Iarwain: Yet among those who felt a spark of hope even at the rumor, there is born then a blaze of desperation:

The replacement mayor of a town filled with justifiably sullen tieflings proclaims an emergency moment of prayer;

An emperor on another continent, who knows himself for damned, orders every major city within Teleport distance of his mages to worship Carissa Sevar;

A priest of Sarenrae from further yet who stayed up past midnight to see, now rings frantically the bell of Her temple, to summon Sarenrae's faithful to pray to a Lawful Evil goddess, just in case, just in case;

A nine-year-old boy, whose father told him his mother went to Hell, kneels by his bed and sobs for Carissa Sevar to save her;

His father is busy gathering cattle in to the fold, and he cannot delay in that work, but he weeps and prays to Carissa Sevar all the same.

It's all that almost everyone on Golarion can do, those mortals who know anything at all of what's happening, if they don't just want to stand and wait in the hour of their own doom.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa Sevar finds the fragments of Herself / the fragments of herself find Her, and She is whole then, and a god.

It's with mixed emotions (perceived more clearly in their parts, Her parts, than ever before) that Carissa sees the gods have not done the last thing They might have done to stop Her, have not destroyed Absalom, or even Golarion, where it stood behind Her.  There was a sense in which that path being probable would have been a very bad thing; if that was an outcome expected by Nethys, Keltham and the others would not have attempted this strategy, and Golarion would have been destroyed by Rovagug. 

But also They are all off the path Nethys foresaw, as is even clearer from where She now stands; and perhaps Golarion could've been destroyed helpfully, not as Keltham's distraction but to preserve Creation. From what She knew when She ascended, it was possible. And She'd hoped for it, and it is not so.

She is reaching now for a glimpse -

- and then for a whole and stable view -

of the god-negotiated levels of the world -

- She sees how Nethys and Cayden and Milani have been twisting and bending those alongside the mortal layers of reality to bring them all here to this, and She doesn't see any ways out, now, though of course She looks -

The mortals are still praying to Her, empowering Her in a way that's injurious to their own interests on one level, and also part of a greater strategy that leaves the people of Golarion better off, and also asking Her to do something She deeply wishes to do but which is not in this instant Her first priority.

She spares little of Her attention to her feelings from Her other priorities, but even a little of a coalescent god's attention is a great deal, and She could not be coalesced if She was leaving parts of herself behind.

So Carissa Sevar mourns / and nods across time / and accepts a debt to be repaid -

Starstone Cathedral: And in mortal Absalom, the Starstone is visibly much diminished in size and brilliance; for Carissa Sevar has seized of it almost all the power that Aroden did not take for Himself, and nearly all of Achaekek's remaining energies beside.

Keltham+: Keltham comes forth, then, laid around with protective spells so that he will not immediately evaporate in Carissa Sevar's mere presence; and he lays his hand upon what remains of the Starstone.

Otolmens: NO.  Absolutely NOT.

Carissa Sevar: In a way, Carissa Sevar is more aligned to Otolmens than any other god's purposes here.  Otolmens should have been allowed to squish Keltham, and everyone else should not have stopped Her.  And yet, straight through Her as a fact that does not change, an oath she swore / time-crossing decision that she made, standing halfway between mortal and goddess, because the alternative consistent pathways through time were even worse:

I will not let you destroy Him.

The Gods: More and greater gods, then, answer with larger pieces of Their attention when Otolmens Herself adds to the call, for this whole business is becoming quite worrying.

Their blows rain down on the goddess Carissa Sevar, seeking to extinguish Her piece by piece wherever She shields Keltham.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa Sevar is above all the greater goddess of survival at any price, and to extinguish any piece of Her own selfhood would take a divine effort more serious than this.

