This is going to be such an interesting conversation when Cam talks to this guy if Cam winds up deciding he can reasonably have anything to say.

The rest of the Empire's history becomes gradually less interesting. If there are unusually creative and clever scholars or advisors sprinkled among the rest, they don't stand out much, but magical research continues to advance. Concert-work temporary Gates are perfected, and soon become commonplace. Weather magic is incredibly sophisticated, now, and crop failures are almost unheard of. While the Empire is very far from egalitarian, it's still more true there than anywhere else that an intelligent and hardworking commoner can obtain an education and rise to a position of great importance. The criminal justice system is a well-oiled machine – oh, certainly some highly-placed people are able to skirt by without punishment, but for a commoner, the streets of a city in the Eastern Empire are among the safest place to be in the known world. Every once in a while, bribery, internal conspiracies, or illegal use of compulsions or blood-magic are uncovered within the bureaucracy, and suitably punished and rooted out. 

The Emperors regularly live to two hundred and rule for a hundred and fifty of those years. Succession isn't free of drama, but usually this comes in the form of fierce behind-the-scenes political wrangling in the decade before an Emperor's expected death, and the actual ascent of a new Emperor is bloodless. Assassinations are next to unheard of; it's difficult to kill a leader when the best mages in the Empire are vying to serve in their Court and, of course, take the expected oaths and loyalty-compulsions. 

The internal investigations become rarer. Eight hundred years in, they still happen occasionally, but tend to have obvious political motivations. It's unspoken but taken for granted that there will be internal conspiracies, and highly-placed officials will obviously bind their own subordinates with illegal compulsions and even try to sneak their agents into the Emperor's Court. Use of blood-magic (usually used with convicts, but those are more and more likely to be political prisoners, or prisoners-of-war from new conquests) skirts by the letter of the law, but no longer especially obeys it in spirit. 

The author of the text doesn't say it in so many words, but Cam might notice that the Empire begins to resemble a carefully-built machine now running on its own, without the supervision of its creator. 

It's a remarkably stable machine. The Empire is still extant, with the same Imperial Law (at least in theory), at least sixteen hundred years after its inception. 

Cam idly makes a teeny desk-size model of the capital city as of the last time covered by his reading.

The next book, "A Lesson on Lessons", is much more recent than the Empire's founding, only nine centuries old. (The history tome did briefly mention some reforms to the academies and examination system in the ensuring century, but the title and author's name were too obscure to warrant a mention.) It lays out theories of pedagogy, the importance of training the teachers, the relevance of tests that can be run identically across the entire Empire, and thus give results that can be compared, when it comes to selecting which candidates from outlying provinces will be accepted to the central academy in Jacona. It discusses tests that measure specific learning, versus raw potential, and under what conditions to use which one. 

It's...not quite the same style as Arved's writings. It's not a grand vision, or even especially a policy proposal; at most, after all the discussion it offers some modest recommendations. Still, some resemblance shines through. 

At this juncture Cam tires of using stylistic resemblance and conjures the title pages (alone) of the complete works of Leareth to see what names are written on them and who they correspond to in the histories.

It's quite an extensive list! 

There are about two hundred title pages that look like published treatises, on various topics – economics, math, architecture, city planning, it goes on and on. 

There are also, interestingly, a set of numbered 'Personal Records' titles, each with a name and a date range. The numbers run from three to forty-two (fourteen and twenty-nine are also missing). The date ranges are everything from eight months to ninety-five years, with a trend toward earlier numbers covering shorter periods. The names very nicely match up with the ones on the various published treatises. 

Arved, the second Emperor, the third Emperor's two ill-fated advisors, the fourth Emperor, and various authors of works mentioned in the Empire's later history all correspond to names on the list. 

Cam makes a list of all the names and refers to it throughout his reading.

And there's a book on theories of magic! This one is much more recent, only three centuries or so, and it doesn't look as polished – more like someone's personal notes, bound for convenience and maybe shared with a few friends but not widely. The name matches Leareth's record-keeping name from the appropriate dates. 

Vanyel and Leareth's world is known to have multiple planes, described as similar to parallel dimensions that have some permeability and interaction with each other. Mage-energy is a sort of universal fuel, able to affect the matter of any plane in a very large number of ways – and to build passages between them. Invisible to un-Gifted humans, it nonetheless behaves somewhat like water, gathering into river-like ley-lines and eventually into dense, turbulent 'nodes' of power. What makes a person Gifted is that they possess 'channels' in their mind, which can take in mage-energy and direct it to some useful purpose. 

Different planes have widely varying levels of ambient mage-energy. Human mages and those of other intelligent races can, via using mage-energy form purely mental projections to other planes. 

