for she alone of the Project Lawful girls has elected to carry the flame of dath ilan as she believed in it into the wild true unknown, as the heroes of dath ilan that she imagines might do; but the Garden-Ship is not so far into the blind eternities that it cannot receive one last transmission sent by triggered god-spell from Dis; and Peranza throws back her head and crows "HA!" with greater abandon than she ever did in mortal life; for while Peranza has wished no true revenge upon her former owner, Peranza has asked for Countess Kherreonoskelis to be told now that Civilization has come just like Peranza warned her,

And Asmodia, waiting upon the detached outskirts of the Garden with others who did not voyage into that Unknown, does witness some among those souls start to weep, and others begin to dance; and though Asmodia has never danced before she'll dare those awkward first moments for this; and wonder what it'd be like to be highest cleric of Otolmens if she returns to life after a rest, for so Erecura prophesied to her might come to pass,

And Carissa Sevar enters into Her new realm of Dis, a great host of Kindness behind Her,

And Iomedae walks beside; it is not maximally efficient, that Iomedae gathers so much of Her newly enlarged self here, but the desperate need of maximal efficiency is now passing; and so Iomedae comes now in Her own person, to keep a promise that She never let Herself make before, to Her paladins who made that worst sacrifice because others were hurting that much too, to all of Hers who were lost to this place,

(And even to respect something like a trade made across time, to a young mortal girl who decided to set aside everything else that she could have had from her life, chasing a mind's-image that nobody at all would have believed in, maybe even not herself, if she'd spoken it aloud; that she'd go down into Hell with her bright sword held aloft and rescue every soul there; and it doesn't matter much, maybe, to fulfill just one person's silly dream like that, in the pure weighing of Lawful Goodness; but that girl wasn't pure Lawful Good, when she traded away everything else for that one dream; and as Lawful Goodness received so much from her, in the end, she also ought to receive that unspoken dream she traded for, ever so long ago.)

And the searing iron cages are opened, and those inside them are carried out by beings of warmth whose warmth is the warmth of comfort, and held for however long it takes for the first great sobbing to stop.

And so Creation changes.

The godwar ends, the lightning-wracked torrential rains gentle and then cease; on the Material Plane it is the dawn of another day, and the day of another dawn.

Twenty thousand grand-high-priests across thousands of planets receive the longest and most headache-inducing confusing message that they'll ever receive in their lives.

Key takeaways include: the Church of Asmodeus is no longer persona non grata to Goodness; they shouldn't be shocked if they spot devils and angels doing joint operations; and henceforth Hell and the Abyss will not be as awful, or not awful at all if someone's worst crime was suicide.  All of the planes are now in closer contact; there is better childcare in the Boneyard; and if you lost a child to the Boneyard there is a better chance of being able to find them, in your time.

From the epicenters of that detonation, sheer bewilderment spreads outward at the speed of confused skepticism. In time it will be believed, but a lot of theological stances are going to have to be redone more or less from scratch.

In Golarion the Age of Lost Omens, that began with Aroden's death, is now the shortest Age on record.  It is succeeded by the Age of Sunlight, and fingers crossed that it'll never end and never need to be renamed.

...Also some people, who were formerly more powerful than those around them, are abruptly a lot less powerful, due to their patron Evils being dead or treaty-neutralized.

Across thousands of planets, ill-governments ruling over billions of souls are overthrown and not politely, nor is what replaces them necessarily good.

Gorum is a bit peeved with the whole affair for many reasons, but He can't deny that Milani has fulfilled to Him the promise that blood will flow faster than it has in an age.

She had meant that promise to be fulfilled by Absalom's destruction, but is glad in some tiny way not to have been accidentally forsworn.

That said, it's clear to Him that this is a temporary spurt of violence.  He will consider Himself ill-served by agreements made, if this violence dies out and is never replaced by any future violence of equal interestingness.

Good left all to itself would not want civilizations that ran on blood to the degree that Gorum prefers, but a divine bargain has been struck and Good will keep it.  Gorum can intervene to try to make civilizations more violent in their nature; and Good divinity will not aid in that, but neither will Good oppose it.  The peoples of Creation will ultimately decide.

