"I bet that's true of lots of things. Caterpillars, for instance, I bet they're totally irrelevant to whatever it is you do all day." Om nom.

"That is true! I could tell you almost nothing about the life cycle and dietary habits of caterpillars. They eat...leaves?" He eats. If they can get Mindspeech working they can eat and talk at the same time that'll be convenient. 

"I have seen them do so, yes!"

"Did you study them in your training as a Healer? Or have you just...watched caterpillars, sometimes? I suppose that is the sort of thing children probably do. I have not been a child myself in a very long time so I would not know for sure." 

"I didn't decide as soon as my Gifts awakened that I was going to specialize in diseases! I think it was the right choice but I considered other things and caterpillars are interesting because they turn into butterflies. I did a term project on that once. I also seriously considered going into plants! Mages make new species sometimes, I hear, but they're always animals and often people and that seems like it's, I don't know, chasing glamor at the expense of value, sure, it's cool if you can smush a parakeet and a snake together or whatever but why hasn't anyone smushed together a dandelion and wheat. But I can just, you know, tell bright young Healing students they should consider doing wacky things to plants, whereas my specific Gift combination is especially useful for the disease angle."

"Because of the safety aspect, I imagine? That makes sense. And, fascinating - which traits of a dandelion and wheat would you be wishing to combine, in that example? The hardiness and, well, weed nature of dandelions with the edible grain?" 

"Ideally hardiness, self-reseeding, and speed of growth - wheat grows on a stalk yea high, and we don't eat that part, why bother with it. I suppose if you had wheat dandelions someone would need to invent a novel form of scythe, but that doesn't seem intractable."

"That makes sense. Have you been able to direct any young students toward this project yet?" 

"Couple of them are maybe thinking about it." She finishes her porridge. "So. Gods."

Nod. "Do you have an order of questions to ask?" 

"I'm not sure whether it makes more sense to have you go through all the facts you learned about gods - ideally all the reasons you came to believe any such facts instead actually - in chronological order, or if it makes sense to get your grand theory and then point out where it doesn't seem to hold so you can explain why you think so anyway, but I'm leaning the first because it was sort of frustrating when you were like 'well maybe Astera doesn't think her church is her stuff but she's at best neutral' instead of, I don't know, 'Astera murdered me in cold blood in 207 and I then stole her church in a clever heist which is why it's my mail service now'."

"That makes sense. It is not - stored in my head in this order, mostly, but I can go in chronological order through all of the things that I observed and how confident I am in those observations, and what my interpretation was of which god acted and why. And if I am being frustrating you can tell me so." 

"Yeah, that makes sense that you'd have it memorized in some other way."

"Yes." 

Leareth retrieves his suitcase of books and unpacks a few of them. "If we are going in chronological order, then I suppose the earliest intervention I am aware of was well before the Cataclysm, does not involve me at all, and involved a confusing set of two paired gods and goddesses called the Twins. The records are very fragmentary as a result, but - it seems likely they answered the prayer of one of their worshippers, a mage who wished revenge for some wrong, and worked a miracle whereby her spirit was installed permanently into a magical sword who calls herself Need and is at least partially sentient. She can form a bond to living women and mind-control them into following her mission of rescuing women from danger or avenging various wrongs to women. She survived the Mage Wars, even though I suspect the gods who created her did not survive in a recognizable form. I have bumped into her on occasion." 

Belrun takes notes of her own as he talks. "That's... weird... I'll avoid picking up swords I encounter, shall I..."

"It is very weird. I am still quite unsure what goal that was accomplishing on the gods' part." Leareth skims through some pages. "...Next chronologically would be the cleanup immediately after the Mage Wars. It seems to be Vkandis Sunlord and the Star-Eyed Goddess who moved in soonest. Both had been worshipped by some locals despite the fact that I suspect Their core territories were more distant at the time, which is why They were not destroyed or badly damaged and were able to respond within a few decades. Tantara, one of the kingdoms destroyed, was very multicultural." 

"You're editorializing already," she points out. "You haven't even established that gods die or use physical territory in the way you describe."

"Fair enough. Backing up. There were several gods named and worshipped by religious orders with documented miracles before the Mage Wars and none afterward; some of the orders stayed around for a time but withered over the next few centuries. Bestet, the Battle-Goddess, is an example, as are the Twins I mentioned." 

He frowns, flips through one of the books. "Ah. Information I have on the very early history of the Kaled'a'in people's split into the Tayledras and Shin'a'in after the Cataclysm..." 

He goes through the blood-pact that the Star-Eyed made with the people, and documented miracles to make some of the land sufficiently habitable that they could survive there. 

Belrun leave lots of whitespace in her notes so she can go back and add to them and chews through a lot of pages in the fresh notebook she started for the occasion.

Leareth gets out a different book and finds the relevant section. "Iftel was, I believe, settled by evacuees from an army that fought in the mage wars. The human personnel were from an ethnic group that worshipped 'Vykaendys', and their religion at the time decreed that all mages had to be priests, as is the case in many religious orders under gods who do frequent direct intervention via mortals–"

He stops himself. "Sorry, that is editorialization. There are some modern groups where this rule holds true, including the Shin'a'in, and the mage-priests and priestesses in such orders are often reported to receive prophetic visions or be able to work miracles on behalf of their god. Anyway. Since the priests were not serving military duty, their battalion was assigned some mages from elsewhere, as well as various nonhumans. Their Gate had a problem and they ended up much further northeast than intended, and then ran into some of the opposing army, and the Vykaendys-worshippers prayed. Apparently this earned them the shield-barrier, which still exists. I assume something was asked in exchange but have absolutely no idea what, as I mentioned." 

"The pronunciation difference is - purely cosmetic?" she checks.

"I am fairly certain it is, yes." 

"If they tolerate that much variance, does that mean there might be a single god behind several names? Or for that matter vice versa, maybe Vkandis is actually six gods in a trenchcoat."

Leareth chuckles. "An excellent question! I suspect that it has happened for a single god to go by several names. As to whether Vkandis is six gods in a trench coat - well, it is difficult to say exactly what it means for gods to exist as individuals, since they are very different sorts of being from people and in particular are larger. The Shin'a'in lore says that their Goddess has multiple facets which can be prayed to separately for different needs. This is mostly hearsay because I am not Shin'a'in – on the two occasions I ended up in Shin'a'in bodies, once was by accident and I got murdered within a week, and the second time I decided it was wiser to leave the Plains immediately before the Goddess could notice. Interestingly, it seemed the blood-pact did not apply to me once I had taken over a body." 

"What would have happened if it had applied to you, how is that enforced?"