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Labor rental outfit. Could be a disaster if it's for fetching and carrying, could be all right if she's hired out for writing, could be mediocre if it's for caring for people's invalid maiden aunts, could be intolerable if it's code for "whorehouse" - and there are more girls than boys in the batch she's currently shackled in a wagon with. Aya's debating whether to start a conversation with the slave next to her to see if she knows more when -
An embroidered bear that looks like it's wearing a suit of lace-bordered plate armor and has tiny useless metal wings to match and is at least four times its likely original size charges the horses, who startle madly and go completely out of control.
The wagon goes over. There's a fence, at the side of the road, there's posted warning signs, beware Magic in this ravine until post marking its end, but the wagon with all the slaves in it crashes right through the fence. Gravity's upended, everyone's screaming, some of the screams cut off abruptly as they tumble end over end down the slope. Aya flings manacled hands over the back of her head, feels a familiar snap in her arm as something strikes it - that's broken; and now her nose is too - there's a splinter of wood through her calf and her ear's ringing and wet with blood and she's got to have cracked a rib -
She's completely unharmed, unperforated, not even embroidered as far as she can tell. The steel around her wrists and ankles is gone. She doesn't see any of the other slaves - no, on second though, maybe she does, there's a bright orange snake with a tail that splits into five fish-finned ropes and a beetle the size of her head with the lyrics of Midnight Lightning written across its wing casings in block letters and a surprised-looking rabbit with wheels for forefeet and a broom-end for a tail. Everyone else is either much less recognizable or vanished entirely. But she's fine.
(She checks her heel. It's still marked. So she's unrestrained and unsupervised, but not, technically speaking, free.)
She needs to get out of the magic soonish, before it gets bored with its minimal alterations of her person, decides she'd be prettier as a glass music box decorated with butterfly wings, or a leather-upholstered down pillow that drinks blood, or a goose with windmill blades spinning around its neck. She's not, however, sure that she can climb the hill. It's likely she'd get just far out enough to count as having exited the magic and then fall, taking her chances a second time, and while this occasion she was lucky, nobody else was - she doesn't think she's been lied to all her life about the general safety of the environment. She'll have to go out the other way. She wades into the waist-high grass, routing around the clump made of swords and the clump made of swaying violin strings and the patch that might just be pitch-black flora but might be something else - but most of the grass seems only to be grass; plants tend to be safer in magics than animals. She winds up startling a dozing bird-eel-cat hybrid so thoroughly mixed up that she has no best guess as to what it was originally. It flap-flop-flees.
And then, when she hasn't seen an embroidered plant for a while since the shrub that appeared to be growing assorted national flags for leaves and onions by way of fruit, and thinks she might be close to the edge, there's a door.
It is freestanding in its frame, painted bright and glossy red with a few words in other colors on it running in various directions ("entirely", "yellow", "jump", "choristers", and "melting"), has pink fringe growing out of its hinges, and has where a handle might normally be, a slender open jar affixed with its mouth pointing up which is full of small-denomination coins, dried cloves, and what looks like it might be olive oil.
Aya has no idea how big this magic is. She doesn't know if drinking the water or eating anything vaguely appetizing that she finds around it will be taken as a second invitation to turn her blue or centipedal or dead. She could turn back and try to climb out the way she came, but - then what?
She's nowhere near the border.
Her legal owner is the employer of the fellow who was driving her and the others to the labor rental office.
The magic hasn't given her a set of papers and it has not unmarked her heel, and provoking it is more likely to make things worse than better.
And she's never heard of a door in a magic before.
She gingerly touches the jar, which is cool under her hand - and she pulls - and the door opens, tufts of pink in the hinges squeaking, to reveal what looks like a bar, which definitely isn't behind it if she peers around the frame.
Aya takes a deep breath and she walks in.
