Hello, Leareth.

Tadri relays in Mindspeech, with a marker to make it clear that he's speaking for her. 

Leareth nods to her. "Bella." 

This method of communication is cumbersome but unfortunately before I left my last world I did not learn a teleportation spell I could use on myself and I imagine it would be all kinds of complicated if I just yanked you here.

Leareth waits for Tadri to relay, which isn’t long, the boy can do it almost in sync with Bella as he gets used to it. “Rather, yes. It would trigger a number of alarms, which are not quick to disable. This method is less cumbersome than waiting for a prophetic dream, at least.”

It's at least more schedulable. Do you have an agenda for this conversation?

"There are some things I wished to say first, and after that I can answer your questions. Do you have anything you particularly wish to cover?" 

Depends on what you say. In principle you could preempt it all.

Leareth nods. "Then I shall say my piece, and you may choose your questions accordingly."

"To begin: I still know little of either your world of origin or the world from which you arrived, however, from what I do know, I suspect my choices here will seem monstrous to you. You would not be wrong. All I can say is: until very recently, it seemed the case that the path of trying to change the current state of affairs while following conventional virtue had been tried – by myself and by others – a thousand times over, and proven to fail. I might have said that I hoped future generations would look back on my work and consider me a monster, because it would mean I had succeeded and they lived in a kinder world. One not subject to the schemes of gods who, themselves, do not hesitate to crush anything and anyone that is inconvenient to them. It seemed to be the case that anyone trying to fight on their level needed to match their ruthlessness, to craft a plan that gave them no leeway; that, from our starting point, change could only be accomplished by someone such as myself, someone willing to act in monstrous ways rather than give up."  

Leareth pauses, black eyes unreadable. 

"However," he says finally, "the situation has changed. I have spent millennia adapting to my world as it is, with all its constraints. Your arrival means that I was wrong about what those constraints are. The correct responsive to such an event is to stop and reevaluate everything. Fortunately, my plans are at a stage where I am not yet committed to a timeline, and so I have halted all preparations while I reassess." 

He smiles, thinly. "I hope, desperately, that what I will eventually learn will widen my options. I do not like my current plan. There is a reason why it is my final resort; why I took nearly two thousand years to admit that none of my lower-cost, less horrific options were working. It seems that at least one of the worlds you hail from is considerably kinder than this one." He bows his head. "And so, this is my starting position in our conversation: I am asking your aid." 

It would be encouraging to find that you're the sort of person who is less dangerous with more power and more options, rather than moreso. I know there are people like that. It'd have to be a very well supported finding. You've had reports on what I can do - I've developed nothing new since I've gotten here, everything I started with was something routinely taught to bright schoolchildren in large un-screened batches, everything I developed from there was conveniences suited to paradise over two decades of dev time. Taking my arcane knowledge and turning it toward war against a population not accustomed to defending against wizards would be a catastrophe.

A slow, deliberate nod.

“This is a situation where the burden of proof rests on me. I recognize this. In my world at least, it is far more common that those who seek power become more dangerous as they attain it, and so from your position, it is reasonable to assume I am in that category unless the counterevidence is strong. Words are cheap, and my actions that you have observed do not give you evidence to distinguish which kind of person I, in fact, am.” 

“Given this, I am not currently asking you to share your arcane knowledge. I also do not plan to seek it by other means, though,” a slight smile, “it would be reasonable of you not to trust this claim, so a move on your part to prevent my learning it via spying might reduce the pressure on our conversations.”

This sort of concern is among the reasons I haven't begun teaching classes.

"That does seem wise." 

Leareth is silent for a long thirty seconds, looking out of the portal-device at – well, Tadri, but through him, Bella. 

"It occurs to me," he says finally, each word placed slowly and carefully, "that perhaps a person whose formative experiences were of a paradise, might be better suited to create one. I...have been shaped by this world, as it is and has been. A world of gods that ruthlessly crush anybody who attempts to shift things from how They prefer it. They act subtly; it took a millennium of accumulated unlikely coincidences before I was sure of Their interference; and perhaps that is even worse than obvious interventions, since it incentivizes paranoia. You have likely noticed that my instincts do not tend toward cooperation or trust." 

"I am, however, not stupid; I do try to adapt to circumstances, and they have changed. I believe that I am capable of cooperation even when it goes against my gut. However, I can imagine an outcome of our negotiations where you, or a friend of yours, decide that this world needs fixing, and that the mage who calls himself Leareth is not the right hero for such a mission. I...will not pretend that I like the prospect; this is my world and I feel a certain attachment to it. However, in my preference ordering it ranks above the world where I complete my original plan – assuming that a hero from another realm can devise one that is less brutal, which seems likely." 

A slow, deliberate shrug. "None of this is especially relevant yet. I wished simply for you to know my thoughts on the matter." 

I'm not from paradise. I'm from somewhere else. I'd say actually my advantage in paradise design is more from the contrast, having seen ways a world can fail and ways it can flourish, and still finding things worth copying from the worse and things worth improving about the better. This one is different from both and I'm sure I have things to learn from it.

Leareth nods. "That makes sense. In any case, I would be happy to answer your questions now." 