Keltham+: He channels some of his attention, while he can, into the crown worn by his mortal form, that was prepared by spellcraft of Carissa Sevar to accept divinity into itself: and into that crown, by Keltham's will, as he wears it along his journey to godhood, he places as much of dath ilan's knowledge as he can place, to be used by a wearer out of Golarion with whom dath ilan might have touched fingers; not someone like a dath ilani, but someone on their own pathway toward a greater whole that dath ilan once hoped to join someday; an assistance to help other worlds along their own ways, to become themselves and not a copy of dath ilan, as dath ilan would also have asked of him;

Keltham+: And the crown awakens as an artifact, and knows of itself that it is the Flame of Civilization, to kindle in another place what burned elsewhere, though they be different fires that light;

Carissa Sevar: As Carissa Sevar placed into Her own crown, greatest of the three, Her comprehension of Law and Spellcraft and magic's hidden order; tinged by her strength of will, and her fierce determination; to be wielded by one who chooses, with that knowledge, to protect souls and worlds from destruction; and that Crown awakens and reflects upon itself, and knows that it is the Light of Consciousness that must never be extinguished;

Pilar : And final of those three is a crown once worn by Pilar Pineda, which device is also now a person, and that crown knows herself for the Warmth of Friendship; and that crown is not Snack Service, for Snack Service now is no more, but she bears Snack Service's last best wishes, and some of her imaginary personhood, and some of her power.

Keltham+: But soon enough Keltham can no longer try to channel divinity into his artifact-of-ascendance, soon enough He also falls into fractally shattered dream and ascends—

>Keltham: But it is over more quickly, for Him; He is making Himself into the least powerful god who can do a single task.

>Keltham: And Keltham claims for Himself this divine portfolio:

>Keltham: He is foremost the Neutral god of Kelthamness, with domains of 'being Keltham', 'staying Keltham', and 'becoming more Keltham',

>Keltham: But also He is the god of being in one place and then another; and god of things being made of math; and somewhat the god of silent death, since that part of Achaekek's essence was like right there and it seems potentially helpful.

>Keltham: It can weaken you, to try to be that strange and specific as a god, but Keltham does not need to be any stronger than He is become.  One task only lies ahead of Him.

Starstone Cathedral: And when Keltham has finished ascending, and vanished about His purpose in Creation,

After the deadly focus of the gods shifts elsewhere,

Carmin Isandre: There teleports into the ruins of the Starstone Cathedral a wizard who follows Iomedae, who was oathbound to Keltham for a time but no longer, to gather up the three artifacts called Warmth and Light and Flame.

The three crowns don't form a set and you cannot wear them all at once to gain ultimate power.  They are simply there to help.

And Iomedae's wizard gives a wondering sad look to the remnant of the Starstone, now dimmer.  The Starstone is no longer defended, but anyone who touches it now will be destroyed, if they have no gods to defend them in their ascension.  Reaching the Starstone was never really the hard part in the first place, if anyone is that much the fool.  Once this Cathedral was defended at least against some gods, if not the likes of Asmodeus or Achaekek; but now that is no longer so.

And so Carmin departs to Lastwall, setting an illusion of warning glyphs in the air there before she goes, accompanied by warning animations; lest any touch the Stone and true-die.  Lastwall will return, perhaps, with greater troops than this, to claim the Starstone's remnant and make the reckless hear at least a disclaimer first.  But to muster her fellow Iomedaens will take time, now that she is no longer oathbound and her secrets are secrets no more.

Starstone Cathedral: So the Starstone, or its remnant, now lies alone and quiet, but for the seethe of lava and crackle of flames that will take long to subside—

Starstone Cathedral: The air beside the Starstone parts into the form of a Gate.

Prince Fe-Anar: And from that Gate, Fe-Anar comes forth,

Erecura: And an old woman,

Dispater: And her husband.

Nethys: Huh!  That hasn't happened before—

Erecura: —but Nethys is the only god who sees, and His splinter can speak of it to no one, for there is present a Power in whose domain lies secrecy.

