Creation: 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.

Creation: 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.

Golarion: 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.

Creation: ...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: 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.

Milani: 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.

Gorum: 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.

Sarenrae: 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.

Carissa : 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: 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.

Creation: 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.

Creation: 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.

Creation: ...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.

Golarion: 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.)

Project Lawful: 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 : 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.)

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

Golarion: 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.

>Keltham: 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: 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: 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?

>Keltham: 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.

dath ilan: 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.

>Keltham: 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.

Ione Sala: 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,

>Keltham: 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.

>Keltham: 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.

Ione Sala: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Milani: Gratitude.

Hugs.

World-N: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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!

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: 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.

Nethys: ...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.