Word gets out anyway and other people come by hoping for food. 

They do not get in any kind of official trouble, though the priest says he's keeping it quiet at the temple.

They can give out any food that's left at the end of the day, although he'll charge for it for everyone other than the neighbours who chipped in for the spell and Parmida's family. 

Once he's more confident that he's not bringing anything bad down on their heads, he goes out quietly to the other wizards he knows and tells them about the spell, and that there's a priest willing to help, and he'll let them copy the spell in exchange for copying any of theirs that he doesn't already have. He tells them, quietly and seriously, that he knows it's necromancy which is generally bad, and he wouldn't be doing it under normal circumstances, but - he has a family to feed, and so do a lot of people, and this is going to save lives... 

He can get quite a lot of people to go for it, under the circumstances. 

(In trade he can get the personal shield spell, and a spell that makes a weapon someone's holding suddenly get red-hot so they hopefully drop it, and a spell to summon a riding horse for a few hours, though he will still have to buy expensive inks to have any of them in his spellbook and usable instead of just in his notes.)

The horse might actually be really, really useful if they want to get anywhere fast, though it doesn't seem like the violence is getting any worse. And they have a little more income, from the excess meat-stew they can sell on days that they get bigger animals. He will save up for the ink and buy just enough for that one spell, and then keep a close eye on their money. He wants, if possible, to save up for a passage by ship somewhere else, if next year Sothis is no longer a good place to be; he tries to find out if ships are even still sailing, and how exorbitant the prices would be.

The dumps probably don't have infinite animal skeletons in them, even with lots of very determined and hungry children digging. But they'll have enough for a while, though he supposes they might run out of convenient big animal skeletons and need to go down to chickens. (Still better than nothing.) 

Sometimes the neighbourhood children are enthusiastic and bring more than one long-rotted corpse, and he hides them for later.

He practices magic, does laundry - for anyone still paying to have laundry done - and listens, closely, for rumours of what's going on in the city. (Quietly hates the fact that he has to rely on rumour to guess at what the future holds.) 

He could go to Qadira, or Absalom, or Taldor; none of those are far, but none of them are doing that much better. South in Katapesh there are reports they're doing well but there are also reports they had a hundred thousand slaves killed so they'd stop needing food, so. Fishing villages along the coast are mostly doing fine. The storm over Lirgen and Yamasa has not stopped and people are claiming it looks stable; just a hurricane a hundred miles across, there forever. No one's sure what happened to all the people in Lirgen and Yamasa.

People are saying that prophecy is broken. Not just that none of the prophecies made about this year came true - that happens, sometimes, prophecy isn't set in stone - but that the spells meant to reveal the future don't work, that inquiries to the gods about the future turn up no answers at all, that fate ended when Aroden died. 

Some people still pay to have laundry done. They mostly have well-positioned relatives. Clerics who can cast Create Food, the owners of fishing enterprises, a wizard who put together a demiplane where food grows very rapidly and has people in and out every day to harvest it. ("Can you do that?" Parmida asks him.) The faiths of Abadar and Irori and Sarenrae and Pharasma in Osirion seem to have pushed a lot of clerics up to third circle at the expense of having as many, the ratios are way off compared to normal. It is kind of like they are apologizing about having left the world in ruins. 

There's a cholera outbreak, and a measles outbreak, and an outbreak of sleeping sickness.

"Someday I will be able to create a demiplane but not until I am much more powerful," he confesses to Parmida. They're already better off than some, he thinks.

He remembers a little about how human diseases work, possibly more than the average citizen of Sothis knows, it's unclear what the average knowledge level is. They should prioritize clean drinking water even if they need to pay the cleric at the temple for it and do extra walking and carrying. They should keep Saba indoors and away from other children when the measles is spreading, and burn incense to ward off insects. Saba is getting plenty of meat, now, his body will have more in reserve to fight off illness, but he's also still very young.

He knows the city isn't the best place to be, for disease, but - there's still money to be made here for him. If the laundry business dries up enough, he tells Parmida that they should consider relocating to some quiet fishing village for a while, even though he knows this would mean abandoning her family. His horse-summoning spell means they can cover significant distances, ride the horse as hard as it can handle for the time he can summon it, camp and do it again the next day if necessary. But they'll stay put for now.

He has more free time, now, fewer people are paying for laundry even if some still are. He pokes at his cantrips, they're the cheapest to research, he holds the structure of the magic in his mind and tries to see what it's really doing, whether he could use a cantrip for more things than he's thought to so far. Can the 'sorting' spell he uses to clean laundry be applied to other kinds of separating-things? Is there anything that, for example, lets him trap or confuse the birds that still fly around the city, so he can hit them with stones and add a little food to their supply? 

