He remembers dying. He has died many times, but this death was unlike those; this death, He had every reason to suspect was forever (there'd been no way to check, whether His immortality method would still hold his spirit in the Material world if He died outside it, as a god, not by violence to some trivial physical form but by the sudden and utter destruction of His magic, His people, His mind, His city, until not enough remains to hold it together as it's scattered -

He does not know how long it took. It felt like centuries, bits and pieces trying to glue themselves back together and being systematically shredded again. 

He does not remember who killed him. He remembers his careful and firmly calculated conviction that the opposition of the evil gods would not be enough, that to lose He would have to be betrayed, but He does not remember ever knowing who betrayed Him. He remembers taking that conviction with Him as he dissolved, because on the off chance that He could start over again He needed to start over with that, He would be lost for sure if He forgot that for a second -

He remembers some other things, too. They're jumbled, the product of an entirely different sort of mind, and they fade next to the terrifying gripping salience of the memory of His death, but they're there. He remembers His city in Axis, bright and bustling and beautiful, humming with the delight of people going about free, safe, happy lives. He remembers coils spinning and a glass bulb lighting. He remembers a woman, bold and demanding, Chelish, new to Her powers, her sharp eyes watery - "I knew you had a plan, I knew you were never resigned to this - can we make it happen faster -"

He remembers stepping into a quiet place, like a library, but not full of books, walking through it looking for - 

- "Of course I have all of your records," Abadar says - not says but that's how it's rendering now, as this distinctly human mind tries to reach for the scraps of the memory - "I save every work of mortal hands, that none of it might ever be lost."

"Why don't you tell them that," He'd said, "They'd - they'd want to know -"

"Huh. I never really thought about it."

And tangled in with that, He remembers some things that aren't of this life, memories of memories He's carried through since the beginning, and ones reclaimed in Abadar's First Vault - an underwater city - an alien voice, thrumming with approval - you care so much, maybe too much - 

- men like you and I should not rule, I have seen what becomes of us when we do - 

- flying across the ocean to see what became of Azlantl, and seeing only ocean as far as the eye could see, ocean and a dozen little barrier islands, barely peeking out above the sea -

- and choosing clerics, over and over again, the work He thought He'd never tire of and eventually did, looking into the hearts of men and seeing the brightly-burning spark that'd mean they'd fight, with this, for the right things or at least for the things that in expectation seemed right to them -

- there are a dozen other memories interpretable barely at all, made up mostly of searing some-sensation and overwhelming some-emotion, fitted very poorly into this human head which now hurts very very badly -

His head hurts and he's so thoroughly disoriented, confused, scared, he doesn't know where he is - doesn't know when - but, the last time that he remembers anything at all, it was very, very much not safe.

Betrayed. 

He hangs onto that, and tries to pull the other fragments together around it - the shining city - the proud voice - the woman's bright-blazing hope–

He feels three-quarters blind; he feels claustrophobic in his own head, that can no longer hold all of the pieces that matter.

But he's still here. He still exists - or something does... 

Orient. Where is he? 

It's a two room house, made of stone. It had a window, now boarded up, and a roof, now leaking; the wind is howling and the walls are lashed with sheets of rain and there are other people in here, two women and four young children, sleeping, whatever movement he has made thoroughly covered by the storm.

(This body knows how long it has been like this - three weeks, since the day Aroden was supposed to return. The fields are all flooded and his sister and her children are here because their house blew apart, in the winds, ripped right out of the ground and sent tumbling off through the sky and hit one of the children on the head on the way out - he didn't make it -)

–oh. 

He's still here, as long as anything is left at all he can't give up, but - but he can't look for the next step forward, right now.

He rolls over - moving awkwardly, the shape of his mind not quite fitting the shape of his body, but fortunately the body can make habitual movements without his thinking about it too hard - and he covers his face with his hands, and weeps, silently. For the man this body used to belong to, the price he was used to paying, once, but had hoped never to pay again. For the dead child. For the crushing defeat, the betrayal, and the damage it must have done everywhere, not just here.

One of the children whimpers. One of the women rolls over to soothe her. Mumbles a nursery rhyme, wearily.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If turnips were swords, I'd wear one by my side. If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, There'd be no work for tinkers' hands.

There's a small shrine, on the boarded-up windowsill. It has a woodcut of Aroden and a silvered metal with Iomedae and a painstakingly written list of relatives, because the priest had said that in the Age of Glory the dead could be returned, and it would help to know who had prepared a dinner and a bed for them.

Focus. He can grieve later. 

He can't stay here. It hurts, because - what are these poor people even going to do - but the damage is already done, there, he can't give them back the person whose body he stole. And it's only going to be worse if he waits until they ask questions. 

He lies still, waits for the mother and child to both be asleep again. 

...Does his current body have any magical abilities. (He's not even sure what to look for, at first, it's been so, so long since he was human.) 

He is a farmer in good health, age 28, he can read and do a bit of accounting, and he has absolutely no magical training whatsoever. The town has a wizard, who they send their laundry to in good years where there's spare money. He knows that wizards need a spellbook, and need to be clever, though the fellow who does the laundry doesn't seem that clever. 

Well, it's something anyway. The farmer is probably reasonably clever, if he can read - he can't remember if the immortality setup was meant to select for that at all.

It is unfortunate that he's about to head out into a storm and has no magic to do anything about it, but he doesn't see a better option, trying to impersonate a dead family member for days or weeks seems worse. 

When he's confident that everyone else in the cottage is soundly asleep, he gets up, moving slowly and cautiously, the sound of the storm covering any noise he makes. 

No one wakes up. 

He pauses to check if there are any warm and/or waterproof clothes by the door; he's reluctant to steal more from these people even if they have money, but it would be very stupid to risk dying of exposure. 

He has a long warm coat that looks like it would stand up to an ordinary rainstorm, though maybe not this one.

He takes it, along with the sturdiest available footwear, and then opens the door very quickly and slips out and shuts it without looking back. 

The winds have calmed down a little bit, from how intensely they must have been blowing to cause the devastation that can be seen all around him. It's still raining quite hard; there's still water six inches to a foot deep, and in the places where the water is running it's running very fast. 

The town isn't far away.

Then he'll head for the town, head tucked in against the rain. Not that he's sure what he's going to do once he gets there. 

There's a temple to Aroden and a temple to Erastil. There is an open-air market, the stalls deserted. There are some houses, including the one where the wizard who takes laundry lives.

He spends a while staring in frustration at laundry-wizard's house. 

It very likely has some sort of ward on it. Which he can't even see. (Feeling blind is almost the worst part, right now.) It - probably isn't that good a ward, he doesn't think the man can be very high level, since he didn't come across to the previous inhabitant of this body as very sharp, and if he were a good wizard he'd have better things to do than laundry. Still, he has magic and right now Aroden has nothing. 

He could check the temple to Aroden, anything in it arguably sort of belongs to him, but it's unlikely to have useful magical artifacts.

After a little more thought, and trawling through any context on human magic that he can dig up or re-derive from first principles, he turns and scopes out the area for nearby penned livestock. A low-level wizard might be able to ward his house, but it would probably be a one-time-use spell, so he needs a diversion. 

This is a dead goat. This is a live goat, but not very alive. These chickens are super dead.

He has to briefly turn away, blinking back tears. 

Sigh. What happens if he gingerly picks up one of the (more recently-dead) chicken corpses, and - gently tosses it at the wizard's door? He isn't sure if the wards are only against living things, but if not, it shouldn't make a loud enough thump to wake the man, in which case he can give a go at coaxing the not-very-alive goat to move under its own power. 

Nothing happens with the dead chicken. 

Nothing happens with the live goat, either. Maybe the wizard decided to spend his probably-very-limited spells elsewhere.

Well, it's certainly neither the kind of place nor the kind of weather where break-ins by neighbours seem like the most likely threat. 

He tiptoes around, scoping out windows. (Does his host-body seem to have any memories of seeing inside the house?) 

His wife usually took the laundry over. He's met the man at church, can call a face to mind, but not a layout of the house. 

The windows are boarded up because of the horrible rainstorm.

Which makes perfect sense and is very inconvenient. 

Does the man lock his door at night. 

He slides a bar across the door, probably more to keep it from blowing open than to keep out neighbors.

Aroden spends a minute seeing if there's any way to jimmy the bar loose from the outside - maybe with the aid of a stick he can snap off from a nearby blown-down tree bough - and if not he'll check the boards on one of the windows that from house-layout seems least likely to open onto the man's bedroom. 

He can knock the bar back far enough to open the door a crack, and then the rest of the way. 


This is a kitchen and dining area with a fireplace; next to it is a parlor. There are some people sleeping in the parlor, but the sound of the door opening doesn't wake them; it's still very noisy outside.

It's very dark, but it's also quite dark outside and his eyes are adjusted to it. (He cautiously re-bars the door partway, to avoid it blowing open in the wind and making a lot of noise while he's inside.) 

...If he were a town wizard, where would he keep his spellbook? Possibly in his bedroom, which would be inconvenient, but he'll try the other areas first. 

Ready to freeze and crouch down on a moment's notice if anyone stirs, he creeps around, looking for shelves or cupboards or other obvious places. 

There's a laundry room, and a chest above the mantle of the fireplace in that room. 

...If he were a wizard, and his spellbook were in there, he might put his wards or alarms there. Maybe this man is less paranoid. Still, Aroden gauges his escape routes before touching the chest; is there a faster way out than sprinting back to the front door? 

The laundry room has its own exit, presumably through which people bring laundry to be washed. That door is barred right now, though.

He slides the bar back first, then, to check that it moves without resistance, and then puts it back partway before looking at the chest.  

It's not that large, large enough to contain maybe a couple of books. It's locked. It looks like it's used regularly; it's not dusty, which the rest of the room is on account of how for the last three weeks no one has been bringing laundry.

Is there a key in evidence anywhere in the room, or - a jar, a bowl, the sort of object that a key might be hidden inside...? 

There is not.

...If he were a wizard, he would sleep with the key on his body. Which is inconvenient for his purposes. 

He slips back out into the main area, peering around for either a key-receptacle, maybe on the mantle above the other fireplace, or for anything thin and metal that might be used to pick a lock. (He checks his pockets too, just in case, not that he's expecting a random upstanding farmer to be equipped with lockpicks.) 

(He is not equipped with lockpicks.) There's a sewing kit in the living room with needles and embroidery hooks and so on. 

He tiptoes over and extracts one of each and heads back to the chest to have a go at the lock. (He has no particular idea how to pick locks so is attempting to model it from first principles, guessing at the shape of the mechanism from how it responds to being poked at.) 

It's not a very good lock but this still takes a while. The storm sounds to be quieting, somewhat, outside. There are muffled voices from the other room. 

...At least the quieter storm means he'll definitely hear footsteps headed this way, and if he does he'll give up and slip out the door right away rather than risk being seen. He shouldn't be visible from this angle unless someone actually heads for this room, though, so he risks trying a little longer. 

No one comes into the laundry room. 

The lock, eventually, pops.

He hesitates, checks that the bar on the door won't take more than a second to slide out the rest of the way, and then cautiously lifts the lid of the chest, ready to run.

There's no audible alarm. There is a spellbook, there, and a little pouch of spell materials.

