"I'm sorry."

"Thanks. Ugh. I'm getting maudlin and it is not my regularly scheduled maudlin afternoon."

"Want a funny story?"

"I was about to ask, yeah."

"Once upon a time when I was ten I was dragged to a fancy dinner and hated it and got the idea that maybe an illusion of me would be good enough so I asked my brother to spin one up, only he does his spells by singing, so he had to sing all dinner to keep it up, but he told everyone he had a new song in his head and if he stopped before he'd sung it out loud he'd lose it, and it worked fine, except that my mother told me after dinner I'd been rude to him, pointedly ignoring the song all meal."

"Well now I can't tell if your funny stories are true or not - didn't he have trouble eating any dinner, while he sang -"

"Probably. He's not a very practical person. I'm sure Abadar'd pick him over me but he wouldn't be happy about it."

"Is there an obvious next?"

"One younger than me's a cleric in his own right. I don't think he wants to be the pharaoh at all but he'd probably do it fine, just with less - people stuff."

"Is it - known, to the people who it might happen to, exactly what becoming pharaoh entails - I wasn't giving random residents of Sothis much credit for knowing what they were talking about when they argued about whether he basically turns into a fork of Abadar with a limited human capacity or if he's actually just another cleric invested with a lot of pomp and circumstance or somewhere in between -"

"Not - exactly? It's hard because they also get the crown at the same time and the crown is - you know the most powerful items you can get for Cunning, it does that and Wisdom and Splendor and then there's the added responsibility. I think it might just be all that and then having Abadar as a close confidant you talk to for hours. But when we were kids we got the official theological account - which if you haven't heard it is that gods have aspects, which are facets of their personality and aptitudes that are themselves coherent and identity-like in the way a person might be, and for ascended gods the person they were before ascension is one of their aspects but it's more complicated for the ones that were never human, and each pharaoh becomes an aspect of Abadar, and nothing on what that's like."

"I assume he doesn't let people try on his hat."

"Didn't ask. Didn't want - every time I talk to him I'm scared he'll tell me he's arranged me a marriage and I can't sneak away."

"Aaaugh? Is that in character?"

"Not - it probably wouldn't be to someone horrible and it probably somehow wouldn't make me miserable and I have no idea how that'd possibly be accomplished and this is perhaps why it hasn't happened yet but if he saw a way to get me to stay and not want to die all the time he probably would."

"Out of concern for - your final reward, the reputation of the family, Abadar's choices -"

"Ever getting to see me, thinking I could achieve important things with my life if I tried, weird risks from me careening around independently? Worse than death, I mean."

"...what in the world are you going to achieve hanging around in the Dome?"

"Well, if I had opinions on the slavery reforms, I could've injected them, probably."

"Is that how that works? Is there a suggestion box?"

"Lotsa meetings. You can attend them. Say things. I'm not actually good at talking. Out here, sure, where I'm lying most of the time and no one's judging me and the standards are low -"

"So not really a big lever you're passing up there."

"I don't think so. The pharaoh's probably unimpressed with 'shoot things with arrows' as a lever."

"Of course. You ever try to lift something by sticking a lever under it and opening fire?"

"Sort of! In a trapped corridor in a tomb we were robbing. We were trying to get a wooden door which had on our side of it been covered with metal to catch fire."