"Whenever you're ready."

Leareth Gates them back up to the desert. (The other end of his Gate is on thin air, rather than awkwardly using one of the doorways poking up from buried buildings.) 

The Osirians do not have quite enough context to appreciate how remarkable this is but they do notice it. It's not what Vanyel was doing. 

The sun is setting. 

It is rapidly going from way too hot to unpleasantly cold. Also windy. 

Mahdi raises a hand once they're back and creates a shell of force, opaque from the outside and transparent from the inside, twenty feet in radius, in which it is neither cold nor windy. Inside it is warmly but not brightly illuminated. He rings it with some alarm spells. He does all of this with a bit of a grimace on his face. "I am skipping my turn in the watch order," he says. "And never teleporting people to and within Sothis, to and from Andoran, to and from Absalom, and back and forth repeatedly between the surface and the buried palace in the same day again."

"Who knew that spell slot restrictions were really for your own good all along."

Leareth looks curiously at the shield and alarm-spells with mage-sight. This is all magic he can replicate Velgarth-style, of course, but he can sort of understand the group not wanting to leave their defences to him. 

"I can take a turn in the watch if you wish," he says. "However much or little you trust me in general, it is not at all in my interest that we be attacked in the night." 

They glance at each other. "Sure," Fazil says. "Mahdi's usually first. You can wake Hagan around midnight. Do you want reading material or anything?"

"Will I be able to read things in your language?" 

"For as long as the translation spell lasts it should give you a command of the language as good as Mahdi has, though we ran into some words that didn't translate for Vanyel because your world hadn't invented the relevant concepts." He digs through his bag. "History of Osirion? History of the Inner Sea Region? History of Cheliax? I don't have one on Rahadoum -"

"I have the recruitment letters they were handing out. I don't think I've seen books."

"I will read the one on Cheliax first, I think."

Leareth also doesn't have any bedding or travel supplies, due to having been involuntarily kidnapped in just his pyjamas. (Someone presumably still has his shirt and he would like it back eventually.) 

He can have his shirt back and Hagan and Fazil can double up with apparently no awkwardness at all to leave a bedroll spare for him. 

He can have a book about Cheliax. 

"I assume you can do your own light?" says Mahdi, and he dims the barrier until it no longer produces any; the stars glitter overhead.

Leareth summons a tiny mage-light in the palm of his hand, and settles in to do some reading until midnight. 

Cheliax started out as the vast, undersettled western provinces of Taldor; as Taldor declined, it became the intellectual and economic center of the empire, and then became independent, and then became an empire in its own right. Its patron deity was of course Aroden, the god of humans, prophecied to someday return and usher in an Age of Glory. Cheliax expanded north as far as Varisia and the Hold of Belkzen, became the world's largest naval power, annexed neighbor after neighbor, often peacefully. 

The prophecied year of Aroden's return was 4606 A.R.. It was foretold that Aroden would bring an age of glory to the whole world, but Cheliax was where he would start, and the people of Cheliax eagerly awaited him. Religious orders swelled. The King prepared to abdicate. On the prophecied day there was a national festival. 

And - no one knows for sure what happened, of course, but the general understanding is that the gods went to war. In locations as far as three thousand miles from Cheliax, three weeks of furious storms are recorded. The ground shook. At least five cities were swallowed by earthquakes, and at least two countries drowned beneath the waves as the storms receded from most of the world to form a permanent hurricane of unfathomable force and scale where the nations of Lirgen and Yamasa used to be. A hole ripped open between this plane and the Abyssal one; it is called the Worldwound and it is still open, despite the armies of five nations fighting to hold back the tide of demons. 

After three weeks of this Aroden's clerics stopped getting spells from him. 

Prophecy stopped working -- even, it is said, for the gods.

And Cheliax, built on the church of Aroden for healing, for clean water, for administration, for the authority of the monarchy, collapsed into a bloody and vicious civil war that lasted more than twenty years. A third of its population was dead by the time a claimant backed by Hell secured the throne and announced the nation would now worship Asmodeus. 

This is possibly one of the most upsetting things that Leareth has ever read.

(He's briefly distracted when Vanyel, in the throes of some nightmare, starts projecting a little; he puts his own shields over him, but waits for him to wake up on his own rather than risk Mindtouching him awake and getting blasted for his efforts.)

He takes some notes, and stares into the distance. Ends up waking Hagan somewhat after midnight, and settling down in his borrowed bedroll. 

It takes him a long time to fall asleep. 

Vanyel is having a terrible night. He wakes all of them a few hours before dawn, screaming and nearly setting the wall of the tent on fire. 

Mahdi - who apparently summons a flock of bats by default when startled awake - is irritated about this but goes back to sleep pretty quickly.

He's irritated at Yfandes, and keeps thinking about what he'd do if Fy decided she hated him. 

Leareth is so curious about what the flock of bats is supposed to accomplish. He puts more shields on Vanyel and moves to be closer to him, in case of any other accidental magic.

In the morning, he's not the most well-rested he's ever been, but he can manage. 

Vanyel seems to be sleeping in. (Leareth puts a sound-barrier up around him as soon as he's awake, so they can let him sleep as long as possible, it seems like he needs it.) 

In the morning Hagan goes out looking for things they can eat and comes back with a cactus whose spines are hallucinogenic but whose flesh is delicious; he spends a while carefully dethorning it, while Fazil and Mahdi prepare their spells for the day, and then has breakfast for everybody. 

"Okay. Let's puzzle over what Nethys had to say a bit more and then we can make everyone much smarter for twenty minutes and we can see if we figure anything out that way. And then - I guess maybe we should get started on petitioning Abadar on the question of whether divine spells will work in Velgarth, and on researching the plane so Fazil can Plane Shift there."

Vanyel is awake at this point, and can be coaxed to eat breakfast, but doesn't seem very up for participating in the brainstorming. 

(Leareth cannot wait to experience the intelligence-enhancement spell.)

"I am a little confused about the information from Nethys," he says. "My understanding from last night's reading is that prophecy and Foresight are broken here?"