Then he will take both and shove them under his coat and very quickly slip out the door, ears alert for footsteps (quietly frustrated that his senses right now are so limited.) 

No one pursues him out into the chilly early-morning rain.

Then he'll quickly put as much distance between himself and the wizard's house as he can, since presumably the wizard will be up to prepare his spells soon. 

He's a bit giddy with relief; it's such a piddling achievement, really, and he doesn't feel very good about stealing the local wizard's entire livelihood either, but - one step forward. 

Past the town there's a river that has overflowed its banks and is rushing through the stands of trees that once lined it. There's a road, which is entirely washed out. There are more farms. 

Does his host body know anything about the surrounding region? Nearest decent-size city? 

The nearest big city is Ostenso, on the coast, maybe a week's journey by horse; Augustana is closer as the crow flies but it's through the foothills of the mountains, and a longer trip on horseback. His host body vaguely recalls learning in school that Ostenso was the capital of Cheliax until 3991AR, when King somebody-or-other moved the capital to Westcrown.

Ostenso seems like the sensible destination, then. He doesn't have a horse. Maybe he can steal one, at some point. If any are still alive.

In the short run he's going to need food, and shelter, and a safe place, among people who won't recognize him, where he can look at his stolen spellbook and try to make some headway on it. (He's pretty sure he can use it but doesn't know how, and it could take a lot of puzzling over.)

He trudges off toward the washed-out road, keeping an eye out for places where the water might be too deep to risk wading through. (He's resigned to getting his feet wet, but he'll get chilled if he drenches too much of his clothing, and he absolutely can't afford to damage the spellbook.) 

By midday the rain is definitely letting up; it's still a storm, but no longer an obviously magical one. There are farmhouses. The ones not too close to the river and sturdily built mostly look intact.

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? 

If he's concentrating on it, he can hold onto it about twenty seconds; he can cast it again when he loses it if he remembers to draw the energy back, though.

He expects he'll be practicing both a lot today, then.

Is the horse in a friendly enough mood to let him mount her? Come to think of it, can he find a saddle and tack anywhere? A week of riding bareback is going to get very miserable. 

Is he going to look in the house with the dead bodies?

If the saddle is nowhere to be found in the barn then he will, reluctantly, look there too. He should probably be trying to scrounge for other supplies though; sleeping would have been a lot better with a blanket, he has no food or water-carrying receptacle, he could use a waterproof bag for his book. Also he'll look around for money, since it's not like they're going to be spending it.

The house has a saddle, and blankets, and food in various states of rot, and canteens for water, and a little bit of money in the mattress which is underneath the bodies of three people squashed by the tree and then a toddler who seems to have died of dehydration or exposure while clinging to them.

He has to turn away and blink a lot before he can bring himself to go closer. If he had somehow gotten here sooner - but he couldn't have, he was - dead, or in the process of dying maybe - that's the entire problem here... 

He holds his breath and forces himself to sort of poke the bodies out of the way so he can get at the money hidden in the usual spot people hide their money inside mattresses. 

He takes a blanket, and for the road ties it at the corners to make a sort of bag, which he puts two of the water canteens in, and if he can find any food that's not too questionable to eat then he'll take that, otherwise leave it and go saddle the horse. 

There's a little food that's not too questionable to eat. The horse is tolerant of being saddled.

He ties his food and water and spellbook firmly inside the blanket-sack, and rides out, casting the magic-sensing spell every so often and trying to concentrate enough to reclaim the energy from it. 

There's not a lot of magic to be seen along this road, just a lot of devastation. Some people are wading through their crops to see if anything can be salvaged. By nightfall he reaches another small town; some of its lower-lying buildings are flooded but the temples are intact, and there are a few other buildings standing clear of the high-water mark. People are working on repairs.

He heads in to see if any of the temples have space to host a traveler, or any news. (He wishes he could offer them useful magic in exchange for room and board, that would be very reasonable, but neither of his working spells are that helpful, probably a town this size has someone who can do magic better than he can right now.) 

This town has a cleric of Aroden who now isn't, and she looks like she hasn't been sleeping and hasn't been eating. They haven't heard from Westcrown but, well, it seems like probably something went wrong. (Her affect is almost entirely flat, but at 'something went wrong' she giggles, a little hysterically.) They have space to host a traveller. They don't have food to spare, really. He should maybe consider getting on a ship to Absalom or something once he reaches Ostenso, the storms presumably didn't reach that far. 

That's all right, he'll pick at his slightly-questionable salvaged food. It hadn't occurred to him - or, no, it had, but he hadn't fully gone through the implications - that of course Aroden's clerics would have lost their divine magic. 

He tells her, dully, that he was just starting to dabble in arcane magic before all of this happened, and he's not very good but he can detect magic for her, if that's helpful for some reason, and make things light up, though that would really only be helpful for reading after nightfall or something and she doesn't look to be in the mood for that. 

Is anything magic that wouldn't be expected to be?

He's not sure what's expected to be magic, around here, but he can cast it and then point out everything that's showing up to him? 

Sure.

He does that, though he'll need to cast it again a few times to even cover the full interior of the temple. (Getting lots of practice seems good. He still feels mostly blind even with that, but it's better.) 

The temple is consecrated. There's a scroll in a box in the other room.

He points these facts out to her. :Should I look elsewhere in the village too?: 

"If you'd like," she says dully. "Interesting, I guess, that it's still consecrated."

"Yes." All his memories of how consecration would work are from a god's eye level; he tries to dig at how it would work from the human view. And has a peek around the town with his magic-detecting spell, because why not, he's not exhausted yet and it might be interesting and will let him practice. 

Consecration works by bringing in positive energy; if they made it permanent, then they just made this temple a well in the world for positive energy, for as long as it lasts. In this case it survived the death of the caster's god.

One person in the town has a magic weapon. If he were good with this spell he'd be able to tell what kind of weapon just by looking at the magic but as it is it's just a tangle. The school is transmutation but that's not very informative.

He goes back to the temple and asks the cleric if said magic weapon is one of the expected magical objects. 

"Oh." She frowns, distantly. "I think Sila has claimed he has one he inherited? I've never actually seen it, though."

Shrug. It isn't really his business and he's going to leave tomorrow. 

He unties his bag so he can use it as a blanket, returning the spellbook to under his coat; he feels kind of protective of it. 

He sleeps a lot better that night. 

In the morning there's a traveller passing through town in the other direction who claims he was in Absalom and paid someone to teleport him to Ostenso and is now riding north to try to find his family. He claims there's been three weeks of awful storms in Absalom, too, and all ships that were at sea are presumed lost there. 

...Oof. Although it doesn't seem ridiculous that a war between the gods could have wreaked that kind of devastation on the world. He listens to the exchange of news, conveys what little he can of his actual observations, and then rides onward, stopping at the next spot with relatively un-destroyed grass to let his horse graze. 

This farmhouse was on a bit of a hill, which saved it from the floods; around near the back of the house there is grass for his horse to munch. 

In the distance in the field of debris left by receding stormwaters there is a young kid slumped on a piece of driftwood.

Huh. 

He starts preparing to ride onward - and remembers the dead toddler. This one doesn't look dead. Yet. 

It's kind of an absurdly small-scale priority, but - he's seen too many dead things, lately. 

He loosely tethers his horse to a tree so it can keep grazing but won't run off, and heads toward the child. 

Not dead. Just curled up asleep, in clothes that haven't fully dried yet, shivering.

He spends a while figuring out how to shift things around, to pockets and under his coat, so that he can undo his blanket and cover the child. He pats - his? her? - shoulder, gently. 

People in Cheliax mostly don't cut kids' hair at this age either way. 

When patted the kid opens their eyes. Looks confusedly around. 

"Am I dead?" they ask hoarsely. "Want to - want to go to Axis."

"No, you are not dead," he says, as gently as he can. (And his understanding is that children this little don't and can't go to Axis, generally, but he doesn't say so.) "I...am sorry - your parents...?" There isn't going to be a good way to have this conversation, is there. 

"They're in Axis and I want to go there too and I can follow all the rules I'm not too little," the kid says. They are probably three.

Oh no, bursting into tears in front of the three-year-old - one of the people he was supposed to save, to give a glorious future, except he couldn't even save himself - is not going to help at all.

"No, not yet," he manages. "It is not the right time for you. But you could come with me? I am going to the big city." 

The kid bursts into tears.

"I am sorry. I am so sorry." A word that has two meanings, condolences and regrets for a personal failure, and he means the latter but the child doesn't need to know that.

He sits down, tries to see if the kid will let him scoop them into his arms. 

The kid would absolutely like a hug right now. 

"I want my mommy and my daddy."

"I know. I know." There's nothing else he can say. 

"'s not fair."

"No, it is not. None of this is fair, at all. I am so sorry." 

"Wanna go to Axis, want my mommy and my daddy, I can follow the rules I can," but less coherently this time. It was really remarkably coherent, the first time.

Which is exactly what you would expect, from a traumatized toddler desperate to see their parents again. "I know." Hug. He's prepared to sit still and hold the crying toddler for - well, if it takes hours he's going to get impatient and see if hugs while riding are acceptable, but he'll wait it out for a good while. 

After about ten minutes the kid falls asleep on his shoulder, clinging.

He waits for a bit to make sure they're settled, and then carefully stands up, making sure not to drop any of his other possessions, and makes his way back to the horse. Getting back up into the saddle without jostling the sleeping child is a production, but if he buttons his coat over them that'll help hold them in place so he has free use of at least one hand, and he can manage it. 

He keeps riding in the direction of the city. Casting his magic-detection cantrip every time he passes a building or other signs of habitation. 

The stuff out here is not magic but he does get more competent with the cantrip. 

He's out of food. He could manage on an empty stomach until tonight just fine, but probably he shouldn't subject the toddler to that, if there's literally anyone around here who can spare food for them - or just for the child, even, surely little kids don't eat that much. He keeps an eye out for a relatively-less-destroyed farmhouse or small village. 

Here's an intact farmhouse where a wary man comes to the door brandishing a crossbow, and relaxes when he sees a man with a child. 

"I found this child by the river," he explains in a low voice. "Their parents are dead. I - I do not have any food - I can go hungry for a day but I think a toddler should not - if there is anything you can spare..." 

He hesitates. "Where're you from?"

He names the town that he first passed through. "Well, one of the farms nearish to it. My family is dead. I thought, why stay..." It is, again, not hard to look the appropriate level of bereaved. 

"Hmmph. - come on in."

The house has a stone floor that has recently been cleaned of the mud that swept in during the floods; you can still see a ring of it around the base of the walls. There are a couple of older children, eight or ten, sitting against a wall. 

The man gets them cheese and bread and water.

He unbuttons his jacket, nudges the toddler awake. "You should have something to eat. ...What is your name?"

He'll introduce himself to the family, politely, with the same false name he used before. 

"Saba," says the toddler, and then downs quite a lot of water and coughs a lot and tries to follow it up with quite a lot of bread and cheese.

"Slow down," he says, moving some of the food further away. "Give your stomach time to get used to it. You did not have enough to eat recently, no? 

"I can follow the rules," he says reflexively, and then starts crying again.

"Shh, I know." Hug. 