It is definitely possible to use just the slightest scrap of magic for minor telekinesis. It's separately definitely possible to command their minds and confuse them out of the sky. It'd be a different spellform than the ones he has here but it's very obvious that it ought to work, from a god's perspective it'd be a nearly identical motion... He can puzzle over it for a while, or try to copy it out of someone else's spellbook. 

Parmida keeps Saba indoors and walks to the temple for water. Her family gets the measles, most of them not too badly, and she leaves their stew on the porch rather than go in. 

She gets more reliable at the laundry cantrip herself.

He'll puzzle at it for a bit first - looking at the Charm Person spell for comparison, that's mind-affecting albeit much stronger and more specific. (Does that look like it could be adapted slightly to do something different?) If he can't get anywhere then he'll ask around, but the research work seems important in its own right, he thinks it'll pay off later when he's a stronger wizard and can invent more powerful spells. He talks out loud to Parmida and Saba when he's thinking through it, sometimes. If he's still not able to see it after a few weeks, though, he'll ask around if any wizards have a cantrip like that. 

When they next have any money to spare, he thinks they should invest in the beginnings of a spellbook for Parmida, even if it literally just has one cantrip in it for now, then it won't require him taking a day off of meat-procurement; the cantrip won't need a lot of the magic ink.

She is delighted. She could take over all of the laundry, and let him focus on research.

(Charm Person has obvious and not so obvious variants; most trivially, you could make people dislike you instead. If you do the same thing it's doing with no structure at all and not much power you'll leave a person dazed and disoriented, and if you do that with a little more power you'll leave them with no memory of the last few things that happened, or leave them without the ability to understand language for a few minutes.

With a bit more power you could tell them what to do. With a lot more than that you could make their mind yours. He's not remotely that powerful but it's easy to see what the spell would be doing, if it weren't so weak and ineffectual and limited to tapping at things it should be able to take possession of.)

He's very proud of Parmida and happy to let her take over laundry, the practice will be good for her. He encourages her with the other uses of the spell, too, it's the extremely general minor-entropy one that can also flavour food and colour objects and exert small amounts of telekinetic force. Or cool their drinking water. It still takes concentration to pull off the other uses of it, but it's a cantrip, she can cast it as many times a day as she wants. 

He writes out a less-structured variant of Charm Person that would daze someone, in his notes, but doesn't have the ink to add it to his spellbook right now. He does try to get ink for the cantrip that will command birds, with their smaller minds, as a backup to their meat in case it becomes impossible to get skeletons from the dump.

Saba is spending a lot of time indoors with him, because of the measles, so he keeps teaching the boy his letters.

He keeps listening to all the rumours he can, but the easiest way to see what the future will hold, right now, is to wait for it to arrive. 

In the Chelish calendar it's now midwinter and the start of the new year. 4607 by the Absalom Reckoning, counted from the year when the famous hero Aroden lifted the island out of the ocean, set the protections on the Starstone, and became a god. 

Osirion does not have winter but the rainy season is followed by what Osirians call the season of the emergence, when the Sphinx recedes from its swollen rainy-season banks and the crops grow in the fertile land it uncovers. The crops don't grow well, this year, but there are some hardy plants making their way. 

There are emaciated children's bodies in the streets of Sothis.

Saba is not impressively quick with his letters but he's impressively diligent, and has them all learned after a while. 

He can daze birds.

He will daze birds whenever he spots them, then, it's cantrip-level and he can cast it as often as he wants. (The birds are not all starving; they have bodies to pick at, children's bodies...) He teaches Saba to go after the dazed birds and break their necks before they wake up.

He tells Parmida they should try to grow a little garden, maybe shared with the neighbours, it won't be a lot of nutrition but some fresh plants in their diet will make them healthier. 

He's waking up in tears almost every night, again.

Parmida figures he is probably mourning his dead wife and children. She can hold him, if it seems to help. 

It does help, a little, if perhaps not for the reasons she expects. 

He gets her ink for the mending spell, once she's comfortable with the minor entropy spell and its various applications. Lots of people's clothes and household objects are worn or broken; nearly everyone they know is spending almost all of their spare money on food.

He waits to see if the previous signs of unrest will worsen, when things don't improve as much as people might have hoped they would with the next crop season. 

There are actually less riots. Maybe people are too fatigued and malnourished to riot. 

Casting a first-level spell takes less out of him.

Every so often he'll try preparing a second spell in the morning, to see if he can, he knows he's gradually getting stronger. He continues to have lots of research time, and he studies the structure of his spells, trying to figure out if he can make them more efficient to prepare. 

The way humans prepare spells is stupidly inefficient, probably because they can only barely interact with the forces they're using. With more precision and some alterations he can waste less energy preparing them. 

He can reliably get two.

He prepares the necromancy spell every day, of course, but starts rotating through his other options, so he has a chance to practice all of them.

He tries talking to some of the other wizards he's met about his research; mostly he hopes to hear what other spells people have, for the future when they have a little more spare income. His intuitions for magic are still mostly unusable as a human caster, but he can draft modifications of first-level spells and guess if they ought to work even when he can't actually afford ink to try casting them.  

