I am glad to hear that.

Do your people just... not divorce, or...?

Severing a marriage isn't possible. Sometimes one partner died. Here we hoped that grief would be unknown forever.

Not possible like... how...?

You can stop living together if you don't live together well. Of course you can stop being in love. But you can't cease to be married any more than you can just decide you weren't in fact married in the first place, that's just revising history.

I still don't understand what you mean by not possible. My parents aren't married any more. They went to the civil recordkeepers and adjusted the record and I think they may have also notified the Khersian church.

Ah. Our marriages are not a legal construct; two people can marry without notifying anyone. It intertwines your minds and spirits.

Oh. That is not how marriages in my world at least in any species I know work.

How many species are there in your world?

Of people? I'm not sure exactly, and some of them it's not clear whether they're one kind or more, but dozens.

I wonder why our world has only the one.

...well, your gods cooperate more than ours do, I guess?

He laughs. There you go, I suppose.

And some kinds of people are made other ways, like golems.

Golems?

Golems are magically created beings that can be made with or without their own wills and when they have wills they're people and it's sort of arguable if they are when they don't.

We do not have anything at all like that, no. Anyone can create them? Here Eru is the only one that can give something, uh, a will.

Well, you have to know how to do it and it's complicated, but yes, anyone who knows how and has enough magical power.

Magical power?

People can have more or less arcane magic ability, and more or less subtle arts talent - all the way down to none for subtle arts but not that much variance for arcana. Subtle arts you basically can just train up what you've got, but with arcane magic you can get the oomph from somebody else - there's a market in it, people sell theirs - and that can let someone do bigger magic than they usually could. So somebody might be unable to make a golem alone no matter how much they knew about the process but then all they'd need would be some more magic.

I don't think our species has either of these talents.

Subtle arts is mostly telepathy type stuff, doing things with the mind. Osanwë seems to interface just fine with mine. And it also can include telekinesis and pyrokinesis; I have a little of one and none of the other right now but I can work on things if I want to get better at them. Arcane magic is much more diverse, it can do all kinds of stuff, but I only know up to the high school level and one college course in self-defense. I was hoping it would get me out of having to carry a knife around on campus because I'm really hopeless with a weapon and it wouldn't save me if a monster went after me anyway, but it turned out I misunderstood the requirement and I would have had to take another semester before I'd qualify for an exception to the weapon rule. And then there's divine magic, which comes from some combination of gods and faith in gods, nobody's quite sure but druids can do it and 'nature' probably isn't a god so it's at least partly the latter; and it can do a lot of things too but it's got the biggest advantage over arcane magic in dealing with the undead and also healing magic.

The Valar don't grant us new ways to change the world, they just teach us how it works so we can do things in more detail.

...Huh.

Perhaps there's less difference between that and what you call divine magic than I'm realizing.