"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.

...Well. All right. That's done. He can feel the spells there, ready. It's very odd. 

He considers going back to his work area to try out some of the spells with Khemet's researchers and Nayoki before she leaves, but - there's one more thing he has to do first. Part of the mandatory due diligence of taking this risk at all, even though it feels in itself like an unacceptable, terrifying leap into danger.  

He reaches further, past that single surface of god-presence neatly designed for handing out spells, toward - whatever's on the other side. 

Abadar? 

And then -

- it's like tilting and falling into something, something fast-moving and complicated and very very magic, something that pulls away as you fall into it - by comparison the single surface was indeed mechanical and impersonal -

:Leareth:, it sends, and it comes packed with godemotions that are far harder to parse than reassurance and recognition, though those are there - or meant to be - the predominant one is a kind of identification. Leareth is a pattern, a way-an-agent-can-be, and a pattern He values, a pattern that moves the world towards all of the things that matter, a pattern He can trade with though He is very big and it is very small. 

It's overwhelming and terrifying - and presumably Abadar can tell that he's scared which is even worse - but that won't help, fear is only a message his mind is sending him that what he's doing is dangerous and he's already decided to do it anyway, so Leareth waits for the fear to settle and then folds it away. 

:Abadar. I wish to know what your plan is: His answer is not quite in words, the words wouldn't be the right ones - he suspects the raw concepts are the wrong ones too, Abadar is too big for the human idea of plans or goals or strategies to quite apply. 

There is a pause at the edge of his senses where Abadar - reaches for concepts, discards them as too far away to be usable for translation -

- a prediction: Asmodeus will not directly intervene, will grant advice and resources through the ordinary channels - if the prediction is correct, then Abadar will not directly intervene, this fact about Abadar makes the prediction more likely, the prediction being likelier means more worlds where Golarion is not torn apart by another war among the gods -

- a prediction: if Asmodeus does directly intervene, then Abadar will, the outcome in this case is Golarion torn apart by a war among the gods but the consequence of this prediction is less war, He thinks Leareth can see why -

- a prediction: Sothis a city of portals, interconnected with Absalom and Almas and Quantium and Azir and Westcrown and Egorian, sprawling and tall and prosperous and full of people - the thing He is steering towards, or one of them -

:I understand: Or Leareth thinks so, anyway, hopes so, it's just as hard to wrap his mind around the godconcepts as he'd expected - even with the translation, even with Abadar clearly trying as hard as He can.

It's beautiful, the sprawling flourishing city. It's - there's a blazing bright feeling, Leareth wants that, he's been trying to build it in Velgarth for so goddamned long, centuries and centuries and the gods aren't having it and here is a god who, however alien His true goals and values, wants that too. He feels recognition there too, and it feels precious, and he holds that part of himself up, wordlessly, like tilting one face of a gem toward the light. There are darker facets to a Leareth's pattern and he knows that Abadar sees that too - and still recognizes him as an ally, still wants to grant him power, and that in itself is dizzying and...he doesn't really know what to do with it, doesn't know how to fit it into the rest of his conception of the world...

(The pattern that is a Leareth is not one that finds trust particularly comfortable, even if he, too, is often steering toward cooperation...) 

Flickering through concepts looking for -

- Khemet III, speaking to Abadar of Leareth. I think he has never had anything go right - advance his goals in any lasting way - that he wasn't steering. There are - still trades that you can make, like that - but I think he is alone in Velgarth like you were alone, before we built our first cities -

and another one - Khemet III trying to relate a conversation they'd had, about Abaddon - Khemet trying to guess - what must a man who feels such deep anguish at the death of anyone have done, to count as Evil -  Abadar trying to show him - piecing it together, between the two of them, a whole picture, of a person who can make the world better with the right tools, and so so much worse, with the wrong ones...

He's not even sure why that hurts. It's true, right, he is and always has been someone who will use the tools at his disposal, however awful they are - and he's someone shaped by circumstances where everything was so broken, where he had so little to work with, so few true allies - almost none, really, not in a lasting way, and that doesn't normally ache like this but for some reason, right now, it does.

Leareth isn't a good person, in a conventional sense. He never has been and he told Vanyel that upfront, he - prefers not to hide it, people who want to make trades with him should know what's on the other side of the bargain. But, from the very beginning, he's been trying to fix Velgarth - and it seems more and more true, over the millennia, that the people who are good don't succeed in this task, not in any lasting way, and that if anything was ever going to change it would have to be done by someone like him - 

- and that doesn't change the costs he's been willing to pay, for a victory that isn't even assured. 

And Abadar would like him to have more resources. It will make things go better. It's - it's almost exactly what Abadar is for, people who will get better results with more resources. It costs more, to offer them in Velgarth, He's probably not going to do it very often, but here it was so startlingly clear - there are more bright rich sparkling cities, in a world where Leareth has more from the world.

Abadar doesn't do - forgiveness, redemption, that's the domain of the Good gods, it's something that doesn't really apply to any of the things that He understands or values, but - the Good god concept here is that every pattern at every moment has a Good future ahead, if it chooses to walk it, that there has never been a pattern or a moment that cannot turn upwards with the right reasons or the right resources or the right thoughts (that a mind might be too panicked and young and weak and threatened to ever successfully think) -

- and Leareth's paths are so clean, the only thing that has to be there is a way to fix everything, and he will think of it and he will walk there, and Abadar is - proud -

- and would forgive him all the things along his path so far, if that were the kind of thing it made any sense to do, which it isn't, but certainly He does not need them defended, and if great evils someday stand again on all the paths Leareth can see to victory Abadar will not withhold Himself on that account -

Leareth is experiencing a surprising level of emotions about this, enough that it's hard to pick apart what they all are - also it's continually effortful to parse and deconstruct Abadar's thoughts, even though Abadar is clearly trying very very hard to convey them in simplified form.

He - glad. Grateful. Touched. He's hopeful, that - Abadar predicts he will, successfully, fix everything if there is a way to do so, that's the kind of entity he's been trying to shape himself into for millennia but it's not like he's ever had an opportunity, before now, to - have that checked, by something so much bigger than himself... 

He wants to have allies, wants to no longer have to walk this path alone, and - for some reason there's a lot of pain in that desire. 

He's not alone. Aroden -

- Abadar pulls the geas away from the surface of Leareth's mind, temporarily, because it'll make it even harder to communicate -

- Aroden is alive (Abadar is satisfied, about this, He did not predict it and it is better than any of the things He did predict), and Aroden has allies - will take them up again, once he knows which ones he can trust -

- and Abadar tried, when Aroden died, to do the thing Aroden had been doing, to build through humans, even though it's very hard, and Abadar's church has people Leareth can rely on, in the ways Leareth finds it hard to rely on people as well as the bounded self-interested ways Leareth finds it easy -

- this is important, that Abadar's church has people Leareth can count on, but Abadar does not know how to communicate His reasons for believing it and does not expect it to otherwise be believed and - frustrated shuffling -

(Leareth is concerned that Aroden won't be happy at all that Abadar can and did meddle with his geas, even if it's not at all surprising a god can do that, but this is a distant worry, for the future.) 

It's not that it's hard to believe on an explicit level, so much, but it's hard to feel it - hard to even see how he could have enough certainty in that to put real weight on it. 

Leareth waits, patiently, even though his head is now hurting; he can fold the pain away into a corner too, along with the gibbering pointless fear that his mind is bare before a god like an insect pinned to a board, neither of them is adaptive to dwell on right now. 

Abadar is reaching for the concept of Khemet again. Abadar likes him, the godsense He has is - fond, admiring - maybe Leareth and Khemet can figure this out, if Abadar cannot, because He does think it's important - 

- Leareth can trust Khemet and he does not have enough information to conclude that and that's maddening. If they were gods they would trust enough other because gods can be legible in the right way and it would be great and Abadar is so annoyed that humans do not work this way.