"Well, do you want to read everything with the door closed first before sending a message? I was meaning to ask if there's anything I should read for more detail on the war and stuff. Since, um, I assume you'd rather not talk about it in a lot of depth, and also it'd save time if we can both be reading." 

"Go ahead and let the door close. Has the advantage of letting more people come in, maybe ones who can help either or both of us.

"I'm not sure what if anything has written up in the last few months. Bar might know. But it wouldn't surprise me if there were nothing, Elves are very - patient, meticulous, probably take more than a year or two to write a book."

This is the moment that Lissa chooses to come in, stretching and yawning. 

"Morning, everyone." She glances at the closed door, then shrugs and ignores it. "Cam, what's it like to have wings, anyway?" 

"Well, I like it, or I'd take them off. I could give you a set but humans find flying very tiring and can't heal trivially if they change their minds."

Lisa’s face goes through a number of fascinating expressions before she settles on a grin. “I’ll tell you if I want to risk it, then. Flying sounds amazing even if it’s tiring.”

She beams at Cam for a moment before heading for her brother. “Van, hey, come here.” Against his muttered protests, she drags him to a booth, which isn’t quite sound-isolated from where Cam is.

“You seem less miserable here,” she stage-whispers in his ear. “Anything to do with the incredible handsome winged person? I can’t seem to get his attention, maybe you’re more his type.” 

Vanyel makes a face at her. “Liss, please, can you not?”

Cam puts on some music rather loudly and starts plowing through his reading list.

Vanyel is peeved with Lissa, because he in fact wasn’t miserable and now he sort of is, not to mention embarrassed because he’s pretty sure Cam overheard, and honestly she should really have learned tact by now but he’s pretty sure she never will.

”I have reading to do,” he says sharply, yanking his arm out of her grip. “Go find some other way to amuse yourself.” 

He goes over to Bar and asks for books about the recent war in the Elves’ world, and, failing that, more specific background on the various gods involved.

Not so much with the recent war books. Bar can do newspapers? Would he like recent newspapers?

“Um, sure, whatever you’ve got.” Pause. Blink. “...What’s a newspaper?”

A publication issued on a frequent basis to keep recipients up to date with current events.

"Oh! Like a proclamation but written? What a good idea." It sounds way better than yelling in Mindspeech followed by passing on news to a town crier. Although it would take an army of scribes, or almost as many clerks to keep up with one of the printing devices he's heard of from the Eastern Empire– no, of course not, makers like Cam could just make a thousand of them, and there must be plenty of other methods in other worlds.

He has lots of time to read. "I'd like all of the ones since the war ended, please – um, and also any from during the war, if they were still publishing it then." 

That quantity of newspapers will not fit on me. Would you like my recommendation of the highlights of a single city's paper?

"Oh. Um, sure." On reflection it also makes sense that a world not reliant on an army of scribes could produce more written content than he's used to ever seeing in one place outside of the Palace library.

Here is a pile of newspapers from Brithombar in chronological order.

Vanyel carts the newspapers over to one of the booths, and goes back to ask Bar for a drink that isn't coffee – it's tempting, but he isn't sure how long he's been awake now given the confusingness of time here, and presumably he wants to sleep at some point. 

Bar provides him with a mango smoothie.

The newspapers describe the return of Melkor; the sudden anger of the orc nations at atrocities that never happened; the capture of anyone caught alive on the battlefield; the mustering of troops, the development of warplanes and tanks and weaponry. Rationing, air raid protocols, maps of more and more lost territory, reminders not to hold onto dead loved ones' chips because these too can be captured. President Círdan is reelected with 98% of the vote.

Noldor from Valinor arrive to help with high technology and mysteriously rapid production capacity - they have visited Brithombar, a winged stranger has been seen walking the streets handing out chocolate. Certain rations are increased due to foreign aid. There's a Noldo singer in town, he's very good.

Cities continue to fall, and the ways they die change faster and faster.

The war is over. The Maiar are inconsolable. The winged stranger, Cam, is responsible, in a deal with the Enemy - Valinor is gone, the Valar are gone, the Doriath forcefield is down -

- the orcs are suing for peace, they propose prewar borders, it is safe to go abroad again.

And on Cam's reading list: 

The Eastern Empire was founded more than sixteen hundred years earlier by the calendar of Vanyel’s world, in the chaos following the “Cataclysm” (which the book takes for granted and does not describe), by a band of soldiers and mercenaries stranded after a frantic evacuation.

One of the founders, though not the first Emperor, was a man called Arved. He was a mage, and a military commander who led much of the initial unification, and he was a scholar. His writings, while never included in the Imperial Law charter, doubtlessly influenced the early direction, and some of the surviving passages are included in the historian’s account.