He eats a little, enough to show that he's accepting their hospitality, but no more than that. He can fill the family in on all the news (and rumours) he's picked up on his journey so far, if they want? 

They would like that, yeah. They're considering heading east to family in Almas, since there's not going to be a harvest, here.

Well, the devastation sounds like it could have been pretty thorough, so he can't be sure it would be better there, but if their relatives aren't so close to a river then maybe they could have avoided the worst of the flooding even if there were bad storms there too. 

"...Almas is on a river too. Most big cities are. But it's far from here, another four hundred miles east. I've been figuring - something went wrong in Westcrown."

"It must have." 

"So far enough away..."

Shrug. "Hopefully." 

...It's kind of hard to be around people, actually. He excuses himself as promptly as he can - he considers whether to ask the family if they can take Saba, he's really not that equipped to be looking after a toddler, but they already have so little for their own children, it doesn't seem like a fair thing to ask. He should wait until he finds some family who hasn't lost nearly everything.

(And it's oddly comforting, traveling with Saba's warm weight in his arms, it helps him feel less like it's too late to salvage anything.) 

Saba would like to sleep snuggled up against him!

It's nice. He's maybe going to miss this toddler when he finds them a new home. (He is still kind of unsure of Saba's gender; does his host body have any memories of the name itself being gendered?) 

Mostly a boy's name. 

Proooobably a boy but he should ask next time Saba is awake. ...Probably should stop and encourage Saba to pee at some point, little children likely can't hold it as long as adults. He does this midway through the afternoon. 

This will confirm that Saba is a little boy.

He gives Saba some water to drink from his canteen before they keep going. "I am planning to ride all the way to Ostenso," he tells Saba, seriously. "And then I can try to find someone who can take good care of you." He isn't going to be so gauche as to say 'a new family'. "But it is a long way. If you think it is too far to ride, we can ask people at the next town if you could live with them now." 

"Axis." Sniffle.

Sigh. "No. Not yet, anyway. I am very sorry." He scoops Saba back into his arms, rebuttons his coat, gets on the horse again. Hopes the toddler will fall asleep once they're moving, because he doesn't have hours worth of conversation in him. 

Saba absolutely immediately falls asleep once they're moving.

Probably the toddler is sleep-deprived from the last three weeks and will stop sleeping such an absurd amount eventually. He hopes Saba won't be awake all night instead. Do three-year-olds sleep through the night usually? 

He starts keeping an eye out for a place to stop an hour before sunset. If there's a town he'll stop then, if not he'll press on as long as possible and find a farmhouse. Saba probably shouldn't sleep in a wet barn like he did before. 

There's no town to be seen; there are some farmhouses. Quiet, scared, devastated people who've heard only vague rumors, but who can still put two and two together. Aroden was supposed to return, and instead, this. They can give the two of them somewhere dry to sleep, and thin soup stretched to feed too many people. And beer, if he'd like that.

...Sure. It's got calories. He can give them the slightly more concrete news that he's heard from the various villages and travellers. 

Then everyone can get drunk - they'll offer it to Saba, too, 'good for nightmares' - and take to morosely worrying about whether Axis is still there.

He thinks it would be impossible to destroy an entire afterlife plane, no matter what went wrong, but he doesn't do more than speculate with them. He makes sure Saba only gets a little beer, not that he expects the toddler to want more, it's not the best-tasting even to an adult's palate. 

He curls up to sleep with the spellbook under his coat and Saba beside him, to share his blanket. 

Saba sleeps fitfully and sniffles a lot. At dawn he wakes up and tries lying still but is very very wiggly.

He snuggles Saba. "Should we get up?" he whispers. "You can sit with me while I practice magic. I am trying to learn to be a wizard." 

Saba nods solemnly.

He gets up as quietly as he can and carries Saba outside to watch the sunrise and look at some of the other cantrips, seeing if they make sense to him now that he’s had more practice shaping the magic for the two he figured out. 

He can demonstrate the light for Saba; that seems like the sort of thing a toddler might enjoy?

The light is rewarded with a tentative smile and a pronouncement of "magic!".

The way humans do magic is bizarre, even mildly ridiculous. Once upon a time he knew its nuances inside and out, and its restrictions didn't feel absurd at all - they were necessary, actually, in the same fashion that mathematics could not be done without laying out some starting premises magic could not be manipulated by humans without starting with some rules about how it could be permitted and assumed to behave. He'd known even back then that there were other, equally workable sets of starting premises; he'd learned the Thassilonian style, once upon a time, with the idea that you ought to be able to cheat by combining them. Thassilon was of course destroyed as thoroughly as Azlantl, and didn't have anyone to hold its colonies together afterwards...

Gods do not need assumptions or premises or careful bounds on what magic might do and the ones these people are using he has to derive on the go. 

The spell which the wizard has labelled 'sorting' is the one used for laundry; it can separate out dirt and fabric, or if used in the opposite fashion it can mix them up. It can also color objects, lift objects that aren't heavy, chill, warm, or flavor them, and create crude, temporary toys. These are obviously not all caused by the same thing and the people who made this spell clearly have no concept of why they managed to gerrymander reality in a way that gave them this set of abilities and no others (it's obvious to him; they're manipulating entropy, the force for disorder, and constrained by trying to do so in ways that have negligible net magic expenditure, which gives you a dozen different minor abilities not clearly related to each other). 

The sound spell creates a sound; he doesn't currently have the precision to make it intelligible or even particularly close to the sound he wanted.

The 'mending' spell is just a variant on the entropy-spell that gives a bit more scaffolding for the caster to fix a particular thing in a way that'll remain when the magic ends.

The 'copying' spell will transcribe a page of text onto a blank page, probably, if he had paper and ink which he does not.

The (misleadingly-named) sorting spell seems like a good case for practicing control and precision, trying to wrap his newly-limited human mind around the structures he’s manipulating. He gets a nicely-shaped pebble and attempts to float it into the air or turn it different colors for Saba’s amusement, and will keep practicing until his hosts are definitely awake. He can go without breakfast himself but hopes they’ll be able to spare something for Saba.

He checks that his horse is set up to be able to graze, so that he’ll otherwise be ready to depart afterward.

They can give Saba a little bit of cheese for the road. They notice the spell; does he have it down enough to do the washing?

He can give it a try!

He does not super have it down enough to do the washing yet; it requires a fair bit more fine control than floating or coloring pebbles does.

He apologizes for this. Saddles his horse to ride out with Saba, saving the cheese for when the toddler starts complaining of hunger. (Probably Saba should be eating more than he has been but he’s not sure what to do about that given the condition of, well, everything.)

He practices his cantrips in the saddle until his focus starts flagging.

They can get hospitality, if inadequate food, all the way to Ostenso, and by then he has decent command of his cantrips. Saba thinks he should practice even more, especially the one that does pretty lights. He stops asking about Axis after a couple of days. At night when he's not so tired he drops asleep on the spot he mumbles a prayer for Aroden to watch over them and lift them to glory. 

Ostenso is swarming with people, and with rumors. There were storms as far north as Irrisen, as far south as Geb, as far east as Qadira. Maybe the whole world. All ships at sea at the time are presumed lost. Earthquakes have swallowed some cities in southern Gerund. The storms have calmed down except in a six-hundred-mile area on the western half of Gerund, where they're showing no signs of it. A storm surge carried salt water several hundred miles up the Sphinx River so be glad you're not in Osirion, at least our crops should grow next year.

Aroden's clerics are without their powers. Someone scried the City of Men in Axis; it's not destroyed but it is empty. The people probably fled. Iomedae's clerics still have their spells but they don't know anything more than anyone else. 

There's not enough clean water; the church did that. There's nowhere near enough healing; the church did that, too. There's enough food right now but it's very very obvious to everyone that there won't be, soon. 

It's awful. So many people are already dead, and so, so many more are going to die in the coming weeks and months - and there's nothing he can do about it. Not now. 

At least Axis is still there. 

The city is, right now, a pretty reasonable place to be. It very soon won't be. He's not sure exactly what will happen, when this many people crammed into a small area start starving, but it's not going to be pleasant. He'll...plan to leave the area, then, before it gets bad. It's not like there's anything he can do to keep the peace. 

(He could...tell people his identity? Except that it still doesn't provide any concrete help, no matter who or what he used to be he's now a human wizard-barely-worth-the-title, and - why would anyone believe him? More to the point, he has an enemy, or enemies. He was betrayed. Until he has a much better idea of what happened and what's happening now, best to keep his head down and focus on orienting.) 

He should hand Saba off to a family who can take care of him. Except, it doesn't feel like anywhere here is going to be safe, and - it doesn't make sense, really, but the thought pains him. Saba is kind of attached to him now and will probably be upset to be dropped off with strangers. Also it's concretely useful in some ways. People are more likely to find a man with a young child trustworthy, and offer them hospitality, which he's relying on a lot right now. 

He lingers in the city. Practices his cantrips, tries to barter magical services for food. Thinks about obtaining a weapon. His magic won't be useful in combat for a long time - he's so limited, he still feels weak and helpless and mostly blind, though he's getting used to it a little - and it may end up being very necessary, that he can defend himself. And Saba. 

Food is getting steadily more expensive but there are people who'll pay for mending and washing and inns that'll let him stay for free if he flavors their food. There are a lot of hungry kids, in the street; orphanages were run by the church and the church is, to put it mildly, in disarray. Saba stays very close to him. He can save up for a dagger, or a shortsword, or passage to Absalom or Oppara or somewhere if that seems more urgent.

He definitely needs to make plans to get elsewhere; he's not sure which is the most urgent, that or self-defence. Maybe the former. It's not like he has much in the way of possessions to steal, yet (his spellbook stays very close to him at all times, usually inside his shirt), and hopefully having a toddler with him will dissuade all but the most hardened potential attackers. 

He should get elsewhere. Ideally, an elsewhere where at least the church is more functional and the clerics still have their magic, so, not Aroden's (former) territory. Which of Absalom or Oppara looks better on that front? 

He was the most popular god everywhere this language is spoken - it's very inconvenient now - but either one would have more presence from other churches than Ostenso does. If he wanted to go somewhere where he was barely worshipped before, there's the Empire of Kelesh - in its westernmost reaches of Qadira and Osirion some people speak Taldane like he does - 

- or he could go north, to Lastwall, Iomedae's more-an-army-than-a-country - 

Absalom has the Starstone; he designed the protections around it. Touching the Starstone would make him a god again, except they're very extensive, meant to select for competence and caution and an extremely rare level of magical skill. And then there's the stage where the person who touched the stone is born as a new god, initially defenseless. He can half-remember how often they die that way.

There's no point even attempting the Starstone now, he decides. It's - already too late for him to do much about the current devastation, and he doesn't know enough, it's a risk that he can only afford to take once. Given that, he isn't sure it's worth prioritizing Absalom as a destination, not yet. 

He remembers Iomedae. Sort of, a god's memory cut down to fit, distortedly, into a mortal mind. He doesn't think she was the one who betrayed him. But he can't be sure. He also doesn't think that she has a way of recognizing him, but, again, not certain. 

He can learn a new language to at least minimal fluency in a few months, if he must, and get by in the meantime in Osirion where some people speak Taldane. Which is across the sea, but otherwise not too far. 

He starts asking around about passage to Sothis. 

