She grimaces. "Why... here? Why now?"

"--I--was told you were dying."

The ensuing chuckle is dry in tone, though distinctly wet in practice.

"Correct. Who?"

"Someone who rescued me from dying myself," she gestures at her still-red burns, "and explained a lot less than I would've preferred."

Reluctantly, the woman murmurs:

"Not dead. Not yet. And I... know things."

"...She said that the Hours were demi-deities, are any less-demi divinities known around these parts?"

"No. It was Rowena, then... she doesn't care for implying they're right. Just big and scary."

Her voice steadies out as she exposits; probably the Beholding is lending a hand.

"That's what she called herself but I didn't care to assume it was her real name. ...She wants me to replace you as Librarian." 

If actually the books she is being asked to Librarian over are all Leitners this seems like a magnificent opportunity to find out.

"Of course. I'm not a proper Librarian any more than she is, not really, just desperate enough to try to break the rules. You'll probably do much better."

"Can you explain what a Librarian is? She said she had no qualifications but literacy, but I have no idea what makes me more qualified than her--I mean, sure, I was studying library science, but I didn't finish, and anyway I doubt a Master's from my home dimension would do me much good here."

"The Librarian is permitted to read books which no one is permitted to read. Some of those books house numena, ideas so powerful that they can believe themselves. The qualification Rowena and I lack is mortality. ...conventional mortality, as you see we can still bollocks ourselves up badly enough."

"--Wow. Okay, uh, I guess it's good that I hadn't gotten around to getting rid of mine yet? I mean, I always planned to, eventually--I'm guessing there's more wrong with you than is visible to the un-medically-trained eye and I can't save your life by dragging you somewhere inhabited and getting you drinkable water."

"Whatever strange power is allowing me to speak is doing an impressive job compensating for a severe concussion, several broken bones, and lungs partly filled with seawater. I'd certainly be dead on my own. If you drag me to the village nearby, I'll only probably be dead."

"Are any of the broken bones in your spine? That affects how I drag you."

"Not that I can tell; everything hurts but my back is no worse than anywhere else."

"If everywhere hurts you probably haven't broken your spine but I cannot emphasize enough that I am not medically trained." She grabs the woman by her armpits, then, and attempts to drag her towards the village.

The woman is tall but quite thin, and can be dragged effectively along the only-slightly-muddy dirt road from the beach.

"I think that if I stop talking, the effect making me able to think and speak properly will wear off," she notes. "So, hello, and it's lovely to meet you, and my name is Artemis Blackwood. Is there anything else you'd like to know?"

"Yeah, sorry, I'm kind of plugged into an eldritch fear god of knowing things and invading people's privacy. Uh, I would like to know if Hours could be reasonably described as eldritch fear gods, that'd be real helpful."

"Eldritch fear gods? They're certainly eldritch, and many of them fearsome, and we've discussed their godliness... but it wouldn't be the first description I'd jump to, no. They're just very big, very strange beings."

"Where I'm from, there are fourteen gods, or maybe fifteen, and each one of them is focused on a different kind of fear. They're called the Fear Entities, or the Dread Powers. It sort of sounds like the Hours are focused on time, rather than fear?"

"All just for fear? How monomaniacal. The Hours... let's speak in specifics, why not. The Malachite is the Hour called also the Ring-Yew. Its blood is honey, its flesh is green wood. It once loved a mortal man, and so the Red Grail, that Hour that is hunger, destroyed him, flayed the skin from him and stretched it on a drum and beat the drum to make the thunder, and now that man is the Hour Thunderskin. All of that is a metaphor except for how it isn't. That's the kind of silly antics the Hours get up to."

"Cultists of the fear Desolation would absolutely skin someone to hurt someone who loved them. That's where the burns come from, actually, is a Desolation cultist who wanted to hurt my parents. Does 'a metaphor except for how it isn't' make more sense on exposure?"

Artemis apparently feels that this question merits an actual wobbly hand gesture. "You get used to it, at least."

"Yes, but you see, I have a pathological need to know and understand things. Are there any lists of hours that claim to be definitive and/or exhaustive, and if so, do they have any meaningful clusters with regards to how many they claim there are?"

"Twenty-one are generally agreed upon. Four more are obvious to those who care enough to look, and two more if you look closer than that. Six are dead, for whatever that's worth. There are almost certainly a few more, but I'd be surprised by more than five."