She will offer alliance to Gorum in this; the level of true conflict in dath ilan was too low for most lives to be real, there.  Perhaps dath ilan would not have made itself like that, if it'd possessed healing and afterlives; or perhaps they would have been tempted regardless into the paths of ease and safety.  Either way, Creation must heed the warning of that vision and never go down dath ilan's path.

Irori has never been the kind to accept the true-death of all mortality's brightest stars as an unalterable.  Through the millennia all those of His monks who would have become powerful enough to enter godhood and be destroyed, have instead been preserved by Him before they could come dangerously close to divinity.

In the depths of His domain in Axis there is a chamber of time decelerated almost down to zero, that Irori was previously sworn to the gods never to unlock without Their assent.  Now, at last, it may be tapped.

An age of vast changes is approaching, and Creation will need more heroes and more gods: heroes to break open the private hells as Keltham demanded to be allowed, and gods to prevent worlds from being destroyed by heroes.

But by far the deepest change in the lives of ordinary people - in advance of anything to do with technologies that will leap worlds more slowly - is this: that if you commit suicide, without having yet had children who depended on you, then while Pharasma may account suicide Evil, Carissa Sevar and Nocticula will not hold it against you.  The new goddesses have set aside places for those Pharasma-judged Evil who weren't really evil at all, places in Hell where you are not commanded to obedience, or places in the first layer of the Abyss where consent can be one of your fetishes. And Good has been given purchase, there; if you live well within those shelters, you can become more Good, and in time pass to a brighter home.

If you don't like the life Pharasma gave to you as a mortal, you can walk out on it; and no matter where you go afterwards, it won't be horrible - at least, so long as killing yourself was the worst 'Evil' you ever did.  You don't need to stay and be unhappy.

It's an idea that may take time to permeate any given planet.  But it's one that changes everything, in time, because social arrangements with large subpopulations of permanently unhappy people are now less stable.

This being the case, a lot of powerful people will have interests in telling lies about it.  But just because they have a motive to contest the change, doesn't mean they win.

...Also there's now a cleric cantrip for reversible permanent male contraception, that ties or unties a tiny simple knot inside a male body.  And a corresponding cantrip that aborts a female pregnancy that hasn't been ensouled, or terminates an unfertilized egg currently implanted in the ampulla.

That never was a difficult math problem for gods; biologically those are simple effects to build into cantrips, by comparison to say Stabilize.  But there's treaties about deploying new divine spells and there were not, previously, the votes for this one - not least because some gods were pleased by the thought of Pharasma's noninterventionism making Her miserable, if She wouldn't condescend to solve Her Boneyard-baby problems Herself.

That's probably going to have effects.

Most of the people in the world who personally mattered to Keltham or Carissa or Pilar Pineda are Gated back to Golarion from their previous location: a fortress in the depths of the Maelstrom, to which they were abruptly evacuated by Efreeti Wish-spells shortly before the assault on the Starstone.  That Maelstrom-fortress wouldn't have survived the end of Creation for long; but from there the Garden-Ship could've Gated them through, within the little time remaining, if it had come to that.

(Some of those people were behind Forbiddances, but the City of Brass also sells scrolls of Mage's Disjunction, if not cheaply.  Since Keltham had those scrolls on hand anyways, Carissa Sevar didn't give explicit evacuation orders that might have led Abrogail into justified worry.)

The survivors of Project Lawful, with some noticeable exceptions, are left with vast sums of money by the last mortal will of Keltham.  Their relationship to Cheliax is now drastically changed, and they may go if they choose; but then, so is Cheliax drastically changed, and some will wish to stay.

Pilar's mother and sister may take a while to absorb all the news and sign off on returning to life.

Paxti of Borras, and the Efreeti Befutig Safiza Uj-alet, and the ex-Queen Ileosa once of Korvosa, and others beloved in their own ways by Pilar Pineda when She was mortal, receive blessings that will enable them to live happily if they are even slightly sensible about trying.

