"You are King Fetohep's [Cleric]." She names Fetohep's title with only a slight hint of disdain. "A relic out of a bygone age. My predecessors never liked them, and by what I remember, I must concur. Wherefore did you come by your class?"

"Honored Quarass, I am from another world, one where clerics are commonplace. My clerichood was granted to me by my patron Iomedae."

She shifts.

"Iomedae. A god of your world? A living one? You sent my historians a query on gods, and on two names. Kasigna. Laedonius Deviy." She pronounces the second wrong. "What is the relevance?"

"Iomedae is a living god of my world, yes. While I am not formally a subject of King Fetohep, he contracted for my services in introducing clerichood to the people of Khelt, and two people who were not attempting to become clerics in the fashion of my world were instead granted clerichood in the fashion of this one. One for each of Kasigna and Laedonius Deviy."

"If you petition us for information, then you believe them to be of this world's, not yours?"

"Yes. In my world, clerics work a particular way and are granted particular spells; people there do not level as it is understood here, at all. Since coming here I have begun to level, but people chosen by the gods of my world also have the functionality and spells that clerics of my world have. The clerics of Kasigna and Laedonius Deviy have only levels of the local kind, and furthermore I don't recognize the names from my home."

Her scowl deepens.

"Do you recognize the name 'Tamaroth'?"

"No, Quarass."

"Flos offers me generous terms for an alliance in a war I am losing. His only condition is that I build and staff a temple to Tamaroth in my three largest cities. I do not recognize 'Tamaroth', whom he claims to be a living god, despite that the gods are, obviously, dead. I do not recognize 'Kasigna', or 'Laedonius Deviy'. Not in tens of thousands of years have I heard these names. Yet the evidence cannot be lightly denied. How do you untangle this?"

"There are a number of possibilities, Quarass, and I do not know which are likely. One is that the dead gods have begun coming back to life. Another is that they were only ever hibernating, not dead. Or it could be that these are not the same gods who once populated this world nor are they from mine but from some third world. Or that they are not gods, but some other sort of being which can emulate them in the observed respects, only recently active. - I should caution that if some of those possibilities sound like obvious nonsense it may be because there is some effect constraining the god-related thoughts of most people of this world."

"I have been made aware of the injunction your refer to. Regardless of the origin of these new purported gods, I am not eager to bring about the return of holy orders, now complete with the gods they did enough without in our history. Shall I assume that you and Khelt are with Flos, in this, in cultivating new temples and worships?"

"- with him, no. At the time I arrived in Khelt and was approached with the offer under which I have been working, I believe he was still asleep. I am actually only on this continent at all because one of his partisans kidnapped me and I would not all else being equal tend to align with him or his on anything."

"But you do support the promulgation of religion."

"Only some of it. It varies considerably."

"Elaborate."

"On my world we think of - morality, ethics, philosophy, that kind of thing - as existing within a two-axis grid of 'alignment', such that an entity may be Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic, and also Good, Neutral, or Evil. I am in favor of Good religion and also a specific Lawful Neutral religion that I have observed to have benign effects where it is practiced. I am content to tolerate but would in most situations not choose to propagate most other Neutral religions and am definitively opposed to Evil religions. I have only guesses, no direct information, about the alignments of any local gods, although local people do show up to alignment detection magic if they are high-level enough. My own patron is Lawful Good."

"Lawful Good such as paladin orders that defend the innocent and swear by a code of honor, and Lawful Neutral such as monastic orders that practice asceticism and martial perfection? And Evil would be cults of human sacrifice, ritual suffering, corruption and excess?"

"Those are all examples of those alignments, although not the full range of any of them."

The [Paladins] are the most annoying, she doesn't say, because you can't just kill them all.

"Are there religious orders in your world which do not follow a god? What are notable differences between god-worshipping and non-god-worshipping faiths?"

"There are... organizations and interest groups... which do not follow a god. I would not refer to them as religious orders but this is my fourth language and there might be a subtlety of the words affecting my translation. Examples of organizations and interest groups which are not oriented around a god include most governments, professional guilds, voluntary clubs and associations of various kinds, adventuring parties, military units and ships' crews, criminal gangs... I'm certainly forgetting some. Without regular feedback from a god in the form of newly chosen empowered followers and the occasional renouncement thereof, I think they are more likely to fall prey to corruption and drift, but are in the best case as good as their purposes."

"I use 'religious orders' to refer to organizations which practice worship, and deliberately and successfully produce faith-based classes. [Clerics], [Paladins], [Priests], [Acolytes], et cetera. In the absence of gods, they worshipped concepts, creatures, people, institutions or other more esoteric things. There were once Dragon cults over the world, for example. Terandria had their paladin orders. The Lizardfolk of Baleros once worshipped Naga god-kings."

"Classes as they are understood here are unknown on my world and so I cannot gauge any organization's effectiveness at producing them except by extrapolating to empowered clerics, paladins, and so forth as I am historically accustomed to them. There are... edge case entities... that are worshipped in the same way as gods, on my world, for various reasons. I don't specifically know of anyone worshiping a dragon there but it would not be particularly startling to hear about. There is a country ruled by a man who passes himself off as a god but I would expect most of his followers to believe him to be one. The monarch of a particular theocracy is popularly understood by his subjects to be an aspect of the god who makes him a cleric."

"Is obtaining the powers of a cleric or paladin in your world only possible through the endorsement of a god?"

"Yes. Or - many of the individual spells and powers can be acquired or mimicked other ways but the complete package of either is exclusively through a god's intervention."

She wants to take a lot more time to pick that apart but it's not terribly relevant, and she has a war to win.

"You said your guess is that the steering hand of a god is a moderating influence on their faith."