Good: her extremely baffling husband, she can barely ever guess what's in his head these days, and having his attention on her instead of lost in illusions he's tracing and political rumors he's muttering about. The fact that the distant haunted look is barely there at all. Getting an understanding of what all of those women in Cheliax were ruining themselves for. 

Not good: well, she doesn't bring it up, but he's not a hard man to read, and he is definitely much more lost in satisfaction and joy and belonging-in-the-world when he has his intelligence spell up and is watching Nefreti try things with Detect Magic and then showing her with an illusion what he saw. But, well, you can't have every thing in a man and she's pretty sure she got a spectacularly unusually good collection of things.

He can sense the edges of that slight dissatisfaction, because telepathy, but mostly she is happy and he likes making her happy, and if sex doesn't quite capture his full attention in the same way that drawing on the fragments of who he used to be does, well, it's still quite a lot of attention he points at her and diligent effort put toward learning what pleases her.

It's - nice, doing something so fully and mundanely human, something that, for once, doesn't remind him at all of how much less he is now than before.

He realizes he's not sure when or how Parmida is going to know if it worked and she's with child. He's all right with this, he doesn't mind having marital relations every other night for a while, though he tries to keep it under an hour so it's not taking too much time from his research. 

She doesn't mind either! And after a few months she tells him that they've succeeded, though she would not mind if they were to do it occasionally anyway, it turns out to actually be excellent. 

They're saving more money than before, even with the larger house and the more expenses and the more nice things (fresh cut flowers on the dinner table! spices!). He has another couple thousand gold only six months after he completes the headband.

He's content to have marital relations occasionally, at least once he's confirmed that it's not bad for a woman who's pregnant. 

He's learned that you can get spells cast permanently on yourself. Having Detect Magic permanently would only cost about twenty-five hundred gold. (Only!) He tells Parmida that he thinks this is an extremely worthwhile investment, given how often he uses the cantrip for teaching and research, dozens if not hundreds of times a day. It would mean having it like just another sense, like his eyes - he could Detect Magic his own spells as he's casting them, take that for granted... 

It seems like a weird thing to want to spend such an astounding sum of money on but he clearly wants it very badly, so she kisses him and tells him that that's what they've been working so hard for, for him to have the gold for his research, of course he should get it.

The day he gets it put on, he is immediately and visibly happier. He moves more lightly. The haunted look is barely noticeable at all.

He thinks it's a pretty worthwhile investment. The fact that he doesn't need to concentrate on holding a spell in order to see magic makes it much easier and less tiring to teach; he can teach a lot more students this way. 

They have a lot of paying students. "I would like to take on some scholarship students," he tells Parmida. "Maybe a couple per year, with entrance exams to select who we take? Just - there have to be others like Nefreti in the city, who are very clever but too poor to even consider training as a wizard. It would not increase our costs much, since it is not really any harder to teach eleven students instead of ten, now that I have Detect Magic permanently. We would need to pay for their starter spellbook, but my thought was that I would give them Prestidigitation, and once they were skilled enough with it, they could earn the money themselves to pay for future spells, with laundry businesses or working for us as teaching assistants."

"It seems like a good idea to me. Of course, most poor children can't read, no matter how clever they are, you can't learn if you've never seen writing."

"I mean, a very bright child can pick up reading quickly enough, I think, with only a little bit of formal instruction and it would not have to be from us. What I am looking for here is – well, no one else is going to be like Nefreti, but children who are quite exceptional and can succeed despite many disadvantages."

He is seriously considering just wandering around the poorer parts of town casting Detect Thoughts and scouring for the smartest minds he can find, and then asking them if they want to be wizards. 

She smiles fondly at him. "Well, we can afford it."

Their usual word-of-mouth network won't reach the poorest children, of course. He has to go out and talk to people, which he minds a lot less now and, for this at least, feels comfortable doing without Parmida feeding him lines. He walks around offering cantrips to help people with whatever they're doing, and says he's looking for very clever children to apply for a scholarship as a student at his magic school, do they know people they can direct him to? And he does sometimes cast Detect Thoughts just to skim all the minds, once he finds a place where a lot of children are. 

The most desperately poor children aren't typically as clever; it is probably the two years of severe malnutrition. But he can find promising children on the docks, among the fishermen, occasionally in the slave markets, children with enough potential to become very competent wizards.

Does he need to buy any children he finds in the slave markets in order to teach them?

If he really believes he can turn them into wizards he should see that as a good investment, right? And if he doesn't think it's worth his money it's unclear why it'd be worth anyone else's to feed and shelter them for years while they go through his school (and are then probably a flight risk since they have magic, unless their owner can afford an expensive magical binding for them).

Well, he can afford it. Not trivially - it's equivalent to the cost of a second-level spell - but it's really obviously worthwhile, if what he's buying is their entire future as a wizard, maybe a very good one. He just feels - dirty, interacting with even the concept of a slave market. (And some part of him wants to buy all the children, but that he really can't afford.) So he'll buy any children he finds there, and then immediately tell them that they're not slaves anymore, though if they don't have anywhere to live they can maybe join as servants in his household, and be paid for it, albeit not much.

He ends up with more than a couple children in total, but it's too hard to turn anyone away, once he's seen them and the potential in their minds, and he can afford it; he does tell some of the children who are borderline and also younger that they should come back next year. He sets Saba and a few other junior students to rotate giving basic lessons to any children who can't read yet; he tells them that if they're clever enough to be wizards at all, they should be clever enough to be reading and writing simple sentences in a month or two.

