"It bothers me a great deal. My method of immortality does not keep my physical body alive forever; rather, when I die, rather than reincarnating eventually according to the gods' will and without remembering anything, I immediately return in a new body. This was on my list for later because you are not going to like it; it involves killing one person each time I return. Though life extension magic exists and if the gods are not arranging to murder me every twenty years or so then I can stretch it out to almost two hundred years. I am not going to say anything more about it, because the gods have not managed to figure out how to destroy it so far and I do not wish there to be any chance of the information leaking to them. Anyway, returning in a new body involves losing all but a relatively small set of core memories. I have very good record-keeping and this is mostly not a problem, however, the Cataclysm destroyed nearly all civilization, including records that I or anyone else might have made of my life." 

"If the gods can read conventional Mindspeech but can't read minds I can get information without it being leaked, if you want."

"Oh? I suppose it is also rather unlikely the gods could arrange to have you interrogated under torture, given that you can teleport." 

"I cannot vouch for my ability to cast while being tortured so that might still be an issue."

"It seems highly unlikely that would happen. However, I have also learned to be very paranoid. In any case, I do not believe the gods can read minds, or else they could read mine and disrupt my plans far more efficiently than they actually do. What would your method be here?" 

"I don't use Mindspeech per se. I'm just borrowing the protocol for it because it's what people here are used to, same as I borrowed the protocol for Elf telepathy when I was there. But I can in fact just straight up read minds."

"Including through shields?" 

"I haven't tried, actually, but it wouldn't surprise me. There's magic that can interact with subtle arts on Materia but it has to be specifically designed for it."

Nod. "In which case you could likely find out with or without my permission, but I assume are choosing not to because of your ethics. How about we do an overview of the rest, and I consider whether I am comfortable with you know this fact, if it can be communicated in an undetectable way." 

"Sure. I'm not exactly eager to give the gods a reason to come at me with the Symbols of Pain or whatever's in vogue here. - I have a Maia friend. I don't know if Maiar can do what the Valar did and slow down aging - I'm not even sure if it's still working on me, I haven't been out of Arda long enough to be sure if I should look older yet - but if they can and I can get one to come wherever we wind up, it can probably get you way more than two hundred years out of this body, give us more time to figure something out before anybody dies."

"I would appreciate that deeply."

Leareth glances at his notes again. "Immediately after the Mage Wars I did a number of ethically dubious things when attempting to rebuild civilization. To be fair to my past self, the local conditions were terrible. In particular, magical energy was very limited after the Cataclysm, and there were a number of necessary lifesaving interventions that required magic, such as fixing the weather to make it possible to grow crops. I often resorted to using blood-magic for this, if the math came out to save more lives in expectation that way – and I could select them to be convicts, murderers themselves, and not the young children of farmers who would be most vulnerable to starvation. My work eventually led to the existence of the Eastern Empire, which is...not a nice place nowadays. Or then, really. I was trying to see if I could build an empire that the gods could not take down." 

"Well, it sounds like it still exists, I guess, though I don't know if national continuity per se was the thing you had in mind."

"It exists and is, in the sense of purely material wealth and physical safety, a better place to live than anywhere else in the known world. I would say that its law code is more humanitarian overall than that of Rethwellan or Hardorn, certainly Karse – Valdemar is somewhat of an exception in this region. However, in addition to legalized blood-magic – which is still nearly always done with convicts, in cases where most countries would use the death penalty anyway, I am not saying capital punishment is good but I do not think this is much worse – it does have an entrenched culture where all those in power use compulsions as much as they can get away with, including in ways that are well outside the legal oaths of office. Which I initiated because it was at least better than constant mindreading at preventing assassination plots. Also I banned religious orders because they kept serving as vehicles for the gods to act, usually to kill me, and there were some other authoritarian practices which lasted far longer than that original justification. I think I died at least twenty times during that time period."

He lifts a shoulder, lets it fall. "It is not what I originally wanted to build. I eventually judged that what I had built was not a good starting point for further work, so I left it." 

"I'm not about to knock purely material wealth and physical safety," says Bella. "Or fuss about using people who were going to die anyway for magic except insofar as I suppose it will not do any kindnesses to the incentives of the people who could avert the deaths."

"No. And during some of the more corrupt periods, especially highly expansionist periods after I left, I think this was abused." Down the list. "Many instances of similar things over the years. I have also been willing to work with - less scrupulous people, sometimes. It is difficult to find people who are all of ethical, competent, and willing to carry out plans I judged would actually work against the opposition I was facing. Sometimes I have settled for the last two. Occasionally I have misjudged it, because I do not have the resources to vet everybody and make sure they are exactly the level of unscrupulous I require and no more. The campaign of kidnapping Valdemar's mage-gifted children has some examples of this. Also, being willing to provide materials to such people means that sometimes they end up in the hands of even worse people, later on, and have consequences I did not intend. I acknowledge that this is quite bad, actually; I have done much less of it for most of the last millennium, however, the last century has been a ramp-up toward acquiring more resources and as a result I was more ruthless." 

"Materials like - I assume you don't just mean basic things like money and food, that sloshes around so much anyway and gets, uh, eaten, respectively -"

"Basic mage-artifacts, often – even when bandit groups have mages, they tend not to be well trained. I've sometimes equipped them with artifacts for shielding as their payment in exchange for providing services I want. Generally not offensive magic, but there are a few exceptions. Though since your arrival, I have reclaimed or neutralized all of the major weapons that were in the hands of unscrupulous people or groups not directly under my command." Leareth's expression is hard to read but it seems like he's maybe relieved to have had an excuse to do so. 

"- presumably you didn't just put them all in an armory that somebody like Iftel could ransack, doesn't seem like a you mistake, but it was the first thing I thought of," she remarks.

"A few were rather specific to a given person's purposes, and I have destroyed those. The rest are now back on this side of the Ice Wall Mountains. I suppose it is not impossible that Vkandis could try to send His army to ransack my armories here, now that it is no longer secret anyway, but they would have to get past my army first and I think they would have difficulty there." 

"...oh dear. - that's not a 'I have reason to believe otherwise' oh dear, it's 'that reminded me of an unrelated thing' oh dear. Though I hope it won't come to that, sounds messy."

Mildly concerned look. "I hope so also. I think that Vkandis would recognize this is a stupid use of His army and would cost Him more than it would gain Him. ...You do not need to tell me about the unrelated thing if you prefer not but I will admit I am curious." 

"Um, in a certain kind of story told in Materia, saying something like that would be a narrative cue to immediately have the story reveal to the audience that in fact exactly such a war was in the works, and this isn't - random? In addition to prohibiting science Materia is also not very tolerant of hubris. Not solely through direct god-mediated enforcement like it seems to be here."

"I see. What a highly unpleasant world – I am glad that you escaped it, even if it was by accident and, I am sure, frightening at the time. Fortunately, while the gods of Velgarth are certainly against hubris in mortals, reality itself does not seem to care either way, or else the past two thousand years of history would surely have looked different." 

"Materia does make select exceptions for people with a sufficiently acceptable path from humble origins on up, that's how ascending to divinity works at all."

"Huh. Ascending to divinity works based on having the correct story?"