She grins.

"Anyway. So my father's not the most doting, pleasant of fathers, to be very euphemistic about emotional abuse. My mother—figures out I'm a meta, helps hide it, doesn't get pregnant again—but I'm a small child so I eventually borrow some of my father's magic and he realises what's going on and then I go through the worst year of my life."

"That doesn't sound good..."

"Oh no it was pretty terrible. And then my mum decided enough was enough and she should take me away and run. And then it leaked—somehow, maybe my father told, maybe someone figured out—that I was a meta, so she and I were sentenced to death."

This doesn't sound like it's going anywhere good. Ruava listens.

"We ran. We kept running. They found my mother. She was executed. They never found me. That was... seven years ago, I think." By now she has ceased to express emotions and is just reciting dry facts. "I hid, I figured out more about my magic, I changed my face, I've been making a living out of purchasing scrolls, absorbing them, and rewriting them more efficiently so I can keep the leftover magic, and more recently out of the Explorers' Guild. And that's it."

"I'm sorry," says Ruava.

"One of the things gods can famously do is bring dead people to life. Actually bring them back to life and not just fake it and get lucky like happened with me."

She zips at Ruava to hug her.

...yeah. Ruava hugs back.

"I don't know how we're gonna do it, but - someday we'll make or find or become or something an actual reasonable friendly god who can fix everything," she says.

"How do they do it? That—there's nothing left, her brain isn't written somewhere."

"I don't know, but they did it, some of them did it a lot, and it worked, the people were really alive and really themselves..."

"Yeah. I really... really really want that."

"Me too." Hugs.

Hugs.

"There's this one group that's rumoured to exist, of people who think metamancers aren't all that bad. I've been looking for them. I expect if they exist they're either some fringe group of lunatics or a deep conspiracy so in case it's the latter I've been trying to gather enough social capital and, well, actual capital that I would be noticeable."

"Makes sense."

"And of course if they don't exist then, well, I can make them exist. Eventually."

"Yeah."

She sighs, and hugs, and flies.

Hugs. Flight.

Flight!

The landscape doesn't change much for the first while, but after a bit some more ruins are visible in the distance. They look like upside-down eggs, about twenty feet tall, with bright colourful carvings all over in strange spiral patterns.

And they're moving. Just dragging themselves along the landscape, not being pushed or pulled by anything, with no mechanical explanation. They just move.

"...what," says Ruava.

"Hmm? Oh, those. Yeah, they're... a thing."

"What... are they?"

"Honestly no one has any clue," she says as they approach. Some people start becoming visible as they do, separated in groups, looking at the things. "They've just always been there, and they're a curious enough touristic attraction that there are royal enchanters who occasionally top their charges up so they won't stop moving."

"They're so weird!"

"They're really weird! There's lots of stuff like that, ruins and bizarre artefacts and scrolls and stuff, all over Galatea, from before the Last War."