It's two weeks' journey from here, assuming the storms don't start up again (they laugh, but not because it's funny) and they'd be sharing a underwater bunk with eight other people but they can afford passage.

...If the storms start then he and Saba will both die. But his immortality is still working, he won't lose everything, and if he's still here when things get really bad, then they're probably going to die anyway. And he doesn't think the storms will start, unless the war between the gods starts up again and another of their number gets murdered, which doesn't seem terribly likely. He'll take the risk, and scramble to trade spells for as much not-very-perishable food as he can before they leave. 

Then they can spend two weeks in a tiny disgusting-smelling compartment of a ship with another terrified family (they have an uncle in Sothis, he's rich, he might be able to help). The storms don't start up again. Saba almost never lets go of him. 

Saba asks if he has been to Axis and if it is nice.

He tries to befriend the family, offering to clean their clothes and possessions and do what he can about the smell in the compartment (not much), and flavour their not-very-tasty rations, and entertain their children with magic to distract them from the terror. It's good practice.

He doesn't mind wearing a toddler around. It's sort of comforting, in a very - human - way. He's still getting used to being human again and could use any help he can get with it. 

He's been to Axis once, he tells Saba, not for long, but it was nice. He describes the shining city, as best he can, a god's-eye memory crammed into a human mind. 

Sothis is hot and foreign and certainly staring a famine in the eye come harvest-season but the Empire primarily worships Sarenrae, Abadar, and Irori, and their churches are all providing clean water and conducting healing as usual. There aren't hungry children on the streets, at least not yet.  

There's more news. On the western coast, the storms have stopped everywhere except Lirgen and Yamasa. The storms are still going at full force in Lirgen and Yamasa. No one is sure when they'll stop; it's been two months, now. If it's not soon there won't be much left. 

...He hopes that won't be what happens. He can't do anything more useful than hope, right now. 

He finds an inn that has someone who speaks Taldane and will give him free room and board in exchange for various minor spells, and in the less-hot parts of the day he wears a toddler around the city, looking for people who want magic done. Trying to practice the local language. He wants to save up money to buy a dagger he can wear on his person, first, although hopefully law-and-order won't break down here since the church infrastructure is still functioning. 

People will pay him some copper for mending and laundry, and if he saves it up he can have a dagger. There's a library that can't pay him for book copying right now - their discretionary budget has been cut until the scope of the disaster is better known - but will let him stay in their climate-controlled building if he copies books while he's there.

Saba is quiet and thinks magic is neat and is as fast as him picking up the local language.

He feels good about copying books, anyway; a comfortable place to sleep is more than enough payment. 

Toting around a toddler forever still seems non-ideal, but Saba is shockingly low-maintenance (probably because he's very traumatized, and trying very hard to be Lawful), and he doesn't eat a lot, and - well, Aroden sleeps better at night with another warm body there. He can't do anything to protect the larger world, anymore, but he can protect one child and that feels very important right now, when he has so little ground under him. And he's definitely not about to drop Saba off at an orphanage. 

It's probably important for children to have playmates, though? Maybe Saba can play with the children of some of the families that he does laundry for regularly, if he wants. 

He is initially wary of them but warms up, slowly. Asks Aroden if they go to Axis too even though they're heathens and foreign and have different gods.

"Maybe. It depends which god they follow. Abadar is worshipped a great deal here," (memories of a quiet place-like-a-library), "and he is lawful neutral." 

So Saba makes some friends, tentatively. Stops being quite so good about following rules. They get kicked out of the library when he yells. 

The price of bread climbs. Osirion enslaves people for theft but this is only so much of a deterrent when there's no food to be had. 

He gets mugged one evening, toddler notwithstanding; they noticed the magic and figured he might have some money on him.

Getting kicked out of the library is unfortunate, but - well, it's probably not normal, or healthy, for a child that age to be so well-behaved, it seems like it might be a sign of how traumatized he was by the storms and the loss of his parents, and Aroden is carefully not angry about it. 

–Even human, in a small weak body that still doesn't quite feel like his, he has quick reaction times, and he draws his dagger in a flash, he's on his feet and shoving Saba behind him. (He keeps his spellbook in a pocket he sewed against his back, now, using the mending spell and a scrap of cloth. His money is in his boot, it could be taken from him by force but it's hard to grab in a short scuffle. His eyes are quick-moving and haunted and implacable, and there's no expression at all in his face; this is usually what happens when all of his attention is elsewhere. 

- they will run away and bother someone else.

He returns the dagger to its sheath in his other boot, and crouches down, holding his arms out to Saba. "I am so sorry. We are safe, now, they left, but - we should be somewhere else, now." 

Saba looks back at him, wide-eyed, and climbs into his arms, and is well-behaved again for the next couple of days (but not too many).

He tells Saba to stay close to him, now, the city isn't safe; he stops leaving Saba at his friends' houses while he makes the laundry rounds, and totes the child with him instead. (He hopes Saba wasn't too frightened by his sudden change in demeanour; it wasn't even on purpose but he expects it helped his defence and so he's not going to try to change that reflexive response.) 

–Things are, in fact, getting bad and they might get worse. So far he's been keeping his head down, being as boring and unassuming as possible while he regains some simple magics and - re-habituates to his current state. He's reluctant to change that just yet, but he starts paying very close attention to what his options are, if he wants to join an organized group of some kind that will provide some defences at the risk of drawing more attention and perhaps putting himself at risk.

If there are riots he's going to leave the city, at least for a little while. He's not sure the countryside is any better, but at least it won't have tens of thousands of very upset people crammed into one place. 

He tries the harder first-level spells every so often, to see if he's mastered magic enough to cast them. 

And one day he can make them work, though on any given day he can only prepare one of them. The wizard's illusion spell is actually pretty good, though right now he has no finesse at all with it; it can fill about forty square feet with whatever he's imagining ought to be there, though it only lasts as long as he's concentrating on it. 

The other spell makes people fall asleep, though with sufficient effort they can throw it off and it won't work on anyone with magical defenses of their own. 

He alternates preparing both, for practice; either is kind of useful in a fight, he can illusion some fog to run away in or try to catch a would-be mugger off guard enough that they fall asleep. If he hasn't used the illusion by the end of the day, which he usually won't have, he'll cast it before going to bed, making different scenes to entertain Saba.

He pays a lot of attention to how people seem in the streets, the general level of unrest and unease, whether it's building or levelling off. He works hard with his cantrips to earn enough that he can feed himself and Saba, and maybe add a little more to the coin he keeps in his boot. (Which he sleeps wearing, nowadays, even in the inn.) 

There's a lot more human misery. There's a little more unrest.  The government has fixed the price of bread and made it illegal to sell it fresh but the loaves can shrink in size and there's a long line even for day-old bread. 

Some of the people he does laundry for ask if he wants a wife, a mother for the boy, they have daughters and too many mouths to feed...

...Wow. 

He tells them he needs to think about that. On the one hand, probably he shouldn't marry someone he hardly knows, who may not want to be married at all, and it's a commitment to a specific person, at a time when he has no idea what his future plans will be except that they're likely to be very weird. Also he - doesn't think his mind is currently set up very well to love a woman, which seems like an unfair thing to impose on a wife. 

On the other hand, he is clearly, at this point, not going with the option of finding Saba a nice home with new surrogate parents. All the families he considers already have too many mouths to feed, and probably won't get out of the city in time if things erupt into violence, although it's looking like maybe they won't. And he's not sure he's providing adequate parenting, and it seems like it would be good for Saba to have a mother. Also it would be convenient for him to have an - ally, he supposes. Or at least a reasonably clever assistant. He wouldn't be able to tell her his identity but he could tell her some of his plans.

After Saba is asleep and no longer demanding entertainment, he folds his arms under his head and stares at the dim rafters of the inn they're staying at nowadays, and thinks through what he's picked up of the local marriage customs and what the expectations would be. 

Men provide for their wives and children, and protect them from danger, and discipline them if they're badly behaved, and set a good example for them. Women maintain their household and care for their children and look after their husbands in old age (which comes sooner for the husband, because men marry almost a decade older than women do). Men can have several wives, so long as they can support them and all their children. Osirion permits divorce in the case that either party has grossly betrayed the foundation of the marriage (adultery, or conviction for a serious crime). 

If he were interested he would have chaperoned meetings with suitable women and if they liked each other all right they'd proceed from there to a marriage. In some parts of the country dowries are expected, but not everywhere.

He gives it a lot of thought. 

From a strategic perspective: it'll make him seem more respectable and trustworthy, and buy him some extra time in the day to just work on magic. It'll also limit his flexibility, potentially a lot, though he could maybe get a woman to agree to long-term separation once Saba is grown up, if the marriage otherwise wasn't working at all. Also he definitely needs to be upfront with the woman in question, inform her that what he wants is very different from the usual Osirion marriage. And, hmm, whether a woman thinks that's a downside or a perk is probably a decent filter for whether he wants her as an ally/assistant. 

He goes back to the family. Says that he's considering it, he does want Saba to have a mother, but it's a significant decision, obviously, and also he's foreign, not from Osirion, and may expect rather different things out of a marriage, though he would of course do right by any wife. He implies, without saying outright, that he's still grieving a wife lost in the storms. (He lost so, so much more than that.) 

If they're still interested given that, he would like to meet the daughter or daughters who might be interested, with a chaperone, to see if they get along. 

There are four daughters! All of them are interested, for a value of interested where it seems to have been distinctly their parents' idea and very much motivated by there not being any way to put enough food on the table right now. He might not care to talk to the oldest one, twenty-one and unmarried because she had the pox badly as a child and still has the blemishes.

Actually, he'll definitely talk to her! (He doesn't feel inclined to care about blemishes, all human bodies look sort of weird to him right now anyway, and at twenty-one she might seem less like a child to him. Maybe.)

He sits down with her and says some things that he made a list of the night before. He has a child already; doesn't want more children, certainly not at a time like this, but does want a mother who will love and help him raise Saba. He comes from a place that's very different, and he's also an ambitious man (he sort of makes it sound like the storms and resulting loss gave him the new life mission of trying to rebuild in the wreckage, which isn't entirely false.) He intends to learn a lot more magic, and he's hoping for a wife who is clever and practical and ideally interested in learning some magic too, if only from the safety of home. Because of that, he expects he can provide well for a family; he's not wealthy right now, of course, but he does have a reliable livelihood.

He isn't sure yet what his future will hold, and it may involve doing dangerous things - he'll have to take on some fights, to continue gaining magical ability past a certain point; though he intends to be quite conservative and only take on survivable fights, he has plans and if he dies he won't accomplish any of them, right. If he leaves her a widow, she'll be a wealthy one; he's not planning to go off adventuring or anything before he's seen to that. 

He is aware that this is not what the usual Osirion marriage looks like, and would understand if she's less interested as a result. 

She listens very carefully and then has five questions, which are: does he have some way with the magic to accomplish not having more children, and is it as she has been not-very-reliably informed Evil, and what are the products of his ambitions going to look like for her and Saba if he does not get himself killed becoming powerful enough for them, and given that not all people can learn magic, how can he tell whether she'd be able to, and would he be willing to give her family money, for the next year, she could probably do logistics so he could get to twice as many houses for laundry in the same amount of time and he could give her a quarter of that.