You seem like you'd be a good source of information on what I need to know to operate in this world safely.

"I assume that you are referring to the interference of gods?" 

Principally, though I'm also bottlenecked in my ability to research mortal politics.

"For that, it might be more efficient if I shared some written records rather than discussing it now – I can send material addressed to Bella at Healers' if you wish. In brief: if you remain in Valdemar, I expect you will not face surprise political hostility unless you try to directly change the setup of Heralds and Companions. The Council of landholding representatives does have political influence, however, the Heralds have more, and they seem to like you. My sense is that the Heralds in power will tell you honestly if they disapprove of some action you are considering, and are unlikely to scheme against you behind your back, although you probably have more information on the inner workings of the Heraldic Circle than I do." 

Leareth pauses, shifts his posture. "Speaking of gods. Something you might find interesting, is that I think you are partially outside Their ability to predict. I have Foreseers on my side, including long range Foreseers with control over their visions, and one of my first actions when I received the report was to seek information this way. They...do not see you. They do not see large changes to previous predictions regarding operating against Valdemar, only minor ripples, which seems implausible given your goals. My best understanding of long-range Foresight is that it taps into certain magical structures that the gods also access for Their own planning. Given that possible route of interference, I do not rely on Foresight for critical intelligence; however, the inability to see you is telling, and is evidence that the gods also cannot See the path you have ahead of you. Which, if true, reduces Their toolkit for interfering as well." 

I cannot fluently read the local language yet. I'd have to get help with whatever you sent. I can get that help, but that's what I meant about a bottleneck.

I was a blind spot to prophecy in Arda too. If anything this made me seem more, not less, threatening to the gods there.

"I see. Well, I can also answer your questions verbally, it is just that 'mortal politics' is a very broad domain and without knowing your plans – which you probably ought not tell me – I cannot guess which parts are most relevant." 

"Speaking of the gods: yes, I can see that, and it might be true of our gods also once They catch up to the fact that you are here at all. It is simply also the case that They will be able to do less about it. I suppose that this does risk pushing Them towards more overt action than They usually take. However, it is possible that They are more limited than the gods of Arda. They do not control reality directly, nor do They appear to be omniscient about the past, unless They were paying attention to events at the time. In my case, had They been watching, They would certainly know enough of my immortality method to disable it. They have never succeeded at doing so. One assumes They also did not know to watch out for your arrival – which did not cause a noticeable discharge of magic, or else the Web in Valdemar would have triggered an alarm – and that this makes it much less likely that They can evict you at will."

"However, even if They cannot kick you back to your world, They do not care for your wellbeing and are certainly capable of killing you if they wish. Also, I am not sure of how to extrapolate my past observations here to your situation, so I cannot be certain of any claims. If you like, I can describe the pattern of past cases where they interfered with my work, and the form that those interventions took." 

I think that would be useful.

Leareth is going to start at the very beginning, then, and tell her about the early history of a place that, in Valdemaran, would translate as the 'Eastern Empire'. It's about sixteen hundred years old, pieced together from a mishmash of survivors after the ancient Mage Wars and the Cataclysm that created the Pelagirs. It's the first place where he tried anything large-scale in an incarnation past his first, and correspondingly the first time the gods attempted to stomp on that attempt. 

They don't care about his writing as a scholar, or even about his military leadership in the early unification of a dozen warring tiny city-states. However, They do nudge an assassination plot into motion, through the priests of a religious sect, when he pushes to increase the number of Gifted mages, and thus the effective technological level of the Empire, through financial incentives for mages to have more children. 

They don't interfere when his next incarnation legalizes and regulates blood-magic in order to deal with the lack of ambient mage-energy and the fact that everyone is doing it anyway and in much more destructive ways. The assassination plots start when he's working out the rest of the Imperial Law charter, and trying to let the Empire feed more of its people by innovating on weather-magic techniques. They don't much like his foray into democracy either, a few hundred years later, and he dies at least three times in a row while trying to get through some educational reforms. 

In general, They don't mind it when he studies magic, or builds himself nice things, or even when he goes around saving lives with his power, magical or mundane; it's scalable interventions, which if played forward would increase the average rate of innovation of a civilization, that They really hate. It's possible to squeeze things through eventually, if you're stubborn enough, but then other parts tend to fall apart in the background. The modern Eastern Empire does have a higher average quality of life than Valdemar, if you look at food and sanitation; it's also absurdly repressive, thus why the first King Valdemar fled.

Leareth admits this is partly his fault. Building an authoritarian state is the only way he kept his incarnations alive long enough to make inventions like the permanent Gate network for goods transport exist. In hindsight, maybe he could have realized sooner that the tradeoff wouldn't be worthwhile, but in fairness, he hadn't yet put together that it was gods rather than bad luck and/or human enemy action. 

Huh, at first I was considering the possibility that there's some fragility to the magic system they're worried about if usage increases much but the invention of democracy seems a very odd target if that's their primary concern.

"That is not a bad hypothesis, but there are counterexamples. In some later places, they also objected to non-magical technologies being further developed, and sometimes to education reform that was not mainly related to teaching magic."