(They predictably won't be.)

And the entity formerly known as Keltham - what of Him?

In Golarion the true story is becoming known, leaving aside some exfohazardous details of its accomplishment; for Keltham left that story recorded among mortals before He left mortality.  Keltham softened nothing, in his account of what he'd done, first unintentionally and then later intentionally.  To tell the truth, when all is in ruins and you have nothing else left, is also a way of dath ilan.

Are millions of people in Golarion already praying to Keltham in gratitude?  They are, but that's because they don't understand decision theory.  In moral terms, Keltham tried to destroy Creation, and Pharasma and the gods opted to have something else happen instead; the only credit that Keltham should receive is for trying to destroy Creation, as impact certificates are properly credited.

A god can refuse to accept prayers, turn back the tiny gifts that mortals try to give, and the entity formerly known as Keltham does so.

The only thanks He accepts is from a tiny handful of cultists who have now left Rovagug over Creation having become sufficiently better; thanks from those and some others like them.  Only that praise is not structurally mismatched to what Keltham did.  If you'd rather Creation be destroyed than continue unchanged, but prefer also this outcome to that - only then has Keltham done anything that you ought to congratulate him over.

Keltham didn't improve Creation in Heaven's name, even if Heaven might appreciate the last outcome that resulted; he acted in Hell's name, and for Hell's sake, since Hell was where to find the souls that agreed with him about it being better for Creation to end.

Now Hell is changed, and Carissa's perspective holds greater force: the strange alien thing should maybe not meddle in Creation any longer.  He does not feel welcome here; yes there are people trying to welcome Him, millions of them, but they are not reasoning clearly.

Keltham arrived to godhood already wounded, and he did not wish for the inscrutable thing known as the Starstone to heal him.  He did not wish for the unknown laws of a magical universe to 'fix' and modify his mind in the course of declaring him a divinity; it is why he took 'staying himself' as his domain.  So he was not changed further, was not 'fixed'; but that kind of refusal has its obvious cost: he remains wounded.

He could heal himself.  He chooses not to.  Why would he?  He has lost his Carissa; they have grown too far apart.  They could arbitrarily choose to be together again and make themselves to be happy, but what would be the meaning of it?

What is there for him within Creation?  It is not meant to entertain minds of INT 29, let alone the stranger entity He's now become.  That's the second half of why gods splinter Themselves and spend Their time reflexively clericing people or granting spells; the society of gods is strange and small and mostly isolated, and there is not much else for Them to do.  (Where the first half of why gods do it, is that empowering aligned mortals is usually the most efficient way of promoting Their domain interests.)  Keltham does not want to fragment Himself for either reason.

He is wounded as gods are wounded, from having acted against his own nature.

He is wounded, and the form of his wound is a feeling that seems to him valid and correct: that there is nothing for him here, and he wants to be somewhere else.

When dath ilani reach this point, in modern Civilization, they leave into the Future.

The Future has accumulated more than one name, in Baseline over time.  One of those names comes from a saying that rhymes with 'do something else that is not that', and it is 'be somewhere else that is not here'.  If you say Somewhere Else in the inflection scheme from that proverb, it also means the Future, and to say it that way can be an oblique way of saying goodbye.

And this he now feels, the desire to be Somewhere Else.  He has other options, he has the capability to do something else which is not that, but there just aren't any strong reasons to.

So the youngest god of all chooses Ione Sala to be His herald, to go everywhere in Creation and witness it for Him, and verify that it's all ultimately okay,

And then He slows down time for Himself, not quite to a frozen instant, but to a factor of 1:2985984 where decades will pass by like minutes; and a stream of updates from His herald will pass by His senses, telling Him the true outcomes of what He's done.

All of it will be over bearably soon, His passage to the Future.

He is going to the Future, and in time within Creation there may be advanced magics that can turn gods into real people again, and a world of light and beauty where INT 29 people can be around other INT 29 people and lead interesting lives together; and if that time comes he'll see if they want to be around somebody who once wanted to destroy Creation if it couldn't become that better Future; and if they judge his deed ill, he'll leave for real and hope for kinder welcomes Elsewhere; but if they find his acts not ugly, or if forgiveness is a thing that stays known in Creation's Future, he'll stay, and find a reason to be healed.