The plane where humans live is generally called the mundane or material world. The spirit world, also referred to as the Moonpaths and/or Ethereal Plane, is believed to be where dead spirits reside, although they're difficult both to find and to communicate with even for Gifted people capable of visiting. There are additionally four Elemental Planes (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), named by some long-dead mage for metaphorical resemblance and not because the comparable mundane substances originate there. All are much 'hotter' than the mundane world, in terms of their density of ambient mage-energy. Beings of varying levels of intelligence and power live there, able to dimly sense the mundane world, and mages can summon them by opening a passage that allowing said being to project a magically-constructed body.

The Abyssal Plane is host to 'demons' (an image of something with a random-seeming body plan consisting mostly of legs and eyes), which can also be summoned, although they're very stupid and the only reason to do so is if the mage wants something dead in a messy and disturbing fashion. The Empyreal Plane is believed to exist, and be the primary home of the gods (which are fully multiplanar beings, able to influence all of the other planes), but outside the reach of mages.

There's also the Void, which is a sort of sink – adjacent to all of the planes, it becomes the eventual resting place for all mage-energy, which is eventually returned via some sort of weather-like cycle that isn't fully understood even by Leareth. His top theory is that living things (in all planes), known to be generators of excess mage-energy, are actually pulling from the Void. Space is known to behave differently in the Void; Gates exploit this by routing through the Void to link two places that are distant in mundane-world space. 

Leareth adds the novel hypothesis that the sentient races in the mundane world – those capable of Mind-Gifts – are also multiplanar beings, that a 'Mind plane' exists, separate from the spirit world, and that humans and other races have metaphysical appendages of some kind extending into it. He thinks that routing through this plane could explain why Mindspeech and similar Gifts are so widely found, and how a Thoughtsenser can read the thoughts of anyone, Gifted or not. 

Leareth also theorizes that the Gift of Fetching, the part of it where objects can instantly be transported long distances, works by cutting through the Void in a similar way to Gates, though through a dedicated mind-channel that doesn't leak characteristic Void-energy in the same way. 

Cam writes the outline of a letter, though while all this is interesting it's neither something he has an angle on nor something that will let these people help him.

The rest of the book is mostly some even less organized notes on weird phenomena related to Gates.

Gates don't have to be built on a threshold, though it takes incredible mental discipline for a mage to build one in thin air. Gates don't have to face the same orientation – a clever mage who's mastered threshold-less Gates might, for example, jump down into one built flat on the ground and come flying out somewhere else at his enemies. 

Gates don't always need a specific destination. A mage can instead anchor on an artifact if they know its magical signature, even if they don't know where the artifact is. 

Permanent Gates don't have to be anchored on a threshold either; they do need a focus and a power-seed, but the focus can be a person. The book neutrally mentions a long-ago historical case of a mage successfully attempting this; the name of said mage matches one of Leareth's past lives. The power nearly killed said mage, and left his body fragile, but until the end of his life he could instantly and effortlessly Gate back to the other home terminus, without actually needing to raise a threshold that enemies might follow him through. 

Two ends of a Gate terminus don't have to be in the same plane. A mage could raise a Gate directly to the Elemental Plane of Fire, for example. Which has been tried, because it seems there are people crazy enough to try anything. It mostly results in a very loud explosion – that Plane being much 'hotter' than the mundane world in terms of mage-energies, a rapid 'downhill' flow of power ensues, shortly ending in the death of the mage and collapse of the Gate. Leareth wonders if this is the secret behind the incredible power available to Adepts of the reclusive White Winds school. You can also Gate directly to the Abyssal Plane, if for some inexplicable reason you wanted to. 

Gates...don't always work like Gates. There's a reported incident of a mage – not a very competent one, it sounds like – attempting the spell from instructions in an old book, not knowing its purpose, and accidentally snatching up a different Adept mage who had been in the process of stepping through a Gate several hundred miles away. It's bizarre and hard to believe, but the source is reliable, so Leareth speculates on whether this is a case of Gating imitating Fetching. Both route through the Void, after all. Fetching from a distance can only grab a precisely known object from a precisely known location; in this case, the mage was able to nab a random Adept, but only because he happened to be the only Adept in the world midway through a Gate and thus closer than usual to the Void.

Leareth thinks that this was only a necessary component because the spell would otherwise be underspecified, and fail in the same way that a Gate fails if the mage's sense of his destination is hazy. The Gift of Fetching isn't very flexible, but he muses on whether it would be possible to develop an equivalent spell to Fetch a known artifact from anywhere, as in the case of Gating with said artifact as the destination, or even to Fetch a particular Adept if the mage knew them and their magic intimately enough. 

