"Fine." He flops down and puts his feet up on the arm of the sofa. "- Is something wrong?" 

"Hmmm? Not that I know of. Urtho asked about you, today, and explained the Mindhealer thing. Apparently children are supposed to pretend they don't know what rape is until they're grown, so he thought there was something wrong with you. If any of your classmates get raped you should tell them to come here, I can't do the thing I'd do for me for them but at least I don't have to pretend that nothing has ever happened to anyone until they were sixteen."

"Mmm. I - guess that's good to know. ...Are you mad. You seem kind of mad." Well, mostly she seems quiet and controlled and calm, but he knows how he is sometimes when he's very angry. 

"I think it's kind of a stupid policy but it's his tower."

"It does seem stupid but I guess at least I know what I was in trouble for now." 

"He's not thinking of it as 'in trouble', though if he was that'd be better honestly. He's thinking of it as - damaged? Children are supposed to be cute and innocent and trusting, and it scares him, that you're not."

Ma'ar sits up, suddenly very tense. He doesn't even know what to say. 

Hug?

Hug. 

"I don't know what to do about that," he says finally, plaintively. "I don't mean to scare him - I don't want to, it seems - dangerous - but...I don't understand what he wants..." 

"I don't know what to do about it either. I'm scared. I understand what he wants but I don't see how you can possibly do it, and you'd lose so much of you, I don't want that for you..."

Ma'ar snuggles up closely against her; he's not normally that kind of clingy, but he's not normally this scared lately.

"Maybe you can try to explain what he wants, and then I'll - figure out if it's something where I can pretend...?" 

"Yeah. So - you're born in Tantara. I'm guessing, here, but I don't think I'm wildly off - you're born in Tantara. Tantara is prosperous and lovely. If someone hurts you it happens once and they get caught and punished and everyone gives you extra love and support, so you get through the awful out-of-nowhere unlikely thing of someone hurting you. And even poor families can send their mage children to Urtho, and they know it, so even if your family is very poorly off, as soon as you're a mage, they proudly take you through those fancy Gates to the Tower and it's - big, and beautiful, and lovely, and if you just work hard you can be everything in the world, and you feel safe and at home, and you trust people, and you make friends with children like you, and you learn ethics from your betters who understand more than you about whether it's a problem if people compulsion their servants, and you aspire to be the best mage researcher in the whole world, and invent new techniques, and maybe you remember that one winter your family was hungry so you start a soup kitchen in the city where your family lives, and feel very good about yourself. 

Urtho sees lots of children like that and they feel very safe to him, he understands them, he can predict them. He wants that. He wants you to feel safe and trust people and believe that the world is not fundamentally broken and accordingly trust them, when they explain to you the right way to do things in it, and he wants you to want to improve the world in some fashion not more ambitious than his own. You could tell him you wanted to build a Tower and city like this one, I think that'd be fine. And he wants you to believe that people are good and nice and the world doesn't have problems in it like rampaging armies that rape and pillage, or that if it does they're very far away and the grownups are taking care of it."

"I...think I understand that. I don't know if I can pretend that I think it's true. - Could you pretend the thing to him, did he trust you...?" 

"I probably could. I don't think I did a good job of it this time, because I didn't want to - not defend you - but I'm good at pretending, and being the shape that's safest. It's not a harder thing to believe than Asmodeanism. But -

- I want to tell you about Leareth. I told you - a bit about him, I want to tell you more than that."

"I'm - glad you wanted to defend me. Even though it must've been really scary." He leans on her. "You can tell me about Leareth."

He doesn't quite see the connection, yet, but if Carissa thinks it's important then he trusts her. 

...It's odd, actually, noticing how true that is. He doesn't know how to pretend he trusts people in general, much less actually trust them, but he trusts Carissa. 

"The fighting was all over very quickly, in Corentyn. I was on leave - first time in two years, because I'd been at the Worldwound - my parents got word we were supposed to evacuate directly to Hell and I got word we were supposed to make people do that, and they'd wrangled something to get a portal. By the time we got there it'd been shut down. I told my family to go home and stay there and I made myself invisible and made it out to over by the docks and read peoples' minds and learned the city'd surrendered, a day later. There were Velgarth mages enforcing order. There was a curfew. Word had it that everyone at the Worldwound had been turned to stone. I debated whether it was safer to go home or to not go home - I figured they wouldn't track down and execute everyone in the old army, that's all your wizards, that'd be insane, but I didn't know, and I was pretty sure I could pass a loyalty test once I knew who I was supposed to be loyal to - they were saying it was Aroden, I barely knew anything about Aroden except that he'd been a god, and died, Asmodeus had killed him -

I considered pretending not to be a wizard until I was sure they weren't going to kill us all but it's not exactly safer to be less valuable, to conquerers. I paid for a new place, just so as to leave my parents out of it. I figured I'd retrain into wondrous items so it wasn't conspicious I'd been in the army, and make magic items but not interesting ones, until things had settled down, until I could bribe the new leadership whoever they were.

We learned more. Aroden hadn't died for real when Asmodeus killed him. He'd just been - thrown into a human body, somehow. And he'd built up an army to take his country back. And found mages from another world, called Velgarth, who were very powerful and could all do Gates. And he didn't want anyone to go to Hell and had lots of diamonds and was offering Atonements to anyone who wanted them, through the church of Abadar and the church of Iomedae. I went and got one. From Abadar, I figured I'd rather be neutral than good. I did it. Iomedae picked me, not long after that. And a week later she sent me a vision, of a man that I eventually figured out was Leareth. He was Aroden's heir. People assumed he was his son. He was a Velgarth mage - mage and Mindspeaker -

I made a false identity as a really weak wizard who could barely cast the laundry spell, and applied for a job at the palace, so I could learn about him. Figure out what Iomedae wanted."