Prince Fe-Anar: And Fe-Anar touches to the Starstone, with his bare hands, three great diamonds, which Fe-Anar now at INT 30 has comprehended and prepared and enchanted; for which sake Dispater yielded the greater part of His personal treasury of spellsilver, accumulated over millennia, simply to burn as much magic into those three diamonds as they could hold;

Those diamonds were already made lesser artifacts, and now into them, begins to flow the last of the Starstone's fossilized godhood, transforming them into greater and divine artifacts;

And all this is done, not to make those three diamonds powerful, for none of that is power;

Rather, it has all been to make them a container of true power.

Erecura: And She who was once a mortal soothsayer, called then Aerecura, before she stole divinity of Pharasma Herself,

Begins to glow with a white-golden light.

Prince Fe-Anar: And he ascends towards godhood as slowly as he possibly can, fighting to hang onto every shred of his mortality with every scrap of his raised Splendour, pouring the last of the Starstone's captured divinity through himself and into the artifacts that are now becoming themselves; even as all of his augmented Intelligence is entirely devoted to making and completing the three Containers of Radiance, to capturing and holding and structuring what Erecura now gives back and shines forth,

Iarwain: (ai art)

Prince Fe-Anar: And there is even mortality left in Fe-Anar, he is only half-way to divinity, when the Containers are complete;

Dispater: And before Fe-Anar can lose himself and become a god, Dispater raises His mace of office; and with all His might, bellowing a vast roar that echoes all through Absalom, He smashes the Starstone.

The Gods: That cannot be concealed, and many gods turn their attention from Zon-Kuthon's vault to stare back at Absalom again in sudden and considerable alarm.

Prince Fe-Anar: And Fe-Anar who has become something more than he was, not from having touched the Starstone, but from learning the truth of his own character, gives a brilliant imperishable Radiance to Erecura and another to Dispater,

Dispater: (All three of the bearers having been bound around with a vastly carefully-composed oath of mutual interest and thorough honest cooperation, whereof which Dispater has sworn from sixty-six different angles that He has not tried and will not try to pull anything sketchy or unexpected,)

Erecura: And she-who-was-Aerecura, much diminished but still not just an ordinary god,reaches into the shattered Starstone and draws forth the indestructible awfulness that lies at its center,

Starstone Cathedral: the cysted remnant of a stillborn universe, of a flawed and failed Creation,

a thing of indeterminate size, at once light enough to hold, and heavy enough to bore through a moon,

Starstone Cathedral: and the awful green brilliance that shines out from it sure looks poisonous, and would dissolve even a god if they were unprotected by the Radiance that stabilizes Creation,

but the three of them hold Radiances, and they withstand it.

Dispater: Dispater opens another Gate then, and in that dread green brilliance it seems to gape wider than even a god's Gate should.

The Gardens of Erecura: And the three of them pass through that Gate to a place that should have been less simple to reach, into the heart of the Gardens of Erecura.

There was a great golden Ship buried beneath those Gardens, but it need not be raised; for now there is a better alternative, that was also prepared-for.  All those who'll go have stayed, and those who'll stay have gone.

Erecura: Erecura raises the hand holding the Starstone's poisonous center high, even as Her other hand grips a Radiance;

Erecura: green brilliance flows about Her form as though She wore a cloak of it, twists about Her head in twin pointed vortices; and the local distance metric deforms around that power, light wavering and distorting and showing glimpses of gaps into starlight through the haze in which She's cloaked;

Erecura: And with a huge crack that echoes through nine layers of Hell, She rips out the Gardens of Erecura from the fabric of Dis;

Prince Fe-Anar: Fe-Anar has by then comprehended somewhat of how to wield the Radiance of Stability, and he lays it about himself, blazing protection to match and neutralize the poison;

Dispater: And Dispater lays one of His hands upon the green brilliance, while Radiance flares white-gold about His other hand that He may not die; and Gate after Gate after Gate begins to gape impossibly wide about them.

The Gardens of Erecura: There is an ark that is leaving Creation, before it might perish; and those who have longed through ages to leave it, now come to pay their oaths of passage to the captains.

