"Hopefully nobody is getting set on fire."

"Vanyel confirmed a certain other rumour about the day that their war with Valdemar ended - did you hear that one? Rethwellan borders on Karse but I am not sure how much communication there was." 

"I am impaired in learning about current events. What's the rumor?"

"Oh, is that because of the Bards thing? Surely there is any other way of receiving news here– sorry, digression. There were rumours that Karis had been directly possessed by Vkandis in the aftermath of the final battle, and walked around for a night miraculously healing wounded soldiers on both sides. Vanyel says this is true. His sister was there." 

"I get things out of date once there's a book on it. That's... a nice intervention I guess? Assuming Karis wasn't traumatized."

"I do not know her so I am unsure. It was a fairly friendly intervention as they go. Frustratingly characteristic in that it happened after the battle rather than before, when a very obvious miracle demonstrating which side He was on might have prevented the injuries from happening at all. I am not sure if the gods avoid that kind of measure because it causes too much unpredictability in the future. It would not seem more costly in a purely magical sense to have done it before." 

"Is it possible he didn't in fact favor a side?"

"I did consider whether He intended to bless whichever side ended up winning the battle, just to - I am not sure, to have that result stick, perhaps? One might have thought it would bother Him that the side that ran the coup was passing off blood-magic as 'miracles' from Him, but in practice it seems gods are often surprisingly unbothered by fake miracles done by Their ostensible followers." 

"I'm not sure what incentive they have to prevent that, really."

"Fair enough, I suppose." 

"I do think it's interesting that they wind up forming the range of church structures we see and wonder how much of that is deliberate on the gods' part and how much of it just accretes around the sort of pressure they bring to bear."

"That is an interesting question! I do wonder to what extent church-like structures would form in the absence of any gods at all, just because...humans like to have organizations and can gain legitimacy from claiming divine authority. Certainly it seems as though churches have persisted for centuries despite a complete lack of verifiable miracles or communication from the god they were following." 

"In the absence of any god like people would make up the entire idea of gods, or like if they all died?"

"I had been imagining the latter, but...either, I suppose?" 

"It'd be a funny invention."

"It really would be. Anyway, I think this is a digression from the afterlife? We had been talking about Companions and then ended up down a very long rabbithole." 

"You know a lot of cool stuff! It's very hard not to get sidetracked! Do tell about the afterlife when nobody's turning into a horse."

"Well, multiple cultures speak of reincarnation, the Tayledras and Shin'a'in among them. It is difficult to find well-documented cases of it, and it is possible people are sometimes mistaken, but there are enough cases in their histories and legends that I found it quite believable. Sometimes the person in question does have a few fragments of memory and speaks of their past life; I suppose this is easier to recognize among the Tayledras in particular, since they live in such small clans where everyone knows everyone else and renowned people can be spoken of for many generations. Tayledras and Shin'a'in lore is also the source of the claim that lifebonds persist across reincarnation - rather, the potential for them does, nobody is lifebonded as an infant." 

"Oh good."

"It would be rather awkward! Anyway, aside from that, and from the obvious case of my own method, there are also instances of human spirits made into god-avatars without a physical form at all. The leshy'a Kal'enedral, or spirit warriors, serve as avatars of the Star-Eyed and points of contact for Her people, and are supposedly made from the human spirits of living Swordsworn who served Her." 

"Are gods unable to come up with new souls or is it just cheaper or is it better somehow to use old ones?"

"I think they must be capable of creating new souls, but perhaps it is cheaper in some way to reuse existing ones, or maybe it is just difficult to destroy them so why not reuse them. Souls can be destroyed, I think, but it would be fairly extreme and I do not actually know of any methods of doing it accessible to mortals." 

"Or - hm, if they're using Heralds in particular for Companions, maybe they find it easier to predict things based on comparable past behavior? So they could use the Herald souls that acted how they liked best for Companions."

"That would make sense, yes. Interestingly, I am of the impression that the Groveborn Companions in particular are not reincarnated humans – Taver did not confirm this in so many words, but he seemed...more alien." 

"Huh. Did he seem similar in character to any other species? I haven't met many non-human people."