"We may be willing to do that at some point. Today I thought you could do more magic research, all the magic researchers are really delighted about that, and perhaps this evening we could trade information about Rahadoum."

"Of course." Leareth smiles at him. "It is my pleasure to work with your researchers, they are quite excellent."

The pharaoh is suspicious of him, Leareth is thinking. More than he's letting on. Very reasonably; Leareth would be unimpressed if he wasn't, but of course, the pharaoh isn't stupid. (The pharaoh is very not stupid, in fact, he's three standard deviations above the population average on several different measures of cleverness, and Leareth doesn't think he's ever been this jealous of someone getting perks from a literal god.) 

"They have gone and fetched some more artifacts you can experiment with, if you'd like. I only wish I could sit in, but I very rarely cancel meetings and don't care to have anybody conclude there's anything interesting afoot. Hagan, if you'll walk back with me -"

" - sure, your majesty -" And he heads back into the palace with him.

"I can't find Tylendel," he says in Taldane as soon as they're away from the rest of the group. "The spell fails in that fashion if he's either destroyed - no soul remaining - or alive. Either way a resurrection won't work - do you have a guess about which is more plausible -"

"- I have no idea. Leareth might know. You can telepathy at him - or at Vanyel but we're keeping this from Vanyel -"

"I gathered that. I do not think I can 'telepathy at' Leareth without, well, intending that he be able to read some of my thoughts, and I do not intend that at all. You're welcome to pass it along, though."

"I think he's all right. Leareth. Dangerous but not - he was disappointed in you about the slavery."

"I have freed more people from slavery than the angriest best-armed ideologue in Andoran."

"Because no one put them in charge of Osirion! - I don't really want to argue about this. I just think you can trust Leareth. And if you want him to like you, now you know how."

"I think if I trusted him he wouldn't trust that. But - I am holding your recommendation quite highly, here. And I'm grateful that you came. And - I'll keep it in mind, about the slavery."

Hagan goes back to the beach.

Tylendel's not dead, he tells Leareth. He says the soul is either permanently destroyed or alive, from the spell result. Do you have any idea how that could've happened?

:Oh: Leareth's expression doesn't change. His mindvoice is very level. :I - am not sure. I do not think souls are - the kind of thing that are ever destroyed, in the usual order of things. Let me think a moment: 

"Does Valdemar have beaches, Van?"

"What? Oh, um, sort of but not like this. We're not on a coast, Valdemar is pretty far inland. There's a river that runs through Haven, the Terilee, it has some beaches in the wider sections. I guess there are some lakes." 

"Rivers don't have the tides, it's not as good. - here I am assuming your planet has tides - or would all planets have tides -"

"Most don't. You need one moon, fairly large relative to the planet. It's the pull of the moon on the water that causes the tides, at least that's the going theory."

"We have tides. The moon is also our scholars' best theory. You know of other planets that do not have tides?" Leareth looks impressed. "Our astronomers suspect that there are at least a couple of other planets around the same sun as us, and that the distant stars might have planets of their own, but our magic does not give us any particular advantage to studying them, much less traveling there. The range is thoroughly intractable for Gating, even leaving aside the difficulty with aiming a Gate to a place no one has ever been, which is also moving rapidly relative to the departure point." 

"Golarion is the third of eleven planets around our sun and some people have been to some of the others. Elves are from one of the others, there was a permanent portal a very long time ago though I think it's been lost by now. And then we know of a couple of planets around other stars. One of them built a ship that travelled for tens of thousands of years from their star to ours, and crash landed here."

Leareth stares at him. "Tens of thousands of years! How did they survive in a sealed vessel for that long? And - were they immortal, or did they– that would be several hundred generations, if the generation time were similar to humans..." 

"There were no members of the creator species on the ship, just intelligent constructs made of metal."

"Oh. That– I would say that makes more sense, but I think that it answers some questions and creates even more new ones. How were such constructs made? Was magic involved, or only mundane engineering techniques?" 

Vanyel would be so curious about every part of this conversation, if he were better able to focus on anything other than misery! He tries his best to listen to it anyway. 

"They don't show up to Detect Magic but that might just mean they're some other kind of magic. No one has been able to reverse engineer them,  they seem to run on lightning and require a degree of precision in engineering which we have no idea how to achieve ourselves."

"No idea how to achieve ourselves in the Material Plane. Aroden's city in Axis had lightning lights and lightning iceboxes, and Aktun has a few of them though mostly as novelty, they're worse than magical ones."