Ranara and her little daughter Azabel move to Urtho's Tower when the latter can say six words ("up", "mama", "milk", "no", "now", and "please") and hasn't started to walk yet. Ranara sets up to teach little children to read, ones who don't have evident Gifts yet - Ranara herself has Mindspeech, is all, with about a classroom's worth of range. Azabel sits in on classes, worn on her mother's back or later plopped in a corner with toys or, when she's only four, plopped in a corner with a book, younger than the other kids in the class. When Azabel has in fact sat through her mother's curriculum she is turned somewhat loose, to walk very carefully up and down and around the Tower, exploring.
"That seems like a reasonable plan. I can give you directions to the temple where she usually is, and tell her to expect you at some point...?"
"Any other questions for me right now? About the patient, or matters of religion more generally...?"
She tells Ma'ar that someone called Summerhawk will be up for answering questions at thus and such a temple.
:Yeah, it was less frustrating this time, we were talking less about specific gods and their mystery projects and more about what people get out of religion like, emotionally, if they are not you or me:
:I guess that'd be important for you to understand as a Mindhealer. And...maybe just in general, it seems like religion might be relevant for politics even if the gods themselves aren't really. - Want to come over at some point? I found some books in the library and did research about what the gods have supposedly done:
Ma'ar is there waiting for her in his room. Aala is at her desk, legs swinging, practicing penmanship, and he has six or seven library books spread out across his bed.
Aza plops down next to him. Mindspeaks, to avoid disturbing Aala at work. :Whaddaya got?:
:A lot of histories written by priests or religious groups. Which I don't incredibly trust, is the inconvenient part, they've - clearly got an agenda. But - here, this one is on the Twain, it mentions some historical miracles they recorded:
:There are some really famous miraculous healings - some of them are actually pretty well documented, too, Healers who weren't even worshippers of the same god confirmed it. Lots of cases of praying about the weather and claims that it helped, probably some of those were real but it's harder to tell... Supposedly Vkandis set a battlefield on fire once to help His people's side win a battle, which...honestly seems pretty horrible:
:I mean, mages fight with fire too, it's very horrible, there were reasons I didn't take combat magic:
:I don't know if any human mages could set an entire battlefield on fire! Though I guess maybe they teamwork it: Shrug. :What else... The Twain are claimed to have sent an earthquake once to express displeasure at two different temple sects dedicated to Them having this stupid religious war over it:
:It sounds like it! Also two different priests on both sides got visions. I - suppose that's sort of a helpful intervention, although the earthquake part seems like overkill:
:Assuming they listen to their visions yeah. What was the religious war about?:
:I don't even really know! It's so confusing to read about. I think partly just arguing over who the rightful high priest was, and then some doctrine differences but they seem so dumb to have a whole war over, so...I don't know, maybe it wasn't even really about that:
:Here, you read about it: He flips the book open to the relevant page and hands it to her.
There's a disagreement on whether the Twain are two sets of twin god-goddess pairs or a single pair where the god and goddess have different facets of Themselves. There's also a dispute over whether the true inheritance of the priesthood is the one passed down generationally since the main order was founded, or whether the 'divine revelation' that led to a young priestess starting the breakaway sect is what truly reflected the will of the Twain.
...It doesn't seem like these disagreements were actually settled in the aftermath of the war, the earthquake, or the visions; the two sects just agreed to stop fighting and coexist (mostly) peacefully.