"Thank you for letting us know that people will want to form reflections of Rivotra and Orana. We think they'd be honored, if they knew; we'll share all of our records on them with your people freely. The five of us aren't yet sure how we'll feel about interacting with reflections of them and can make no promises about that, but we very much appreciate your people's unique ways of honoring their memory.

We'd be interested in hearing more about your people and your history, if you wish to share. We will also want to talk to you more at some point about working together on some technological projects, including a radio telescope array for communication with Doheem, which we expect to be very worth the cost of building; we'll be able to get access to several thousand years of Azurifice technological research and development."

"The history of Anadyne is mostly a history of sects and reflections; ever since prehistory we've warred and argued and debated who is worth preserving in reflection. Naturally everyone wants their own loved ones to live forever, and so devotional art is very common; there is a library, in the modern age, recording the shirasanmi* of everyone who wishes to leave one, both on dedicated hardware and on physical copy. Those who inspire others create small sects around themselves even in life, but most of them fade away quickly after their passing, leaving behind only the shirasanmi they entrusted to the vaults. Politically, the continent goes through a five-hundred-year cycle of falling apart and reuniting; we're seventy years into the most recent reunification, which is ruled by a council of the leaders of the foremost sects, each representing their own province of the greater nation. I was elected from among their number to be the Sanctified of this generation - the post is held for a thirty year term, I am the third so far. I hold the duty of speaking for the unremembered in ritual contexts, and therefore have the final say on any debated political matter, though I can be overruled by a three-fourths majority of the council. The recent period of reunification has also been a period of rapid technological progress, as the development of mass manufacturing and electricity has led to computing technologies and many labor-saving inventions. Many of the key figures of those revolutions stand in reflection as high officials of the modern sects; it is however required that the Sanctified personally not be a reflection, as it undermines the duties of the position. The history of Eravia I will leave to Gilded Rose to explain, as she is more familiar with it than I am."

*Soul-record, in practice a combination of a will, a eulogy, and a personal mythology with specifically defined rites of remembrance, generally written by the person in life or their survivors. It is a daily ritual for the Sanctified to select a shirasanmi from the vault and publicly perform one of its rites, thereby representing symbolically the wishes of all the unremembered. 

"The continent of Eravia was discovered roughly a thousand years ago, near the end of the previous theocratic union in Anadyne. As an unforgiving frontier, it was used originally as a penal colony for those accused of heresy, atheism, or other political crimes. When Anadyne fell apart into warring states some fifty years later, many refugees decided to brave the treacherous ocean crossing in hopes of a better world on the other side; and when they eventually organized into a unified nation some hundred years later, they wrote into their new constitution that there should be no state religion on the continent. Sects still organized, but politically anyone in a sect was forbidden from holding office. Many scientists and natural philosophers of old Anadyne came to this new continent fleeing persecution by one sect or another, and as a result a scientific revolution proceeded over the next five hundred years, providing secular answers to many questions that were formerly solely the province of religion. The strain of atheism in the nation grew and grew, and the old Anadyne traditions fell out of favor. It is the formal position of modern Eravia that the "soul" that unites reflections across mirrors does not exist, and therefore the practice of kindling factives* is unsettling to us, as we believe it often better represents the person who created the factive* than the person who is ostensibly being remembered."

*Verinaset, again.

"Despite this fundamental disagreement between Anadyne and Eravia, we are nonetheless strongly committed to a mutual peace in the modern union. Anadyne is reunited within living memory and has no desire to waste lives on a senseless war, and as part of the new reunion the principle of religious freedom was adopted, which we owe largely to Eravia's example. Our economies are also deeply intertwined, with Eravia being the leader in digital technologies while Anadyne provides most heavy manufacturing. Though some on the modern council attempt to proselytize to the Eravians, in practice those who truly believe generally immigrate to Anadyne, while those who are unsatisfied with the religious life in Anadyne emigrate to Eravia. We are harmonious, even if some believe the Eravians' denial of the soul is a grave mistake."

"As Snowblossom has said, we are indeed allies in the modern age. However, there is still some degree of latent tension, so your proposals regarding technological projects will no doubt require some bargaining between us. In particular, that radio telescope will need to be a joint project if we choose to go ahead with it."

"I second Gilded Rose's assessment. The Council will need to be called to discuss this, at the very least."