"Anyone who can be talked into it, then." She saw the picture on the front, but when the Lord of Montreal was mortal he was obscure enough not to be instantly recognizable four centuries later. She turns it over. "This looks a lot like what you were saying about the Seal of Solomon."

"Does it. What a coincidence."

"It's not a coincidence, is it."

"Stranger things have happened."

"Do you have a way to get from here to there, or is it a utopian thing?"

"Utopian thing?"

"Oh, plotting out and designing how a better world could work, with no expectation that it's necessarily possible to build let alone that anyone would try."

"Oh. Well, the people who came up with this Seal probably have something in mind."

"Hopefully. And spreading the word shouldn't hurt."

"Specifically in the case of money, it should help."

"It should. Where did you get it? Handing it out just for the chance to spread the word only makes sense if, you're either very rich in this currency or are a salesman for them."

"Salesman might be closer to it but not quite. Investor, maybe?"

"I hadn't pegged you for the type with a lot of capital."

"Something between those two, then. I'm not getting paid for my time, but I also didn't buy in or anything like that. It's a bit more complicated."

"Okay. Well, thank you for the sample and if I spend it it'll almost certainly be in a way that helps it spread."

"Thank you!"

"Let me know if there's anything I can help with. Information, magic where it's safe, or even just a place to stay."

"Hmm, actually I'm a bit curious about how exactly Incarnations work."

"Got a particular one in mind, I assume?

Comparisons to gods are exaggerations, but Incarnations can be powerful. The drawback is they can’t natively have any thoughts that aren’t whatever they’re an incarnation of. You may have noticed Conquest isn’t rampaging until destroyed even though restraint isn’t his thing. That’s because Incarnations use a series of human hosts. They keep them relevant, give them a place in the human world.

Conquest draws on whatever idea of what it means to conquer he got from his past hosts. Eventually the current one will be too subsumed and one-dimensional to be very useful, and Conquest gets more unstable until he adds a newer human. Or he goes too long without updating, and an interpretation of what conquest meant two hundred years ago doesn’t mean anything anymore."

"...so he's possessing a human? Is the human awake?"

"The human mostly doesn't exist as an individual. Their patterns of thought are there, so they don't entirely not exist; it's just Conquest thinking them."

"And if he becomes too one-dimensional, does he—lose power? Or control or something?"

"Free will. An Incarnation can't act against its nature, and that gets more pronounced the less humanity it has. In Conquest's case that would probably mean using flimsier and flimsier excuses to capture or kill, gaining power each time, until eventually he's on an outright rampage. It's not likely to get that far; he doesn't want it and everyone else really doesn't want it."

"Why doesn't he?"

"Taking hosts doesn't make him any less Conquest, and he knows the reasons for it. Plus he'd eventually be everyone's enemy. But he's got time. I think it's generations; it's not like he demands a sacrifice every new moon."