"Faidre. Who's the kid?"

"He's from another world, he can teleport and make rock move like water with a thought, and I'm pretty sure he is in some bizarre metaphysical way a version of Ashras," says Faidre.

He looks at the kid with renewed focus.

"All right, you have my attention."

"So! The world I'm from is called Nuime. Its emperor is a version of you - it's called being 'alts'. I know for sure Faidre's an alt of my grandfather, and I have no reason to doubt him when he says I'm an alt of Ashras, although I'm an only child so that bit's weird - anyway. The teleportation thing can move planets around. Someone I know had occasion to pick up their planet and move it around, and accidentally landed within reach of the genocidal aliens. They attacked. We teleported their attack fleet away, and then the followup attack fleet they sent in a little while afterward, and used our various absurdly powerful magic to capture and interrogate some of the aliens, and I ended up coming here after we found out that this place existed. I would like to rescue you all from the genocidal aliens. Ideally I would like to do that without causing the genocidal aliens' entire civilization to collapse, because the majority of them have never actually killed anyone and don't really deserve to die, and there's something like a hundred billion of them."

"If you can rescue us from the genocidal aliens without killing them all, be my guest," says the king. "I'm hardly about to complain. But I do prefer to be rescued sooner rather than later."

"I'm also probably going to acquire the power to resurrect arbitrary individuals sometime in the next few days," he says, "so the situation is not quite as urgent as it looks, but yeah, overall I prefer people not dying in the first place."

"Perhaps you should explain your absurdly powerful magic," he says.

"Sure. Okay, I'm a soulbearer. That's a thing that happens in Nuime. Getting wings can only happen in this world—what's it called?—and becoming a soulbearer can only happen in Nuime. This is my soul." He points at it. "Pretty, right? It has a bunch of powers, including land-shaping, object conjuration, a planet-sized healing aura, a planet-sized sensory power to go with all the other things I can do at a planet-sized scale... and when I need another power, my soul can usually come up with one, but if it's new and can't be branched off an existing power, it takes three days. I already have a resurrection power that only works on some people - soulbearers can be resurrected from their souls, and there are other people who uh, leave behind ghosts, sort of, and I can do those too. But since that planet got wrecked by the genocidal aliens, now I urgently need to resurrect a whole bunch of people who didn't leave behind ghosts or souls or anything else, and as such I'm pretty sure I'm finally going to turn up general resurrection."

"Suranse. At least that's the name of this planet. How exactly does one become a soulbearer?"

"There's no, uh, entry requirements like I heard there are for getting wings, but it's definitely something you do, not something that happens to you - you have to sit there for a few hours, looking for it and then pulling it out into the world, sort of by thinking about who you are and imagining what your soul is going to be like. And then you're a soulbearer. Oh, don't ever touch a soulbearer's soul, it's nearly always unbearable torture for them."

"Nearly always? Never mind that. The, ah, broadcast effect, is that particular to your soul, or...?"

"You mean the thing where it tells you who I am? No, all souls do that, mine is just unusually loud about it."

"And the powers? How much variance is there among those?"

"Enormous. My soul is also self-resurrecting - your alt's is too - I don't know of anyone else who has that. It makes us really, really immortal, though. I don't actually know if Esarkan has any powers other than the immortality, but there's soulbearers who can do... well, just about anything, in theory, except that we can't sustain ongoing magical effects without an ongoing investiture of power. Although I'm pretty sure we Taliars are going to break that barrier at some point. ...Uh, I have a self-duplication power for largely irrelevant reasons and there's now three of me. I go by Dawn-shining, the other two are Sun-dark and Summer-blue, they're our soulnames, it's customary for soulbearers to pick one of those and then go around being addressed as 'Dawn-shining Taliar' in formal contexts."

"I think I want one," says Dalvor. "In fact, I think I want one for me, one for my granddaughter, one each for the entire Kevarsin line, and I'm sure I can think of more after that."

"My parents and grandfather are all soulbearers - your alt's granddaughter isn't, actually - people can't become soulbearers unless they genuinely want to on their own behalf, but I bet that won't tend to be a problem with the sort of people you'd pick," he says.

"I note that you apparently got your wings the minute you arrived. What have you done of which Ashras Kevarsin is going to be ragingly jealous?"

"Killed a god. It was an evil god and needed killing."

He laughs.

He grins.

"So. In your judgment, god-killing extradimensional Kevarsin, what's the best way to proceed from here?"

"...I really, really want to try to connect your planet to somewhere safer than the portal maze," he says. "Apparently I can do that through my Sphere?"

"Yes, if you make a portal here and then leave and make another one elsewhere. Not directly inside the palace, please, you may be an extradimensional Kevarsin with a personality-radiating magic soul but I still don't know you that well yet."

"Yeah... so that'll be what I do on my way out. In the meantime - do you happen to have any droughts or famines I can help with, would it be worthwhile to cover your planet in my healing aura - it's a really good healing aura - "

"To clarify," he says, "I don't actually rule the entire planet, just the interior. But feel free to put your healing aura over the whole thing."