"It would be helpful if we knew which one was responsible for the lifebond! I would suspect the Valdemaran local god but I know very little of Them. I am not sure if the gods would have shared information on the lifebond, or to what extent They can target you personally. That being said, probably you do not want to visit the Pelagirs or the Dhorisha plains anyway. The locals are quite hostile to any outsiders. Vanyel is somewhat of an exception, as he and his aunt have friends among the Tayledras." 

"In Valdemar I think Kernos and Astera are popular, but you don't seem to think they necessarily interact directly with their churches, so maybe that's unrelated?"

"I think that Kernos perhaps interacts with the monks of His order at all - though not often and the last documented instance was centuries ago - but has a fairly small actual territory mostly confined to the northwest of Valdemar . I am not even sure which interventions to attribute to Astera, but I have a theory that Her original territory is further south or southeast than Valdemar and the temple order simply spread much further. They have some profitable business with scribes making and selling copies of rare books." 

"Huh. What limits their spread if not each other?"

"I suspect something comparable to total 'size' or strength - They exist across all the planes and have relatively little influence on this one, so it becomes inefficient to try to control a very large area. Though sometimes a given god's territory is not contiguous – Iftel and Karse are both under Vkandis, for example, despite being on opposite sides of Valdemar and Hardorn. Do you know much of Iftel?" 

"Uh... Queen Elspeth married a guy from it?"

“The country is on surprisingly good terms with Valdemar given that they do not even allow Heralds in through their impassable barrier. I am not sure how that worked with Elspeth’s state marriage.”

"I guess she didn't visit him at his place? Uh, they export wine. They speak Ifteli, which I think is related to Karsite." She grabs one of the notebooks they're packing, finds something toward the back, finds another notebook, flips to a page in the middle. "...okay, that's actually all I have on it, and I have a note here that it was hard to recall last time I needed any of this information."

Leareth nods, unsurprised. "I find that everyone not of Iftel has difficulty recalling facts about it, and no one has much idea what goes on inside. I suspect there is some kind of mind-affecting magic causing this but I have no idea of how it works." 

"Why would anyone do that though?"

"Well, the obvious theory is that Vkandis has some kind of operation in Iftel that He does not wish outsiders to learn of. I have tried very hard to set up spies there and never succeeded, it is very frustrating." 

"That's so - that's really big! Are there other things like that -"

"I think Iftel's shield-wall and whatever magic causes the diffuse anti-curiosity effect is the largest and longest-duration single intervention I am aware of. Another major one is the Heartstones that the Tayledras have; do you know anything of that magic?" 

Headshake.

"Do you know much about ordinary magical nodes and ley-lines? I am not sure if that discussed among people who are not mages and cannot actually see or make use of them." 

"I know the school is near a couple."

"Yes, I noticed. In any case. Nodes are a natural collection point for mage-energy, but they can only be drawn on by Adept mages - you cannot tie a permanent spell directly to one, which is a major limit on how large and powerful permanent set-spells can be. A Heartstone is different; it sits at a hub of ley-lines, like a node, but provides a sort of 'surface' where many other kinds of spell can be linked in. It has, not quite a mind of its own, but some minimal intelligence; a Heartstone is almost alive. This is not something that can be done with ordinary magic. The Tayledras rely on Heartstones greatly in order to survive in the Pelagirs, and the way the Star-Eyed Goddess granted them this ability was by allowing them to copy a small fragment of Herself every time a Heartstone is created." 

"What does it mean for something to be a fragment of the Star-Eyed?" She starts loading boxes onto the cart.

Leareth helps her. "I actually know little about Heartstones because the Star-Eyed does not like me and so I have never seen one. They have memory of a sort and can answer questions, although I think they do not understand questions so much as draw up a list of everything they 'remember' associated with the concepts in the question. They can sort of communicate with other Heartstones. I believe that they also give the Star-Eyed direct access, so She can cause things to happen in Vales with much greater ease and finesse than gods can usually manage in the material plane." 

"I feel like I'm somehow even more confused than I used to be about what gods are able to do. I mean, because before I wasn't thinking about it too hard since as far as I knew they mostly left people alone apart from the nightmare horses and I was clear of those. But still."

"They leave most people alone. I am not most people. You...are also not most people, but I think They would have left you alone if not for me, unless you were to get up to something much more drastic than giving eggs the flu–" He stops. 

"...It would be a good time to mention that the gods seem to particularly dislike change and innovation, at least ever since the Mage Wars. I think They might be leery even of something that just allows more people to live healthy lives, simply because it would allow populations to grow and free up more total person-hours towards work that builds the future. I do not think They would see your current work as a threat, yet, but it is possible They will eventually become alarmed, if you succeed at some point at curing a disease and are working on more. Or...before, perhaps, since They perceive many possible futures as well as the present moment." Shrug. "Moot point, perhaps, since I assume at least one of Them is aware of your existence thanks to the lifebond alone." 

"They dislike change and innovation even that's just about curing diseases? That's not... I mean, I could come up with applications of my work for warfare but curing diseases is not one of those applications."

"One would think! So far the innovations I have been involved with that I am confident They intervened against include the development of a magic-run printing press, interest-bearing banks, and democracy." 

"That's... a very weird list of things for gods to be against. Like - is this collective action, or does it just happen that if you run a large empire, it will contain a lot of god territories, and if you then try to turn the empire into a democracy, one of them will be allergic and the others aren't going to intervene to save you?"

"I think this might sometimes be the mechanism, but..." Leareth sighs. "My current best theory is that the gods disprefer turns of events that - make the future more chaotic, harder to predict. Possibly some of this is for good reasons, since rapid societal change can occasionally lead to catastrophe. I think it is also partly because Foresight is something akin to Their main sensory modality? And indirect nudges, which work only if their Foresight is not too blurry, are the most efficient way they have of steering the future towards paths They prefer. Which are certainly not maximally bad. They prefer humans and other sentient species to be around and living in stable conditions, it seems. The Haighlei set of gods to the far west take change-aversion to a truly remarkable extreme, resulting in an almost completely static civilization. Conversely, the gods in - some other periods of history and locations, where innovation flourished - must have been unusually permissive." 

(The time and place of Urtho's Tower is a good example, and...presumably the gods who were nearest to the Cataclysm are not, in fact, around anymore.) 

Leareth shakes his head. "But...I think that at least some gods will intervene upstream, on social technologies that seem likely to increase the overall rate of future innovation. The printing press is obvious. A well-run banking system can better fund various merchant ventures and industries. And democracy - might lead to freer scholarship and flow of ideas? There are a few democracies on this continent that have lasted for centuries, and in practice they seem to be the ones with relatively little academic freedom."