"Yes. I'm very confused. Part of the puzzle has to be that prophecy isn't broken everywhere and Nethys can see other worlds, but there were some predictions in there that seemed to be about this situation. And it'd be weird if Nethys could see for example that we all show up in Velgarth in two weeks as the best of friends, unless it were incredibly overdetermined - this situation doesn't really feel to me like it was incredibly overdetermined -"

Sigh. "Let's just - 

Fox's Cunning." And he reaches out and presses the spellform into everybody. 

It's sort of like the difference between being tired and not tired, except moreso. You notice your thoughts more, especially where they are incomplete or confused; it feels easier to draw connections between things, and also easier to notice if the connections are substantive or just stylistic. 

"I think either she was lying or she had some significant measure of Foresight; maybe it isn't as wholly gone as people thought, or maybe piggybacking on other worlds works better than it sounds like it ought to. The same story repeats over and over again - maybe if you're omniscient and the multiverse is vast enough you can find somewhere else where the same story plays out? And make inferences from that - Vanyel was saying before we retrieved you, Leareth, that it sure sounded like she was making the claim that this world had a Leareth, or a pattern that's similar enough that to her they looked the same -"

Leareth nods. Thinks. 

"Aroden," he says. "Seems like the sort of god I would create, if - if this worlds held - holds - a version of me who was much further advanced in his plans. Although that did not exactly end well." 

"Aroden started out human himself. He - set up the current arrangements with the Starstone whereby humans who pass the tests he arranged can ascend, and after a lot of preparations did it himself. There've been four others after him."

"'the future is clouded and whose fault is that, hmmm', she said to Leareth, who hasn't done anything to make the future clouded -"

"Interesting. It is not entirely false that I make the future clouded in my own world; my current understanding is that this is part of why the gods there oppose my projects, anything that results in an increased rate of civilizational innovation makes the future less predictable, which They find very inconvenient. I certainly had not done so in this world, though." 

"Fazil did Abadar and Aroden get along -"

"Yeah. Of course. Lawful neutral, both of them, god of trade and commerce and civilization, god of humans, lots of shared interests there."

"Young men who believe themselves immortal, because they are, because they were - but eveything else was not, everything else was lost, a price they did not know they might need to pay, and time erodes even the mountains - she could have been talking about Earthfall -"

"I thought it might also describe an event in my world's history. What is Earthfall?" 

"A catastrophe eight thousand years ago that wiped out the Azlanti and Thassilon Empires, and led to the Age of Darkness - uh, there was too much ash in the air for crops to grow, for hundreds of years -"

"Oh." 

Leareth is quiet for thirty seconds. "Velgarth had a Cataclysm," he says finally. "Caused by a war between two powerful mages. It wiped out empires also, and left the land devastated for centuries - there is still damage being repaired even now..." 

He hesitates, but only briefly. "I was one of them. I remember little of the details, but I know that - the mage I fought had been my teacher and mentor, and I never intended war with him. I am still not sure how it went so wrong." 

"Aroden survived Earthfall. Damned if I know how, gods died in it. I don't remember if he had anything to do with it happening in the first place."

Mahdi combs through his pack for a couple of minutes. 

"Histories put out by his church might be slightly sanitized even if he remembers."

"Sure, but it's a place to start."

He reads. Mutters things out loud while he does. "The aboleths, an underwater race of sentients, taught what they knew of magic to humans, and planted the seeds of the first human civilizations. The Azlanti civilization became advanced, advanced enough to threaten the aboleths, it made them nervous - Aroden had made powerful magical artifacts for the emperor of Azlant - emperor was dissatisfied with his successors, chose Aroden instead - that provoked the aboleths, for some reason - and of course there aren't many surviving details about how it escalated from there but at some point the aboleths decided to call down a meteor that they thought would end life on the surface of the world but leave it intact beneath the water. 

They miscalculated, it destroyed them too. And several gods intervened such that some humans on the opposite side of the planet survived. There were surviving Azlanti colonies, here in what's now Avistan and Gerund - of course they were still pretty much destroyed by the Age of Darkness -"

Leareth's face and body have gone very still, unreadable. 

"Was Aroden a god yet, at the time, or just a person?" he says finally.

"Just a person."

"When did he become a god?" 

"Thousands of years later." He keeps reading. "Aroden led the Azlanti survivors east to the empire's colonies in Avistan and tried to salvage the empire's vast cultural legacy, especially its unparalleled magical developments. Somehow, Aroden became immortal even as his contemporaries bred with other humans and died. Thus, he is considered the "Last of the First Humans" - the colonies had to contend with the Age of Darkness and also with Ibdurengian, a demon lord who had been ravaging Azlanti colonies for three centuries in a quest to eradicate all of Azlant's descendants - Aroden eventually led an army into the Abyss to kill him - 

- unclear what he was up to for a long time after that, he travelled lots of planes and rarely returned to the Material one - and then eventually he came back, set up the Starstone, and ascended."

Leareth takes notes. His expression is still blank. 

"All of this," he says finally. "sounds - very much - like something that I would do. The parallels are somewhat uncanny." He looks down. "...Except that, if this is true, the - local version of me - both succeeded in what I have been trying to do - I suppose he had longer, my - first life - was just under two thousand years ago, so he was ahead... But he did not win in the end, and - died, at the hands of the other gods..."

Leareth goes quiet. This is not a very comfortable fact to learn about an alternate version of oneself.

" - wow. Uh, I'm sorry."

"He might well have been taking reasonable bets the whole time. You can do everything right and still lose."

"We'd better make sure it goes better in Velgarth. I guess."

Leareth ducks his head. Doesn't say anything right away. 

"He did not have access to other worlds," he murmurs finally. "Maybe that will help. ...Although, Hell is worse than anything Velgarth holds, I think. It seems very important that Asmodeus not gain access to my homeworld."