He makes beginner spellbooks with Prestidigitation inked in, and starts teaching them exactly the way he would all his other students, giving the first couple of lessons himself with his illusion-accompanied explanations and then setting Nefreti to it. 

And one day Nefreti comes in, bounds up to him glowing with joy. "Look, look," she says, and casts Greater Detect Magic, which she has already mastered, as a divine spell rather than an arcane one. It looks very different, to his magic senses; both of them fundamental forces of the universe, but this one humans can't tap into with any amount of hacking. Not without help. 

"–How did you do that."

His face holds much less of the pride and joy she's probably hoping for; his expression goes very controlled. 

"Nethys gave it to me! I had a vision, it was like I could see magic, and touch it, the way it's meant to be used, and I saw everything that it could do and I wanted all of it, and I saw what humans were doing and it wasn't enough, and then I saw that there was more we couldn't touch at all and I - went over to explore it, and I was mad, that we couldn't have more of it, that we couldn't see all of it and use it the way it was meant to be used, and I tried to explain that we could do better, if they'd let us, that we were trying, that sometimes from the right angle we could almost see it - 

- I heard you are supposed to pray, for cleric spells, but I didn't do any of that, just tried to explain - it feels really different - it's not the way magic's supposed to be either, it's still compressed very oddly so it'll stabilize -"

He stares at her. 

Eventually he forces out some words, he doesn’t even remember afterward what they are, some sort of inconsequential praise that has to sound insincere, when she knows what his sincere pride looks like. He excuses himself, says that he needs to go deal with something. Escapes.

He doesn’t even know what this is, yet. Except that it’s blatantly the hand of a god. Nethys. Does he even have any memories of Nethys...

The god of magic, the god who knows everything - hard to interact with, his attention split as it is among a trillion other worlds, ten trillion other gods -

- one of the ones who hadn't minded the strain on Foresight -

- and if he reaches very hard for it, shifts his thoughts headsplittingly into a format not native to this brain, that memory unfolds into more details. The gods were angry, frustrated, rendering one of their own main sensory apparatuses unusable and failing to click into conditionally-committed accord on a way to stop that. Abadar has proposed ten different sets of commitments which, if copied across everyone, would restrict them all to a degree of use of it that makes it useful. Lots of gods haven't adopted them, and it has remained unusable. Aroden is talking with - no, with a bit more practice interpreting his godmemories 'talking to' ceases to be the right abstraction, Aroden is making legible his intent in a way shaped for specific others, one by one, in case that can get them all in accord on something - Aroden is making legible that he did not intend this, that it is negative sum and he hates that too, that he cannot be dissuaded from returning when the Age of Glory is foretold to begin -

- Nethys does not mind the lack of Foresight, Nethys is doing something else, flashing across his worlds - Nethys has committed to noninterference in Aroden's plans unless various conditions Aroden is shaped-towards cease to apply - 

- Aroden asked, of course, because why not, 'do I win', and Nethys said 'you cannot lose', except that's the wrong handle on those words and the way it's the wrong handle is important - Nethys was saying not that all the paths ahead led to victory but that all of the paths in which there was Aroden were not paths in which he had lost, that there would never be an Aroden who had lost -

- still the wrong handle - 

- that there would nowhere be an Aroden who had lost, that there would nowhere be an Aroden who -

- his headache is far, far too painful to think through -

He grasps at it for, harder than he ever has before - for a lot longer than he should, probably, he can't think these thoughts, can't hold these memories in their real entirety - the entire framework from which he can be in the world and act it in is straining and breaking under that weight–

He lets go at the point where he can't even grab for it anymore, lets go and slides down his bedroom wall to slump on the floor beside the bed, his head in his hands. There's some key understanding that he's still missing, he thinks, that he maybe can't understand ever again, but - he saw enough to comprehend, if only briefly, why Nethys' assurance was so pointless. It wasn't speaking to his future at all, wasn't at all saying that he, in particular, couldn't lose - it was saying that in the worlds where he lost, he no longer was, those were worlds that no longer contained an Aroden at all. 

He's scared.

He's also in pain and it barely leaves any room to have thoughts at all, and then it recedes enough that he can string very simple thoughts together. Nethys is here. Nethys is the god who sees everything, knows everything - Nethys spoke to his student in a vision - Nethys granted her divine magic, there has to be a reason but he doesn't see it–

–and maybe it's an innocuous or even friendly reason, but - he can't trust that, can't trust that Nethys is a friend and not an an enemy, and so he can't allow any path that Nethys can know more things about him, have more influence over him... 

It takes a pretty long time to, from that premise, reach the conclusion: that he has to leave.

Parmida is worried about him. She gives the students their lessons, because Nefreti is inexplicably upset and sulking and reading her husband's books in a corner, and when the students have left she comes in with tea for a headache.

He takes the tea, absently, but doesn't drink it. His eyes aren't focusing on her. He looks confused, and scared. 

"We need to leave," he says. "I - no, sorry. I need to leave. I would - of course - prefer if you - came..." 

"Mmm. I want to get a healer in, okay? If you still want to leave we can talk about it tomorrow."

He blinks at her. Still not really looking at her. "...All right. Tomorrow." It's not like he can think right now, much less cast any spells, and actually leaving is going to require planning. "But - make a sign, say the school is closed. Lock the door." 

"Nefreti and I can cover the students for a few days while you're unwell." If Nefreti isn't also sulking at the same time. " - is this about Nefreti?"