The section ends without saying whether such a spell was ever developed. 

Cam adds a paragraph to his draft.

Curled up on the couch, Vanyel stirs restlessly. 

The soldier’s name was Galrich. He was twenty-two years old. Once he had been a little boy, leading a tame pigeon through the streets of Sunhame, and now he was dying on the gilded floor of the temple. Blood bubbled at his lips, and then the bubbles stopped, the light fading from his eyes. Everything that was him was escaping, a tide of warm, wild, living power–

–It tasted metallic and sweet and not like a node at all–

... 

What Cam will observe is Yfandes leaping up from the corner and bolting in Vanyel's direction, half a second before a tide of projected sick-horror washes over all of them, cutting off when Yfandes' muzzle touches Vanyel's shoulder, and Vanyel yelps loudly and sits up, staring wide-eyed at the fire. 

Lissa, who's been comfortable installed in a booth with her drink and her packet of papers, belatedly scrambles up and makes a beeline for her brother. 

"whatthefuck!"

"Sorry sorry sorry–" Vanyel looks mortified. "I – gods – I'm so sorry, did I – I checked my shields – sorry..." He trails off, and drops his head into his hands. Lissa is beside him now, muttering something that Cam can't hear. Vanyel seems to be ignoring her. Yfandes looks upset, which is an impressive amount of emotional range to show on a horse face. 

Finally, Vanyel frees himself from the pair of him and gets up, giving Cam a sheepish look. "I had a nightmare, um, about the war. Sometimes when I have a really bad nightmare I project it by accident, but it hadn't happened in ages so I thought it was safe. I'll, er, make sure to either sleep upstairs or with Yfandes closer by, um, in case it happens again..."

And now he's going to go get some coffee, because he probably hasn't slept enough but he's definitely done trying. It would be so incredibly convenient if he could use it to replace sleep like Cam does.

Lissa glances around aimlessly, lands on Cam, and smiles brightly at him. "Did you learn anything interesting in your reading?" 

"Uh. Yeah, lots of stuff, some of it even maybe relevant."

Vanyel stands with his mocha and glares at the fire for a while. He's having trouble even remembering what he was supposed to be doing before the very failed attempt at sleeping... 

:Newspapers: Yfandes helpfully reminds him. 

Right. Which is why he went to sleep thinking about the war, and proceeded to completely humiliate himself in front of Cam. 

Finally, he gathers up the courage to wander over– "Oh! Is that – I haven't read that book! The one on magic theory. It's probably from one of his private collections. Anything interesting?" He would be hurt that Leareth shared a book with Cam and not him, but that would be kind of dumb at this point. "Um, also, what do you think overall? Of Leareth, I mean." 

"It's interesting, yeah. Uh, he's. Very persistent."

Vanyel barks out a short involuntary laugh. "That's for sure. I guess not much else for him to – oh!" He spots the pile of title pages. "What's this? You've got – oh, you have a list! That's incredible, I should go through and check how many of my guesses were right." He blinks, shakes himself. "Er, is that all of the reading list then? Have you decided if you think it's worth sending a message?" 

"Definitely going to send something. Weird application of Gates might conceivably work."

Vanyel stares blankly at him for a moment, trying to silence the sudden litany in his mind of why does it have to be Gates, why can't it be literally anything else. 

"Oh," he says finally. He licks his lips. "Er, good? That's promising, right?" It's unclear. Cam doesn't look all that happy. 

"Is something wrong with Gates? This guy is apparently intermittently into magic powered by human sacrifice, so maybe he wouldn't have mentioned if something is wrong with them?"

Vanyel winces – now he's thinking about things that he really doesn't want to be and, uh, definitely meant to tell Cam about sooner but it somehow ended up not happening and now it's awkward. 

"...Oh, right, Gates. No, there's nothing wrong with them, er, at least not the same kind of thing as with blood-magic. They don't involve killing people or cause environmental damage or anything. They're one of the most costly spells in terms of energy input, so they're tiring, that's a practical issue. And, um, I do have a problem with Gates specifically, but that's just a me thing, it's a bit mysterious but it's probably because of how my Gifts were awakened." He sighs. "If it were anything else I'd be a lot more confident I could go from his description and invent the spell for you – I mean, hells, he's the one who taught me most of what I know about spell research. But not Gates, I'm afraid." 

"There are a million dead Maiar, so anything that goes through a single volunteer probably doesn't work if it's not as scalable as what I'm doing with Elves anyway. I guess unless we get one and they can get all the rest but if they can do that they might get the Valar and if they do that then all the humans and Dwarves on Endorë can't summon and die without afterlives."