:Axis is the lawful neutral afterlife. Abadar's lawful neutral and it's the one most people here aspire to. It's - a collection of a thousand cities, connected to each other with portals, each with their own laws and customs, and there's all kinds of people there so there's all kinds of customs, and you don't have to work all day just to survive, and it's very interesting, not the way Golarion is interesting with awful buried history at every corner but just - in that with lots of time people get up to all kinds of things. When I retire I'm probably going to run pilgrimages there. - I'm lawful good but maybe that'll change someday or maybe you get a choice or maybe I'm needed for something, dunno.:

:...I think maybe we need an explanation of this, er, system. I don't know what you mean by the terms you're using - 'lawful good', 'lawful neutral' and such: 

:Huh. Should it wait until Vanyel comes back or should I explain now?:

:Probably wait: She watches Vanyel soaring. :He looks like he's having fun. Flying was a good idea: 

:Who's the dead person we're looking for - brother? Child?:

:Oh. This might be hard to explain, if it's not something your world has, but - do you have any kinds of soulbonds between people? Actually, Van and I have one as well, if it's the kind of thing you can sense:

:Not with Detect Magic and I don't have anything fancier up right now, though I could prepare something tomorrow maybe. I haven't heard of soulbonds between people outside of, like, halfway mythological stories.:

:They're not common in our world either - well, the kind I have with Van is an established thing in our kingdom, we're sort of - colleagues, is probably the best way to look at it - but the other... Our world has something called lifebonds as well, between romantic partners. Losing a lifebonded partner is very, very bad for someone and usually they kill themselves. Van and Tylendel were lifebonded. Tylendel died, oh, more than twelve years ago now: 

:I'm very sorry. - twelve years ago wouldn't be a Raise Dead, it'd be a Resurrection, about twice as expensive. If we can do it at all.:

:If you can't scry him, does that mean it's definitely impossible for your magic to do it, or...still worth trying...? I don't know how long it'd take us to save up that much, but apparently Van's services would be in demand here, so...: 

:Shouldn't take him that long, no. Even if we can't scry him it might work to resurrect him, scries fail if the subject successfully throws it off and Mahdi doesn't have much to go on so it's easier to throw off. - and it might work to resurrect him in your world even if it doesn't in ours? I've never thought about this with other worlds involved, and we'd have to go back to your world anyway to do a resurrection...:

:Why: Pause. :Oh, goodness - is this something where you need a body? Because, um...: 

:Without a body it's a True Resurrection, and that's even more expensive. Not impossible, though.:

Yfandes just nods, an oddly humanlike gesture on a horse. It doesn't seem like there's anything to say. 

Vanyel comes down immediately when prompted at nine minutes. He's smiling. "That spell is very good!" he says quietly to Fazil, not wanting to interrupt Mahdi again. 

"It's great, isn't it? That one's for combat, there's a higher circle one for if you just wanna fly all day to wherever you're going next."

"Could you explain what you mean by 'higher circle', there? I've heard people use the term circle a few times and I don't know what it means." 

"Mahdi's the specialist but for prepared casters - like clerics and wizards - who either receive the spells in advance from our god just ready to deploy when asked, or complete the spells most of the way in advance ready to finish when asked - there are certain configurations of magical energy that are stable, and most aren't. If you do something that's unbalanced then you can't store a spell indefinitely like that. So our magic ends up - discrete. Either something requires a first-circle spell slot or it requires a second-circle spell slot but it's never halfway in between. - I think they're called circles because of something that wizards came up with, I do not myself have an intuitive felt sense for what makes a spell belong to a particular circle of power. Researchers try all the time to figure out how to compress a wizard spell so it uses a lower spell slot. Cleric spells just are what they are, mostly, maybe with a little bit of give in an emergency. - divine magic used to be unambiguously much more powerful than arcane magic but now arcane magic is generally considered more powerful, so much more has been invented. I can try to give you a sense of what spells are what circle but it takes a while to get an intuition for. Uh, something like creating water, or stabilizing a dying person, or creating an illusory light, uses very little energy and I can call the energy right back into my hand as I cast it, we can do those an arbitrary number of times per day. Invisibility is second circle. Flying is third circle. Scrying is fifth-circle for me but wizards recently figured out how to compress it into fourth, which means it's much easier for Mahdi to do than for me, so he has to do all our scrying and he mopes about it constantly. Teleportation is fifth-circle for wizards and plane shifts are fifth circle for clerics, wizards can't do a plane shift until seventh circle. 

Raise dead is fifth circle. Resurrection is seventh. True Resurrection, which doesn't need a body, is ninth. There are not stable configurations higher than ninth, you can do ridiculous things if you get that good at magic but you're not really working within the same system anymore.  The vast majority of casters are not powerful enough to do more than third-circle spells, and lots can't even do that. 

Interplanetary teleport is ninth. Wish is ninth. Miracle is ninth, Gate's ninth..."

"Topology," he says without looking away from his scry. "If that translated then I guess your world has the concept and if it didn't then I'm not really going to be able to explain it while I do this. It's what determines what circle a spell is."

:Interesting. That is a field of study in our world - with some magical applications, even, although more obscure ones:

Vanyel could really do without the repeated reinforcement that True Resurrection is hard and high-level and absurdly expensive (and might not even work in his case...) 

“What’s Gate, in your magic?” he asks, desperately hoping for a different topic. “We have a technique called a Gate but it’s not that absurdly difficult, although it requires pretty strong mage-potential to do at all.”

"Opens a portal between two planes. I've mostly heard of it used to, like, summon the armies of Heaven to a battlefield or something. You have a technique for that?"

“We have a technique that opens a portal between two locations. I - hmm, I haven’t actually checked if I could Gate back to my own world. Doesn’t seem impossible, but...I have a weird sensitivity to Gates, I can cast them but it hurts me a lot, so I’m not that inclined to experiment.”

"Huh. If you wanted to tomorrow I could prepare Delay Pain and then we could try knocking you out nine hours later when it'd hit."

"...Wow, wait, you can just block pain for nine hours?" Vanyel rubs his eyes. "Yes, sure, seems worth trying. And I want to hear more about spells that exist and how hard they are, because I'm getting the sense your magic is really, really different from ours. I mean, creating a light is easy," he does so, "but I can't create water from nowhere at all, I don't think. And healing is an entirely different Gift, although I happen to have it too because, um, I have a lot of Gifts. Oh, and I meant to ask, your world has Bards too?"