Can his horse-summoning spell do anything else, with modifications? 

It could instead get a pony pretty easily, or a donkey or camel or ox or dog or crocodile with some tweaking. 

Other wizards mention that he could enchant a bonded object. It's a magical focus of some kind, and it takes a while to connect it thoroughly with your own magic, but once you've done it it lets you cast a spell from your spellbook that you didn't prepare, every day. (It's a little bit closer to how all magic works when you're not clumsy and limited and human.)

His illusions can get more convincing; that's just a matter of practice. His charms can get subtler. Charm Person obviously creates a link between your mind and the mind of the person you've charmed, which could probably be used for other things, it would have to work that way, but human wizards seem totally unaware of this. 

He starts working on the bonded object; he has a leg-up there, but still expects it to take a while.

...He would really like it if Charm Person let him see through another person's eyes, or read their thoughts; there's a link and he just has to figure out how to coax his limited human mind into using it. Also he thinks that at higher power levels he ought to be able to do it for longer, or on more people. He has lots of Parmida-siblings as willing experimental subjects, if they're all over the measles and not contagious anymore.

If they can manage to save up for it, he'll go find the wizard who knows the floating force-disk spell and copy that, partly because it's useful in itself but mostly because it'll give him something else he can study and try to build on. 

Even with lots and lots of nudging his human mind does not seem to understand that it ought to be able to use that link to look through peoples' eyes or read their thoughts, but it does eventually figure out how to send thoughts; he can talk in peoples' heads, if he has them Charmed. It ought to be able to at least catch their responses but it can't quite do that yet, the link might need to be stronger. The spell lasts longer already, between his efficiency tweaks and his growing magical reserves; he can hold it for a couple of hours now. 

Harvest season arrives in Sothis. The harvest is pitiful but, well, the population is smaller, by now. There are a lot fewer kids Saba's age. 

Rumor has it that when Aroden died there opened up a mile-long cosmic blight rimmed by jet black flames, far north of here in Sarkoris. Rumor has it that Rahadoum's priesthood and King are at odds and people expect a civil war. Rumor has it that Cheliax is headless, more or less, but that won't last. The Kelesh Empire raises taxes on Osirion, takes more of the grain, and there are some riots about that.

He wants to do something about Cheliax. 

Realistically, he can't. He is a random nobody farmer-turned-wizard with some cantrips and a wife and toddler and laundry business. He might get somewhere if he were willing to reveal his identity but he absolutely cannot afford to do that. 

...He does need to start planning longer-term, now that the state of things seems to be stabilizing a little, even if it's stabilizing at 'very bad'. In the long run, if he wants to accomplish anything in the world, he's going to need - territory, people. Magic. For now, the tractable thing to work on is magic.

He does talk to Parmida a lot about politics; he makes predictions about what's going to happen where, his god-memories also have some intuitions of how humans behave when embedded in a civilization, currently those memories aren't very useful for guessing at the future but he hopes he can hone that sense. (He has a weak guess that there'll be a revolt in the Kelesh Empire that might fragment it, though it might also fail to do that.) 

He asks the cleric who's been helping them purify restored animal corpses if he can come by and cast Detect Magic while they do their spells, maybe he can translate more of his implicit not-really-usable context on magic if he sees it from that angle too. 

He tries to teach Saba to count. 

Saba is quick at counting, he has seen his parents handle money and understands that it is very very important and where food comes from and you have to be very clever to eat. 

Parmida has never given politics that much thought. The Kelesh Empire has ruled Osirion for a while. Everyone really important and powerful is from there; there are local nobles, but they're less important, and in more dire straits now because Osirion was hit harder than the rest of the empire by the disaster. The riots have all been crushed efficiently enough. She does say somewhat wistfully that a long time ago Osirion was an empire of its own, and had pharaohs. Their tombs are still visible out in the desert. She's well out of her depth but she can be a sounding board, if he wants that. (He has that restless empty look in his eyes that is sometimes frightening but has never once meant he'd hit her.)

Humans use magic in such contorted ways, and it's more obvious when he's watching with Detect Magic while Parmida casts or while the cleric does. Their spells look bizarre because they're like the shape you'd get if you took a random planar cross-section of a forest and tried to guess how forests worked. No, like if you took ten thousand random cross-sections of a forest, got one that looked like a ladder, and declared you'd discovered a ladder-spell. There are so many efficiency improvements to be had and - maddeningly, he's not smart enough to see all of them, though sometimes he can see he's not seeing them.

He takes notes on all his observations (in very, very small handwriting and using invented shorthand, to save on paper. Their hopeful shelf is still empty of other books.)

He asks the local wizards if they know about intelligence-increasing spells. 

Second level. And lasts just a couple of minutes. You can buy magic items for it but they're outlandishly expensive.