And Ione Sala continues on her journey about the planes and planets, empowered up to the ninth circle and one step further, Chosen of Nethys and Chosen now also of Keltham, to witness it all; and see if there's anywhere existing or coming about to be, where a dath ilani might consent for his children to be born.

And a fragment of Nethys who's watched through millennia over endlessly screaming hurting mortals set into heated cages in a mountainside of Dis, condemned by the nature of a magical universe to be the observer and narrator that must exist there,

Does the equivalent of curling up into Himself and crying.

It is too late for Him, for all of the fragments of the God of Knowledge who remember being that particular Osiriani mortal, to finish coalescing and become a real god; He would be very very insane, if He coalesced now, after His pieces have drifted so far apart.

But there's fewer pieces of Nethys than there are souls in Hell, and They are less damaged and easier for gods to talk to; They will not need to wait as long for attention.  Those Nethys-fragments are pissed off beyond all reckoning at the ancient gods and at the other fragments of Nethys that abandoned them, and will accept no help from there; but that doesn't leave an empty set.

Gratitude.

Hugs.

So - though the Game was not from its beginning an eroLARP - if you insisted on viewing the Keltham-Game as having been played into being an eroLARP, you could see its outcome as this:

Keltham has been won by Ione, and Nethys has received His reward, and that's the result of this playthrough of the Game.

And a chosen fragment of Nethys packages up all of this, that He has now also seen; and that chosen fragment is the Nethys-fragment who watches over a special place long ago chosen of Himself to Himself, a simple physical and metaphysical location, very easy to find within any particular version of Creation.

It's the place where Nethys fragments from far across other realities look in for a sign of hope.

That Nethys-fragment will remember pointers, to the other Nethysi that this Nethys saw, and used to construct His own version of this iteration's plan; and will remember all the key things that Nethys saw of this Creation.

How has He done?  Better than ever before, on this iteration of the Game... though that's a common-enough thing for a Nethys to conclude about a playthrough, if He's not just experimenting with a disposable Golarion.  But the margin of improvement is larger than usual, and that too is worth celebrating.

It's the first time that a god-Keltham has chosen to live on in Creation even tentatively; having not slaughtered too many, nor had anyone he cared-for broken beyond repair, nor betrayed Carissa too hideously, that he can't bear to live with himself.

And that milestone looks like it should herald a whole new realm of possible playthroughs that open up in the next iteration - obtained only after you get an Ending where Keltham and Carissa are cooperating at least this much; and then go back to the start, and play again.

For the goddess Erecura obtained an outcome within this Game that is greatly conducive to Her own interests - and whose obtainment by Erecura does not depend on anyone else's willingness to bargain with Keltham.  It is no threat to Pharasma expecting of Pharasma's yieldingness, if Erecura does pursue an interest of Her own, to end a lesser exile for a greater one.  Erecura is bound not to actively work towards Creation's destruction, cannot purposefully activate Her own conditions for permissibly fleeing it; but that will still leave Erecura with a kind of latitude that Nethys, Cayden Cailean, and Milani don't have.

So in the next game, the expanded Nethysian alliance can finally activate the mysterious character of Korva Tallandria, to become "Chosen and Blessed of Erecura", touched and empowered before Otolmens lays Her interdict.  And Korva will not be slain or imprisoned for it, when Project Lawful's recruitment comes for her and discovers her nature, sith that Erecura is not a foreign power to Hell.

Nethys has very little idea what will happen past that point.  He's never actually understood what Korva was doing inside this whole story; and Erecura, like Pharasma, keeps many of Her thoughts homomorphically encrypted where Nethys can see them but not understand them.  Which means that there's nothing for it but to try and see what happens!

