"Evil clerics channel negative energy, which harms or kills everyone around them. It's easy enough to learn how to exclude your allies but this is still kind of stupid since if people are within thirty feet of you you probably have a lot of ways to kill them. Neutral clerics get to choose, and almost all of them choose to channel positive energy. I asked Abadar if he could make an exception but it's one of their godagreements and he can't. He did confirm you can retrain it once you're not evil."

"How inconvenient. Do - you have reason to think I will not read as Evil after the war?" 

"Well I don't know for sure but Abadar says it is mostly the killing children to wear as a skin and that's - the kind of thing that doing a lot of Good can, in principle, pull more than enough in the other direction, but it has to be a lot of good, and if the next week doesn't count I don't know what would but I would bet - have bet - that it will."

Leareth makes a bit of a face, but he nods. "Is it very unusual for Abadar to choose a cleric who is Evil?" 

"Not especially. Less than five percent but not less than two percent, I'd guess? He's planning to do a bunch of it in Cheliax after the war so there's not a whole country with no clerics. And He's not, Himself, Good, right, there are plenty of ways to be Evil which don't touch on anything He cares about... murder isn't one of those, He disapproves of murder."

Leareth sort of wants to say that he also disapproves of murder, but, as someone who has done rather a lot of murder, it feels questionable that he personally has the right to claim that.

(Also, more generally, he disapproves of people dying - there are reasons murder is worse than death by natural causes but they're all indirect ones, the harm to the dead person is the same. In Velgarth at least, where people are to a first approximation just gone when they die, in a maybe-retrievable way but one the gods don't bother implementing. And he remembers trading the lives of bandits exploiting the chaos after the Cataclysm, for ten times as many lives of starving children, or so he hoped when he added it up in his ledgers, blood-sacrifice to power weather magic so there would be a harvest at all... He wonders what Abadar would think of that.) 

He can get him the book of cleric spells. There are hundreds at each level. And he can talk him through the domains, there's a handy chart so he can compare all his options. The most sensible thing to optimize for with domains is getting spells that aren't otherwise available to clerics at all. Thus Travel, which grants him flight and teleportation. Protection eventually gets you Mind Blank, the spell he uses to be impossible to read magically, otherwise only on the wizard list; he chose it for that reason. Abadar is planning to eventually work out a suite of spells related to cities but hasn't yet. And so on.

It's a lot of spells! 

Leareth, after a lot of thought, decides to go with Travel and then Protection as the second domain; it's duplicating a lot of the shielding he can already do, but extra shielding is hardly a bad thing, and - well, he knows Malduoni can read him right through his shields even when he has a talisman for additional coverage, Golarion's magic is in some ways stronger than his own. 

Picking spells is harder because there are so many and also they are so, incredibly, obnoxiously specific. For cantrips he eventually goes with Stabilize, Guidance and Resistance, mostly on the grounds that they seem different from the kind of magic he already has easily. He - should definitely ask for Recharge Innate Magic, to see if that works, and then maybe he'll test Sure Casting and Divine Favour, again on the grounds that they seem different from what Velgarth magic can do.

All right, is the next step getting a holy symbol? 

The pharaoh has some of those! Some people like a golden key but among Osirians who want to show how clever they are the more popular holy symbol is the crisscrossing lines he must have seen. It's from a concept about how prices work under certain common conditions.

Leareth likes that concept quite a lot, more than the key. (He is mildly against people just thinking he's trying to look clever, but it doesn't actually matter that much.) 

"What people are going to think is what kind of cleric wears an intelligence headband, you must care about actually being smart far more than almost anyone in the world."

"Is intelligence not helpful for clerics' casting, the way it is for wizards? Interesting." 

"Clerics wear Wisdom, usually, and you can't just put both on or they interfere oddly with each other. - you can enchant something to have both and not interfere but it's much more expensive. Mine does all three and is, accordingly, worth a significant fraction of the total wealth of this kingdom."

"I am so curious how they interfere with each other. I am still trying to understand why your world's magic - divides mental phenomena into such oddly discrete categories." 

Also he's musing to himself how wise Golarion magic thinks he is. 

"Magic items that have permanent ongoing effects for the caster generally interfere with each other a lot, which is the only thing that stops people going around draped in forty of them. There are known techniques to avoid that problem but they take more time and more talent."

"That makes sense. It is true for permanent magic items in my world as well, although - I have centuries of work on this and can combine multiple spells into a single talisman and wear a number of them." 

"I would be deeply unsurprised to learn that the local you can do the same.....for that matter somewhat unsurprised to find he made my crown."

Leareth chuckles. 

"...All right. I think I might as well go do this now." 

(He's scared. But he's not going to stop being scared by thinking about it more.) 

He looks like he is tempted to lean forward, or something, but he just nods. "Good luck." And he heads out.

Leareth goes back to his room with the holy symbol and his list of spells. He sits down on his bed and puts up shields, absently. 

He clears his mind. He thinks about...trying to be the kind of entity that other people can have positive-sum interactions with. About trying, over and over and over, to make Velgarth the kind of place where people can trade and flourish from it, and he thinks about how Abadar is that - how Osirion, despite its flaws, is in other ways exactly what he was trying to build all this time. He thinks about how his plans, which he's pretty sure are making more of the things Abadar cares about exist in the world, will benefit from this agreement between them - how it will further Abadar's plans, though he's not sure how and that in itself is an uneasy thought - but this is worth it, he thinks, to make that leap of faith, to try to cooperate even when so many forces push against that trust...

He waits for the presence of a god. 

And then there's something there. It's - slightly more intimate than Khemet's description might have led one to think, it's projecting not just presence but warmth, recognition. Reassuringness. You are the right person, it seems to want to say, you are valued, you are trusted and worthy of that trust, you will do things and they will matter a great deal to me. 

–aaaaaaaaaaaaaah -

Leareth does not flinch away from the presence even though he really wants to. He fights to take in a breath and let it out, to relax his shoulders and unclench his face; he waits for his racing heart to slow, for the extremely pointless panic to subside so that he can think properly and figure out how to ask the (terrifying) warm, reassuring, presence of a god for magic. 

It waits for him.

He calms down enough for his brain to work again, and he asks it for the spells on his list. 

And he can feel them flow from the tiny-fragment-of-a-god to him.