There are methods and he knows that some of them are definitely not Evil, but also he's going to be very frank with her, and apologetic, that he is probably not ready for activities that result in pregnancy. It's been - a very bad year so far - and he thinks he needs a little more time, but Saba shouldn't wait years for a mother. He suspects that if he does become powerful enough, it'll take decades and Saba will be grown, but he's likely to end up eventually seeking political leadership or - becoming a very eminent scholar, or something. (He still feels very not-oriented to the kinds of things that are feasible as a human who's also trying to operate somewhat undercover.) 

He'll come back to the magic question in a moment. Yes, of course - he would be delighted to have logistical help with a laundry business, if she can learn the cantrip they might be able to do even more than twice as much, and a quarter of the earnings being hers seems very fair, he would even say half if she ends up able to learn the spell. 

To be the kind of wizard he is, he tells her, a person just needs to be reasonably smart, and of course very diligent and patient and willing to work at it. Can she read and write? Do basic figuring? He can give her a couple of quick mental math problems, it's not a very rigorous test of magical potential but it'll give him a sense of whether she can do it at all. 

She can read and write! She taught herself from her brother's books; he went to school and did well and did the books on a merchant ship (lost at sea, of course). She can do household accounting, too, and she's never thought about anything like the math problems at all but reasons through it eventually, frowning. 

He thinks she'll do great! Assuming she wants to learn magic, of course. He thinks that someone will probably be happier married to him if they find magic interesting. (Saba loves magic too, albeit mostly as entertainment.) 

She would definitely like to learn magic! Then she won't be destitute even if he widows her sooner than planned, see, and housework would take so much less time. Also can wizards really make everybody like them all the time, there'd be so much less household conflict. 

He thinks there is a spell for that, although it's complicated and there are some cases where it wouldn't be legal to do that and it would be sort of rude to go around using magic to make people like you more when they would prefer you not, but you can. And, yes, it seems like it might be very convenient sometimes, especially when everyone is so stressed by outside events. 

She looks slightly embarrassed and promises very earnestly that she will not use magic illegally or on him or his friends, just, sometimes it's hard to like people even when you want to and don't prefer to always be frustrated with each other.

Reasonable! And once they knew each other better, which they would by the time she got to that sort of spell, he would probably not mind at all if she wanted to practice it on him once in a while. (He expects he'll be reasonably calibrated within a few months on what sort of person she is and how much trust she deserves.) 

Is she interested, then? 

Yes, definitely! - was he going to also go talk to some other people?

He doesn't really want to go through all that again with her sisters, but it does seem responsible to put some thought and time into who he marries, if he's going to do this (which is very weird and surreal all of a sudden). He will talk to the family's other eligible daughters as well. Privately he already thinks that he probably isn't going to like any of them as much. 

They are younger and do not have blotches on their faces but otherwise seem a bit - well, it's probably mostly the "younger". Slightly less practical and slightly less clear on what they want.

Feeling quite awkward about the entire process at this point, he informs the parents that he likes their eldest daughter and would be pleased to marry her, and he thinks they can earn significantly more with his magic work and contribute some back to the household. In terms of practicalities, he doesn't yet have a permanent place to live, lately he and Saba have been sleeping on the floor in the back room of an inn in exchange for minor magics, but he thinks his wife deserves better accommodations (so does Saba, honestly) and he will need to see what his options are. 

They are delighted! Which temple does he want to get married in, they go to Irori's but they're not terribly picky. They could do the wedding in a month, which would allow time for their eldest to teach her sisters the accounting and for him to get better accommodations?

He used to worship Aroden, back home, but– well. He doesn't mind going to Irori's temple, if it's the one familiar to their family. A month from now is perfect. 

...And he should go collect Saba, who he left under the supervision of the younger siblings, and explain this plan. 

Saba is confused but not actively opposed. He wants to know her name and whether she is nice.

He thinks so! She's like him in a lot of ways, which is why he thinks they'll get along. She's organized and clever and she wants to learn magic too, then he'll have two people to show him pretty spells when he likes. They should get properly introduced, though, and Saba can judge for himself. 

He is quiet for a while. 

Eventually he says, "is she my mommy?"

"Do you want her to be? She is going to help me take care of you, until you grow up, and she will do all the sorts of things that your mother did for you before, but - it is up to you if you would also like to call her your mommy, or something else." 

"'m not supposed to forget my mommy's in Axis. Even if they make me go somewhere else for a little while until I'm big enough to follow rules she will wait for me in Axis."

He nods, seriously. "Then I will help you to not forget that, and you can call my wife by her given name, Parmida. I am sure she will not mind. And - do you remember your parents' given names? I can write it down for you, and once things are better here and we have more money, perhaps we can send a message to them and tell them where you are. I am sure they are thinking of you."

(He wonders, absently, when Saba will be old enough to start learning his letters, he isn't sure if three is too young but maybe he should start showing him them sometimes just to get him used to the idea.) 

"My daddy's name is Arrus. ...dunno my mommy's name. Mommy."

He writes it down, and the name of the nearest town, and hopes that will be enough information to find one dead person among what has to be millions. "Do you remember any instructions about where you were supposed to meet them? I want to write everything down now, while it has not been too long, so that we know how to address a message to them once we are able." 

"In Aroden's city, there's lots of Chelish people, because we're Aroden's people, and I'm supposed to go there and -" 

And he starts crying.

"And I dunno. I don't know what after that."

Aroden pulls Saba into his arms. "I know. It will be all right. We will find them, because they are not going to forget you and they have time, we have time, and - everything will be all right." 

"Aroden's dead. That's why all the bad things happened, Aroden's dead -

- where do the gods go when they die -"

...He starts crying. 

Here, he wants to say, here is where dead gods go, here I am, I will fix it, somehow, someday– But he can't say that, and he can't speak past the lump in his throat anyway. He doesn't know what promises he can even make, now. Except that he isn't going to give up. Not ever. No matter how long it takes to rebuild and how unimaginably, unendurably hard it is. He made a promise, once, and he's still going to keep it. 

Somehow. 

One month later he gets married. Parmida is dressed up very nicely and wearing perhaps too much makeup so the spots aren't very conspicuous and she looks extremely relieved and happy. Her rather large family attends and also looks happy; some sisters are jealous.

It is traditional in Osirion for men to buy their wives wedding jewelry which is the woman's own property, by law (everything else in the marriage is his).

Aroden is also happy. Happier than he's been to date since waking up in a stolen body, anyway, which is perhaps a low bar. 

He would dearly love to buy her some magic jewelry but he almost certainly can't afford it. As it is, he finds all the jewellers he can in town and asks if he can barter magic - he's willing to sign a contract for future magic services, if a month isn't enough - for something suitable.

He looks for accommodations to rent. One room is fine for now, they can upgrade later if the laundry business goes well. Ideally a cellar for some natural climate control, but he can't afford to be that picky. 

If they're not picky about what part of town to live in they can have a big room with a cellar; if they are, they can have a small room without one, but near the rich peoples' houses where the laundry business will do best.

He asks Parmida which one she thinks is best. 

" - nice part of town, it'll save us a lot of travel time and might make it easier to eventually have people drop their washing off with us so you don't have to take more than a ten minute break from whatever you actually want to be working on. I thought wizards could magic the heat away anyway."

"That is what I thought too." He's pleased. "I do not yet know any spells for dealing with heat but I think it is not too far off, if I make time to practice." 

"Well, you had better do that, then!"

"I will!" 

So they can get married, with relieved and happy family members watching, and Aroden (he still thinks of himself as this in his head, when he's alone, even though it's not the name he's been going by) buys a nicer set of clothes for the occasion, though not as nice as Parmida's, presumably saved for years for this occasion. He gives her a necklace and matching earrings that he traded for magic (and still has a commitment to clean the jeweller's shop once a week for the next two months, but it's not too long a walk.)

They move into their new small room. They don't have any real furniture at the start, just a mat to sleep on together, and some crates to sit on, and whatever Parmida brings with her, but they can work on that over time. His first furniture purchase is a set of shelves for his notes, and the books he hopes to own someday. 

He has the conversation with Parmida about how Saba isn't his son by blood, and how he wants to help the child remember his parents, and this is why Saba will call her by her given name, although he hopes that the boy will accept her as a second mother eventually. (Why can't someone have two mothers?) 

On the off days from laundry work, he looks for other wizards in the city. He's been poking at the structure of his few spells, trying to hold up the shape of it in his mind and match any of it to the half-remembered procedural knowledge of a god's-angle view of magic. He can get the minor entropy spell to cool water, which is quite nice, and he's hoping he can adapt a higher-level spell eventually to cook food, though ideally he'll find someone who knows an existing one first. In the long run, he hopes to gain back a deep enough intuition for how he and magic can interact that he can throw together new spells with relative ease, but for the next few years, copying from other wizards is going to be faster and easier.

He starts trying to teach Saba the alphabet. 

His world feels very, very small, and he feels weak and helpless and blind and deaf, and he still wakes up crying in the night sometimes - kind of often, really - but he has a roof over his head and nobody is trying to murder him right now and he finally feels like he's maybe, barely, starting to rebuild. 

Parmida is very confused about this man who wants to become powerful, or a scholar, or something more than that, but picks up orphaned Chelish toddlers and marries merchant girls with the pox so they can do accounting for him. But she is pretty sure she loves him very much. She does logistics at his laundry business. She knows of another laundry wizard who had the spell down fast enough he didn't need to see the clothes and it didn't matter how densely they were packed and the only thing that determined his rate of cleaning was the overall volume, can her husband pick that up? Then they can tell people how to pack the clothes and it'll go faster, and make the switch to a delivery service easier. 

She cooks for them. The price of food keeps getting higher and higher but she knows some ways to stretch it. Saba should learn the alphabet but he should maybe also learn how to pull barnacles off the sides of the canals, he can get into small nooks where other people can't and where they're accordingly not all gone yet. 

There are bread riots in the Quarter. It's not particularly near them. 

He can buy spells off other wizards, if they're not spending every penny on food. The wizards want payment to show him their spellbooks and the inks which will let him stabilize the magic in his own spellbook are expensive, ordinary ink won't do. Alarm is nearly useless right now because he could only do one a day and it'd only last an hour, but it'll be useful when he's more powerful. Charm Person is also only for an hour but more useful, for that. He could learn a simple personal shield against physical attacks. Or the ability to see alignment. He could carry their laundry on a floating force-disk. He could, with a touch, render people so clumsy they can't walk in a straight line and might not be able to walk at all, but that one will last a grand six seconds at his current level of magical ability. He could make himself invisible for just as long.

The man who is her husband, who used to be a god and is now a low-level wizard living in poverty with a wife and child, is quietly scared. Things are getting worse, which was inevitable, but he doesn't know how much worse they're going to get before they start getting better again, and - there's so very little he can do about it, there's so little he even knows, he's half-blind and pinned to a specific body in a specific place and he can't even perceive what's going on a neighbourhood over, and he hates it, and he's scared. He does his best to stay focused anyway, on the small limited projects in front of him, but sometimes when he's looking at his notes, his eyes are dark and haunted and full of - something - that really doesn't belong in the face of a human man of not yet thirty.

