He's tired and hungry, enough to feel a bit lightheaded, and his feet hurt.

Does his host body remember ever coming this far, or whether the farmers from this area came to the same town market? 

His host body has never gone this far. Knows that farmers come from pretty far over for the big festivals, but can't think of anyone in particular he's met from out here.

...Then he’ll prepare a story. Family dead, no point staying on his ruined lands, he’s headed for the city in hopes of finding something else - can he trouble them for something to eat, and any news they might have...

He approaches a particularly well-built and prosperous-looking farmhouse. Tries to look like a man devastated by grief, which isn’t hard, because - that is approximately what he’s feeling.

They have food, they have (fragments of) news, they have sympathy. 

There were earthquakes, on what should have been the day of Aroden's return. There was a lightning storm across the whole sky, and then the rains started, and they're only just stopping just now. His host's sister went to Westcrown for the festival of the return and they're worried maybe things are even worse in Westcrown. 

Aroden's clerics stopped receiving spells from him. No one knows what that means. There's an obvious thing it could mean but - it couldn't be. They have a shrine; it has a woodcut figurine that has been worried smooth. Someone says authoritatively that gods cannot die as long as people still believe in them, and everyone nods. It sounds like the kind of thing that ought to be true. 

It hurts. 

He doesn’t tell them. 

He thanks them, graciously, and says he’s planning to push a little further onward before nightfall - do they know much about the region, the next village, he’s never been this far before. 

They know the towns along the river between here and Ostenso, though with the flooding, who knows. Some of those towns sat in valleys right by the river. Someone's sister's husband would've been at sea, between Ostenso and Absalom, hopefully the storms didn't reach that far of course, if he hears any news can he pass along that they're all alive, and that, well, he should be importing grain, because -

-they turn to discussing this. If Aroden shows up it'll all be fine, of course. If Aroden does not show up then they'll have to import a lot of grain but assuming the floods didn't reach much east of the mountains they'll be able to scrape by.

- if Aroden's gone, if Aroden's shining city in the next life is gone, where should they plan on meeting, in Axis, if the winter turns out harder than they planned -

"Getting at least five steps ahead of yourselves," an old man says gruffly, and everyone laughs, humorlessly, nervously. 

And they might notice a particular pained expression on his face, but there are a lot of reasons to be distraught, right now. 

He leaves as soon as it’s not impolite to do so and walks until nearly sunset before he starts casting his eye about for another place to stop.

Barn with a live horse and some dead chickens?

It'll do! 

Is there a farmhouse nearby - are there any people around -

The farmhouse nearby appears to be crushed by a tree and relatedly not contain any living people.

He's crying again, as he scrapes the chicken corpses out of the barn and checks whether the horse has clean water to drink or anything to eat. 

The horse's trough is really really full of water because of all the rain but it doesn't have anything to eat.

He's exhausted and ready to collapse and sleep, but keeping the horse alive, and having a mount to get as far as the city, seems like a very high priority. He hunts around for a storeroom or loft where grain and feed might be kept; if he can't find anything around the barn he'll try the remains of the farmhouse, but he would kind of rather not go near the human bodies. 

The barn has a loft; the grain is soaked but not yet rotted.

He tries to coax the horse to eat it, making sure to offer only a reasonable amount, he vaguely has the context that it's bad for horses to overeat. 

The horse is surly and resentful and not at all appreciative of being in the presence of the god whose death wiped out the entire countryside, for some reason, but eventually she eats.

He puts a bit more effort into trying to acclimatize the horse to his presence, and then looks for a relatively-less-wet place to sleep. 

It's pretty wet but some places are not literally mud puddles?

He'll take it! He tries to curl up with the spellbook on his chest, still wrapped under his coat, so that hopefully it'll stay dry even if the rest of him gets quite wet. 

The rain stops fully, overnight. It's sunny the next morning, even.

It's timed rather conveniently for his return to life, which is interesting. 

He gets some more wet grain for the horse, and then looks around for a spot outside that's maybe dry to sit on, so he can have a look at his stolen spellbook. 

The man was a very limited wizard who knew six cantrips, barely-spells that a caster can do at any time and recall the energy as they do, and two spells labelled first-circle. The cantrips are labelled 'sound', 'sorting', 'mending', 'copying', 'magic', and 'light'; the spells, 'unseen servant' and 'sleep'.

The notation isn't familiar. A very long time ago he was the best in the world at this, a time after that he was trying to singlehandedly preserve as much of possible of the work of a civilization that has not yet, eight thousand years later, been surpassed (though it's getting close, now), but the magic of the gods works entirely differently and his procedural memory can't help much. But it's possible to puzzle out what the man must have been doing, approximately, and the patterns are all simple enough he could use his own reserves of energy to try them right now if he wanted.

Then he'll try that! It might take a while to relearn this, and having zero magic is a terrible state of affairs, so he should get started as soon as possible. 

He can sporadically get the light spell to work! It makes things shine brightly. It lingers for a couple of minutes after he's cast it. 

The 'magic' spell is harder to get to work but once it works he can see that the spellbook is magic, the way he ought to have be able to see it from the start.

The light is at least moderately useful; the magic one is a lot more than moderately! And it's not limited like the first-circle spells. He expects he'll be casting it a lot for the next while, until he finds a more efficient solution here, the downside is still that he's pretty sure he can only be casting one thing at a time. How long does it last?