lintamande: "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Nethys: 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.
Greater Reality: 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.
Greater Reality: Similarly, it happens to be an a priori truth that all consciousnesses find themselves inside of a continuum that is made up of bits of realityfluid in 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.
Greater Reality: (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.)
Golarion: 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.
Nethys: 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.
Nethys: Then what is Nethys seeing? Mere possibilities that aren't real?
Greater Reality: 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.)
Nethys: 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.
Nethys: 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?
Nethys: 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.
Keltham: Consider Keltham materializing into Golarion, near the Worldwound.
Nethys: 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.
Nethys: 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.
Greater Reality: 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.
World-0: It begins with Keltham materializing at the Worldwound, and running into the building closest to him, containing Carissa Sevar.
Nethys: 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.
Nethys: 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.
World-0: Boy meets girl.
World-0: Girl reads boy's mind.
World-0: 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.
World-0: ...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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: Carissa Sevar comes to Irori's attention as before, and Irori bargains with Asmodeus...
World-0: But Ione Sala is not oracled of Nethys.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.)
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: Asmodia doesn't go to Hell, doesn't tell a contract devil about Keltham's ambitions.
World-0: 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.
World-0: And Otolmens is less unhappy with the total amount of divine intervention...
World-0: ...which means that Otolmens is more amenable to manipulation, and Asmodeus has accordingly put more effort into manipulating Otolmens toward His interests' favor.
World-0: 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.)
World-0: And so matters plod on, in the archduke's villa, slower than they did in another timeline.
World-0: 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.)
World-0: 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.
World-0: Everything plays out more gradually, in the archduke's villa; and Keltham's Chelish hosts are reading his mind, swifter to deflect his suspicions.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
Nethys: (And a fragment of Nethys sees Asmodeus's successful tactic, watching with continuing interest, with rare fascination...)
World-0: Security Dominates Peranza into quitting, giving Keltham the Sevar-invented story of her having realized her own unhappiness.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: ...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.
World-0: 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...
World-0: ...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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.)
World-0: 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...
World-0: ...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.
World-0: (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.)
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: Carissa Sevar accepts that binding as part of what she thinks is her penance.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: She does not know, when he asks for her analysis, that he is INT 29 and not merely INT 24 like her.
World-0: 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.
World-0: Carissa Sevar concludes that the caster's conscious intentions are what a Wish perverts.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: ...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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: Asmodeus is tired by that battle, but so are the other greater gods also tired...
World-0: ...when the ascended remains of Keltham come before Them to present His demands.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: ...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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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."
World-0: 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.
World-0: 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.
Milani: A vast terrible order is overthrown, and a better order has replaced it. It would be Milani's nature to pay the cost.
Cayden Cailean: 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.
Nethys: And Nethys—will find Creation less horrifying to look at, now.
World-1: And then it all begins again, inside the well-founded possibilities.
World-1: A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and a Nethys who has seen exactly one other possibility like this witnesses it.
Nethys: 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.
World-1: 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.
World-1: 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.
World-1: 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.
World-1: 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.
World-1: 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.
World-1: 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.
World-1: 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.
World-1: ...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.
World-1: 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.
Nethys: 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.
World-2: 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: 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.
Nethys: 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.)
Nethys: And so the Nethysi begin to probe the Possibilities of Keltham.
Nethys: 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.)
Nethys: 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.
World-2: 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: 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.
World-2: 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.
Nethys: 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: 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."
World-N: 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 Gruhastha, 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.
Nethys: 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.