drifted off like the land split by sea

There's a lot to be done, in the immediate aftermath of finding Carissa and young Ma'ar in Urtho's Tower, and for a while Leareth is very very busy, as well as very happily distracted in his scant free time by having his wife back. And Ma'ar needs lessons, in magic and other things, and he has a baby daughter and spends more time than he strictly needs to visiting the nursery to hold her.

He introduces Ma'ar in the palace as a 'relative' who's going to be fostering here with him and Carissa for the next few years; he doesn't try to further explain the situation. There are curious whispers and various rumours about this for a little while, but then it stops being controversial.

Running Cheliax continues to hold many ongoing headaches. There are nobles used to getting away with more than he especially wants to let them; there are a handful of local insurgencies that need dealing with, and uncertainty around whether there's any larger organization behind this; some neighbouring countries are still discomfited by the rapid changes of the last year. But nothing goes sufficiently wrong to reach the threshold of being an emergency, rather than just a hassle.

They try a Sending to the other Velgarth he found, but it doesn't work, maybe 'the Leareth who lives there' isn't specific enough, and even after consulting his records he hasn't been able to narrow down what name he was going by or what he was doing at the time.

After six months, he finds time to slip off with Urtho and return to the Velgarth of a millennium ago, and check the cache where he left a note for his younger self. There's no reply, which is unsurprising - even over the entire course of a given lifetime he won't necessarily visit all of them - but in the meantime he's looked up the locations of a dozen other records caches, spread around the world. He leaves more notes.

Another six months later, there are still no replies. This time he brings a Chelish wizard with him too, to attempt a Sending from within the same world; this doesn't work either.

After that point, he stops going in person, and sends one of his mages every so often, equipped with a map and a list of locations to check, plus knowledge of the counterspell-techniques to his protective wards. Someone who's travelled widely throughout their Velgarth and can manage Gates to places that haven't changed too much, and compensate with scrying for the differences across a thousand intervening years.

At the two-year mark there's still nothing. Leareth worries about this a little, and then puts the matter out of his mind; the very fact that this is taking place during a gap in his records, and that there are no large-scale activities that hint at his presence, means it's not as time-sensitive as many of the other things on his plate.

He still sends another mage a year later, though, with the same briefing, a list and a map.

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"The days are finite, and in each one I have things to do. I think that will work for you sometimes. I do not know if it will work for you right now.

...also spite. I am not sure that will work for you either."

the-unforgiving-minute

"I am scared that even if there are things that would have worked for me other times nothing will work right now and I will just be stuck and - not able to help or do things effectively forever..."

"That doesn't look plausible. Also, we know that you get through this, because Leareth is a chronologically later you."

the-unforgiving-minute

He knows that, and Aroden thought it would improve too, and neither of those things is actually, right now, making him feel any less scared or hopeless.

"There is a Lawful Good god, Shizuru," says Iomedae, "who used to be the leader of the forces of Good. "And then her lover, god of the moon, died, and her grief overwhelmed her, and she decided to take the next ten thousand years off to grieve, and that is why there was no single leader of the forces of Good when I ascended."

the-unforgiving-minute

That's incredibly horrifying. "I - cannot see how anyone could justify taking ten thousand years just to grieve," he says. "Is she - back now...?"

"No. Three thousand more years."

the-unforgiving-minute

He closes his eyes, overwhelmed with - something, it's nowhere near as simple as grief.

She is standing beside him, suddenly, holding him. "When Aroden died.... I didn't understand. None of our plans could be used. We were losing so much, and millions of people were dying, and I thought there was no way to ever make it right, again, and no one else like him, in all the universe. And there was not enough of me, to catch his clerics, to catch his country -"

the-unforgiving-minute

"...I am so sorry. That sounds - harder than I can imagine..." He leans into her arms, and suddenly he seems to be weeping, except here in this god-metaphor place it conveniently doesn't get in the way of talking.

"I think you can imagine.

In some ways, a human and a mouse are very different. But if you have ever touched a piece of red-hot metal, you know exactly what it feels like for a mouse to touch a piece of red-hot metal. In that thing, wired before humans and mice were different sorts of things, you are the same.

I think you know what it is like.

Do you know what I did?"

the-unforgiving-minute

That's an interesting way of putting it, though mostly Tadesse is too overwhelmed and hurting to mull on it. "No. What did you do?"

"I went to Shizuru. And I said that I understood, now. And she said that it was all right, to take some aeons away from the fight."

the-unforgiving-minute

For a long moment all he can do is lean on her shoulder and cry. For defeat and loss and death that he knew nothing about - for a century of painful awful slow rebuilding - for all the souls in Hell now that can't be gotten back. For Shiruzu.

"You - did not take ten thousand years," he manages finally.

"I did not. Aroden - didn't either, though he had far more reason to, far fewer people counting on him."

the-unforgiving-minute

"It is not clear to me that Aroden set aside any time at all just to grieve! He took a century becoming powerful enough to fight Asmodeus but it does not seem as though he wasted any time." Unlike Tadesse, who's wasted decades at this point.

"There are lots of ways of wasting time. I don't know if he rested.

He wasted time not talking to me. Because he was afraid."

the-unforgiving-minute

"Of you?" That makes no sense to Tadesse at all but presumably there's some bit of context he's missing.

"He didn't know who killed him." She doesn't sound angry, just sad.

the-unforgiving-minute

"You were his paladin - I cannot possibly see how he could have entertained the idea it was you... But I suppose he would have felt very powerless, vulnerable, and - that it was evidence he had not been cautious enough, that someone managed to sabotage his plan and murder him without his catching it. And he must have been so afraid. ...Who was it? He did not say. I assume he knows now that he is a god again - was he angry, did he kill them...?"

"He knew that many of the Evil gods would try. He was confident that the balance of commitments was such that they would not succeed. But - somehow - the power that was being expended in swaying the balance of futures was such that if He died, it would break Foresight, the paths the gods use to see the future. And some previously allied gods, including one Aroden had chosen, had mentored -

- decided that was worth it."

the-unforgiving-minute

"- Why? ...I could imagine it being because Foresight - makes gods more powerful at the expense of mortals, that is certainly the case in Velgarth - but in that case I would be surprised by any gods themselves being on the side of that outcome, let alone strongly enough to murder an ally and mentor!"