"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?"

"I am not sure to what extent it is enforced on the level of every single person born to a community, since I think occasionally Shin'a'in and even sometimes Tayledras do leave their community and make their way elsewhere. However, it seems likely that the Star-Eyed can send a leshy'a Kal'enedral, or spirit warrior avatar, to speak individually to any of Her people; at the very least she can do it with some and they do not have to be mages or priests, since there are documented instances where they were neither. She can give them premonitions. There is at least one recorded occasion where She directly possessed a Swordsworn in order to work a very obvious miracle, but that happens very, very rarely. Also, on a more mundane level, the Shin'a'in and Tayledras are both tightly-knit, fairly isolated communities, and most children growing up in such a place will not end up with a desire to leave. She did not send any spirit warriors after me when I fled the Plains on the second round, though." 

"Okay." She writes that down, bits of it in different sections according to her organizational system, and continues marching through Leareth's understanding of history, trying to derive relatively original conclusions about divine territories and powers and limits and attribution and beginnings and endings and infighting and alliances. It's a lot of evidence to sift through and they're not done before she assembles sandwiches for lunch and has to go teach microbio (it's about tiny-parts-of-creatures dividing in two) and resume.

Leareth can accompany her to the class again. He's even more fascinated this time and adds to his notes from the previous class. In addition to the material being novel and interesting, he finds Belrun a very compelling presenter, though he's not exactly unbiased on the topic. 

(He has to keep making sure to stay focused on the content rather than drift into thinking about how Belrun is very clever and he wants to snuggle her about it, he doesn't want to distract her through the lifebond.) 

She does occasionally glance at him with amusement but mostly manages to get through her lesson on how the tiny parts squish themselves around the middle and then are two of them.

Does Belrun want to check on her eggs afterward before heading back to talk about gods some more? 

Yes, but it can be pretty fast, she doesn't have a new egg delivery today.

Then Leareth will wait while she does a quick check and then walk back holding hands with her. 

Holding hands is NICE.

And then they can finish going through his notes on the patterns of divine behavior.

Eventually - tucked back into the guest room so Rana doesn't wonder what they're so into theology for - Belrun says, "So I think I follow along with you pretty well on most of this but I think you may be overconfident about the attribution of various motives to various gods. I don't have a better single model but I think you're more attached to this one than you should be, there's not just a lot of difficulty in the first place in identifying who if anyone did any given thing and why, there's also a motive for a god that is against you to mislead you into thinking that's not exceptional on their part so you don't concentrate your defense in their direction specifically."

That earns her a surprised, thoughtful look. "Hmm. You...could be right. Although it does seem to be the case that none of the gods are actively in favour of my existence and work, or else they would be intervening in helpful ways. I think I would be capable of noticing suspiciously lucky coincidences, not merely suspiciously unlucky ones–"

He stops. "Oh. The dream with Vanyel - the part where we can speak to one another - could be interpreted as an intervention actively in my favour. Or not. It is unclear how it will eventually end; it could also be a bet on some gods' part that I would try to befriend him - which I did - and in the process give him knowledge and resources that would increase his odds of successfully defeating me if he were to choose that option." 

"I could also be an intervention in your favor? I mean, or not, but nothing's tried to murder me yet. It's not the friendliest shape of intervention but it might be intended helpfully. Also some help might take the form of no-selling or averting the usual unlucky coincidences, which would be much subtler."

"Hmm. I will have to think on that further." Leareth smiles. "You are quite good at causing me to reconsider questions I have perhaps not reviewed in too long." 

"Happy to help." She leans on him.