Saba can learn barnacle-picking, and anything else that might be useful for stretching their food supply. He'll probably find it fun. (Aroden does supervise him closely. Doesn't let him wander out of line of sight, ever. Gods but he hates not being able to see.) 

He thinks that all he needs for the cleaning spell better version is lots, lots, lots of practice, where he pays a lot of attention and hones his concentration, and he's getting there. 

He takes notes on all the spells the other wizards have, scrimps and saves carefully and decides when he can risk paying for one. He thinks it's probably still more useful for him to learn another spell than to get Parmida set up with a spellbook of her own, but he keeps that on the table, and he can talk to her about his magic, when he's practicing.

He suggests that he could take a day off, once in a while, and then she could use his spellbook and try to learn some of the cantrips. It'll probably take her a while to get the shape of it in her head (she doesn't have any of his inherited half-memories), and then she'll have a head start. 

Finally he thinks he can afford a new spell. He's torn between Charm Person and the shield. Both of which can offer some usefulness if there ends up being a breakdown of civil order in the city - this is the threat he's most worried about, this year, if that doesn't happen then he thinks they can scrape by on their income. The shield is the most useful for a direct attack, of course; he doesn't wear his money anymore, he's hidden it in a space carved out below the floorboards that will be very hard for anyone else to find, and he has a weapon and also apparently some intimidation factor, but it could get worse than muggings. Charm Person won't offer much protection against angry rioters, but it could help if there's some sort of tense standoff not quite at the point of violence, and will be more useful in the day to day order of things though of course he's not going to use it in illegal circumstances. What does Parmida think? 

She tries to learn the cantrips from his spellbook. It takes her much longer - dozens of actual practice days, squeezed in when he takes a day off - before she can get them even occasionally. She has no idea how long it usually takes and asks apologetically if that means she's no good at it. 

She doesn't quite understand what he's afraid of, it's been safe in Sothis her whole life. She believes him, that they ought to be afraid of it, but it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that happens to real people, the collapse of order in great ancient cities with thousands of years of history. She has - no idea what'd help, if there's a riot, but maybe with enough deftness Charm Person gets you to "this person is definitely one of our fellow rioters", which seems better than a force barrier that can only stand up to so much and that doesn't envelop you entirely.

(He doesn't think it means that at all. Magic is very hard, especially at the start. He thinks she'll find it much easier once she has the very basics down and also her own spellbook to practice with more regularly.) 

When they talk about his worries, he hugs her. "I am sorry. These are - not normal times. There was a war between gods, and - things are worse than they have ever been in this city's thousands of years of history, I think. And nowhere on the continent was untouched; it would be much better if we could import grain from across the sea, even if it cost all the gold in Osirion, because - what good is gold when there is no bread? But they are starving there as well. I came here because I hoped it was the best place to pass this year." 

(Maybe not next year. He remembers the rumours of salt water washing up the river, and maybe multiple years of ruined crops, and - wonders if they'll still be able to get out, if everything starts to fall apart. He won't be able to teleport by then no matter how much he practices. He remembers being a god, who could just see the threads of the future ahead, and he misses that sense desperately, along with all the other lost senses, he feels like he's drowning in fog.) 

He buys the expensive ink, just enough for one spell, and he takes his hard-scrimped coin to the wizard who knows Charm Person and asks to copy it. 

He can charm people! The wizard warns him it'll be conspicuous, at first, though he can make it less so with practice. They will think he's very reasonable and very trustworthy and an upstanding sort, and it'll last an hour or so (and with more practice it can be inconspicuous in the wearing-off, too).  Pushing the spell too far - say, stabbing the person - will snap it. 

He will keep in mind not to stab anyone and expect them to remain Charmed. Getting this right seems a lot more important than having an illusion or sleep spell in reserve, so for several weeks he prepares it every day. Keeps it in reserve all day, but casts it every night - can he practice on Parmida's siblings? Parmida already likes him so it's not a very good test. 

He worries that Saba doesn't seem to be growing. Probably he isn't really getting enough to eat. 

He can practice on Parmida's siblings. They're grateful for his help and despite it they look thinner every time he sees them.  There are more riots; the governor imposes a curfew.

Parmida knows priests can create food and water but can wizards do it? 

No. It's divine magic only.

He starts thinking about routes out of the city, if things get sufficiently bad. He's very, very glad of their decision to stay in a better neighbourhood; he thinks their chances are better here. The worst will be if anyone sets a fire. He tells Parmida to think about how they could barricade their door. 

There's a spell for that but they're not going to have enough spare money for it for a long time. She gets some sturdy boards down at the docks, instead. 

The Church of Irori suggests that its followers achieve mental and physical perfection through meditation, like Irori. Also you don't burn much energy that way. They're also selling Create Food as many times a day as they can cast it, of course, but third-level spells are rare and everyone's hungry. 

Everyone is hungry. But the three of them aren't, yet, starving, even if his clothes are hanging looser each week. He has the spell down for getting a lot of packed laundry at once, and - maybe they can start encouraging people to bring it, instead, because doing magic is fine as long as he can concentrate but walking, especially with laundry, burns more energy than he wants to spare for it. 

They could pay some kids on their street a pittance to haul it for them.

"If you want to stop giving some money to my family I will understand," Parmida says to him one evening when the soup is particularly thin and requires a lot of prestidigitation to save its flavor.

(He will pay the kids a pittance, it's still better for them than not that.) 

Shrug. "It is your money. I think it is up to you how to prioritize it. I am worried that - this will affect Saba harder, he is very young and his body needs nourishment to grow right, your siblings are all older and more likely to weather it. So I might make a case that it will - save more of us, in expectation, if we use it to feed him. But, nonetheless, you earned that money and the decisions is rightly yours." 

She looks very baffled, at that. "It's your laundry business. I asked you to help them but - I didn't expect it to be quite this bad."

He had expected it to get this bad. Expects it to get worse. He doesn't say it, now, what's the point. "Yes, and you are my business partner. - I realize that is not usually how property works with husbands and wives, in Osirion, but I am not from here and I do not think that way. You are pulling your weight, here. It is far easier when I do not need to worry at all about whose laundry I am doing where." 

"Oh."

She thinks. 

"I don't have the slightest idea how to decide something like that. They're my family. I owe them everything, and I love them, and they arranged this for me because they hoped I could help them. And - you're my family too, and Saba, and Saba has no one else looking out for him, and you're right that he's smaller - how do you choose -"

He hugs her again. 

(When you're a god, he thinks, you just - look at the threads of all of the futures, and there's still uncertainty, there are still gambles, but at least they can be goddamned informed ones, and every single thing he does now feels like tossing pebbles in the dark, at a target that may or may not exist.) 

"I am not sure there is any good way," he tells her. "You - try to weigh it. And...maybe try to find roads that you did not see, before. What is your family's other income right now? I am trying to think if there is anything they could do, that they are not already doing, to bring in a little more. Maybe there is not, they are quite sensible people, just..."

He puts his head down on her shoulder. "I am sorry." 

Hug. "You're doing everything you can, you work so hard... Maybe - maybe if we had to stop with the money but you flavored their food for them it wouldn't seem so much like we were abandoning them. And it's easier to eat enough when it tastes like it's real, rich food."

“We could do that.” Sigh. 

"I don't -

- I don't want to tell them. That I decided - it'd be easier to tell them that you said to - they're hungry -" she bursts into tears and then looks profoundly embarrassed. "I'm sorry. You've been - wonderful - no one could possibly ask for more -"

“No, of course. I understand. It is harder for you, they are your family and you - you have that history...” Hug. “I will tell them.”

She looks up at him, sort of searchingly. Swallows. Nods. "I love you."

What is love, anyway. (What does anything mean, anymore.) But - surely being allies in the fight to survive and carry as many others as they can with them counts. “I love you. I am very glad that we met.”

The next day he goes to tell her family, Saba riding on his shoulders. The toddler is even lighter than when Aroden first picked him up from the riverbank. It hurts. 

He tells them gently, calmly, with the haunted look back in his eyes.

They tell him that they understand. That they hope Saba comes through all right. They ask how Parmida is doing.

She's working very hard. She's worried and scared, of course, they all are. But he doesn't think he could have a better wife, he says, fondly. 

Is she expecting? That being, you know, the kind of obvious prompt for him to decide they can't share money, anymore.

No, she isn't. This is a very bad time to have a baby and they want to avoid it (he leaves unspecified what they're doing to ensure this.) They're just very worried about Saba's health, children at that age have so much less in reserve to weather bad times like this. 

That makes sense. They wish them well. They mention he could probably get carried in for healing at a temple for hardly any money, what with not taking up much space. It doesn't do much about hunger, but. 

He'll keep it in mind if Saba starts to seem especially sickly. He thanks them. Heads back, walking slowly.

It's hard to keep practicing his magic as diligently when he's hungry, and tired from it, and it's tempting to sleep more. He tries, though. He's getting pretty good at Charm Person now. 

She makes friends with some neighbors and they come up with a system where they combine what they've obtained for stew, and take back a portion of stew that weighs what they put in. It means there's a bit more variety, at least, fewer days with no meat at all and the occasional one where dinner is actually filling. 

Someone murders the governor. It's not really clear why you'd do that; he of course does not stay dead. There's a public execution of rather more coconspirators than the plot could possibly have had. 

 Parmida heard from a friend who heard from a friend that there's a spell that restores a corpse in an advanced state of decay to less-rotted. It's necromancy. If he could copy it -

He agrees that it's really not clear what murdering the governor would add!

Her idea about the spell is a very good one; he's proud of her for it. He would need to find a person who knew the spell, and it might not be a level he can learn - though his vague intuitions around the shape of magic think that it could be first level, in which case he could do it once a day, at the cost of losing his Charm Person fallback. He asks the other wizards he knows, quietly. Also pokes at researching it from first principles, though he's not optimistic he can do so at all quickly. 

Necromancy is...frowned upon...though less here than many other places. Eventually he can get a referral to someone who knows the spell. And is charging a fairly exorbitant price for it. 

Well, he'll see what they can scrape together. Parmida can maybe ask if the neighbours are willing to contribute something, if they agree to share any long-dead animals they can make sort of salvageable with it. 

The neighbors can scrape together a little bit of money, for that. Not enough. Halfway there.

"I could sell the wedding jewelry," she says to him. "You could get me more, if we survive, if we're rich -"

"If we survive, then someday we will be rich, and I am going to buy you magic jewellery," he promises. "I would not have asked, but - if you are willing..." He takes her hands. "You are far more precious, in my eyes, than metal and gemstones. You and Saba." 

" - are we not kissing because you'd be too tempted from there or because you don't really like it or because I'm ugly or - I don't have hurt feelings I was just suddenly curious -"

"It is not at all because I think you are ugly." He barely notices how her face looks; all human bodies seem like weird leaky skin bags to him, though he's getting used to it, and - finding her exterior more beautiful, now that he knows the mind inside it better. "I - I am not really set up, as a person, right now, to - think about that, so - I suppose 'I do not like it in general' is the closest, though... I mean, I have not tried it recently." 

"It's just that I think ordinarily if my husband said that to me I would want to kiss him about it."

Nod. "...I am - pleased, I think, I know the sentiment. I - do not feel ready yet for kissing, but...maybe someday." 