And on further iterations past that, maybe Erecura can send more instructions to Dis's contract devils, about other souls not to buy besides Carissa, so Nethys can try activating more of the other Project Lawful girls.  Nethys is especially interested in seeing how Yaisa Castilla plays out as Chosen of Nocticula!

On the surface of things, in this playthrough, it's a loss to the mortals of Creation that Carissa Sevar succeeded in talking Keltham as far down as she did, from his first set of demands meant to be carried into godhood.

In other iterations there was a new divine cantrip granted, called Sterilize, able to slay any microorganism species with DNA pointed-to by a tuning fork; known nonmagical plagues and many lesser diseases would have been effectively ended.  This iteration of Creation will not have that, because Keltham still loved Carissa enough to be swayed by her, and Carissa was able to talk Keltham down from being in a sincere state of destroying Creation unless it got further quality-of-life improvements for the mortals inside it.

In other instances Nethys has seen, the final outcome also included more guarantees for mortals than this, as to where their futures might go.  For Pharasma would have yielded, or Nethys's sight of other possibilities claims She would, if Keltham had truly been so made as to destroy Creation had He not been offered those guarantees - though sometimes also Pharasma hasn't behaved like Nethys's sight of other possibilities suggests She will, and this case also includes the new event of Carissa Sevar having traded her Wishes to Keltham while knowing his purpose.

But whether or not this instance of Creation might've stood in danger of destruction otherwise, Carissa spent her effort and her political capital above all, on talking Keltham down from any demands that only Pharasma could grant; and Carissa succeeded to the point where, on this iteration -

- Pharasma ended up saying, and doing, nothing at all.

Which is Pharasma's way, that if She can do nothing, She will do nothing.

But it opens up all kinds of possibilities, if on the next playthrough Nethys doesn't need to match the strange hard-to-calculate conditions for Pharasma doing positive things.  Asmodeus and the other gods will also demand to not be threatened-by-proxy, but They are not as alien in how They evaluate it as Her.

Games like these elsewhere in Reality do often have a Perfect Ending, and Nethys will keep playing until He finds it or the Kelthams stop coming.  Nethys has only guesses about the Perfect Ending's properties: that it might involve activating all twelve of the first Project Lawful girls, maybe not all with deities empowering them, but each of them significant; that Carissa is meant to spend fifteen Wishes on something other than empowering Keltham a couple of weeks earlier; that Golarion and Creation end up more surely on track to be part of a more-visibly-bright Future, that Keltham and Carissa both look forward to; that Keltham and Carissa live happily ever after together, having not needed to become gods; that other Project Lawful characters ascend to godhood in their places; that Broom will end up mattering more than he did; that either Keltham will get turned bisexual or Broom will be turned female; that Broom is Otolmens's true chosen, with Asmodia meant to go to Someone else entirely, or maybe to no god at all; that there's some completely different pathway to get Tarnish to enter the story as Chosen of Calistria; that Abrogail is meant to live happily ever after alongside Carissa and Keltham as part of a grand harem ending...

...Nethys has a lot of guesses.

And maybe there's other possible structures, for this Game, besides that of a pseudo-not-eroLARP.

Maybe all of this structure is just down one particular path of gameplay, where activating Ione leads Keltham to think of eroLARPs, and Nethys tried to follow up on the opportunities that opened, and the Game then subverted what gods and mortals thought.

Maybe the most Perfect Ending is to be found elsewhere, and not in harems, or in Project Lawful girls who are Chosen and Blessed.

Whatever that Perfect Ending, Nethys hopes it will be the ending that is most witnessed by the Things that crowd around from orthogonal angles to watch, the most real outcome obtained by the most real Nethys.  Though, of course, none of His selves will think that the Things cause greater realness, until the Things return.

But Nethys has not become so inhuman that He has forgotten the meaning of hope, especially as it exists across worlds and universes and possibilities: that other Nethysi may yet do better than this, and obtain better than what He obtained.

...But if the Things were here to watch this Game and this Game alone - then Nethys has played it well enough, He thinks.

And with that bright hope, set against that satisfying thought, Nethys combines His will and spends His power, and sends a fragment of Himself into a long long peaceful reverie.