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Taliar in Evil Arda
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Huh, that's way smaller than Nuime. Should be pretty easy.

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World's new, about four hundred years old. Is yours older than that?

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...his father is older than that, never mind the rest of the world.

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Elves are older than that, but the Sun rose four hundred years ago and all of the humans arose after the Sun.

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Oh. Yeah, my world has had humans for much longer than four hundred years. We're not sure how long there were people before the Soul Wars, but it must've been a while because their population was much bigger than ours, and it's been about two thousand years since then and there's something like a couple hundred million of us.

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Wow. Soul wars?

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A long time ago, it used to be much harder to manifest souls, and soulbearers were really rare. The first time that large numbers of people all manifested their souls at once, they were in a country that was at war, and they almost wiped out the entire country they were at war with, until the losing side got their own army of soulbearers together, and then it was a huge mess and both sides ended up getting completely destroyed. Everyone decided that an army of soulbearers against an army of soulbearers was a really bad idea and they definitely shouldn't do it ever again. Then a few centuries later someone decided that they wanted an army of soulbearers and didn't care about the consequences, and by the time anyone else was willing to fight them they'd already conquered like half the world, and it was an even bigger nastier mess, and that's the Soul Wars. They didn't so much end as get to the point where there weren't enough people left to fight on a wider scale than individual warlord against neighbouring individual warlord.

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And what policies are in place now to make sure that does not occur again -

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That's kind of a long story but I can tell you if you want!

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It seems like it might be pretty important!

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Well, the really short version is 'Esarkan is emperor of the world and won't let anybody get away with trying to muster an army of soulbearers'. But the context goes back through two previous world emperors, and forward through that time when Esarkan's son Seofar tried to steal one of the southern provinces and I had to manifest my soul to fix it.

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I am very looking forward to it but in that case perhaps it'd be wiser to get all the logistics in motion first. 

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Yeah, I think so too.

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So he settles down to work on that, sending Taliar a line to what he's doing as he does - though if you're not used to juggling eight conversations at once, it'll come out a little muddled - and they spend several hours sorting out how to safely get everywhere in the country and how to bring human laws in line with the ones for Elves now that both are immortal.

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He's not used to juggling eight conversations at once, but it doesn't take him long to get up to speed. Listening in on Maitimo having eight conversations all aimed at establishing a safe healing-aura tour route and updating the laws to reflect the new status quo is utterly delightful.

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Good, because apparently his good mood and his conviction that he's acting righteously is of literally magical importance. Maitimo smiles at him. Another hour of this, then I think we can let the gears grind for a bit and you can tell me the history of your world.

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I look forward to it. Though watching you work is pretty amazing in its own right.

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I cannot imagine how one runs an empire without telepathy. 

 

 

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Esarkan makes it look easy but I bet he'll be consumed with envy when I eventually go home and tell him about your telepathic empire-running skills.

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Sadly we have yet to find a way to give them to humans!! Perhaps by the time the war's won and we find a way to send you home someone will have sorted that.

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That would be amazing. Sign me up.

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Dwarves have immunity to all mind-affecting magic, which definitely has its benefits, but I'd miss osanwë terribly. The ability to really connect with people.

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I'd have a hard time giving this up even for immunity to all mind-affecting magic. Even if there was some mind-affecting magic to be pressingly worried about. Like you said, the ability to really connect with people. And no language barriers! And no delays trying to find the right word for something or figure out how to explain it! And no time wasted on you figuring out if you can trust me!

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It would have been a lot of time wasted! The Enemy can pull some elaborate things and we cannot afford to be incautious!

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So I'm really glad I can skip all that by cheating with telepathy!

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