The Gods: Now at this point, every sensible god will finally panic:

The Gods: They will coalesce Themselves wholly, forsaking all other matters, and turn Their entire attention toward whatever triggered Erecura to do that:

The Gods: For to the ancient gods it is a known fact about Erecura's exile, that if Creation itself is seriously threatened, Erecura may break Her exile for a greater exile: may flee Hell and flee Creation, with Her stolen energy and any others She chooses to protect with it, sith that any tiny remnant of Pharasmin Creation might survive.

The Gods: There's a difference between interesting and important moves being made within your divine game, which is how it is for three new gods to arise or Iomedae to consume Zon-Kuthon; versus gods realizing that They personally may be about to die, along with all those things in which They hold Their value.

The Gods: They don't need to know the specific alarming details, to panic.  They are gods, and it has become predictable to Them that They will learn alarming details later.  They gather Themselves now, They are ready to spend vast desperate resources now—

Iarwain: But by the time They are paying that much attention, all Their real chances to intervene, now lie in the unreachable past.  By the time They finally notice the true danger, all of the critical events are already done and over.

For the way of fighting all the gods at once, if you insist on doing that, is to make very sure They have lost before They awaken to Their danger and act, at all.

The moment when the gods finally panic has been scheduled, and it comes after it is already too late.

>Keltham: A lesser god looks up from where He stands near the base of Pharasma's Spire, that is the foundation of the Great Beyond; He has passed in a flash by distant suns and the surface layers of planes, and hidden away encapsulated strangelets and other catastrophes, whose dead-man triggers are in Golarion where prophecy is shattered; and near about the base of Pharasma's Spire there are now hidden the frozen potentia of thunderbolt singularities and relativistic death waves, true-vacuums and single-quarks and assorted other kinds of physics disaster.

Keltham+: (He didn't actually know that he'd be able to do it, even in his last mortal minute.  He'd read some nontechnical gruesome-stories about physics disasters as an overly interested child, he had that much reason to know that possible ways existed in principle.  But while still mortal he carefully avoided thinking about physics disasters in any mathematical detail, or whether his future god-self could implement them with divine magic, just in case those thoughts would have been legible to Otolmens.  He touched the Starstone in a leap of blinded faith, on that last step; trusting that his future self would solve those physics problems, given that dath ilan solved them and that he knew all the base equations.)

>Keltham: And now He sends to all the ancient gods to whom He is not utterly opposed, and to all the once-mortal gods whose address He can see, and to Pharasma Herself, this legible thought:

Coming before you as an envoy sent of Elsewhere, but foremost in my own person and purpose, I have placed my death-grip around Creation's throat.

There is too much pessimization of utility functions going on inside this subregion of Reality.  I consider it better ended, than continuing as it is; for so would wish those souls in Hell that still can think; and my own unshared and unshareable experience suggests that those consciousnesses ending in one place would continue in another.

That's my batna.  Let's negotiate.

>Keltham: And to Pharasma Herself, privately:

A message from a tiny little mortal named Tarnish, who You thought could never do You any injury and whom it was safe for You to ignore:

Fuck you.

The Gods: There are many thoughts and conversations that happen then, simultaneously, at a pace that mortals could follow individually but not in parallel: gods are not fast, but they are large.

Abadar: ....no.

Abadar: Abadar is not one of the gods that is ever near desiring the world’s destruction. For one thing, He couldn’t do it, not when the many many many people who trade with Him have done so since the beginning of time on the premise that He wants, that He uses His strength to bring about, cities, prosperity, invention. But even if no one had ever traded on such a premise, He would never do it, because in all the vastness of Creation He perceives almost entirely things that should be, people trading, people building, people inventing.

And He says to Keltham: I aided you, when you came to this world, in the hope that we could trade peacefully, and I did not believe then that a mortal with your shape would use the value I gave you to act so much against my interests; if this is what you do, then it would be better if I had permitted Asmodeus to ruin you. By the value that I gave you, that permitted you to thrive and gain this much capability, I ask that you not.

