"I mean, all ages were sometimes victims, but mortal babies and children are especially vulnerable - so are the elderly, but I suppose I found the loss of young children especially tragic and wasteful, at the time. In many places, a quarter of all infants born alive - which was not all of them - died before a year of age, and only half of children would live to adulthood." 

"Okay. - I've never seen a child in my life," she clarifies, "I don't have human intuitions about them."

"And fairies presumably do not die of hunger or illness - or of being murdered, for that matter - so your world would have fewer of those particular kinds of stupid problem." 

"We don't die of anything."

"And yet it turns out there are all sorts of other problems a world can still have." Sigh. "Anyway. I tried many things and improved many places around the edges - and made some mistakes along the way, and learned from them, and did better later - but over time there was a pattern, which became more and more blatant as centuries passed. Most plans have a risk of failure, of course, and can fail due to chance and poor luck, but there is an expected rate of that, which one has a sense of after a long time. And specifically those plans that included innovations, increases in technology and magical infrastructure, or even systems of edutation and government, would always fail at rates far higher than chance. If I made plans very foolproof they might work at first, but would crumble sooner or later. I eventually recognized this as the work of the gods - They see through Foresight and thus intervene in nudges that, from our angle, look like chance and coincidence." His lips twitch. "And some more blatant. I was assassinated specifically by priests an absurd number of times."  

"And you think your - sense accumulated over time is accurate even though the entire time you were being interfered with?"

"My sense of– oh, you mean of what kinds of chance are suspicious versus not. I mean, I did most of my comparisons with historical records of other people's work. And of my own plans that were not in a pro-innovation direction, but I think the work of other people is a better comparison, since my impression is that the gods pay substantially more attention to my activities. Since I have such a history of them." 

"How many gods are there?"

"It is somewhat hard to count because They are so - far away from the mortal-level view of the world. Likely a dozen or so major gods - with some cases where I am not sure if two gods worshipped by different names in different countries are a single entity, or where gods are worshipped as a god-and-goddess duo but never act separately and may be a single entity. And at least a dozen additional minor, very local gods." 

"Over - how much area, I know it's round but not how big."

"I believe the total circumference around the widest point of the planet is about twenty thousand miles. This continent is by far the most densely-inhabited, though I know of other landmasses. This one is about three thousand miles long, north to south, and four thousand wide." 

"Huh, okay."

"Anyway. That background is why, as I told you before, I was in a position of fighting the gods. I have spent the last thousand years exploring all the options for doing so, as well as pursuing negotiation with them as far as I could - perhaps further than I ought have, I was murdered several times for my trouble. Vkandis likes to set people whom He has grievances with on fire." 

"Not one of the pleasanter options."

"No. Anyway, that is - why I was willing to be extremely ruthless, in the last fifty years of planning. If I am paranoid enough and leave no openings, then my plans will mostly work as long as I am doing that, and I only needed..." Slight shrug. "It does not really matter. Everything is completely different now. However, my goal remains. I would like to persuade the gods to let us fix the many stupid, pointless, wasteful problems in this world. Or, even better, to help." A pause. "Also I would like to, if you are willing to accept the offer, help you fix the problems in your world. They are different ones, but not necessarily any less awful." 

"I don't know if I'm particularly good at persuading gods of things, I guess besides that I can bully them into trying to talk to me at all."

Leareth takes a slow deep breath in, and lets it out. "My plan had been to create a new god. I have detailed specifications of it. If you - ordered the other gods not to interfere, then I could...use a much less horrible plan than my original one, which was constrained by the fact that They would be try to stop me as hard as possible." 

"Horrible how?"

"Unless I found a better method in the next seventy to a hundred years, I was going to kill ten million people for blood-power. I thought it - more likely than not, but - not certain, that with a helpful god we could reincarnate them afterward." 

"Reincarnate?"

"Oh, right, we have not even covered that. It would not come up in Fairyland. Here, people have souls, which can exist independently from their bodies and still exist after their death. Souls can come back again as different people. In most cases they begin again as infants and remember nothing, which - does not really count - but in Valdemar, to the south, a god once created a miraculous government system and the souls of past humans, with their human skills and faculties and at least some of their memories, are placed in the bodies of horses. It is - not entirely dissimilar to how I come back when I die. Except, of course, with a god's cooperation they could be given new bodies rather than...what I did." 

"Okay.

Sorcery can de-age people. I don't know how to do it but I know it's a thing."

"That...would help this world immensely. You can learn new sorcery from books, yes?" 

"Yes, if I find a library I should be able to get a book on how."

Leareth takes a slow breath, lets it out. "Is this - overall project - something you are interested in helping with."