She sells her wedding jewelry. They have enough for him to copy the spell Restore Corpse.

Well, they should go looking for some long-dead animals, then, maybe in the places where garbage is dumped? 

There are dumps, on the edges of the city. The corpses of animals can be found there. A large one would be ideal, since he can only do it once a day.

He takes a morning off the laundry work and they can trek out there and search for a goat or something bigger, taking turns carrying Saba - Aroden doesn't want him walking and burning energy more than he has to. Probably they should drag it back before he does the spell, it'll be lighter. 

(He vaguely wishes he had gotten the floating disk spell, dragging a mostly rotted corpse in a blanket is not his favourite thing.) 

It's fairly unpleasant! But they can get their goat all the way back to their house.

He casts the spell, surveys his results. (According to the wizard, the flesh is still 'somewhat rotted' and isn't suitable for eating, but, well, they're very hungry and it's still protein and they can cook it a lot, and prestidigitation the flavour better.) 

The flesh in fact looks like it's been dead too long, it's dried-out and swollen at the same time, but there's so much of it!!! And it can sit in a hot stewpot for eight hours and then taste like whatever he imagines it should taste like.

Parmida is glowing. The neighbors are pretty delighted, too.

...He really hopes they don't get horribly ill from it. 

They should have just a very little bit, and see, and then if it's all right - it is - just a little bit more. 

"What we should really do is track down a priest and get them to cast Purify Food and Drink. It's a cantrip, I think, they shouldn't charge much for it - might do it for their share -"

They should definitely do that! He doesn't know any priests, off the top of his head, but is happy to accompany Parmida to go talk to whoever they think of (he thinks he'll look more - wholesome, legitimate, less like a dark necromancer - with his wife and clearly-underfed child). They should ideally ask someone who's not going to be bothered that he's using necromancy to feed starving people, but of course that might not be something you would know before asking. 

They get a couple of glares but it's not actually illegal, and eventually they hit on a cleric at Parmida's church of Irori who thinks it's a great idea, and would accept payment in kind.

And then they can have stew that is guaranteed safe for human consumption. 

Amazing! He reminds Saba not to eat too much too fast, he'll make himself ill, and he beams at Parmida and tells her again that it was an excellent idea and she's very clever. 

And he can pay some of the older and more reliable local kids to go search the dump and bring back the remains of the biggest animals they can find - skeletons are fine, and also easier to carry. He can cast the spell once a day, which on something goat-sized is far more than even his family plus neighbours plus the cleric can eat, so they can share some with Parmida's family as well as long as they're willing to come pick it up themselves.

(Other than that, he doesn't advertise this new capability.) 

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.

He makes the efficiency modifications he can to his spells - well, or takes notes on them, for any change major enough that he would need to actually redraw it in his spellbook. 

He tells Parmida that he thinks the magic item is worth saving up for, though it might take a very long while. And - he's not second level yet, of course, but once he is, even a couple of minutes seems worth having sometimes. If he plans exactly what part of his notes to review, marks out the places where he can feel that there's a critical insight just barely out of reach.

Parmida is an excellent sounding board and he tells her so and maybe she'll feel less out of her depth after a while. 

A Headband of Vast Intelligence that does just one standard deviation - weaker than the spell, which does two - will cost 4,000gold. If he learned how to craft magic items he could do it for just the cost of materials, which might be half that. It's an astounding sum of money and Parmida boggles at him a bit but she doesn't argue. 

When there are revolts somewhere far away in the Kelesh Empire and troops from Osirion are marshalled to be sent off she thinks he is a genius. 

The wet season comes again. 

Rahadoum is having a civil war.

He tells Parmida that at some point it won't seem like an astounding amount of money at all, because the rest of the world is going to slowly piece itself back together (with or without the help of the god who tried to save it and whose murder left vast destruction in its wake instead), and they're both improving pretty quickly as wizards; he's definitely learning faster than the other wizards in town; and in normal times, a couple who are both wizards and levelling up can make quite a good income. 

Once in a while he still lets her borrow his spellbook, this time so she can try one of his first-level spells. 

He gauges how hard it is to prepare his first-level spells each morning; every once in a while he tries to prepare a third one, just to see if he can.

...He can guess, a little, at how much harder second-level spells will be, just by noticing that there's a big gap before the next circle of stable spell configurations. He doesn't think he's there yet, and it's about more than just reserves so he can't turn two first-level into one second-level spell, but he thinks he'll get there sooner than most wizards would. 

He finds out the price to copy the intelligence spell from a wizard who has it, and of the ink, which it'll need more of. Asks Parmida, who manages does all their household finances, how many weeks or months of their usual expenses it's equivalent to. 

They're making about fourteen silver a day doing laundry service and occasionally selling extra meat, and saving four silver from that, most of it's going towards food and a bit towards rent. The sixty gold he'd need (forty for the ink, twenty for the chance to copy it) will take them five months. "But Saba's going to need new clothes, before then."

"I understand." 

He considers if there are ways to earn extra money. Neither of them is spending all their time on laundry, and he can't really think about magic study from dawn to dusk, it tires his head out too much. Also they both have the somewhat-rare skills of reading and writing fluently. Are there any neighbours who would pay something to have their children educated? Or neighbourhood women who would like to learn to do the household books? He knows no one has a lot to spare, right now, but many of their neighbours have a little to invest in a better future. 

They can teach children some lessons for cheaper than the temples do it. Make a little bit more silver. Get there in four months, not five. 

He can get three first-level spells in a day, mostly by cleverly making the spells more efficient rather than because he's increased his reserves.

There's a civil war in Cheliax. 

He is not at all surprised. It still hurts. He cries more at night for the next while. It probably seems explicable to Parmida; it's his homeland. 

(He is blind and deaf and small and weak and clumsy and he can't do anything, the circle of the world he controls isn't much bigger than their tiny room, and - it's going to get better, he already has so much more than what he started with, and yet. Too little, too late, and he's never going to recover whatever is lost this year.)

He pushes his magic hard, every day; he knows that this is the best way for now to increase his reserves and his ability to channel power, so that he'll actually be able to cast his intelligence-boosting spell when he has it or not too long after. 

Saba is - four, probably going on five. He's still small for his age but at least he's growing at all and he can count and read a little, Aroden makes sure he has practice, and write his name and a few simple words. 

By the time he can afford the intelligence-boosting spell he can prepare it, though only barely; he's winded and has a headache and wants a nap once he gets it stabilized and into the spellbook for the day.

The cosmic blight ringed by jet-black flames in Sarkoris turns out to be a tear in the fabric of the world or something. It opens to the Abyss. There are a lot of demons coming through it. Sarkoris is not totally sure what to do and would like some help; Lastwall is trying. 

People are calling the place where Lirgen and Yamasa used to be the Sodden Lands.

(When he hears the news about the cosmic blight, he goes quiet and still and stares at the wall for the next half-hour, not speaking, and the frightening look is in his eyes again, starker than it's ever been before. And then he shakes himself out of it and goes on with his day, because there is currently nothing he can do. Either Lastwall and Sarkoris will handle it or they won't. He tells Parmida that it would be in everyone's interest for Osirion to send some help, even though Sarkoris is far away, because this isn't going to get better on its own. But, of course, he has no standing with the government of the Kelesh Empire at all.) 

He will prepare his precious, scrimped-for spell, and then take a nap and have some tea and ask Parmida to rub his neck to ease the headache. And then he reviews his notes and looks for a place where he's almost, almost seeing some underlying symmetry in the magic, almost linking up the understanding locked away in his mind because it's too much for a human brain to hold. There are a few options, actually, but he starts with his illusion spell, he thinks there have to be one or more nearby stable spell configurations, castable as a human, basically the same underlying magic but it has to be - folded up - differently. 

He writes down where he is and takes out a blank page, holds it ready. Tells Parmida he may want to talk out loud at her and have her remember it.

He casts the spell. 

- yes, he can see it once he's a little bit smarter, there are a couple variants that should also work and be stable, very very similar, just with slightly different scaffolding making different parts of the illusion persistent without ongoing attention -

- and a lot more comes rushing back, too, with his brain a little closer to big enough to hold it - 

- locking bits of himself into the configuration that was almost the same thing as an agreement, among gods, nailing down all of the mutual commitment-shapes of help or nonintervention that he'd need - he must've missed something but if he wasn't smart enough to notice it at the time he's definitely not going to notice now -

- he didn't intend to break prophecy, himself, it hadn't been a plausible outcome of his plans, but it would've changed some of those commitment-shapes, built as they were around the ways the gods could see each others' future actions -

- the spell wears off. 

He lets himself consider the god-agreements for ten seconds and then shoves it away, it's not relevant right now, not yet when he's still struggling to get by on the scale of weeks and months and one neighbourhood. He scribbles down the scaffolding differences in shorthand, talking out loud to Parmida, probably not especially comprehensibly.

He's tired and triumphant and also part of him, the least human part, is quietly despairing. 

He'll have to draw out the spell-notation carefully, later, and maybe he can sell just the notes to other wizards, since he can't yet afford to actually put it in his spellbook, they spent nearly all of their savings on his intelligence-boosting spell. 

They're kind of suspicious that it won't work, if he can't cast it himself, and don't want to waste the ink on it in the meantime. Most of the time when wizards try inventing their own spells they blow up in their face, sometimes very literally. 

That's pretty reasonable of them, honestly.

This one won't take as much ink; he can go back to scrimping and saving for it. Kind of an absurd level of their expenses are magic ink and copying spells, but he tells Parmida this is an investment, and if they dare to invest in the future now when so many people are scraping by one day at a time, they're going to be ahead when things start to improve. He's willing to bet that the worst is over at this point, although it's still possible that a civil war will land here as well, and he's keeping an eye out for the signs. 

He sits down with Parmida to look at his first-level spells and see if she can think up any sellable uses of them. If the riding horse can be ridden by other people, they could sell that to people who want to travel further than they can walk, or transport something heavier than they can carry. Will anyone pay for a floating disk to carry furniture or something? He also has the telekinesis spell, which he now knows is called Unseen Servant, and he'd like to practice it more anyway. 

She could take up house-cleaning, made more efficient by the Unseen Servant, if he doesn't mind her cleaning peoples' houses, it's less respectable than taking in laundry since she'll be in their house and conceivably could end up alone with someone though obviously she would leave. They could go to the stables of a noble house and ask if they'd want to use Mount, maybe for any riding they don't want to risk their real horses on. They'd need better clothes if they want to offer that; she's worn all her dresses rather thin, and magic can mend them but not make them look good as new.

He doesn't at all mind her cleaning people's houses, unless she's worried that it could be harder to transition to other business models later if she's seen as less respectable, but he trusts her sense for that. He would need to cast Unseen Servant for her, though. 

How much would it cost to get materials for new clothes? If it's much less than the cost of ink to test out his invented spell - which he is very sure isn't going to explode, he just needs other wizards' trust of that - then it makes sense to do that first as an investment. 

Nice clothes will be a couple of gold, so cheaper than the ink for his invented spell. She thinks not being very respectable might affect his plans eventually but he could take another, more respectable wife at that point, and it's not going to affect her except insofar as it affects him.