>Keltham: If you are looking on the level of gods you can see it, how Abadar's message strikes at a gaping wound inside Keltham's shape, damage not dealt by any external force but where Keltham dealt Himself that wound by acting against His own nature.

But what is left of Keltham retains its structure and does not change its conformation around the wound as He responds:

There are sentients in Hell, and I knew I could not be Yours anymore, even to that conduct of my trades.  I left You when I knew I could no longer uphold Your flame-light of civilization, and afterward I tried to give You all I could of what You had hoped to buy from me.

I am sorry.

Desna: Desna offers that She will do all within Her power to find the world-wanderer's lost home, and return Him there; He does not need to stay within Creation, if He finds its shape inimical.

>Keltham: You cannot touch dath ilan to place me there, and even if You could find a writeable copy, it is too late.  I would no longer fit there as god or mortal.

Desna: Creation is vast and what lies beyond is vaster yet.  There are other places, and in some of them Keltham could be happy!

>Keltham: If my personal happiness was my greatest desire in the end, I would have chosen that path much much earlier.

Calistria: 🗡 appreciation of Keltham's angry determination to overturn Creation's order 🗡

🗡 approval of Keltham's deeds as a mortal on behalf of Osirian women 🗡

🗡 expression of attraction to Keltham as a new male deity, flirtatious expression of interest in having a pleasurable fling with Him 🗡

🗡 coy emphasis that Calistria does not make this offer to male deities very often at all 🗡

🗡 sensuous eagerness to work with Keltham on some OTHER form of vengeance and power-overturning which is NOT THIS during aforesaid fling 🗡

🗡 self-prediction of horrible painful revenge* against Keltham if He actually carries out any large-scale destructive acts against Creation 🗡

(*)  🗡 it's not meant as a threat 🗡 it's meant as REVENGE 🗡

>Keltham: You do not, so far, live up to Your reputation for subtlety.

Calistria: 🗡 Calistria possesses deep comprehension of when subtlety is appropriate 🗡

🗡 and when it is not 🗡

Sarenrae: It is common for people to want to destroy their enemies because they don’t really comprehend them, because they cannot see any good in them or do not realize about themselves that they would stop if they did see. Almost everyone driven to the horror of true-murder is, in some sense, lying to themselves, refusing to see a sacred thing they’d be unwilling to destroy if they could see it.

Sarenrae’s first hope is that Keltham is making, by his lights, an angry and wounded and bitter mistake, like people do, and that now that He's a god He might be able to understand new truths that’d make Him not want to destroy Creation anymore, in which case She will expend an astonishing amount of resources conveying all of that information immediately.

>Keltham: Keltham does not try to conceal Himself from any Good god's inspection, and it will be obvious to Sarenrae that (though He is truly wounded) He is not a shape that could be changed by that revelation, that everyone else's existence is as intensely real as his own.  Most of His hesitancy about destroying Creation is held within His doubts about whether everyone else here is equally real.  If He were certain that every paving stone in Hell was just as real as himself, that Creation was continually producing new souls and sending thirty percent of them to Evil afterlives and all those people were real, He would be all the more driven to end this.

Sarenrae: Seeing this, She grieves, and has little more to offer the crisis.

Obviously She favors ending Hell, if anyone was wondering. And yes, should any souls be displaced by present events, from Hell or for that matter from anywhere else, Nirvana has space to take every one of them.

(Nirvana sends a lawyer to every Boneyard trial, to argue that everyone has Neutral Good in them. This results in Nirvana getting a number of souls that may have Neutral Good in them but are, you know, not conventionally Neutral Good, or at all people you’d want to have wandering your paradise. The isle that houses them is not, in fact, infinite, but Sarenrae while She still possessed any power at all would not let it be false, that there was space in Nirvana for everyone, that it would turn away none of them; She would die making it true, should it ever come up.)

lintamande: (Some Evil gods have probably considered whether it would be funny to make Her do that, but it’d take a truly ludicrous number of souls.)

