"I sometimes remain in various pockets of the Maelstrom if nothing is urgently requiring my attention," although not nearly as much as some of those slackers, she definitely doesn't say, given who might be running the place.

Okay, necromancy and deadspeaking, not quite the same, unless the targets of his ministrations are all undead. Or maybe it's an advanced technique, but if whispering is sorcery, it should have been easier for him to pick up sorcerous healing.

"I wouldn't classify a magma kraken as a dragon - to me, a dragon is a particular species of sentient being, probably mutated from Ophidian stock from overuse of herb lore many centuries ago - whereas a magma kraken is a sorcerous phenomenon that devastates an area."

Probably best not to talk about necromancy too much. You never know who's going to be extra touchy about it or start ratting her out to the gods for even daring to mention it. If it's not the same thing, no need to invite trouble by bringing it up.

"Oh, no. To me, dragons are titanic living storms of magic that fly across the world as they please, leaving all sorts of chaos and ruin in their wake. A dragon encounter is a natural disaster, not a meeting with a hostile enemy. Rain of stones and fire and acid, transmuted materials, poisoned air, twisted abominations, incorporeal horrors. You name it, a dragon can unleash it on an unsuspecting or unprepared demesne."

"Ah. That sounds a lot more like the Maelstrom - the storm version, although essentially it is an incursion - a bleed - between the world beyond and the physical realm.

Perhaps there are roaming shards of it elsewhere." Or elsewhen - perhaps when it finally breaks down entirely, parts of it go wandering.

"You also mentioned iridescence as a significant phenomenon. My understanding of it is only as a method of producing colour from light." She ruffles her wings slightly; the outer side displays this property in a shimmering rainbow.

"A bleed between worlds, hmm? Perhaps that's where magic ultimately comes from for us - though that's about the biggest unanswered question of all, where magic comes from. Harmless, pretty colors, no? No. Everywhere, as far as we can tell, outside of a demesne, everything accumulates iridescence, crystallized magic in highly colorful reflections. Practically anything other than water and glass will serve as a seed for the growths. Some life has adapted to it, tolerating the pain of the colors burrowing into flesh and bone and brain, growing anyway despite all the strain. But not humans, no- It's deadly to us, and experiments forbidden. The exact mechanics and interactions are not really known, but travellers must contend with it, washing regularly and managing themselves and their possessions slowly becoming irridated, killing the flesh and breaking down anything else. Except glass. Which is exceptionally expensive."

"We're fairly sure exactly where magic came from," replies Apharanta. "Have you ever heard of a darkpowder mill? Or - pistols, muskets, cannon - weapons that take a black powder and use it to propel a metal ball at great speed?"

Magic just leaking out everywhere is definitely one of the possible failure states of the world. And, theoretically, one of the success states, but she's fairly sure that in that case it doesn't cause humans to die in searing agony.

"Not really. Chemical fires? That sounds like a phenomenally dangerous thing to do when much more convenient bound weapons are available. Including ways to fling things with whispering or mentalism if things absolutely must be flung."

Bound... weapons? Only one weapon talisman would work for a person at once, sure, but there was no real binding involved...

"What is a 'bound weapon'?" she asks. "We have talismanic weapons - imbued with magical powers - but what prevents more than one from simultaneous usage is interference, not 'binding'."

"Bound objects in general are magic items that accept beads to sustain their function." He pulls out a clear glassy sphere from a coat pocket and rolls it across the bar. "This looks like glass, but isn't. If I stick it into, say, a bound drill, and pull the trigger, the drill bit will turn rapidly and the bead will slowly be consumed to power it. There's different kinds of beads for different uses, but that's all technical details. The real trick is making beads from ambient magic power, which it turns out, yes, you do need to be a dungeon binder to do."

"Ah. We find that similar objects crystallise in what are called 'mana sites', or at least they did for a time - I believe nowadays only the current master of magic can cause them to coalesce, for as long as there is one.

It appears you have found a way around this involving local reality assertion powers."

Hmm. Perhaps a facet keyed to a dome around a mana site would be able to operate porphyritic spines installed on location. That is definitely worth letting someone know at the cathedral.

If she decides to return, that is. If she has the choice once more, she isn't sure yet which way she will choose.

"I have far too much work to do already or I'd be much more intensely curious about the strange magical traditions of a far-off world."

"Is it work that you can be helped with?" The remnant that had holed up in Draxholt were still there, but another attack and they would be gone; she'd been checking for potential sites they could lie low when the inevitable happened and the fortress was breached, but offering them something useful to do would be more likely to get them to leave in advance.

