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When Vanyel is ready for the mad science tour, he shows him the monkeys. "They're monkeys," she feels it necessary to clarify. "I know they look very human at this point, because the whole point of them is that I'm going to move into one if I ever die, but they're not people, and I have forbidden the staff to name them. I could move into one now if I had to but I'd like to get one actually looking like me in particular first, and I want to stick more Gifts into them, I got Fetching out of some Changesquirrels but further work is needed." She shows him the mice, too. "Do you suppose Jisa'd like a winged mouse? What's her favorite color?" She shows him all her microbiology eggs. "That's a flu sample from the recent plague! I remembered to take one. Those there are other flus. The white eggs have more-alive microbes and the brown eggs have less-alive kinds - there's a cold one of the staff mages had a few months ago, there's food poisoning, there's the most common kind from healthy intestines - you could get your Sight this fine, you know, I don't do heavy Healing-Gift use apart from Sight for this work."
The Shadowgod isn't exactly sure how to convey that in human terms. Something about precedent and historical effects and...comparative advantage, is that a human concept?
Yes, though not one in common circulation. Why does the Shadowgod have an avatar that can only talk to dead people?
It dates back to around when the Companion system was set up - the Shadowgod wasn't the only one who showed up or provided (power/influence/shaping) toward the miracle, but the Shadowgod did do the enduring-infrastructure bits of it, because that's a thing They tend to do more than other gods. The Companion system meant They needed souls with (experiences/memories/imprints) of being human, and some sort of selection criteria for which ones were Companion-suitable, and because of the way god-attention and god-perception works, it was actually easier to make an avatar that greeted all dead souls instead of just a few.
Interesting.
Does the Shadowgod have a plan for handling the second Cataclysm in a few centuries?
They have (shapes of possible plans?) but their Foresight is very blurry that far out and so none of the plan-shapes are formed enough to be worth trying to convey. Also some of the possible-future-shapes were incompatible with the current-shape where Belrun and Leareth are in power here.
(Long pause, shuffling of concepts.)
There is a possible world-that-could-have-been in which Valdemar, some years from now, would have been left with no mages or true magic. This would have been (lower cost/downhill) because the Star-Eyed Goddess would have nudged for it also, and would have led to a future with some valuable prerequisites to surviving a period of disrupted magic.
From the Shadowgod's perspective, 'better' and 'worse' aren't the main descriptors that would divide the worlds where Leareth goes ahead versus not, but they are both acceptable to the Shadowgod's goals, the futures where Leareth does it don't show important things being destroyed, and it seems likely Leareth wants to do it because he expects it to be better on human-scale terms. The Shadowgod will not interfere, and can provide an area free of other godinterference.
Will it be hard for a new god to establish itself if there's not a place for it where no gods including Shadowgod hold sway?
Probably somewhat, although this exact kind of situation has never happened before and so the Foresight is unclear.
Good to know.
She compares notes with Leareth whenever she has a bundle of things the Shadowgod told her all together. "I find the part about how lifebonds work comforting, actually."
"The part where it does not require a direct intervention at the time of? Or the new changes to it?"
"The former. I'm still annoyed that this is how the world works, but if it was just inevitably going to start to happen if we ran into each other without anybody doing anything to make that so, it's less gross."
Nod. "I assume scheming was still required to have us meet at all, and with sufficient distraction that neither of us fled the scene as soon as we noticed the effects. But, yes."
"But in some interventionless version of the world where we still existed if you heard I was doing cool research and swung by. Like, we would have fled the scene but we could have maybe written letters and made an actual decision about it."
"Yes. I - do like it, I think, that we are lifebonded just because we are people - shaped a certain way, as an inevitable result of that plus us actually meeting."
A couple of days later, Vanyel finds Leareth in the middle of the day. "Aaaughh. Leareth. Something just - the Shadowgod says..."