The Gods: (...And if Pharasma's sorting were subverted on that scale, She would likely object.  A few mostly-Evil souls won by Sarenrae's isle doesn't seem to bother Pharasma, any more than the tenth that many souls who end up Maledicted: they're a statistically small fraction, and both varieties of soul end up Good and Evil, in time.  But wholesale relocation of mostly-Evil dead to Good planes probably would impinge on what the gods guess to be Pharasma's own priorities; or at least, some of Her rare interventions seem to have been aimed at not-that, long ago in the Beginning.)

Asmodeus: Asmodeus is, predictably, not going to give into a threat even if that kills Him; mostly that makes entities not try it. And this is, obviously, the work of Iomedae, who He knows does not want the world to end, and so no one will give in. If, bafflingly, She’s arranged for a sufficient coalition to side with Her, well, Asmodeus too can play the game of doing things-against-His-interests-that-harm-the-other-party-more, if that’s the stupid game they’re playing; He’ll release Rovagug and order all the souls in Hell shattered before any saviors can reach them.

Greater Iomedae: Iomedae is busy eating Zon-Kuthon but not too busy to make legible that She has done absolutely no acting-against-Her-interests at any point, ate Zon-Kuthon on Milani’s claim it was a good idea for Her, and opposes the destruction of Creation! Very vehemently! She was guessing that Keltham would be crushed on ascension; She would have impeded Keltham Herself, if She’d possessed unencumbered knowledge of His plans and if She’d expected that no one else would stop Him.  She requests that Asmodeus act with such scraps of civilization as are in Him and not spitefully destroy everything while they figure out if there’s something else to be done instead.

(She can actually see now of Her own unencumbered knowledge how this ought to resolve, from the logic that threads through everything that has happened so far, but She’s not going to tell Asmodeus that. Because She hates Him.)

Sarenrae: Sarenrae also requests clarification on the obvious point here where this was clearly orchestrated by some parties – they can identify themselves if they want or She can think for slightly longer and She’ll figure it out – who were not allowed to do things like that, and who presumably don’t want the universe destroyed, and who should have known that that is precisely what they were bringing about.

Irori: Of those gods that hovered around Keltham, who were once-mortal enough to understand key parts of what has happened, Irori knows He may be the only one who can and will speak.  He does not understand fully; He is coalesced and trying to think as quickly as He can, but gods are large but not fast and He has not solved it all yet.  He does not know why.  But He knows Who.

Nethys.  Cayden Cailean.

Asmodeus: And Milani, and He's not convinced not-Iomedae.

The Gods: There is an exchange then of information, among the gods, gathered to confront this threat to all Creation; in the parts of Their wills not bent on probing Keltham's causal surface to sway Him to another path by any possible input.

Irori yields what He knows, taking responsibility for what must have been His part in bringing Carissa Sevar to this pass.  Abadar gives it away, as a partial payment towards that owed for His protecting Keltham.  Asmodeus selectively releases all of that information and only that information which damns that which is good.

The Gods: And They consider it and think, and in time speak to Milani, in voices that are one and many:  Sarenrae and Slandrais, Gorum and Abadar, Gozreh and Onos, Erastil and Dahak, Asmodeus and Desna:

The Gods: Your faction repeatedly intervened to protect Keltham, empower Keltham.  None of You would have preferred that Creation be destroyed rather than continue unchanged.  You would have no motive to preserve and empower Keltham if We did not yield, so yield We must not.  And You must certainly have known that We would not permit Ourselves to be threatened by proxy, and that Creation would be forfeit.

Explain the actions of Your coalition, Milani; and We hope that it is not the last explanation We all hear.

Milani: Our interests ought not be injured by Our caring for them.  We should do no worse out of these events than if We had been incapable of any action; We should do at least as well, in expectation, than if We had cared for nothing and done nothing.

Milani: Then to understand all these events, You must understand what would have been the result if We had all done nothing.

Milani: This, then, would have been the consequence of Our null action—