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namesthesky
onthewind
"Right, well. Priests run around trying to convince people that their god is the best god and people should worship them. They usually get a part of their god's domain to carry around, and they'll try to talk to them, but often the god won't answer. I am like that, kind of, except I am less - spout out religious drivel and more, 'Here let me befriend you!' Also Raezenoth replies to me, just about every time unless he's extremely busy."
onthewind
"Well. For one, I can fly. I am also under his blessings, which gives a number of minor benefits. But mostly I get the excuse to see the world and get to... I don't think the right word for it is righting wrongs, but I can fix things. Give people some chances where they don't have any. Raezenoth's not big on just handing people stuff, but he loves giving people chances to prove themselves."
namesthesky
"Does it also pay money or do you have to have a second job for room and board and the like?"
onthewind
"Oh, that. Well if I meet any followers of Raezenoth they're usually pretty happy to feed me and let me borrow a bed if I put in a good word for them. If I'm going on a longer trip Raezenoth will give me money that I think he got from donations or offerings or something? I haven't asked. I don't care if he pays me, anyway - he makes sure I am reasonably okay and fit for duty, and that works out all right for me."
onthewind
"Basically? I wandered past when Raezenoth needed an acolyte very desperately and he decided to go with trial by fire and essentially said, 'Okay, look, these people are terrible and they are trying to ascend to godhood by killing me I can't stop them please help.' I'd known of him, before, never had him talk to me directly, but I didn't want him to die, sooo... I helped. Then I got acolyte status and I just kind of kept at it."
onthewind
"Gods do just sort of start existing, but um - people can ascend to godhood, though. They've got to gain a god's trust to near absolute levels, though." She looks like she has a bad taste in her mouth. "Then betray and kill them."
onthewind
"Just on the continent I'm on? I'd put the overall number at around thirty, total. There are a few with large domains and a lot with smaller ones, but - there are a lot. I think the most common kind's harvest gods, and there's only one other desert god besides mine that I know of. Other than that, it varies a bit. I could tell you about all the gods I know of, but there's a bit of bias as to the ones I can meet. Like, I don't know many ocean gods because I am kind of a huge glaring danger when sailing and therefore don't tend to do it."
namesthesky
"...Your god doesn't get along well with any of your continent's surrounding ocean gods?" Aya guesses.
onthewind
"One, in particular, she has got it out for me so much. The other ocean gods might tolerate me if it weren't for her, but they can team up, if there is a common enemy. They find desert gods easy to pick on. Haven't had enough reason to chance seeing if the others will not try to kill me. Maybe they won't if I throw a lot of offerings at them, but one definitely will and it's hard to tell where borders are for ocean gods. Thus, not trying it. I like not being dead."
onthewind
"Apparently I do the religious equivalent of screaming them? I don't see how, I'm not really preachy, but every god I've talked to besides Raezenoth has mentioned it. So, yeah. It's probably the same with other acolytes."
namesthesky
"The acolyte status is a formal - magical? - thing, not just a social arrangement, then?"
onthewind
"Formal magical thing. It definitely makes some kind of connection, to get magic super powers from a god. I think some gods don't call them acolytes, foreigners I've met have different words for them. I can't remember what they are, haven't met that many."
onthewind
"I'm... Not speaking that. At all. I'm speaking in Jorten. I know a bit of Virnoku, too, but I wouldn't call myself fluent. How in the world can we understand each other?"
namesthesky
"And I can read Ancient Sudre but, obviously, our linguistic skills aren't coming into play here. Maybe it's the magic? A magic could have made me - surreptitiously polyglottal just as easily as it could have given me seaweed for hair."
onthewind
"Maybe. I know gods speak all tongues, so if you lose the ability you can still petition and ask for help from them. Probably not useful for day to day life, though, unless you're an acolyte and a god will just be nice and translate everything for you."
namesthesky
"And you're sure this will apply even to very faraway languages? I wouldn't mind learning a new language or two, but it will hardly be instantaneous."
onthewind
"I asked Rae once," she says, dipping into her casual nickname for him. "It's all languages, ever. I actually made up some gibberish and applied it to meanings and used them and not only did it not phase him, but he didn't notice at all."
onthewind
"Hm. I can see how it would, but I'm pretty sure they can't. Rae asks me questions, and I spend a ludicrous amount of time in his holiest temples, so if he could mindread he wouldn't really have much point to asking some of them. Not all of them were loyalty or truth testing questions, some of them were just 'Hey how is that person over there doing.' Plus, they can definitely be lied to. If they couldn't, no one would be able to manage to betray them, they would just notice someone was thinking bad thoughts and off them."