"Don't fucking patronize me, Aspexia. I'm not a child in need of some motherly cruelty. The aspect of this situation that is giving me difficulty isn't the lack of action, it's trying to play the game against fucking Keltham, who I suspect of falling only barely short of a Dark Tapestry horror himself in terms of his effects on others' sanity. Sevar's doings at least make sense. This report of Keltham - is it a record of a true event that reached us accidentally, or sped along only by tropes? Is it a report that Keltham permitted and intended to reach us? I can't analyze the plot just by comprehending its obvious effect if I believed it, because Keltham hails from a world of over-intelligent madlings where my imagination of that intended effect would just be the first layer of his own intended plot. Calculate the consequences of that? He expects me to do that too! And I can't guess how many layers deep he'll think I'll go! He's from a world that plunges their children into false realities to toughen them!"
"There must be, there must be some Law to govern it, but Sevar is lost, Asmodia is lost, Avaricia and Meritxell and Shilira are not trope-touched and haven't the skill, Tallandria has twisted herself into a knot that's fucking useless for any plots more diabolical than diamond chemistry, Gorthoklek won't give me any useful answers unless I ask exactly the right question, and you are fucking useless because for all your vaunted dealings with divinities you seem to have no concept of what it means to fight someone, fight something, that -"