"It makes sense," he says absently to Parmida when he's absorbing the news from Cheliax. "They say prophecy is broken. The gods cannot nudge gently as they did before, and they are - not used, to this new world, so they are clumsy. I wonder what Iomedae so disliked about the would-be ruler..."

He smiles when he says Iomedae's name, without realizing it, thinking of a bright blazing memory his mind can only half contain - woman's sharp-eyed impatience, can't we do it faster. It's a strange, haunted smile, with grief and confusion and loss in it. But he quickly shakes himself out of it.

Saba's old enough for school, after that harvest season; Parmida lobbies for the temple of Irori, which teaches letters and numbers effectively enough and is respectable, decent, lawful neutral. Saba doesn't talk about that anymore but they ought to be trying, right, to get him to Axis someday. 

Eventually he figures out what's going on with a wizard's bonded object and can accomplish the enchantment himself. That means he can cast a spell he hasn't prepared - once, and then he has to spend several hours resetting it.

"We should." Sad smile. "He is a very lawful child, when you take into account his age." Sigh. "And - I did promise him I would help him to not forget. And to send a message to his parents. Do you happen to know how one would go about doing a Sending to Axis, once we can afford that without large sacrifice?" 

"Not really. That's a powerful spell, it'll be a long time I think..."

“...Yes, I think so.”

But he sits down and talks about it with Saba anyway. Recounts some of what he remembers of their flight from Cheliax, in case the boy has forgotten, and promises he hasn’t forgotten and in a few years they hope to have enough money that they can send a message to his parents.

Aroden still isn’t sure why this feels so important to him. It’s...an anchor. It’s part of how he’s been learning, again, how to be human.

Saba runs off after the conversation and when he comes back he's been crying. They pay his school fees and the temple of Irori says he's a good student. 

Second-level spells that he could copy include Detect Thoughts and Detect Magic (Greater) which is more like the sight for magic he used to have.

He wants to sense magic again. Wants it so badly. (Well, what he really wants is to have it back all the time, but he already knows enough to gauge that permanent versions of spells are going to cost him an almost unimaginable sum.) 

Detect Thoughts is probably more useful in the short run, though. He asks Parmida what she thinks - and how she's feeling on household finances, he would like to save for another spell now but only at a sustainable rate. 

Maybe they could save one silver a day towards nice things and the rest can go towards his spells? They're making more money, now, he should still get the next spell in less time than the last one took him.

That sounds good. He thanks her for doing such a good job of managing things. 

Also she should borrow his spellbook again and try one of his first-level spells, to see if she's strong enough yet. 

She tries it for a while. She feels like she's strong enough but the spell slips out of her head at the last second, or something. She's apologetic.

Can he cast his intelligence-boosting spell on her, to see if it helps? She won't be able to then use his spellbook again, that day, but she can look at the spellform, and read his notes on it, and maybe there's some conceptual leap there that will make the spell easier to retain. And then she can try it again the next time he takes a day off from casting. 

"Wow, that's weird," she says, and concentrates intensely for the precious two minutes. 

When she next tries it it works.

He's so proud of her. It'll get easier, he says, she just needs lots of practice, with concentration as much as with power.

(It's clear she has less innate aptitude than him, but it's an unfair comparison when he used to be a god, and she's not doing badly at all for a human.) 

Given that, and that first-level spells take a lot less ink than second-level spells, maybe they should copy one of his into her spellbook. It'll be a lot cheaper than getting him Detect Thoughts, since they only need the ink and significantly less of it, it won't delay that project by much. Does she have a preference for any spell on his list? 

She'd like Charm Person! ...possibly Mount would make them more money, though.

Well, in the longer-term scheme of things he's pretty sure they can get her both! They're making more money and he expects that to continue improving, as the city slowly rebuilds its wealth around them and more people can pay for discretionary services. Maybe they can save up for Mount first, and then she can put the extra earnings from that toward getting Charm Person too? 

They can do that! ...and maybe once they have both of them they can put aside two silvers a day, for nice things.

If she thinks a life with a few more nice things now is what will be best for them on the scale of the next twenty years, then yes, he thinks they should do that.