"Nothing major. Just keeping every major piece of infrastructure functional in Whitecliff. The ventilation system, the reservoir, the aqueduct, the underground farms, the desalination boiler, the lights, the hot water, five different complicated bindings for industry, the cold rooms, the bug-repellant, the ship engines, the backup ventilation system, the backup reservoir... I could go on. Oh, and people management though I do have Listra to help me with that. I complain, but I mostly chose this, brought it on myself really. Honestly, basic materials of various kinds would come in handy. Metal wire in particular would be wonderful. Though I'm told if you try to do bulk trading through milliways the landlords will get mad. More a place to meet interesting people and talk."

That doesn't sound like it could do with more people. A pity.

The... landlords. Hmm.

"Do you know anything else about the 'landlords'?" she finds herself saying, before she can stop it. There are twenty interesting things she could have asked about, but no, she has to pull on the thread that can get her in trouble.

"I don't know much more than what I've been told, which is what Bar has said on the matter. There are rules, hard ones like no violence in the bar and soft ones like not trying to use it as a market or cheat of some kind, and the landlords set the rules and control the door, and she doesn't know anything more about them than that the door tends to find interesting people."

'Interesting people', huh. Part of her wants to compete at being interesting people, and part of her wants to spite them by being the boringest person ever.

"Desalination - so Whitecliff is on the coast?" she settles on. She wishes she had someone here who could benefit from hearing about all the technical details of that infrastructure, but she knows that she's not going to retain it. "Does the door let other people out with you, if you open it to where you come from?"

"Yes, on the coast - or technically, a few taums upriver so that the edge of the demesne just reaches the coast. Seemed more efficient and less obvious to visitors, and a position of great potential if the frontier develops. And it was a beautiful spot. And the door does let you do that! If you wanted to immigrate - or visit, I suppose, since apparently people get repeat doors sometimes - I'd want to make sure you know what you're getting into and have some sort of useful skill first, mind."

"I don't know that I should. It's tempting to see new things, and the W... the gods would love it if I spread their reach to another world. But it's possible that I cannot, in fact, do that, and would simply be lost when my body expires, unable to reach back into the world without their help."

It's a fascinating and terrifying idea. She feels the moth in her drawn to the flame, once again. But she's not all that useful, without the guarantee of return, without there definitely being someone on the other end when she teaches them to pray.

"Hrmm. What do the gods do when you pray? Is it an economic transaction, a motion of fealty, just an ear to listen to your troubles...?"

"It's for information. People use it for all kinds of things, of course, but fundamentally, prayer is for passing information to the gods. It's possible for them to perceive the world directly if they want to, of course, but prayer helps draw their attention to things, to put them in context and explain them.

Also... angels cannot pray. You need a mortal soul to make the appropriate connection. Communication goes one way around the cycle - the mortals speak to the gods, the gods speak to the angels, the angels speak to the mortals.

Prayer is heard more readily when the mortal soul is initiated to the deity, but in exceptional circumstances they can also hear non-initiates."

"And here's the part where you tell me all the wonderful things they do for people and how they're so nice and also won't disrupt the existing balance of power and laws or start any wars or anything."

"You sound like you've had some bad experiences," replies Apharanta. "Does deadspeaking include actually raising people from the dead to serve as your undead minions? They tend to get a bit excitable about that kind of thing."

"I just know how people are. Deadspeaking can't preserve minds... At the very most, it can bring back basic instincts like grabbing or biting things. Though the most common uses are healing and bodyshaping and bloodshaping."

"Oh, I don't think they'd be worried about constructs, it's the part where it traps and degrades the soul that's the problem.

The gods are not very much like people, although obviously people make that mistake a lot. They're a lot more like... philosophies. Philosophies that have opinions and act on them, but still.

Some of those philosophies absolutely would upset an existing balance of power they disagreed with, or laws they considered unjust. What is your existing balance of power, and who keeps it? You did say that murdering a binder was one way of obtaining a core, which suggests everything is not exactly paradise..."

"The big demesnes on the old continent have whole libraries' worth of treaties and agreements and mutual defense pacts and fealty agreements from outlying binders, and there hasn't been a really big war, the kind that gives people titles like 'The Terrible', in a good couple centuries. Just some smaller binders pulling shit on each other. Though the discovery of the new world might be changing that. A whole continent, free for the taking, and not stuck in a hundred thousand ancient agreements to leave this or that valley unclaimed or allow trade through a pass for balance of power reasons. It's going to get messy in twenty, thirty years. Which is why I'm trying to build up Whitecliff."

"Oh - you have a New World?" There must be a million questions that are suitable here. And maybe some advice that would save them all the strife that the colonists have been through. "Do you know if it's already inhabited at all? Something very similar happened to us, just over a decade ago. I'm... sure there are lessons that could be learned from it.

...is it to the north, or the south?"