That's so many things! Ma'ar curls up against Carissa and makes listening noises, and tenses every so often at the scary-sounding parts. 

"That's - good, of Aroden. To make it so people wouldn't go to Hell. ...It sounds really hard and scary to spy on someone who has Thoughtsensing though..." She's telling the story now already knowing the ending, he thinks, but she must've been so confused and frightened at the time. 

"I made myself an amulet that I thought would make it work and I meant to mostly not be in the same room as him. I figured he couldn't be reading everybody all the time, and I could try to mostly be thinking normal things. But - it was obviously very dangerous. You shouldn't try to spy on Kings. I was feeling very bold, I guess, between the Atonement so I'd just go to Axis anyway and Iomedae choosing me. I figured if I got caught they would take me apart over a couple of weeks and then I'd be in Axis. And that - the fate of Cheliax might be at stake.

Leareth was very paranoid and very competent. He was a cleric of Abadar. Lawful neutral god of cities and prosperity, I've mentioned I think. He wore a lot of magic artifacts he'd made." She gestures at her own. "The army from Velgarth was his, not Aroden's, he'd allied with Aroden to fight Hell. It didn't seem like he'd done it for the country, though Aroden plainly intended to give it to him. He was friends with Vanyel, a very very powerful mage who made all the diamonds for them. He spent a lot of his time planning with Aroden, a lot doing magic research. He wasn't friendly with the servants, which made my job harder. I bonded with a familiar - which is something that wizards can do - and picked a cactus, and designed an artifact that would hide the cactus's thoughts, and planted it in their conference room - and I learned that, uh, the Velgarth gods hated Leareth. Because they see the world through Foresight, and he kept trying to fix it, to introduce new technologies, doing things that made the future harder for them to see. They'd assassinated him several times - he had a backup plan - and recently they'd sent some of their loyalists to Golarion, to kill him here. 

I got caught. Shortly after that. They weren't mad. They explained that Leareth had - asked Iomedae for a Chelish wife."

It just keeps getting more bizarre and overwhelming, and at the part about Velgarth gods he shivers and curls up more tightly, and then...

"- Leareth had what? That - you can do that - why would gods even care about that -"

"They don't normally but Aroden's friends with Iomedae I think? It was very overwhelming. Gods can see how people are shaped, sort of, in a very weird abstract sense that doesn't correspond much to what we see, and so she could - search all of Cheliax, for the person who was closest to the right shape to help him be a good King of Cheliax." Headshake. "Anyway. He told me about himself. He said that he was - two thousand years old, he'd used magic to make himself immortal. He doesn't remember his first life, not really, he's died too many times since then, but he wanted to fix everything in the world - all the worlds, when there turned out to be lots of them - and he tried conquest and he tried empire-building and he tried research and he tried invention and he'd finally decided to try making a god of his own. And he said that his plan was to keep trying, to fight Hell someday, to fix all of the worlds, and we'd lose sometimes, but - but every thing we could possibly win was worth fighting for -

He was born in Velgarth in Urtho's time. They were the ones who fought the war."

"Oh." Ma'ar holds himself very still, absorbing it. An entire minute passes in silence.

"That's..." He doesn't have words for what it is. 

The world starting to make sense, maybe, when it never has before, a thousand fragments falling into alignment. 

The stars, and the lights spread out below them, and Leareth spending two thousand years fighting the gods to make there be more lights. 

...The opposite of loneliness - the opposite of the empty lost feeling when Father died and when Mother died - except somehow the opposite of those feelings turns out to be an emotion that hurts just as much. 

And Carissa was the one person in an entire country who was the best shape to help him fix Cheliax, and fight Hell, and win everything that they could. Somehow that's absurd and makes perfect sense at the same time. And...means he's very lucky, and also it's suddenly much more stressful knowing that wherever he is now, whatever he's doing, Leareth is doing it without Carissa there, he must be so upset. 

"So he's - here," he says, or hears himself say, it seems like whatever's moving his lips is a long way away. "And - we have to stop the war–"

He freezes, because the hypothesis which is both utterly insane and blindingly obvious is coming together, now, and he doesn't know how he didn't guess sooner, and it feels like he's going to come apart and everything hurts. 

"It wasn't your fault. Urtho started it."

This doesn't really make him feel better at all. "It doesn't - it still happened. Because of him–" no he has to say it even though it's somehow incredibly hard, "- because of me. Urtho isn't stupid, he must've thought - I don't know what - but I would've had to have...done something so stupid...and, and almost ended the world." He swallows against the painful pressure in his throat. "Maybe - Urtho is right to be scared of me." 

"I think Leareth thought that his mistake was - obvious once you have enough knowledge of history, but he didn't have it at the time, he couldn't have - he conquered all the neighboring warlords, for Predain, and Tantara got scared - and he used blood-magic, for public works projects, and compulsions to keep his soldiers in line, and he still did those things when he needed to, two thousand years later, he wasn't wrong to think it was sometimes the right tradeoff for his goals, he just got better at tracking all the costs -"

He can tell that she’s trying to reassure him but he’s mostly too miserable to even process the words. It feels hard to breathe, almost like when he was drowning in the river, which is an incredibly stupid side effect to have from being upset.