...He does want to explain what he's trying to work toward, a little more, because maybe it'll help make sense of - well, everything about him. And these past few years are a good example, he thinks. When their neighbourhood was starving, it was worth it to make sacrifices in the shorter run, because once they had the Restore Corpse spell, they could feed themselves and her family and a lot of other children. They may have saved a dozen lives, that way, over the course of that worst lean season. He remembers her smile, on the first day that they had meat to share with the neighbours. 

And...that's, at the heart of it, what he's fighting for. What he wants to put his life and mind and magic toward. Last year he was still so small and weak and it was all both of them could do to save a neighbourhood from starvation. If he had been a stronger wizard, he would have been able to do more - and so he has to get there, because there are still problems to be solved, there are still wrongs in the world that are killing people and there will be even once the worst famines are over. That's why he's in a hurry, even if his hurried pace is planned for the next twenty years.

...And he would understand, if that's not the shape she is, he's not asking her to be that shape; he's a strange sort of person and he's...honestly not that happy, a lot of the time, there's just enough fire and desperation in him that it doesn't matter. He wants her and Saba to have all the nice things they desire, and he also wants everyone to, and so he needs to keep investing in the future, learning and becoming stronger and - and he doesn't know what he'll do, then, in what order, because it depends how the world shapes itself in the interim.

But they should make the present something they're happy to live in, too, and if two silvers a day for nice things is what she needs, then they'll do that. He smiles, distantly, says that it might well make him happier too. 

She blinks at him. 

"We're saving eight tenths of our money. That's - much more than most people save, when they're bringing in a couple of gold a day. And - investing in the future is important, really important, but - you can't just wait to have anything nice until you've solved all of the problems in the world, because where does that end, right. If you make seventh circle -" it's the highest she's ever heard of - "and can make pocket dimensions or something there'll still be starving people in Sothis. Or if not in Sothis, somewhere. When do you say - enough -"

Never. Never ever ever. Not until everyone is okay. And the dark haunted look is back in his eyes, briefly. 

"There is magic beyond that. And then, someday, there is magic no one has invented yet, and maybe..." He couldn't do it even as a god. She's not wrong, that the world is full of extremely intractable problems - that no human being can expect to solve even a fraction of them, and yet, and yet, and yet–

He shrugs. "I think you are probably right. I...well, honestly, I think that I barely notice what the inside of our house looks like, I am usually looking at magic in my head. And so I suppose it is a little unfair, because magic for me is both a nice thing and an investment, and so I am hogging the entire nice things budget right now. So - two silvers a day once you have your spells, and if we earn more, I think it is quite reasonable to scale up how much we can spend on the present, until you are comfortable with it." 

She makes the house nicer. Gets them a better bed to sleep on, and curtains, and nice plates.

He notices that sleeping on the bed is more pleasant, and that the curtains help with the heat inside, and remembers to tell her this and thank her. He makes a deliberate effort to pay attention to the plates and enjoy his food, remember how much better it is than what they ate during that one awful year. 

They save for spells. Hers first, since they're cheaper, and Detect Thoughts isn't really urgent; he just wants it desperately, he'll feel just a tiny fraction less blind and helpless and constantly disoriented. 

He leaves Parmida in charge of their moneymaking activities, tells her he'll use most of his spell allotment and several hours a day of cantrips for that, in whatever form she judges best. He spends the rest of his time studying. If he can teach himself how to craft magic items, or write scrolls, he can sell those for a lot of money, they could open a shop... 

It's slow going, even though he's pulling more and more of his opaque distant procedural memory of god-magic into the light. He walks around the city, casts Detect Magic, examines random magic items in shops and carried by passersby. Are there any wizards who would be willing to demonstrate crafting an item while he watches with Detect Magic? 

He'll have to pay for the privilege but there are wizards who'll let him do that. There's one who'll take him on for his own magic shop, if he commits to spending the day making items for the shop at a substantial discount for a year once he's learned the technique.

What does Parmida think? He thinks he might well learn the technique six months or even a year sooner with formal instruction, it's very inefficient to do from his own research, and it'll still bring in income for the year he commits to, just less than it will after that. 

The terms seem reasonable to her though he should get them written down and they should read it over very carefully, maybe with the cleverness spell, that's what you're supposed to do with contracts.

That's a good idea! (He's so grateful for her common sense about business, that's the sort of thing that doesn't transfer at all from a god's-eye view of the world.) He will do that, and if the terms seem reasonable he will sign it and start training.