Arved writes about the importance of re-discovering magical knowledge, training mages, and using that to address the problems of his time. There are an awful lot of problems. Constant famines due to the chaotic post-Storms weather and warped plant life. Long-distance trade is impossible, not just thanks to the frequent attacks by Changecreatures, or because the roads are crawling with bandit groups, but because no one knows who to trade with – mostly there’s no unit of leadership larger than a single family’s landholding. No Healers – well, presumably there are still children born with the Gift, but no one to recognize or train it. Up and down the coast, people are starving, sick, and dying, and they lack the resources or coordination to do anything about it.

But magic is working again now. Weather magic is a known technique; they’re just not organized enough to put trained mages where they’re needed. Transport of food and other goods was a solved problem before the Mage Wars, with the use of permanent Gates – they don’t have any permanent Gates, but they have mages who fought in Urtho’s army; they can piece together the technique, if they hurry. Mages can lay protective wards on roads, alarms for caravans to trip if under attack. They can communicate long-distance via a certain spell, and hold together an organized state. (But not a kingdom. Arved, at this point, is adamantly against hereditary monarchies, and aristocracies more generally.)

Some of Arved’s writing touches on the longer term. Once they have some kind of basic stable government over a region, they can build schools and academies. Some mages can focus all of their time on researching new techniques, to solve the next round of pressing problems. But not just mages, and not just the nobility – everyone can be educated. They can build on that; more trade and enterprise, skilled crafts guilds. They’ll want to grow, but in an ideal world they won’t have to conquer, because their neighbours will want to join.

Someday, generations in the future, survival will be secure, and they can have more than that. Arts, music, theatre, games: a world where people can flourish, not just avoid starving. It’s going to take centuries, but someday they can run an empire that’s better to live in than any from before the Cataclysm.

(According to a brief note in Leareth’s message, Arved was one of Leareth’s past lives.)

"Vanyel? This book isn't explaining what exactly the Cataclysm was, or the Mage Wars, can I have a one paragraph version?"

Vanyel is delighted to have an excuse to put down the extremely depressing newspaper reading. 

"I, um, we don't actually know a lot about it, cataclysms that nearly destroy the world have a tendency to destroy records as well. There was a war, presumably between very powerful mages, some horrific magical weapons were involved, it really, really messed things up. It was...we think about eighteen hundred years ago, and there are regions to the west of here, the Pelagirs, that are still uninhabitable. Lots of weirdly Changed plants and animals that try to eat you, enough ambient magic to change you if you wander around unshielded. The Tayledras – uh, friends of mine, live in clans in the northwest wilderness – have a pact with their Goddess to clean up the land, they've been working on it for millennia, all of Valdemar used to be Pelagirs. Whatever happened, it was bad." 

He frowns. "Sorry, I mostly know about the aftereffects, not the war itself. Leareth must know more, I'm pretty sure he's been around since beforehand. And the Empire might have more in their lore. Bet the Shin'a'in do as well – they're a sister tribe to the Tayledras, they...have a pact to guard the Plains, south of here, I don't know why but they don't let anyone in. I guess you can't find a book unless you know the title and author, though, you can't just vacuum up everything the Shin'a'in have written down?" 

"Depends on whether 'Shin'a'in' is a conjurable parameter. If it's all in a particular language it would be. What do you mean about the pacts?"

"Um, so, there's a goddess called the Star-Eyed – gods here tend to have territories and particular groups of people they, er, have influence over, and I guess She was the goddess of the Kaled'a'in people, who were around before the Mage Wars and are the predecessors of the Shin'a'in and Tayledras but that's all I know." He pauses. "Oh, by the way, Leareth's name is a Kaled'a'in word. It means 'darkness' in modern Tayledras, but in ancient Kaled'a'in it meant the night sky." 

And where was he going... "Right, so I don't know the details, but their tribes got flattened by the Cataclysm, and they prayed to Her, and She made some sort of magically binding contract with them and their descendants forever, in exchange for giving them some useful magic and maybe doing other stuff that helped them survive at the time. The Tayledras are magically bound to the land that She wants them to cleanse. I don't know how it works and I don't actually know what happens if they try to break it. They never seem to want to." 

Vanyel rubs his eyes. It must be getting late according to whatever time his body thinks it is. "Um, and Shin'a'in is a language as well as the name of their people, so if you can grab everything in their language, that would get it." He frowns. "...Ancient Kaled'a'in is also a language, so if any records did survive and we just don't know where they are because they're buried under collapsed cities or something, I assume you could get them anyway?" 

"I can, yeah, we're archaeologically useful. I can also get the ones that were in fact destroyed."

"That's pretty absurdly useful, yeah." Cam could take over Vanyel's entire world in about a week if he decided to try. Vanyel decides not to say that part out loud. He stifles a yawn. "Anyway, do you have more questions about the book? I can answer them, but I think I'll go get some sleep after."

"Go ahead and get sleep, I'm taking notes as I go and can write down any questions for later."