His sense would be that they should save for nicer clothes first, then; if cleaning houses will let them get there much faster, he's fine with that. He doesn't think it's actually all that likely that ten years from now when he's starting to get anywhere, anyone will remember or care that his wife cleaned for a few months during the worst couple of years after the storms, and the fact that he used necromancy to feed his neighbourhood would surely be a much bigger deal. Though if he's wrong and misreading Osirion norms here, she should tell him.

She can ask around if people are wanting books copied again now, too, he has that cantrip and he can teach it to her too, it's not a lot of ink. 

She can clean houses and copy books, then, and they can get a nice outfit each and go ask around if anyone'll pay for Mount (some people might on occasion, and ask how to reach them when those occasions arise), and they can get together enough money for more ink, more spells -

- she does not complain but she hasn't really regained any of the weight she lost, and she sleeps soundly enough it never wakes her anymore when he cries.

He is perhaps a little preoccupied, and he doesn't notice right away that anything is wrong. Saba is putting on weight and growing, which is his main concern, and - by default he doesn't pay attention to the same things that humans do. 

After he's inked out the new variant on Silent Image, though, and put it aside to test the next day, he blinks and orients and looks at her. Hugs her. "I love you. I think we are going to be all right. ...Are you taking good care of yourself? You look..." He isn't sure what. "You look tired." 

"Is it going to be - years, of this, do you think -"

"Of everyone being very poor and everything being very hard? ...It might be. I think we are lucky to have come through as well as we did - and much of that thanks to your cleverness." He touches her shoulder, strokes her hair. "But, yes, our life needs to be a pace we can hold, though I think in five years we ought be much better off. Should we slow down a little? I - I need you, Parmida, if I am going to build anything out of these ruins. And I need you healthy and - and happy." 

Sigh. He hadn't really thought of it, because his burning, desperate motivation isn't going to run out for a long time even at this kind of frustratingly slow pace, but - of course it's hard for someone whose entire life before now was better.

He looks into her eyes. "Should we take some days off sometimes, just to - be together? You should definitely eat more. We have enough capital to hold us, now, I am not in a desperate hurry to have more spells." 

She looks - awfully uncertain, at the idea that they take some days off to be together. "Maybe we could try that and see if it helps. I've been trying to eat more - it's just that we're also doing a lot more walking -"

"I know." He's thinner than he was, too, although he walks less than her since so much of his time is spent on mage-research. "I think we should take - a month, say, and not try so hard to save up for new spells, you can work a little less and rest a little more, and hopefully at the end of it both of us will be less tired - and we will know if the world is better too."

Another sigh. "I really hope that the crops are better this year. Though...I am a little worried, too, about what will happen when people are no longer desperately malnourished but things are still quite bad. I think they were too tired to riot before, but that could change before everything there is to riot about is mended." 

She nods, uncertainly. "We can try that if you would like."

They should take the next day off, then, because they've just finished a very long marathon of investing in the future, and Aroden is pretty confused about how people who aren't him work, but probably investing in the present sometimes is important too.  

They wake up, and he tells Parmida that he doesn't want her to do any work at all today. He wants her to do only the things that she most wants to do, and he is hers for the rest of the day - his magic, his mind, whatever she wants most right now, he will try his best to do it for her. He apologizes for not really having any idea how to pamper a woman properly, but - can he make her breakfast? (He can cook, even if she does all of it normally and his cooking is probably not as good.) 

She looks like this is not remotely how she expected taking a day to be together to work. He can definitely make her breakfast. And then maybe they could cuddle?

He makes her breakfast! A more generous portion than usual, and he asks her what she wants it to taste like. And then, yes, they can cuddle while Saba amuses himself. 

This is nice. Is there anything else she would like? 

She's, uh, new at this. She thinks she could manage anything he wanted? It was really sweet of him to make her breakfast and hold her.

...Huh? He's genuinely confused. This is her day, not his. He wants her to be happy, or as close to happy as they can get when the world is still kind of awful around them. He's sorry that he doesn't just know how but he can't read her mind (yet). 

By be together did he not actually mean anything about marital relations at all.

He actually has to take a second to puzzle over what she means by that, they are spending time together being married and focusing on their relationship, but– ohhhh. No, he actually didn't mean that. He's...sort of forgotten about that entirely.

(Fortunately his host body seems to come equipped with some idea of how sex works, which is better than having no idea and attempting to re-derive it from scratch and god-angle knowledge, gods are not especially well-placed to pleasure human women.) 

"We probably should not," he says quietly, holding her. "We would need to arrange contraception and that costs money, and–" he peers into her eyes, frowns, wishes he could read her mind because most of the time she's a very sensible, legible person but sometimes he swears he doesn't understand her at all. "And, do you want to?" 

" - well, I wouldn't really say I want to or don't want to or anything? I thought you'd want to. Eventually. Once you'd had enough time, and once it wasn't a terrible time for a baby. And it's been some time and it's not a terrible time for a baby and so when you said -" Shrug. Embarrassed shrug. 

"...I mean, I would really not say it is a good time for a baby, but - it would not be disastrous now." He lets out his breath. "We should - try to talk about this." Even though he has no idea how to approach it in a way that doesn't feel like he's some sort of half-human-half-elephant tromping around on her feelings.

"I...told you, before, that my head was not really set up for - kissing, or - other activities that come after kissing. I think every day about how clever and sensible you are and how lucky I am to have you and how proud of you I am. I love you, and I want to see your face and hug you and tell you about what is on my mind and hear what you are thinking. And maybe that means I would also like kissing you but my mind has not - made that leap, yet. I suppose that marital relationships is - something that presumably makes some couples very happy. I would very much like to make you happy. It...is not obvious to me what women like, here, and people are different from each other, so you would have to tell me what gives you pleasure, if we - wanted to try. And you might need to be patient with me while I learn it. But - it is certainly not something you owe me. You are very good to me and I am happy with you already, and - to me, that is a very small part of what marriage is." 

...that was a longer speech than he'd intended at the start, and he should give her a turn now. 

"- you're a very strange man, you know.

In Osirion I think it is more of a part of what marriage is than speeches about love. And it is something I owe you when you would like it, I don't think there are very many people who would make promises like you've made and consider themselves owed nothing off that. But if it is not important to you then that would defeat - most of the point, really."

He smiles a little. "I know I am very strange; I - tried to explain that, at the beginning, but perhaps I failed to convey how odd I am. I - think I do feel owed some things, though I would not have put it in those terms. You are my partner and there are so many fewer things that I worry about now, because I know you will competently handle them. That is what is important to me. If neither of us really wants - marital relations - then I think we can leave the matter alone. I do still wish to know what would make you happy, though." 

"I think I will be happy when we're rich. But in the meantime - this is nice."

"I am glad." Snuggle. "And - we will be rich somewhat sooner, if we work very very hard, but - perhaps not soon. So we cannot work too hard, if it will make you miserable in the interim." It doesn't make him miserable - or, at least, not going as fast as he can would bring its own flavour of misery. 

He will cook all of her meals and do all the household work and they can go for a walk and try to find something pretty to look at. If there are flowers, he'll pick her some; he has some vague, distant intuition that humans often like flowers. 

Some rich people have some flowers but you're not really supposed to pick them. The plants that grow unaided in Osirion are not flowering ones, mostly, and anyways have been eaten.

She does seem more relaxed by the end of the day.

He asks her if she would feel happier, and more like their life was nice now, if they tried to make their house prettier. 

...probably the thing that would improve her quality of life most is not having to clean other peoples' houses which are nicer. But maybe.

That makes sense. He thinks they can afford to set aside that part of their earning scheme, now. Especially since he's planning to cast his new spell the next day, confirm that it works (and what exactly it does, it's some sort of illusion but he isn't quite sure what the difference will map to yet), and then, after that, go back to the other wizards and ask if they want it now. 

His wife had been under the impression he knew what the new spell would do! How does he know it won't blow up in his face if spells often do and he doesn't know what it does?

It's hard to explain, he just has a sense of the magic? He can hold the shape of it in his mind and see that it's stable. He - has unusually good intuitions for this, he says, it seems to just be how his mind works, and so even though most wizards invent spells half by trial and error and it's a risky process, he's very sure that this one is safe. And he can tell most of what it does from the shape, just not entirely. (Gods don't see magic from the same vantage point, and he can only hold a small cross-section of those memories in his head when he thinks about the spell.) 

She wishes him well and has Saba out of the room when he tries it. It is, as he expected, an illusion spell with more scaffolding the Minor Image - instead of filling forty cubic feet but needing him to do all the detail work it envelops him, and uses his appearance as a base he can make modifications from. It will make for a pretty good disguise-spell with a few weeks of practice figuring out which alterations to his nose or eyes or apparent height don't leave him looking weird and inhuman. 

Neat! He's pretty pleased with his discovery, and calls Parmida back in to show her. And then entertains Saba for the duration that he can hold the spell, by doing all sorts of silly things to his face and body. It's good practice and he likes hearing Saba laugh. 

The next day he prepares it again, twice, his third spell is still Restore Corpse most days. He goes to see his wizard acquaintances, says he's gotten a more specific and maybe quite useful variant on the basic illusion, demonstrates, and asks if they would like to buy it off him now, or trade in kind for a first-level spell in their own spellbooks. 

Some of them have heard of that spell and know people who can cast it! They're impressed that his reckless magic experimentation worked out, and some of them will trade. Does he want the ability to store his spellbook on the Ethereal Plane? The ability to feel like he's had a night's sleep while he stayed awake, as long as he didn't do anything strenuous (or use magic)?

He would definitely like to be able to store his spellbook on the Ethereal Plane! (The fact that all his progress would be lost if someone stole it is definitely salient to him, possibly because of how he obtained this spellbook in the first place.) He just copies it into his notes for now, though, since he's pretty sure no one in their neighbourhood is going to try to steal it from his special shirt pocket. 

He'll take down notes on the sleep-replacing spell too, if it's being offered, he's not sure he wants it as badly since he's doing magic basically every day but at least he can look at the spellform, maybe get something out of it the next time he can afford a day to cast his intelligence-boosting spell and slam through some research insights. 

Ideally he's find a wizard who'll give him actual money, too, rather than spells that will just cost him more money in ink before they do him good. He keeps going around, and will offer a cheaper price than the other people who have it. 

In that case he can get a couple of gold for letting people copy it. He'd get more in ordinary times, but these are difficult times.

He gives the gold to Parmida. "You earned this," he says seriously. "By helping me save for the second-level spell, so I could research this successfully. I think you should spend it on whatever will make your life - our lives - easier to endure. And next month we can start saving for the Ethereal Plane spell." 

How is the rest of the city doing? 

Food is still far too expensive and most people are still far too thin but it's distinctly getting better, now. The upcoming harvest - two years and three months after the death of Aroden - might almost be a normal one. The Empire of Kelesh is drafting people, for its internal struggles far away, and even worse it's drafting grain, but Sothis doesn't seem to be about to erupt in disaster.

In Cheliax people say the gods are meddling in the civil war, much more blatantly - much more clumsily - than can traditionally be expected from them. An earthquake affected the course of a battle. One keep is being relentlessly struck by lightning. One claimant to the throne was assassinated by devils in broad daylight; another was vaporized by a paladin of Iomedae who says she had a sudden vision (and six new paladin levels with it). 

"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?