She lifts it out of the box very gently and turns the pages with great care.

The text is handwritten, in beautiful skillfully-inked calligraphy, with fancy illuminated capital letters at the start of each section and borders drawn around the pages. It's in Tantaran, but old Tantaran, a number of spellings are different and there are a few entirely unfamiliar words. 

It tells the story of the founders, seven different men and women from all over Tantara and the region south of it, who one summer about six hundred years ago, all received dream-visions of a particular valley, and of meeting the others there. It took almost a year, but eventually all of them followed the visions and made their way there. At which point, since they had clearly been entrusted with a sacred mission to carry out together, they tried to pull together the contents of their various visions and dreams, and they built the first temple to the Eternal Flame in that exact valley, and put together its doctrine. 

Huh. Was the Eternal Flame not worshipped before that? They're supposed to be very old, right -

It sounds like they had been worshipped in various forms before, for a long long time? The founders all recognized Them as a god they had heard of, even one worshipped locally by some people. But this was the start of the formal, organized religion of the current temple, and its mission and practices. 

Huh. What did they get out of the visions?

Most of the order's current doctrine! ...Though it sounds like there was quite a lot of human interpretation involved; the visions described are things like 'I saw a hanged man wake up, cut himself down from the tree, and get up and walk', or 'I carried a crippled man on my back to the top of a mountain' – not exactly clear instructions. 

They really are not. More evidence for the "gods can't talk, just tell if something gets the result they want" hypothesis. She says as much to Ma'ar.

Ma'ar glances up from his book, which he started reading after finishing the book-preservation magic on it. :...That makes sense. This one is about the first hundred years of the temple and its leadership - I'm pretty impressed with them, actually, but it doesn't seem as though they got a lot of useful advice from the Eternal Flame: 

:Yeah. Maybe they would if they drifted off-message more? But what they told me is about the same as what appears in this old book:

:That's impressive too!: 

:Yeah. They might find ways besides advice to help, maybe? To prevent drift:

:Right, that makes sense - probably the Eternal Flame could nudge them to get certain people ending up as priests: 

:And they were talking before about how they had bad luck when they started doing something silly or trying to get divine help on dumb things:

:And they also get good luck for things the Eternal Flame approves of, so with all of that together, it's a lot of different ways for Them to steer even if they can't give instructions: 

:Yeah. It's sort of like setting up a marble run - the marble does what marbles do, and you can set it up in advance and guess because marbles don't do very complicated things, and a god can predict more complicated marbles, I guess?:

:- Oh, that reminds me of how some cattle herding works! If there aren't a lot of you then it's too hard to run around and whack them to get them to go where you want, but you - sort of get good at predicting how the herd of them will move together, if you startle the one in front by throwing a rock ahead of them or something, and then you can get the whole herd going in the right direction with less work. And without talking to them, obviously: 

:And we're back to the humans as livestock analogy...:

Ma'ar just nods. Makes a face, then turns back to his book. 

Aza reads on.

Her book is mostly about the founding itself and the first five years afterward. The initial attempts at recruitment are recounted at length; this includes a few more tidbits about the preexisting worship of the Eternal Flame, since the founding cohort of priests and priestesses pursued those leads first.

It sounds like the past practices were of a similar general tone - prayers to the Eternal Flame were focused on requests for forgiveness, or for luck in moving on from past traumas - but mostly this happened in an informal way, with some families adding in a prayer to the Eternal Flame along with their usual worship. 

(The book, unfortunately, does not give any hints about how those practices originated.) 

Ma'ar reads his book intently, pausing often to take notes in some cryptic personal shorthand. 

Aza summarizes the book into her own notes, content to be quiet about it.

:- Did you want to read this one too?: Ma'ar Mindspeaks to her eventually. :Or should we just catch each other up with our notes afterward: 

:Second thing is probably more efficient:

:Sounds good. I'm nearly done mine: